
Boeing 737 Max Was Plagued with Production Problems, Whistle-Blower Says - kaboro
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/business/boeing-737-max-whistleblower.html
======
allovernow
>Employees at the Renton, Wash., factory where the Max is produced were
overworked, exhausted and making mistakes, Mr. Pierson said in an interview. A
cascade of damaged parts, missing tools and incomplete instructions was
preventing planes from being built on time. Executives were pressuring workers
to complete planes despite staff shortages and a chaotic factory floor.

I wonder how much of this is directly the result of penny pinching by MBA
types. I'm gradually coming to believe that non-technical management of
technical endeavors is the root of most failure in the engineering domain.

~~~
txcwpalpha
Why does HN love to bash "MBA types" so much? The bit you quoted doesn't even
have anything to do with any type of technical background. Do you think that
only people with MBAs are taught that they need to meet deadlines and
obligations? Do you seriously think that someone with an engineering degree
would for some reason say "actually we don't need to meet deadlines, I won't
pressure you to finish these planes on time"?

~~~
mo1ok
Honestly, and I'm being really frank here, a lot of the management "expertise"
at fortune 50+ firms that come from traditional (re: MBA) tracks has just two
tools in their toolbelt:

1\. Meetings to "align"

2\. Cracking the whip.

That's it. That's all they have. They have poor insight into creating team
chemistry, culture, focused work environments, mentorship, long-term planning,
QA processes, sourcing efficiency feedback, etc. - all those things that are
crucial to boosting productivity and creating supersonic teams. The people
that _really_ know their stuff and can work miracles are people that have been
in the trenches for 20 years, regardless of profession. And they hands-down
make the best managers.

That's my honest 2 cents, it's a bit of disgruntlement from working in large
enterprise environments with engineering and technology.

~~~
txcwpalpha
That’s a hilariously narrow minded generalization. If that’s your honest
opinion then I have to assume you’ve never actually sat down and had a real
conversation with any of these “MBA types” and talked about what they do. My
guess is that the reason you think all they do is crack the whip and hold
pointless meetings because that’s the only interaction you have with them, but
I can guarantee you that every organization you have ever worked in has had
plenty of “MBA types” working in ways that are invisible to you building
exactly the team chemistries, culture, planning, processes etc that you
mentioned.

~~~
mo1ok
I would agree that this is narrow minded - and would say that this opinion is
a result of exactly what you mentioned - my interaction with them being fairly
limited and clinical, despite them having a direct leadership role in my org.

I would argue that this is the problem unto itself. The idea that a manager
can work invisibly "behind the scenes" to create these conditions is the
squarest negative stereotype of the MBA - that they are clerical, remote,
number-crunchers who don't have an intuitive human grasp of the unique
challenges their teams face, because they lack experience where the rubber
meets of the road of their organization. I think this Boeing case conforms to
this stereotype, as does my personal experience.

But I don't believe they're a scourge, or anything. I quantified it with "a
lot" but not "most" ;)

~~~
txcwpalpha
When I said they work in ways invisible to you, I did not mean it as they are
intentionally working “behind the scenes”. It is more likely that your
narrowmindedness just blinds you to all of the things they do. The work is
probably all done out in the open, and in almost all cases I’ve ever seen, the
“MBA types” specifically seek out interaction with and input from “rubber
meets the road” folks (side note: this is another hilarious notion that MBAs
apparently aren’t involved in “rubber meets the road” tasks), but it’s
generally the engineers that shy away from this interaction and then blame
management for being out of touch.

~~~
chupa-chups
In our organization we created a special "department" which is disconnected
from the traditional corporate structure.

We're a compound of self-organized teams of Product Owners and Engineers.

Our traditional organization takes 10 weeks for feature X, we need at most 2
weeks, averaging at 1 week (10%).

We have the luxury of delivering the exact same product (as a green-field
variant of our classical product as a SaaS solution), so it´s quite comparable
in terms of scope.

