"Jeff Findley" wrote in message
...

"Danny Dot" wrote in message
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Two commissions have written up that NASA culture is a major cause of our
two shuttle accidents. They site that engineers are afraid to speak up
as part of the problem.

My question is this: Is the culture worse at NASA than other places, or
does NASA have problems that are in other industries, and these other
places get away with it because the problem with their culture doesn't
result in a highly visible catastrophic event. Maybe a comparison to oil
refineries and chemical plants would be useful. In these industries,
catastrophic events can happen if the culture allows unsafe practices to
continue to happen.

There are companies in the US that take a "shoot the messenger" approach
to management. Consequently, middle to upper management in those
companies always hear that "everything is fine" even when the schedules
keep slipping, customers keep complaining, etc.

In private industry, the bigger problem I'm seeing is sending jobs
overseas. You're replacing highly experienced, highly paid, American
employees with a whole lot of under experienced, low pay (high for their
area) people located in the far east (India, China, South Korea, and etc).
In the end, I think you get what you pay for. From what I've seen,
culturally people in the far east don't like to tell management any sort
of bad news. It seems to be that they don't want their boss to see their
weakness or perhaps it's just that they don't want to disappoint
authority, or something. At any rate, this is so bad that coming from the
US culture, you never know if any of your workers in the far east really
understand what you want them to do.


I found this true in working with programmers from the Far East. They would
say "Yes, I know what you want and can code it." When they didn't
understand a word you said. I learned to look for body language to let me
know they knew what they needed to code.

Danny Dot