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The Ethical Failures Behind the Boeing Disasters

119 points by whack 7y ago

joe_the_user 7y ago
Putting events like this down to ethical failure has the problem that it allows the investigation of the event to stop at a "single point of failure" in the "human system". The focus on Boeing and elsewhere has revealed that for a substantial period of time the focus of management was essentially "gutting" the company; replacing highly skilled and expensive engineers and workers with cheaper workers elsewhere and generally removing any impediment to immediate profit - this including stretching to 737 spec to the point that it essentially "broke" rather than taking the cost hit of designing a new plane for a new era. The thing is, when the paradigm the top puts out is "do whatever it take to make those numbers", you already have an implicitly unethical outlook but one with plausible deniability. The people who push that (whether management, hedge funds or board of directors) are careful not to overtly advocate anything illegal or immoral but it seems logical that when X underling who does Y ethical act is caught and punished, that underling will be replaced by another one who will face the same pressures and quite likely also engage in similar overtly unethical behavior.
- aidenn0 7y ago
  You see the same thing with wage-theft in large chain stores. Corporate HQ always says that they don't support it, but then they setup sales and payroll goals that can most easily be met with wage-theft.
  - pixl97 7y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_fraud https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_fraud
    - ethbro 7y ago
      See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Neumann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Neumann
    - aidenn0 7y ago
      I'm talking about something different from control fraud; particularly in the case that it can arise unintentionally. The fact that it can arise unintentionally makes it much harder to combat because there is built-in plausible deniability. Example of it occurring unintentionally: 1. A corporation sets goals for store managers based upon performance metrics that include payroll. These goals are currently realizable by a competent manager without forcing workers to work without pay. 2. Some fraction of managers realize rather than actually working hard to meet the goals, they can get their numbers up by forcing workers to work without pay. This skews the metrics a bit. 3. The most incompetent managers that aren't committing wage-theft are demoted or fired, being replaced with managers that are either more-competent or willing to commit wage-theft. 4. The payroll goal is now adjusted down because the previous accounting-term's payroll average is lower than before. 5. Competent managers manage to get jobs elsewhere, so the fraction of managers willing to commit wage-theft increases. 6. GOTO 2 Eventually the metrics are so skewed that the majority of managers must either commit wage-theft or lose their jobs. These managers are the only people that will get in trouble if the wage-theft is discovered.
  - ethbro 7y ago
    I believe all of these generally stem from US law making it impossible to charge someone for being an idiot. So provably contradictory claims like "Hit the payroll goals" and "Don't commit wage theft" can be demanded by management all day. However, actual liability is only accrued by those who act on those policies. It'd be nice to see liability, once determined at a lower level, forced to follow the organization chart back to the root decision. Possibly balanced for something like direct reports. E.g. you manage 100 people, 20 of them committed fraud, you have a 20/100 share of the crime
    - aidenn0 7y ago
      It's even worse because, unless someone is stupid enough to send an e-mail saying "hahaha wage-theft, they'll never catch us," bad-actors can hide behind the veil of idiocy. They might have been promoted up from these stores, know that wage-theft is happening, but continue on knowing that they won't face consequences for it later.
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    Same for Wells Fargo. Set impossible goals and then be surprised that people are taking shortcuts. I work in medical and even there they squeeze people to the point of reducing quality. At some point you prefer going home on time over doing a thorough review of the code during (unpaid) overtime.
- ehnto 7y ago
  Target based metrics, be it budget targets or output targets, are too fragile to be useful in my opinion. There is likely a perfect number that's totally reasonable, ensures good productivity while leaving enough room to be safe and grow. But I've yet to see something like that implemented. I've also never seen targets make a company a better place to work, and I would argue that if somewhere is not a good place to work it's inherently less productive and efficient. Management can always compensate for that with more hours or more humans, but you're bloating your system. Like retail stores with 8 employees on, where some are meant to handle stock and some are meant to serve customers, but you've given them all sales budgets for the day. The stock doesn't get handled, and you have 8 people not meeting their budgets. All the employees are unhappy about that, stressed, and working against eachother to try to succeed. Competitive metrics just makes it so you have a handful of "star" people, who are great at undermining their colleagues in order to meet their own budget. Rather than an effective team of good people. So in the example, by the metrics, you have 1 good employee and 7 bad ones, no one is happy, your processes have fallen apart and your team doesn't work effectively together. The only people who get fired are the employees, yet the store continues to underperform.
