[HN Gopher] What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to ...
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What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane
Author : doom2
Score : 295 points
Date : 2024-03-28 19:42 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (prospect.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (prospect.org)
| spking wrote:
| https://archive.ph/Oub0v
| margalabargala wrote:
| If you read this article looking for new or surprising insight,
| you won't find it. It is not new information that Boeing started
| a rapid decline shortly after the McDonnell Douglas merger, and
| it will be unsurprising to you to hear that shortly afterwards,
| Boeing began abusing its most senior employees into leaving.
|
| What this article offers is new detail into exactly _how_ Boeing
| has gone about cannibalizing itself. The specific things done to
| specific employees, the specific quality incidents that were
| swept under the rug, the lengths to which they went to ensure all
| prior institutional knowledge regarding how to properly build a
| plane was systematically destroyed.
|
| It's worth reading, perhaps unless you're going to be flying on a
| Boeing plane anytime soon.
| caycep wrote:
| I am silently grateful to JetBlue for ordering Airbuses from
| the get go...
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Airbus has a limited production capacity, and they are maxed
| out with this scandal.
|
| So Boing is still getting orders, because the world need
| planes.
| iaoat2d wrote:
| "the lengths to which they went to ensure all prior
| institutional knowledge regarding how to properly build a plane
| was systematically destroyed."
|
| why do this intentionally?
| hwbunny wrote:
| That's the million dollar question. Why talented people are
| forced out? Like managers/other key members have a mission
| and if you somehow not fit in their "world view", you get
| hell.
| Tagbert wrote:
| Perhaps because the senior people were at a higher pay grade?
| If you bump off the expensive employees, your overhead goes
| down. Better numbers next quarter so you get a bonus.
| alistairSH wrote:
| It's in the article.
|
| Not just senior = higher pay. Senior = more likely to stick
| to existing (known good) safety/QC processes. Boeing didn't
| want QC at all - they wanted the guys assembling the planes
| to do their own QC (which is likely illegal per FAA
| regulations).
|
| Toss in a side of union busting. And a dessert serving of
| outsourcing to the lowest bidder, regardless of that
| bidders history in the space.
| labster wrote:
| Senior people also cost more because their health care
| costs more. Of course discriminating against older people
| is illegal, so they cut down on senior staff which just
| happens to have the same cost reduction. Funny that.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| It's a side effect of reducing the power of those awkward
| people who want to spend money on well designed aeroplanes.
| Cheer2171 wrote:
| The intention wasn't to destroy institutional knowledge. The
| intention was to cut costs in the short term, largely through
| outsourcing and turnover. Why pay a senior engineer a huge
| salary when you could replace them with a consultant in their
| twenties? They just didn't think or care about the
| consequences.
| margalabargala wrote:
| They adopted a philosophy of management that explicitly
| assigned no value to institutional knowledge, and thus
| eliminated anyone who had it as they were not considered
| worth their salary. From the article:
|
| > Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory
| of "knowledge" that essentially reduced the whole concept
| to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets,
| and data, discarding "thought" and "understanding" and
| "complex reasoning" possessed by a skilled and experienced
| workforce as essentially not worth the increased health
| care costs.
| swader999 wrote:
| This is true, they also cut costs by 'finding' less
| defects in QA, deferring them to production deployment
| several quarters out.
| bumby wrote:
| This is the irony of good QA.
|
| 1) Company starts to notice a lot of quality problems.
|
| 2) Company institutes a good QA program.
|
| 3) Company notices less quality problems.
|
| 4) Company cuts QA program because there seems to be less
| need for it.
|
| Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
|
| (The same can be said for safety when dealing with low
| probability events).
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Yes.
|
| It is raining.
|
| I use an Umbrella.
|
| Still raining, but I am no longer getting wet.
|
| I must not need the umbrella.
|
| Close the Umbrella
|
| Get wet again.
| bumby wrote:
| In that case, the causality is easy to determine. But
| that's not the case with more complex systems, so it's
| easier to rationalize a bias (I don't need this expensive
| QA)
| bfrog wrote:
| This has been done so many times at this point, shouldn't
| MBAs have case studies covering the "how companies have
| rotted from shit decisions made by bean counters" 101
| course?
| downrightmike wrote:
| Rather: Money > consequences. And so far, they've been
| right. How likely will old managers that have long left,
| but fully participated, be held accountable?
| Simulacra wrote:
| You may be right.. your comment reminded me of the
| formula from Fight Club. Maybe the airlines made that
| calculus, reasoning that, after all this time their
| planes were safe enough, and the chance of an accident
| were low. Even still, it was cheaper to settle lawsuits.
|
| "A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling
| at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car
| crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now,
| should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles
| in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of
| failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court
| settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less
| than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
| david422 wrote:
| The Ford Pinto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#
| Cost%E2%80%93benefi...
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The airlines brought a high-quality aircraft. Up to the
| first failures of the Max, there was no reason at all to
| expect Boeings to be badly done.
| djbusby wrote:
| Those old engineers cost too much! And we already know how to
| build planes. So, we can ditch them, my quarterly KPIs look
| good and with the money freed up from pushing them out it can
| land in my bonus check!
| margalabargala wrote:
| Stock price gains.
|
| Fire all the longest-tenured, highest-salaried employees. Now
| you have a company that appears to look similar but with
| millions of dollars fewer per year in headcount expenses.
|
| Boeing's stock price went up 10x in the time frame covered by
| the article. The people responsible for gutting the company
| have cashed out.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| _> Boeing's stock price went up 10x in the time frame
| covered by the article. The people responsible for gutting
| the company have cashed out.
|
| _
|
| Why does the stock market reward idiot shit like this?
|
| I've seen the same whit a a large US semiconductor company.
| In the 2008 crunch, the fired the most tenured employees
| and offshored the work abroad. Granted, the company didn't
| fail, their stock went up and now it's 5-7x that amount.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| Because the market is barely better than a ponzi scheme.
|
| There's ___just___ enough laws around it to keep people
| somewhat okay with it.
| JackFr wrote:
| That's nonsense.
|
| Markets are the best way we've come up with to allocate
| capital. Committees and commissars do not do a better
| job.
| hughesjj wrote:
| I blame index funds. Pump the % gain, index funds buy it
| up because it looks like a better ROI. Abuse that by
| doing short term shit and ride the wave of self
| fulfilling prophecy by the index funds buying into it
| (amplifying noise into a signal) and leave retail/workers
| holding the bags.
|
| I get that statistically DIY'ing your portfolio will
| almost always lead to worse returns but I really do wish
| I could exclude certain stocks from my index funds.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Index funds do not buy shares because shares "look like a
| better ROI". Index funds buy because non index funds buy
| (and same with selling).
| scarmig wrote:
| 1) That's not how index funds work: they attempt to track
| a target market index. At most, it happens indirectly:
| get your company into the major indices by a short-
| sighted depletion of capital, and you can get some level
| of lift from index funds blindly purchasing your stock
| (though IIRC it's not a huge effect).
|
| 2) You can effectively remove certain companies from an
| index using derivatives in addition to the index fund.
| Alternatively, look into direct indexing, where you
| attempt to track an index by directly owning an
| appropriately weighted basket of stocks, though it tends
| to be more complicated, have greater tracking errors, and
| have higher fees.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| I don't think the timing adds up for this explanation.
| Friedman introduced the shareholder value doctrine in
| 1970, and Jack Welch's Pierre Hotel speech that kicked
| off the era of slash-and-burn management was in 1981.
| Meanwhile, index funds were a tiny fraction of assets
| under management until well into the 2000s.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Because the MBAs and financiers have taken everything
| over and are working their way through our government
| now.
| eptcyka wrote:
| Because if you look at it by the numbers, expenses went
| down whilst output remained. If you're an investor that
| investigates annual reports on finances, this would pique
| your interest. There is no way to price the talent and
| knowledge of your workforce until after they have left.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| I really like that last sentence. 'There is no way to
| price the talent and knowledge of your workforce until
| after they have left.' I think that captures so much in
| such a simple to understand way.
| JohnFen wrote:
| The stock market is all about near-term gains, and as a
| result it is often irrational and rewards destructive
| behavior.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| > Why does the stock market reward idiot shit like this?
|
| Well at a first order, the answer is that the stock
| market as a system for promoting value creation is an
| imperfect approximation of an ideal value creator, and
| more and more we are beginning to see the myriad of ways
| this concept produces antisocial results. (See for
| example the state of hospitals and schools, and the
| rising rate of individuals with crippling medical and
| college debt.)
|
| More directly there has been some criticism of the stock
| market for rewarding short term gain over long term
| value, which among other things has led to the creation
| of the Long Term Stock Exchange:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Stock_Exchange
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I should add that our short term market-based approach to
| economic activity fails to produce appropriate housing
| outcomes, and that the approaches in Vienna or Singapore
| could end our homelessness crisis and make everyone
| happier. I recently read a doctor's account of the
| homeless people who use the ER as a community space by
| complaining of minor illnesses, and it seems so clear to
| me it would be cheaper to give them small private
| subsidized housing (not the awful and alienating
| "shelters" that offer no privacy or storage and have
| strict rules, making the street more appealing). Fixing
| housing could be cheaper than them using the ER or paying
| for their prison space, and it would also make the
| streets of San Francisco smell a LOOOT better (and BART),
| but our short term market based system just chops up
| everything good, sells it for parts, and speculates on
| all the land and buildings.
|
| https://www.shareable.net/public-housing-works-lessons-
| from-...
