My first post. Please bear with me.

Mine is probably not funny, but a recent post reminded me of what happened at a start-up and I thought of posting it here. Writing full details might expose me, so going to keep some things generic. I work in a highly regulated field, and we are expected to use some tools to analyze risks and failures in our systems - hardware and software. When properly set up the tools are effective, but set up incorrectly, our risks may appear too low or high. The scoring system requires some estimates and a scale against which you score factors that need multiplication. For about 10 to 15 years, as complexity increased, companies have granuralized their scales, going from scoring things against 1 - 5, many score from 1 - 10, allowing your estimates to be more realistic, because if we find risks to be too high, we have to spend a lot in development and manufacturing to fix them, if our risks appear to be too low, when they are higher, we can get heavily fined, death can occur, etc.

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I was hired at this startup to show them what the best in the industry were doing. Within a month of my job there, I emailed my manager and the director, his manager that the scales of 1-5 were too narrow and could be very problematic, yada yada. They NEVER got back to me, prolly never read it. This is a thing with them. More in this company than others. "Why do I, a mighty director have to respond to a bourgeois engineer?"

In meetings with them, and some other consultants I verbally also said this. They never acted on changing the scales.

Then, no one wanted to finish the risk analysis, so I volunteered to do it. As I had suggested, risk values appeared too high. This was a BFD. So there was a lot of ranting and raving. Out of the blue, the director angrily emails me and my manager saying these risk estimates were too high and why did I do that.

I emailed them both back saying, "I emailed you at the very beginning of my time here warning you both specifically about this. You never got back., I mentioned this in meetings, and still no one agreed to change. My hands were tied."

You'd think he would back off?

Genius gets back to me, "Well, do you have that email with you?"

Boy, did I?!

So, I left a few months later, because SO much was wrong with them. It has been about 2 years. You think he is going to respond?

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Edit: Fallout - All our risks came up at the top end, and we had to provide mitigations, explanations, and documentation, which continues to open up the start-up for further audits and expenses.