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Ask HN: Have you ever intervened over safety when you weren't in charge?
47 points by Waterluvian on Dec 21, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 26 comments
Years ago I was visiting a local robotics team for a meet and greet. There was an adult there acting as the supervision, and the kids were working on getting their robot up and running for a demo. One group was busy on the laptop/joysticks. Another hand their hands on the robot, adjusting pieces of plexiglass that guided balls. From a small demo moments earlier, I learned that the joysticks were VERY sensitive and drove multiple 300 watt motors that drove a chain drive for the wheels. The chain was exposed and there were fingers everywhere. I had a moment of pause and then I just yelled "STOP", startling everyone including the supervisor who was mid-sentence in conversation with me. I slowly unwound the whole situation, turning it into a chat about "culture of safety."

I think about this a lot, specifically because there was about 2 seconds where my brain thought, "I'm not in charge here. I just met everyone. Do I really speak up? Maybe I'm missing something about all of this." After many replays of this scenario over the years, I decided that I would rather embarrass myself horribly than hesitate next time.

Has anything like this happened to you? How did you feel? What did you learn?



Personally, I say props for having the courage to do that. You would have saved my teammate’s finger back when we ran our first-generation robotics team. During competition he picked up our mini robot while it was running and his finger got caught in the gears. The situation went from all smiles to sheer horror in a split second. We didn’t have any mentors with experience so we played fast and loose with most things, learning the hard way.


Clarification: he didn’t lose his entire finger just a sizeable chunk of material. I realize the wording is a bit ambiguous.


At Burning Man I met a guy who was making...something...by drilling into a big piece of wood while his hand was on the other side of the wood. I told him he shouldn't have his hand in the path of the drill.

"You can't tell me what to do!"

That was a powerful lesson on the American view of personal liberty.

At a big sailing regatta for children (about 100 boats), I saw kids climbing onto a coach boat from the rear with the engine running (in neutral). Feet next to the propeller, even using the prop shaft housing as a foothold. I went over and quietly asked the coach boat driver to turn the engine off. She did, but with the most dismissive eye roll I've ever seen, and some comment about this is how they always do it.

Unlike the Burning Man guy, who I guess had a point that he was free to injure himself if he wanted to, perhaps I should have taken the boat situation to a higher authority. Dumb stuff is happening on boats constantly, but the potential to grievously harm children who wouldn't see it coming makes things different.


The Burning Man guy was probably embarrassed and had a bruised ego by being called out for such an obviously stupid mistake and lashed out at you. However my understanding as told to me from a longtime burner is that safety is "third" at Burning Man so who knows.


There are a lot of interpretations of that "safety third" thing. One I'm a fan of is that safety of the audience first, environment second, and self third.


Also the burning man man’s reaction was in character for being a person who attends burning man!


You were right to warn him. Tool injuries are very unforgiving. I'll bet he has thought about what you said and will change his way of working. I certainly hope so.

One never knows the skill level of someone. And even a skilled person occasionally slips, loses his grip or falters with damaging consequences.

As a person gets older too, the familiarity of tools may tempt one to take shortcuts. I saw this in my father as he grew older: he skipped safety precautions sometimes. He was surprised when I would warn him. But when I was a child he gave me all the warnings (more like prohibitions) so I felt justified in returning the favor. Just b/c he was 85 year old didn't mean that he would miss a finger or two any less than a child might.


This is still the deadliest airplane accident of all time

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster

and is thoroughly attributed to people "not in charge" being deferential to those who were. See also

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management


> I'm not in charge here.

But you were. The real leader is rarely the officially designated and credentialed individual, but the one prepared to step up and assume command.

I never find it gets tedious being the "adult" in the room, but sometimes it does wear on me that so little organic leadership arises in these situations. I have to beast people into taking a lead.

People are afraid.

Rick Roderick said it best; "People aren't afraid of death any longer. They're afraid of being seen wearing the wrong trainers. Social media did this to us.

Being unpopular = social death, and the average inhabitant of the idiocracy fears that more than seeing children getting their arms ripped off by 300W motors than speaking up. It's sad.


I grabbed the tiller of a yacht that was about to cut a moored powerboat in half.

The skipper (of the yacht) was in his first season racing. We crossed the finish line and gybed out the way of the other finishers. He chose a poor moment to relax and the mainsail took over. There was no way he was going to work out that he needed to stop fighting to make it turn back the way we were supposed to be going and that the only way out was to encourage the boat to turn the wrong way "more", so I did it instead. In the end it was really, really close.

I'm not sure there was much thought involved. It was certainly very impolite of me to do it, but everyone concerned was very happy to not hear the crunch noise made when a yacht cuts another boat in half. We never really talked about it, but I've heard him reference it once or twice since so my vague fear that I made the whole thing up is unfounded.

I really hope to not have to do it again, but I guess it's good knowing there's a part of me that does this kinda shit before I have time to think about it.


You describe a vague fear and I think I know that feeling… where you replay it and wonder “did I manufacture a crisis? Was there actual danger? Am I misremembering it?”

I wonder if that’s one of many reasons a review of the event is important.


Good on you for speaking up.

I've worked in two safety-critical industries (aircraft flight operations, and spacecraft engineering and operations). Everyone is explicitly encouraged to raise any safety concern at any time, and no one is punished for being wrong. It is better to be late than dead.

This is a required element of a robust safety culture. If you ever find yourself in a situation where this is not the case, you are in a poisoned culture that will eventually hurt or kill someone, and you should do what you can to change it and/or leave.


