Shoutout to a anonymous Boeing engineer sitting in some for a gruesome permanent crisis-meetings, where mostly pr- and mbas talk about what has to be done, but not what has to change, especially not about how engineering and QA should have a blocking-veto right for any decision and the ones actually talking about plans to change.
Add story points to your JIRA tickets and make sure they're either 1, 2, 3 or 5 points, but if they're more than 5 points, they have to be split into multiple 5-point stories, and points don't really mean anything but they also mean exactly how many days you're going to spend on them.
Oh, yeah, and meet your commitments! We'll tell you what your commitments were.
Thanks. Now I'm going to have nightmare fuel about one of my experiences as a young software engineer at a well known Japanese auto manufacturer in a Research and Development position. They had a mess of a software project which involved endless meetings on Jira issues, which became more about using Jira than actually solving the issues and making a quality product. This was all done on impossible timelines with outsourced teams that seemed to change every couple months. We also can't forget about editing every Powerpoint presentation N to infinite times, which mostly involved moving a box or changing a color.
Any lowly Boeing engineers reading this - my condolences... Truly.
> outsourced teams that seemed to change every couple months
But, of course. The productivity of the team they hired last month was just horrible, they didn't manage to finish anything! Of course they were fired.
My current day-to-day apparently revolves around pointing accountants towards approved Aconex Workflows and the documents contained therein, after they email me in a panic asking for me to send them said documents and they "Don't see them" on Aconex. Yes, I am following the published-by-accounting templates and naming protocols.
There's a circle of hell for senior managers who swear they're being "agile" and then butt into a team's estimations and expect totals of story points so they can "increase velocity." Shouldn't have ever called it velocity in the first place; it's just a fucking WIP limit.
> points don't really mean anything but they also mean exactly how many days you're going to spend on them
Work in defense, can confirm. Add "increment planning" where we plan the sprints out 3 months. Also, voting on points? Naw, someone yell out a number and that's that.
I want to take “agile” proponents to a track and make them run Fibonacci multiples of 100m over and over with the only break being to ask how far they want to run next.
Who can sprint forever? It doesn’t make any sense! When do we rest? When do we train? What is this metaphor!?
Nice straw man you've got there. You're really beating the crap out of that thing. "Sprint" is just a term for something you can also call an "iteration." No one is expecting you to actually go full-throttle 24/7.
I love it when people use the phrases "end-stage capitalism" or "late-stage capitalism," because it's basically a flashing neon sign saying "you can ignore me, because I have absolutely zero credibility." Makes it easy to move on.
It's actually exactly the same as they way they "managed" projects before Scrum (and before XP, which Scrum itself is a bastardized version of): "tell me everything you're going to do, and then tell me how long it's going to take, and I'll provide value by asking you every day if you're done with it yet. See, I'm justifying why I make more money than you do!"
I’ve seen teams do 2 weeks of detailed project planning and estimating where the entire project could have been done in 2 weeks by a good team if they just set their nose to grindstone and did the work.
It’s unbelievable how useless some of these planning and estimating sessions are.
Dealing with that right now. I have multiple PMs and directors involved in requesting another team to literally do five minutes of work because we didn't insist they put it in the current iteration and they put it several iterations away.
I want to believe that you are joking, but I'm afraid you are completely serious and also correct. I'm seeing an increasing drift with both this pattern and "safE" toward exactly what you describe.
It works better when you realize a lot of corporate senior leadership doesn't actually want to empower their employees. They only want to say they want to empower their employees. And then go back to being the Big Important Manager in the Big Important Office making Big Important Decisions.
You see, this is how scrum really works as without this, how would we be able to control development timelines? Also mumbling compliance means it just has to be this way for unspecified reasons!
Scrum is the equivalent of top-level management needing a baby rattle or else they'll start crying for metrics because they're lost without them. Trusting their engineers and seeing their progress for themselves, rather than an abstract bastardization of that progress, would destroy their er... productivity.
> shout in the ether that this engineer will have a job at your organization.
This. Or crowdfund a mega million dollar bounty for evidence of certain types of malfeasance.
The market seems to generally punish whistleblowers, and understandably so. I have never worked for a company that wasn't violating some contract, regulation, or law. In my first job we were forging stuff for PCI compliance. The next job stored medical records in a Git repo.
So most people have something to lose if there is a whistleblower personality around, as much as we might admire them when they reveal the secrets of others.
I wouldn't want to work with one. I am not a manager and even as a low level individual contributor I cut regulatory and security corners to keep bosses happy.
You would get far more whistleblowers if it didn't essentially mean wrecking your livelihood, even if you are willing to sacrifice your career.
Far for me to challenge the idea of a fund and bounties. But that’s a lot of money—more than I can personally fork and more than I’d be comfortable advocating to collect. Again, no criticism of your ambition; I’m just a regular guy trying to do his thing.
I do believe that good engineers like their work and drive a lot of self-esteem from it being valued—more than living off a stipend because they shot their career in the foot. It’s well-paid enough they rarely think they need to rely on the generosity of strangers, and that’s not a bad mindset to keep.
In circumstances like these, people talk about loyalty, notably to their employer; I don’t think loyalty is a bad value, but in that case, you want to advocate for loyalty to the craft and the corps, not the organization profiting from putting people in danger. Engineering values, like the brass ring some get in Canada, are things that you want to support not by saying “we’ll support you if that blows in your face” but “We want people like you to speak up during our meetings.”
Giving engineers a guarantee that their craft, their talent and their willingness to ask tough questions is what you value, as a team lead, is something I occasionally can do (not now, though: changing team) and something I’m happy to compensate at fair market value, because it’s objectively a good thing for me too — not because that would put me at odds with my organization, but I’m willing to sacrifice that for some ideal misaligned with profit.
We need to work on getting eggheads at Boeing understand that their cost-cutting was a bad idea (SkyScanner letting you filter-out plane time is beautifully aggressive that way), but in the meantime, we need to tell people facing tough decisions that engineering is full of hard trade-offs but that security is not one of them, and not one that should need charity.
> crowdfund a mega million dollar bounty for evidence of certain types of malfeasance
Yes and:
Make whistleblowing-for-hire official.
IIRC, there's a law practice whose sole activity is suing prescription management practices. Basically forensic accounting meets administrative law.
I want more of that.
Further:
Winner-takes-all seems to be some kind of natural law. And by extension, regulatory capture. Civil society needs countervailing mechanisms that exist outside or separated somehow.
I most like ensuring pro-competition and anti-monopoly policies.
But monopolies will always exist, eg natural monopolies like utility districts and police, so we also need transparency and accountability hacks like you're suggesting.
Or require the government to give a proportion of the fine to the whistleblower, like the SEC has. We find out about a lot of shady finance through that program.
> They’re the ones that aren’t afraid whatsoever to rock the boat or do what they think is right, and are actually able to drive change.
I think a great deal of their ability to drive change is because they know the right things to say to the right people. I.e. they have some diplomatic skills.
Because while they might be able to afford to lose their job, they certainly won't drive any change if they actually do lose their job.
I have never seen an engineering project fail because of poor "relationship skills" - definitions pending.
Diplomacy helps, but mostly it is about being open about problems and about pushing that info up the chain of responsibility. If you need diplomacy for this point, you already have a severe problem here.
Otherwise the head will also fumble. I have been in expensive meetings talking a lot about parking space organization. This always happens if there is nothing interesting related to the business to talk about. Stuff gets off-topic quickly.
That said, change and disruption has a positive connotation in the business of today. But it isn't always positive.
> Diplomacy helps, but mostly it is about being open about problems and about pushing that info up the chain of responsibility.
Then, in my eyes at least, you're talking about either relatively minor things, or things which already fall in the bailiwick of the leader. I'm just a line person with no one under me who could last a max two months without a job but I have no problem communicating problems up the chain. I'm probably naive, but I'd think most other people wouldn't have such problems either. If they do have problems this seems like an organizational issue that even the leaders SteveNuts mentions in the GP wouldn't be able to change.
Not that I think assuring basics is a bad thing, quite the opposite — but I think we would see a lot more rude co-workers who are willing to take risks with their working relationships. That is, specifically those with basics assured and still early in their career and/or poor relationship skills to begin with.
Those issues already surface in any situation, but it's safe to assume that many hold their tongues because they're afraid of losing their income stream.
Compared to the reality of the situation, I agree that it’s garish, but psychologically, people in cushy situations tend to over-dramatize their setbacks. If they _think_ they have nothing to lose, they will act foolishly just the same as if they really do.
If a billionaire slams his toe on the leg of a chair, it still hurts, and being sorry for his real pain isn’t denying his otherwise staggering privilege. It’s an excellent example to use to have him empathize with others. If you want to make them act in society’s interest, you can point out that paying taxes or enforcing environmental regulations won’t prevent them from being rich beyond words.
