4 ms·

> For an arbitrary example, look at the Boeing 737 max. There were some internal emails claiming that the system which turned out not to be safe wasn’t safe (th

> For an arbitrary example, look at the Boeing 737 max. There were some internal emails claiming that the system which turned out not to be safe wasn’t safe (the problem with these was probably that they didn’t seem to make their way up to anyone who could change the decision), and probably the fallout from them will be worse than if there were no such emails and Boeing just appeared to not have considered the possibility of failure. This gives the message that one shouldn’t have these discussions through email because that gives the impression that known issues were ignored if they turn out to have mattered. But no one asked about the cases where people had raised concerns by email and they were corrected by redesigning things or where concerns were raised but deemed to not be significant and turned out not to be significant. It seems better to me for people to be able to voice disagreements. I'm sorry, but what?! The fallout of the 737 max debacle is that the senior people didn't listen when the engineers raised concerns about safety. This is a solid example of why comms _should_ be recorded, and wholly _not_ the example of why they should not.

o-__-o 6y ago
The guy at Boeing who couldn’t raise concerns about safety is currently under criminal investigation. The chilling effect comes from your joke about something at work becoming a punishable event. No one is blaming the single engineer for the MCAS problem but that didn’t stop him from requiring a lawyer
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
waterhouse 6y ago
"Should" for us, yes. But consider the perspective of the company—and specifically its lawyers; their takeaway may be "This stuff being in writing made things worse in court, therefore we'll instruct our employees not to put this stuff in writing." Though I would guess that having an explicit policy of "don't write down any safety concerns" would do badly in court as well. I suspect any real such policy would have to be unwritten, or a not-very-explicit side effect of something that seemed relatively benign.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  That’s already known. It’s why mingling at golf clubs and galas and charity events is important and why clustering in cities is useful. Generally, you can trust conversations you have in person to not be recorded and maintain plausible deniability.
  - el_nino 6y ago
    Many companies and worse, public institutions around the world are moving to solidify the destruction of evidence with data retention policies. They may automatically delete any email older than 1 or 2 years, every instant message sent via corporate channels in 30 days, etc. as a "disk-space saving measure". Including backups! Anyone can see through that explanation since any CIO claiming cost savings come from the few tens of GB of archived Office Communicator chats should be politely invited behind the barn for a dramatic reenactment of an age old saying. Scandals like Boeing's and others that shook trust in public institutions, most of which are required by law to make any such material available to citizens, just convinced them that proactive destruction of evidence is the way to go. This is not punishable by law. And when the requests for data do come in all the have to do is delay the process until the totally legitimate automatic policy kicks in and removes the last shred of evidence. At this point only whistle blowers diligently collecting all the data before it's destroyed could still help in any way but this comes at great personal risk. And when tools like Signal are involved good luck with that, one would have to be part of every conversation.
- bathtub365 6y ago
  In my experience, unwritten policies absolutely exist in major multinational corporations.
- toyg 6y ago
  Verba volant, scripta manent. Ancient Latins already knew the score. A lot of people initially refused to use emails in the ‘90s because they (rightly) perceived it as something written down and hence likely to be used to hold them to account - only people who grew up with IM have a more “disposable” view of electronic text. I can assure you that any manager or owner on the planet, at some point or another, has a conversation where it is agreed that something will never be written down in any form.
makomk 6y ago
It might be a good demonstration of that if the engineers had spotted the safety problem. As far as anyone can tell, they didn't - the press took some internal e-mails worrying about other safety problems which turned out not to actually matter, spun them as proof that their employees knew that the 737 Max was unsafe, and confused people like the commented you're replying to into thinking the problem was actually spotted internally. To give some idea about how overblown this was, the really juicy-sounding email comments were about problems with the simulator, not the actual plane. The fact that Boeing had a culture where people could speak their mind and those comments were recorded left us all less informed.

o-__-o 6y ago

The guy at Boeing who couldn’t raise concerns about safety is currently under criminal investigation. The chilling effect comes from your joke about something at work becoming a punishable event. No one is blaming the single engineer for the MCAS problem but that didn’t stop him from requiring a lawyer

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

waterhouse 6y ago

"Should" for us, yes. But consider the perspective of the company—and specifically its lawyers; their takeaway may be "This stuff being in writing made things worse in court, therefore we'll instruct our employees not to put this stuff in writing." Though I would guess that having an explicit policy of "don't write down any safety concerns" would do badly in court as well. I suspect any real such policy would have to be unwritten, or a not-very-explicit side effect of something that seemed relatively benign.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
That’s already known. It’s why mingling at golf clubs and galas and charity events is important and why clustering in cities is useful. Generally, you can trust conversations you have in person to not be recorded and maintain plausible deniability.
- el_nino 6y ago
  Many companies and worse, public institutions around the world are moving to solidify the destruction of evidence with data retention policies. They may automatically delete any email older than 1 or 2 years, every instant message sent via corporate channels in 30 days, etc. as a "disk-space saving measure". Including backups! Anyone can see through that explanation since any CIO claiming cost savings come from the few tens of GB of archived Office Communicator chats should be politely invited behind the barn for a dramatic reenactment of an age old saying. Scandals like Boeing's and others that shook trust in public institutions, most of which are required by law to make any such material available to citizens, just convinced them that proactive destruction of evidence is the way to go. This is not punishable by law. And when the requests for data do come in all the have to do is delay the process until the totally legitimate automatic policy kicks in and removes the last shred of evidence. At this point only whistle blowers diligently collecting all the data before it's destroyed could still help in any way but this comes at great personal risk. And when tools like Signal are involved good luck with that, one would have to be part of every conversation.
bathtub365 6y ago
In my experience, unwritten policies absolutely exist in major multinational corporations.
toyg 6y ago
Verba volant, scripta manent. Ancient Latins already knew the score. A lot of people initially refused to use emails in the ‘90s because they (rightly) perceived it as something written down and hence likely to be used to hold them to account - only people who grew up with IM have a more “disposable” view of electronic text. I can assure you that any manager or owner on the planet, at some point or another, has a conversation where it is agreed that something will never be written down in any form.

makomk 6y ago

It might be a good demonstration of that if the engineers had spotted the safety problem. As far as anyone can tell, they didn't - the press took some internal e-mails worrying about other safety problems which turned out not to actually matter, spun them as proof that their employees knew that the 737 Max was unsafe, and confused people like the commented you're replying to into thinking the problem was actually spotted internally. To give some idea about how overblown this was, the really juicy-sounding email comments were about problems with the simulator, not the actual plane. The fact that Boeing had a culture where people could speak their mind and those comments were recorded left us all less informed.