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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Apparently somebody in the calculations made a mistake in the very beginning and nobody paid attention to review the calculations.

This is common in projects of such scale, where everyone is so specialised that no one has a general idea of the whole project and could thus have raised a "something feels wrong" feeling.

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I'd also like to point out this is also a situation where several workplace factors can cause issues:

- my job=>my problems

- tight deadlines, crunch, and not enough time to investigate issues outside of your domain

- rigid purview domains--"you aren't authorized to look at that", "why are you wasting time / company resources looking at that?"

- culture of elitism--"of course it's correct; I did it."

Just some food for thought.

What about building a huge skyscraper in New York City and later being told by an undergraduate student that it's got a critical design flaw that could make the whole thing collapse?

That happened.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2014/04/17/the_citicorp_t...

> LeMessurier realized that a major storm could cause a blackout and render the tuned mass damper inoperable. Without the tuned mass damper, LeMessurier calculated that a storm powerful enough to take out the building his New York every 16 years.

> In other words, for every year Citicorp Center was standing, there was about a 1-in-16 chance that it would collapse.

They dropped a factor here. Not every storm strong enough to damage the building without the damper would cause a blackout first.

Exactly! There is no real owner/leader of such project. The clerks just process their checklists. If a clerk finds some calculations, it’s all good, because it was done the right way according the checklist. Clerk has with high probability no knowledge to exam results of the calculations. I just experienced same situation with documentation of the project. There was none at very beginning, clerks were mad, there must be one according checklist. Documentation was written later, absolutely useless document, but it was here and it was good enough for the checklist.

Yes totally agree, the clerks/integrators/chief engineers/etc. handle a lot of data and it is easy to get lost. That is why all the checklists must also contain bounds. Upper and lower limits of the calculated/measured physical quantities in question.

Isn't that what systems engineering is for?

Only if you hire them.

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