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Nearly 23 years ago: ‘A Boeing aerospace engineer presented a controversial white paper in 2001 at an internal technical symposium. The engineer, John Hart-Smit

Nearly 23 years ago: ‘A Boeing aerospace engineer presented a controversial white paper in 2001 at an internal technical symposium. The engineer, John Hart-Smith, warned colleagues of the risks of the subcontracting strategy, especially if Boeing outsourced too much work and didn’t provide sufficient on-site quality and technical support to its suppliers. “The performance of the prime manufacturer can never exceed the capabilities of the least proficient of the suppliers,” Hart-Smith wrote. “These costs do not vanish merely because the work itself is out-of-sight.”’ https://www.wsj.com/business/airlines/boeing-manufacturing-737-max-alaska-door-plug-spirit-18f7e233 https://www.wsj.com/business/airlines/boeing-manufacturing-7...

PaulHoule 3y ago
Airbus was a masterstoke of international politics as much as it was of technology in that it involved a high level of international cooperation that was completely successful. (Compare that to the corruption-driven procurement that left Superphenix with broken steam turbines) Boeing’s outsourcing plan was quite similar in that it discouraged many countries that might have been able to enter the competition for airliners, say Japan, from doing so. Japan very well might have decided to subsidize and otherwise help domestic manufacturers but didn’t feel they had to because they made the tail of the Dreamliner.
- nobodyandproud 3y ago
  From the same article: ‘Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury, in a June interview, said the plane maker faces similar risks with its own suppliers—many of which Boeing shares. But he said Airbus has largely been able to avoid major problems with its quality-assurance approach. “We are quite intrusive on what suppliers are doing,” Faury said. “We always have to remain very prudent and very humble—you don’t know what could hit you tomorrow.”’ … ‘When it [Spirit] needed to ramp back up, not only did Spirit have fewer people on site, the company had lost years of expertise. There were fewer experienced mechanics, but also fewer experts who could inspect the quality of their work. … Boeing’s demands for lower prices left Spirit strapped for cash as managers panicked over meeting increasingly demanding deadlines. Boeing routinely had employees on the ground in Wichita and conducted audits of the supplier.’ Leadership issue from Boeing : Completely disparaging and underestimating the deep skills of manufacturing and engineering through-and-through. What was Boeing even auditing? And guess who’s left holding the bag of awfulness?
  - a_square_peg 3y ago
    Can confirm. I worked as Airbus' tier 1 supplier and they were even accompanying us to manage our own supplier, which in hind-sight, ensured that things like this didn't happen.
    - nobodyandproud 3y ago
      That sounds a partnership: They’re there to help. In essence, did Airbus help advise what sorts of corners could/couldn’t be cut?
      - a_square_peg 3y ago
        The way the project was structured, it was in the interest of everyone to succeed since everyone paid for their own development cost and only made money when the planes were sold. Not the easiest client to work for mind you - I've been told that many companies flat out refuse to work with them, but again, thinking back, I think that's what made the project a success, although extremely stressful.
        jacquesm 3y ago
        Some customers you can't afford to have and some you can't afford to lose, especially not the ones that help you to perform at (or even above, by educating you) your potential.
        a_square_peg 3y ago
        Yep - certainly lessons learned through painful experiences. Supply chain management is incredibly challenging and it's interesting to see one school of thought moving away to vertical integration as an alternative solution and another doing just as well with suppliers (Airbus, Apple, ASML, etc).
sfifs 3y ago
My guess of what may have happened reading between the lines is - Boeing originally possibly instructed Spirit to loosely fit the plug and not secure it because they planned to remove it to fit out the interiors. In this case Boeing would be accountable to secure the plug door after the interior is done to the right specs Somewhere down the line, Boeing possibly decided not to remove the plug and instead just load interiors through the bigger openings only. They possibly either did not document this change and think through implications and instructions changes for Spirit to secure the door plug instead or did so but Spirit possibly missed. So the bunch of planes may have been delivered with loose plugs that Alaska and United found. All the implications of outsourcing without sufficient supervision and hand-offs made in the parent point would have a bad effect. The question FAA is probably asking is if Boeing or Spirit has deviated from documented production practice in this area, have they deviated in other areas.
williamcotton 3y ago