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| _> and that the approaches in Vienna_
|
| Vienna's approach worked because it happened after WW2
| when the country was bombed and broken, land,
| construction materials and labor were dirt cheap, so the
| state built over half the city's homes and turned them
| into public housing cheaply no problem.
|
| But fast forward to today where most of the land and
| buildings in a city are privately owned, how to you
| expect a city, any city, to buy up over half the
| buildings in the city at today's market and turn them
| into public housing?
|
| The city would probably have to go broke or into huge
| amounts of debt and everyone would be screaming
| communism.
|
| Even in the rest of Austria, this approach today would
| not be feasible due to how insane the cost of urban
| housing ahs reached no city could afford to buy up over
| half of it.
|
| The monetary appreciation of housing prices and and
| turning it into an speculative asset is the west's
| biggest policy failure. You'd have to undo this first
| before you can think of implementing Vienna's policies.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Right so you're saying Vienna's approached worked but we
| would have to change things to make it work for us. That
| is exactly what I am saying too.
|
| I'm also saying that it could be worth considerable
| effort to try to make those changes, because the reward
| is a much better system.
|
| For example we might introduce bills now that help
| stabilize (reduce) housing prices by limiting large scale
| corporate speculation on housing, such as these two bills
| [below] introduced into congress. With cheaper housing
| available, the need for social housing goes down and so
| does the cost to build it, dramatically lowering the
| total cost to implement.
|
| https://projects.propublica.org/represent/bills/117/hr924
| 6
|
| https://projects.propublica.org/represent/bills/117/s5151
|
| > everyone would be screaming communism
|
| Yes and part of what I'm saying is that we might want to
| stop doing that and think about what is actually going to
| fix our problems, even if _gasp_ the government is
| involved. Nobody can afford housing and our planes are
| falling out of the sky and we're having a cold-war
| political debate while every other major country offers
| cheaper medical care and education.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| That would require actually listening to each other and
| experts, and not using demagoguery to villainize people
| who disagree with us on minor culture issues, like
| putting people of color in roles as elves on a terrible
| TV show. Again, the financial incentives align for the
| anti-social aspect, since yelling at each other draws in
| more engagement and viewers and sells more ad-space.
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| > the stock market as a system for promoting value
| creation is an imperfect approximation of an ideal value
| creator
|
| yet
|
| > See for example the state of hospitals and schools, and
| the rising rate of individuals with crippling medical and
| college debt.
|
| Ummmm. State hospitals and schools are not traded on our
| stock exchanges. If there's a failure here, it's not with
| equities markets.
|
| There's an obvious common denominator between the
| examples you give, and that these are the most highly-
| regulated industries in America. My first guess as to
| where to lay blame would be on those regulations -
| although we'd really need to dig into whatever the
| specific failures you're thinking of, if we want to be
| sure.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| "See _the state of_ hospitals" meaning the situation with
| hospitals, many of which it seems are private. Our
| schools are a mixture of state and publicly owned (I'm
| including college) but even state funded schools suffer
| due to their reliance on stock market driven suppliers
| such as textbook companies and the housing the teachers
| live in.
|
| > My first guess as to where to lay blame would be on
| those regulations
|
| Considering medical and educational costs (total system
| costs including government expense) are much higher here
| than they are for example in Germany which has State run
| institutions for both, I would see this as a poor
| assumption.
|
| However I'm not actually advocating for State-run
| institutions, as I would rather see locally owned
| cooperatives for housing and schools, and larger
| federations of cooperatives for medical research. My
| point is that short term market-based winner-take-all
| approaches are hurting us.
|
| I should add that the broad topic of discussion here is
| Boeing, which degraded in critical safety metrics after
| moving to a relaxed regulation environment and focusing
| on market based short term optimization.
| justwool wrote:
| Because state hospitals aren't publicly listened they
| aren't broken by this?
|
| Yes I forgot every aspect of state run hospitals are the
| same...
|
| But except wait.. almost every aspect of what makes that
| hospital is on the stock market.
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| > Why does the stock market reward idiot shit like this?
|
| Goodhart's law, unfortunately. Whatever metric the stock
| market rewards gets gamed like there is no tomorrow (or
| next quarter, here.)
| afavour wrote:
| Because, depressingly, the stock market is correct.
|
| Boeing is one of two manufacturers for planes of this
| size. The other is totally backlogged with orders. The
| stock market has assessed, correctly, that Boeing can
| withstand this loss of knowledge and keep generating
| profit. Does it result in shit equipment that literally
| kills people? Sure. But how many people are going to stop
| flying because of it? Not many. Throw in the lucrative
| military connections and you've got yourself a sure bet.
| swader999 wrote:
| I'm not getting on a Boeing plane again. More on
| principle than fear of my life. And yeah, I'm probably in
| a group that is not statistically important.
| fcatalan wrote:
| I flew this week. There were two 737 flights at about
| 130EUR then one with an A320 at 220EUR. I took the
| Airbus. Same reason as you.
| JackFr wrote:
| I think that many of the managers honestly didn't
| understand where the quality and safety came from. They
| probably thought that they could just coast and the
| quality would continue.
|
| As a counterpoint, I work at very large financial firm in
| technology and in general, the 20+ year veterans who've
| been here forever are _terrible_. They are hidebound in
| their actions, years behind in industry best practices
| and they maintain little fiefdoms simply because of their
| intimate knowledge of the banks arcane and idiosyncratic
| policies. The place would be better of without the bulk
| of them.
|
| That is to say we are the complete opposite of what
| Boeing was. But the most charitable interpretation you
| could offer the Boeing management is that they thought
| they were in the situation of my company rather than the
| situation they actually had.
| soraminazuki wrote:
| You're being too generous. Boeing actively retaliated
| against people raising safety concerns. That's not the
| action of people who didn't know any better.
| vkou wrote:
| > Why does the stock market reward idiot shit like this?
|
| Because as someone buying stock, I have no idea whether
| these kinds of things are right and necessary to reduce
| bloat and redundancies in the firm, or idiotic and self-
| destructive.
|
| All I know is that I probably want to be buying stock in
| firms that are more profitable, as opposed to less
| profitable. Or, at least, firms that other people think
| are going to be more profitable.
| api wrote:
| Few stock market investors bother to look beneath top
| line numbers like profits, revenue growth, etc. Number go
| up, so stock goes up.
|
| They're exploiting the uninformed, which in this case are
| retail investors.
| dboreham wrote:
| > Why does the stock market reward idiot shit like this?
|
| Wall St geniuses are not engineers.
|
| That said, I bought Boeing stock and held over that time
| frame. I did so because I could see that humans were
| going to need more planes over the long term, and there
| are only two vendors. Also I visited the Everett plant
| with my family on vacation. It didn't occur to me that it
| would be worthwhile introducing KPI BS and McDonald's
| management style when constructing things worth 100
| million and safety-critical.
| toss1 wrote:
| Because the entire rewards system is built around short-
| medium term financial gains.
|
| It is a very old story. People build a company with deep
| knowledge and caring about what actually makes great
| products. Financial managers get involved to manage the
| money aspects of the business. Financial types want a lot
| more control to make the company more profitable.
|
| The financial management has no actual clue what makes
| the company valuable. They only know what makes more or
| less cash flow in this or that direction. But, credit
| where due, they _DO_ know how to make that work.
|
| They start financially 'engineering' the company for
| near-term profits and higher stock prices. This works.
| This works fantastically well. Everything looks leaner,
| teams of younger workers are sometimes orders of
| magnitude cheaper than the highly experienced teams, and
| no one can tell the difference from outside. Profits are
| higher, stock prices hit record high after record high.
| Cash is spent on stock buybacks and not R&D or retaining
| institutional knowledge. Warning flags start showing up
| in product and service quality indicators, but are
| ignored and even suppressed. The problems start
| multiplying at increasing rates, then exponentially
| increasing rates.
|
| Eventually, it starts to get serious. But by then, the
| "financial geniuses" have long since cashed out and the
| core of the company's workforce, ethos, and institutional
| knowledge has been so gutted that there is no recovery.
| The death spiral starts in earnest.
|
| The only questions are whether for Boeing, being a
| critical keystone in the US aerospace and defense
| industry can or will be allowed to fail, and, if not, if
| there will be an actual engineering-based turnaround, or
| if it will be a Soviet-like zombie company for how many
| years?
|
| Forkin' MBAs, they'll kill it every time.
| listenallyall wrote:
| > Why does the stock market reward idiot shit like this?
|
| Because Boeing boosted revenue from $60 to 101 billion
| during the time frame. And had just a single competitor.
|
| The current stock price is less than half of its 2019
| peak.
| unsui wrote:
| The only thing that seems to work nowadays is name-and-
| shame (unless you run for president, apparently).
|
| Who are these folks that deserve to be outted for gutting
| an American institution? I'm sure they're still around,
| practicing their strain of vulture capitalism.
|
| UPDATE:
|
| Looks like the article points out the following main
| culprits: * Jim McNerney * Dave Calhoun
| yowzadave wrote:
| It seems like this is the same pattern that we've seen
| happen more broadly in the tech industry over the past year
| --the big tech companies think they can juice the bottom
| line by reducing headcount, and the increased profitability
| will outweigh any negative impact on their engineering
| performance. It's a perverse incentive that seems very
| difficult to turn around once it starts happening.
| listenallyall wrote:
| > millions of dollars fewer per year in headcount expenses.
|
| I don't know how much they saved by forcing out highly-paid
| employees, but it was a tiny amount compared to the 40
| billion in additional revenue earned between 2008 and 2018
| (60 to 101 billion). The stock market rewarded the company
| primarily because of the revenue gains.
| forgotmyinfo wrote:
| Y'all're gonna hate this, but financialization and the
| relentless pursuit of profits. Every time this stuff happens,
| people ask why, and it's because of greed. When you focus on
| making money above all else, this is what happens. It's not a
| mystery.
| trilobyte wrote:
| This is where regulation steps in. A regulatory body should
| make the cost of certain failure scenarios so painful that
| companies are incentivized to make better choices. We
| probably don't need regulations about the color choices of
| t-shirts, but safety & testing for mass-transit vehicles
| might be warranted.
| jandrese wrote:
| That's the future guy's problem. So long as it is
| possible to cash out before the consequences happen that
| sort of regulation won't move the needle much.
|
| Making it illegal to be a bad CEO is one of those things
| that sounds intriguing on paper, but would be a nightmare
| to implement in real life.
|
| Prosecutor: "You inflated investor returns by sabotaging
| the future survival of the company and made shoddy
| products that killed people."
|
| Former CEO: "So what?"
|
| The worst part is that this is a real problem. So many
| formerly strong companies have been brought down by this
| behavior that it is becoming notable when it doesn't
| happen. We are allowing these guys to destroy the
| American economy slowly just because it makes them and
| their close buddies ridiculous money. And of course the
| government is largely captured by these same people, so
| Washington isn't going to help. Just so frustrating.
| rybosworld wrote:
| This phenomenon also explains some others that may or may
| not be surprising:
|
| 1. Founder led companies have higher returns. And it's by
| A LOT. Hard to quantify exactly but, I've seen quoted
| numbers as high as 20% outperformance for founder led
| companies.
|
| 2. The biggest corporations never remain the biggest.
