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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 ex

by 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/
acqq 7y ago
> being aware of those incentives is crucial if we’d like to actually change corporate behavior. We are aware how the hierarchies function: "I was just following the orders" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders#Nuremberg_Trials_after_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders#Nuremberg_Tria... I agree with you that it doesn't have sense trying to discuss about the abstract evilness, but I claim that the Boeing's top brass should be brought to the court! If those who make decisions aren't held accountable, the results are provably terrible. "I was ''just'' securing the profit for my shareholders" shouldn't be an excuse.
rectang 7y ago
Why should Boeing and Wells Fargo executives be afforded sympathy and mercy routinely denied to people far less fortunate and whose actions have far fewer consequences? Carrie Tolstedt of Wells Fargo is as close to a comic villain as you're going to get, designing a system which forced multitudes of employees into unethical actions. And even after clawbacks Tolstedt ended her career tens of millions of dollars ahead. Executives are already so coddled and protected from failure that terrible actions are rewarded and inevitable.
- akerl_ 7y ago
  Speaking morally, I believe in having empathy for everybody. The fact that some people don’t behave that way doesn’t cause me to act in kind towards them. That said, empathy (which is what I’m suggesting above) is not “sympathy and mercy”. I haven’t suggested at any point in this thread that we should feel sympathy or mercy for anyone at Boeing (or Wells Fargo). Speaking practically, treating execs as comic villains gets in the way of actually fixing their behavior. There are a variety of ways to force corporations to behave differently, but they all start with actually figuring out why they act this way in the first place. Otherwise we end up making the same mistake as Wells Fargo and Boeing: if we apply pressure on them to act better without clearly understanding why they’re doing what they’re doing, we’re just going to incentivize them to misbehave differently to get around the new rules.
  - rectang 7y ago
    > Speaking morally, I believe in having empathy for everybody. I take you at your word. It's just hilarious that a post urging empathy for executives floats to the top while it's bootstraps for everyone else. [EDIT: in other upvoted HN posts, not necessarily yours.] > There are a variety of ways to force corporations to behave differently, but they all start with actually figuring out why they act this way in the first place. It starts with whittling down the outrageous soft power enjoyed by corporations, their owners, and their agents — and which you are contributing to by delaying, denying, and softening accountability for the most outrageous of executive actions.
    - 7y ago
ljm 7y ago
Maybe I'm wrong but it feels a bit simpler than people being evil or malevolent. It's more like squeezing a juice out of a lemon: at first, it only requires light pressure to get the juice, but as you want more and more juice, your grip must get increasingly tighter. At some point it becomes clear you need a new lemon to get more juice, but for some reason it seems cheaper/more effective to keep squeezing the one that has nothing left to give. So it is with businesses extracting value (/making as much money as possible).
- akerl_ 7y ago
  The tricky part is figuring out the “for some reason” in your metaphor, and then designing a system that causes them to rethink that calculus instead of just finding a different way to keep squeezing the same lemon.
- Majromax 7y ago
  > Maybe I'm wrong but it feels a bit simpler than people being evil or malevolent. It's more like squeezing a juice out of a lemon: at first, it only requires light pressure to get the juice, but as you want more and more juice, your grip must get increasingly tighter. It's like the idea of "pot odds" in poker: Boeing here wasn't just looking at the marginal return on investment, it was looking at the cost of essentially deprecating an entire line of aircraft. It would lose value from its entire "installed base" of customers, as competition from Airbus would become more viable. In economic terms, the marginal value of the investment was probably close to nil, but it protected profitable infra-marginal investments. Interestingly, this seems like a problem that large companies face far more often than startups, which is perhaps why conventional wisdom thinks the latter are far more 'agile'.
mlang23 7y ago
I dont believe your point at all. Do you know how high the psychopath rate amongst managers is? You would be shocked. I really dont believe that someone having fought their way up to a job that pays a 7 figure number per year actually cares about normal human people anymore. I just dont.
- mcv 7y ago
  > Do you know how high the psychopath rate amongst managers is? What I've always wanted to know is: do psychopaths make better managers? Do they somehow gravitate towards management positions in some other way? Or is it the management position that brings out the psychopath in people?
  - tempguy9999 7y ago
