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Subject:RE: The Quick and the Bad From:Chuck Martin <CMartin -at- serena -dot- com> To:"'TECHWR-L'" <TECHWR-L -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Thu, 27 Apr 2000 09:33:49 -0700
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andrew Plato [mailto:intrepid_es -at- yahoo -dot- com]
> Sent: Wednesday, April 26, 2000 9:39 PM
> Subject: The Quick and the Bad
>
<snip>
>
> Stupid people make stupid products and stupid documents.
> Rigid process and
> exceptional amounts of time have nothing to do with it.
> Before you go telling
> me how great NASA is, remember this is the moron factory that
> blew up a
> trillion dollar space ship because they forgot to swap out
> the head gasket on a
> rocket engine. Stupidity is more powerful than ISO 9001. All
> their time and
> processes still failed.
>
From the reports I read, the O-ring wasn't forgotten. Decision makers *did*
have the information on hand about the temperature risk, but chose to ignore
it because of other pressures, pressures to make the launch a success.
*That* was the true stupidity of the situation--and it's everywhere,
especially in newly public companies that feel pressure by investors to
produce profit and sacrifice quality to those profit gods. (Before you claim
that it doesn't happen that way in *your* company, answer me this: do you
have a stock ticker on your desktop that shows your company's stock price?
To the other engineers around you? Does your internal home page have
prominent links to the stock price and quarterly results?)
--
"I don't entirely understand it but it is true: Highly skilled carpenters
don't get insulted when told they are not architects, but highly skilled
programmers do get insulted when they are told they are not UI designers."
- anonymous programmer quoted in "GUI Bloopers"
by Jeff Johnson
Chuck Martin, Sr. Technical Writer
cmartin -at- serena -dot- com
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