6 ms·

I look at this and see surprising parallels to the Wells Fargo scandal ( https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-10-23/fake-accounts-still-haunt-wells-f

by akerl_ 7y ago

I look at this and see surprising parallels to the Wells Fargo scandal ( https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-10-23/fake-accounts-still-haunt-wells-fargo https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-10-23/fake-a... ). In both cases, management appears to have applied significant pressure to the teams doing the work, pushing them to achieve extremely unrealistic targets. And in both cases, the results of that incentive ended up being extremely detrimental to basically everybody (to the general public in the form of identity fraud / unsafe aircraft, to the companies in the forms of fines / grounding / PR / etc). I doubt anybody in Boeing’s offices woke up and thought “what a nice morning! Time to go to work and build some dangerous airplanes that will kill people, so that I can get slightly richer”. I suspect the execs involved were just amazingly (and potentially even criminally) negligent: in their minds, they were pushing their employees to make the airplane actually similar enough to qualify as a “minor” change, without any of the oversight that would have caught what was actually happening. They turned a blind eye any time somebody told them that the new plane would require larger changes, and the results are unsurprising: their teams declared all the changes “minor”, not because they’d successfully made only minor changes, but because exec pressure mandated that all changes be “minor”.

lnsru 7y ago
While reading your text I was thinking about Volkswagen, diesel cars and their defeat devices. This article (sorry for German only writing) https://www.auto-motor-und-sport.de/verkehr/audi-abgasskandal-betrugssoftware-diesel-defeat-device/ https://www.auto-motor-und-sport.de/verkehr/audi-abgasskanda... states exactly opposite! The VW guys were writing poems for their clever defeat device! I am pretty sure, that some people at Boeing were also clapping hands about sales potential and cost savings of the new planes. There are more evil people in the corporate floors than you think. And top management plays with them!!! There is no way to build in defeat device in millions of cars without top management agreeing. I can guess, that Boeing’s management had enough clues, that their software wasn’t in the best shape.
- keyme 7y ago
  There is always at least one guy that really does understand the implications, is in the position to make changes, but proceeds anyway.
  - nguoi 7y ago
    To be picky, that is unfalsifiable. I think you're probably correct but shaming the engineers in the hopes they'll stop it has repeatedly failed to work: that's why this isn't a thread about VW. IMHO it's because actions from a single individual carry too much risk for enough to accept. It needs collective bargaining.
- akerl_ 7y ago
  I don’t think anybody is arguing that Boeing execs hate money, or weren’t excited to make loads of money. And, as I wrote, the incentive structure the Boeing execs created has an incentive structure whose outcome was incredibly dangerous. Realizing those incentives required that the executives turn a blind eye to how the problems were being solved. But I think it’s pretty implausible to suggest that the “evil people” at Boeing we’re clapping their hands about savings with an understanding that they were trading human lives for those profits. It’s tempting to imagine that the executives of corporations are all comic villains, sitting in their offices plotting the demise of humanity, but to imagine them in that way is detrimental to the goal of actually avoiding these problems. If we treat corporations as if they’re comic villains, we ignore that they’re actually made up of normal people with a variety of social and economic incentives, and being aware of those incentives is crucial if we’d like to actually change corporate behavior.
  - jeroen 7y ago
    > But I think it’s pretty implausible to suggest that the “evil people” at Boeing we’re clapping their hands about savings with an understanding that they were trading human lives for those profits. Yet it's entirely plausible that they were consciously making that trade off. I see a lot of similarities to cases like these: > Ford (..) Pinto became a subject of controversy after Mother Jones magazine exposed that it was prone to deadly fires in rear-end collisions; Ford’s internal documents showed the company knew of the potential problem but chose not to fix it, calculating that it would be cheaper to pay out possible injury claims. > The Japanese manufacturer of airbags has recalled airbags in some 19.2 million vehicles in the U.S. due to a tendency of the device to deploy with too much force, sending metal scraps flying into the passenger cabin. Eight deaths and about 100 injuries in the U.S. have been attributed to the defect. According to a New York Times report, Honda, one of the companies using the bags, and Takata knew about the dangerous airbags for years before disclosing it to the public and issuing recalls. -- https://fortune.com/2015/09/26/auto-industry-scandals/ https://fortune.com/2015/09/26/auto-industry-scandals/
