Innovation

I thought I had said enough about the Titan submersible and hubris, and while technically this is a bit of a different topic, I guess I'm not done yet.

The New Yorker just published this article giving some background on the Titan, and I wanted to focus on some of the quotes.

Rush replied four days later, saying that he had “grown tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation and new entrants from entering their small existing market.” He understood that his approach “flies in the face of the submersible orthodoxy, but that is the nature of innovation,”

“If you’re not breaking things, you’re not innovating,” Rush said, at the GeekWire Summit last fall. “If you’re operating within a known environment, as most submersible manufacturers do—they don’t break things. To me, the more stuff you’ve broken, the more innovative you’ve been.”

 

in 2021, Stockton Rush told an interviewer that he would “like to be remembered as an innovator. I think it was General MacArthur who said, ‘You’re remembered for the rules you break.’ And I’ve broken some rules to make this.”

All of these quotes seem like something you'd hear from a 'tech bro'.

And here's the thing. The tech bro attitude (move fast and break things) came Silicon Valley and tech where lives are not at risk.

If your code doesn't work and the program crashes, you just lose time. Well, and depending on if you've pushed to production you might lose some customers and some money. 

It's not like civil engineering, where if your bridge is poorly designed it'll fall apart and people will die.

Maybe there's more serious consequences when we start talking about Industrial Control Systems and medical implants, but most of the time tech failures mean the loss of convenience, not life.

Furthermore, this guy seemed to have only superficial knowledge of the challenges involved.

It reminds me of what a character said, trying to teach etiquette and proper behavior to an unwilling student - 'if you're going to break the rules, you should at least understand which rules you're breaking.'

This guy seems to think simply breaking rules proves he's innovating, rather than knowing which rules his innovations allow him to break.

Overall he comes across as a boy pretending he's a man, which I suppose is part of the whole tech bro think. (That's why they're 'bros')

Finally, he reminds me of a terrible commander I worked under as a young lieutenant. The kind that has learned to basically pressure their underlings to get results...

And doesn't care about what sorts of shortcuts or illegal behavior their subordinates do to meet their goals.

Like... Some pressure is fine? But you don't want to create a team that goes too far, and how do you know when it's too far?

People perform at their peak when they're challenged, but if the challenge is too much (or impossible) it does more harm 5yan good. That's why there are so many studies on how to coach athletes to their peak potential.

You don't make someone start long distance running with a marathon, you build up to it.

These guys only seem to know half of the puzzle.

It's a shame their attitude is so pernicious.