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This comment from a 'boeing engineer' has basically no information content. - He's not a Boeing engineer, he's 'a senior member of the union'. Apparently he w

This comment from a 'boeing engineer' has basically no information content. - He's not a Boeing engineer, he's 'a senior member of the union'. Apparently he was an engineer sometime in the past, now his job is to push anything that will benefit members of the union, which is what he is doing here. He has no specific information about the MAX to offer. - Cost savings is always the root cause of every engineering failure, so long as you have the benefit of hindsight. I mean once you know what the problem is you can spend money to fix it, and they should have spent that money right off the bat, right? I mean, if they knew there was a problem, which they must have or else there is nobody to blame. We need someone to blame! Of course projects that don't try to limit costs can't fail since they are canceled and never built. Except for the Space Shuttle, which went massively over budget again and again and still had a terrible safety record, which absurdly was blamed on cost cutting. https://www.wired.com/2016/01/to-cut-costs-and-save-time-nasas-taking-more-risks/ https://www.wired.com/2016/01/to-cut-costs-and-save-time-nas... So no matter how much money you spend, when something fails you are going to be blamed for not spending more. If you budget $1 Billion and then decide to spend $10 Billion to improve safety, whenever something goes wrong they'll say you should have spent $11 Billion. - Trying to vilify people and attempting to create an environment to produce massive punitive damages and lawsuits, or to bring political pressure to change staffing decisions dramatically decreases safety. The FAA has spent almost a hundred years building up an environment of cooperation with a shared responsibility to understand failures and enable the changing of the entire aviation industry whenever necessary to promote safety. This has been fabulously successful. Trying to place blame and attack people for past decisions will only lead to a closing of the culture and an attempt to hide information in the future. Compare aviation to the auto industry in how they adapt and improve safety, it's night and day for exactly this reason. Creating an environment where companies have to be afraid to admit mistakes does not help us find the root causes of problems and change the system to prevent those problems in the future.