  - CobrastanJorji 7y ago
    Great example. Another is that you may have one "star" employee who consistently notices the thing that most needs doing despite incentives, like jumping on the stock problem, and when review time comes around, they're the absolute worst employee on paper. So you fire them, and things get worse, and there's no obvious reason in the analytics as to what went wrong.
  - redis_mlc 7y ago
    > Target based metrics, be it budget targets or output targets, are too fragile to be useful in my opinion. The reported target in the 737 MAX case was that Boeing had promised Southwest a $1 million penalty per plane if retraining was required. So both Boeing and Southwest created a perverse incentive to make the plane less safe. One or two airline accidents can close an airline, so I guarantee nobody at Southwest really wanted to make that deal in retrospect. Although Southwest didn't have any 737 MAX accidents and they paid for the deluxe MCAS instrument package, they were horrified to find out that what was delivered, what it was supposed to do, and what was documented were 3 different things. Source: commercially-rated pilot, followed MCAS fiasco daily. Search for "simulators" in the following link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2019/03/28/did-airbus-rivalry-drive-dangerous-tradeoffs-for-boeings-737-max/#408634eb2e18 https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2019/03/28/did-airbu...
- inimino 7y ago
  Ethical failures can be structural, not merely individual. I think the problem you rightly identify is that decision making power and ethical responsibility are delegated separately, allowing a kind of ethical-risk arbitrage. This seems to be a failure of regulation in this particular case, or in general of ethics in management rather than engineering.
  - tbrownaw 7y ago
    Ethical failures can be structural, not merely individual. At what point does some other word become more appropriate?
    - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
      Some other word than ethics? When it's not an ethical problem that you're describing. What you seem to be saying (without actually saying it, so I have to guess) is that, because it's a failure of a group rather than an individual, it isn't ethical any more - it's something else. But if the group structure pushes individuals into unethical actions, isn't the group structure an ethical problem? Or, for the snarky answer: If companies are corporate persons, then of course they can have ethical issues.
      - fuzzfactor 7y ago
        In a high-stakes situation fundamentally depending on innovation to provide fair value with outstanding safety, you can not drop the ball or ethics alone will not help you. You're going to need overall integrity in addition to ethics, from bottom to top, starting with elements that are known to be lost, or recognized as not being adequate, before you have a chance to make it to the goal again.
- pizlonator 7y ago
  That’s a great point but I actually read the article as possibly implying, rather than contradicting, the notion that this is a failure that is bigger than any one engineer. I read this as: engineering ethics were broken because of a toxic management culture.
  - mark-r 7y ago
    I read this as: engineering ethics were broken but ascribing no reason for it. Thus the engineers were 100% responsible.
  - craftinator 7y ago
    One of the largest responsibilities of management is to set the culture of the business. They obviously do not have the skill set do the design, engineering, fabrication, or production. They are people people; they are paid to shake hands, make deals, and cultivate workplace culture. They are solely at fault for a toxic, because of why their jobs exist.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  Seems to me that at some point they just should say “it’s good enough” and contend with current growth rates. The paradigm of never ending growth pretty is guaranteed to push companies to the point where they will produce inferior goods. Same happened to Deutsche Bank. I still remember when they were doing well the CEO got it into his head to increase their margins even more and declared that 25% was the goal now. There were a lot of people saying that a bank simply has to take on too much risk to produce these numbers and, indeed, the bank blew up. Some industries simply can’t be run like consumer good companies because the consequences of failure are too severe. Obviously this doesn’t stop people from trying repeatedly. With current executive salaries it makes total sense to destroy a company’s base in exchange for a few profitable years. That’s one of the reasons why I am against more nuclear plants and running them like other businesses . They will start out doing solid work but over time management will get greedy, reduce quality until something blows up.
- shaki-dora 7y ago
