Future of what? Reliable mass public transport is the best option for a sustainable future. We don't need car centric suburbia but with heavier and more expensive cars.
Even if the US and other car-centric countries started a serious effort on that today, it would take decades. During which people continue to use gasoline cars, and emitting more CO2 we will need to undo in the future. Electric cars make sense right now regardless of your perspective on trains (I like trains, and dislike cars, and I am sympathetic)
I absolutely am on board with the idea... but reliable mass public transport requires an entire country of cities to be redesigned (this is in a country that struggles to get zoning laws changed to move from single to multi-family housing in many places), we'll have self-driving cars first.
Hell, I think we'd get flying cars first. It's nearly impossible to touch anything that requires modifying suburbs or their streets, politically.
We already have car centric suburbia and its going to take decades to change that. We might as well switch to electric cars which are quieter and produce less air pollution rather than wait for thousands of homes to be rebuilt.
except that mass public transportation is never going to happen on the needed scale in the US; electric cars is the next best thing and much preferable to the current status quo
you don't even need to agree on 'never' as 'not in the next 25 years' and 'never' both look the same for the timeframe we have to decarbonize personal transportation.
whether we have a world of 3 billion cars (doubling) or a world of 750 million cars (halving) in 2050, they all need to be electric.
Engineers designed and built that plane. The plane is fundamentally flawed. The engineer in charge absolutely deserves to be let go. Frankly, it should have happened after the first 2 crashes made it clear that there were problems with the plane. And they shouldn't stop there.
The problems almost certainly go deeper than engineering. It sounds like there's pressure to cut costs. Still, an engineer has a responsibility to design and build a safe airplane. If the budget prevents that, it's still the engineers' responsibility to make sure that whatever plane they can build is safe or they shouldn't build it. It's a total cop out to put it all on the MBA's when it's layer upon layer of failures that result in a plane as bad as the 737 MAX. Engineers in commercial aviation shouldn't ever be afforded the luxury of pointing the finger at their bosses. Their job above all others is to protect lives by building a good airplane.
This is not how companies work. Engineers at Boeing didn't have a design labeled "not-good-enough-but-cheap" and another labelled "more-skookum-but-is-expensive" and because they were bad engineers decided to go with the cheap one. It's a systemic issue due to cost cutting by, you guessed it, people MBA's.
No engineer, if given the choice, would have re-used the old plane design instead of designing a fully new, modern plane, that was an MBA trying to cut costs.
No engineer, if given the choice, would have put the plane through as little testing as they did or sold it as not requiring much training for pilots, that was an MBA trying to cut costs.
No engineer, if given the choice, would have separated the manufacturing facility out of Boeing, that was an MBA trying to cut costs.
These are decisions that were pushed by higher ups (with MBAs) that engineers have to live with. They aren't "wrong" decisions, there is nothing in them an engineer could look at and say "this will, 100% cause a failure down the road and I demand we not do this". What they are is steps in the wrong direction, steps away from the "best" decision that could have made from a safety and quality standpoint. Take enough and eventually they add up into what happened.
I think the best way I can put it is if, as an engineering org that deals with real world things, you aren't pushing towards best practices, higher standards, and technical excellence than you are either stagnating or declining. In either case your quality will decline without anyone doing anything "wrong" as you end up with people with increasingly less experience and resources being asked to do more work. And the worst part is you can get away with that and often companies do. But if you go to far eventually you cross a threshold where cumulative effects push you over the boundary of failure.
And no engineer would have gone with only two AoA sensors.
And no engineer would have made the computer ignore one of those two AoA sensors because two isn't enough and now you have a dilemma of which to trust.
And no engineer would have cooked up the cockamamie idea of hiding the new CAS scheme so that they could claim that the new plane was the same type as the previous plane.
And no engineer would have insisted that the new plane was the same type as the previous plane.
And no engineer would have threatened the U.S. Congress with canceling the whole program if they don't get the waivers needed to get the plane flying.
Yet, the engineers did go with two AoA sensors. The MBA’s aren’t putting the planes together. Ultimately, it’s engineers who build the planes within the budget and parameters set by the bean counters. Somebody decided 2 AoA sensors were good enough and the engineers built it that way, presumably giving the ok to use just 2 sensors or they would have cut some other corner instead.