fj39dkf 7y ago
> Trying to vilify people and attempting to create an environment to produce massive punitive damages and lawsuits, or to bring political pressure to change staffing decisions dramatically decreases safety. The FAA has spent almost a hundred years building up an environment of cooperation with a shared responsibility to understand failures and enable the changing of the entire aviation industry whenever necessary to promote safety. This has been fabulously successful. 346 dead passengers is definitely not successful or acceptable. You think the rating/MCAS problem doesn't merit further investigation?
- ltbarcly3 7y ago
  I have no idea how you could possibly think I'm saying it shouldn't be investigated. I also don't understand how you could think that a union representative complaining about the company using non-union workers is the same as investigating the problem? Investigating, understanding, and changing regulations and future policies and behavior is what we need. A witch hunt with a bunch of vested interests trying to benefit financially and find a scapegoat is not what we need.
rayiner 7y ago
This is a great comment. Engineering is about cost cutting. Everything is a trade off performance, safety, efficiency, and cost.
- ThenAsNow 7y ago
  Cost control or cost-benefit trades are certainly a critical aspect of engineering but saying "Engineering is about cost cutting" is way overstating the case. There absolutely is a difference between a short-term cost-driven engineering culture and one that weighs costs with a strategic view. I am actively involved in remediation of an engineering program that suffered from the former. It will cost significantly more money in the long run to have done it that way, assuming the program survives.
StudentStuff 7y ago
My friend made it slightly under a year at Boeing after working for another airline as a maintenance mechanic. The level of quality control at Boeing was so abysmal he quit to work on busses, paying all $20k in relocation back to Boeing. He takes pride in the quality of his work and adherence to the rules, but Boeing's managers let him know that reporting unwired bolts & incorrectly installed hardware per policy was something they did not do. Very sketchy, not something anyone wants to be signing off on as personally liable! The management loves to circlejerk about the "Boeing process", but lots of shit is slipping through these days that would have been unacceptable (and firable) only 2 decades ago.
- notatoad 7y ago
  If your friend wanted to go on record, i'm sure there'd be plenty of reporters eager to hear about it. As long as the only whistleblowers about Boeing's quality control are union execs and anonymous friends of internet commenters I have a hard time giving that too much weight.
  - StudentStuff 7y ago
    Its already ruined his life and pushed him back to the bottle, I doubt I could entice him to do anything relating to Boeing. Edit: Here is a piece New York Times did on exactly what I'm talking about: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamliner-production-problems.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamline...
    - ltbarcly3 7y ago
      No offense to your friend, but maybe, just maybe, he didn't quit due to cultural problems at Boeing, causing him to pay back his huge sign on bonus, but maybe.. and I hate to say it, he was drunk at work and got fired, then lied to you to save face?
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
philwelch 7y ago
> Cost savings is always the root cause of every engineering failure, so long as you have the benefit of hindsight. I mean once you know what the problem is you can spend money to fix it, and they should have spent that money right off the bat, right? I once heard it said that any reasonably smart person can build a bridge that doesn't collapse. It takes an engineer to build a bridge that just barely doesn't collapse, by an acceptable safety margin that still provides economy. So yes; any unforeseen failure exists because of that tradeoff. The counterexample you name, the Space Shuttle, is just a series of fundamental mistakes compounded together--a boondoggle machine designed for a dozen different mission profiles, most of which never happened, and introduced serious regressions in survivability and launch escape compared to Apollo.
- EnFinlay 7y ago
  The pithy way of saying it is "Engineering is making something with $1 that any fool could make with $2"
- dillonmckay 7y ago
  The Space Shuttle disaster was a symptom of the US political process.
  - ltbarcly3 7y ago
    No, it wasn't a 'symptom' of anything. The Space Shuttle was a remarkable engineering achievement, made at enormous cost, built and managed by great people who had only the best intentions. Yet it still failed in a spectacular way, because the engineering wasn't perfect and the management wasn't perfect. In the end Challenger was destroyed by the failure of a cheap gasket, and the gasket failed because the decisions made and processes which produced the environment in which those decisions were made around making a go/no-go call was imperfect and failed. It doesn't matter what political process is in place, it doesn't matter how good the people are, or how good the engineering is, or anything else for that matter, spectacular failures are inevitable. When one happens, we have to learn from it and figure out how to build organizations and engineering artifacts that are better in practical and achievable ways, not try to use it as some kind of evidence that our pet political theory would have somehow let people make perfect decisions or make rubber gaskets invulnerable to cold weather. It turns out that if you take some task that is incredibly hard and inherently complex and performed by a very large number of extremely qualified and smart people near the limits of human experience, and you want to do that task in a better way it isn't going to boil down to something simple or obvious. In fact, if the US political process is so broken, why is it the only process that ends up with space shuttles sitting in hangers? It's certainly not perfect, but since nobody can point to a political process that results in better space shuttles I don't see any evidence that humans have so far developed a better political process if you are measuring it in units of 'space shuttle reliability'.
save_ferris 7y ago
> Apparently he was an engineer sometime in the past, now his job is to push anything that will benefit members of the union, which is what he is doing here. He has no specific information about the MAX to offer. The executives of Boeing have pushed anything to benefit the company throughout this story, changing their narrative multiple times. Boeing has handled this entire saga so poorly that I truly don't understand the POV that the union is somehow responsible. The cost savings hindsight argument doesn't address that this was an entirely preventable failure that was caused purely by miscommunication, disorganization, and greed. It's not like the aircraft experienced some unforeseen phenomenon that engineers have never recorded, they introduced a haphazardly flawed feature, they failed to clearly communicate the feature to clients, they failed to properly train the pilots, and people died.
- notatoad 7y ago
  I don't think anybody was suggesting that the union is responsible, just that a union exec is not a "boeing engineer" as the headline claims, and whistleblowing by an actual engineer who worked on the MAX program and has actual knowledge would be a very different story than just more armchair criticism.
  - rossdavidh 7y ago
    I think the task of making a public statement from the engineering point of view, that could be career limiting, is exactly the kind of thing that a high ranking engineering union official should be doing as part of his job representing those engineers. If he is NOT speaking publicly the POV that engineers are grumbling to each other privately, he's not doing his job. This kind of statement is exactly what he should be doing.
    - notatoad 7y ago
      >This kind of statement is exactly what he should be doing. which is kind of my point - he's just doing his job and making a completely predictable and expected statement. I'm not trying to say he shouldn't, but it isn't interesting or newsworthy.
7952 7y ago
Cost trade offs need to be made in a well reasoned way though. I have no idea if this applies to Boeing. But a "cost cutting culture" can be due to the internal market within the company. The widget department wants to make enough money to meet its budget. So it unilaterally makes changes to the process that affect the quality of the overall product.
eternalban 7y ago
> This comment from a 'boeing engineer' has basically no information content. I found his "3 Business Cultures" quite informative: https://kuow-prod.imgix.net/store/77d64a0b1331588db82efa7812b7c028.jpg https://kuow-prod.imgix.net/store/77d64a0b1331588db82efa7812... > Creating an environment where companies have to be afraid to admit mistakes does not help us find the root causes of problems and change the system to prevent those problems in the future. 'Feelings' ("afraid") are not operative here. A company in a highly regulated industry has a societal and legal duty to be forthright regarding their product. The sort of "fear" that companies need to feel is "being afraid of getting caught lying or covering up their mistakes".