An engineer worried about being fired experiences genuine distress: you can empathize with that there and then because it’s real. Once they have a job, ask them to be more considerate when designing processes or buildings so that everyone can work comfortably in the shade or without having to fear how they are going to feed their family by the end of the week.
Should call them what they are, behavioural hacking to introduce compliant, seddated behaviour, without a longterm grasp of the damage the hacks inflict. Obvious solution? More law-ducttape on the imperfect ape.
It's not like there haven't been tons of books and studying done on the topic. We have an _almost_ ideal production methodology that ensures absolute quality (the Toyota Production System). I take issue with its just-in-time supply chain, but the quality factor is worth emulating, and basically any company who has has guaranteed themselves best quality outcome.
So this is willfully producing a less than superior product, which, when it comes to airplanes, is basically criminally negligent since it will result in a crashing plane that kills people.
Not sure how execs are so capable of dodging culpability, but I'd say the real issue is our justice system holds no one rich to account.
Here's the change that needs to be made (more accurately, reversed):
>>Boeing outsources a lot of the production of components for its aircraft because it’s cheaper as part of an overall shift in strategy that dates to CEO Harry Stonecipher who had been CEO of McDonnell Douglas,
>>>> "When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm."
IOW, the McDonnel Douglas, now Boeing, CEO deliberately wrecked the engineering firm to make finance primary. In my book, that merits being tarred, feathered, drawn, and quartered. He's putting millions of lives at risk, risking the defense capabilities of the US, and already killed hundreds. All to line the pockets of himself and his cronies.
The only question is whether the engineering organization is too far lost to reconstitute.
And these meetings mysteriously have a bunch of sticky notes everywhere, they're purpose is unknown, they're unintelligible, but load bearing for the project. Load bearing sticky notes.
I think MCAS was one of those organizational failures. I could see myself implementing something like that. I imagine the conversation would go a little like this:
"We need to replicate the pitch performance of the 737-800. These engines pitch the plane up when accelerating and it messes up go-arounds."
"What if we have the computer just pitch down to compensate? We know the angle of attack and the engine thrust output."
<implements>
Meanwhile in another conference room:
"United is telling us that Airbus is giving them an A321 for 10% less than us. What can we cut?"
"No regulation requires us to have 3 angle of attack sensors. We could get by with 1 and stick it on the Minimum Equipment List if it fails."
"That sounds great."
Then the 1 angle of attack sensor fails the system that was designed for 3. Was it the engineer who agreed to hack 737-800 handling emulation onto the 737 MAX that failed here? Was it the engineer that agreed that the AoA sensors didn't need to be redundant, perhaps before MCAS was even invented?
These complex failures are rarely the result of one individual failing. Everyone did their job; the business saved United 10% (I actually have no idea who their launch customer was), the engineer saved thousands of pilots from being pulled off the line for re-training. But combined, it was a tragedy. Ultimately, it's the organization and its processes that failed, not an individual. As a manager, you own the organization and the processes.
Why would it be useless? Boeing's update for the Max8 MCAS (to make the FAA happy), was to make the system validate the two values.
If there is a mismatch, the system outputs an error and MCAS will disable itself.
In fact, that is literally one of the requirements set by the FAA to begin flying the Max8 again
> FAA Airworthiness Directive approved design changes for each MAX aircraft, requiring input from two AoA sensors for MCAS activation, elimination of the system's ability to repeatedly activate, and allowing pilots to override the system if necessary.
Stick pushers aren't anything new, and the sad irony is that except for the two tragedies, MCAS worked so well that in the thousands of flight hours the Max had, no pilot had even noticed it.
It absolutely was the fault of the engineers who failed to realize what would happen with an AOA fault. I'd love to be corrected, I don't believe a single email from the engineers to management telling them would would happen was ever dug up. And, there's never been an engineer whistleblower saying "I warned them."
Normally I would agree if an engineer directly knew what they were doing was bad and didn't say no but in the case of MCAS: pilots had no idea it was there. Yes, it also wasn't properly redundant and that is bad but had the pilots known it had existed in the first place and understood it was operating off a single data source they would have acted accordingly and a lot of people would still be alive. Door plug I can't speak to.
Hiding MCAS to avoid recertification was well above the paygrade of an engineer at a bench poking a circuit.
Also, if you want a short version of how this stuff goes very wrong even when engineers do say something, the challenger disaster[1] movie is great. Chase it with the NASA documents[2] for the long version.
Engineering needs to be embedded in a system that can handle the fact that engineers fail and still produce reliable and effective outputs. The primary purpose of management is making sure such as system exists and functions. Managers are the engineers of the entire meta-system, basically.
Sounds like you suggest that an MBA have no influence on the production and output of the organization, the performance, not at all, they just stand there watching helplessly while others do something some to them uncontrolable way.
Can they all be fired and the wealth they leach redistributed then please? :)
They don't put Boeing engineers in management or executive positions these days.
Heck, they fired the last CEO over the 737 crashes but he was literally only on the job for 3 years and had no involvement with the 737 design. The problem? He was an engineer and he was already stirring up shit inside. So they threw him under the bus and replaced with him another useless goon that spouts PR bullshit and has no technical experience other than milking companies dry.
Its worth noting that this article is based entirely on an anonymous comment made below another article. They also link a Tweet alleging that "[..] other usually credible, usually careful folks positing same idea.", but no links are provided to that.
Albeit a long comment which seems to have correct insider jargon, plausible numbers and scenarios, etc. Agreed it's getting more credence than I would expect, but it wasn't a lazy offhand comment.
That's true, but where else would you expect to get such information?
No real whistleblower is going to publish their name, rank, and serial number etc. The corporate PR department sure isn't ever going to tell you such things. Investigative journalism and reporters who can be trusted to verify sources and preserve their anonymity is all but dead these days. The Government might publish something that isn't a total white-wash in 5 years. Or they might not. Who can tell?
jonnyc is a hardcore airline enthusiast (i think they might actually be ex-American Airlines) and is extremely active on flyertalk. i trust them when they said that several sources confirm this anon comment.
Came here to upvote this idea. Many of you probably relate to the under-informed or less experienced junior engineer who gets dramatic at times. Did this person see something they thought was a non-conformance but actually standard operating?
I’ve been that junior engineer more than once (and not always junior), and I’ve had to deal with it more than once. The proof is in the pudding, and the pudding is that there are at least four distinct significant mechanical issues; three have led to major emergencies on board.
The second element is that this particular junior engineer has seen enough to know not to share his name. Naivety goes both ways, and the rhetorical engineer tends to leave identifiable information if they don’t think getting caught is a problem. This one does. He’s asked internally, and the answer wasn’t reassuring. I’ve been on the receiving end of “What do you think we should do about this?” and hard trade-offs; if the manager knows what they are doing and they are not pushing bad stories, the junior engineer learns something.
The last element is that this is not new: very senior engineers complaining about penny-pushing MBAs ruining the company and “that won’t stop until someone gets hurt” are as old as the merger with McDonnel-Douglas.
Would I trust the technical details and the recommendation of that particular engineer? Lord No: I know nothing about airplanes. But I know what a dysfunctional operation sounds like, and that sounds like the bassoon—but there’s the strings, the brass, and the percussions playing the same tune.
Whether this whistle-blower is well-informed or not is an interesting question, but it is overshadowed by the fact that we even have to ask. The fact that the public still doesn't know what happened or is happening is unacceptable, to put it lightly. Boeing has been given a chance - now they should be raided top-to-bottom by 3rd party agents, whether that be federal or private, and be placed under existential threat until we are satisfied with the investigation and resulting consequences.
That is very true, with the caveat that FAA and NHTSA aren’t the fastest at putting out a report —by design, thankfully: I want that thing vetted. It’s been three weeks. That would be better if we knew much more in the next week or two. If not, we shouldn’t be too patient either.
Much as I'd like to see Boeing investigated for what look like systemic failures in their construction processes, I don't think a totally anonymous comment on some blog article on the internet really qualifies anyone as "a Boeing whistleblower".
That’s understandable caution, but would you expect a whistleblower to not be completely anonymous?
This is why we still need serious journalism by the way - a reporter would personally contact and verify the credentials of the whistleblower while protecting their identity, with their career on the line. Random news blogs or independent reporters will never replace this.
> would you expect a whistleblower to not be completely anonymous?
In my view, a "whistleblower" is someone who gives their information confidentially (not anonymously) to a responsible investigating authority.
Not someone who writes a comment on the internet that you or I could write ourselves, with a little research sprinkled with credible-sounding 'insider chit-chat'.
Ordinarily I would agree with you, but the case of Boeing includes some extraordinary context.