Yet another example of not just the inability, but the unwillingness to engage in managerial accounting. These companies primarily focused on financial accounting and even use EPITDA as an internal metric. They do not consider the true costs, such as, people dying or being traumatized by the use of their products. They do not think about the costs of such decisions 20 years into the future. These executives are motivated primarily by their performance with regards to their own personal shares. Quarterly reports are the rear view mirror. Making projections into the future is the road ahead of you. A focus on short term goals leads blown out windows and aircraft falling from the skies. This is how the tech industry is managed as well. It is not “enshitification”, it is rather corporate incentive structures and a general level of incompetence. Pure tragedy, the hero CEO brings his own downfall upon himself with only the audience capable of understanding the reasons why.
lamontcg 3y ago
Yeah the MAX itself isn't as much of a problem as the outsourcing. Spirit is a financial tire fire. They've had zero gross margin since the pandemic and they're now burning through half their revenue in interest payments on top of that. Boeing is offloading those losses onto them in order to juice up their own profits. Boeing should probably just be forced to reacquire them.
- nostrademons 3y ago
  Clarification for anyone who is as confused as I was: Spirit Aerosystems, not Spirit Airlines. Spirit Aerosystems is the subcontractor that made the door plug. It was spun out of Boeing in 2005 and still has tight employee connections. Spirit Airlines has no connection to Boeing; they actually run an all-Airbus fleet.
noAnswer 3y ago
[flagged]
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y ago
  I believe what he's pointing out is prioritizing identity politics over experience is a problem, especially in certain industries. Agree or disagree with his statement as you see fit, but at least represent it properly.
- nvm0n2 3y ago
  The problem at Boeing is a sort of cultural decay in which safety and quality have been lost. Musk isn't wrong that changing their promotion criteria from safety/quality to safety/quality/climate/diversity is going to inevitably reduce the safety/quality dimensions. That's the whole point of changing the incentives - to cause a refocusing onto those other topics. Some people will probably deny this, and claim that it's all additive. If your employees were 100% focused on safety and quality before, then adding more stuff just means they're now 200% as focused and nothing has to lose out. This is obviously incorrect. The real question here is not whether climate/diversity focus over quality is bad because it obviously is. The question is whether it's a symptom or a cause of their culture issues.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Everybody with a shred of industry knowledge links the issues at Boeing to the MDD merger and resulting management and culture changes. Musk has, as usual, no idea what he's talking about.
    - nvm0n2 3y ago
      So you argue it's not a cause but an effect. Fine, whatever. It's still a major problem, isn't it. But: the MDD merger was 25 years ago. Boeing wasn't considered to be in dire quality straits until the MCAS disaster, which is recent. Maybe the people with "shreds of industry knowledge" are missing what's actually going wrong there, perhaps for ideological reasons? It wouldn't be the first time people have suddenly developed selective blindness over catastrophic decision making by "diverse" people. See the Harvard debacle for one in just the last few weeks. I think we can safely say that promoting people because they hired lots of black women, over the head of someone who focused on safety, will yield poor safety outcomes regardless of whether the stupid decision making is ultimately traceable to a merger 25 years ago or not.
nostrademons 3y ago
“The performance of the prime manufacturer can never exceed the capabilities of the least proficient of the suppliers” Software connection: this is known as SLA Inversion [1], the phenomena that you can never be more reliable than your least reliable component. There are ways to get around it, but they involve having multiple redundant but independent paths to achieving a successful result. This is difficult for structural components of an aircraft because each redundant mechanism adds weight and decreases performance & fuel economy. It's somewhat shocking to me that there are no redundant failsafes to something as critical (and potentially error-prone) as a loose bolt in a door plug, though. Or maybe there were and we'll see compound errors in the final FAA report, which will definitely be interesting to read. [1] https://sookocheff.com/post/architecture/stability-antipatterns/#sla-inversion https://sookocheff.com/post/architecture/stability-antipatte...
- _a_a_a_ 3y ago
  I'd be really surprised if it was just one loose bolt that would allow this to happen, but I don't know. It would be hard to believe they were that stupid, so I'd rather not assume.
  - beej71 3y ago
    I'm not a structural engineer or anything, but I don't see how a single missing bolt would allow this to happen. It would have to be at least the two upper retaining bolts, neither of which were particularly picky about torque and both of which had cotter pins on castle nuts, ideally. In my humble, ignorant opinion, this. You heard it here on the Internet. :) Last I heard, though, none of the 4 main bolts were recovered, and they were going to do lab tests to try to determine if they were present to begin with.
    - bcrl 3y ago
      Watch Mayday. There are a number of accidents that were caused by a single bolt, but it is usually a systemic series of faults that allowed that to happen as was the case for Flight 17: https://www.avm-mag.com/a-loose-bolt-and-lives-lost-the-crash-of-emery-flight-17 https://www.avm-mag.com/a-loose-bolt-and-lives-lost-the-cras...
cjbgkagh 3y ago
