[HN Gopher] Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)
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Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)
Author : annapowellsmith
Score : 107 points
Date : 2024-11-25 11:49 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (landley.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (landley.net)
| weinzierl wrote:
| _" [...] our group was a mix of people over 55 and under 35, with
| few in between."_
|
| We will be seeing this with nuclear soon. The only people I know
| that studied nuclear engineering or related fields are in their
| 60s. The renaissance of nuclear will put these people in high
| demand and a fresh cohort of young people will be drawn into it.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| no - for a specific example, plenty of math majors at UC
| Berkeley got pulled into Nuclear Physics more than ten years
| ago.. William Gates was pushing some money around.. graduate
| students are pulled in via backdoor channels perhaps?
| sevensor wrote:
| I know lots of mid career nuke Es. They have great jobs.
| Programming, industrial automation, carpentry, middle
| management. Not, you know, reactor design or operation, as
| those aren't jobs that exist.
| jahabrewer wrote:
| This doesn't smell quite right. For me, it wasn't uncommon to
| run in to NRE majors at college 15 years ago.
|
| (now maybe they all work at NRC, I'll give you that)
| relaxing wrote:
| A while back there was a discussion about employee retention and
| churn, with some parties claiming a complete staff turnover over
| some period was a good thing, and that documentation could serve
| as the complete institutional memory.
|
| I hope they read this.
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| Three problems with documentation. Sometimes it doesn't exist,
| sometimes you can't find it, and sometimes you don't read it.
|
| Well I guess the fourth problem is it could be wrong, but that
| just comes with the territory.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| There could be a fifth problem too, it shouldn't be
| referenced.
|
| Because it was compiled incorrectly by someone/some group
| without sufficient permission to do so, so referring to it
| would lead to corporate politiking.
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| Back up: https://archive.is/1AxnM
| ForOldHack wrote:
| Thank you for your digital archeology.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| The phenomena is hardly industry specific:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
|
| If anything, a factory is a result of the communication structure
| the organizations culture chose at its launch date.
|
| People wasting each others time with inconsistent
| documentation... sounds like the place is falling apart. At least
| get a private LAN wiki up for people that work there... Good luck
| =3
| djoldman wrote:
| This reminds me of the Saturn V. If I remember correctly, no one
| knows how it works anymore.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Lol, NASA literally left an instruction manual on how to go to
| space, and return safely. The contributions those folks have
| made over the years is related to just about everything you
| depend on these days.
|
| People just choose to ignore the documentation, as there is
| less political mileage in throwing money into space these days.
| =3
| ungreased0675 wrote:
| NASA wastes billions and billions of dollars on space
| projects that will likely never fly. Rest assured, there's
| still plenty of political mileage to be had from space money.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Is Artemis really that upsetting... =3
| ungreased0675 wrote:
| Honestly yes. Imagine the cool stuff we could have had if
| that money was put to good use.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >Lol, NASA literally left an instruction manual on how to go
| to space, and return safely.
|
| This, I'm so sick of this "no one knows how _x_ works anymore
| " when it comes to ancient technology. Aerospace engineering
| is a whole field, do people seriously think we've just
| forgotten how to get to space?
| exe34 wrote:
| > My job now was to smuggle these documents back into the
| company. I would be happy to just hand them over. But that
| doesn't make any sense to the company. The company officially has
| these documents (digitally managed!), and officially I don't. In
| reality, the situation is the reverse, but who wants to hear
| that? God knows what official process would let me fix that.
|
| This is beautifully written :-D
| ysofunny wrote:
| > _Oh, and as an external consultant, I 'm not allowed to know
| some of the trade secrets in the documents. [...] I need to
| smuggle these trade secrets back into the company, so that the
| internal side can handle them. They just have to make sure they
| don't accidentally repeat them back to me._
|
| he's not supposed to know things he made and left behind. this
| all gets me thinking about the difference between the employees
| and "the company"
|
| the employees are always the company, they embody it, like he
| used to. but as soon as he retires he's supposed to suddently
| not-know the secrets of the company? best to laugh at the
| absurdity
| tokinonagare wrote:
| At least the company hired him back as a consultant with a big
| paycheck.
