Normalization of Deviance (2015)
“Let&#x27;s say you notice that your company has a problem that I&#x27;ve heard people at most companies complain about: people get promoted for heroism and putting out fires, not for preventing fires.”<p>My first day at work at big-laser-company. Manufacturing engineer for a laser (then) so complex, it required a PhD to solve problems to get units out the door.  The product was a ring laser.  What that means is that the laser beam travels around in a race track pattern inside the laser before getting out, not a back-and-forth bouncing between two mirrors. Now this laser could be tuned to any wavelength by suitable setups and machinations, and once there, would “scan” a small amount about this wavelength, enabling scientists to study tiny spectral features in atoms and molecules with great precision. I knew all this shit. I was a Berkeley-trained physicist that built precision lasers out of scrap metal for my thesis.  First day of work. I walk into the final test lab. The big laser was happily scanning away. The bright yellow needle-like output beam was permitted to hit the lab wall. As the laser scanned, the beam was MOVING on the wall. Whereupon, first day of work, I exclaimed the most obscene four words in manufacturing, for all to hear, “You can’t ship that!” (“Beam pointing instability” is detrimental to almost any laser application. It turns out that during scanning, an optical element was rotating, on a shaft, inside this laser. This mechanical motion caused beam motion.”)
Well, I got an immediate reputation as a negative guy. (You can tell it’s deserved.) The solution was to retrofit 28 lasers in the field, mostly in Europe, with a component that cancelled the movement, on an expensive junket by a service guy.  Who was hailed as a ”hero.”