This company's incompetence killed 346 people in 2018-2019, and the postmortem revealed an unethically cozy relationship with their regulator, the FAA. Now, five years later, we are seeing more catastrophic failures that will eventually claim more lives, and once again the FAA is coming under scrutiny for being too lax in its oversight of Boeing.
It seems to me that the FAA lacks some kind of either technical or organizational competence to regulate Boeing. Screws must be turned publicly until Boeing's financier-led culture is replaced with the original engineering-led culture. Anonymous insider comments are one reasonable way to do this, although it might be better to work as an anonymous source to a well-known journalistic outlet.
It wasn't incompetence, it was greed. They said "no new training for pilots" in order to keep sales volume up and to ensure no new training they kept the MCAS system a secret from pilots.
It is very in-vogue to hate on Boeing on the internet. Deservedly, I might add, but it does mean that it wouldn’t be at all surprising for some random non-employee to make up some detailed post as a whistleblower.
> would you expect a whistleblower to not be completely anonymous? [...] This is why we still need serious journalism
Exactly. I'd expect a whistleblower wanting to be taken seriously to be talking to a real journalist with editors and a publication with a history of getting things right, not a single-author mid-tier aviation blog.
The temptation to spin things "just a little" and to fail to verify identity and authority, for a site like this, is just too high.
Exactly. The problem is that whistleblower protections come from the government. The courts cannot be trusted to always have your back. Hell, I would go further and outright assume that they will blatantly favor corporate interests.
I do not blame someone for not wanting to risk the exposure.
In this case I'd stress that the FAA itself cannot be assumed to "have your back", given their coziness with Boeing
(although I can't know if the whistleblowers were truthful)
To be clear: mainstream major media publications use anonymous sources all the time. The point here is that the whistleblower be talking to the Times or the Post[1] and not "View from the Wing". No one is demanding they come out in public to tell us who they are.
[1] And let's also be clear: journalists from both those organizations are surely on the phones full time right now trying to find dirt on Boeing quality processes. That would be a huge story if they could land it.
The mid-tier blog (probably?) doesn't depend on revenue from it for their living. Professional journalists these days often do, and are teetering on the edge of solvency as-is. And so they're a lot more vulnerable to their corporate contacts telling them, don't publish that story or slip us the name of the whistleblower, or else you'll be blackballed from our PR department. Your job will be toast, since we're your only real source, and there's 50 other journalists and publications in line to replace you.
> The mid-tier blog (probably?) doesn't depend on revenue from it for their living.
The page is absolutely filled with ads. Clearly it's a revenue source, not a labor of love.
Also your ideas about the media industry somehow being compliantly beholden to the interests of Boeing (a company less than a tenth the size of Google or Apple) seems a bit silly. This would be a huge scoop and a big win for any paper that got the story. That they don't have it speaks broadly to this blog's story being spun.
The "View from the Wing" site that is the main link here has a relatively modest number of ads once I turn off my ad blocker. Not that much compared to many "proper" news sources. They do seem a little click-baity, and are loaded with tracking scripts, but I doubt they're making enough money for even one person to make a living. I wouldn't trust them that much, but they're not the actual source anyways, they're just republishing a comment from another page.
The linked page that the comment that is the source of all this is actually on is "Leeham News and Analysis", which looks like a professional-quality aerospace news site. I don't see any ads or tracker scripts on them at all. The author and the bulk of the commenters sound pretty professional and knowledgeable. It looks like they sell subscriptions at substantial cost, which explains a lot. That's enough for me to presume they're much more trustworthy about the aviation industry than any legacy media source.
When was the last time the legacy media did a real investigative report about something that wasn't super hip or somebody had a grudge against already? You may not necessarily agree, but I think it's at least reasonable that an actual whistleblower like this wouldn't bother with them. Or maybe they already did, and got ignored, because they thought the article would cost too much to put together and not get enough clicks to bother. On Leeham's site, the author did ask the commenter to contact them - perhaps something will come from that, or maybe not.
Accessing the SAT system to re-read all the tickets to the reporter sounds like the easiest possible way to get fired. Obviously someone is going to review every access and be very skeptical of anyone viewing that data after the news broke.
I guess there is always "use your coworker's computer when they go to the bathroom", though. Lock your screen!
> That’s understandable caution, but would you expect a whistleblower to not be completely anonymous?
On the other hand, wouldn't that also sound like something someone completely unqualified could easily make up and it would just fit our own bias enough to avoid thinking about it too critically?
Complaining about Boeings quality, especially in the 737 Max department, is just an easy and cheap shot.
It is "easy" because it fits perfectly with all the publicly accessible information that we have about the relationship between Boeing and Spirit Aerosystems. We know it was spun off out of Boeing in order to cut costs. We're also a forum full of engineers who have been inside companies that have done those kinds of things before in other industries and seen how it turns into a shit show. Yeah, this article is filling in the details that we fully expect to see around how the sausage is actually being made, to that extent it fits our preconceived biases.
Biases can be entirely accurate.
And even if this is a work of fiction around this particular incident, the reality may not be far enough off to matter.
There's enough smoke that all the biased people rushing to assume there's a fire are likely more correct than the skeptics demanding to see the flames enveloping the building before rushing to any judgement.
I don't claim that the comment is wrong (I have no knowledge of Boeings internals and it actually fits my biases, too), but I still wouldn't qualify it as evidence.
There's solid evidence that there's a metaphorical fire; trusting an anonymous internet comment actually weakens/poisons the pile of evidence.
Isn’t speculating wildly on the internet that an internet comment is fake just about the cheapest shot there is? The comment does include many verifiable details…
I'm not making the accusations against Boeing, so I'm not the one who needs to provide evidence. I've also also given clear points on why I assume the comment to be fake and I did so with my known username attached - so no, it's not just a cheap shot :-)
Also note that I never claimed that the comment is wrong (I have no private knowledge about Boeings processes), just that the comment could easily be fake.
While I agree, Blancolirio over at YouTube went through a recent lawsuit[1] which had some non-anonymous sources claiming quite serious incidents at Spirit.
While I agree in principle, as a society we don't have a great track record of supporting or protecting whistle-blower, so hard to verify shit like this is what we have to put up with in response.
> this check job that should find minimal defects has in the past 365 calendar days recorded 392 nonconforming findings on 737 mid fuselage door installations. That is a hideously high and very alarming number, and if our quality system on 737 was healthy, it would have stopped the line and driven the issue back to supplier after the first few instances.
If this (anonymous) quote is true, it may mean Boeing thinks production quality can be achieved via Quality Control alone. Yet nothing could be further from the truth.
But getting failures when you need to test a clob for nullity, calculate the size or a raw binay, or get null when you were expecting an empty string (or the other way around) is usually not life-threatening.
"""
Once they have finished, they send it back to a Boeing QA for final acceptance, but then Malicious Stupid Happens! The Boeing QA writes another record in CMES (again, the correct venue) stating (with pictures) that Spirit has not actually reworked the discrepant rivets, they just painted over the defects. In Boeing production speak, this is a “process failure”. For an A&P mechanic at an airline, this would be called “federal crime”.
"""
If this happens at Boeing, should we double-check other aviation companies? Is this part of a systemic trend to hollow out engineering industries for maximum profit extraction?
Back to my "trying to buy a toaster" problem... I just found out all commercially available toasters, no matter what price, are made in China. I don't subscribe to the "everything from China is bad" philosophy, but I feel this is pretty absurd. You simply can't buy a toaster that is manufactured in Europe or America anymore. Even companies such as Bosch that still produce the majority of their products in Europe (as far as I know) seem to have thrown in the towel.
Maybe we need to have an engineer revolution instead of silently being part of this hollowing out by that top percentage of business and political "elite".
China plugs in the system by being a manufacturer for the whole world. It is no wonder that it squeezes others out as this has been planned by the world elites long time ago.
At which point did the MBAs convince us they are suited for more than bookkeeping? Medicine, engineering, architecture and many other things have been slaved to economics and this is presented as the natural order of things. Why?
Look at who gets them and their social status - the worst MBAs I’ve dealt with came from money, went to expensive schools, but … weren’t exactly going to knuckle down for med school or becoming a PE. The MBA was a way to add plausible deniability to the idea that the question of whose opinion matters usually comes down to class.
(One notable exception: Scots-Irish guy from a very modest background - unsurprisingly, he worked harder than anyone else I’ve met and took care of the staff)
All the focus is on Boeing (as it is a household name) and they have final signoff... but Spirit Aerosystems (the fuselage manufacturer, not the airline) is also a big, public company that doesn't seem to be sharing any of the blame here.
This is ironic because Spirit also manufactures parts for Airbus, etc.