| Where is the Dutch East India company today? More recent
| examples: IBM was overtaken by Nippon Telephone, was
| overtaken by Exxon Mobil, was overtaken by GE, was
| overtaken by Microsoft etc.
|
| 3. It's not very common that a company stays in the S&P
| 500 for more than 30 years. The average lifespan is 21
| years.
|
| The common thread is that as soon as the sociopath MBA's
| take over, they Boeing the whole business.
| nyolfen wrote:
| "greed" is a useless term for anything besides moralizing.
| it's just "self-interested behavior i don't like" -- great,
| but self-interested behavior is also literally the only
| thing that has ever worked at scale
| truckerbill wrote:
| Even most economists these days would agree that this is
| a really bad take (invisible hand). You should read more
| than the punchline of that Adam Smith book and you would
| find that even he would agree
| vundercind wrote:
| I grow less and less tolerant of "stuff just is, you
| can't, like, _judge_ it, man" the older I get.
| rybosworld wrote:
| A lot of people (sizeable majority?) seem to go the
| opposite way when they get older, so that's pretty
| interesting.
| malermeister wrote:
| It's almost as if an economic system based on maximizing
| greed instead of reigning it in was not sustainable or
| desirable.
| vundercind wrote:
| It's this, absolutely. Professional managers trained in
| finance who either don't know or don't care about the
| actual business they're managing. Work = moving money
| around a spreadsheet and all else is incidental at best and
| something to be avoided at worst, doubly so if it can't be
| captured in a spreadsheet with a dollar value attached.
| autokad wrote:
| a lot of people say things like 'stock price', but that's
| missing the point. the lesson is in the nuance.
|
| its many factors, effecting all aspects of our lives now
| honestly.
|
| - young people's disregard for the knowledge of people older
| than them. This can be an essay in itself, but there's the
| idea that the reasons why people are doing things the way
| they are is because they are stupid, something like: "you are
| young and you knows how to do everything right if only these
| dumb old people would get out of my way." I had a friend do a
| start up to make bourbon in 3 months. He thought all those
| alcohol producers that take 5-30 years making them were doing
| it wrong. I am like, definitely give it a go but understand
| that "I am sure they thought about this'.
|
| - management focuses on nonsensical metrics. In recent
| history, you have to be data driven, focus on metrics, ignore
| everything else, its the new religion. An example is how
| technical support teams focus on having 0 tickets open, so
| support engineers just close tickets even if the customer
| isn't helped. but hey, that red line is pointing down and to
| the left right? win! And as with boeing, they made their
| metrics look really good, look, no more defects! all you have
| to do is stop reporting them.
|
| - companies willing to outsource critical components of their
| business. I never understood this one, I don't care how
| 'cheap' it is, you don't outsource critical parts of your
| business. at best, they don't have the same stakes as you do
| on the matter, at worst they steal your IP and/or become your
| competitors.
| tomthehero wrote:
| Don't blame this on young people, it's probably mostly
| post-40 dudes who run the board of these large companies
| autokad wrote:
| young dudes of the time, that are now hitting their 40s.
| Dont get me wrong, the new young are doubling down on
| that world view.
| tanseydavid wrote:
| >> why do this intentionally?
|
| Myopia + greed is a hell of a drug.
| vpribish wrote:
| they did not. this article and many people are
| sensationalizing it to get attention and push whatever their
| angle is. it was short-sighted, stupid, greedy, and wrong,
| but not intentionally suicidal (let alone homicidal!).
| pyrale wrote:
| Some people in organizations can't take no for an answer.
| They want to see their orders followed, and if they see you
| as a roadblock, you will be marginalized, sometimes with
| harm.
|
| That's not always bad, sometimes employees drag their feet
| when they shouldn't. But in some situations (for instance,
| one arm of the company gaining the upper hand), the people in
| power are so convinced that their own perspective and goals
| are right, that they think they don't need to listen or
| understand the big picture.
|
| Ad to this that sometimes an exec has sociopathic tendencies,
| and you have an explosive cocktail of harassment and
| destruction of valuable knowledge. The more resilient the
| company, the more entrenched this behaviour can get, and the
| more irreversible it will become.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| "intentionally" is too strong a word here.
|
| More -> intentionally cut cost by eliminating experienced
| people.
|
| Not -> intentionally getting rid of knowledge. even the worst
| managers wouldn't admit to wanting to loose knowledge.
| bsder wrote:
| Are any of the executives who did this in jail? No? Well,
| carry on, then.
|
| None of the executives responsible for this have paid any
| price. None of the investors or board members who allowed
| this paid any price.
|
| And the worst part: it's not clear you can fix it, now. Even
| if you completely busted out every executive and wiped out
| the investors, there is no path forward since those
| executives pushed out all the engineering knowledge.
| stephenhuey wrote:
| I learned some things reading this article from 2 days ago:
|
| Boeing's Dead Whistleblower Spoke the Truth
|
| https://www.thefp.com/p/boeings-dead-whistleblower-spoke-the...
|
| The Free Press
| zer00eyz wrote:
| The entire first half of this (tfp directly above this
| comment) article blindly supports the spin that there is some
| conspiracy where someone killed him. HIs own family goes into
| great detail all over the press about how he had anxiety and
| ptsd. That he quit his job on DR orders or the stress was
| going to give him a heart attack.
|
| The shit Boeing did to him was awful (stress, anxiety and
| ptsd) and Boeing should be blamed for that. They should be
| held accountable for that. Making his sucicide "Fishy"
| discredits the pressure he was under and its cause. Playing
| at the edges of conspiracy theory also serves to discredit
| the author of the article and the validity of everything else
| they are saying.
|
| The man killed himself. The actions of Boeing played a part
| in that.
| stephenhuey wrote:
| On a previous HN discussion, plenty of people here believed
| it was fully possible that someone at Boeing essentially
| pulled the trigger and gave plenty of examples, even from a
| huge successful Silicon Valley company, of corporate folks
| doing stranger nefarious things than would be believable in
| film. As someone who has known multiple people who
| committed suicide, I'm not sure I can feel as certain as
| you that this was a suicide without more evidence.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| After reading the story of ebay execs harassing a random
| completely unimportant couple, to the point of repeatedly
| mailing them threatening or disgusting packages, I can't
| discredit killing a witness for a real tangible reason.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Oh yeah, I remember that one [1]. One of the bastards got
| five years in prison - one of the very very few
| exceptions to my general line of calling for prison
| abolishment.
|
| [1]
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/sep/29/ebay-
| exec...
| mateus1 wrote:
| Monsanto also did some pretty awful persecution to
| scientists... there are plenty of examples in American
| contemporary businesses
| segasaturn wrote:
| There's more than enough circumstantial evidence to support
| the allegations of foul play here. When people kill
| themselves, they usually do it somewhere private and
| personal to them, like inside their home, or their car. Not
| in the parking lot outside a courthouse.
| lstamour wrote:
| The article above and every other article I've read says,
| "he was found in his truck". That's a personal vehicle,
| and assuming it was locked, enough to suggest that it was
| self-inflicted.
| Supermancho wrote:
| I can close a locked door after shooting someone in the
| head. I'm not sure how this follows that "it's enough".
| After years of criticizing Boeing, he kills himself
| during his deposition? I don't think so.
| dralley wrote:
| >or their car
|
| That's where he killed himself. Inside his truck, in the
| parking lot.
| isleyaardvark wrote:
| And they generally don't tell a friend "if anything
| happens to me, it's not suicide".
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Unless its one last troll against boeing on the way out.
| Why go quietly if you are going to go when you have a
| shot to majorly embarrass the company one last time?
| layer8 wrote:
| From TFA, it seems that it was someone else (still alive)
| who said that.
| metabagel wrote:
| From "the f..ing article"?
| layer8 wrote:
| See https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=39488667 .
|
| It's commonly used on HN.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| >>> or their car. Not in the parking lot outside a
| courthouse.
|
| NO: Barnett's body was found in a vehicle in a Holiday
| Inn parking lot in Charleston on Saturday, police said.
|
| Or you know this
|
| The family says Barnett's health declined because of the
| stresses of taking a stand against his longtime employer.
|
| "He was suffering from PTSD and anxiety attacks as a
| result of being subjected to the hostile work environment
| at Boeing," they said, "which we believe led to his
| death."
|
| FROM: https://www.npr.org/2024/03/12/1238033573/boeing-
| whistleblow...
|
| The man was found dead, with a sucide note (hand written)
| and his own gun in his hand.
|
| You know what happens when gun owners get the urge to
| kill themselves. They kill themselves. Guns make suicide
| less of a cry for help and more or less "effective".
|
| Any article that doesn't mention what his family had to
| say about the matter is not only creating a narrative,
| but they are openly disrespecting the family of a dead
| man to grab attention and headlines.
|
| How about todays interview with his OWN FAMILY:
|
| FROM HIS MOTHER: If this hadn't gone on so long, I'd
| still have my son, and my sons would have their brother
| and we wouldn't be sitting here. So in that respect, I
| do," Vicky Stokes said when asked if she places some of
| the blame for her son's death on Boeing.
|
| OR THIS: Stokes and her son Rodney Barnett said they do
| not want to comment on whether they believe he died by
| suicide until the investigation by the Charleston police
| department concludes.
|
| source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/john-barnett-boeing-
| whistleblow...
| lyu07282 wrote:
| It's not like we know or will ever know the details of
| and the extend of the investigation, the note was
| actually reported as a "white piece of paper that closely
| resembled a note,", what was on the note? Were his
| fingerprints on the note? Was handwriting analysis done?
| Did the gun belong to him? That wasn't reported either.
| Was it registered to him/ when/where did he buy it? Was
| there gunpowder residue on his hand? Does the trajectory
| and blood splatter analysis all match? Was there
| surveillance footage of the car? What was his last
| cellphone usage?
|
| Part of the reason why people jump to conclusions is
| because of a distinct lack of rationalist reporting by
| police and media. They don't tell us the empirical
| evidence because we are supposed to just believe them,
| and trust in their competent investigation, but that
| doesn't really work, at least not everyone is going to be
| satisfied by that demand.
|
| That's not to say it wasn't a suicide, it just means we
| don't know either way and will likely never know. But it
| crucially also doesn't mean sufficient evidence couldn't
| be presented to convince a reasonable observer.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| Sure:
|
| What we do know: this was an AR21 case. It was him suing
| boeing for forcing him to retire early and not promoting
| him because he was "whistle blowing". This is a case that
| had already been dismissed once.
