alt Hacker NewsImagine you work as an aerospace engineer. Imagine having to couch/overthink everything your say in communication so that it can't be taken out of context later. You literally have yearly training on how you have to communicate and in hugely impacts how people work because one dumb one off comment in email can financially end the company when an accident occurs.
and that's before you get to the fact that you have to defer how your IT systems work to the lawyers from the big overseas insurance company that covers your company/products. It's a major pain to get them to sign off on collaboration systems because they are such a discovery risk not because you are hidings, but because of how people communicate especially around issues. As far as discovery goes with aerospace, if your engineers anywhere acknowledged any problems, you are hit. How can you have a good product/continuous improvement when you can't acknowledge issues in writing?
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> You literally have yearly training on how you have to communicate and in hugely impacts how people work because one dumb one off comment in email can financially end the company when an accident occurs.
Wow, that's a very sad contrast to the blameless failure analysis culture of aviation accidents/incidents I've heard so much about (and actually see as a model for what we should strive for in software).
I can't even begin to imagine what kind of organizational chilling effect this must have on the way problems are discussed.
I am exactly in that line of work and that's not my experience. All our written communication is kept basically forever in case of investigation, and yet people don't second guess everything they write.
At the same time I've never seen anyone knowingly defend anything unsafe or illegal anyway.
And my experience is that the "blameless" culture is very present.
Imagine your parents get on a plane and it crashes due to a malfunction. Then imagine five years later the maker of such plane had communications where an employee said "i think something is wrong with x. we should pause work on x" and their manager said "no, the tests with x are within range. you should continue". Then the relatives of people in the crash sue.
I'm not saying who is at fault or who is liable (that's for a judge to decide) but you don't think that communication should be in court? Do you really know the depths that capitalism will go to to make a dollar off of you and everyone you know?
I'd be surprised if you could find a single aerospace engineer with more than five years of experience who hadn't learned to couch everything they say in a way that made it difficult to misinterpret or change by taking out of context.