It's Boeing's job to stop the line but they didn't as the whistleblower mentioned:
"As a result, this check job that should find minimal defects has in the past 365 calendar days recorded 392 nonconforming findings on 737 mid fuselage door installations (so both actual doors for the high density configs, and plugs like the one that blew out). That is a hideously high and very alarming number, and if our quality system on 737 was healthy, it would have stopped the line and driven the issue back to supplier after the first few instances."
I've heard Spirit has had a lot of problems, but likewise Boeing itself is not immune to this. A few years back the Boeing South Carolina plant was having a very consistent problem with foreign objects (wrenches, parts, etc) being left behind in assembled planes, to rattle around and damage who knows what.
My understanding as well is that while Spirit makes the fuselage of the 737MAX, final assembly is at Boeing in Renton Washington, and the plug door would have been removed for final assembly and then reinstalled in Renton, so Boeing itself would be responsible, assuming, as appears likely, that the plane left the factory without the door bolts installed.
Airbus is, supposedly, very much "boots on the ground" in cooperation with suppliers. Somehow nobody hears of issues they have with Spirit, but at the same time nobody hears of Spirit being squeezed dry by Airbus - only by Boeing.
If you look something up look it up in detail. Especially which parts of the planes get build by them for Boeing and Airbus AND Spirit is a spinoff of Boeing... it's their bad bank.
Hopefully the anonymous commenter HAS also made a proper whistleblowing process where the problems are reported confidentially to the relevant authorities.
To then comment on it anonymously in public is not in itself blowing the whistle, but it might make sense to do both at the same time.
> The FAA has issued a new Airworthiness Directive (AD) that will allow most MAX 9s to return to service.
Contrast this few-week stint with what happened with NASA after Challenger and Columbia. Everything came to a grinding halt while questions were asked about culture and entire operating principles. And then here, we just have an airworthiness directive followed by business as usual. This is pathetic.
> there are 4 bolts that prevent the mid-exit door plug from sliding up off of the door stop fittings that take the actual pressurization loads in flight, and these 4 bolts were not installed when Boeing delivered the airplane, our own records reflect this.
MCAS isn't an issue from a software perspective; it does what it's supposed to do, the issue was that its existence was not communicated to pilots, somewhat intentionally, out of a misplaced assertion that the 737-MAX should not require any additional type rating (i.e. to save money). In other words it was a business management failure.
Effectively zero economic activity is changed depending upon the outcome of engineering challenges of a NASA vehicle.
In contrast, grounding hundreds of planes for an indeterminate amount of time has severe implications for many companies. As far as I know, there are no claimed underlying engineering faults to the design. Ask the uncomfortable questions, but if all of the planes can be reviewed to confirm basic airworthiness, at some point you have to let them fly again.
> but if all of the planes can be reviewed to confirm basic airworthiness, at some point you have to let them fly again.
Doesn’t this review and confirmation take place before they even go into service? So if they missed these bolts on the last review, what’s to say they won’t miss them or something equally as important on the next review?
“Oh think of the economy” is the worst excuse I can imagine to let these back into service.
The shuttle program was a significant source of economic activity in a number of different areas of the country. [1][2] Just because we really want to have planes flying, isn't a good reason to let them fly if they're not fit to do so. This is known in aviation as "get-there-itis". You really don't have to fly.
Very little of that economic activity was directly linked to the Shuttle flying. If we had moved the Shuttle through the fabrication, preparation and refurbishment cycles without actually launching it, the economic impact would be more or less the same. That's not true of airline flights, which generate most of their economic value by actually moving people and/or stuff.
But just as with pilots and get-there-itis, the "need" to fly the planes is secondary. The primary concern is making sure the higher order system is operating correctly, which we know it isn't. Flying planes will be counterproductive if it leads to a bad crash, setting the industry back even further than grounding the planes and planning ahead would in the first place. If your goal is to move people and stuff as much as possible, the strategy should be to make sure you can do that safely. We can and will abandon air travel as soon as it loses its safety record.
I would like Boeing to get through this and be able to produce new aircraft, though. NASA hasn't produced a new human-capable spacecraft since these disasters, and it has been a long, long time.
If NASA was a private enterprise, it would've simply gone out of business. Instead, it stopped being an exciting organization willing to push the boundaries of space travel, which is inherently risky, and became a risk-averse bureaucracy mostly wasting taxpayer money until they eventually got/get the fire lit under their ass by organizations like SpaceX showing that it is still possible to progress in space exploration in ways other than launching robots
NASA worked through its issues. When the shuttle program ended, it wasn’t directly because of either of the disasters. Both of those were followed by extensive reworking of the system behind the missions.
Also, Boeing is not a fully private enterprise and receives significant federal funding.
Reduce the power. It's much more easily said than done obviously, but things like exemptions just should not be done. If the FAA makes a rule, it needs to be adhered to. The FAA needs a spine. Whatever we need to do in terms of reform to achieve that is up for debate, but we aren't even having that conversation yet.
David Calhoun told the newspaper that pilots from Indonesia and Ethiopia “don’t have anywhere near the experience that they have here in the US”. He added the planemaker made a “fatal mistake” by assuming those flying the aircraft would immediately counteract software failures, which played a role in both accidents.
Minimizing the damage (legal and reputational) is of course the job of any executive. What that looks like will vary between business and legal cultures, but that's what it looks like in the US.
The way the US law works (as I understand it from popular culture and news) is a good idea to deflect liability as much as possible as any admittance of liability could end up costing.
That doesn't sound like "covering up," that sounds like saying "the flight crews should have been skilled enough to compensate for our awful software." Still terrible, mind you, but I'm not seeing a "cover up."
That’s exactly what a coverup looks like. At that time, they knew they had significant airworthiness issues AND that they had deliberately removed mention of the MCAS system from the training guides in support of their marketing pitch that it’d save the airlines a ton of training costs. Those pilots did what they were trained to do but he lied about it trying to cover up the problems which Boeing had known about years earlier because that would make his company liable.
The awful software they intentionally made not redundant so they wouldn't have to retrain and inform the pilots about it, as it would have then be classified as Security Critical (which it obviously was)?
Also first blaming bad maintenance then poor training, when they knew they fucked up?
Have worked at both, Airbus pays worse but has a much better engineering culture. Also arguably, because of the location(s) the quality of the engineers is quite high despite the pay as they can afford a pretty good lifestyle.
Airbus also functions very much like a quasi governmental institution in many parts, so there's less interest in squeezing everything to death to save money.
Finally, Airbus generally has a KISS mindset, and are very conservative w.r.t change in engineering practice and tooling. When I was there we spent way, way, way, way, way more time testing than writing software - and the software was written in a way that any software engineer could walk off the street and understand it.
Oh, and quite low levels of outsourcing in critical software - they save that for things that don't have people's lives on the line.
HCL was mentioned as a Boeing software outsourcing shop. Not the only India software shop used by Boeing. I recall reading a news story about outsourcing being linked to Boeing sales in India, but there's a pile of news stories about Boeing outsourcing to India, so it's hard to find where and how it started. More recently, Boeing laid off 2000 people in the US and moved those function largely to Tata's BPO. This follows the pattern of how IBM was hollowed-out.
As in understand, German played a minor role in the design in Airbus, for example the flight controls were designed in Toulouse by french engineer.
However they have more responsibility in designing the production system and assembly line. The assembly line in Hamburg is quite unique.
…As a result, this check job that should find minimal defects has in the past 365 calendar days recorded 392 nonconforming findings on 737 mid fuselage door installations
>The Boeing QA writes another record in CMES (again, the correct venue) stating
(with pictures) that Spirit has not actually reworked the discrepant rivets, they just painted over the defects. In Boeing production speak, this is a “process failure”. For an A&P mechanic at an airline, this would be called “federal crime”.
Holy Shit. Whoever is directly and indirectly responsible needs to go to jail. Thats a level of malice which I don't remember eading very often in any kind of news.
A good friend of mine was in QA at Boeing. He turned things away constantly, to a point where he was let go for being too much of a pain in the ass. They’ve been a dumpster fire for a long time.
In theory this is not supposed to happen because the QA organization reports directly to the top of the org chart. This structure was developed after some high profile quality failure episodes in the 1960s (Minuteman?).
Yeah, calling attention to escapes is a good way to be on the short list for the next round of layoffs. So is having a LTD, or being old, or taking maternity/paternity, or taking more than a week of PTO at a time . . but none as sure-fire as flagging nonsense in parts lists.
Merit makes sense when you want to promote hard work, talent, and creativity—and we need all that. Engineering meritocracy is how we build bridges, go to space, and dig under mountains.
Engineering supremacy in that context means that if engineering says no, it’s definite.
What Boeing needs is QA supremacy: nobody wants them to be particularly creative, original, or unusually hard-working when doing audits; they need to be thorough and systematic. We need to make sure that their voice isn’t challenged.
Maybe your view of merit is too narrow, or mine is too broad.
