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The Admiral’s Pipe

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I was recently reminded of a story one of our development managers told me. Before he started his career in software he was a sailor aboard a Russian sub. Inspections by the admiral were a regular occurrence and involved a huge investment of time to clean the entire sub… As you might expect Russian admirals were fairly demanding and always expected to find problems. In fact they kept looking until they found the problem however unimportant they were. Apparently the sailors came up with a creative way address placate the admiral. They would leave one, fairly obvious, pipe un-cleaned. The admiral would find this pipe, insist that it be cleaned and feel satisfied that he found a problem and not dig any deeper. This practice became known as using “the Admiral’s pipe”.

I will leave it to you to apply this to your work with your own management whether a Russian admiral or IT manager…

BTW, if any of *my* management is reading this, rest assured that this has nothing to do with the executive review deck we are putting together today. ;-)

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 12, 2005
    It is very interesting because a programmer under me was caught one day saying "Oh that bug, I thought of the other". Since then we always joke with him about planting bugs in the code.

  • Anonymous
    May 13, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 13, 2005
    LOL - that's hilarious! Especially the "BTW" comment.

  • Anonymous
    May 13, 2005
    >> BTW, if any of my management is reading this, rest assured that this has nothing to do with the executive review deck we are putting together today. ;-)


    See now you just want me to keep digging further :)

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2005
    There's another Russian military joke that can go with that:

    --What is it? Dirt?? What does THAT mean to you?

    --That a pig will always find dirt, sir?

  • Anonymous
    May 17, 2005
    In my previous post as a graphic designer, I took great pride in my "art". I found that clients always had to make their mark but it offended me, after all, am i not the artist they hired? So I'd leave a big red, ugly, obnoxious blip somewhere in the illustration so they would say, "oh, take that out." Today, I often will use an obnoxious bold, red font in the middle of a page to keep focus on something trivial. Management needs to manage sometimes, even if they don't

  • Anonymous
    May 23, 2005
    What was the guy's rank in the sub?

  • Anonymous
    December 23, 2006
    One of the core skills of a Program Manager is to build consensus. Microsoft (like many knowledge-worker

  • Anonymous
    January 12, 2007
    One of the core skills of a Program Manager is to build consensus. Microsoft (like many knowledge-worker