fj39dkf 7y ago

> Trying to vilify people and attempting to create an environment to produce massive punitive damages and lawsuits, or to bring political pressure to change staffing decisions dramatically decreases safety. The FAA has spent almost a hundred years building up an environment of cooperation with a shared responsibility to understand failures and enable the changing of the entire aviation industry whenever necessary to promote safety. This has been fabulously successful. 346 dead passengers is definitely not successful or acceptable. You think the rating/MCAS problem doesn't merit further investigation?

ltbarcly3 7y ago
I have no idea how you could possibly think I'm saying it shouldn't be investigated. I also don't understand how you could think that a union representative complaining about the company using non-union workers is the same as investigating the problem? Investigating, understanding, and changing regulations and future policies and behavior is what we need. A witch hunt with a bunch of vested interests trying to benefit financially and find a scapegoat is not what we need.

rayiner 7y ago

This is a great comment. Engineering is about cost cutting. Everything is a trade off performance, safety, efficiency, and cost.

ThenAsNow 7y ago
Cost control or cost-benefit trades are certainly a critical aspect of engineering but saying "Engineering is about cost cutting" is way overstating the case. There absolutely is a difference between a short-term cost-driven engineering culture and one that weighs costs with a strategic view. I am actively involved in remediation of an engineering program that suffered from the former. It will cost significantly more money in the long run to have done it that way, assuming the program survives.

StudentStuff 7y ago

My friend made it slightly under a year at Boeing after working for another airline as a maintenance mechanic. The level of quality control at Boeing was so abysmal he quit to work on busses, paying all $20k in relocation back to Boeing. He takes pride in the quality of his work and adherence to the rules, but Boeing's managers let him know that reporting unwired bolts & incorrectly installed hardware per policy was something they did not do. Very sketchy, not something anyone wants to be signing off on as personally liable! The management loves to circlejerk about the "Boeing process", but lots of shit is slipping through these days that would have been unacceptable (and firable) only 2 decades ago.

notatoad 7y ago
If your friend wanted to go on record, i'm sure there'd be plenty of reporters eager to hear about it. As long as the only whistleblowers about Boeing's quality control are union execs and anonymous friends of internet commenters I have a hard time giving that too much weight.
- StudentStuff 7y ago
  Its already ruined his life and pushed him back to the bottle, I doubt I could entice him to do anything relating to Boeing. Edit: Here is a piece New York Times did on exactly what I'm talking about: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamliner-production-problems.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamline...
  - ltbarcly3 7y ago
    No offense to your friend, but maybe, just maybe, he didn't quit due to cultural problems at Boeing, causing him to pay back his huge sign on bonus, but maybe.. and I hate to say it, he was drunk at work and got fired, then lied to you to save face?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]

philwelch 7y ago

> Cost savings is always the root cause of every engineering failure, so long as you have the benefit of hindsight. I mean once you know what the problem is you can spend money to fix it, and they should have spent that money right off the bat, right? I once heard it said that any reasonably smart person can build a bridge that doesn't collapse. It takes an engineer to build a bridge that just barely doesn't collapse, by an acceptable safety margin that still provides economy. So yes; any unforeseen failure exists because of that tradeoff. The counterexample you name, the Space Shuttle, is just a series of fundamental mistakes compounded together--a boondoggle machine designed for a dozen different mission profiles, most of which never happened, and introduced serious regressions in survivability and launch escape compared to Apollo.