There is another effect, if the dependency is strong enough suppliers can intentionally lower the quality to force Boeing to buy them out with much greater profits than they would have made from continuing as a normal supplier. Thus suppliers have an strong incentive to lower quality to unsafe levels and Boeing has a strong incentive to not do anything about it.
ren_engineer 3y ago
this applies to an entire national economy, Silicon Valley was successful due to having hardware and software right next to each other, same thing for US manufacturing in general when we were a powerhouse. We then let our government get bribed by Wall Street to allow outsourcing everything for a few decades of short term profit. Now China has the manufacturing ecosystem that allows them to innovate more efficiently
- voakbasda 3y ago
  Yup. Speaking as an embedded engineer, outsourcing at least some manufacturing to China (or other Far East empires) is often the only road to profitability with modern hardware. Doing so significantly impacts the momentum that can be achieved.
  - lostlogin 3y ago
    > Doing so significantly impacts the momentum that can be achieved In a good way or a bad way? I can think of a few success stories that are dependant on China’s manufacturing prowess. I’m typing this on an iPhone.
    - abestic9 3y ago
      Both/neither, I would suggest. Offloading manufacturing reduces risk, but requires you to have better oversight in other areas before actually shipping. From what I've seen, businesses will often hire someone with specific experience dealing with Chinese manufacturers in their specific vertical, for example PCBs/electronics, tooling like injection molds, or textiles.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  How is China's economy doing? Also, the US economy is running near full capacity; what would you have the US move offshore in order to bring manufacturing onshore? Or would you allow more immigration and foreign investment?
  - 3y ago
corethree 3y ago
>These costs do not vanish merely because the work itself is out-of-sight. This quotation isn't technically true. There are actual costs that do vanish depending on who you contract to. This is completely independent of quality. They are orthogonal. The sacrifice is characterized as a guaranteed drop in quality if costs are lowered. No. When you sub contract quality is just harder to control. You are rolling the dice. But depending on the sub contractor there can even be an increase in quality along with a cost drop. For example: iPhones. Subcontracted to china. But pretty high quality. Of course apple had to move over qc to china but there was still overall an up in quality with a cost drop.
- lostlogin 3y ago
  Could someone who disagrees with this offer their counterpoint?
  - corethree 3y ago
    Haha. This is an illustration of human bias. You can't find a counter point on your own so instead of building a conclusion based off of evidence you call out to others to provide you with evidence so you can support your desired conclusion.
    - binoct 3y ago
      A more charitable read of the question could be: GP reads a compelling argument about a topic they have little expertise in, and are curious if there are dissenting opinions. We can also talk about how much to trust comments on hacker news generally, but multiple data points from any quality of source are better than one.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - corethree 3y ago
        This is true. I'm assuming disagreement in general because my post has negative karma. I therefore think it's more realistic to assume that he disagrees. But you're right I could be wrong. Anyway my comment was very general. And I offered a anecdotal counter point. Falsification only needs a single piece of evidence as proof. A single example of a sub contractor who is both cheap and high quality will falsify the general quotation here. There is literally no stronger argument in existence. So not surprised that people can't find a counter point as what I offered is literal proof. Other then dismissing the quality of iPhones coming out of china, At best one can counter by changing the topic of the debate. You could say that in general there's a trend of lower quality associated with lower cost and that while it's not strictly true, it could be generally true. But that's not the argument. In fact on that topic i am not making such a strong claim that it isn't true. For that topic I literally don't know.
wolverine876 3y ago
> “The performance of the prime manufacturer can never exceed the capabilities of the least proficient of the suppliers,” It's also limited by the least proficient of their internal functions. Internal or external makes no difference in that respect.
lordnacho 3y ago
I see a risk of this thing being "Conways's Airplane" like the law that says your software will be structured like the team that made it.
nobodyandproud 3y ago
Apologies: The actual white paper as well - https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/69746-hart-smith-on-outsourcing https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/69746-hart-smith-on-...
mrb 3y ago
Hindsight is 20/20. I'm sure one could go back and read thousands of these internal technical symposium papers criticizing X or Y or Z, and most of those turned out to be unwarranted.
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  The 'hindsight is 20/20' comment only works when someone points out the problems after the fact. When someone mentions it before it happens the correct comment is 'they were right and we should have listened to them'.