errnoh 7y ago
There's a great book about the thing you're describing, called "Drift into Failure"
ownagefool 7y ago
I'm not a real engineer, just a software guy, but situation feels similar. Responsiblity of outcome and to save money is placed on management who pressure the workers to save money without sharing the bigger picture. Would it still happen, if responsbility was placed directly on the worker? Why isn't there a review teams were senior enough and given the time to critique an outcome? Why is it management doesn't understand the consequences of these actions, or are too shameless to admit them and plow ahead?
- crocal 7y ago
  Because at a certain level of complexity and scale, it is possible to have managers in charge who no longer understand cause and consequences, especially if the time between the two is in years. Sometimes they don’t even want to understand due to the incentive they receive and the dilution of responsibility in such large organizations. The first thing such managers usually do is fire / sideline the senior engineers who complain all the time. And then...
ajsnigrutin 7y ago
This is easily fixed by governments doing their jobs. In this case, FAA (or whoever the regulator is) should verify if the "minor change" is a new coffee machine on board, or has the engine been moved. And then, progressively larger fines (comparative to potential damage caused in the event of failure) to offset the "savings" by misdeclaring the scope of changes.
- rectang 7y ago
  It's not at all easy for government to do its job because corporate soft power is ridiculously out of whack in the US, thanks to Citizens United and similar decisions. If you are an effective regulator, corporate money and influence will converge with a vengeance to neuter you and those who appointed you.
  - ajsnigrutin 7y ago
    I'm not saying it's easy... I'm just saying that the parts of the government, that should be controlling this, are not doing their jobs. But I agree, that with a high enough level of corruption (from low-key bribing an inspector, to higher up lobbying at highest government levels), doing this efectively is impossible..
    - rectang 7y ago
      > with a high enough level of corruption (from low-key bribing an inspector, to higher up lobbying at highest government levels), doing this efectively is impossible. That's a great way of putting it — nice! What I'm looking for is a way to put responsibility where it truly lies. Blaming regulators alone is reductive, because the architects of the regulatory framework and the context in which it exists have ensured that corruption will occur. Those architects are the ones most at fault, starting with the Roberts Court.
    - enraged_camel 7y ago
      >>I'm not saying it's easy... But that's literally what you said? "This is easily fixed by governments doing their jobs."
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
StreamBright 7y ago
>> I doubt anybody in Boeing’s offices woke up and thought “what a nice morning! Time to go to work and build some dangerous airplanes that will kill people, so that I can get slightly richer”. It is the other way around. People should understand that adding pressure on teams delivering mission critical systems is dangerous. Intentions matter very little in this context, the outcome does.
dspillett 7y ago
I'm seeing it as closer to the Challenger accident (1986): management overriding engineering concerns (in the Challenger case it was Thiokol overriding internal engineers, in the 737 case it is Boeing trying to work around external safe-guards) to Get The Job Done and save money/face/other, at the possible expense of endangering peoples lives.
hef19898 7y ago
Not sure if this rings true. You kind of assume that management "only" set unrealistic gial and then lower level employees decided by themselves to come up with MCAS as it was them implemented. Based in my aerospace experience, it is mire likely that lower level employees raised concerns about certification which where then subsequently ignored by management (TM) as they asumed rightly to have a lot of leaway with the FAA. All that of course i usually documented extensively. I suspect the above scenario because I took part in quite a few change boards affecting much smaller and less critical tickets. And everyone is informed and changes are signed of by the relevant peiple quite high up the food chain. I'd suggest some other issue here, willful ignorance by upper management. At Boeing it is a fair bet for managemet to have solid certification knowledge (as shown in their creative approach to it). Thus taking the risks they did with MCAS involves a lot of ignorance. And potentially panic when they realized the commercial risk a failing 737 MAX would have. So they chose to take shortcuts, ignore warnings and hope for the best.