There’s plenty of blame to go around and many people deserve to be fired, but this notion that the engineers should get a free pass because an MBA told them to do it is absurd. Obviously, it was engineers giving assurances they could, in fact, build a safe airplane per requirements. It’s silly to think management would go through with building a plane if the engineers had told them in no uncertain terms that it had fundamental flaws. It’s a big fat fail all around.
But it wasn't an engineer, nor any one person, that made all the decisions that lead to this failure. It was company culture, driven from the top down, to cut costs. Who is accountable for that?
Who is at fault if a cars brakes fail? The mechanic that installed them wrong? Or the boss that overworked them, expected them to get more brakes installed for less money every year, didn't give them the proper training to learn how to install the brakes, and hired that mechanic after firing the senior one with more experience because the new mechanic was cheaper?
If the engineer doesn't remove the 3rd sensor to match cost expectations of the bean counter, then the bean counter can always find another engineer, fresh out of school, afraid for his job and CV, with no real-world experience, that WILL remove that 3rd sensor if someone yells at him/her or is offered a promotion for his/her "achievements". This new engineer will also cost less to hire than the old experienced engineer.
Yes. But a company with good engineering culture will also have review schemes that the bean counter can't get around without having to remove all the "troublesome" senior engineers who do the reviews.
> The engineer in charge absolutely deserves to be let go. Frankly, it should have happened after the first 2 crashes made it clear that there were problems with the plane. And they shouldn't stop there.
This engineer guy was the one that took over after they fired the last one after the 2 crashes...
No, that's a meme. Clearly the problem with the door plug was a production process problem. They engineered a bad process[1] and it led to a failure. Was that due to pressure or interference from someone on the "MBA side"? Well, maybe? But that needs evidence before you can make a statement like you did, and so far we don't have it.
[1] Seems like consensus at this point is that the repair/rework review process had a hole contractors/suppliers could use to skip reviews by changing a category. Again, that might be done for "MBA" reasons but if the process allowed it it's still a bug in the process.
Steps in the right direction, let's get rid of more engineers and replace them with more MBAs.
> However, a person familiar with the decision and who asked not to be identified commenting on sensitive personnel decisions, confirmed that Clark’s leaving was not voluntary.
> Clark is an engineer. His successor Ringgold has business degrees. However she began her aviation career performing avionics systems maintenance and troubleshooting on C-130 aircraft in the United States Air Force.
While many here won't disagree in general, be wary of holding this sentiment as dogma. There can be bad apples in engineering, and MBAs who can see that whether or not they have the knowledge or experience to make it better themselves. Whether or not they can (or want to) make the next step of hiring better or more honest engineers is what matters then.
Sometimes (as rare as you expect, likely) an MBA has the tooling to fight back against the standard business pressures to cut costs, whereas an engineer is basically defenseless.
That's a funny way of spelling "Self-entitled jackass, who would spit on his own mother for a nickel", but I'll accept it.
Edit: I guess the DVs are just ignorant idiots. here is just one example of how stellar of a guy ole Jack was:
Under Welch's leadership, GE waged a twenty-year battle with the Environmental Protection Agency and New York State over polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) that the company dumped into the Hudson River at its capacitor products division plant in Hudson Falls, New York.
The person you are quoting did not express approval of Jack Welch. You are being downvoted for being unnecessarily argumentative and inflamatory, not for being wrong.
I disagree, learning how bad certain business people are is useful for society. Jack Welch ruined the lives of many families and played an explicit role in giving people cancer by dumping waste into public spaces.
And the OP wasn't contributing to the truth about Jack Welch by simply skipping past what a jackass he was. He was technically an engineer, and spent 30+ years ignoring engineering, integrity and common sense, for the sake of profits. That's faux engineer, at best.
Every single time assholes are mentioned, their assholery should be mentioned too. Let's not rewrite history for those unaware of how these "people" acted.
By your logic, the only thing that should be mentioned about Pol Pot is that he was a leader of Cambodia at one point.
