I recently learned about a man by the name of Roger Boisjoly, who, in the 80’s, was involved in the Challenger shuttle project. In 2012, NPR put together some information about him and his involvement in the project.

If you’re unfamiliar, this was the shuttle that blew up on its way up out of our atmosphere. I remember less of the actual event myself, but was well aware of it because my elementary school was named after Christa McAuliffe. She was to be the first teacher in space.

What does this have to do with management, you say? Take a read from NPR:

[Boisjoly] found disturbing the data he reviewed about the booster rockets that would lift Challenger into space. Six months before the Challenger explosion, he predicted “a catastrophe of the highest order” involving “loss of human life” in a memo to managers at Thiokol.

The problem, Boisjoly wrote, was the elastic seals at the joints of the multi-stage booster rockets. They tended to stiffen and unseal in cold weather and NASA’s ambitious shuttle launch schedule included winter lift-offs with risky temperatures, even in Florida.

It continues:

On January 27, 1986, the forecast for the next morning at the Kennedy Space Center included a launch-time temperature as low as 30 degrees Fahrenheit. NASA had never launched in temperatures that cold and Boisjoly and his four colleagues at Thiokol headquarters in Utah concluded it would be too dangerous too launch.

Three weeks later, he told NPR’s Daniel Zwerdling in an unrecorded and confidential interview, “I fought like Hell to stop that launch. I’m so torn up inside I can hardly talk about it, even now.”

I live my life in software, and it literally never has any real impact to human life, so I cannot even fathom how this man must have felt. That quote is just…difficult to read, let alone comprehend fully.

In a well-running organization, it’s our duty to communicate risks appropriately.

I’ve recently been through a lot professionally. As a “developer’s developer” (my self-inflated title), I’ve found myself working tirelessly in the realm of DevX to provide a better set of tooling for my (mostly Golang) developers.

Unfortunately, I’ve often struggled to communicate and align with management over various priorities.

In a well functioning organization, I firmly believe that management listens to its engineering staff.

In DevX and internal tooling, engineers are effectively “customers” in the retail sense.

Management should be asking them:

  • What do they struggle with day to day?
  • What processes would you like to see simplified or added?
  • How well do they understand the existing build and configuration behavior across their supported environments?

It’s pretty rare to see a management chain that is as familiar with the day to day technical efforts of the engineers they oversee. In my experience, this is often driven from a “top down” or “bottom up” approach. Both require good communication, which I think is the point I’m getting at here.

Having a top-down approach can often be dicey, and not having good communication makes it a recipe for disaster.

Having said this, however, engineers aren’t always right, either. “Bottom up” approaches without the right workforce can also lead to a lot of technical challenges, mostly discovered later.

But if you:

  • Do the right hiring
  • Listen to those employees on the ground doing the work
  • Dogfood the code that you’re supplying to your engineering workforce

…you’ll likely find yourself working well within an organization that values its technical workforce.

Managing people is hard enough - why make it more difficult by refusing to communicate?

Getting back to Roger Boisjoly…

If you don’t speak up, management won’t know, and the organization will suffer.

If you do speak up and management doesn’t listen, the organization will suffer.

Strangely enough, I’ve found that a lot of engineers these days don’t feel empowered to speak up. Tech has become cutthroat and with nearly constant layoffs, people generally just want to collect a paycheck and do other, hopefully more interesting things with their lives.

But sometimes, just sometimes, people speak up and others listen.

And things get better.

One can only imagine if management had listened to Roger on January 27th, 1986 and had chosen to postpone that launch.