S_A_P 7y ago
Its all a slippery slope. If you had shown this outcome to the execs prior to starting down the path they took, none of them would have chosen said path. Execs think they are being "good managers" when they push for more from less, because they force the worker bees to be innovative. Yeah, sometimes that happens, but many times the restriction is just arbitrary and causes corners to be cut. What seems to have happened in my mind is that the managers pushed people down a path, and there was a knowledge gap combined with a lack of oversight that caused people to die. To walk back what I said above slightly, I think that the execs really screwed up here, and there is some house cleaning in order at minimum and possible criminal liability. I think this really stresses the importance of thorough if not downright adversarial oversight by the FAA.
throw0101a 7y ago
> I doubt anybody in Boeing’s offices woke up and thought “what a nice morning! Time to go to work and build some dangerous airplanes that will kill people, so that I can get slightly richer”. It's been thought for a while that the suits of McDonnell Douglas have "ruined" the engineering company that Boeing once was: > Where on earth did Boeing go? Directory assistance does list an aerospace concern by that name in Chicago, but surely it's not the American icon that boldly launched the world into the jet age. That company's president once received a standing ovation from a Senate committee. This "Boeing" has boldly violated Pentagon rules, broken new ground in industrial espionage, and somehow made an enemy of the U.S. government--all while falling behind its foreign rival. Besides, everybody knows that Boeing is in Seattle. [...] > Now that Condit has pulled the ripcord on yet another bad relationship, the "reverse takeover" theorists seem prophetic: Harry Stonecipher, 67, is Boeing's CEO. While he might be the man to mend fences with the Pentagon, his pit-bull routine seems unlikely to mend Boeing's broken culture. "We have the right strategy," he declared at a news conference. "The task before us is to execute." > If there's one bright spot, it's that Boeing finally looks poised to launch its first new plane since 1990: the hyper-efficient 7E7 "Dreamliner," so dubbed after a global naming contest. If it gets the go-ahead, the $7 billion project might restore some of Boeing's once-famed esprit de corps--maybe even enough to lure its severed head back to Seattle. If, on the other hand, the company loses its nerve, it might consider another naming contest--this one for itself. > May we suggest McDonnell Douglas? * https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2003/12/22/356081/index.htm https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archiv...
- alexis_fr 7y ago
  Thank you. I’m also that, when a company presents an unfit plane so many times for take off, there is a problem with its traditions. If a big company fails and the competitir buys it for cheap, it corrupts the competitor. Which begs the question: If a big company fails (or some Boeing branch in a near future), even if Airbus doesn’t buy it, should it dodge job applications from the former employees of that competitor?
  - throw0101a 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
notjustanymike 7y ago
A NYTimes article this weekend had multiple anonymous sources stating that management actively supressed warnings and Boeing lobbied extremely aggressively for being their own regulator. It was very very intentional.
ivankolev 7y ago
"The path to hell is filled with good intentions" someone once said
rconti 7y ago
This is why, if you're in upper management and concerned with long-term corporate health, you WANT a regulator (or, better, internal auditor) with real teeth. It's by design that you're going to put pressure on teams to perform and meet high expectations. You need someone to check and validate the output of those expectations before it blows up and kills someone.
- rectang 7y ago
  > (or, better, internal auditor) An internal auditor will forever be at risk by executives focused on the short-term. So long as executive compensation is decoupled from long-term health, no auditor can endure — eventually somebody's going to force out the auditor for the sake of padding their paycheck. This is unfortunate because external regulation introduces lots of inefficiencies.
  - rconti 7y ago
    Right, I meant "better" from the perspective of the execs :D There's a lot wrong with external regulation, as you indicate, but it's often (sometimes? always?) the least bad option.

