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Comment by mk_stjames | Hacker News Reader

I am a Mechanical/Aerospace engineer.... I wish my scariest stories 'only' involved a potential bricking of a main computer on an unmanned $500M rover.

No... I was the senior safety-crit signoff on things carrying human lives. I had to look over pictures of parts broken from a crash and have the potential feeling of 'what-if that's my calculation gone wrong'. My joint that slipped. My inappropriate test procedure involving accelerated fatigue life prediction, or stress corrosion cracking. My rushing of putting parts into production processes that didn't catch something before it went out the door.

It's interesting to read people's failure stories from similar fields but, to me, the ones that people so openly write about and get shared here on HN always come across as... well, workplace induced PTSD is not a competition. It's just therapy bills for some of us more than for others.

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That reminds me of a fiction-quote by one of my favorite authors, where a welding-instructor has just finished sharing a (somewhat literal) post-mortem anecdote of falsified safety inspections.

> He gathered his breath. “This is the most important thing I will ever say to you. The human mind is the ultimate testing device. You can take all the notes you want on the technical data, anything you forget you can look up again, but this must be engraved on your hearts in letters of fire.

> “There is nothing, nothing, nothing more important to me in the men and women I train than their absolute personal integrity. Whether you function as welders or inspectors, the laws of physics are implacable lie-detectors. You may fool men. You will never fool the metal. That’s all.”

> He let his breath out, and regained his good humor, looking around. The quaddie students were taking it with proper seriousness, good, no class cut-ups making sick jokes in the back row. In fact, they were looking rather shocked, staring at him with terrified awe.

-- Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold

Aside: I recognised 'quaddies' from your quote ... there was some very distinctive cover art on the Analog magazine for that story: https://www.abebooks.co.uk/Analog-Science-Fact-Fiction-Febru...

Regarding your last paragraph, I thought the same... When the author wrote:

> I'm instantly transported back to that moment — the room, the lighting, the chair I was in, the table, the pit in my stomach, ...

I could'nt help but think "that sounds like a trauma reaction". Good on them to be able to use that energy to do better! But also not everyone reacts the same way to trauma nor is it easy to compare such reactions to trauma (for example as a hiring question). I feel there are too many social variables at play

This was the triggering phrase in the original article for me, yep.

I also want to clarify that I've worked in both aerospace and automotive, and the mention of the word 'crash' in my above comment was referring to work I did in automotive, lest someone tries to start wondering 'which one' with regards to an airframe.

For me, the reaction the the stress of having to make sure I was delivering... and the idea that those things out there, I mean.. put it this way I've worked on enough vehicles that a majority of HN readers will have ridden in something utilizing math that I did or parts that I specified, drew, and released, on a road, at least once in the last 15 years.

I once had potential employers ask that 'how would you respond to this kind of stressful situation' question before and I've actually had difficultly getting my answers across because the real stressful shit I can't even talk about without potentially triggering just a horrible social reaction. Or panic attacks. Or potential legal issues.

> I had to look over pictures of parts broken from a crash and have the potential feeling of 'what-if that's my calculation gone wrong'.

Does it inevitably come down to that for someone? I mean even if its a detail that a procedure couldn’t have caught, someone is responsible for forming good procedures. I suppose there could be several factors. But it seems like ultimately someone is going to be pretty directly responsible.

Just interesting to think about in the context of software engineering and kinda even society at large where an individual’s mistakes tend to get attributed to the group.

I’d be interested in talking to the team at Boeing.

For what it's worth, I strongly disagree -- the group as a whole (and especially its leadership) is responsible for the policies they decide to institute, and the incentives they allow to exist. For example, in this article's story the author is apparently working >80 hour weeks directly manipulating the $500M spacecraft two weeks before it launches. Do we really think they are "directly responsible" for the described mistake? I think a root cause analysis that placed responsibility on any individual's actions would simply be incorrect -- and worse, would be entirely unconstructive at actually preventing reoccurrence of similar accidents.

I think this is furthermore almost always true of RCAs, which is why blameless post-mortems exist. It's not just to avoid hurting someone's feelings.

"But it seems like ultimately someone is going to be pretty directly responsible."

Or many people, or no one directly. Space missions come with calculated risk. So someone calculates the risk that this critical part brakes is 0.5% and then someone higher up says, that is acceptable and all move on - and then this part indeed brakes and people die.

Who is to blame, when the calculation was indeed correct, but 0.5% chances still can happen (and itnwould be a lot)? And economic pressures are real, like the limits of physic?

See Murpheys Law, "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong." (Eventually, if done again and again)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy's_law

Astronauts know, there is a risk with every mission, so do the engeneers, so does management. Still, I cannot imagine why anyone thought it was an acceptable risk, to use a 100% oxygen atmosphere with Apollo 1, where 3 Astronauts died in a fire. But that incident indeed changed a lot regarding safety procedures and thinking about safety. Still, some risk remain and you have to live with that.

I am quite happy though, that in my line of work, the worst that can happen is a browser crash.

> Still, I cannot imagine why anyone thought it was an acceptable risk, to use a 100% oxygen atmosphere with Apollo 1

Especially when, in prior experience there, asbestos had caught fire in the same situation (O2, low pressure).

Wow, this detail I did not know yet. It just was a reckless rush to the moon, no matter the cost at this time. Without the deaths, nothing would have changed probably.

I read this in a book some years after the Apollo 1 (i.e. Apollo 204) fire, so I have no reason to doubt its provenance.

They had reasons. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1#Choice_of_pure_oxygen...

Even after the fire, the Apollo spacecraft still used 100% oxygen when in space. The cabin was 60% oxygen / 40% nitrogen at 14.7 psi at launch, reducing to 5 psi on ascent by venting, with the nitrogen then being purged and replaced with 100% oxygen.

> See Murpheys Law...

Indeed. I hope that was a joke.

I sincerely hope there are more people like you in the aerospace industry and less like those who conceived, implemented and signed off the 737 MAX's MCAS at Boeing...

I'm surprised that group therapy for engineers doesn't exist or maybe I just can't find it. I don't work in anything high stakes myself though have often been an ear to those who do in aviation or rail.

I believe that it can be quite hard sometimes if you have empathy and don't take the "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department" approach."

Perhaps some peer support group (possibly facilitated) for people that build safety critical systems or deal with the fallout. Not all companies will provide good counseling etc.

Perhaps the engineering boards / chartered engineer organizations should provide this and fund it from their membership fee, though that would probably scare people off going to the service as they could be afraid of losing their stamp / chartered engineer status / license.

Perhaps this would be dealt with in the past by getting drunk with colleagues in the pub, though alcoholism (or being impaired at work the next morning) is bad and pubs etc. are less popular now.

Profession induced trauma is finally getting taken seriously in the medical setting, another high stakes field.

Group therapy for doctors and nurses is finally becoming a thing, but unfortunately it is completely dependent on being employed by an organization that cares about it.

And the engineers designing safety mechanisms for nuclear weapons probably think you have it easy.

Yep, that's fair!

But my understanding is the default behaviour of most nuclear weapons (other than Hiroshima-style ones) is "blows itself to pieces without detonating the nuclear part", rather than "vapourises everyone within a mile".

Everything needs to go right for a nuclear weapon to actually blow up with a significant yield.

Yeah, luckily they seem to have a pretty well sorted failure mode.

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