I don't know how many people on HN have served and heard of Rickover? But I'm pretty sure most people on HN could not function in a Rickover style management context. It gets things done, but it's not terribly polite about going about getting them done.
To the article's credit, it does touch on this aspect of his management style. But engineers today are from the Millennial or GenZ generations. A lot of that just would not fly. I chuckle thinking about the shock and surprise on the average HN'ers face when one morning they come in and find out they're fired because a hypothetical "Rickover" did a code review last night and found a long existing bug they didn't fix yet.
And keep in mind, this hypothetical "Rickover" would review your code, and that of all your reports, every night. He doesn't like the architecture you chose? You're gone. He finds issues in the code of one of your subordinates? That subordinate is gone and you are too.
It's harsh. I'm not sure today's Americans are ready for that?
> I don't know how many people on HN have served and heard of Rickover? But I'm pretty sure most people on HN could not function in a Rickover style management context. It gets things done, but it's not terribly polite about going about getting them done.
Ex-Navy nuke here; I had to interview with the KOG [*] to get into The Program.
My guess is that most people on HN would do fine in a Rickover-style program — albeit likely after some culture shock. After 50 years I can still recite my own interview with the man pretty much verbatim. I served only five years on active duty; I've forgotten most of what I knew about the specific subject of nuclear engineering. But the no-bullshit, face-the-facts general management style that Rickover created and propagated in the nuclear Navy was likely the single biggest professional influence of my life. To this day I regularly quote Rickover to my law students: You get what you INspect, not what you EXpect.
And in the fleet, most of us nukes were regular people, not nearly as abrasive or peremptory as he could be.
[*] KOG = Kindly Old Gentleman: Of those four things, Rickover was at most two.
> He doesn't like the architecture you chose? You're gone. He finds issues in the code of one of your subordinates? That subordinate is gone and you are too.
I doubt it would have been that severe unless it was a recurring thing. But it does bring to mind a story told by the USS Enterprise's then-chief engineer, about an episode before my own time aboard. Back in the day, there was a "billet" (org-chart position) known as the "shaft officer"; those were experienced, mid-level officers, as in, late 20s to early 30s in age. Each shaft officer oversaw (IIRC) one of the ship's four propellers and its shaft, along with the specific engine room and two nuclear reactors that drove the shaft.
(Enterprise had a total of eight nuclear reactors in four numbered "plants"; each shaft officer would have been roughly equivalent to the chief engineer of a single-plant ship.)
During one Rickover visit to the Enterprise, an officer is introduced to him as the shaft officer for 3 plant. Rickover immediately asks, "You're the shaft officer? How long is your shaft?" The shaft officer could have given either of two possible answers — and either answer would have saved him — but he "failed open" and couldn't answer. Rickover supposedly de-nuked him on the spot.
I'm sorry this is getting down voted. The kayfabe surrounding Rickover and the Nuclear Navy is pretty impressive -- it's hard to find anything negative about it when you do an internet search.
For instance, you won't find any mention of the "Skipjack Skydiving Club"[1].
It would be interesting if they released statistics for the suicide rate within the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program vs. the rest of the population. Anecdotally I would guess 30x.
[1]: "Skipjack", named after a Naval Vessel, is the name of the tallest dormitory at the Goose Creek Naval Weapon's Station Nuclear Power School. I'm sure you can do the math on where the club name came from.
I see what you're saying, but as soon as you go in the direction of "engineers today are from the Millennial or GenZ" I'm writing you off. My boomer parents were spoiled little snowflakes. I spent six years operating Rickover's reactors on US Navy submarines. I actually served on the boat that finally got Rickover fired. So I'm very qualified to say that this has absolutely nothing to do with generational pampering. Rickover's methods wouldn't work anywhere outside of the Navy during the Cold War because even there they were considered draconian and extreme (and generally nutty), and in most of the rest of the world a boss isn't allowed to literally put their employees in jail for any reason they make up.
>Rickover's methods wouldn't work anywhere outside of the Navy during the Cold War because even there they were considered draconian and extreme (and generally nutty)
What people forget is that Rickover controlled one of the largest budgets in the DoD, so there were people lining up to kiss his ass just to get a piece of that pie regardless of his behavior.
Having read Eric Berger's Reentry about SpaceX and having a few friends who work at Tesla, my impression is that those organizations are not too dissimilar. They are also populated largely by millenial and gen Z people because older workers can't/won't deal with the hours and other working conditions.
Furthermore I think most blue collar American workers, and many white collar workers, are used to the concept of sudden and arbitrary termination.
That you are comparing Rickover's nuke program to Tesla and SpaceX kind of illustrates the cultural gap. Anyone at SpaceX ever get jailed for whatever reason his/her boss dreamed up off hand? Any analog to Skipjack at Tesla?
Think about that, today, Tesla and SpaceX are "tough" environments to people.
It's kind of a sign that a lot of people today have no idea how things worked back then. We will definitely have trouble bringing those environments back.
So why is the quality and reliability of Tesla products so bad compared to competitors? From an outside perspective it seems like Tesla engineers are generally lazy and incompetent, at least relative to an organization like Naval Reactors which maintains much higher standards.
They are not being tasked with making Toyota like reliability. That is not what made Tesla successful. Falcons are pretty reliable.
With that said, Musk went crazy a few years ago and people are just now starting to realize.
yeah but this hypothetical rickover wouldn't also be the same person constantly telling them to put off fixing the bug to build out a feature that the nontechnical product manager thinks customers want.