PaulHoule 3y ago

Airbus was a masterstoke of international politics as much as it was of technology in that it involved a high level of international cooperation that was completely successful. (Compare that to the corruption-driven procurement that left Superphenix with broken steam turbines) Boeing’s outsourcing plan was quite similar in that it discouraged many countries that might have been able to enter the competition for airliners, say Japan, from doing so. Japan very well might have decided to subsidize and otherwise help domestic manufacturers but didn’t feel they had to because they made the tail of the Dreamliner.

nobodyandproud 3y ago
From the same article: ‘Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury, in a June interview, said the plane maker faces similar risks with its own suppliers—many of which Boeing shares. But he said Airbus has largely been able to avoid major problems with its quality-assurance approach. “We are quite intrusive on what suppliers are doing,” Faury said. “We always have to remain very prudent and very humble—you don’t know what could hit you tomorrow.”’ … ‘When it [Spirit] needed to ramp back up, not only did Spirit have fewer people on site, the company had lost years of expertise. There were fewer experienced mechanics, but also fewer experts who could inspect the quality of their work. … Boeing’s demands for lower prices left Spirit strapped for cash as managers panicked over meeting increasingly demanding deadlines. Boeing routinely had employees on the ground in Wichita and conducted audits of the supplier.’ Leadership issue from Boeing : Completely disparaging and underestimating the deep skills of manufacturing and engineering through-and-through. What was Boeing even auditing? And guess who’s left holding the bag of awfulness?
- a_square_peg 3y ago
  Can confirm. I worked as Airbus' tier 1 supplier and they were even accompanying us to manage our own supplier, which in hind-sight, ensured that things like this didn't happen.
  - nobodyandproud 3y ago
    That sounds a partnership: They’re there to help. In essence, did Airbus help advise what sorts of corners could/couldn’t be cut?
    - a_square_peg 3y ago
      The way the project was structured, it was in the interest of everyone to succeed since everyone paid for their own development cost and only made money when the planes were sold. Not the easiest client to work for mind you - I've been told that many companies flat out refuse to work with them, but again, thinking back, I think that's what made the project a success, although extremely stressful.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        Some customers you can't afford to have and some you can't afford to lose, especially not the ones that help you to perform at (or even above, by educating you) your potential.
        a_square_peg 3y ago
        Yep - certainly lessons learned through painful experiences. Supply chain management is incredibly challenging and it's interesting to see one school of thought moving away to vertical integration as an alternative solution and another doing just as well with suppliers (Airbus, Apple, ASML, etc).

sfifs 3y ago

My guess of what may have happened reading between the lines is - Boeing originally possibly instructed Spirit to loosely fit the plug and not secure it because they planned to remove it to fit out the interiors. In this case Boeing would be accountable to secure the plug door after the interior is done to the right specs Somewhere down the line, Boeing possibly decided not to remove the plug and instead just load interiors through the bigger openings only. They possibly either did not document this change and think through implications and instructions changes for Spirit to secure the door plug instead or did so but Spirit possibly missed. So the bunch of planes may have been delivered with loose plugs that Alaska and United found. All the implications of outsourcing without sufficient supervision and hand-offs made in the parent point would have a bad effect. The question FAA is probably asking is if Boeing or Spirit has deviated from documented production practice in this area, have they deviated in other areas.

williamcotton 3y ago

Yet another example of not just the inability, but the unwillingness to engage in managerial accounting. These companies primarily focused on financial accounting and even use EPITDA as an internal metric. They do not consider the true costs, such as, people dying or being traumatized by the use of their products. They do not think about the costs of such decisions 20 years into the future. These executives are motivated primarily by their performance with regards to their own personal shares. Quarterly reports are the rear view mirror. Making projections into the future is the road ahead of you. A focus on short term goals leads blown out windows and aircraft falling from the skies. This is how the tech industry is managed as well. It is not “enshitification”, it is rather corporate incentive structures and a general level of incompetence. Pure tragedy, the hero CEO brings his own downfall upon himself with only the audience capable of understanding the reasons why.