  One person squarely at the center of this scandal is Boeing's Chief Test Pilot. Here's his bio: > O’Donoghue’s military experience includes 12 years of active duty as a U.S. Marine Corps fighter pilot and test pilot. He flew operational missions in the A-4M, AV-8A and AV-8B Harrier aircraft, and engineering flight tests on the AV-8B and F-14 Tomcat. In 1994, O’Donoghue transferred to the U.S. Air Force Reserve where he flew the C-130, C-141 and C-17. While there he commanded both the 728th Airlift Squadron and the 446 Airlift Wing, stationed at McChord Air Force Base, Wash. In 2005, he retired from the Air Force Reserve at the rank of colonel. > O’Donoghue holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy. (http://www.boeing.com/company/bios/dennis-odonoghue.page http://www.boeing.com/company/bios/dennis-odonoghue.page) This doesn't seem to conform to your theory that it's "cheaper workers" and business majors that caused these problems: sure, they may have created even undue pressure. But it was an all-American fighter jock doing a lot of the actual lying about MCAS.
  - hootguy 7y ago
    To elaborate on the management, not engineering, failure: nice domestic marquee credentials for the most-visible leader, but... How much credence was his input given among other leaders? How high-quality were his lieutenants and the teams they led? This is the kind of issue that only gets flagged from the deep work of your team.
- smadurange 7y ago
  I can't see how these accidents point to cheap incompetent labour unless you are saying that the product managers, chief engineers, principal engineers are being outsourced. Are you saying that a plane that tends to tilt up dangerously under certain conditions that is designed to be pushed down nose first by a software with no limit to how much it'll push down depending on a single sensor would have been an acceptable solution if the workers were different? This is a problem with the design and definition of a large system rather than the implementation. So, I think in this case, whoever had any knowledge of this at any level and let it go through are absolutely responsible. While outsourcing to cheap labour elsewhere can and often does become a problem,these crashes can't be attributed to that. This was a very specific failure with very specific people in the wrong.
  - inferiorhuman 7y ago
    Are you saying that a plane that tends to tilt up dangerously under certain conditions that is designed to be pushed down nose first by a software with no limit to how much it'll push down depending on a single sensor would have been an acceptable solution if the workers were different? With different engineers and a focus on product versus profit the MAX never would've seen the light of day. With the focus on outsourcing Boeing had a gigantic mess on their hands with the 787 (and 777X) and no resources to focus on getting a 737 replacement to market.
- deleted 7y ago
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- zouhair 7y ago
  This is Capitalism 101, as long as there is no real consequences of ones actions (like polluting, causing deaths...), any Capitalistic company has to make more and more money each year. As the profit universe is not infinite they soon hit the thin smoke wall that is used as ethical barrier and pass through it. If we start to put CEOs and majority share owners in prison things will start to shift a bit.
Stratoscope 7y ago
Site availability has been intermittent. In case it's having trouble: https://web.archive.org/web/20190509220235/https://blog.apaonline.org/2019/04/08/the-ethical-failures-behind-the-boeing-disasters/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190509220235/https://blog.apao...
samcat116 7y ago
During my civil engineering studies there was an emphasis on ethics throughout classes, even the more specialized, technical ones. This is one huge difference I've noticed compared to the software engineering field. There aren't these governing bodies such as ASCE or NSPE with these ethics canons. I suspect we'll see that change in the next several years.
- jdkee 7y ago
  I wonder if the MCAS software coders are held to any ethical safety standards by Boeing's engineering department or are they so siloed that it would be impossible.
  - ethbro 7y ago
    They were held to the standard of "Get it done, yesterday." And will likely eventually be held to the standard of "How dare you let this happen?" as they're fired, to demonstrate how seriously Boeing takes safety.
  - skissane 7y ago
    The programmer is told to implement a spec. They didn't write the spec. If the spec is flawed, do they even have the necessary domain knowledge and experience to identify those flaws? And, if they can identify them, and they speak up and nobody listens, what do they do next? Implement it anyway, or quit and let somebody else implement it instead? Especially if they don't even work for Boeing, but for some subcontractor.
    - ethbro 7y ago
      The logic follows that if a malicious company deliberately subcontracts all their development, then they've completely indemnified themselves against all claims. While simultaneously providing no opportunity for subcontractors to bring noticed issues to their attention. Which seems a pretty bad state of affairs to trust when building things like airplanes.
      - 7y ago
tus88 7y ago
Someone, somewhere, said "let's butcher the design of the 737 and try and patch it up with software". That person should be in jail.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  That person would definitely fail FizzBuzz
- noipv4 7y ago
  someone like Pat Shanahan, former defense secretary. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2019/03/13/shanahan-faces-ig-complaint-over-boeing-ties/ https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2019/03/13/...
- chriscappuccio 7y ago