You are literally repeating the classic - "younger generation" are "negative adjective" and not as "positive adjective" as "older generation" and thus can't hack it - which has been going on since the beginning of time.
> I don't know how many people on HN... and heard of Rickover?
Eliding "have served" -- not American, don't care.
I suspect the name is familiar to a lot of SF readers, as Rickover reactors play an important part in Kim Stanley Robinson's SF novels about the colonisation of Mars. That's where I know it from.
My favorite style is his style and I wish it was more pervasive in the tech sector. At the same time, I understand it’s not practical in today’s society in a practical sense.
I alluded to it above, but I'll say it again here: the only reason the K.O.G. was successful was because he controlled one of the largest budgets in the DoD and people were lining up to kiss his ass to get a piece of that pie regardless of his behavior.
I think you’re right, but also wrong at the same time.
I haven’t read as much as I should have on him, but from the stuff live gleaned, his personality didn’t change once he got into that position of a large budget. Sure, his persona and leadership style evolved along with him, but it was always there. It’s what got him to be what we know today.
And even if they weren't "ready for it," what does it matter? Give me any asshole leader, no matter how accomplished, and I'll show you someone who would have been even more effective if they'd gotten down off their high horse and worked on their social skills.
Then again, I was an aviator, and find the constant lionizing of Rickover irritating. He was effective in his context, but he also wasn't perfect. And on top of that, his context is not the only one you can learn from, even in the United States Navy.
> I don't know how many people on HN have served and heard of Rickover? But I'm pretty sure most people on HN could not function in a Rickover style management context. It gets things done, but it's not terribly polite about going about getting them done.
I have never served. I am a Millennial. I prefer Rickover's management style. I thankfully had some of the earliest managers in my career who /had/ served under Rickover and applied this management style.
Some of the things I found very comforting under this management style is:
1. Everyone would be held accountable and managers would be held accountable for their subordinates
2. Everyone was expected to actually know their job, and not just hand wave away things. It's okay to say "I don't know", but it's never okay to bullshit.
3. Outcomes trump platitudes, which means it's absolutely okay to point out the emperor has no clothes.
I've had a very successful career considering my origins, and I attribute a lot of that success to that fact I hold myself strongly accountable in a way that is rare, both in my generation /and/ in older generations. Managers trust me, even in dysfunctional organizations, because I am razor sharp about what I do know, what I reasonably believe/assume, and what I do not know, and I have no qualms whatsoever about speaking the truth to anyone, regardless of title or position. The only times I've ever been reprimanded/fired or otherwise faced career challenges with my behavior were in organizations that were participating in unethical and arguably illegal activities, otherwise I've found that nearly everyone appreciates honesty and accountability, even if it's few and far between in their larger organization.
I think you'd find that for all the ink shed about the necessity of politeness and niceness, that the kindest thing to nearly everyone in the workforce is to be honest to them, both to their face and when they are not present, and to hold them accountable in a fair and even-handed way. Being kind is not being nice, and telling the truth is not always polite, but it makes a team, organization, and the outcome (product) better when people act in this way and that is incontrovertible. Almost everyone prefers to be part of a winning team, a team that produces high quality outcomes, and can clearly point to their contributions to that outcome because they took ownership of their work, accountability for it.
The fact we /don't/ act in this way towards people in younger generations is, in my opinion, one of the reasons there's so many mental health problems and dissatisfaction with life in early adulthood. Nobody feels ownership over anything, and they feel as if they have no control over their own life or anything that surrounds it, just floating along in misery. Taking accountability is the first step to taking control, and having the deep knowledge about the things you do every single day is something that builds a confidence born out of competence that nobody can challenge unjustly. So many people in tech completely lack both competence and accountability, so it is no surprise to me that they suffer deeply due to this.
> I've had a very successful career considering my origins, and I attribute a lot of that success to that fact I hold myself strongly accountable in a way that is rare, both in my generation /and/ in older generations. Managers trust me, even in dysfunctional organizations, because I am razor sharp about what I do know, what I reasonably believe/assume, and what I do not know, and I have no qualms whatsoever about speaking the truth to anyone, regardless of title or position.
I've been at a few tech companies now, and what I've consistently found is that people far above me tend to respect my opinion and listen to me, while often times, people at my level or just above it resent me for having the audacity to know things, and to figure things out from first principles, and to demonstrate this ability quite publicly in incidents and the like. I think part of it is an unwillingness to be wrong, which is idiotic. I will frequently state a hypothesis, my basis and assumptions for it, and then test it. I'm sometimes wrong. This is not something to be ashamed of at all, but people seem to treat being publicly wrong as the worst imaginable outcome. So you were wrong - great, now you have more information. Continue, folding this new data into your next hypothesis.
I don't know how many people on HN have served and heard of Rickover? But I'm pretty sure most people on HN could not function in a Rickover style management context. It gets things done, but it's not terribly polite about going about getting them done.
To the article's credit, it does touch on this aspect of his management style. But engineers today are from the Millennial or GenZ generations. A lot of that just would not fly. I chuckle thinking about the shock and surprise on the average HN'ers face when one morning they come in and find out they're fired because a hypothetical "Rickover" did a code review last night and found a long existing bug they didn't fix yet.
And keep in mind, this hypothetical "Rickover" would review your code, and that of all your reports, every night. He doesn't like the architecture you chose? You're gone. He finds issues in the code of one of your subordinates? That subordinate is gone and you are too.
It's harsh. I'm not sure today's Americans are ready for that?