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What's incredible to me is how this could be allowed to happen. Are the higher echelons of these industries staffed by charlatans? Has something changed in the

What's incredible to me is how this could be allowed to happen. Are the higher echelons of these industries staffed by charlatans? Has something changed in the engineering culture? Did greed override diligence and if so, how was this allowed to happen when the consequences can be so catastrophic both to passengers and to the company? It just doesn't make sense to me how, with such high stakes, a company could manage to let things go so awry. Seems to me like the entire management team for years should have the entirety of their assets seized, as I assume they were very well rewarded for presiding over failure.

metanoia 7y ago
It's precisely due to this lack of real accountability that these kinds of things happen in C-suites everywhere. Massive golden parachutes are the "punishment". Asset seizure and jail time work wonders, too bad they're not being used.
klodolph 7y ago
At some point, engineering gets displaced by short-term business concerns, driven by managers who have incentives to cut costs and deliver faster even if it destroys the company in the long term. Make a management chain long enough, and most of the decisions will get made this way. Each layer in the hierarchy serves both to insulate decision-makers from the impacts of their decisions and to amplify perverse incentives (e.g. a VP is asked to cut costs, who asks a middle manager to use cheaper solutions for problem X and recoup costs where possible, who asks a direct manager to spend no more than $Y and Z weeks on problem X, and the engineers can no longer do it safely). This happens all the time, everywhere. I think of “good company culture” as a temporary, unstable situation. Any movement away from that position will accelerate towards failure. The entire system is not necessarily engineered to avoid accountability, but the system encourages people to figure out a way to avoid accountability, and so you end up with this. As another example, take a look at clothing companies which use child labor to produce cheap clothing. The companies don’t directly employ the children, but they use a chain of contractors and subcontractors. Each layer in the chain makes it more likely that leadership is unaware of ground truth, and with this many links in the chain, a top-level directive to cut costs will inevitably end up with something like child labor at the bottom, because it’s cheap. If you get bad press coverage for it, you look to assign blame to a specific link in the chain, fire that contractor, and then rehire someone else (but the chain repairs itself around the missing link and you end up with the same child laborers working for you). Systems are usually to blame more than people are.
- iSnow 7y ago
  >Systems are usually to blame more than people are. IDK, honestly. Systems are created by people who think or ought to think about the incentives they are setting. But in the end, the lower echelons are still "just following orders" by employing child labourers or pushing out a plane with a crippled design. I don't know about US companies, but I think most big enterprises have an internal whistleblower system, that can and should be used if unethical decisions are pushed down.
  - klodolph 7y ago
    > Systems are created by people who think or ought to think about the incentives they are setting. You can think all you want, but the system is larger and more complicated than you are. You might as well ask a gear to think about the engine. The system has, in it, people who are smarter than you. You can’t hope to understand all the implications of incentives you create in a system. > But in the end, the lower echelons are still "just following orders" by employing child labourers or pushing out a plane with a crippled design. I feel that a statement leading with “in the end” is too reductionist. These are complicated problems, and pointing fingers is too simple a tool to solve them. The system is set up so that you can blame the people who hired child laborers, fire them, replace them, and still end up with the same child laborers making the same clothes in the same factory. Same with Boeing—no matter who you point fingers at with the 737 MAX, you can fire those people and rehire new ones but the disaster will happen again as long as the system encourages it.
csours 7y ago
I've found real life to be very complicated and making good decisions to be difficult in cases with strongly competing goals. It's very easy to see that the wrong decision was made in this case, but this is just one of thousands (or more) that were made in this program; much less the company as a whole. So while this was definitely bad, it's much simpler to say "this decision was bad and you shouldn't done this" than it is to say "you shouldn't make bad decisions"

metanoia 7y ago

It's precisely due to this lack of real accountability that these kinds of things happen in C-suites everywhere. Massive golden parachutes are the "punishment". Asset seizure and jail time work wonders, too bad they're not being used.

klodolph 7y ago

At some point, engineering gets displaced by short-term business concerns, driven by managers who have incentives to cut costs and deliver faster even if it destroys the company in the long term. Make a management chain long enough, and most of the decisions will get made this way. Each layer in the hierarchy serves both to insulate decision-makers from the impacts of their decisions and to amplify perverse incentives (e.g. a VP is asked to cut costs, who asks a middle manager to use cheaper solutions for problem X and recoup costs where possible, who asks a direct manager to spend no more than $Y and Z weeks on problem X, and the engineers can no longer do it safely). This happens all the time, everywhere. I think of “good company culture” as a temporary, unstable situation. Any movement away from that position will accelerate towards failure. The entire system is not necessarily engineered to avoid accountability, but the system encourages people to figure out a way to avoid accountability, and so you end up with this. As another example, take a look at clothing companies which use child labor to produce cheap clothing. The companies don’t directly employ the children, but they use a chain of contractors and subcontractors. Each layer in the chain makes it more likely that leadership is unaware of ground truth, and with this many links in the chain, a top-level directive to cut costs will inevitably end up with something like child labor at the bottom, because it’s cheap. If you get bad press coverage for it, you look to assign blame to a specific link in the chain, fire that contractor, and then rehire someone else (but the chain repairs itself around the missing link and you end up with the same child laborers working for you). Systems are usually to blame more than people are.

iSnow 7y ago
>Systems are usually to blame more than people are. IDK, honestly. Systems are created by people who think or ought to think about the incentives they are setting. But in the end, the lower echelons are still "just following orders" by employing child labourers or pushing out a plane with a crippled design. I don't know about US companies, but I think most big enterprises have an internal whistleblower system, that can and should be used if unethical decisions are pushed down.
- klodolph 7y ago
  > Systems are created by people who think or ought to think about the incentives they are setting. You can think all you want, but the system is larger and more complicated than you are. You might as well ask a gear to think about the engine. The system has, in it, people who are smarter than you. You can’t hope to understand all the implications of incentives you create in a system. > But in the end, the lower echelons are still "just following orders" by employing child labourers or pushing out a plane with a crippled design. I feel that a statement leading with “in the end” is too reductionist. These are complicated problems, and pointing fingers is too simple a tool to solve them. The system is set up so that you can blame the people who hired child laborers, fire them, replace them, and still end up with the same child laborers making the same clothes in the same factory. Same with Boeing—no matter who you point fingers at with the 737 MAX, you can fire those people and rehire new ones but the disaster will happen again as long as the system encourages it.

csours 7y ago

I've found real life to be very complicated and making good decisions to be difficult in cases with strongly competing goals. It's very easy to see that the wrong decision was made in this case, but this is just one of thousands (or more) that were made in this program; much less the company as a whole. So while this was definitely bad, it's much simpler to say "this decision was bad and you shouldn't done this" than it is to say "you shouldn't make bad decisions"