QA supremacy makes sense, but it relies on the merits of QA (that QA are competing to be the best) to avoid false positives/negatives rather than rubber stamping, no?
I'm pushing back a bit on that? QA needs to be challenged, like any part of a company. They also need to have the last word on any decision on stuff that has a potential to ruin lives.
MCAS was designed by engineers in response to a design problem.
The MBAs elected to cover it up from the manual because that would hurt their sales goals of not needing pilot training.
Yes, sales/marketing and management leeches have a lot of control over documentation that leaves the company.
The best part is, it was the leeches that decided to make a fucking indicator light that told you the sensors for MCAS were unhappy, a PAID FUCKING ADDON.
The last CEO was an engineer who got thrown under the bus for the 737 crashes while not being the CEO when it was designed. He was pissing too many leeches off internally so they threw him under the bus.
I know two long time employees of Boeing that left after the last CEO was removed because roughly paraphrasing "Wow, this company is fucked, he was actually trying to fix the company"
Yes. And the design problems was created by MBAs that decided that they want:
1) to keep the new engines that change how the plane flies
2) a convincing lie that passes minimal scrutiny that the plane flies the same - to avoid training pilots to a perfectly good new plane
3) after engineering came with the MCAS solution MBAs drove the cost down and removed redundancy - after all the whole feature was a secret so no one would demand redundancy
> The clearly over complicated door plug system was designed by engineers.
It may be a little early for armchair engineering; we should probably wait for a failure analysis report. But the door plug doesn't seem overly complicated. Put the plug in, bolt it on, tada. Where's the complication? The bolts are supposed to have safety wire to keep them from loosening by vibration.
[1] might explain it, if it were so. But the fault would be of the MBAs...
Anyhow it was a management decision to not tell about the MCAS changes (not to mention what led to requiring it), management kind of does affect the engineering choices, and is it really over complicated to require 4 rivets?
American engineers and technical designers are being laid off by the hundreds while Russian engineers are quietly hired at the Boeing Design Center in Moscow.
There's a reason people don't let the inmates run the asylum.
> Boeing outsources a lot of the production of components for its aircraft because it’s cheaper as part of an overall shift in strategy that dates to CEO Harry Stonecipher who had been CEO of McDonnell Douglas
Outsourcing is not the problem; It is Boeing Management's mindset which seems to have completely given up on Design/QC/QA as it was strictly practiced earlier during its heydays.
That depends. if you look at the history of the 787 project, Boeing way overestimated their suppliers' ability to take on major engineering and manufacturing tasks. But they all signed contracts that said they could. Everyone who has let a contract for outsourced software knows an outsourcing shop would never blow smoke up your ass, right?
For the 787 bad outsourcing cost Boeing literally $10s of billions in overruns and a plane that was initially sold at a loss of tens of millions per unit and is unlikely to ever make development costs back.
That's Harry Stonecipher's legacy. He was going to show those arrogant 777 engineers how it's done when a tough manager takes over.
I think generally vertical integration produces higher quality products. Outsourcing to other firms trying to save money comes with its own hidden cost not part of the price tag.
If the article is accurate, it seems like it's a specific type of outsourcing causing problems here. Namely, that the thing they outsourced wasn't a commodity. Spirit is selling them shit but they have to suck it up and try to patch the things together, because there is no one else to buy from.
Exactly: Spinning off Spirit makes no sense in terms of outsourcing: It was Boeing's own factory that formed the basis of Spirit, which made Spirit a sole-supplier of critical components with exactly zero technical advantage, and exactly zero capacity advantage over doing it in house.
So why do it? It makes return on net assets look better? It makes unions fragmented and weaker? It provides a third party to blame when they shortchange quality? It takes soon-to-be obsolete production capital off the books? But nothing that actually makes anything about making planes better.
I thought the McDonnell Douglas management taking over control (and thus destroying Boeing engineering culture) was the interesting part to point out, not the outsourcing.
I'm not sure that approach to regulation would entail a minor increase in costs. Thorough design review and testing of a complex system is far from cheap and would require a lot of in house expertise and facilities. It would massively increase the scope of agencies like the FDA and FAA.
Why shouldn’t regulatory agencies have expertise in the industries they are intended to regulate? Government by corporation or consultant is not democratic. Without internal knowledge, government will always play the fool because it won’t know any better.
I don't understand why the plug doesn't use pressure as a failsafe. You have high pressure one side, low the other side, and just like normal airline doors the interior pressure makes it impossible to open the door.
That is exactly how it works actually. There are a series of ears around the door, and the pressurization of the cabin forces the door out and against the airplane frame mating ears.
The more it pressurizes, the greater the force jamming the door shut.
However, since it's a door, it has to be able to open. The door is constructed such that if you slide it upwards, the ears clear each other and the door can come out.
There are bolts to physically block the door plug from ever sliding upwards. If the bolts were correctly installed, or ever installed at all, the door would be perfectly safe.
I understand the vulnerability of the slide up thing, but I guess what I didn't explain properly is why doesn't it open by swinging inside instead of upwards? I don't know if I've ever seen a passenger door that slides up, but I haven't flown on all aircraft types.
Adding a hinge there would be extra weight, but probably more importantly, the plug door is convertible to an emergency exit, so you want the hardware to be similar to the emergency exit door. For those, the door comes completely off and you throw it out of the plane when you use it. If the door hinged inward, it would take up a lot of space in the cabin during an evacuation and slow down people trying to get out.
Ultimately it's extremely difficult to make a plane where you can just not install a bunch of bolts and everything still keeps working fine. You have to have a high quality manufacturing operation to make a reliable plane.
Emergency exit doors should open outward, fall outward, etc, otherwise people rushing to get out could pile up and get stuck. True in buildings as well as vehicles. Some Airbus models have a similar upward hinge on at least some exits, I think on many the door fully detaches and you're supposed to chuck it out of the way.
Maybe there should be a rule along the lines of "if there are bolts laying around someplace, and there is no record for them, start re-inspecting until you're damn sure where they came from".
As I suspected the four bolts were not installed at the time of the Alaska Airlines incident, based on this article. From what I had read and watched it seemed impossible for the door to slide upwards if any of the four bolts were installed. And if installed correctly with a castellated nut and cotter pin, seems highly unlikely the bolt could fall out, let alone four bolts.
The NTSB stated that the door did slide upward and also stated they could not find the bolts and were unsure if the bolts were there at all.
If I was the government I'd break up the arms contractor and plane manufacturer as soon as possible and make it possible for everyone in the plane organisation to talk about problems. The culture of secrecy around these issues is a big disaster.
I only want to fly on Airbus and possibly Embraer planes from now on.
I wonder what's happening at Airbus right now? If they're doubling down and empowering on their engineering divisions or if they too focused on cost cutting from engineering and QA and thanking their lucky stars it's not them.
They're popping the champagne at becoming the world's undisputed number one aircraft supplier.
Boeing has crippled themselves in this two-horse race, and both airlines and consumers don't want to fly Boeing aircraft over Airbus. (Airlines because groundings are extraordinarily expensive, Consumers because they care about their safety).
The only saving grace is that the A320 order book is backed up until almost 2030, but I would not be surprised if Airbus try to permanently ramp up production now.
The best thing they could possibly do is just keep their heads down and crank out planes and they'll crush Boeing in all categories smaller than the 787. The 220, the 321 neo, etc are great, just keep on making them.
Important correction, it’s not DD/MM/YYYY, but DD Month YYYY. (At least what I saw in the article)
This format is common in heavily regulated industries and frequently a regulatory requirement since it’s fully unambiguous. I (American) worked in clinical research/pharma for a bit and still write my dates like 23Jan2024.
I like dd MMM YYYY just fine, especially in documentation. But truthfully, I much prefer YYYY-MM-dd.
I know that by using dd MMM YYYY you avoid the ambiguity of dd/MM vs MM/dd, and avoiding the ambiguity is important, but I think most folks know that when the year comes first, then what follows is the month. If someone sees 2024-03-05, I don't think most people wonder Is that March 5th, of May 3rd of 2024? And I like YYYY-MM-dd because it's (a) In alignment with ISO 8601 and (b) sorts so much easier as plaintext.
In documentation, I'll use dd MMM YYYY for signatures and document dates, but for things like big tabular data in the body of a document or in spreadsheets, or logging, or CSV exports, I'll default to YYYY-MM-dd
Aviation, with the annoying exception of feet as unit, largely eradicates such problematic "local standards" from professional usage. At some point you find yourself simply using the "standard" ways even when you don't have to.
Yours sincerely, guilty of using ICAO phonetic alphabet with poor random office workers over the phone.
And some idioms involved in it don't translate easily if you're not conversing in English, for example X-Ray or Yankee.
