Engineering was literally taught to me in a well respected engineering university as making an appropriate cost/reward trade off and being careful in taking tha

Engineering was literally taught to me in a well respected engineering university as making an appropriate cost/reward trade off and being careful in taking that risk. But the economics of the business were important too as it was part of the competition of driving more efficiency into a system. In classical engineering, there can be more risk because you’re dealing with people’s lives and so you have to be more careful and add extra margins of error even if more expensive. One person’s recklessness is another person’s calculated risk. The consequences of FB engineering mistakes are minimal in both impact to customers and FB’s business. As FB scaled, the impact to individual people is still largely minimal (perhaps even beneficial) but the impact to their own business is larger and same for their customers if their ads aren’t getting eyeballs. So they shifted as big companies do. It’s kind of the best case of thoughtful risk taking - we’re rolling out a new system and we don’t know what could go wrong at scale and we put in monitoring of what we think we need. If there’s problems we’ll catch it with our monitoring/alerting and rollback or fix. You see the outages but not 99% of changes that go in without anything going wrong which lets the business resolve issues quickly and cheaply. As for Boeing and Fujistsu, I’d say those are very different situations and aren’t an engineering problem nor do they indicate a move fast and break things mentality. As with many things like that, the engineering mistakes are a small detail within the overall larger picture of corruption. Boeing wanted to escape being classified as a new aircraft and met a perfect storm of skimping on hardware and corrupting the FAA through regulatory capture. I don’t fully understand Boeing’s role with the recent failures as a subcontractor is involved, but my hunch is that they’re nominally responsible for that subcontractor anyways. Same goes for Fujitsu - bad SW combined with an overly aggressive prosecution mandate and then cover ups around having made mistakes based on the assumption that the SW was correct rather than assuming new SW that hadn’t run anywhere before may contain bugs (not really sure whether Fujitsu hid the bugs or if politicians did or what happened but certainly the Post Office officials hid the reports of the auditors that found bugs in the sw and continued with prosecutions anyway). Btw in engineering classes, all the large scale failures we were taught about involved some level of corruption or chain of mistakes. A contractor not conforming to the engineering specs to save on costs (valid optimization but should be done extra carefully), overlooking some kind of physical modeling that wasn’t considered industry standard yet, kickbacks, etc.