Yes but Boeing needs to send a message. A message that they understood how they failed, a message that they apologize, a message that they can be redeemed.
Sometimes, it’s about PR.
And culture, they haven’t changed. Boeing is still firing engineers, appointing MBAs, getting paid by politicians, and hiring on the revolving doors of local prisons. I wouldn’t even trust a burger flipped by this bunch. Boeing factories also need to move to other states before we trust them again.
I've mentioned it somewhere else, and maybe I've just been really unlucky with my experiences in industry but I'm at the point where I feel like someone with an MBA or finance background should start any new company (regardless of previous experience) by sitting in the janitor's closet for a month. If the janitor says they're ok, the MBA can start following the janitor around at a distance of 10 feet. If they don't screw anything up, they're allowed to ask one question a day of said janitor. So on and so forth. I estimate 10-15 years of persistence before the MBA/finance can be in a position to make minor decisions
This is the completely and utterly insufferable mindset that one gets when they spend too much time around other engineers and actually begins to buy into the completely fabricated self-important narrative that they are God’s gift to the world. It s a profession! Pull your head in. I’m not sure what sort of highschool bully trauma you’re trying to make up for, but being a bully yourself isn’t the answer. Interest rate rises couldn’t come soon enough, because there’s obviously at least one generation of techies that have been tricked into thinking that ‘finance’ starts and ends with “take a bunch of dumb VC money, build a completely unsustainable business, and change jobs every 18 months”.
I’m not for one second saying that Boeing hasn’t been seriously mismanaged. The whole debacle has just inexplicably been some sort of lightning rod for people that want to flex their self-identified nerd cred by saying “ENGINEER GOOD BUSINESS BAD!”
I don't think you're being all that fair here. I have no idea whether she's going to do a good job or not, but there's more to a person than the degree they got. Former military getting business degrees is pretty common and often the only reason is they were the most likely program to offer distance learning and night class options back in 2001. I'll say, as an engineer with a CS degree who is also a former commissioned officer, former military can be hit and miss, but in many ways I'd be more confident going with prior enlisted who got a degree via the GI Bill than other commissioned officers. There can be a tendency with the way we get trained in the military to become serious yes men. You never say no to a commander and you always attempt to accomplish any mission without question, no matter how ludicrous or impossible it is. That makes sense in wartime but not in business and many do not understand that or know how to turn off that attitude.
Prior enlisted, however, are usually not that fanatical about pleasing superiors. Their rating and promotion process is a lot saner and they tend to be more aligned and care more about the career field they were in. In her case, you can see this involved ensuring and maintaining the quality of aircraft comms and nav systems. That's probably not a bad place to come from. I was a tank commander back in the day myself, and I can say there was nobody who cared more that the tanks were reliable and safe than the career enlisted tank crewmen and tank mechanics. I would trust them with my life way before I would trust a career engineer who had never served on or with a crew.
From personal experience, once engineers go the MBA route they tend to lose their technical edge and get sucked into the vortex of the MBA universe. It's like some strange indoctrination process.
It makes sense. Engineers who get MBAs (or any second degree) usually do it early in their careers, so it's not like they have deep experiences to anchor them after they switch career path.
Absolutely, but systemically, that's not been their problem. Too many MBAs are making decisions without Engineering involvement. I know because my industry works the exact same way le rage
this is because shareholders (pension and investment fund managers) are all MBAs and they demand results a-la "quick wins" that forces management into short-term thinking, cutting corners and cutting costs
I suspect that it can also be likened to "when the only tool you have is a hammer...". An MBA will see a product with flagging sales and solve it by cutting people, products and costs to improve the numbers. An engineer will see that same problem as requiring changes to the product, or developing a new one.
The MO of ‘business people’ isn’t inherently ‘quick wins, bleed the company dry’. I have absolutely no idea why techies can be so precious about every problem in their profession actually being a ‘systems problem’ yet are so quick to personally blame each and every person in another profession based on some ‘YouTube video essay’-level understanding of the context.