Still most of it works out so less confusing than if I tried to jury rig something (traditional polish way was to use First Names that use given letter as the first letter, but that doesn't cover X or Y well, either)
mmHg is, due to historical reasons, pretty well distributed, and hPa is also rather widely used. inHg appears to have way less penetration than feets for altitude or feet/minute for vertical speed (way inferior to meter/second IMHO).
US customary units and formats are often used in US homes, but other units and formats are frequently used, particularly in industries that do business internationally. Even the US military actually uses DD/month/YY
> "When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm." - CEO Harry Stonecipher
> "When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it's run like a business rather than a great engineering firm," he said. "It is a great engineering firm, but people invest in a company because they want to make money."
> In a 2019 article, Jerry Useem criticized Boeing's move to Chicago, suggesting that by "isolating" the Boeing management from its engineering and manufacturing staff, the company discounted its former engineering-led corporate culture in favor of a management style run by MBAs instead of engineers.[7]
I hope Boeing's stock tanking will be a strong indicator to the bean counters at Boeing and other engineering firms that you engineering chops do bring value to the business.
Those problems are systemic. It is the whole system called "Boeing" that is now rotten - and the rot can have extended anywhere and everywhere now.
The executive don't care. They earned enough to live rich until the end of their lives. Like locusts, they ate through Boeing's real value (its engineering, its reputation) and can now fly away their bellies full, leaving behind a devastated company.
We want curious conversation here. That certainly means not fulminating, as well as not repeating things.
You're far from the only one, of course; but this comment was heavily upvoted. In fact it was sitting at the top of the thread, emitting fumes. That's not what HN is for.
Boeing's a weapons company that makes airplanes on the side. Commercial airplane revenue is now down to 32% of their total. [1] They've just honed in a bit too much on their primary money maker - killing people.
This kind of degeneracy (normalisation of deviance[0]) is systemic.
Expect problems to crop up in Boeing's weapons too sooner or later. I hope the US air force didn't let Boeing self-certify its products as much as the FAA did.
By law, Boeing must pay the USG for the USG to test and certify equipment produced for the government at one of many test ranges throughout the country. Exactly because companies can't be trusted to meet their contractual obligations. See https://www.test-evaluation.osd.mil for more info.
Same is true of their non-government products; planes have to be inspected and certified by the FAA for the same reason. Unfortunately, regulatory capture is preventing some of the proper checks and balances.
Regulatory capture generally refers to putting up onerous and unnecessary regulations as a moat around a product or service.
I think you're referring to the weakening/dismantling of regulatory requirements and enforcement favored by libertarians.
Please correct me if I've misunderstood.
Edit: Personally I think valid and helpful regulatory frameworks can easily drift into capture territory, so they must be vigilantly maintained. Also to keep incentives in alignment, the regulators shouldn't be able to jump back and forth between industry and regulation. Dismantling them, however, is worse. Like a long standing code base there's a lot of useful but misunderstood parts.
> ...occurs when a political entity, policymaker, or regulator is co-opted to serve the commercial, ideological, or political interests of a minor constituency, such as a particular geographic area, industry, profession, or ideological group.
My description was just more succinct and didn't identify every single entity that could be coopted and every single group that could benefit. Regulatory capture is unnecessary and onerous checks and balances, not the removal of regulatory checks and balances that you implied.
Your descriptions both here and above seem incorrect to me. Regulatory capture does not mean onerous or unnecessary regulations, that is wrong. It also does not necessarily mean less strict regulations either, however Boeing v FAA in 2019 is a well known case of Boeing actively preventing oversight.
Regulatory capture means that the entities being regulated have control over the regulatory process, despite a conflict of interest.
> not the removal of regulatory checks and balances that you implied.
Regulatory Capture is when the checks and balances are biased in favor of special interests. You may have misunderstood what I said.
It’s hard to imagine and hard to find evidence of special interests making their own regulations more onerous, but I invite you to try. There probably are lots of cases of companies making regulations easier on themselves and harder on competitors.
> There probably are lots of cases of companies making regulations easier on themselves and harder on competitors.
And how exactly do you think this is accomplished from the perspective of people outside the captured regulatory system? Ie from the perspective of those not already on the inside of the corrupt regulatory scheme?
From the outside, it’s accomplished via private interests bending the regulations in their favor, which is why we have a term for it: “regulatory capture”.
I’m not sure what your point is. Are you still stuck on the incorrect notion that “regulatory capture” can be summarized as onerous regulation? That simply does not work, but I’m happy to keep trying to explain why, if it’s not clear yet. There are also plenty of cases of regulatory capture dismantling regulations for everyone. Again, the single most relevant case in this thread, of Boeing circa the Lion Air crashes, is one of removing regulation. No regulations were made onerous or unnecessary in that case, it was the opposite of that, the regulation was bypassed for Boeing’s benefit, effectively removing it, and it remained unchanged for other carriers.
When regulatory capture occurs, sometimes regulations get harder, and sometimes they get easier. Whether it’s one or the other depends on the case, and depends on whose perspective it is. Trying to summarize “regulatory capture” as making regulations harder is just false, because that’s not what always happens, and not even what usually happens, and it completely fails to mention the primary relevant point: the special interest getting prioritized over the public interest.
Eh Boeing has been having issues delivering Air Force contracts already. They fucked up QC on KC-46s so bad that the air force was basically getting free planes after fines were levied. The Air Force is different than airlines in the fact they basically tear down the plane after receiving it to inspect it. They found all kinds of shit like fucking wrenches left in the wall.
It's gotten so bad that Boeing announced they will no longer accept fixed price contracts from the military because they are that broken as a company and no longer able to manage anything.
“B company” ;) Similar story: Bombardier trains in Switzerland. The defects required Bombardier to not only fix, but deliver several extra trains for free.
Luckily for them (military) dying of their own is more of a common thing than in passenger traffic. As well as secrecy of troublesome matters (e.g. weaknesses and vulnerability). Business as usual may carry on.
... observing the few downvotes I have the feeling that I offended the sensitive patriotic hearts believing I had negative words on the beloved military. While in fact I had negative words on Boeing management, that they can abuse the inherent nature of military customers further and can carry on building crappy products blaming faults on the risky profession of home protecting soldiers. I felt like I had to clarify this before causing too much damage with my carelessly phrased sentences...
Why tanker specifically? Which specific failiure mode of which specific component in the past was indicator in military use equipment for Boeing's present organizational f ups with the potential of future consequences?
> Boeing's a weapons company that makes airplanes on the side.
I don't think this is an honest assessment. From your own source, Boeing's "Defense, Space, and Security" segment draw 39% of the company's revenue, while it's "Commercial Airplanes" segment accounted for 32% of its revenue.
I don't think that there is a single company on earth that would describe the source of a third of its whole revenue as something they do "on the side". Moreso when the top segment is barely over 5% larger, and is comprised of a coarse agglomeration of activities that may or may not be all related.
But in the top third of the business, you listed Space, and they are not doing well there either. When was Starliner scheduled to launch, and when did it actually? Oh, it hasn't? Hmm...
> Which direction are those figures trending though?
As Boeing's 737 MAX problems started in 2018 and all 737 MAX were grounded in 2019, I'd be surprised if these figures are already reflecting a considerable drop in Boeing's revenue from commercial planes.
If you think the problem is the revenue, then you're part of the problem that Boeing has. Boeing's problem is they put the revenue people in charge and diminished the role of the engineering.
> I’m no fan of Boeing, but they’ve been focusing on the military for a very long time.
But it feels like they aren't succeeding. Didn't Boeing lose out on all the advanced fighter competitions to Lockheed, so all their fighters are last generation and headed for obsolescence? I'm also under the impression that the ULA is losing to SpaceX pretty badly (but maybe the government is pumping money into it for reasons, I don't really follow too closely).
I also don’t follow that stuff too closely, but yeah, those examples are exactly why Boeing doesn’t stop making commercial airplanes and completely pivot to defense contracting.
You _can_ make money hand over fist working with the US military, but winning giant money printing contracts is easier said than done. It’s a super volatile industry that Boeing unsurprisingly limits their exposure to.
Discussing anything related to the US military on HN can be frustrating, and the recent surge of “Boeing only really cares about their cash cow, defense” comments is no different.
Article says it's comprised of "supply chain and logistics management, engineering, maintenance and modifications, upgrades and conversions, spare parts, pilot and maintenance training systems and services, data analytics, and digital services."
I don't fully understand the breakdown, looks like they're doing some finance BS to push costs into the commercial and military segments (which report losses) and list global services as pure profit for some MBA reason. How else does the segment grow 180% year-over-year?
BGS is a combination of relatively random acquisitions, such as Aviall (aircraft parts and consumables wholesale) and Jeppesen (charts and training materials). Some military contracts in there, but mostly commercial.
