Hi, friends!
I finished the CNN special about the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003.
Throughout the early episodes, there’s a lot of discussion from engineers analysts etc saying hey there’s a safety issue and the culture of NASA leadership being that you don’t override your managers if they don’t deem something important to share up the chain of command.
But in the middle of episode 3, where it disintegrates upon reentry, they interview a NASA director who flat out said “it was my job to be responsible for this” and that just got me. Having to be that person when he wasn’t even directly involved with the Columbia mission and knew nothing yet about what happened? That’s not a good place to be.
Have you ever had a good boss who actually understands the concept of responsibility and doesn’t just throw other people under the bus?
(Also I don’t know what the fuck I was doing my second semester of college but I have no real recollection of the Columbia disaster as it happened. It might have been that we didn’t have cable tv in the dorm so we didn’t have any news coverage of it to easily watch?)
I’m struggling to think of a boss who has, but I’ve had other employees in groups I’ve worked with on a joint project who have said this situation is a mess and we need to band together. When bosses up the chain in multiple places realized they all had this kind of problem at the same time, there was something of a collective “uh oh” that helped.
Bosses want to gaslight and claim that nobody else thinks this is a problem. If they start hearing that it’s causing rumblings in multiple places, they start feeling like the earth is less stable than they like.
Yeah, it’s pathetically easy to find management who doesn’t take responsibility.
There’s a team I’ve worked with for a few years and they’re so bad about it, that they don’t even like to write down decisions in case it backfires. So my workaround is I send meeting notes after talking to them, so there’s at least a paper trail of “oh on 3/28 so-and-so said ____.” It’s bullshit, but it’s a fact of life.
HAHAHAH
I’m in a different state so they got nothing on me.
My last two bosses have been great about that. I’ve had scant few in the past who met that bar.
On a related note, our project is doomed, mostly because leadership has Go Fever and refuses to adjust the go-live date. I have been making the reference to the Columbia disaster at least once a month.
Maybe they’re like me and too dense to remember Columbia? Have you tried referencing the Hindenburg or Challenger or Titanic or Enron?
A crazy fact is that NASA thought about sending up Carroll Spinney in Challenger in his Big Bird costume before eventually realizing it didn’t make sense.
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/weird-science/nasa-confirms-talks-fly-big-bird-doomed-shuttle-challenger-n353521
On a dumber level for Challenger, they completely blew past the fact that the O rings would fail in freezing temperatures, which Richard Feynman was able to demonstrate by dropping one in a glass of ice water.
I can guess exactly what happened prior to launch. Bosses trivialized the risk of O ring failure by creating a list of a zillion variables that weren’t at risk, and then used that volume of variables to argue that the O ring risk was trivial.
It’s a kind of sophistry that’s maddening. It’s designed to create false debates that drown people arguing in good faith in BS. The fact that other things aren’t a problem doesn’t change the reality of something that is a problem.
OMFG AFTER ALL THIS WE ARE PLAYING BOSTON OMFG! WHAT????!!!!
ive had good bosses what actually cared for the little worker bees under them and took responsibility
never for very long tho….
they burn out or get canned by the shareholders
I got fired from my first real engineering job for taking responsibility for a fuck up. I had always thought I was stupid honest but never got confirmation that I was till that day.
On the other hand, this place was a fucked up place to work. Every meeting felt like a SPECTRE board meeting where I would check my chair for electrical wires or a trap door hidden underneath.
Initially I was quite upset that I got fired, but a couple of years later I was relieved that I was.
The bosses I liked were the ones who took responsibility and their jobs seriously. I could respect and work for that. Like many of you, they are far and few between.
No one at my current place matches that. Just a bunch of weaselly yes men/women.
The nicest thing anyone ever said to me about my leadership skills was someone who told me that if he had to go to war, he’d want me as his commander. I laughed, but he was quite serious as he said that I was the kind of leader who wouldn’t waste lives even for his own glory…
I currently have a good boss. Very hands-off, trusts us to get our work done, and just wants to know if we see trouble coming ahead of time so that he can help craft a solution.