The main difference is there is no hidden agenda of would-be managers, nothing
between the customer than a PO who _knows_ what he is doing (i.e. is doing
regular A/B tests, customer interviews, involving the dev team as deep as
possible to understand customer requirements).

We were awarded a nation-wide award for digital transformation.

No middle-managers, no HR.

You can reach me @ hackernews@disposable-email.ml for additional details if
you like.

Summarizing: we got rid of all non-relevant management ballast and are able to
deliver features at a pace of around 10x of a traditionally managed line.

Overtime: around 0% with a tendency to dip below 0%.

Addendum: the POs are 70% MBAs, but they are good (i.e. they learnt to deliver
as opposed to manage)

~~~
bumby
Keeping in mind this whole thread is about the process of manufacturing
aircraft, do you think this approach works equally well with traditional
manufacturing?

My experience is that these lean approaches work well for something low on the
severity scale, like an SaaS solution, but can more easily falter with complex
safety-critical systems that blend multiple domains (e.g., mechanical,
software, etc.) I think sometimes people interpret the process rigor that gets
added to critical design to management bloat.

~~~
mo1ok
Not disagreeing with you, but worth mentioning proto-lean/agile methodology
began with the manufacturing of cars at Toyota.

~~~
putnambr
Also worth mentioning that Boeing has their own variant of the 'Toyota
Production System (TPS)' named the 'Boeing Production System (BPS)'.

~~~
bumby
Do you have any insight into how BPS addresses software development? I've
looked but so far most of the information is related to hardware manufacturing
or using software as a tool (e.g., for training).

------
romaaeterna
Did any of these production problems relate to the MCAS malfunction though?

Also, this is buried further down in the article than it should be.

> Mr. Pierson and his lawyers declined to answer whether he was seeking
> whistle-blower protection or filing a federal whistle-blower case. He has
> hired a prominent whistle-blower lawyer, Eric Havian, and could stand to
> gain monetarily if he pursued such a case.

~~~
AndrewBissell
Compensation for filing legitimate claims is an important carrot to encourage
people with inside information to speak out. Whistleblowers are routinely
subjected to intense retaliation and professional difficulties when they come
forward, and the process of claiming and securing an award takes years.

Everything this whistleblower is saying seems consistent with dozens of other
stories which have emerged of Boeing's corroded engineering practices.

~~~
romaaeterna
> Compensation for filing legitimate claims is an important carrot to
> encourage people with inside information to speak out

I've found over the course of my life that money encourages all sorts of
people to say all sorts of things.

~~~
AndrewBissell
That's nice. I'm not sure exactly what you think is happening here, but "make
up a bunch of stuff and use it to pursue a whistleblower claim" doesn't strike
me as a very appealing or sound strategy for ill-gotten gains. This isn't
something that gets litigated in backroom discussions or tabloid news outlets.

~~~
romaaeterna
Have you ever been in a courtroom? Not a lot of neutral statements of
unvarnished truth pass back and forth there. Some do, but not many. I am
extraordinarily worried about the precedent of paying witnesses for their
testimony, which is what this amounts to. However good we think that our
reasons may be.

~~~
generatorguy
Expert witnesses get paid for their testimony all the time.

~~~
romaaeterna
Expert witnesses are paid by the hour, and still get paid whether the case is
won or lost. The abuses of honesty in the expert witnesses system are still
horrific enough.

------
xiphias2
Why would I believe anything Boing's PR says if nobody went to prison for
endangering so many people's lives?

It makes sense that sensors on an expensive plane shouldn't malfunction so
early.

~~~
paulmd
physical sensors malfunction all the time, and you have a fleet of several
hundred aircraft.

You would be _shocked_ to learn how many faults an aircraft can have at a
given time and still be allowed to take off. That's what redundancy is for, if
everything had to be all-systems-go every time then you couldn't run an
aircraft for a week straight. It doesn't matter as long as you have a spare,
and it'll get fixed the next time you're in for maintenance.

the issue with the 737 MAX is that there are only two sensors, and so far I
don't see that being addressed. One sensor failing should not kill the
aircraft, and it should not disable a control regime that is necessary for the
aircraft to receive type certification.