|
| It's ironic how managers and executices in organization,
| especially but not limited to companies, are always stressing
| about the clock for a few minutes lost here and there by
| employees, yet are totally fine wasting _days_ of productivity
| by not having a proper documentation process or practices.
| btrettel wrote:
| I could have sworn that I read this before, on a different
| website. Turns out that I was right according to my notes.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20111228105122/http://wrttn.in/0...
|
| Previous discussion on HN:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3390719
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3311015
| motrm wrote:
| And here I was wondering what the odd title meant, but with
| your hint it totally makes sense. From the page:
| <!-- from http://wrttn.in/04af1a -->
| <title>wrttn:04af1a</title>
|
| and of course if one visits https://landley.net/history/ you
| can see that Rob has archived some things he found interesting:
| I'm writing a book on computer history. You can look at my
| mirror of stuff I found elsewhere on the web, or the scans of
| stuff I found at garage sales and such.
|
| ...which links to https://landley.net/history/mirror/index.html
|
| Apologies for those who lose hours if not days to the rabbit
| hole therein.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| I love when I run across minor versions of these sort of
| archeology projects in the course of my job.
|
| Git makes it a lot easier though.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Git is only 19 years old, I suspect the bigger problems in this
| area are more likely to be 30+ year old, as most of the people
| who built such systems are likely to be retired.
| neallindsay wrote:
| Some git repos were ported over from SVN repos that were
| migrated from CVS. I never migrated anything into CVS, so I
| don't know if that was common at the time. But there are a
| lot of git repos out there with commits older than git itself
| (the Linux kernel itself I'm sure is the most prominent
| example).
| cesarb wrote:
| > But there are a lot of git repos out there with commits
| older than git itself (the Linux kernel itself I'm sure is
| the most prominent example).
|
| No, the official Linux kernel repository is only as old as
| git itself (being one of the first three projects using
| git, the other two being sparse and git itself); the older
| history of the kernel was deliberately not imported into
| it. There are later repositories which did import the
| previous Linux kernel history from Bitkeeper and older
| tarballs and patches, using mechanisms such as graft to tie
| together these historical commits and the new ones, but the
| result has never been part of the main repository.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| That's true actually, I'd forgotten about that possibility.
| I believe that FBs monorepo was originally in Subversion
| and that codebase turned 20 this year.
| mberger wrote:
| Needs (2011)
| zetx wrote:
| If someone wanted to be such an archeologist but instead for
| figuring out how some code or project worked (where perhaps the
| only remaining thing was the compiled code and some limited
| documentation), what sort of role/position would that be?
|
| To my mind it just seems like something one would get assigned or
| throw into when looking into improving a process similar to the
| company in this story, but perhaps I am missing something.
| SonOfLilit wrote:
| If you're a strong technologist, ideally with some reverse
| engineering experience, and you befriend a bank CTO, you will
| probably be offered a job that is part this and part saving
| projects that are trying their best to jump off a series of
| cliffs.
|
| Just make sure to set it up as a consulting gig and never,
| ever, work for a bank.
| btrettel wrote:
| In "traditional" engineering, there are a lot of old code bases
| still in use that few people (if any) have a solid
| understanding of. I've seen code comments dating to the 70s.
| Often the code was "documented" in internal reports. Many of
| these reports are now lost. These reports are often incomplete
| or unclear when they can be found. Plus, what you read in the
| ancient reports may not be current.
|
| The job ad will probably not directly say anything about code
| archaeology. If the job ad mentions some sort of in-house
| simulation software, and the organization is 50+ years old, I'd
| say it's a coin toss as to whether you'll have to be this sort
| of software archaeologist from time to time.
| Muromec wrote:
| >what sort of role/position would that be?
|
| Go work a normal engineering job for a bank or government on
| something close to whatever was the core system 30 years ago.
| You should see the signs when you get close enough.