  The 737 Max isn't the only plane to fatally crash from failed AoA sensors. It's amazing that boeing didn't think harder when basing MCAS actions on a single AoA sensor and then making it hard to detect after their own pilots warned them it creates a dangerous situation!
nabla9 7y ago
No Single Points of Failure applies also to organizations. Boeing's corporate governance failures became life threatening only because FAA certification process failed. Regulatory capture of FAA was the second failure. Regulatory capture may be responsible for Boeing's recent problems https://www.economist.com/business/2019/03/23/regulatory-capture-may-be-responsible-for-boeings-recent-problems https://www.economist.com/business/2019/03/23/regulatory-cap... Barbara Hollingsworth: 'Regulatory capture' explains a lot about FAA's failures https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/barbara-hollingsworth-regulatory-capture-explains-a-lot-about-faas-failures https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/barbara-hollingsworth-reg... > What happens to federal employees who ignore safety warnings, cover up incompetent or even criminal behavior, destroy official documents and mislead members of Congress? At the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), they get promoted. > That's the take-away from last week's National Whistleblowers Assembly on Capitol Hill, sponsored by the Government Accountability Project (GAP) and featuring famous NYPD whistleblower Frank Serpico and former FBI agent Coleen Rowley.
petilon 7y ago
What stands out about Boeing's mistakes is how easy it is for laypersons to understand the mistakes. Relying on only one sensor, no redundancy? Anyone who has stood up a service on the cloud will be astounded that Boeing made this mistake. We run 3 or more copies of everything to make sure we can tolerate failures. Computers making an automated action while making it hard for humans to override? Again, astounding mistake (MCAS). Fixing hardware defects using software? Again, unfathomable how Boeing could have made such a mistake. Would anyone here buy a computer that overheats and catches fire unless monitored and controlled using software? That would be very unusual indeed. There are lots of very smart people at Boeing. If laypersons can recognize these mistakes then there must have been hundreds or thousands of engineers at Boeing who also recognized these mistakes. But they didn't speak up. I see this as evidence of a cultural problem. Do you work at a company where the boss discourages you from speaking up about potential problems, and expects you to just do what you're told to do? If so your company could be the next Boeing.
- tbrownaw 7y ago
  "laypersons" "Anyone who has stood up a service on the cloud" I don't think I'd call those the same thing. . Aside from that, having a single point of failure in some component isn't necessarily unconscionable, you just make sure the system as a whole can handle the loss of the affected component.
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    Well, anyone who has stood up a service on the cloud is probably a layperson with respect to designing airplanes...
- cryptonector 7y ago
  > Fixing hardware defects using software That is a thing. It's not ideal, but it's not the end of the world provided it works. E.g., the F-117 cannot be flown without a computer constantly adjusting flight surfaces -- the plane isn't stable. The other decisions are definitely intolerable. The whole thing smacks of corner-cutting in the worst way.
PhantomGremlin 7y ago
The article specifically calls out the engineer former CEO. IIRC he was the only engineer in Boeing's C-suite and board. His egregious behavior doesn't get emphasized enough. It's beyond horrible. To back up what was said in the article, here is something from Reuters on the day after the 2nd crash: “We are confident in the safety of the 737 MAX and in the work of the men and women who design and build it,” Boeing Chief Executive Officer Dennis Muilenburg told employees in an email seen by Reuters. “Since its certification and entry into service, the MAX family has completed hundreds of thousands of flights safely.” https://www.reuters.com/article/ethiopia-airplane-boeing-ceo/boeing-ceo-confident-in-737-max-safety-after-second-deadly-crash-idUSKBN1QS2PJ https://www.reuters.com/article/ethiopia-airplane-boeing-ceo... That asshat CEO made those comments the day after the second crash, after 346 people were dead.
AnimalMuppet 7y ago
(Mostly) reposting from a comment on an article that very few people saw: Reuters had an article at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-boeing-737max/new-boeing-.. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-boeing-737max/new-boeing-.... This article contained a paragraph that was news to me: > Boeing had earlier turned over the documents to the Justice Department, which has an active criminal investigation underway into matters related to the 737 MAX plane. An active criminal investigation? Wow. Boeing's in a lot hotter water than I knew.
tonetheman 7y ago
Someone has already said it I think but ethics without a way to stand up and say something is wrong is just doing lip service to ethics. Sure our engineers have ethics but we will get some new ones if anyone complains. All of this is about making money and nothing else. Each quarter make these numbers at all costs. That is what almost all companies are. Amoral beasties that do whatever is needed to make more money. If they could have killed 300 more people and still kept the planes in the air, the CEO, wallstreet and anyone who held the stock would not have given a single fork.