As usual, it IS a system’s issue. It’s an incentive issue. If the people that made decisions were incentivised to prioritise long-term stability and performance, they would. They aren’t, and the reason they aren’t isn’t solved with a swift “get rid of them all”. You think that these big scary business people you demonise don’t themselves have KPIs? The pressure of corporate America, of short-term returns, is still going to be there. Have you seen how drastically the average shareholding lifespan has dropped over the last 10 years? Businesses are just operating in more of an environment where long-term stability and even growth don’t matter.
Boeing is such an easy target. It’s very easy to just lazily say “Boeing is rotten!” and leave it at that, because then you get to pretend that the solution is easier than it is. Whilst there are definitely Boeing-specific circumstances that heavily heavily contribute, the reality is that Boeing has had few chances to ‘innovate’ in recent memory, especially with its new makeup. This is just what it looks like when they do. The reality is that this is merely a reflection of how the wider world works. And that’s the thing with systems problems. It’s intellectually dishonest to just sit back and “blame MBAs”. These sorts of problems fester in the wiring and the mechanics, with unpredictable consequences that are almost impossible to reverse by the time they’re realised.
The wheels were set in motion before the Boeing merger. It wasn’t a trigger, it was a consequence. Similarly, some “MBAs” making decisions, either with Boeing or investors, were themselves not the trigger. Fate had already been decided several layers up the stack when personal and organisational incentives were set as they are in the first place.
It was at this point, that I knew you had no idea what you were talking about.
>The MO of ‘business people’ isn’t inherently ‘quick wins, bleed the company dry’.
It absolutely is the model, because humans gotta human.
I assure you that Engineers with knowledge of the products are rarely included in steering meetings, and when they are, they are window dressing.
I know this because I'm an expert in my field and over 3+ decades, this is pretty much exactly how technical people get handled when it comes to meetings and decisions.
Guess who occupies most of the C-suite. Do you think it's engineers? No, its MBAs.
MBAs are NOT the source of all things bad, but lets not break our arms jerking them off over the "great work" they've done.
Well in the 737 MAX case here it is. There are multiple engineering failures, and regardless the management pressures there are specific engineers who implemented them and who signed them off.
We can consider 3 common ways this could have happened.
1. Engineering incompetence.
2. Mgmt pressure.
3. Engineering failure. As in legitimately attempted, but missed the mark.
Considering how this company has operated, for decades, it's fairly simple to point to Option 2 as the most likely culprit. Option 1 is possible, but unlikely, since there are a number of engineers involved. Option 3 is also possible and could still be the issue, but if we were betting, it would be option 2, because they've already proven, that's who they are.
Looks like MBAs doing a CYA and throwing the Engs under the bus.
Why did this action take _this_ long for this to happen? To me it says they were burying their heads in the sand hoping things would blow over.
I'll believe Boeing if they turn a new leaf and prioritize engineering over marketing and being number one in aircraft deliveries in the short-term at the cost of long-term viability.
I know that there was a Boeing sub with a doc repository
whose internal address was "TheBlameThrower". It had the explicit purpose of nailing specific people for saying specific things. So throwing people under transmissions is something of a company sport, with points awarded for distance and style.
Mmmmm, there was a delicious "Under-Bus-Throw Contest" in the wake of the MCAS fiasco, centered around their chief technical test pilot, Mark Forkner.
Keep in mind that half of this is anecdotal, but the sequence of events was something like this. Crap goes down, Forkner gets canned. He leaks documents, and wow, that was super bad. Now something curious happens, more docs get leaked - from <s>who knows where</s> - showing that Forkner was a bit of a burnt out cynical a-hole[1]. Now, imagine those chats going to the media - it would make that person seem like the real villain, yes? The DOJ thought so too, so the leak brought criminal fraud charges on Forkner. After that, even worse documents were leaked - probably from Forkner or his attorney's people - and the charges get walked back, because it's insanely obvious that whatever fraud he might have been committing was done at the behest of his masters. A colossal cock up, part of the bigger cock up that was the PR blitz following the MCAS crashes, which was itself a subset of the Ubersturmbanfuhrer Cockup of the MCAS fiasco. It's cockups all the way up.
