Hacker News Reader

Comment by swader999 | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure most of us have been on projects where similar bad engineering decisions were made. It's depressing how common these attitudes are. At least death isn't a possibility with the projects I've left in disgust.

View on HN

Titan is fairly akin to modern software engineering, there's a lot of behaviours in the company that certainly resonates. Mechanical and structural engineers don't behave like this 99% of the time.

I heard pressure testing of the carbon fiber wasn't done. They relied on sensors to detect delamination instead. In software engineering, a component is both created and unit tested with tests on relevant functionality. Delamination sensors are poor compensation for a missing test. They probably didn't test the delamination sensors, either.

As the article mentions though, one of the issues with using carbon fiber for this is that unlike titanium, it weakens with each pressure test.

Also that you can't very effectively model a composite materiál the way you can a solid single material.

To be fair, most modern software engineering doesn't directly lead to someone dying, so in a lot of cases, it makes economic sense to try and push out that additional feature quickly rather than combing every line for potential bugs.

Most customers are going to go with the product with more features even if there are a few more bugs, compared with one with zero bugs and much less functionality.

Depends how severe the bugs are. If they're rare edge-case ones that won't result in significant loss of data or functionality, I can believe that; but I've seen far more instances where the product grows so many buggy features that it becomes barely usable as the bugs start affecting core functionality, while the additional features are basically useless to me.

Sure, there's a line where there are too many bugs. It's just a different line than in something where lives are at stake.

I would certainly NOT apply what I did in the job in this kind things. They are of different leagues.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com