> Like locusts, they ate through Boeing's real value (its engineering, its reputation) and can now fly away their bellies full, leaving behind a devastated company.
What's that joke about Software Managers being told to imagine they're on a plane on the ground and then asked if they would remain knowing their teams developed the plane software...
I heard it as an engineering class is on a plane and the pilot announces that the plane they're flying is one designed by the class. All the students run in terror, but the professor stays on the plane. The flight attendant asks, "you have a lot of confidence in your students, don't you?" He says, "no, I know my students, this thing will never get off the ground."
My understanding is that prior to the 70s most CEOs were effectively ceo for life. They were strongly incentivized to preserve the business, even if that meant keeping it at a low/no growth state.
When the MBA and Private Equity craze kicked in, we had golden parachutes and other instruments which pushed companies into growth mode.
It is not immediately clear to me that incentivizing short term growth is a wise business strategy for the long term.
"When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm."
Yes, because I'd rather fly in a plane made by a "business" rather than "a great engineering firm." Why in the f*ck isn't this scumbag in prison? When you take a firm that produces a product that must ensure the safety of its users because the consequences are dire and you purposely subvert that, and then people die, you need a long stint of FPMIA prison. Also, cheated on his wife in their Golden Anniversary year. Lowest of the low.
Because we don't actually believe in holding rich people accountable in America. Wage theft is worse than retail theft, private equity and drug company CEOs kill more people than gang violence. We need to take money/power from rich people much more aggressively.
Also while I have some reservations about the expectation of rape as something we joke about, I do love Office Space.
One of my managers once said “No one ever got fired for following McKinsey advice” and I’m not sure that it has the positive implications he meant it with at the time.
This comment was interesting until it's weirdly specific anti-executive rant at the end. Is there a specific executive you'd like to name? Do non-executives care more or do they also have full bellies?
On average, executive priorities are different from non-executives.
If one hires a plane engineer, one’s filter will be: person who is capable and motivated to engineer a plane.
If one hires an executive, return on investment is the metric in focus.
So it is safe to say that, on average, non-executives will care slightly more about the safety of the plane. (please notice words “on average” and “slightly”).
Since we are spitballing without any statistics, I could take the position that the underpaid (and presumably empty bellied) engineer has little motivation to do excellent work or, indeed, any work at all. The executive needs to focus on producing good products since they sell better.
But I won't take that position since making up hypothetical arguments isn't a good use of anybody's time.
Well if we're spitballing, I think a business savvy executive would see a great opportunity cashing in on the good name Boeing built when it was run by engineers. The product will continue to sell for years even as they cut costs, cut corners, and extract as much wealth out of the organization as they can.
Said another way, vampires sucking out the blood and leaving an exsanguinated corpse behind.
Worth noticing - most of the decisions in the world are made without statistics gathered by independent auditors, but by using the information and experience that’s available. (My point here: its correct to reject idea, because you have statistics, but dismissing a line of thinking because of lack of statistics is the best kind of correct - “technically correct”)
> the underpaid (and presumably empty bellied) engineer has little motivation
Usually, salary budget is controlled by executives..
In case Boeing accidentally left a wrench inside a plane, the last person touching it was technician (and firing possibly is in order), but responsibility for deaths falls on organisation and those who control and shape it.
I honestly think (and am annoyed somewhat) that asking for statistics/study (popular on HN), or citation (even more popular on wikipedia), became convenient way to shut down discussion or dismiss opposing viewpoint.
Hypothetical example with a bit of exaggeration that illustrates what I observe frequently: personA:“people go to work in the morning”, personB: “study/citation needed”
Your example would be a great one for a statistic. The one I was replying to created a whole straw man argument using words such as "will be" and "on average" implying knowledge.
Using phrases such as "I honestly think" are to engage in discourse as it invites discussion rather than presenting opinion as fact and leading to a request to back it up. The whole thread created a straw man caricature like out of the 1920's adding no value to the discussion.
> Thatcher eliminated all this feather bedding and the UK was better for it.
You might want to catch up on the last few decades of UK history. To say it's unraveling would be generous. The once mighty British navy can hardly even build working ships anymore.
There was a BBC special on the Titan submarine before it imploded, and on one of the dives with the camera crew, it got stuck going in circles on the sea floor because the direction buttons on the gamepad used to steer it were incorrectly mapped.
We have a very progressive shipbuilding industry. They are overturning the timeless tradition that the honour of sinking ships should belong only to the enemy.
I don't know the specifics in the UK, but in the US this was a common belief among a certain political class in the 1960s and 70s. You had skilled blue collar laborers making the equivalent of $30/hr and politicians and some economists felt that was too high. Paul Volcker very famously carried around a card with US autoworker wages printed on it.
I expect cleaning aircraft factories requires more training and care than cleaning typical industrial facilities. They have to be trained in avoiding foreign object damage, for example. And aircraft assembly has a lot of vertical dimension, so they probably sometimes work on scaffolds with fall arrest harnesses. You can’t just hire the cheapest for that.
Dude, Thatcher was more the kind of person to be on the side of the locust executives that tank a company to cushion their short-term bonuses than on the side of actual workers...
Most of the predicament of Boeing is due to the same kind of anti-worker philosophy (nasty cost-cutting, lowering quality, anti-union, moving headquarters away) that Thatcher championed. The UK may have gotten rid of degenerated featherbedded companies, but they only destroyed it, and never rebuilt any excellence.
no need for the death penalty. Life imprisonment without parole will do just as well. It doesn't even seem unlikely to me that lines could be drawn for manslaughter (of course expensive lawyers would find ways to muddy the water but lets be real, our society relies on the fact that the buck stops at the top. Where else could it?)
You posted 24 times about this in this thread. That's excessive.
Once or twice might have been ok, although it's already a flamewar tangent. But please don't go overboard. HN is supposed to be for intellectual curiosity, not culture war.
It's an ideological battle topic of the sort that leads to repetitive discussion and usually nasty flamewar. That's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
I think it's an important topic that has an empirical, objective answer. We just don't yet know and agree on what that answer is, but it's not a matter of mere opinion. I agree that flame wars are bad, but civilized discussion is also possible.
Maybe, but you can say that about most politicized questions, so from a practical moderation point of view in the short term, it doesn't change the outcome.
Sorry, I've lost the thread here. The Apple/EU/appstore story is on topic for HN and I don't think there have been tons of duplicates on the front page.
Taking a thread into an offtopic flamewar tangent about DEI is, from my perspective, a different question altogether.
I read the “evidence”. Executives get bonuses based on hitting certain targets. Those targets now include DEI, IN ADDITION TO safety and quality which are still listed first.
Furthermore, the evidence comes from a guy on Twitter who is primarily concerned with raging against “Leftists”.
> I read the “evidence”. Executives get bonuses based on hitting certain targets. Those targets now include DEI, IN ADDITION TO safety and quality which are still listed first.
Still, making DEI any priority implies that there will be some tradeoff. You can't simultaneously optimize for two different quantities without compromises. As a the thread shows, DEI has a significant effect on hiring.
> Furthermore, the evidence comes from a guy
That doesn't matter when the information is accurate.
It does matter who it comes from because what someone doesn’t say is as useful as what they do say. If his critique of Boeing was more than just “DEI bad” I would be more inclined to take him seriously, but the dude clearly has an agenda and those with agendas tend to omit more information than they communicate
That's not a good counterargument! There is a clear reason why DEI hiring is bad: It comes at the cost of merit based hiring. That can't be simply dismissed with DH1 [1].
In the first two cases as well, because if you take more time and invest more money for search, in expectation you find more qualified people without optimizing for the DEI tradeoff. We can't compare "DEI + more search" with "no DEI". We have to hold the amount of search constant for an objective comparison.
The comparison is simple: given that you want to hire a fixed number of people and you don’t want to lower the bar (hire based on merit), you can either not invest in DEI or spend extra time/money on getting diverse hires without lowering the bar.
Disagree. You’re assuming that the quality of hires is limitless. In practice it doesn’t work like that. Unless you have a good reason to want the next Einstein or even Jeff Dean, you can hire a more that good enough person with limited time and resources and even a diverse and good enough person if you throw in some extra time and/or resources.
The assumption is that more competent hires do a better job on average. Aerospace is not an easy field, but even in much more simple jobs competence matters.
Yes, more competent hires do a better job. But there is a limit to how much competence you can hire per person. That means there is a limit - or at least severe diminishing returns - to how much more competence money will buy you.
That means you can opt to spend that money on DEI without losing out on competence
What limit? If you optimize for DEI your hires will be less competent on average. Possibly substantially less competent. The difference can mean the difference between life and death.