    This is my opinion, from experience. > do psychopaths make better managers? I've had 2. No, they're horrible to work for. Indifferent to you as a human, bullying, lying, destructive (edit: and manipulative). The best bosses I've had, the ones that got the most out of me, were humane and decent (Also 2 of them). > Do they somehow gravitate towards management positions in some other way? I guess so. Power, control, money (all of these really boil down to power). > Or is it the management position that brings out the psychopath in people? No. A psychopath is a definite mental phenomenon that AFAIK is something you're born with. It is thought to be perhaps made worse by bad childhoods, but it certainly isn't something you develop if you weren't born with it. What I do see in those psychopaths that I recognise as such is that they often really driven for money/power. They're often great fun to be with because they're so impulsive, but wear you down with constant demands. Above is just my personal understanding and experiences.
msiyer 7y ago
The executives in any corporation are in no way normal people. More so in a behemoth like Boeing. They have nothing in common with common people. They might not be clapping hands at the death of few humans, but they would not be crying either.
mcv 7y ago
They were probably not thinking about human lives at all, merely about how to game the regulations they had to meet. It's not mere negligence, but intentional short-sightedness. Forget that this is about human lives, it's merely about red tape you need to get past. That's the real corporate evil: losing sight of the big picture of what your product is supposed to accomplish in the world, and see it merely as a vehicle for profit, where the regulations are merely obstacles you need to bypass, rather than a necessary good that ensures your product is safe and provides real value to the world. And I fear this kind of thinking is incredible common in large corporations. It doesn't always lead to disasters like the 737 Max, the VW emission scandal, or the Fukushima or Deepwater disasters, but losing sight of the larger context of what you're doing does enable those kind of disasters. After the mortgage crisis and other banking misbehaviours, all people working at Dutch banks (including developers like me) are required (and trained, to some extent) to always keep this big picture in mind: what does this decision mean for the company, the customers, the shareholders and also society in general. All 4 need to be balanced. Maybe this should be more common among all industries. Corporations certainly do need to be held accountable for their actions, and for the corporate culture they create, because that will impact the actions of the corporation as a whole. If everybody just focuses on the immediate requirements (passing that emissions test no matter how, making the plane pretend to be the same in order to pass certification) without considering the larger picture, that is a result of the corporate culture and the way performance of employees is measured. The corporation is absolutely responsible for that, and yes, maybe it should be considered evil when upper management fosters or allows a culture of this kind of short-sightedness.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  While I don't mean to defend the multi-step process that led to the 2 737 Max crashes, I think this is a case where many actors combined, with most every individual action apparently seeming fairly reasonable, to achieve an outcome that was unreasonable in aggregate. (This excludes a high-level systems engineering oversight function, of course.) The airplane needs more efficient engines. The new engines are physically larger and the space underwing too low. Let's move the engines forward. That causes the stick force curve in an uncommon region of the envelope seen mostly only when hand flying and out of normal envelope. We could fix the stick force curve by actively displacing the horizontal stabilizer under those conditions. We can limit the authority of the stab under MCAS to 0.6°, a figure which would only be a slight hazard to flight as pilots could easily override. We can prevent the need to retrain pilots (even if only differences training), but this requires us to use only a single angle-of-attack sensor to drive the system. That's OK, because the 0.6° limit is safe. Later, someone else decides to give MCAS a little more control authority. It's not clear (to me) that the 0.6° prior limit was documented as something that was being relied on by regulators or not. A "safe" system being given a little more authority in the name of safety doesn't sound so bad, after all. No analysis appears to be done for the case of multiply resetting the MCAS system, allowing for progressively more authority. No analysis appears to be done for the fact that line pilots were relying on the "control breakaway" to interrupt automated trim motion on legacy 737s. Pilots using this undocumented technique may have become overly accustomed to it and assumed the plane was designed that way. Of course, MCAS, being a system to protect the stick force curve during manual flight, could not reasonably be disabled by a control column breakout switch, because it's designed to protect the aircraft exactly during hand flying situations where the pilot had the column in an aircraft nose up attitude (where the column breakout switches would be activated). I agree with your overall point that the holistic outcome was bad, that it's a systems problem, but want to amplify the fact that a great many people were working diligently to accomplish their goal(s) in the face of their constraints. Very few (to perhaps none of them), pilots included, likely realized that they were acting in a short-sighted way.
breatheoften 7y ago
Just to take things to another extreme — our society seems to believe the death penalty works as a deterrent — so why shouldn’t we seek the death penalty for executives when their neglect kills people ...?
- rightbyte 7y ago
  Making being in charge riskier will probably not make more risk aware people being in charge. If I could get prosecuted for accidents my code coused I would never work which such tasks.