| zellyn wrote:
| My only-mostly-joking answer is that you can go work for a
| typical Silicon Valley style technology company, and stay
| around for two or three four-year vesting periods. Most of them
| have Google-influenced design doc processes, and few if any
| have a process for documenting what actually got built, much
| less what it eventually turned into.
|
| One of my hobbies is feeling dumb for not understanding
| something, being willing to ask, realizing _nobody_ knows the
| big picture, and trying to document it.
|
| tbh though I have also occasionally fantasized about finding a
| job that was _only_ software archeology.
| black_13 wrote:
| This is something ive seen at three defense companies ive worked
| for. They will toss the new hires in bad times but hang onto the
| old timers and let them do as the please. The rto never applies
| to them and they horde like smaug. The best job in defense is to
| be one of these. Boeing made lip service to passing on knowledge
| but when it came to true core ppl they were never part of the
| process.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| I was supposed to do knowledge transfer at one job but I burned
| out and quit before it got done because my job was knowledge
| transfer, training new hires in C++ itself, putting out fires,
| fixing bugs, and shipping new features that had already been
| promised to customers I'd never heard of.
|
| In terms of "Ars Longa, Vita Brevis" [1], I'm not as good of an
| indexer / teacher as I wish I was.
|
| https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Ars-Longa-Vita-Brevis
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I've explicitly written things down at work, starting with the
| sentence: "A note for future archeologists".
| BlandDuck wrote:
| It is great that the URL for this website is:
|
| https://landley.net/history/mirror/institutional_memory.html
|
| In other words, it is in the "history/mirror/" sub-directory,
| being preserved for future corporate archeologists.
| mrgoldenbrown wrote:
| >Unfortunately, the internal team doesn't know what the secrets
| are, while I do. I even invented a few of them, and have my name
| on some related patents.
|
| I'm confused about how something can be both a secret and
| patented. Isn't the point of a patent that it is public and no
| longer secret?
| btrettel wrote:
| I was confused by the same thing. I guess that the patents are
| only _related_ , and don't actually contain the trade secrets.
| masfuerte wrote:
| That's the game. Put in enough detail to get the patent but not
| enough to actually implement the invention.
| cesarb wrote:
| > The alien machinery hums along, producing polymers. [...] The
| more I look around, the more the engineering world, once you go
| back more than a few years, looks like subterranean New York
| City. A mass of strange engineering feats humming away out of
| sight, produced by long-forgotten ancient peoples
|
| These sentences made me think of the game Factorio. For those who
| don't know, in the original game (before the recent Space Age
| expansion) the official objective was to build and launch a
| rocket, leaving behind the still running automated factory which
| produced the parts for that rocket (and yes, one of the
| intermediate products is polymers, simplified in the game as
| "Plastic"). One can imagine someone, much later, encountering the
| long abandoned factory, still running and still producing
| polymers.
| Kinrany wrote:
| I wish there was a game that did this on purpose. You are given
| an undocumented alien half-broken contraption and your goal is
| to repurpose it for something different.
|
| Space Station 13 was a little bit like that sometimes.
| alganet wrote:
| This technical archaeology thing, it's a rare skill. It's not
| hard, but requires patience and empathy (in addition to technical
| expertise).
|
| The few engineers I know that have this, went through some sort
| of ritual passage. A project or idea that forced them into
| digging.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Was listening to a podcast where the interviewee talked about
| this problem in aerospace. We are quickly approaching a point in
| the industry where Boeing for example won't have anyone left that
| has been part of a clean-sheet design and production assembly
| line for a new passenger jet.
|
| The 787 design & assembly line spin-up work was done 2004~2007.
| grendelt wrote:
| This smacks of Exxon...
|
| The big merger coming in the 99 being the creation of ExxonMobile
| which would create duplicate documentation systems spanning the
| dates the author gives.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| yet another working class chutzpa who cannot see the golden
| opportunity he's sitting on top of. this is a very sad history.
| executives fired people and operated under sane staff levels in a
| bet their knowledge was unnecessary, now thanks to this guy lack
| of both class conscience and self worth they don't have to suffer
| any consequence of losing that bet. guess they did bet right
| after all.
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