The first crewed voyage of Boeing’s Starliner was supposed to last around a week, but the high-stakes mission is still in limbo eight weeks after launch.
Their high-stakes mission was supposed to last about a week — but 56 days later, two NASA astronauts are still aboard the International Space Station, waiting as teams on the ground try to figure out how to bring them home safely in the Boeing spaceship they rode to orbit.
The beleaguered Starliner capsule has two problems: its propulsion system is leaking helium and five of its thrusters malfunctioned as it was docking with the space station. Mission managers were aware of the leaks before the vehicle lifted off but had said they were unlikely to affect the flight or the astronauts’ safety.
I think or hope that these managers were engineers in the past but at the same time wont be surprised if they are not. I mean like, isn’t it a thing in the aerospace or any engineering industry to promote engineers up until they become managers and such? It does feel like Challenger 2.0 :( hope they return safely.
Technical people that move into management usually (but not always) suffer from something I’ve started calling management brain rot. They’re exposed to the spreadsheet warriors and their corporate jargon, and it doesn’t take long for the good ones to give up and the bad ones to thrive in a, let’s call it, “low-information environment.”
The first-time I was promoted to management, I had no idea what I was doing. Managing people is a totally different skill set to the highly technical positions I had before. So I decided to look into management courses etc. to try to figure it out. I convinced my company to pay for a few graduate level courses.
After a very short time in these courses, it became abundantly clear nobody else had a clue either. They had ideas and "case studies’ but no actual proof of anything. It was all a bunch of bullshit fads to make money.
Over the decades I have come to understand why a good manager is such a unicorn. A good manager has to care about both the people and the business equally. It’s a razor thin balancing act. I have met exactly one person who fits this model.
You have to care about the people, to foster a culture of caring about the work. Caring, motivated people are the backbone of a business - they aren’t easily replaceable resources that you just hire off the street as needed.
suddenly the carrots and the sticks are strictly tied to Key Performance Indicators, which are ultimately short-term financial with inflation. whats best or safest or ecological or wise or in the long term best interests of the workers or the customers doesn’t come into the math. try to refute this and you are quickly replaced.
Any time I hear anything about KPIs I immediately turn my brain off not because I don’t understand it, but because I maliciously don’t give a fuck.
I’ve been out of work for 4 months and tbh, getting desperate. But I saw a job posting that talked about KPIs and didn’t even apply. Homelessness would be less shitty than dealing with that (I say having never been homeless and probably not going to be).
This is the Mission Manager, not “manager.” The person who is the Mission Manager can be but isn’t necessarily also a people manager.