I'm an Aerospace Engineer, currently working for the U.S. Gov, but have spent time on the Industry side. I don't have a thesis per se after reading this, but s

I'm an Aerospace Engineer, currently working for the U.S. Gov, but have spent time on the Industry side. I don't have a thesis per se after reading this, but several thoughts: - I don't think it's unfair to vilify Boeing's accumulated divergence from "doing the right thing". On the other hand, it's quite sad that it takes significant events like this to force anyone to act against the long-term pressure of corporate behavior that leads to such events. - As per a thread I had with WalterBright, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21037522 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21037522 , I agree Airbus has a number of significant flaws in their vehicle management systems for which there has been insufficient criticism and action. - It's not easy being on the side of the gov/regulators. There is continuous pressure from industry, and from up the management/political chain, to be a cooperative partner. Especially in light of how quickly industry can execute tasks, it's very hard to say "we need to take a pause" or "we need to go back, do some more homework, and be deliberative about this". If the gov/regulator is excessively slow, there are concrete costs that industry incurs. These realities, with the continued pressure, have trended in the U.S. to lead to ultimately less effective oversight. - The U.S. Government insufficiently values in-house technical expertise. In the aerospace realm, NASA is the principal exception. But within the DoD and FAA, while there is is technical expertise, much heavy-duty technical lifting is done by FFRDCs (e.g., Aerospace Corp., MITRE's CAASD, the national labs) or UARCs (e.g., Johns Hopkins Univ's Applied Physics Lab). In my view, the DoD and FAA should build in-house engineering capability sufficient to properly oversee and advise major programs without having to outsource as much as they do. You cannot do an effective job overseeing complex engineering developments if you are insufficiently technically-competent. The DoD is starting to realize this and places like AFRL are starting to swing back toward that direction, but there's a very very long way to go. If you are going to effectively push back against industry pressure, you have to be equipped to make strong technical arguments, not just appeals to precedent or vague statements about risk. - If you can find people with the right mindset and competence levels, it's better, in my view to have ex-Industry engineers working for the government. Those that go straight from school to government don't often have direct experience as practitioners, and as per my previous point, that often makes them less effective than they could be. - "Follow the plan," from the article, sounds exactly like what I've heard from Boeing. The article captured well the context and implications of that kind of talk. - "... engineers had to accept that they were no longer the center of the universe" really resonated with my own experience at another (non-Boeing) large American aerospace company. I was told by the man in charge of a major subsystem discipline that "engineering is out of favor [with the company management]". He was an engineer and on the side of engineers, he was just telling it the way it was. I couldn't believe what I heard then, and decades later, still can't believe it. How can engineering be "out of favor" in a company that specifically engineers systems at the edge of what humans can accomplish in hardware? I think you will find most large American aerospace companies helmed by people who really see no irony in making statements like that. - The aerospace industry is not one I would encourage my children to work in. I'm driven heavily by my passion for aerospace - it's an integral part of my identity. But it's really hard in industry to find job security, avoid rampant pigeonholing, avoid corporate mistreatment, work on multiple well-executed flight programs in your career (the equivalent of "shipping" software), and generally work somewhere where there is a strong corporate motivation to "do the right thing". It's a lot harder than in software for the corporate culture to not permeate everything around you because of how capital-intensive the field is. Also, the U.S. Government sucks as a customer, which makes it harder for small companies to thrive in the field. The job security issue can go away if you work in government, but then your ability to be an implementer (why a lot of people become engineers) also diminishes.