119 points by whack 7y ago

Putting events like this down to ethical failure has the problem that it allows the investigation of the event to stop at a "single point of failure" in the "human system". The focus on Boeing and elsewhere has revealed that for a substantial period of time the focus of management was essentially "gutting" the company; replacing highly skilled and expensive engineers and workers with cheaper workers elsewhere and generally removing any impediment to immediate profit - this including stretching to 737 spec to the point that it essentially "broke" rather than taking the cost hit of designing a new plane for a new era. The thing is, when the paradigm the top puts out is "do whatever it take to make those numbers", you already have an implicitly unethical outlook but one with plausible deniability. The people who push that (whether management, hedge funds or board of directors) are careful not to overtly advocate anything illegal or immoral but it seems logical that when X underling who does Y ethical act is caught and punished, that underling will be replaced by another one who will face the same pressures and quite likely also engage in similar overtly unethical behavior.

aidenn0 7y ago
You see the same thing with wage-theft in large chain stores. Corporate HQ always says that they don't support it, but then they setup sales and payroll goals that can most easily be met with wage-theft.
- pixl97 7y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_fraud https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_fraud
  - ethbro 7y ago
    See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Neumann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Neumann
  - aidenn0 7y ago
    I'm talking about something different from control fraud; particularly in the case that it can arise unintentionally. The fact that it can arise unintentionally makes it much harder to combat because there is built-in plausible deniability. Example of it occurring unintentionally: 1. A corporation sets goals for store managers based upon performance metrics that include payroll. These goals are currently realizable by a competent manager without forcing workers to work without pay. 2. Some fraction of managers realize rather than actually working hard to meet the goals, they can get their numbers up by forcing workers to work without pay. This skews the metrics a bit. 3. The most incompetent managers that aren't committing wage-theft are demoted or fired, being replaced with managers that are either more-competent or willing to commit wage-theft. 4. The payroll goal is now adjusted down because the previous accounting-term's payroll average is lower than before. 5. Competent managers manage to get jobs elsewhere, so the fraction of managers willing to commit wage-theft increases. 6. GOTO 2 Eventually the metrics are so skewed that the majority of managers must either commit wage-theft or lose their jobs. These managers are the only people that will get in trouble if the wage-theft is discovered.
- ethbro 7y ago
  I believe all of these generally stem from US law making it impossible to charge someone for being an idiot. So provably contradictory claims like "Hit the payroll goals" and "Don't commit wage theft" can be demanded by management all day. However, actual liability is only accrued by those who act on those policies. It'd be nice to see liability, once determined at a lower level, forced to follow the organization chart back to the root decision. Possibly balanced for something like direct reports. E.g. you manage 100 people, 20 of them committed fraud, you have a 20/100 share of the crime
  - aidenn0 7y ago
    It's even worse because, unless someone is stupid enough to send an e-mail saying "hahaha wage-theft, they'll never catch us," bad-actors can hide behind the veil of idiocy. They might have been promoted up from these stores, know that wage-theft is happening, but continue on knowing that they won't face consequences for it later.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  Same for Wells Fargo. Set impossible goals and then be surprised that people are taking shortcuts. I work in medical and even there they squeeze people to the point of reducing quality. At some point you prefer going home on time over doing a thorough review of the code during (unpaid) overtime.
ehnto 7y ago
Target based metrics, be it budget targets or output targets, are too fragile to be useful in my opinion. There is likely a perfect number that's totally reasonable, ensures good productivity while leaving enough room to be safe and grow. But I've yet to see something like that implemented. I've also never seen targets make a company a better place to work, and I would argue that if somewhere is not a good place to work it's inherently less productive and efficient. Management can always compensate for that with more hours or more humans, but you're bloating your system. Like retail stores with 8 employees on, where some are meant to handle stock and some are meant to serve customers, but you've given them all sales budgets for the day. The stock doesn't get handled, and you have 8 people not meeting their budgets. All the employees are unhappy about that, stressed, and working against eachother to try to succeed. Competitive metrics just makes it so you have a handful of "star" people, who are great at undermining their colleagues in order to meet their own budget. Rather than an effective team of good people. So in the example, by the metrics, you have 1 good employee and 7 bad ones, no one is happy, your processes have fallen apart and your team doesn't work effectively together. The only people who get fired are the employees, yet the store continues to underperform.
- CobrastanJorji 7y ago
  Great example. Another is that you may have one "star" employee who consistently notices the thing that most needs doing despite incentives, like jumping on the stock problem, and when review time comes around, they're the absolute worst employee on paper. So you fire them, and things get worse, and there's no obvious reason in the analytics as to what went wrong.
- redis_mlc 7y ago
  > Target based metrics, be it budget targets or output targets, are too fragile to be useful in my opinion. The reported target in the 737 MAX case was that Boeing had promised Southwest a $1 million penalty per plane if retraining was required. So both Boeing and Southwest created a perverse incentive to make the plane less safe. One or two airline accidents can close an airline, so I guarantee nobody at Southwest really wanted to make that deal in retrospect. Although Southwest didn't have any 737 MAX accidents and they paid for the deluxe MCAS instrument package, they were horrified to find out that what was delivered, what it was supposed to do, and what was documented were 3 different things. Source: commercially-rated pilot, followed MCAS fiasco daily. Search for "simulators" in the following link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2019/03/28/did-airbus-rivalry-drive-dangerous-tradeoffs-for-boeings-737-max/#408634eb2e18 https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2019/03/28/did-airbu...