|
| On the matter of that, the FAA already got his reports
| and agreed with him. The harm to Boeing from his wistle
| blowing was finished. They were probably paying more for
| lawyers to fight this than it was going to cost to
| settle. So this wasnt about Boeing loosing anything other
| than cash at this point. If we're going to speculate we
| should be asking if Boeing was fighting this out of spite
| rather than making a good business decision.
|
| The family themselves have spoken up: that he was
| troubled, and they firmly blame Boeing for his death. The
| way they are going about it says "we know he killed
| himself" ... they just think Boeing drove him to do it.
| They are coy with the conspiracy theory angle cause it
| just make boeing look bad...
|
| There is a really interesting narrative here about
| stress, mental heath, and suicide for gun owners. Topics
| that the press wants to touch less than the ones your
| suggesting they ignore....
| lyu07282 wrote:
| I care infinitely more about the questions I asked than
| whatever the family had to say. Because questions about
| fingerprints and gunpowder residue are concerning the
| physical evidence that could prove suicide to a
| reasonable degree.
|
| I don't really care about talking about circumstantial
| evidence when the physical is right there.
|
| The reason why people aren't convinced by the "this
| wasn't even about his whistleblowing, he already
| disclosed everything, so Boeing has no motive" argument
| is because it isn't just about stopping whistleblowers,
| it's about the chilling effect for other potential,
| current employees.
|
| We can brush it all aside as crazy conspiracy theories,
| but I think that's actually very harmful to society.
| Conspiracy thinking is very damaging, our response
| shouldn't be "shut up and trust authority" when somebody
| asks about forensic evidence.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| >>> it's about the chilling effect for other potential,
| current employees.
|
| We agree on this 1000%
|
| "If this hadn't gone on so long, I'd still have my son,
| and my sons would have their brother and we wouldn't be
| sitting here. So in that respect, I do," Vicky Stokes
| said when asked if she places some of the blame for her
| son's death on Boeing.
|
| FROM: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/john-barnett-boeing-
| whistleblow...
|
| Let me restate that: THE MANS OWN MOTHER SAYS BOEING
| DROVE HIM TO KILL HIMSELF
|
| They didn't need to hold a gun to his head and pull the
| trigger. The just needed to fuck him over badly enough
| for long enough for this to be the inevitable outcome.
|
| Blow the whistle all you want kids, Pappa Boeing gonna
| take your job and fuck you over and there aint nothing
| you can do about it... Thats the chilling narrative if
| there ever was one.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| On the other hand, he might have wanted to go out leaving
| exactly this sort of mess of optics for boeing PR to deal
| with. Most people who commit suicide probably aren't in
| the national spotlight against the very thing that
| brought them this point beforehand.
| whythre wrote:
| Seems pretty convenient to the people in power that he had
| the courtesy to off himself before he could hurt them in
| court.
| dralley wrote:
| It. was. a. defamation. lawsuit.
|
| The second of two, because he lost the first one.
|
| People act like this was a criminal proceeding. It was
| not. He'd already been testifying and speaking publicly
| about Boeing for more than 5 years. He sued them because
| of Boeing's attempts to defame his character to downplay
| the allegations which have been public for a long time.
| ladzoppelin wrote:
| I am not saying your wrong but who were the faulty
| suppliers for all these claims? Is it possible things
| would start unraveling for something much bigger than it
| already has? The other motive would also be to send a
| message which it definitely did. I find it weird that he
| would ruin the chance of future whistle blowers coming
| forward by doing this the day after the court appearance,
| its strange.
| dralley wrote:
| What was his testimony in a civil (not criminal) lawsuit
| which had already been given many times before both in
| public and in other lawsuits going to unravel? Especially
| given the number of additional investigations going on?
|
| Why would I just assume that it exists?
|
| And why would it ruin the chance of future whistle
| blowers coming forwards? Was he supposed to imagine that
| everyone was going to start believing conspiracy theories
| about his death?
| ladzoppelin wrote:
| I mean, do you really think this will not deter future
| whistle blowers lol? "conspiracy theories about his
| death" You mean like that 30 year coordinated Epstein
| situation?
| zer00eyz wrote:
| Right... defamation is a good analog for this. Its under
| AIR21...
|
| This case was him suing Boeing for money. The claim was
| that his whistleblowing was the reason he didn't get
| promoted and was forced to retire early. Thats
| whistleblowing past tense, the FAA already said the
| things he was whistleblowing on were in fact true, and
| Boeing was at fault.
|
| He had lost this case once, but his lawyers felt that he
| could win this 2nd time around as there was a
| preponderance of evidence. The table stakes for this were
| in the 10's of millions at best, a trivial sum of money.
|
| >>> I am not saying your wrong but who were the faulty
| suppliers for all these claims?
|
| It was all, already, long ago, unraveled:
|
| https://archive.is/iUzxR#selection-1111.393-1111.775
| euroderf wrote:
| A billion dollars here, a billion dollars there, pretty
| soon someone needs to be taken out of the picture.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| What billions of dollars.
|
| The man had already been on film. He already has written
| statements everywhere. The FAA already agreed that what
| he said had happened.
|
| He was in court for AIR21 case... to get money out of
| boeing for himself, for 10 years of early retirement.
| Candidly Boeing was probably paying more for the lawyers
| they were using to fight him than they would have paid
| just settling.
|
| There weren't billons on the line with this.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| The reason you don't settle is to discourage others from
| doing the same thing. It would also be the reason to
| 'suicide' someone even if they were not costing you much
| money.
| smsm42 wrote:
| You say it like "anxiety" and "stress" are synonymous to
| suicidal. I am a pretty anxious person, and sometimes have
| a lot of stress at work, and experienced burnout in the
| past too. That doesn't mean I am about to shoot myself in a
| motel parking lot - or anywhere else, for that matter. This
| binary view of mental health - either a person is "healthy"
| which means 100% perfect, or he's not - and then anything
| can be expected, including a suicide at any arbitrary time
| - is nonsense. It's completely legit to ask how comes the
| person who wasn't suicidal, and actually told people that
| he's not - suddenly turns to commit suicide in the middle
| of court testimony, without any warning signs or
| explanation. Saying "oh, he was anxious and stressed about
| work" is not a good explanation to this. Maybe there was an
| explanation, maybe there wasn't, but pretending "anxiety"
| explains it is nonsense.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| His whole lawsuit was about being forced to retire 10
| years early because Boeing forced him out for
| whistleblowing.
|
| Thats whistleblowing as in past tense. He complained to
| the FAA and the FAA said 'yes John you're right'.
|
| Not to diminish your mental heath but the whole argument
| here is that what Boeing around "stress", "pressure" and
| "anxiety" was far worse.
|
| Its not like is anti whistleblower retaliation case
| (AIR21) was going to be some massive blemish for Boeing.
| It's not like it was going to be a 100 million dollar
| write down. It is basically "wrongful termination" that
| they are fighting. And it would be round 2 on this case
| (the first was "dismissed").
|
| https://archive.is/iUzxR#selection-995.134-995.139 does a
| bit better job of surfacing more of the details. Ones
| that paint boeing in a far worse light without the
| sensationalism of a tv script murder plot.
| partiallypro wrote:
| I don't really even get the conspiracy theory that he was
| murdered, if Boeing etc are all so knowing and powerful why
| didn't they kill him years ago, well before he could tell
| his tale? Now they kill him because he already spoke out
| and they want to put the spotlight on themselves? The whole
| thing doesn't really make a lot of logical sense.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| The "funny" thing to me is that I'm old enough to remember when
| the merger occurred that people were predicting exactly what
| came to pass. It just took 25 years to finally happen.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Yes, large companies take a lot longer to fail than I ever
| imagined. A lot of time can pass riding on past excellence
| before the cracks start showing.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| It's not about the size of the company, it's about the
| barrier to entry of the market they're in, how much
| competition they have and the amount of vendor lock-in.
|
| And civil aviation in general scores top marks in all those
| fields. It's a duopoly with an insane barrier to entry both
| technical, legal and financial with very long and complex
| vendor lock-in.
| krisoft wrote:
| So what you are saying is that twitter, oh sorry x, is going
| to break down completely in around 2048? :)
| masklinn wrote:
| I doubt xitter has as much quality buffer as Boeing had in
| '97, and Elon's brutalisation of it was a lot less gradual.
| YeBanKo wrote:
| Does quality matter as much for X as it does for Boeing?
| A closer example to Boeing is Tesla and SpaceX. Tesla is
| a mixed bag of good and bad stuff. But SpaceX is a marvel
| and essentially has no competitors.
|
| Compare X to media. Since the bridge collapse in the
| Baltimore I have read interesting analysis on X and
| reddit, not the best medium, but yet did not come across
| a single decent article about it in the media.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| SpaceX is a much better analogy than Tesla.
|
| Tesla accepts that there will be some accidents at the
| cost of progress.
|
| SpaceX does not. (Or specifically lines up launches so
| that accidents have negligible consequences)
| YeBanKo wrote:
| Tesla can cause injuries and casualties to general
| public, so can Boeing. SpaceX much less likely.
| masklinn wrote:
| > It just took 25 years to finally happen.
|
| "Quality inertia" is one thing which allows for giant amounts
| of damage to be done long before the wheels visibly come off,
| as deviance gets normalised (and even mandated in cases such
| as Boeing) and the company eats its reserve of quality and
| goodwill, it starts going off-track in small ways before it
| falls off a cliff.
|
| It took closer to 20 years than 25 for the wheels to come off
| of Boeing. Lion Air 610 crashed on October 29, 2018, the MDD
| merger was on August 1, 1997.
|
| And that crash was the first major _externally visible
| symptom_ [0], the decisions which led to it happened years
| earlier (2014-2015).
|
| [0] unless you count the dreamliner's joke of a rollout,
| which probably should have been the warning shot that things
| were getting unwell
| hammock wrote:
| Where can I read more about quality inertia , find other
| case studies, etc?
| jgeada wrote:
| There was a recent discussion right here on HN about
| "trading trust":
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39394990
|
| Basically, many of these companies took decades to reach
| these positions where they're trusted. A bunch of
| managers rightfully figured out this was an asset that
| could be easily traded away for increased profits and
| they'd be gone by the time anyone noticed the devastation
| they left behind.