by akerl_ 7y ago

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/

acqq 7y ago

> being aware of those incentives is crucial if we’d like to actually change corporate behavior. We are aware how the hierarchies function: "I was just following the orders" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders#Nuremberg_Trials_after_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders#Nuremberg_Tria... I agree with you that it doesn't have sense trying to discuss about the abstract evilness, but I claim that the Boeing's top brass should be brought to the court! If those who make decisions aren't held accountable, the results are provably terrible. "I was ''just'' securing the profit for my shareholders" shouldn't be an excuse.

rectang 7y ago

Why should Boeing and Wells Fargo executives be afforded sympathy and mercy routinely denied to people far less fortunate and whose actions have far fewer consequences? Carrie Tolstedt of Wells Fargo is as close to a comic villain as you're going to get, designing a system which forced multitudes of employees into unethical actions. And even after clawbacks Tolstedt ended her career tens of millions of dollars ahead. Executives are already so coddled and protected from failure that terrible actions are rewarded and inevitable.

akerl_ 7y ago
Speaking morally, I believe in having empathy for everybody. The fact that some people don’t behave that way doesn’t cause me to act in kind towards them. That said, empathy (which is what I’m suggesting above) is not “sympathy and mercy”. I haven’t suggested at any point in this thread that we should feel sympathy or mercy for anyone at Boeing (or Wells Fargo). Speaking practically, treating execs as comic villains gets in the way of actually fixing their behavior. There are a variety of ways to force corporations to behave differently, but they all start with actually figuring out why they act this way in the first place. Otherwise we end up making the same mistake as Wells Fargo and Boeing: if we apply pressure on them to act better without clearly understanding why they’re doing what they’re doing, we’re just going to incentivize them to misbehave differently to get around the new rules.
- rectang 7y ago
  > Speaking morally, I believe in having empathy for everybody. I take you at your word. It's just hilarious that a post urging empathy for executives floats to the top while it's bootstraps for everyone else. [EDIT: in other upvoted HN posts, not necessarily yours.] > There are a variety of ways to force corporations to behave differently, but they all start with actually figuring out why they act this way in the first place. It starts with whittling down the outrageous soft power enjoyed by corporations, their owners, and their agents — and which you are contributing to by delaying, denying, and softening accountability for the most outrageous of executive actions.
  - 7y ago

ljm 7y ago

Maybe I'm wrong but it feels a bit simpler than people being evil or malevolent. It's more like squeezing a juice out of a lemon: at first, it only requires light pressure to get the juice, but as you want more and more juice, your grip must get increasingly tighter. At some point it becomes clear you need a new lemon to get more juice, but for some reason it seems cheaper/more effective to keep squeezing the one that has nothing left to give. So it is with businesses extracting value (/making as much money as possible).

akerl_ 7y ago
The tricky part is figuring out the “for some reason” in your metaphor, and then designing a system that causes them to rethink that calculus instead of just finding a different way to keep squeezing the same lemon.
Majromax 7y ago
> Maybe I'm wrong but it feels a bit simpler than people being evil or malevolent. It's more like squeezing a juice out of a lemon: at first, it only requires light pressure to get the juice, but as you want more and more juice, your grip must get increasingly tighter. It's like the idea of "pot odds" in poker: Boeing here wasn't just looking at the marginal return on investment, it was looking at the cost of essentially deprecating an entire line of aircraft. It would lose value from its entire "installed base" of customers, as competition from Airbus would become more viable. In economic terms, the marginal value of the investment was probably close to nil, but it protected profitable infra-marginal investments. Interestingly, this seems like a problem that large companies face far more often than startups, which is perhaps why conventional wisdom thinks the latter are far more 'agile'.

mlang23 7y ago

I dont believe your point at all. Do you know how high the psychopath rate amongst managers is? You would be shocked. I really dont believe that someone having fought their way up to a job that pays a 7 figure number per year actually cares about normal human people anymore. I just dont.

