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Comment by inetknght | Hacker News Reader

> The FAAs safety risk management is built around a rigorous process, but that is also a massive slowdown to reasonable progress.

In one role, I worked on writing software for drones.

That very rigorous process was very reassurring to me. Reasonable progress was absolutely occurring.

> One of the eng I worked with was 80+ years old and just didnt want to retire. He did not understand modern systems at all and the risks we were looking at were not (imo) realistically balanced.

What kind of risks were you looking at with what kinds of balances, if you're able to share?

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I liked the process but i didnt see a counter pressure to the SRM process. It often became a hard blocker.

The SRM board knew the legacy system but much less the modern one. Its hard to compare safety when you only clearly understand one systems safeguards.

I appreciate the process being there but at the time it felt much more like (some) people protecting their jobs than the public.

The risks I felt were overblown (iirc) were around likelihood of catastrophic failure in the system.

I actually loved the overall process and it informed how I look at software, it was the application of the process that bothered me.

Thanks for clarifying! I also really liked the SRM process.

Insomuch as people protecting their jobs: that's always a thing. But I honestly felt that people wanted to protect their jobs because they wanted to protect the public. Some people definitely wanted to keep their work and personal life separate with solid 9-to-5 boundaries. That's perfectly OK too. It was helpful to be inclusive of them even if their time was already filled.

I worked with numerous people who didn't understand all of the components or systems. We took it upon ourselves to be very open to questions and to thoroughly explain how each thing works. I've found if someone had good understanding of one component but didn't understand another component, it was very useful to schedule time with them to walk through the components they didn't understand to try to alleviate their concerns. They might not know what questions to ask, so I would instead ask questions about their well-known components to try to understand and correlate to newer components. Perhaps their concerns were even justified but they didn't know how to articulate them!

Maybe this was an HQ problem over a lower level problem.

Iirc there were 1 or 2 people who could hold the process up and were not open to persuasion.

I was also young and less equipped to handle that.

I worked in a few other spaces and liked a slightly more balanced approach.

Silicon Valley style approach is not what id strive for at the FAA. I dont think that is the extreme they have swung to either.

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