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| Also called "brand harvesting".
|
| (If you built the brand yourself and did this all
| intentionally, I think it could also simply be called
| "the long con".)
| bumby wrote:
| https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/caib/news/report/default.
| htm...
| jrs235 wrote:
| https://youtu.be/GN80sx3s4LA?si=de_4xxo1YhFVy0lD
| MilStdJunkie wrote:
| Remember the big rollout of the Dreamliner in 2014 to show it
| was all done, but it was actually an empty metal tube with
| landing gear duct taped on it? And remember the _venom_ that
| people got for bringing up the fact that, you know, you could
| see the sky from the wheel wells? Or the second rollout, when
| they had to strap the fuse segments together because no one
| knew where the fasteners were?
|
| Oh we could go on and on, for pages and pages. This story's
| not anything new.
|
| I think a lot of people in the industry have just been
| waiting for the thud, but everyone underestimated just how
| _good_ A &P mechanics are[1], and how tight aircrew is. As we
| approach the days when aircrew have to punch a de-ice button
| every five minutes, we're hitting the limits of those staff.
|
| Something to think about: name a commercially successful
| Boeing-designed product from the 21st century. Something that
| can legitimately be called "Successful", and "Boeing"
|
| [1] Who are not required in the Boeing fab - oh no - they are
| _far_ too expensive. But wait, you might ask . . what
| credentials _are_ required in the plant? Heh heh heh heh heh
| . . . oh that is a fun question.
| masklinn wrote:
| > Remember the big rollout of the Dreamliner in 2014 to
| show it was all done, but it was actually an empty metal
| tube with landing gear duct taped on it?
|
| It was in 2007 (on July 8th, a date obviously picked for
| the memes). Maiden flight was supposed to be two months or
| so away with introduction in 2008.
|
| Maiden flight was on December 15, 2009. Commercial service
| started October 2011.
|
| > name a commercially successful Boeing-designed product
| from the 21st century
|
| The MAX was _commercially_ successful before it started
| falling out the sky. Orders even picked back up after the
| dip and cancellations from the MCAS crisis.
|
| It's not like customers have much of a choice if they need
| a new frame, there are 7000 outstanding orders for the
| A320neo family and in 2023 Airbus built 45 a month, with
| plans to eventually reach 75 a month (and stabilise there)
| circa 2026.
| constantcrying wrote:
| >name a commercially successful Boeing-designed product
| from the 21st century. Something that can legitimately be
| called "Successful", and "Boeing"
|
| Boeing is still able to sell planes to customers, they
| still have a lot of orders in their backlog. This would
| only change if their are mass cancellations by their
| customers.
|
| There is a _massive_ demand for planes right now, airlines
| rather would own a "good enough" plane from Bowling than
| no plane at all.
|
| The problem isn't the _lack_ of commercial success, the
| problem is that Boeing _is_ commercially successful and
| that there is absolutely no punishment from the market or
| their customers, because everyone knows that they will
| continue to make and sell planes.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> It just took 25 years to finally happen._
|
| To me the big question is, why did it take 25 years for this
| to become common knowledge? Why is our system of evaluating
| public corporations so messed up that a public company, and
| one with huge government contracts to boot, could get away
| with this for that long?
| baggy_trough wrote:
| Boeing, and the United States as a whole, have been very
| richly endowed with capital. When you decide to stop adding
| to your seed corn and start to eat it down, but you began
| with an enormous mountain of it, you can eat well for a
| very long period of time.
| mooreds wrote:
| Do you remember any specific newspaper or trade mag articles?
| Or was the conversation more in private/back channel?
| justrealist wrote:
| > It's worth reading, perhaps unless you're going to be flying
| on a Boeing plane anytime soon.
|
| This is all bad for Boeing, but at the end of the day, nobody
| has died on an American carrier in a Boeing plane in a very
| long time.
|
| Aircraft safety is layers on layers on layers. Let's not FUD
| people into thinking that flying on the worst plane Boeing has
| ever put out is anywhere comparable to the daily risks of
| driving.
| theragra wrote:
| Thanks
| bsder wrote:
| > Aircraft safety is layers on layers on layers.
|
| This is true, but disasters occur because those layers and
| layers get eroded until there is only one layer left which
| then fails.
|
| The problem is that Boeing has eroded layers and layers and
| layers of that safety. The question is "How many of those
| layers are left?"
| stcredzero wrote:
| _it will be unsurprising to you to hear that shortly
| afterwards, Boeing began abusing its most senior employees into
| leaving._
|
| Sounds a bit like what happened in newsrooms and at newspapers
| in the past decade and a half. (Except in that case, it was
| bottom-up, not top-down.)
| deviantbit wrote:
| What do you mean by "down hill"? Boeing has developed
| incredible technologies since the MD merger. They have been
| profitable w/ these technologies. You make a claim they were
| going down hill, what do you mean?
|
| I have a number of family members that work for Boeing, that
| have been in executive management, engineering and research.
| None of them ever mentioned MD as being the beginning of a
| decline.
|
| All of them tell a different story. The problems began with
| James McNerney. Harry Stonecipher came from MD, and was one of
| the best CEO's to ever touch that company. The 787 wouldn't
| have been a thing if it were not for McNerney.
|
| If you make a claim, back it up.
| m463 wrote:
| It's really hard to recover from a downgrade in culture. I hear
| the same kinds of things about IBM. I'm pretty sure there are
| other examples.
|
| The tough part is - it is _sad_.
|
| Read about boeing and Tex Johnston:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_M._Johnston#Boeing_Compa...
|
| and IBM invented the PC:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer
| jrs235 wrote:
| Norminalization of Deviance:
| https://youtu.be/GN80sx3s4LA?si=de_4xxo1YhFVy0lD
| proc0 wrote:
| > Swampy believed relying on mechanics to self-inspect their work
| was not only insane but illegal
|
| This sounds like the changes that have taken place in the
| software industry in the past 10-20 years. Engineers are meant to
| do much more than engineering, including testing their own
| software, managing project timelines, etc., however with software
| nobody dies, you just get crappy software that constantly breaks
| and needs an update every other day. There's an overall theme
| here of underestimating how hard engineering is, and as a result
| expecting a lot more from engineers which then of course causes
| bad engineering. Not surprisingly this is caused by non-technical
| people with power. Perhaps the fix is a cultural shift and a
| renewed respect for people who want to spend all their time
| specializing in technical skills.
| rjbwork wrote:
| Great idea but how will the bean counters and schmoozers get
| their multi-million dollar bonuses if they can't force
| engineers to do 5 jobs while paying them for 1? Will never
| work.
| pfortuny wrote:
| quality control is most of the times unmeasurable in the
| short term...
| margalabargala wrote:
| > however with software nobody dies
|
| The MCAS issue which crashed two Boeing planes was a software
| hack.
| SahAssar wrote:
| Well, yes, but also no. It was a hardware design change that
| necessitated a software hack (to escape mandatory retraining
| of pilots) that relied on unreliable hardware, right?
|
| Sure, software played a big part in it, but I think it seems
| like it was more a management and communication failure. If
| it was just software it'd probably be much easier to diagnose
| and fix.
| margalabargala wrote:
| I disagree. The hardware design of the cockpit is intended
| to be such that any computer inputs also move the pilot's
| controls, so that the pilots can countermand computer
| inputs if necessary. In this case, software was written
| such that this was not possible. The software that operates
| MCAS operates on a garbage-in-garbage-out model, like most
| software. There was no software written to determine if the
| incoming data was garbage, thus the software decided to
| crash two planes.
|
| Here's an article that goes into detail on the software:
| https://spectrum.ieee.org/how-the-boeing-737-max-disaster-
| lo...
|
| > When the flight computer trims the airplane to descend,
| because the MCAS system thinks it's about to stall, a set
| of motors and jacks push the pilot's control columns
| forward. It turns out that the Elevator Feel Computer can
| put a lot of force into that column--indeed, so much force
| that a human pilot can quickly become exhausted trying to
| pull the column back, trying to tell the computer that this
| really, really should not be happening.
|
| > Indeed, not letting the pilot regain control by pulling
| back on the column was an explicit design decision. Because
| if the pilots could pull up the nose when MCAS said it
| should go down, why have MCAS at all?
|
| > MCAS is implemented in the flight management computer,
| even at times when the autopilot is turned off, when the
| pilots think they are flying the plane. In a fight between
| the flight management computer and human pilots over who is
| in charge, the computer will bite humans until they give up
| and (literally) die.
|
| At the end of the day, if the person who wrote that
| software had written it differently, then those planes
| would not have crashed and hundreds of people would not
| have died.
| error503 wrote:
| > At the end of the day, if the person who wrote that
| software had written it differently, then those planes
| would not have crashed and hundreds of people would not
| have died.
|
| You can't really blame the software engineers. This was
| all thought out and tightly specified by Boeing to their
| avionics subcontractor (Collins, IIRC). This is how it
| was designed and engineered to work at a systems level -
| it is a _design_ hack. As far as I know there weren 't
| any software bugs or 'hacks' involved, and the avionics
| operated as designed (aside from the AoA DISAGREE alert,
| which was due to a requirements miscommunication, not a
| bug). It was broken _by design_ , which happened long
| before implementation, at Boeing.
|
| > When the flight computer trims the airplane to descend,
| because the MCAS system thinks it's about to stall, a set
| of motors and jacks push the pilot's control columns
| forward. It turns out that the Elevator Feel Computer can
| put a lot of force into that column--indeed, so much
| force that a human pilot can quickly become exhausted
| trying to pull the column back, trying to tell the
| computer that this really, really should not be
| happening.
|
| The Elevator Feel Computer is a part of the 737NG as
| well, and would behave the same way in those airplanes
| when receiving such erroneous AoA data; it's nothing new
| in the MAX. It certainly did not help the crews during
| the fatal MAX incidents, and is clearly not an ideal
| design, but it's also barely a footnote in the root cause
| analysis, along with the stick shaker and stall warnings
| blaring at them constantly. The pilots would easily be
| able to overcome it long enough to get safely on the
| ground. What was a bigger problem for those crews was
| that the MCAS has enough trim authority to make it
| impossible, with any amount of elevator input, to restore
| level flight - limiting its trim authority was part of
| the 'fixes' required to get them airborne again.