In this tit for tat, the only one with the bomb craters showing was Boeing's rep, because, let's be honest here, at the end of the day even if Forkner was a horrible asshole he was still Boeing's representative to the goddamn flying world.
Terribly calculated, terribly executed, terrible results. A masterclass in how not to do public relations and, failing that, dirty tricks campaigns.
[1] You know the type. The guy who always ends each IM with some quip about what crap your company is making and how he feels like a con artist. His soul, hollow and shrivelled from all the sucking sounds, tends to kick cats and hiss at dogs. Leak that to the media, see who the villain is now.
I see a lot of comments trying to pin point the problem with a name. People: if in an airplane some pieces are taken off, they have to be labeled. In fact anything entering or leaving the airplane has to be noted, juat like in an op-room, to avoid for example forgetting tools (or loose bolts) somewhere. That is basic ABC 101 of working in an airplane.
Why this happened? Massive cost cuts ordered by management, which led to cut corners, or cut trainings, or both. If ing. Or MBA is irrelevant.
If I have to guess, I would point to an MBA
This was actually a QA problem — a set of design issues starting at the front of the process. All QC can do is identify problems after they have occurred.
As the saying goes, “you can’t test quality into a product.”
I guess I am a bit confused. Someone was supposed to be checking the bolts before the plane left the facility and they didn't. That seems to be a QC process issue more than a QA issue.
But that also seems like splitting hairs. The problem is not one of engineering design, to OP's post.
I disagree somewhat. It should not be possible for a plane to leave the factory without completing all QC checks. People are fallible, so a robust process is critical, and designing/confirming a robust QC process is a QA responsibility.
Sure, but "did the plane leave with all of the bolts it was supposed to" does not seem like a question that needs to be answered by someone with mechanical engineering degree. Let alone the responsibility of someone sitting in a cubicle in Everett.
How do we know that it was just 'someone was supposed to be checking the bolts before the plane left the facility and they didn't'. Because I'm not sure it's actually been fully revealed where the problem was. And despite the production issues, I'm of the opinion that the door-plug design should have been fail safe like the other doors where just pressure prevents them from being opened during flight. And another thing, passing the buck to QA doesn't let engineering off the hook since QC in this setting is a part of the engineering!
The person you're replying to was being sarcastic. But -- to be clear -- this was clearly a problem with the defect tracking process, not like individual QC contributors.
My question is, "was the defect tracking process influenced negatively by spending cuts?"
Shareholders are more than willing to reward the relevant executives for cutting spending, but they rarely hold the same people who made those cuts for issues stemming as a consequence of the aforementioned cuts.
> If you do it by taxing the rich, you wind up hobbling and punishing your most productive citizens. Look at China's economic situation right now to see how ultimately unproductive that can be.
What hogwash, if there's anything that's apparent today it's that the rich do not get there either by working hard or by being more smart. They just happen to have rich parents. Why are we ok with billionaires like elon musk who spend most of their day tweeting to control society changing amounts of wealth?
I agree mostly, but disagree about demand dropping, as this is industry specific. With regards to teachers, students and families will simply be stuck with whatever resources can be provided (in the citations I provide above, some parents are unhappy with a 4 day school week, but if taxpayers don't want to pay more for a mandated service, too bad so sad, you get what you get). Speaking of police protection, you will get degraded services or no services. Most critically, if there are not enough nurses, CNAs, and other medical practitioners, care delivery will degrade and people will potentially die. These are all services and systems with mostly inelastic demand. Where demand is elastic, there is more flexibility in the feedback loop. Labor is not fungible, so expect this to continue in a lumpy fashion for at least the next decade.
Nope, we’re big believers in trunk-based development and see this as a necessary extension of it - when you’re blocked from merging into trunk (e.g. because you’re waiting for your teammates to review your code), we believe you should still be able to continue working on your new feature or refactor, but without continuing to make your PR larger and in turn more time-consuming for your teammates to review.
Stacking makes this all easy by allowing you to make smaller sets of dependent PRs so you can stay unblocked and merge into trunk more often.
In the US? It's an incredibly slow process with a designated separate court system with seperate labor laws. Oh yeah and solidarity strikes are illegal.