by akerl_ 7y ago

lnsru 7y ago

While reading your text I was thinking about Volkswagen, diesel cars and their defeat devices. This article (sorry for German only writing) https://www.auto-motor-und-sport.de/verkehr/audi-abgasskandal-betrugssoftware-diesel-defeat-device/ https://www.auto-motor-und-sport.de/verkehr/audi-abgasskanda... states exactly opposite! The VW guys were writing poems for their clever defeat device! I am pretty sure, that some people at Boeing were also clapping hands about sales potential and cost savings of the new planes. There are more evil people in the corporate floors than you think. And top management plays with them!!! There is no way to build in defeat device in millions of cars without top management agreeing. I can guess, that Boeing’s management had enough clues, that their software wasn’t in the best shape.

keyme 7y ago
There is always at least one guy that really does understand the implications, is in the position to make changes, but proceeds anyway.
- nguoi 7y ago
  To be picky, that is unfalsifiable. I think you're probably correct but shaming the engineers in the hopes they'll stop it has repeatedly failed to work: that's why this isn't a thread about VW. IMHO it's because actions from a single individual carry too much risk for enough to accept. It needs collective bargaining.
akerl_ 7y ago
I don’t think anybody is arguing that Boeing execs hate money, or weren’t excited to make loads of money. And, as I wrote, the incentive structure the Boeing execs created has an incentive structure whose outcome was incredibly dangerous. Realizing those incentives required that the executives turn a blind eye to how the problems were being solved. But I think it’s pretty implausible to suggest that the “evil people” at Boeing we’re clapping their hands about savings with an understanding that they were trading human lives for those profits. It’s tempting to imagine that the executives of corporations are all comic villains, sitting in their offices plotting the demise of humanity, but to imagine them in that way is detrimental to the goal of actually avoiding these problems. If we treat corporations as if they’re comic villains, we ignore that they’re actually made up of normal people with a variety of social and economic incentives, and being aware of those incentives is crucial if we’d like to actually change corporate behavior.
- jeroen 7y ago
  > But I think it’s pretty implausible to suggest that the “evil people” at Boeing we’re clapping their hands about savings with an understanding that they were trading human lives for those profits. Yet it's entirely plausible that they were consciously making that trade off. I see a lot of similarities to cases like these: > Ford (..) Pinto became a subject of controversy after Mother Jones magazine exposed that it was prone to deadly fires in rear-end collisions; Ford’s internal documents showed the company knew of the potential problem but chose not to fix it, calculating that it would be cheaper to pay out possible injury claims. > The Japanese manufacturer of airbags has recalled airbags in some 19.2 million vehicles in the U.S. due to a tendency of the device to deploy with too much force, sending metal scraps flying into the passenger cabin. Eight deaths and about 100 injuries in the U.S. have been attributed to the defect. According to a New York Times report, Honda, one of the companies using the bags, and Takata knew about the dangerous airbags for years before disclosing it to the public and issuing recalls. -- https://fortune.com/2015/09/26/auto-industry-scandals/ https://fortune.com/2015/09/26/auto-industry-scandals/

errnoh 7y ago

There's a great book about the thing you're describing, called "Drift into Failure"

ownagefool 7y ago

I'm not a real engineer, just a software guy, but situation feels similar. Responsiblity of outcome and to save money is placed on management who pressure the workers to save money without sharing the bigger picture. Would it still happen, if responsbility was placed directly on the worker? Why isn't there a review teams were senior enough and given the time to critique an outcome? Why is it management doesn't understand the consequences of these actions, or are too shameless to admit them and plow ahead?

crocal 7y ago
Because at a certain level of complexity and scale, it is possible to have managers in charge who no longer understand cause and consequences, especially if the time between the two is in years. Sometimes they don’t even want to understand due to the incentive they receive and the dilution of responsibility in such large organizations. The first thing such managers usually do is fire / sideline the senior engineers who complain all the time. And then...

ajsnigrutin 7y ago

This is easily fixed by governments doing their jobs. In this case, FAA (or whoever the regulator is) should verify if the "minor change" is a new coffee machine on board, or has the engine been moved. And then, progressively larger fines (comparative to potential damage caused in the event of failure) to offset the "savings" by misdeclaring the scope of changes.

rectang 7y ago
It's not at all easy for government to do its job because corporate soft power is ridiculously out of whack in the US, thanks to Citizens United and similar decisions. If you are an effective regulator, corporate money and influence will converge with a vengeance to neuter you and those who appointed you.
- ajsnigrutin 7y ago
  I'm not saying it's easy... I'm just saying that the parts of the government, that should be controlling this, are not doing their jobs. But I agree, that with a high enough level of corruption (from low-key bribing an inspector, to higher up lobbying at highest government levels), doing this efectively is impossible..
  - rectang 7y ago
    > with a high enough level of corruption (from low-key bribing an inspector, to higher up lobbying at highest government levels), doing this efectively is impossible. That's a great way of putting it — nice! What I'm looking for is a way to put responsibility where it truly lies. Blaming regulators alone is reductive, because the architects of the regulatory framework and the context in which it exists have ensured that corruption will occur. Those architects are the ones most at fault, starting with the Roberts Court.
  - enraged_camel 7y ago
    >>I'm not saying it's easy... But that's literally what you said? "This is easily fixed by governments doing their jobs."

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

StreamBright 7y ago

>> I doubt anybody in Boeing’s offices woke up and thought “what a nice morning! Time to go to work and build some dangerous airplanes that will kill people, so that I can get slightly richer”. It is the other way around. People should understand that adding pressure on teams delivering mission critical systems is dangerous. Intentions matter very little in this context, the outcome does.

dspillett 7y ago

I'm seeing it as closer to the Challenger accident (1986): management overriding engineering concerns (in the Challenger case it was Thiokol overriding internal engineers, in the 737 case it is Boeing trying to work around external safe-guards) to Get The Job Done and save money/face/other, at the possible expense of endangering peoples lives.