~~~
teachrdan
This observation is incomplete. The problem is not the absence of more
sensors. It's that, in order to quickly produce (and sell) the 737-MAX, it was
changed so much that its behavior was fundamentally different than that of the
737.

The MCAS system, which was dependent on those two sensors, was developed to
compensate for the degree to which the plane behaved differently. And Boeing
underplayed how much the performance of the new plane had changed, and hid the
existence of the MCAS system from commercial plane pilots, to the point where
it wasn't even in their manuals.

Had Boeing behaved ethically, they would have told the FAA that the new 737
required pilot training. But that would have diminished sales and hurt
Boeing's stock price. That's the managerial misbehavior that many of the
commenters in this thread are remarking on.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-c...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-
crashes.html)

~~~
kayfox
MCAS was required for certification, in that it increases the linearity of
control forces through to a stall. Without it, it becomes easier to enter a
stall.

MCAS was not a fix to make training lighter, the aircraft would not be able to
get a type certificate without it.

[https://leehamnews.com/2019/02/08/bjorns-corner-pitch-
stabil...](https://leehamnews.com/2019/02/08/bjorns-corner-pitch-stability-
part-9/)

------
AndrewBissell
The thing that strikes me about the Boeing MAX story is that executives made
decisions which they were told over and over again would put lives in danger,
and so far the likely monetary damages are so small the stock is completely
unfazed, and criminal prosecution is a distant, all-but-impossible notion.

~~~
djsumdog
I don't think the majority of people understand how deep this problem went.
Back when they were first grounded, we saw stuff on HN nearly every week. I
don't think it got much place elsewhere. Many of my friends are really unaware
of how serious the Boeing situation is. Same thing for back when Uber had a
new scandal (grey ball, harassment memo, hell map, hiring Eric Holder to run
damage control, the other harassment memo). I'd tell friends I refused to use
Uber and they were mostly unaware of half of that stuff.

------
dblohm7
> “Mr. Pierson did the right thing by elevating his concerns.”

I doubt that Boeing would have been so gracious to Pierson if they had not
already been waist-deep in shit.

------
mzs
What's worse is that the upcoming MCAS fix is not a fix. If one sensor is
misbehaving (seemingly more common than desirable) then pitch-up will not be
automatically corrected:

"Boeing specifically highlighted in presentation documents the new MCAS
compares inputs from two angle of attack (AOA) sensors as opposed to a single
sensor in the original, flawed, design. MCAS will only activate if data from
both sensors agree the AOA is too high. MCAS will activate only once per high
AOA event. Pilots will be able to override it and the system will not activate
automatically a second time. In the original design, the system reactivated
over and over. The presentation reiterates the crew can deactivate MCAS by
turning off the automatic trim system and manually turning the trim wheel."

[https://imgur.com/a/H5milYP](https://imgur.com/a/H5milYP)

~~~
rtkwe
Hmm I wonder if that will be accepted. The whole point of MCAS was to avoid
getting assigned a new type which would require airlines to pay to have pilots
certified on the new type, with MCAS only working and only fixing the
maneuvering differences when both AOA sensors agree (and Boeing not making AOA
a critical system with redundancy) it will be interesting to see if this still
gets the benefit of sharing type rating with the existing 737s. I imagine the
FAA is going to be reluctant to just wave them through this time and I wonder
if one activation is enough to actually correct the pitch up.

------
heisenbit
The best remedy to runaway quality problems is management by wandering around
(MBWA) but that is of course impossible if HQ is in Chicago.

------
_Codemonkeyism
"He worries that once the Max is flying again, Boeing — scrambling to make up
for the costly delays — will not have changed."

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/tKX4Y](http://archive.is/tKX4Y)

------
JadeNB
The title should be "whistle-blower _says_ ", per the headline—did it get
automatically truncated?

~~~
dang
No. Maybe it was just a select-paste glitch. Fixed now!

