The Wetware Crisis: the Thermocline of Truth (2008)

> In many large or even medium-sized IT projects, there exists a thermocline of truth, a line drawn across the organizational chart that represents a barrier to accurate information regarding the project’s progress. Those below this level tend to know how well the project is actually going; those above it tend to have a more optimistic (if unrealistic) view.

I wonder if this is unique to IT projects. Could folks from different industries comment?

As an aside, when I read "wetware", I am immediately reminded of this iconic line: "Burn's wetware matches her software"

This is Hacker News after all!

As a developer, I think we all learn how this works in our first year of our first job.

We're attending a company presentation where a C-level executive discusses our project. They explain how we're going to ship this in the next eight months or so. We get confused because we know this will not happen, so we shoot them an email saying there is no way it will happen, and there must have been some miscommunication.

One of two things occurs:

1. The person we sent an email to ignores us or tells us that we are stupid and don't know what we're talking about.

2. The person we sent an email to believes us, talks to the chain of management, and we get punished by middle management for skipping them.

Either way, we learn not to do that again.

> the IT software development profession largely lacks — or fails to put into place — automated, objective and repeatable metrics

The author is part of the problem, if he ever let his customer hope that an "automated, objective and repeatable metric" could exist. Please, do not open this discourse again until civil engineering will have a metric to gauge the completion of the blueprint!

This is tragically relatable (and as relevant today as when it was written, if not more so).

Derived concept: thermocline of trust

https://every.to/p/breaching-the-trust-thermocline-is-the-bi...

https://xcancel.com/garius/status/1588115310124539904

i think the author and commenters here are went the "half-glass empty" way.

Whereis if you think the "half-glass full" way you'd remember that thermoclines allows a submarine to hide from sonar, and similarly it isolates a typical corporate drone employee from whatever stuff the execs are engaging their childish egos in.