hef19898 7y ago

Not sure if this rings true. You kind of assume that management "only" set unrealistic gial and then lower level employees decided by themselves to come up with MCAS as it was them implemented. Based in my aerospace experience, it is mire likely that lower level employees raised concerns about certification which where then subsequently ignored by management (TM) as they asumed rightly to have a lot of leaway with the FAA. All that of course i usually documented extensively. I suspect the above scenario because I took part in quite a few change boards affecting much smaller and less critical tickets. And everyone is informed and changes are signed of by the relevant peiple quite high up the food chain. I'd suggest some other issue here, willful ignorance by upper management. At Boeing it is a fair bet for managemet to have solid certification knowledge (as shown in their creative approach to it). Thus taking the risks they did with MCAS involves a lot of ignorance. And potentially panic when they realized the commercial risk a failing 737 MAX would have. So they chose to take shortcuts, ignore warnings and hope for the best.

S_A_P 7y ago

Its all a slippery slope. If you had shown this outcome to the execs prior to starting down the path they took, none of them would have chosen said path. Execs think they are being "good managers" when they push for more from less, because they force the worker bees to be innovative. Yeah, sometimes that happens, but many times the restriction is just arbitrary and causes corners to be cut. What seems to have happened in my mind is that the managers pushed people down a path, and there was a knowledge gap combined with a lack of oversight that caused people to die. To walk back what I said above slightly, I think that the execs really screwed up here, and there is some house cleaning in order at minimum and possible criminal liability. I think this really stresses the importance of thorough if not downright adversarial oversight by the FAA.

throw0101a 7y ago

> I doubt anybody in Boeing’s offices woke up and thought “what a nice morning! Time to go to work and build some dangerous airplanes that will kill people, so that I can get slightly richer”. It's been thought for a while that the suits of McDonnell Douglas have "ruined" the engineering company that Boeing once was: > Where on earth did Boeing go? Directory assistance does list an aerospace concern by that name in Chicago, but surely it's not the American icon that boldly launched the world into the jet age. That company's president once received a standing ovation from a Senate committee. This "Boeing" has boldly violated Pentagon rules, broken new ground in industrial espionage, and somehow made an enemy of the U.S. government--all while falling behind its foreign rival. Besides, everybody knows that Boeing is in Seattle. [...] > Now that Condit has pulled the ripcord on yet another bad relationship, the "reverse takeover" theorists seem prophetic: Harry Stonecipher, 67, is Boeing's CEO. While he might be the man to mend fences with the Pentagon, his pit-bull routine seems unlikely to mend Boeing's broken culture. "We have the right strategy," he declared at a news conference. "The task before us is to execute." > If there's one bright spot, it's that Boeing finally looks poised to launch its first new plane since 1990: the hyper-efficient 7E7 "Dreamliner," so dubbed after a global naming contest. If it gets the go-ahead, the $7 billion project might restore some of Boeing's once-famed esprit de corps--maybe even enough to lure its severed head back to Seattle. If, on the other hand, the company loses its nerve, it might consider another naming contest--this one for itself. > May we suggest McDonnell Douglas? * https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2003/12/22/356081/index.htm https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archiv...

alexis_fr 7y ago
Thank you. I’m also that, when a company presents an unfit plane so many times for take off, there is a problem with its traditions. If a big company fails and the competitir buys it for cheap, it corrupts the competitor. Which begs the question: If a big company fails (or some Boeing branch in a near future), even if Airbus doesn’t buy it, should it dodge job applications from the former employees of that competitor?
- throw0101a 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

notjustanymike 7y ago

A NYTimes article this weekend had multiple anonymous sources stating that management actively supressed warnings and Boeing lobbied extremely aggressively for being their own regulator. It was very very intentional.

ivankolev 7y ago

"The path to hell is filled with good intentions" someone once said

rconti 7y ago

This is why, if you're in upper management and concerned with long-term corporate health, you WANT a regulator (or, better, internal auditor) with real teeth. It's by design that you're going to put pressure on teams to perform and meet high expectations. You need someone to check and validate the output of those expectations before it blows up and kills someone.

rectang 7y ago
> (or, better, internal auditor) An internal auditor will forever be at risk by executives focused on the short-term. So long as executive compensation is decoupled from long-term health, no auditor can endure — eventually somebody's going to force out the auditor for the sake of padding their paycheck. This is unfortunate because external regulation introduces lots of inefficiencies.
- rconti 7y ago
  Right, I meant "better" from the perspective of the execs :D There's a lot wrong with external regulation, as you indicate, but it's often (sometimes? always?) the least bad option.