
Former Boeing Engineers Say Relentless Cost-Cutting Sacrificed Safety - thereare5lights
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-05-09/former-boeing-engineers-say-relentless-cost-cutting-sacrificed-safety
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mekane8
Man Boeing sounds like such a disgusting place to work. Granted, I'm sure
many, many large publicly-traded companies are like this. But the way the
article lays it out these executive initiatives reminds me of mobster movies
where they move in and milk an honest citizen's store for all it's worth.

That profits and executive bonuses should take precedence over the safety of
human lives is horrible. I'm curious to hear more about why the unions formed,
since it sounds like there was a very contentious relationship there.

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phkahler
TFA mentions shareholder value. How exactly do unsafe planes help shareholder
value?

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mikeash
People are bad at understanding risk. Tell someone that this change will save
the company enough money to bump the share price by $2, but there's a one-in-
a-million chance per flight that it will cause a crash that will destroy the
company instead. Do you go for it? A lot of people will hear "one in a
million" as "basically impossible" and say it sounds great. They'll probably
rationalize it further by deciding that you're being paranoid about the risks.
And then a while later you have a few hundred dead people and a company with a
shattered reputation.

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challenger22
And to further complicate it, the smaller a risk, the worse we are at
estimating it.

Investigations after the Challenger Disaster revealed that engineers at NASA
thought the space shuttle had a 1/100 failure rate per mission, while managers
thought the shuttle had a 1/10,000 failure rate.

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dillonmckay
Why do the simulators cost $15 million?

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throw20102010
The simulators are certified training devices, which means that you can do
part of your legally required training in them (and not have to fly an actual
jet).

To be certified as a training device it has to be accredited to act similar to
the real thing. That accreditation costs money.

That's not to say it couldn't be done cheaper, but until someone does $15
million is what the market will bear. The other option is gassing up a real
jet for training.

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dillonmckay
But if the cost is discouraging the decision of what is legally required
training, that is an issue.

Also, who accredits the simulator? The company that built it?

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throw20102010
Following up here. For a new jet (new type certificate), there is a minimum
amount of required flying to get rated- in this case, you can put many pilots
through a $15 million simulator and not put any wear and tear on your shiny
new jets. When the option is sim vs real flight, the cheapest option is the
sim.

But $15 million is still expensive. A major selling point (possibly the
biggest selling point) of the MAX jets was that Boeing convinced the FAA that
they were similar to old 737s and did not need a new type certificate. That
meant for the many pilots already certified to fly the 737 they would not need
to do any flight training to transition. All those currently certified 737
pilots could fly the new jets just by reading a manual on an iPad for an hour.
That is a huge savings in training cost even compared to powering up a
simulator. The simulators still exist because new pilots still need to get
certified need to log flight time- the iPad app is not good enough for them.

Regarding simulator accreditation, I believe Boeing does that themselves. They
hand the FAA a stack of documents claiming that they tested the simulator with
the same flight profile as a real jet and it handled the same as the real
thing. The FAA basically says, "as long as you're not lying about running the
test then the simulator is acceptable for training." This is how the FAA
handles most certification- they do not do their own testing, they just accept
manufacturer test results and documentation. As long as the documentation
claims to meet standards then it's all gravy. In general this system works,
because if someone crashes your plane and a whistleblower says that you did
not actually perform the correct test procedures then you are in hot water.

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cameronbrown
Our industry needs to take the 'Engineer' part of Software Engineering a lot
more seriously. A professional certification to use the title is looking more
and more important with each incident like this, otherwise developers have no
teeth to push back when flaws like this are brushed aside by management to
save money/reduce costs/etc.. Cyber security, data ethics,.. many things in
programming could benefit from certification, and having to legally sign off
on your own work.

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olliej
First off, this is nonsense: the software was doing exactly what it was meant
to (and designed to) do. Hardware engineers chose not to provide multiple
sensors to validate AoA, hardware engineers did not provide a human-capable
override. MCAS was designed to not be disabled by pilots, because doing so
would make the plane a different aircraft according to the FAA.

Anyway I have yet to see a software related “certificate” that isn’t rote-
learnable, comically high level, or both.

You also have to ask, what are you certifying?

All of these are fairly trivial to avoid in small programs:

* Use after free * time of check/time of use * out of bounds * numeric overflow

Especially in any kind of test environment where you are being extra careful.

Then there’s the language problem: many engineers have to use multiple
languages, some only have to use “safe” languages. Should you require a
different cert for each?

You’re also saying “not everyone gets to write software anymore” because the
certification won’t be free.

How does open source then work? Clearly people working on the Linux kernel
should be certified, so now you’re saying Linux should only accept patches
from people who live in countries that can provide the required certs.

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dnautics
Nobody is saying that you can't be a programmer, or a dev, you just can't be a
software engineer without a certification.

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umvi
Why, so the software engineer can be a scapegoat if something goes wrong?

Certify the software, not the person.

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JohnJamesRambo
Stand up for your code and certify it like a mechanical or civil engineer
certifies what they make or don’t wear the title of engineer. It’s time to
take on all the qualities of the sobriquet not just the status and the salary
that was appropriated.

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dnautics
Exactly. It's just a title. I'm perfectly happy being a professional
programmer with no certification. Tinder and even most parts of Google don't
really need "engineers". Boeing, not so much.

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throwvatars
This seems like another case to stop H1B visa system. We are sacrificing
quality over Q4 earnings by outsourcing skilled jobs to unskilled cheap body
shops.

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SamReidHughes
That has more to do with outsourcing and haphazard disintegration of product
requirements than H1B's.

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monksy
This is exactly what Agile succeeds in. This story is going to be an 8 point
story? But Jim said he could get it done in 2.

Have a safety concern? The product owner doesn't think it's a priority.

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brianwawok
Does Boeing use agile when deciding things like safety features on planes?

if not, is this relevant to the story?

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monksy
Do they? I have no idea. I'm not an employee of Boeing.

Have I seen agile/scrum used to cut corners on and dismiss engineering
concerns? Absolutely.