lamontcg 3y ago

Yeah the MAX itself isn't as much of a problem as the outsourcing. Spirit is a financial tire fire. They've had zero gross margin since the pandemic and they're now burning through half their revenue in interest payments on top of that. Boeing is offloading those losses onto them in order to juice up their own profits. Boeing should probably just be forced to reacquire them.

nostrademons 3y ago
Clarification for anyone who is as confused as I was: Spirit Aerosystems, not Spirit Airlines. Spirit Aerosystems is the subcontractor that made the door plug. It was spun out of Boeing in 2005 and still has tight employee connections. Spirit Airlines has no connection to Boeing; they actually run an all-Airbus fleet.

noAnswer 3y ago

[flagged]

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y ago
I believe what he's pointing out is prioritizing identity politics over experience is a problem, especially in certain industries. Agree or disagree with his statement as you see fit, but at least represent it properly.
nvm0n2 3y ago
The problem at Boeing is a sort of cultural decay in which safety and quality have been lost. Musk isn't wrong that changing their promotion criteria from safety/quality to safety/quality/climate/diversity is going to inevitably reduce the safety/quality dimensions. That's the whole point of changing the incentives - to cause a refocusing onto those other topics. Some people will probably deny this, and claim that it's all additive. If your employees were 100% focused on safety and quality before, then adding more stuff just means they're now 200% as focused and nothing has to lose out. This is obviously incorrect. The real question here is not whether climate/diversity focus over quality is bad because it obviously is. The question is whether it's a symptom or a cause of their culture issues.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Everybody with a shred of industry knowledge links the issues at Boeing to the MDD merger and resulting management and culture changes. Musk has, as usual, no idea what he's talking about.
  - nvm0n2 3y ago
    So you argue it's not a cause but an effect. Fine, whatever. It's still a major problem, isn't it. But: the MDD merger was 25 years ago. Boeing wasn't considered to be in dire quality straits until the MCAS disaster, which is recent. Maybe the people with "shreds of industry knowledge" are missing what's actually going wrong there, perhaps for ideological reasons? It wouldn't be the first time people have suddenly developed selective blindness over catastrophic decision making by "diverse" people. See the Harvard debacle for one in just the last few weeks. I think we can safely say that promoting people because they hired lots of black women, over the head of someone who focused on safety, will yield poor safety outcomes regardless of whether the stupid decision making is ultimately traceable to a merger 25 years ago or not.

nostrademons 3y ago

“The performance of the prime manufacturer can never exceed the capabilities of the least proficient of the suppliers” Software connection: this is known as SLA Inversion [1], the phenomena that you can never be more reliable than your least reliable component. There are ways to get around it, but they involve having multiple redundant but independent paths to achieving a successful result. This is difficult for structural components of an aircraft because each redundant mechanism adds weight and decreases performance & fuel economy. It's somewhat shocking to me that there are no redundant failsafes to something as critical (and potentially error-prone) as a loose bolt in a door plug, though. Or maybe there were and we'll see compound errors in the final FAA report, which will definitely be interesting to read. [1] https://sookocheff.com/post/architecture/stability-antipatterns/#sla-inversion https://sookocheff.com/post/architecture/stability-antipatte...

_a_a_a_ 3y ago
I'd be really surprised if it was just one loose bolt that would allow this to happen, but I don't know. It would be hard to believe they were that stupid, so I'd rather not assume.
- beej71 3y ago
  I'm not a structural engineer or anything, but I don't see how a single missing bolt would allow this to happen. It would have to be at least the two upper retaining bolts, neither of which were particularly picky about torque and both of which had cotter pins on castle nuts, ideally. In my humble, ignorant opinion, this. You heard it here on the Internet. :) Last I heard, though, none of the 4 main bolts were recovered, and they were going to do lab tests to try to determine if they were present to begin with.
  - bcrl 3y ago
    Watch Mayday. There are a number of accidents that were caused by a single bolt, but it is usually a systemic series of faults that allowed that to happen as was the case for Flight 17: https://www.avm-mag.com/a-loose-bolt-and-lives-lost-the-crash-of-emery-flight-17 https://www.avm-mag.com/a-loose-bolt-and-lives-lost-the-cras...