|
| I don't think it's reasonable to blame the implementation
| of MCAS for the accidents, its _existence_ is to blame,
| and really highlights how nothing about the 737 platform
| has been designed holistically - it is a patchwork of
| hacks on hacks dating from the 1970s, which is difficult
| to reason about as a whole, and has dark corners. To
| truly 'fix' MCAS, you need to consider AoA as critical
| air data (which the 737 does not), and you need to
| integrate it holistically with the rest of the flight
| controls (which the 737 cannot, since it is not fly-by-
| wire), and you need to consider it critical equipment
| (it's an 'augmentation' and not considered critical on
| the 737, 'justifying' the lack of redundancy). Once
| you've done those things, you've basically got the bones
| of a proper envelope protection system in place, and
| you've obviated the need for MCAS in the first place. Of
| course the 737 team couldn't do this, because the
| business decided that it was more important to avoid (and
| hide) any differences than to bring the aircraft in line
| with modern standards.
|
| Realistically, this should have been trapped by the
| safety analysis of the flawed design, which should have
| considered its effect on the whole flight control system
| when evaluating it, but Boeing again only considered MCAS
| to be an 'augmentation' and it got an abbreviated safety
| review as a result. Some engineers did express concern
| about some of these factors, but given the environment
| outlined in TFA, those concerns did not go anywhere,
| because they would have basically scuttled the idea and
| sent everyone back to the drawing board, which Boeing was
| desperate to avoid having already been caught flat-footed
| with the launch of the A320neo.
|
| The 737 airframe needs to be put to rest, it is simply
| not safe or sane to keep stacking more hacks onto it. But
| there's no indication Boeing's working on a successor so
| it's probably going to be on the market for another 20+
| years. Hard to imagine folks will probably be flying on
| an airframe with a 100 year old design (2024 + 20 years
| before a new revision + 20 years life span = 2064, around
| 100 years from the 737 launch before they start
| retiring)!
| canucker2016 wrote:
| Buying an airplane is not the same as buying a consumer
| item from a big box retailer.
|
| It's more like buying an expensive car/enterprise
| software. There are options. Options cost extra....
|
| excerpts from
| https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/business/boeing-
| safety-fe...:
|
| As the pilots of the doomed Boeing jets in Ethiopia and
| Indonesia fought to control their planes, they lacked two
| notable safety features in their cockpits.
|
| One reason: Boeing charged extra for them.
|
| For Boeing and other aircraft manufacturers, the practice
| of charging to upgrade a standard plane can be lucrative.
| Top airlines around the world must pay handsomely to have
| the jets they order fitted with customized add-ons.
|
| Boeing's optional safety features, in part, could have
| helped the pilots detect any erroneous readings. One of
| the optional upgrades, the angle of attack indicator,
| displays the readings of the two sensors. The other,
| called a disagree light, is activated if those sensors
| are at odds with one another.
|
| Boeing will soon update the MCAS software, and will also
| make the disagree light standard on all new 737 Max
| planes, according to a person familiar with the changes,
| who spoke on condition of anonymity because they have not
| been made public. Boeing started moving on the software
| fix and the equipment change before the crash in
| Ethiopia.
|
| The angle of attack indicator will remain an option that
| airlines can buy. Neither feature was mandated by the
| Federal Aviation Administration. All 737 Max jets have
| been grounded.
|
| "They're critical, and cost almost nothing for the
| airlines to install," said Bjorn Fehrm, an analyst at the
| aviation consultancy Leeham. "Boeing charges for them
| because it can. But they're vital for safety."
|
| "There are so many things that should not be optional,
| and many airlines want the cheapest airplane you can
| get," said Mark H. Goodrich, an aviation lawyer and
| former engineering test pilot. "And Boeing is able to
| say, 'Hey, it was available.'"
|
| But what Boeing doesn't say, he added, is that it has
| become "a great profit center" for the manufacturer.
|
| The three American airlines that bought the 737 Max each
| took a different approach to outfitting the cockpits.
|
| American Airlines, which ordered 100 of the planes and
| has 24 in its fleet, bought both the angle of attack
| indicator and the disagree light, the company said.
|
| Southwest Airlines, which ordered 280 of the planes and
| counts 36 in its fleet so far, had already purchased the
| disagree alert option, and it also installed an angle of
| attack indicator in a display mounted above the pilots'
| heads. After the Lion Air crash, Southwest said it would
| modify its 737 Max fleet to place the angle of attack
| indicator on the pilots' main computer screens.
|
| United Airlines, which ordered 137 of the planes and has
| received 14, did not select the indicators or the
| disagree light. A United spokesman said the airline does
| not include the features because its pilots use other
| data to fly the plane.
|
| When it was rolled out, MCAS took readings from only one
| sensor on any given flight, leaving the system vulnerable
| to a single point of failure. One theory in the Lion Air
| crash is that MCAS was receiving faulty data from one of
| the sensors, prompting an unrecoverable nose dive.
|
| In the software update that Boeing says is coming soon,
| MCAS will be modified to take readings from both sensors.
| If there is a meaningful disagreement between the
| readings, MCAS will be disabled.
| Terr_ wrote:
| The difference is whether organizations are willing--or forced
| --to invest in it.
|
| That's not automatically a wrong though, since different
| objects or processes merit different levels of quality.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| The real fix is popularizing the notion that management is just
| as commoditizatable than those they seek to commoditize.
|
| Note that in the recent dialogue about AI eating jobs, there's
| zero mention of whether it could come for management positions.
| Nothing. Curious, isn't it? Why wouldn't an LLM be good enough
| at this? I mean, it's really data-driven, right?
| passwordoops wrote:
| Frankly I think ChatGPT 3.5 was already good enough to
| replace the majority of CxO positions
| lrem wrote:
| Why not a Markov chain generator?
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _The real fix is popularizing the notion that management is
| just as commoditizatable than those they seek to
| commoditize._
|
| What's described here is exactly what happens when you have
| "generic" management. Generic management finds unneeded
| expenses and eliminates them. The only way a senior expert
| isn't a cost to be eliminated is if you managers focused on
| and understanding the enterprise they are managing (and no
| promises with that, however).
| lozenge wrote:
| > however with software nobody dies
|
| Eh, not a good hard-and-fast rule. Fujitsu's Horizon software
| drove some of its users to suicide.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > however with software nobody dies
|
| Unless that software is running a life-critical or potentially
| life-threatening piece of equipment. People have died from
| software bugs in such things.
| ccakes wrote:
| > however with software nobody dies
|
| Software that runs systems which can directly kill people does
| tend to get a lot of scrutiny, but there is also a lot of
| software which can indirectly kill someone that doesn't get the
| same level of attention
|
| https://www.technologydecisions.com.au/content/convergence/a...
| ljsprague wrote:
| An intrusive popup took over my screen at that link.
| strict9 wrote:
| You can click reader mode in your browser to read the article.
| buildsjets wrote:
| I have zero patience for fools who are allegedly knowledge
| workers, yet complain about popups and ads in the year 2024.
|
| The ads are obnoxious, but they are there for the plebs, and we
| need to put obnoxious ads the faces of plebs to fund the
| internet. If you are not a pleb, you already have an adblocking
| solution installed, so please use it. If however, you are a
| pleb, please consume mass quantities of the product which is
| being advertised. There are a lot of adware developers who are
| counting on you to buy their next Porsche.
|
| Or, invent a decent micropayent solution so we can get rid of
| the damn ads.
| ljsprague wrote:
| Or how about pop-ups not take over my screen? I'm on a work
| computer without an ad blocker.
| swader999 wrote:
| Get back to work Brian.
| huimang wrote:
| Or you can not complain about a dismissable popup on
| quality article being presented to you for free.
| ljsprague wrote:
| It wasn't dismissible; I had to force quit the browser.
| type_Ben_struct wrote:
| It baffles me how this happens time and time again in companies
| as they grow (albeit rarely with this level of human life
| consequence), and nobody ever seems to learn from it.
| carom wrote:
| Structural incentives that prioritize short term profits.
| Terr_ wrote:
| There's one technology where humanity's pace of progress has
| not been so swift: The programming and execution of
| organizations.
| noahtallen wrote:
| The companies are smart enough to learn from it. The problem is
| that in a late-stage capitalist market, companies have already
| grown so large that the easiest way to continue to grow profits
| is to cut costs as much as possible.
|
| It's pretty obvious that in many cases, this incentive is
| entirely opposed to human health and flourishing. Sure, you can
| cut costs in consumer electronics like TVs without harming
| anyone. (Assuming regulations that enforce a baseline quality
| in electrical components.) You can't do that in aviation or
| health care.
|
| Another aspect is that lower costs don't make it back to
| consumers in many industries with little competition. A more
| "financially efficient" Boeing means more money for
| shareholders, not cheaper airplanes.
|
| A counterpoint is that disasters should provide an economic
| incentive to the company to fix problems that cause disasters.
| As you point out, this simply isn't happening. There was
| apparently not enough market incentive after the B737max
| crashes to fix their quality control problems. That means it's
| cheaper for Boeing to crash its planes than to have really
| strong quality control. Obviously, the capitalist incentives in
| this system are no longer working for society.
|
| These late stage, massive companies are not about making good
| products. They are legally about returning value to
| shareholders. The people in charge are therefore all about
| optimizing the company finances.
|
| The only way to counteract this frequently terrible incentive
| is by us people (the government) creating the incentives that
| work for society. That could mean huge, costly fines in these
| situations such that the only way to get money for shareholders
| is to make quality products, since what should be a market
| incentive has gotten so messed up.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| > The only way to counteract this frequently terrible
| incentive is by us people (the government) creating the
| incentives that work for society. That could mean huge,
| costly fines in these situations such that the only way to
| get money for shareholders is to make quality products, since
| what should be a market incentive has gotten so messed up.
|
| The US government could also get more aggressive about
| blocking mergers and breaking large companies up for being
| large. If you blew up Meta as an example, you'd force all of
| its ventures to compete with each other on the open market
| again. If you blew it up in to regional or state-level
| companies and prevented them from merging with each other
| they would all have to figure out how to work as they each
| invaded each others' markets. That "inefficiency" of the
| market would naturally create jobs and upward wage pressure
| as companies attempted to hire each others' staff away from
| each other.
| jethro_tell wrote:
| They absolutely learn! These jackasses got paid in stock,
| inflated their income 10x, cashed out, and then when shit hits
| the fan, the corporation is on the hook. These leaders never go
| on trial for this shit because destroying culture isn't a
| crime.