EnFinlay 7y ago
The pithy way of saying it is "Engineering is making something with $1 that any fool could make with $2"
dillonmckay 7y ago
The Space Shuttle disaster was a symptom of the US political process.
- ltbarcly3 7y ago
  No, it wasn't a 'symptom' of anything. The Space Shuttle was a remarkable engineering achievement, made at enormous cost, built and managed by great people who had only the best intentions. Yet it still failed in a spectacular way, because the engineering wasn't perfect and the management wasn't perfect. In the end Challenger was destroyed by the failure of a cheap gasket, and the gasket failed because the decisions made and processes which produced the environment in which those decisions were made around making a go/no-go call was imperfect and failed. It doesn't matter what political process is in place, it doesn't matter how good the people are, or how good the engineering is, or anything else for that matter, spectacular failures are inevitable. When one happens, we have to learn from it and figure out how to build organizations and engineering artifacts that are better in practical and achievable ways, not try to use it as some kind of evidence that our pet political theory would have somehow let people make perfect decisions or make rubber gaskets invulnerable to cold weather. It turns out that if you take some task that is incredibly hard and inherently complex and performed by a very large number of extremely qualified and smart people near the limits of human experience, and you want to do that task in a better way it isn't going to boil down to something simple or obvious. In fact, if the US political process is so broken, why is it the only process that ends up with space shuttles sitting in hangers? It's certainly not perfect, but since nobody can point to a political process that results in better space shuttles I don't see any evidence that humans have so far developed a better political process if you are measuring it in units of 'space shuttle reliability'.

save_ferris 7y ago

> Apparently he was an engineer sometime in the past, now his job is to push anything that will benefit members of the union, which is what he is doing here. He has no specific information about the MAX to offer. The executives of Boeing have pushed anything to benefit the company throughout this story, changing their narrative multiple times. Boeing has handled this entire saga so poorly that I truly don't understand the POV that the union is somehow responsible. The cost savings hindsight argument doesn't address that this was an entirely preventable failure that was caused purely by miscommunication, disorganization, and greed. It's not like the aircraft experienced some unforeseen phenomenon that engineers have never recorded, they introduced a haphazardly flawed feature, they failed to clearly communicate the feature to clients, they failed to properly train the pilots, and people died.

notatoad 7y ago
I don't think anybody was suggesting that the union is responsible, just that a union exec is not a "boeing engineer" as the headline claims, and whistleblowing by an actual engineer who worked on the MAX program and has actual knowledge would be a very different story than just more armchair criticism.
- rossdavidh 7y ago
  I think the task of making a public statement from the engineering point of view, that could be career limiting, is exactly the kind of thing that a high ranking engineering union official should be doing as part of his job representing those engineers. If he is NOT speaking publicly the POV that engineers are grumbling to each other privately, he's not doing his job. This kind of statement is exactly what he should be doing.
  - notatoad 7y ago
    >This kind of statement is exactly what he should be doing. which is kind of my point - he's just doing his job and making a completely predictable and expected statement. I'm not trying to say he shouldn't, but it isn't interesting or newsworthy.

7952 7y ago

Cost trade offs need to be made in a well reasoned way though. I have no idea if this applies to Boeing. But a "cost cutting culture" can be due to the internal market within the company. The widget department wants to make enough money to meet its budget. So it unilaterally makes changes to the process that affect the quality of the overall product.

eternalban 7y ago

> This comment from a 'boeing engineer' has basically no information content. I found his "3 Business Cultures" quite informative: https://kuow-prod.imgix.net/store/77d64a0b1331588db82efa7812b7c028.jpg https://kuow-prod.imgix.net/store/77d64a0b1331588db82efa7812... > Creating an environment where companies have to be afraid to admit mistakes does not help us find the root causes of problems and change the system to prevent those problems in the future. 'Feelings' ("afraid") are not operative here. A company in a highly regulated industry has a societal and legal duty to be forthright regarding their product. The sort of "fear" that companies need to feel is "being afraid of getting caught lying or covering up their mistakes".