inimino 7y ago
Ethical failures can be structural, not merely individual. I think the problem you rightly identify is that decision making power and ethical responsibility are delegated separately, allowing a kind of ethical-risk arbitrage. This seems to be a failure of regulation in this particular case, or in general of ethics in management rather than engineering.
- tbrownaw 7y ago
  Ethical failures can be structural, not merely individual. At what point does some other word become more appropriate?
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    Some other word than ethics? When it's not an ethical problem that you're describing. What you seem to be saying (without actually saying it, so I have to guess) is that, because it's a failure of a group rather than an individual, it isn't ethical any more - it's something else. But if the group structure pushes individuals into unethical actions, isn't the group structure an ethical problem? Or, for the snarky answer: If companies are corporate persons, then of course they can have ethical issues.
    - fuzzfactor 7y ago
      In a high-stakes situation fundamentally depending on innovation to provide fair value with outstanding safety, you can not drop the ball or ethics alone will not help you. You're going to need overall integrity in addition to ethics, from bottom to top, starting with elements that are known to be lost, or recognized as not being adequate, before you have a chance to make it to the goal again.
pizlonator 7y ago
That’s a great point but I actually read the article as possibly implying, rather than contradicting, the notion that this is a failure that is bigger than any one engineer. I read this as: engineering ethics were broken because of a toxic management culture.
- mark-r 7y ago
  I read this as: engineering ethics were broken but ascribing no reason for it. Thus the engineers were 100% responsible.
- craftinator 7y ago
  One of the largest responsibilities of management is to set the culture of the business. They obviously do not have the skill set do the design, engineering, fabrication, or production. They are people people; they are paid to shake hands, make deals, and cultivate workplace culture. They are solely at fault for a toxic, because of why their jobs exist.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
Seems to me that at some point they just should say “it’s good enough” and contend with current growth rates. The paradigm of never ending growth pretty is guaranteed to push companies to the point where they will produce inferior goods. Same happened to Deutsche Bank. I still remember when they were doing well the CEO got it into his head to increase their margins even more and declared that 25% was the goal now. There were a lot of people saying that a bank simply has to take on too much risk to produce these numbers and, indeed, the bank blew up. Some industries simply can’t be run like consumer good companies because the consequences of failure are too severe. Obviously this doesn’t stop people from trying repeatedly. With current executive salaries it makes total sense to destroy a company’s base in exchange for a few profitable years. That’s one of the reasons why I am against more nuclear plants and running them like other businesses . They will start out doing solid work but over time management will get greedy, reduce quality until something blows up.
shaki-dora 7y ago
One person squarely at the center of this scandal is Boeing's Chief Test Pilot. Here's his bio: > O’Donoghue’s military experience includes 12 years of active duty as a U.S. Marine Corps fighter pilot and test pilot. He flew operational missions in the A-4M, AV-8A and AV-8B Harrier aircraft, and engineering flight tests on the AV-8B and F-14 Tomcat. In 1994, O’Donoghue transferred to the U.S. Air Force Reserve where he flew the C-130, C-141 and C-17. While there he commanded both the 728th Airlift Squadron and the 446 Airlift Wing, stationed at McChord Air Force Base, Wash. In 2005, he retired from the Air Force Reserve at the rank of colonel. > O’Donoghue holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy. (http://www.boeing.com/company/bios/dennis-odonoghue.page http://www.boeing.com/company/bios/dennis-odonoghue.page) This doesn't seem to conform to your theory that it's "cheaper workers" and business majors that caused these problems: sure, they may have created even undue pressure. But it was an all-American fighter jock doing a lot of the actual lying about MCAS.
- hootguy 7y ago
  To elaborate on the management, not engineering, failure: nice domestic marquee credentials for the most-visible leader, but... How much credence was his input given among other leaders? How high-quality were his lieutenants and the teams they led? This is the kind of issue that only gets flagged from the deep work of your team.
smadurange 7y ago
I can't see how these accidents point to cheap incompetent labour unless you are saying that the product managers, chief engineers, principal engineers are being outsourced. Are you saying that a plane that tends to tilt up dangerously under certain conditions that is designed to be pushed down nose first by a software with no limit to how much it'll push down depending on a single sensor would have been an acceptable solution if the workers were different? This is a problem with the design and definition of a large system rather than the implementation. So, I think in this case, whoever had any knowledge of this at any level and let it go through are absolutely responsible. While outsourcing to cheap labour elsewhere can and often does become a problem,these crashes can't be attributed to that. This was a very specific failure with very specific people in the wrong.
- inferiorhuman 7y ago
  Are you saying that a plane that tends to tilt up dangerously under certain conditions that is designed to be pushed down nose first by a software with no limit to how much it'll push down depending on a single sensor would have been an acceptable solution if the workers were different? With different engineers and a focus on product versus profit the MAX never would've seen the light of day. With the focus on outsourcing Boeing had a gigantic mess on their hands with the 787 (and 777X) and no resources to focus on getting a 737 replacement to market.
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zouhair 7y ago
This is Capitalism 101, as long as there is no real consequences of ones actions (like polluting, causing deaths...), any Capitalistic company has to make more and more money each year. As the profit universe is not infinite they soon hit the thin smoke wall that is used as ethical barrier and pass through it. If we start to put CEOs and majority share owners in prison things will start to shift a bit.

