“Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and adjusting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product,” said Charles Poon, VP of vehicle hardware engineering, in a briefing this week with reporters.
Lol. Probably got bonuses then celebrated for identifying the issue and fixing it.
Heh, a few weeks back a new project manager at my work held a meeting about an upcoming project, and half the team was able to say the timeline was workable, but the specifics the project manager laid out would lead to disaster, and we just had to adjust the strategy, but still have same time and same cost. We spelled out exactly what would go wrong and how, based on previous attempts to do it the way he said. It was scheduled to be a weeklong project, which would have been a fine timeline.
He got stubborn, insisted that based on his research his approach was right, and while he would have us on standby in the unlikely event of a problem, he would largely outsource the project to a company that agreed with his plan.
So the project started Monday, and based on past experience we expected to be called into action on Tuesday morning and have to hustle, or maybe Tuesday end of day and really get overworked to close it in time. So Friday comes along and we are shocked that it must be going ok since we hadn’t heard anything. 4pm rolls around, the project manager calls us in a panic saying it’s all gone nowhere, zero progress made, and he has escalated to make sure we take over and now we had to make the Monday morning deadline, or our asses are screwed. Everyone worked their asses off, a couple didn’t sleep the whole weekend.
So in a followup call, the project manager said “no one could have predicted it would go so badly”, and then an email came out from executive team congratulating the project manager for making the project work despite challenging circumstances.
If you have concerns like that always express them in an email as well as verbally, not only is it good for covering your own ass if you weren’t able to pull it out the fire (tbh I think you shouldn’t have busted your ass to make it work), but its also going to make people less likely to claim that unearned credit for your heroic work if you do.
I would literally go “Nope, no going to happen, you deal with you making promises with estimates you yourself made up instead of listening to the experts”.
In fact, I’ve already done this in the past.
This as a good example of how people fail upwards.
If he had listened to us from the onset, this would have proceeded, he would have been maybe casually acknowledged for a solid enough job, business as usual even though the money in play was abnormally astronomical, leadership would have just taken this part of the business for granted.
Because he didn’t listen, he created a disaster. Because the disaster had just unimaginably large amounts of money attached with just stupid amounts more potential money in followup business, the executives were panicked. The ability to recover it on schedule suddenly they appreciated it, and he manages to bask in the spotlight.
Ok, so what if we had left him out to dry? We probably would have been fired. He probably would have too, but declining to assist and risking millions of dollars of business screws you too.
The upside? Well, this was noteworthy because this was the first time in many years I had to lose a weekend, so it’s not super common. To the extent stuff like this happens more regularly, it usually isn’t this bad and is more annoying but on normal business hours. This also happened close to review cycles, and was fantastic relevant information to hold over management so while I didn’t get broad recognition, I did walk away with the second largest bonus of my career. Also the project manager learned the lesson and his standard game plan for this sort of thing is now consistent with what we said. He fails upward, but at least he’s an ally for the foreseeable future.
The true mark of experience
That would make me quit on the spot. No notice. No explanation. Just get up and leave and not say any word to anyone.
No matter what, the parasites in the big club always fail upwards.
*Underpaying someone else to fix it.