You’re assuming I agree that all ad hominem arguments are bad. You cannot separate a person, where their beliefs have no sway over their arguments and they are perfectly logical. That’s like physics 101, imagine a perfect sphere kind of thing. I cannot take an argument in good faith when the person is presenting it in bad faith - even if I agree with it (which I sort of do, I think DEI stuff is mostly worthless, I just don’t think it’s why Boeing sucks).
The accusation of "bad faith" is either unsubstantiated or irrelevant or both. It's basically saying "I don't like your arguments, therefore I'm allowed to dismiss them by declaring them to be 'bad faith' arguments."
That neither shows that the "bad faith" accusation is justified nor that the arguments in question are wrong. It's not a counterargument. It's just a mixture of ad hominem and mere contradiction.
To reiterate: "There is a clear reason why DEI hiring is bad: It comes at the cost of merit based hiring." That's the argument. The "bad faith" stuff is irrelevant.
Yes I have. He is clearly against DEI and his entire post was about how DEI is bad and why things are bad. He is ignoring any of the other myriad things that could also be the causes of why Boeing sucks, even though he must be aware of them.
Yes, he is against DEI because he thinks there is evidence DEI is bad. That has nothing to do with bad faith.
And other people here in other threads are also ignoring alternative theories about what went wrong at Boeing, including the DEI theory. Yet you aren't holding that against them, aren't you?
DEI has been identified as a 'wedge issue' which means that it can be used to polarize discussions and to divide voters into 'left' and 'right' with the bulk of the 'reliable voters' to move to the 'right' of that issue. As such you can expect a lot of noise around this around election time. Please don't amplify the noise.
Have you read the entire thread? Do you think one can simultaneously optimize for merit and diversity without making compromises? In other words, do you think merit and diversity are perfectly correlated?
I did, and the writer has a clear and obvious bias against DEI. I personally am not in favor of much DEI stuff too, but I have worked at enough large bureaucracy type businesses that are all about it and it is 90% meaningless HR busy work. I don’t think they are “optimizing” for DEI, they are optimizing for maximum profits and that is the problem. DEI is something they are saying they are doing to appease cultural trends. They are clearly not optimizing for merit, even from before all this DEI stuff started. They are optimizing for extracting as much money as they can and that means cutting costs wherever they think will yield a higher profit margin. DEI shit is just a distraction, to appease those on the cultural lip-service left, and to inflame those on the right.
The thread above contains clear evidence that they in fact do optimize for DEI. Even if they weren't exactly merit-based before, that only makes things worse.
Ok but also, who cares? It is almost assuredly not the reason they are having these issues. I don’t know why you have this crusade against DEI stuff. I also think it’s lame, but the problems with Boeing are more likely that they are run by people who feel the need to make every single dollar they can and will cut costs wherever they need to do that. DEI is a screen they can hide behind.
I think it's quite possible, though by no means certain, DEI is a main reason they are having these issues. See the last post in the Twitter thread about their supplier Spirit Aerosystems.
The argument about cost cutting sounds less convincing to me. Compromising on critical safety will only save cost in the short term. But both Boeing and their suppliers have more incentive to optimize long term cost. They are not in this business for a short period of time.
Maybe in the sense of how considerable amount of such efforts is a fig leaf to distract any complaints about systematic issues, helping turn away people with complaints by making them jump through ineffectual supposed "help" programs.
On my list of symptoms, it's way below things like moving the HQ away from engineering and close to financial centres.
I see a clear possible mechanism from low-skilled DEI hiring to quality issues, but where is the mechanism in case of "corporate culture"? Quality problems aren't good for business!
I think people like the corporate culture theory more because it is less controversial. After all, nobody likes those greedy capitalists anyway. They are the most convenient scapegoat. Pointing out problems with DEI, on the other hand, makes you seem like a Bad Person who is possibly racist, i.e. evil. But facts are what they are, they don't care about whether we call them evil.
> but where is the mechanism in case of "corporate culture"? Quality problems aren't good for business!
Pilots not needing retraining is good for business.
Getting lawmakers to give you an easy time, and give your competitors a hard time, is good for business.
Getting the product out on time and on budget is good for business.
Simplifying things so you can use low-skill labour instead of expensive highly skilled labour is good for business.
Getting your grounded planes given the OK by regulators ASAP is good for business.
Getting the widget install guy to install 50% more widgets per shift is good for business.
Getting rid of that expensive, middle-aged, unionised widget installer and replacing them with a cheaper, younger, non-unionised widget installer is good for business.
Dealing with defect reports efficiently and not holding up deliveries to customers is good for business.
Avoiding costs and delays caused by excessive perfectionism where it isn't warranted is good for business.
Promoting people who deliver business value - i.e. increased revenue or lower costs - and putting them in charge of important projects is good for business.
Making a good profit margin is good for business.
Paying out to investors consistently in dividends/stock buy-backs is good for business.
Being cheap on quality is only good for business in the short term, but bad for business overall. People are assuming the greedy capitalists sacrifice their capitalism for short term planning. I don't see evidence that this is true.
Then, to quote a certain overly popular series, You know nothing, cubefox.
Hell, ex-McDonnel-Douglas engineer at Boeing explicitly called out financial "engineering" that looks good on stock market but doesn't work well long term with explicit example of DC-10.
This horrifyingly played out with 787 (which also had design issues, some that FAA smacked them about - fortunately as a new plane and one of the first with AFDX in US market, FAA could assign enough people to checking twice what Boeing did). A lot of the subcontractors were companies that used to be part of Boeing - but which now could be squeezed for cheaper prices.
And the thing you're missing is that the capitalist aren't sacrificing their capital if they can cash out the gains - for example thanks to only playing on the stock market and pushing publicly traded companies towards practices that enable better returns for them. While Boeing managed to keep considerable amount of shares under corporate ownership, it's less than enough to veto anything.
And Vanguard (biggest individual owner of Boeing stock) or any other big fund thanks to stock market can get benefits from short-term planning and get positive returns. In fact, it's arguably beneficial to not hold out too long and always be ready to cash out.
And the same kind of thinking led to a lot of cutting at IBM (the principal guideline was EPS value) and Digital in 1990s (where many units were sold off despite turning profit or being profit-drivers for other units).
I don't see why this would bias people towards short term benefits rather than medium and long term benefits. E.g. why investment funds wouldn't optimize for the latter rather than the former.
Mobility of capital coupled with no liability for shareholders means that many short-term plays can be theoretically more profitable (in fact, in face of lack of profit-sharing schemes etc, trading stock is going to be main source of profit), and decouple you even further from possible risks.
This is the basis of how considerable portion of financial markets operate, with total reduction to "game of numbers" being the ultimate form of capitalism - i.e. capital making more capital.
Maybe they aren't greedy after all? People live long. If a CEO ruinw a company with short term mismanagement, they do ruin their reputation. It's not like politicians who are often elected just once and only for a few years.
Ruining a company does not necessarily mean they failed the goals placed in front of them, especially in a cult of "shareholder value maximization" that makes people think it's a fiduciary duty to take shareholder value as primary goal.
Multiplying shareholder capital through short-term dismantling of existing businesses while ensuring the shareholder do not have negative effects from it is very much a rewarded operation.
The thing is, there's explicit regulations and playbooks which let you easily drive a quality control organization in airplane (or parts) manufacturing, maintenance, repair, and operations.
You're not going to look evil for firing someone who undercuts FAA regs on quality. Those same regs also do not care about how an applicant looks other than being able to do the job mentally and physically (I'd argue you could slip a non-human being into some roles if you could prove they can follow the regs!)
And FWIW, there is rather simple causal relationship between cost cutting and benefits for the top managers. And quality controls cost money. So does corporate culture that rewards quality.
Believe me, DEI or no DEI, every regulatory body in the world would stand up and support you if you show that someone didn't get a job or lost a job because they couldn't ensure the required quality is kept.
Especially when you consider that this is yet another SNAFU at Boeing involving quality, design, or actual production - and sometimes other companies dealing with the same supplier (Spirit) do not have the same issues. Despite sometimes having even more "social responsibility" rules over them (compared to, let's say Germany, DEI pushes in USA have no teeth)
Regulations do not fully determine safety. The best regulations are not enough when your workforce contain a lot of low-skilled diversity hires. Ironically the FAA itself employes DEI since 2013:
Ironically, the push for deregulation that twice had led to deadly accidents involving US-made planes, always came as policy decision from a Republican president - first Nixon, later Bush Jr.
And the regulation mean that Boeing can loose even the ability to sell what they have if they do not maintain quality as necessary.
And what, if not engagement in tribalism, is focusing on "DEI efforts" when we have explicit data that increased delegation of certification to vendors and related changes were official policy of specific US president?
Just like Turkish Airlines Flight 981 was indirectly, but very very strongly, related to policy set by another american president - it just happened that TAF 981 managed to crash before the president who set that policy left the office.