|
| And then when there is an investigation, it's just a general
| cultural issue and no one person is at fault, so the company
| pays out a lawsuit, the current guy gets fired with a huge
| bonus to cover the fact that he couldn't inflate the stock and
| the pattern repeats.
|
| So, basically, there's high upside and no downside so why not?
| 015UUZn8aEvW wrote:
| Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
|
| Every hour that a Boeing employee spends trying to design or
| build a good airplane is one less hour that he can spend
| angling for power within the organization. So the people who
| care the most about the original purpose of the organization
| will be systematically outcompeted by the people who care the
| most about obtaining power within the organization. A
| widespread and profound problem.
|
| When companies are small, the machinations of political types
| and their inadequate contributions to the core product are too
| obvious, and they get weeded out.
|
| But when the company grows large and successful (due to the
| efforts of the people who cared about the original mission), it
| has a brand and long-term customers. At that point, the
| political types can burrow in without any immediately obvious
| effects, since there are enough other people doing the real
| work and the company has enough momentum to keep moving for
| some time.
| Clent wrote:
| People need their mortality taken for future deterrence.
| Anything less is our collective moral weakness saying this is
| OK.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| > He mocked him in weekly meetings whenever he dared contribute a
| thought, assigned a fellow manager to spy on him and spread
| rumors that he did not play nicely with others, and disciplined
| him for things like "using email to communicate" and pushing for
| flaws he found on planes to be fixed.
|
| Sounds like a regular middle manager in any tech company. Sad
| unfortunate effect of the power asymmetries in corporate
| structure: managers have all the power but very few checks to
| keep them accountable. I've seen the same thing happen again and
| again in different companies (including to me), thankfully none
| of them building planes.
| sideshowb wrote:
| Um so... what was he _supposed_ to use email for, according to
| the manager?
| jldugger wrote:
| Letting everyone know there are free bananas in the break
| room. Important stuff should be kept where opposing council
| can't find it, I guess.
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| Generally when companies seek to avoid liability, they push
| to have their employees use telephone to communicate so that
| compromising emails don't come out during the discovery
| period of a lawsuit. I imagine this is one of such cases.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Sounds like a regular middle manager in any tech company.
|
| I bet this is true in some, but certainly not all, tech
| companies. I've only encountered one example of such a manager
| in my entire career (and quit just to get away from that
| nonsense).
| twojobsoneboss wrote:
| Apart from pushing someone out who they don't wanna pay
| severance for, what incentive does a manager have to treat one
| of their reports like dirt?
| smackeyacky wrote:
| Control via emotional abuse. I've currently got a middle
| manager who is perhaps the most clueless person I have ever
| worked for (we gave him the nickname "Bumble" which is short
| for what we actually call him).
|
| He has no leadership abilities, doesn't understand the tech,
| can't mentor us, can't pathfind for us and every vendor we
| deal with he has managed to upset.
|
| To make up for all these shortcomings, he is manipulative and
| two faced, micro-managing to an extreme degree and generally
| when he does find something he half understands he's all over
| it (and you) to a degree that reduces your productivity to
| nothing.
|
| Control is the aim. Everything is out of control, so the one
| thing he does have (seniority, the ear of upper management)
| he uses wilfully.
|
| At one point this guy got an alert on one of the monitoring
| services, so he panicked and called customers, dragged in
| senior management and only after that started sending texts
| that I _urgently_ had to look at it even though I had already
| dismissed the error as a minor fault in the monitor itself. I
| made the mistake of telling him to fuck off after the 6th
| text message in 2 minutes.
|
| I, of course, got a formal warning from HR. He bumbles on
| regardless.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Plenty of things: control, gain more authority at the expense
| of others, decrease someone's value out of pure jealousy,
| have a scapegoat ready for when you make a mistake, create an
| opening where you can hire your buddies, satisfy your ego,
| etc.
| lucidguppy wrote:
| Sociopathy...
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Boeing 's Dead Whistleblower Spoke the Truth_
|
| https://www.thefp.com/p/boeings-dead-whistleblower-spoke-the...
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39838580)
| ortusdux wrote:
| _" So the people that can make the company more successful are
| sales and marketing people, and they end up running the
| companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision
| making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make
| great products. The product sensibility and the product genius
| that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out
| by people running these companies that have no conception of a
| good product versus a bad product.
|
| They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to
| take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really
| have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really
| help the customers."_
|
| Steve Jobs (1995) -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs:_The_Lost_Interview
| csours wrote:
| Sales and marketing - and financialization and capital
| efficiency. I got no beef with accountants, but I think
| companies need just enough focus on financialization and low to
| medium priority on capital efficiency (ie, look out for stupid
| wastes of capital).
| theragra wrote:
| Weird to read from a "you are holding it wrong" man
| asah wrote:
| Perspective: the S&M folks he's complaining about, don't even
| think at all about users holding products. Seriously, it's
| all spreadsheets and powerpoint, because they've never built
| anything with their hands, never worked on a team, and never
| worked on a "factory floor" (e.g. live server/database, etc).
|
| Steve Jobs and his generation all soldered boards that went
| to paying customers. Elon Musk slept on the NUMMI factory
| floor to deal with "production hell." Bill Gates personally
| debugged MS-DOS.
|
| The "bean counters" are not bad people, but doing this stuff
| creates a humility about quality and quality process, and not
| doing this stuff lulls people into a
| distaste/disdain/disrespect for it.
|
| Analogously, engineers who've never been responsible for
| financial statements literally don't appreciate the work to
| get them materially correct, let alone meet legit regulatory
| requirements because someone somewhere cheated in counting
| inventory or money or whatever.
| deanCommie wrote:
| Let's be clear, "you are holding it wrong" was an ass-
| covering lie to carry Apple through an era of bad press for a
| device that was otherwise monumental, and when you look back
| at iPhone adoption history. 4 was the inflection point of
| growth that never stopped. 3, 3G, and 3GS were all fine, but
| 4 is when iPhone took over the world.
|
| It was bold-faced, it was arrogant, it wasn't true, but it
| let them fix the issues and never look back.
|
| The product was otherwise good save a frustrating flaw that
| was easy to fix, but probably wouldn't have ushered in the
| era of dominance if they had to do a total recall.
|
| Would I have been happy if I was an iPhone user at the time?
| No, I would've been livid.
| gigel82 wrote:
| That's so ironically sad coming from Jobs seeing where Apple
| got now (partly due to the direction he set).
| Simulacra wrote:
| How should a company promote diversity without jeopardizing
| safety?
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Why do you think one is at odds with the other?
| rbancroft wrote:
| If you are selecting for anything besides competence, your
| chances of getting competence is effectively random. It says
| nothing about one group of people being more or less
| competent than another.
|
| I have observed that selecting for competence leads to
| diversity, and I believe that diversity is a strength. But it
| is best achieved organically.
|
| Personally I think the shortcomings we have with achieving
| diversity is in the framing stage, not the hiring stage.
| Ajay-p wrote:
| Can you speak more about the framing? I think diversity
| should be encouraged, but I also believe to some extent
| that people of color have been left out of STEM education
| and jobs due to poor education and opportunities. Maybe a
| middle ground is to hire for both. Bring in women, people
| of color, and others who may not be as educated or
| experienced, but make a serious effort to pair them with
| more experienced employees and train them up to where they
| should be. Rather than hire and replace, as some have
| suggested, hire and partner to diversify and holistically
| improve the entire organization.
| rbancroft wrote:
| I think you are right about starting early in education
| and exposing disadvantaged children to things they
| wouldn't otherwise have available to them, and supporting
| them throughout their education. This would benefit
| organizations that want to achieve good performance and
| is worth them investing in themselves, although
| government support is a decent second option that I agree
| with. However it's important to note that this is
| primarily an economic differentiation, not a racial one.
|
| Training can help but it is not sufficient for many
| tasks. You also need aptitude and desire.
|
| Culture is more about what is valued and rewarded in a
| society, and I think the primary driver of the desire
| component.
|
| What I meant about framing was that our economies,
| governments and businesses are framed in a cultural
| context, anglo-protestant american capitalism in this
| case. African-american/black communities have a
| challenging relationship with this for obvious reasons.
| Certain immigrant populations can integrate or
| interoperate more effectively than others. I think the
| key to achieving better results as a society and a planet
| is to incorporate more cultural diversity, allowing a
| broader range of desires and outcomes to be seen as valid
| and worth pursuing. I'm sorry I don't have more time to
| go into this right now, I hope it gives an idea what I
| was referring to.
| reissbaker wrote:
| FWIW, "Prince Jim" McNerney, who most of the article's ire is
| understandably directed towards, is no longer the CEO. He
| directed the 737 MAX's development, but retired before the
| scandals; his successor, Dennis Muilenburg (a 30+ year Boeing
| employee who started out in engineering), was fired for the poor
| quality of the 737 MAX despite it being developed under Prince
| Jim.
|
| That being said, the current CEO -- Dave Calhoun -- is an old
| exec from from GE, where McNerney started out; I hope he's
| different from Jim, but I wouldn't bank on it. Unlike Muilenberg
| and pre-merger Boeing CEOs, he doesn't have a direct background
| in aviation. He's retiring at the end of the year, and I hope his
| replacement is more like the pre-merger CEOs than the accounting-
| focused recent ones.
| ricksunny wrote:
| From the article: >Discussing Swampy's death and the
| whistleblower lawsuit he left behind, the longtime former Boeing
| executive told me, "I don't think one can be cynical enough when
| it comes to these guys." Did that mean he thought Boeing
| assassinated Swampy? "It's a top-secret military contractor,
| remember; there are spies everywhere," he replied.
|
| Me: Aaaaand no way I'm ever applying to work at an MIC defense
| contractor conglomerate ever again.
| NKosmatos wrote:
| Corporate greed. Simple and truthful answer...it's also
| applicable for many many other companies who have abandoned their
| ways and have fallen victim of the dark side profit, dividend,
| share price and all the other similar capitalistic ideas :-(
| benced wrote:
| I am not exaggerating to say that Jim McNerney should be dragged
| in front of Congress and be forced to explain what he did to an
| incredibly important American company. It's important to push
| back against the shareholder value theory where appropriate and
| humiliation is an underrated component of that.
| throwaway458864 wrote:
| A public hearing isn't going to change anything. Look
| at...well, literally any powerful organization or individual
| brought before Congress for excoriation. The pound of flesh
| they want is press and votes, and you don't have to change
| anything to get that.