mcv 7y ago
> Do you know how high the psychopath rate amongst managers is? What I've always wanted to know is: do psychopaths make better managers? Do they somehow gravitate towards management positions in some other way? Or is it the management position that brings out the psychopath in people?
- tempguy9999 7y ago
  This is my opinion, from experience. > do psychopaths make better managers? I've had 2. No, they're horrible to work for. Indifferent to you as a human, bullying, lying, destructive (edit: and manipulative). The best bosses I've had, the ones that got the most out of me, were humane and decent (Also 2 of them). > Do they somehow gravitate towards management positions in some other way? I guess so. Power, control, money (all of these really boil down to power). > Or is it the management position that brings out the psychopath in people? No. A psychopath is a definite mental phenomenon that AFAIK is something you're born with. It is thought to be perhaps made worse by bad childhoods, but it certainly isn't something you develop if you weren't born with it. What I do see in those psychopaths that I recognise as such is that they often really driven for money/power. They're often great fun to be with because they're so impulsive, but wear you down with constant demands. Above is just my personal understanding and experiences.

msiyer 7y ago

The executives in any corporation are in no way normal people. More so in a behemoth like Boeing. They have nothing in common with common people. They might not be clapping hands at the death of few humans, but they would not be crying either.

mcv 7y ago

They were probably not thinking about human lives at all, merely about how to game the regulations they had to meet. It's not mere negligence, but intentional short-sightedness. Forget that this is about human lives, it's merely about red tape you need to get past. That's the real corporate evil: losing sight of the big picture of what your product is supposed to accomplish in the world, and see it merely as a vehicle for profit, where the regulations are merely obstacles you need to bypass, rather than a necessary good that ensures your product is safe and provides real value to the world. And I fear this kind of thinking is incredible common in large corporations. It doesn't always lead to disasters like the 737 Max, the VW emission scandal, or the Fukushima or Deepwater disasters, but losing sight of the larger context of what you're doing does enable those kind of disasters. After the mortgage crisis and other banking misbehaviours, all people working at Dutch banks (including developers like me) are required (and trained, to some extent) to always keep this big picture in mind: what does this decision mean for the company, the customers, the shareholders and also society in general. All 4 need to be balanced. Maybe this should be more common among all industries. Corporations certainly do need to be held accountable for their actions, and for the corporate culture they create, because that will impact the actions of the corporation as a whole. If everybody just focuses on the immediate requirements (passing that emissions test no matter how, making the plane pretend to be the same in order to pass certification) without considering the larger picture, that is a result of the corporate culture and the way performance of employees is measured. The corporation is absolutely responsible for that, and yes, maybe it should be considered evil when upper management fosters or allows a culture of this kind of short-sightedness.

sokoloff 7y ago
While I don't mean to defend the multi-step process that led to the 2 737 Max crashes, I think this is a case where many actors combined, with most every individual action apparently seeming fairly reasonable, to achieve an outcome that was unreasonable in aggregate. (This excludes a high-level systems engineering oversight function, of course.) The airplane needs more efficient engines. The new engines are physically larger and the space underwing too low. Let's move the engines forward. That causes the stick force curve in an uncommon region of the envelope seen mostly only when hand flying and out of normal envelope. We could fix the stick force curve by actively displacing the horizontal stabilizer under those conditions. We can limit the authority of the stab under MCAS to 0.6°, a figure which would only be a slight hazard to flight as pilots could easily override. We can prevent the need to retrain pilots (even if only differences training), but this requires us to use only a single angle-of-attack sensor to drive the system. That's OK, because the 0.6° limit is safe. Later, someone else decides to give MCAS a little more control authority. It's not clear (to me) that the 0.6° prior limit was documented as something that was being relied on by regulators or not. A "safe" system being given a little more authority in the name of safety doesn't sound so bad, after all. No analysis appears to be done for the case of multiply resetting the MCAS system, allowing for progressively more authority. No analysis appears to be done for the fact that line pilots were relying on the "control breakaway" to interrupt automated trim motion on legacy 737s. Pilots using this undocumented technique may have become overly accustomed to it and assumed the plane was designed that way. Of course, MCAS, being a system to protect the stick force curve during manual flight, could not reasonably be disabled by a control column breakout switch, because it's designed to protect the aircraft exactly during hand flying situations where the pilot had the column in an aircraft nose up attitude (where the column breakout switches would be activated). I agree with your overall point that the holistic outcome was bad, that it's a systems problem, but want to amplify the fact that a great many people were working diligently to accomplish their goal(s) in the face of their constraints. Very few (to perhaps none of them), pilots included, likely realized that they were acting in a short-sighted way.

breatheoften 7y ago

Just to take things to another extreme — our society seems to believe the death penalty works as a deterrent — so why shouldn’t we seek the death penalty for executives when their neglect kills people ...?

rightbyte 7y ago
Making being in charge riskier will probably not make more risk aware people being in charge. If I could get prosecuted for accidents my code coused I would never work which such tasks.