Stratoscope 7y ago

Site availability has been intermittent. In case it's having trouble: https://web.archive.org/web/20190509220235/https://blog.apaonline.org/2019/04/08/the-ethical-failures-behind-the-boeing-disasters/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190509220235/https://blog.apao...

samcat116 7y ago

During my civil engineering studies there was an emphasis on ethics throughout classes, even the more specialized, technical ones. This is one huge difference I've noticed compared to the software engineering field. There aren't these governing bodies such as ASCE or NSPE with these ethics canons. I suspect we'll see that change in the next several years.

jdkee 7y ago
I wonder if the MCAS software coders are held to any ethical safety standards by Boeing's engineering department or are they so siloed that it would be impossible.
- ethbro 7y ago
  They were held to the standard of "Get it done, yesterday." And will likely eventually be held to the standard of "How dare you let this happen?" as they're fired, to demonstrate how seriously Boeing takes safety.
- skissane 7y ago
  The programmer is told to implement a spec. They didn't write the spec. If the spec is flawed, do they even have the necessary domain knowledge and experience to identify those flaws? And, if they can identify them, and they speak up and nobody listens, what do they do next? Implement it anyway, or quit and let somebody else implement it instead? Especially if they don't even work for Boeing, but for some subcontractor.
  - ethbro 7y ago
    The logic follows that if a malicious company deliberately subcontracts all their development, then they've completely indemnified themselves against all claims. While simultaneously providing no opportunity for subcontractors to bring noticed issues to their attention. Which seems a pretty bad state of affairs to trust when building things like airplanes.
    - 7y ago

tus88 7y ago

Someone, somewhere, said "let's butcher the design of the 737 and try and patch it up with software". That person should be in jail.