|
| It's not like they're going to break up Boeing. They can't
| actually _do_ anything to improve Boeing. All they can do is
| wag their finger. It 's not like there's an alternative
| American company to give our billions of dollars to. And it's
| not like other companies will suddenly fear being brought
| forward to be gummed to death by whining bureaucrats.
|
| You want real pain? Have them pass a law that says the entire
| executive leadership's bonuses are forfeit, retroactively, if
| the company fails to maintain an adequate safety record. Shit
| will change there real quick. (That law will never happen but
| it's funny to think of)
| benced wrote:
| I think culture is underrated. Acting like he did should not
| be considered a dignified behavior and I think that will
| meaningfully constrict behavior even in the absence of new
| laws. Think about how business culture varies across
| jurisdictions: there's more than just profit-maximization at
| work.
|
| Also, to be clear, Boeing's safety record is still good. The
| only recent deaths are associated with less-trained pilots in
| the earlier days of the 737 MAX. My frustration is they took
| this organization from an engineering leader to an
| organization that can't ship a plane. The 787, 737 MAX, and
| now 777X were/are insanely delayed.
|
| The nightmare scenario of a US-China war and Boeing being
| unable to ship a plane honestly haunts me. Boeing is
| extremely important to the West, broadly defined and this
| jerk didn't uphold his commensurate responsibilities.
| __loam wrote:
| The entire neoliberal ideology needs to be reevaluated at every
| level of business in this country. We're destroying our skilled
| labor forces and our economy to pursue short term gains and
| it's going to have a negative impact on our national security.
| benced wrote:
| I disagree with this. I don't really care if a video game
| company is run in a profit-maximizing way. We should probably
| be a bit more skeptical with important companies,
| particularly ones that seem irreplaceable (for all their
| faults, only one other company can do what Boeing does).
| ordu wrote:
| _> Swampy knew he was caught in a prisoner's dilemma. If he went
| along, he was breaking the law; if he didn't, whistleblowers who
| complained about unsafe practices were routinely terminated on
| grounds of violating the same safety protocols they had opposed
| violating._
|
| How is it a prisoner's dilemma? Is it about cooperating with
| whisleblowers or defecting them?
|
| It seems to me to be a mere dilemma, two choices, both bad. There
| was no interplay of cooperate/defect strategies.
| jmspring wrote:
| The problem here is that large corporations trusted with public
| safety - be it flight safety in the case of Boeing; electical
| generation and transmission safety in the case of PG&E here in
| California - is that companies cater to Wall Street and bean
| counters rather than anything else. This is where the CPUC has
| failed in the case of PG&E and the FAA failed in the case of
| Boeing.
|
| There should be oversight and public safety should play into
| private corporate governance for such things.
| YeBanKo wrote:
| > "Prince Jim"--as some long-timers used to call him--repeatedly
| invoked a slur for longtime engineers and skilled machinists in
| the obligatory vanity "leadership" book he co-wrote. Those who
| cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough
| about the stock price were "phenomenally talented assholes,"
|
| Decline in attention to quality at Boeing is a known thing. But
| this attitude towards engineering and specially to machinist is
| just utterly f*king stupid. Especially to machinists, because
| experienced one are hard to find, not even talking about
| toolmakers. It seems that the starting salary for machinists
| isn't that great and many shops lost to outsource. And
| experienced folks retire leaving a wide gap behind. Of course,
| this does not excuse such an attitude toward engineers either.
| bradley13 wrote:
| tl;dr: Pournelle's Iron Law.
| astrange wrote:
| Pournelle's Iron Law is just him saying "I am a Republican".
| You are not required to listen to him.
|
| For balance, I stopped reading this article at the end of the
| first page because it called Boeing "neoliberal", which doesn't
| mean anything except that the writer is a snotty humanities
| grad.
| rbancroft wrote:
| _Pournelle 's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any
| bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
| First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of
| the organization. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to
| the organization itself. The Iron Law states that in every
| case the second group will gain and keep control of the
| organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions
| within the organization._
| astrange wrote:
| Yes, he's a Republican.
|
| Typical engineering humor of that era where they'd make up
| "rules of the universe" that were just them saying
| something vaguely cynical.
| csours wrote:
| One of the fundamental problems with organizations, no matter
| what economic system you live under[0], is that _you cannot give
| your boss a problem_ that they don 't want to deal with. So if
| your job is to find problems, and your boss does not want to deal
| with problems, then your job will suuuuuuuuuuuuck.
|
| 0. I acknowledge that capitalism has caused a lot of problems,
| including Boeing problems.
| jongjong wrote:
| It makes me so angry reading this about managers criticizing
| employees for being 'too knowledgeable'.
|
| There are so many narratives nowadays which claim that
| performance is at odds with talent. People are embracing
| mediocrity and patting each other on the back for it... The
| idiots who got lucky, since they cannot pretend to be
| knowledgeable, reframe the narrative to portray themselves as
| geniuses who understood the value of idiocy and revel in their
| mediocrity.
| stcredzero wrote:
| _Boeing had quietly assumed many of the roles traditionally
| played by its primary regulator, an arrangement that was
| ethically absurd._
|
| This is simply "vertical integration" applied to "regulatory
| capture."
| layer8 wrote:
| > noncompliance (and nonconformance, which is similar but not
| identical)
|
| Anyone who can explain the difference?
| matthewfcarlson wrote:
| My paternal grandfather worked for Boeing as an airfoil modeling
| engineer (figuring out the right shape for wings and creating
| computer models) from 1960s-2000s. As a nerdy kid he had some of
| most entertaining engineering stories. One of my favorites was
| when a coworker brought a boomerang to work and due to some
| union/budget shenanigans at the time, all the engineers were at
| work with nothing to do. So they designed and machined a 3 foot
| boomerang out of clear acrylic. They went out to the field and
| gave their heavy new toy a good throw, only to have it promptly
| vanish out of sight on a sunny day. After a moment to process
| what just happened, they all hit the dirt as they heard it whoosh
| overhead.
| jongjong wrote:
| I was reading the part about making employees sign a declaration
| about taking responsibility for their work and thought that was
| pure genius. Sounds like managers should also sign something like
| that.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| There are real problems at Boeing and those are real issues, but
| let's beware of the BS that comes with the kind of widespread
| pile-on that's happening now.
|
| This article reads like an Internet rant to me, with the sarcasm,
| hyperbole, and ridicule. Those things aren't awful in themselves
| (though they've become very overused and tiresome to me), but
| they crowd out actual facts, details, nuance, complexities. If
| you write 'it's the worst thing _ever_ ', you omit where and how
| it's bad, where it's not, the consequences, the trade-offs, etc.
| I don't learn what happened, how, or why, just that you are
| really, really, _really_ pissed off.
|
| Examples:
|
| * _pieces are flying off the Boeing planes actually in use at an
| alarming rate_
|
| * _to train the workforce to properly put together a plane._
|
| * _obligatory vanity "leadership" book_ - note the ridicule and
| scare quotes.
|
| * _suppliers, many of which_ lacked engineering departments* --
| now using fonts for emphasis
|
| * _in a perpetual state of unlearning all the lessons it had
| absorbed over a 90-year ascent to the pinnacle of global
| manufacturing_
|
| * _Qatar Airways had become so disgusted ..._ , coincidentally
| matching the author's emotion
|
| * _one of the most pathetic plea bargains in the history of
| American justice_
|
| It's like series of Reddit comments, and the world certainly
| doesn't need more of that. The author's and American Prospect's
| quality is no better than Boeing's.
| skeptrune wrote:
| Tremendously detailed for how short it is. I struggle to
| understand how outsourcing the engineer was sold as good for
| shareholders. Anyone watching someone write a longer book on this
| publicly?
| mnau wrote:
| It's not about being good for shareholders. They are far away
| and generally know nothing about what is good or bad decision
| in long run. We have replaced human QC with computers in many
| industries. C-suite cares about company profit, middle
| management cares about KPI.
|
| It's about maximizing individual management KPI despite being
| wrong for a company as a whole. Problems are for other
| guys/gals down the line.
| SilasX wrote:
| The Onion was joking about this eventuality in 2010:
|
| https://www.theonion.com/boeing-lays-off-only-guy-who-knows-...
| rdtsc wrote:
| > The day after Broken Dreams premiered, Swampy got an email
| informing him that he'd been put on a 60-day corrective action
| plan four weeks earlier. His alleged offense constituted using
| email to communicate about process violations
|
| That is pretty shady. They didn't want to discuss violations in
| emails so it doesn't end up in a court case or found by the FAA
| during an investigation.
|
| > the longtime former Boeing executive told me, "I don't think
| one can be cynical enough when it comes to these guys." Did that
| mean he thought Boeing assassinated Swampy? "It's a top-secret
| military contractor, remember; there are spies everywhere," he
| replied.
|
| I am kind of surprised various executives don't order hits on
| each other more often. Or maybe they do but the assassinations
| are too subtle and they look like heart attacks and accidents?
| With billions on the line, what's a few millions in crypto found
| in a usb stick somewhere in the bushes for a "job well done".
| There is also the idea that sometimes it should look more an
| assassination to send a clear message to others: "you don't want
| to fall on the knife backwards, three times in as row, like so
| and so, now do you?"
| mikewarot wrote:
| >Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of
| "knowledge" that essentially reduced the whole concept to a
| combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data,
| discarding "thought" and "understanding" and "complex reasoning"
| possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially
| not worth the increased health care costs.
|
| So they devalued Wisdom, and Elders... and things fell apart.
| This seems to be a pattern repeated all over the modern world.
| rybosworld wrote:
| U.S. companies have a management problem. I specifically mean
| that the terminal career path for most professions is
| "management". Depending where you work, management can mean:
|
| - giving orders
|
| - delegating work (usually this is work the manager specifically
| doesn't want to do themselves)
|
| - clearing blockers in front of your employees
|
| That the third one is the rarest is a problem.
|
| American corporate culture has devolved into: get promoted into
| management and coast.
|
| There are obviously exceptions. But a lot of people will agree
| they've had their fair share of terrible managers. I dare say
| that's the norm.
|
| Boeing is just the most current example of what happens when a
| company fetishizes management. That is, there comes a time when
| the leeches have sucked the body dry.
| collinmcnulty wrote:
| Larry Culp may not be an engineer, but if you want someone who
| can take a storied American manufacturer that got infected with
| MBA bs and brought it back to its roots ... I mean he's the only
| one whose done it, right?
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