cjbgkagh 3y ago

There is another effect, if the dependency is strong enough suppliers can intentionally lower the quality to force Boeing to buy them out with much greater profits than they would have made from continuing as a normal supplier. Thus suppliers have an strong incentive to lower quality to unsafe levels and Boeing has a strong incentive to not do anything about it.

ren_engineer 3y ago

this applies to an entire national economy, Silicon Valley was successful due to having hardware and software right next to each other, same thing for US manufacturing in general when we were a powerhouse. We then let our government get bribed by Wall Street to allow outsourcing everything for a few decades of short term profit. Now China has the manufacturing ecosystem that allows them to innovate more efficiently

voakbasda 3y ago
Yup. Speaking as an embedded engineer, outsourcing at least some manufacturing to China (or other Far East empires) is often the only road to profitability with modern hardware. Doing so significantly impacts the momentum that can be achieved.
- lostlogin 3y ago
  > Doing so significantly impacts the momentum that can be achieved In a good way or a bad way? I can think of a few success stories that are dependant on China’s manufacturing prowess. I’m typing this on an iPhone.
  - abestic9 3y ago
    Both/neither, I would suggest. Offloading manufacturing reduces risk, but requires you to have better oversight in other areas before actually shipping. From what I've seen, businesses will often hire someone with specific experience dealing with Chinese manufacturers in their specific vertical, for example PCBs/electronics, tooling like injection molds, or textiles.
wolverine876 3y ago
How is China's economy doing? Also, the US economy is running near full capacity; what would you have the US move offshore in order to bring manufacturing onshore? Or would you allow more immigration and foreign investment?
- 3y ago

corethree 3y ago

>These costs do not vanish merely because the work itself is out-of-sight. This quotation isn't technically true. There are actual costs that do vanish depending on who you contract to. This is completely independent of quality. They are orthogonal. The sacrifice is characterized as a guaranteed drop in quality if costs are lowered. No. When you sub contract quality is just harder to control. You are rolling the dice. But depending on the sub contractor there can even be an increase in quality along with a cost drop. For example: iPhones. Subcontracted to china. But pretty high quality. Of course apple had to move over qc to china but there was still overall an up in quality with a cost drop.

lostlogin 3y ago
Could someone who disagrees with this offer their counterpoint?
- corethree 3y ago
  Haha. This is an illustration of human bias. You can't find a counter point on your own so instead of building a conclusion based off of evidence you call out to others to provide you with evidence so you can support your desired conclusion.
  - binoct 3y ago
    A more charitable read of the question could be: GP reads a compelling argument about a topic they have little expertise in, and are curious if there are dissenting opinions. We can also talk about how much to trust comments on hacker news generally, but multiple data points from any quality of source are better than one.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - corethree 3y ago
      This is true. I'm assuming disagreement in general because my post has negative karma. I therefore think it's more realistic to assume that he disagrees. But you're right I could be wrong. Anyway my comment was very general. And I offered a anecdotal counter point. Falsification only needs a single piece of evidence as proof. A single example of a sub contractor who is both cheap and high quality will falsify the general quotation here. There is literally no stronger argument in existence. So not surprised that people can't find a counter point as what I offered is literal proof. Other then dismissing the quality of iPhones coming out of china, At best one can counter by changing the topic of the debate. You could say that in general there's a trend of lower quality associated with lower cost and that while it's not strictly true, it could be generally true. But that's not the argument. In fact on that topic i am not making such a strong claim that it isn't true. For that topic I literally don't know.

wolverine876 3y ago

> “The performance of the prime manufacturer can never exceed the capabilities of the least proficient of the suppliers,” It's also limited by the least proficient of their internal functions. Internal or external makes no difference in that respect.

lordnacho 3y ago

I see a risk of this thing being "Conways's Airplane" like the law that says your software will be structured like the team that made it.

nobodyandproud 3y ago

Apologies: The actual white paper as well - https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/69746-hart-smith-on-outsourcing https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/69746-hart-smith-on-...

mrb 3y ago

Hindsight is 20/20. I'm sure one could go back and read thousands of these internal technical symposium papers criticizing X or Y or Z, and most of those turned out to be unwarranted.

Eisenstein 3y ago
The 'hindsight is 20/20' comment only works when someone points out the problems after the fact. When someone mentions it before it happens the correct comment is 'they were right and we should have listened to them'.