I previously worked in an Exxon owned chemical plant. Everyone on site from ditch digging sub contractors to Exxon employee plant manager was empowered to stop work if they thought there was a problem.


I have a lot, I've worked in a lot of different fields some industrial, and some having to do with volatile materials.

These places breed a culture of "safety is everyone's responsibility." When one mistake can kill everyone in the facility, I'd rather be wrong and cause a delay, than to be right but second guess, and have a lot of deaths, possibly including my own on my head.

You won't likely every regret taking an action that could save lives, so if you are in this situation do it, and keep doing it.


Well, one day during Kung Fu training a guy walked into the hall and started digging through one of the bags of the students. Nobody said anything, or even seemed to acknowledge what was going on, but I thought it strange and went over to ask him if he needed help (I'm one of the seniors, so I feel responsible).

One of my juniors then came over and clarified that the guy was his brother, so that was fine, but I rather prefer having that awkward experience than the unpleasant alternative.


As a cyclist, I used to talk to some drivers who did particularly dangerous maneuvers near me. Often I talked to them at stop lights, though not always. The goal was to get them to think about how what they did was dangerous and didn't have any benefits. If I'm stopped at the same stop light as them, did they really need to pass me so close? I stopped doing this after one driver tried to stab me. (That guy was arrested.) While some drivers were appreciative, I encountered far too much road rage when doing this and decided it wasn't worthwhile.


Thanks for doing that. I was on a FIRST Robotics team and got my lesson the hard way. Was debugging some driving code sitting next to the robot which was up on blocks. The code wasn't working so while ponding why my hand ended up close to one of the wheels when suddenly it started to work, driving the motors at full speed which swept my finger up into the drive chain. I got real lucky and only lost a small flap of skin, but I learned the battery always needs to be disconnected before any hands get near the robot.


Have you ever intervened over safety when you weren't in charge?

Many times. Just because there is a biological adult in the room does not mean there is a responsible adult in the room. If something bad is happening anyone may intervene. People will push back or insinuate you did something wrong because they are embarrassed. Ignore all of that and focus on ensuring a process is put in place to mitigate future mishaps.

One should try to be tactful and pull the leader aside unless there is imminent danger. I would be more concerned if our society reaches a point where nobody is willing to step in.


Safety is too important to stay quiet about. I'll add my vote to others saying props for doing what you did. Too many people will stand quietly by and let a horrible accident happen when they could have spoken up.


When working with 10,000 VDC, we have setoff barriers (think roped off areas used in bank lines) to keep bodies away from live exposed devices under integration test.

One time, someone was standing just outside the offset area, floor was also yellow-black taped, the test voltage meter started to rise rapidly and I yelled "CLEAR, HOT", that person took a half a step away and watched an explosive fireball go right past where he once stood.

so, yeah. It wasn't my job but it remains a collective safety effort, whether you're a safety officer or not.


There's one instance, albeit a different (yet similar(?)) scenario to OP's anecdote, that stays with me. About 6-7 years ago I was back home visiting my family and went out one night with a couple of friends to a local bar/club. There, we met up with several mutual friends, most of them I've only met a handful of times growing up. Towards the end of the night, a good friend of my good friend (so a mutual, male) kept approaching this other mutual (female). Back home, it's fairly common/normalised to approach random people and flirt with them. She was uncomfortable, and normally if a woman tells a man 'no' a couple times, he moves on to the next person (back home, and in this time frame, specifically). He was drunk, and he kept insisting. She was very uncomfortable, and he wasn't getting any better about it. I don't really ~know either of them, her, even less so. But at this moment I stepped in and pushed him away before things escalated. There was some back and forth, but when it was all done, she thanked me and that was that. I don't necessarily take 'pride' in stepping in, because this scenario should have never occurred in the first place. Surely there are millions of instances where these things happen, and in over half of those, no one steps in; it's sad. But that day I was happy to be the one to have made a slight difference in whatever the night could have ended up being. That moment has led me to step in in situations where I 'believe' something is wrong. Worst case, if I'm not, I'll be told to step aside. Best case? It could have a tiny, positive, impact.


Even in an environment where somebody is in charge of safety, it's still everyone's responsibility to prevent a safety issue. Anyone can yell stop at anytime. Even better is when the person officially in charge tells everyone those prior two sentences during the safety training/briefing. The worst that can happen in a false callout is a few jokes are made and you might owe a round of beer.


In my analysis, you absolutely did the right thing.

I have this underlying, background process that is continuously running in my mind that is essentially, “Please don’t let it be my fault.”

And so that thought has guided me while driving, in daily living, and in one particular instance that reminded me of your experience (because I was not in charge of safety).

I was a patron at a wave pool in the heat of the summer. The waves were churning, and the water was packed with people.

I am hyper vigilant by internal design, and I noticed this young girl starting to drown.

If you have not seen this before, it is nothing like you would imagine; there is no wild flailing of the arms, or urgent calls for help. It is an almost surreal, quiet experience.

I made my way to her in what seemed like a slow motion moment blended into a faster-than-life response, and scooped her up in my arms as if she were my own child.

I remember that she was stunned as I raised her from the water, with somniferous, glassy eyes before she inhaled.

I am welling up just thinking about it. It was an intense experience that I will never forget.


So what happened after you yelled "stop" and had the safety convo? Did they fix the issue? Did they praise you for your smartness?


I think safety is the responsibility of everyone in those situations and you did the right thing by speaking up.


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