I just listened to the audio book on spotify, free for premium members, and I'm wondering if that's why I'm seeing so much about the Challenger disaster lately. Well worth a listen, and spends a great deal of time on setup for these key individuals who tried so hard to avert this disaster.
I’m doing something similar with my team in a few weeks, and I’d measure our in person value on a different scale than just what we produce in person together. I don’t know if this is naive, but I still feel like it’s important to celebrate our accomplishments together and if we have a chance to do that in person, even if velocity suffers and some money is spent, we get something out of that shared experience together that helps us grow and understand each other that is sometimes lost when we’re just on video calls.
Is it necessary? Definitely not. But I have the opportunity and I think it’s great to do, and great to plan together.
We are finishing up a major project right now. At the last zoom meeting the business lead excitedly suggested that we should all get together in real life once it is totally completed for a celebration. All of us engineers slacked each other and said that we had less than zero interest in this and wondered how we could tell the business person thanks, but no thanks. I've been in the industry for 20 years and I still don't understand the desire of business people to go get a beer together or go eat together or whatever. I do have friends I'd like to do those things with, but that is not you. Please don't make this awkward.
I was pretty good buddies with some of the higher-ups that spent a lot of time with Patrick. One of the craziest stories they told me was when they were partying at his ranch in the mountains with a lot of property.
Everyone was drinking and laughing or whatever, I think he estimated a handful people were there, and suddenly Patrick gets a notification on his phone and starts freaking out, saying someone was coming onto the property, specifically one of the "men in black" Feds you hear him refer to. Apparently he had people watching cameras around his property for any "suspicious activity," and there were reasons for him to fear for his life over it.
He pushes a button and his house shuts down like one of those movies where metal sheets go over all the windows, code red alarm, and literally a gun room opens up. He grabs a bunch of "Halo-style guns" (source's words) and passes them around to the other people in the room, whispering about hiding and waiting it out or they'll have to fight.
Hours went by without more incident other than everyone freaking out for a while and I think they started partying again or passing out.
People didn't used to believe me when I told them he was like this!
From comments I've read, abysmal, in the sense the Quality people are told they aren't there to keep the plane from falling out of the sky, but rather to generate audit trail so that if a disaster happens, the cause is traceable.
My personal approach to Software QA is generally more in line with the role fulfilled by a Systems Engineer, so I'm intensely uncomfortable having read Quality may be culturally interpreted in such a perverse manner.
Funny thing about Quality is you find exactly what you look for. Start out making a system that only suffers traceable disasters, and you get a different product than one which focuses on not suffering disasters in the first place.
I actually liked having the option to be a contractor in the MSA. I spent a lot of time piecing one together for myself for that purpose, and something like this would have gotten me there 90% faster.