Gibbon1 7y ago
That person would definitely fail FizzBuzz
noipv4 7y ago
someone like Pat Shanahan, former defense secretary. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2019/03/13/shanahan-faces-ig-complaint-over-boeing-ties/ https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2019/03/13/...
chriscappuccio 7y ago
The 737 Max isn't the only plane to fatally crash from failed AoA sensors. It's amazing that boeing didn't think harder when basing MCAS actions on a single AoA sensor and then making it hard to detect after their own pilots warned them it creates a dangerous situation!

nabla9 7y ago

No Single Points of Failure applies also to organizations. Boeing's corporate governance failures became life threatening only because FAA certification process failed. Regulatory capture of FAA was the second failure. Regulatory capture may be responsible for Boeing's recent problems https://www.economist.com/business/2019/03/23/regulatory-capture-may-be-responsible-for-boeings-recent-problems https://www.economist.com/business/2019/03/23/regulatory-cap... Barbara Hollingsworth: 'Regulatory capture' explains a lot about FAA's failures https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/barbara-hollingsworth-regulatory-capture-explains-a-lot-about-faas-failures https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/barbara-hollingsworth-reg... > What happens to federal employees who ignore safety warnings, cover up incompetent or even criminal behavior, destroy official documents and mislead members of Congress? At the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), they get promoted. > That's the take-away from last week's National Whistleblowers Assembly on Capitol Hill, sponsored by the Government Accountability Project (GAP) and featuring famous NYPD whistleblower Frank Serpico and former FBI agent Coleen Rowley.

petilon 7y ago

What stands out about Boeing's mistakes is how easy it is for laypersons to understand the mistakes. Relying on only one sensor, no redundancy? Anyone who has stood up a service on the cloud will be astounded that Boeing made this mistake. We run 3 or more copies of everything to make sure we can tolerate failures. Computers making an automated action while making it hard for humans to override? Again, astounding mistake (MCAS). Fixing hardware defects using software? Again, unfathomable how Boeing could have made such a mistake. Would anyone here buy a computer that overheats and catches fire unless monitored and controlled using software? That would be very unusual indeed. There are lots of very smart people at Boeing. If laypersons can recognize these mistakes then there must have been hundreds or thousands of engineers at Boeing who also recognized these mistakes. But they didn't speak up. I see this as evidence of a cultural problem. Do you work at a company where the boss discourages you from speaking up about potential problems, and expects you to just do what you're told to do? If so your company could be the next Boeing.

tbrownaw 7y ago
"laypersons" "Anyone who has stood up a service on the cloud" I don't think I'd call those the same thing. . Aside from that, having a single point of failure in some component isn't necessarily unconscionable, you just make sure the system as a whole can handle the loss of the affected component.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  Well, anyone who has stood up a service on the cloud is probably a layperson with respect to designing airplanes...
cryptonector 7y ago
> Fixing hardware defects using software That is a thing. It's not ideal, but it's not the end of the world provided it works. E.g., the F-117 cannot be flown without a computer constantly adjusting flight surfaces -- the plane isn't stable. The other decisions are definitely intolerable. The whole thing smacks of corner-cutting in the worst way.

PhantomGremlin 7y ago

The article specifically calls out the engineer former CEO. IIRC he was the only engineer in Boeing's C-suite and board. His egregious behavior doesn't get emphasized enough. It's beyond horrible. To back up what was said in the article, here is something from Reuters on the day after the 2nd crash: “We are confident in the safety of the 737 MAX and in the work of the men and women who design and build it,” Boeing Chief Executive Officer Dennis Muilenburg told employees in an email seen by Reuters. “Since its certification and entry into service, the MAX family has completed hundreds of thousands of flights safely.” https://www.reuters.com/article/ethiopia-airplane-boeing-ceo/boeing-ceo-confident-in-737-max-safety-after-second-deadly-crash-idUSKBN1QS2PJ https://www.reuters.com/article/ethiopia-airplane-boeing-ceo... That asshat CEO made those comments the day after the second crash, after 346 people were dead.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago

(Mostly) reposting from a comment on an article that very few people saw: Reuters had an article at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-boeing-737max/new-boeing-.. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-boeing-737max/new-boeing-.... This article contained a paragraph that was news to me: > Boeing had earlier turned over the documents to the Justice Department, which has an active criminal investigation underway into matters related to the 737 MAX plane. An active criminal investigation? Wow. Boeing's in a lot hotter water than I knew.

tonetheman 7y ago

Someone has already said it I think but ethics without a way to stand up and say something is wrong is just doing lip service to ethics. Sure our engineers have ethics but we will get some new ones if anyone complains. All of this is about making money and nothing else. Each quarter make these numbers at all costs. That is what almost all companies are. Amoral beasties that do whatever is needed to make more money. If they could have killed 300 more people and still kept the planes in the air, the CEO, wallstreet and anyone who held the stock would not have given a single fork.