Comment by brokencode
5 years ago
Boeing was once one of the country’s greatest companies and is now a national embarrassment. This is what you get when the MBAs and accountants take over and the lust for profit begins.
An engineering company should have engineers as managers from the bottom level all the way up to the CEO. Or at the very least, somebody who cares about product over profit.
Take a look at Apple’s functional organizational structure for an example of an engineering company done right.
I think this runs deeper than an “MBA vs Engineer” perspective. Having worked in the industry but no direct knowledge of how this project was run (outside of what’s been reported in the news) here my take:
If I were a betting person, my guess is they have created a culture of “schedule first”. Other orgs managed by engineers have been chastised for this in the past (looking at you, NASA). The problem is the risk/reward is asymmetrical managing these projects. Even though the severity can be extremely high, the probabilities of an error of this magnitude tend to be very small. This creates an incentive for ambitious souls to be aggressive and continually role the dice to meet schedule. As a former manager once told me when I was in a safety role, “you don’t want to get a reputation for slowing things down.”
To oversimplify things, say there’s a 1% chance any project can end in disaster. You can literally create an entire career ignoring that risk and still look like a star. Probability is on the individuals side. Meanwhile, the manager pushing to do things the right way to minimize that risk almost certainly will bear a higher cost/schedule burden. But in aggregate, that probability will catch up to the organization.
What makes me think this? There’s ample reporting Boeing didn’t follow their own procedures because they didn’t want to delay. Hazard analysis documentation wasn’t reflective of the design because the paperwork wasn’t getting updated. Their didn’t follow their own procedures regarding redundancy in design of items identified in the HA. I suspect they knew this was wrong which is why they obfuscated details in the investigation.
Culture matters, irrespective of academic degrees.
Surprisingly enough, it doesn't run deeper. Boeing was once an engineering center of excellence. Building bulletproof planes were what they did, and it showed. Then they decided to acquire McDonnell Douglas - who was run by accountants. For reasons I'm not sure anyone can explain, the MD executives somehow not only survived the merger, but took control of the company. The end result was a move to pinch pennies and maximize profit vs. a focus on quality and engineering.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing...
>With ethics now front and center, Condit was forced out and replaced with Stonecipher, who promptly affirmed: “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.”
I wonder if the implication is that being run like an “engineering firm” is no longer able to produce a competitive company culture. What the MBA vs Engineer framing doesn’t do is explain why other organizations run by engineers have had the same type of mistakes. I think there’s a more general through line
I spent many years working very close to Boeing, though never for Boeing so I wasn't privy to meetings that may have included the alleged malfeasance you describe. What I did see was communication breakdown between major teams. Some interface features were mutually assumed to be owned by another team and fell through the cracks. MCAS in response to unstable thrust vector is commonly cited as an example of this.
But I think it's worth noting to the (mostly software oriented) HN crowd - aerospace projects have massive manufacturing cycle times. Some things literally take years to manufacture for the proof-of-concept stage, let alone production. You can't NOT be incredibly schedule-oriented in this environment. This can cause some perverse incentives for management (which must be mitigated), but there are always going to be somewhat risky last-minute changes that could seem ill-advised in hindsight if you want to deliver something.
Schedule matters, especially in long lead items. The problem becomes when schedule overrides good judgement regarding safety. My personal opinion is this is largely rooted in human cognitive biases that make us bad at objectively assessing risk. We just aren’t wired to think statistically and then we have multitudes of biases that undermine our ability to make judgement, especially about low probability events.
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they dlc'd the secondary/redundant AoA sensor, a critical safety feature and literally a direct cause of the crashes
True. But the hazard analysis reported in the Seattle Times showed Boeing listed it a hazardous failure item. Ignoring that it should have been classified as “catastrophic” because of its ability to cause a loss of aircraft, even at the “hazardous” level their procedures made a redundant element required.
Required, not optional if the customer pays enough.
Actually I wonder how having two sensors is a good idea, anyways. There is no quorum of two, if one of the sensors is off, what's the actual angle of attack?
I dont understand much of redundancy of sensors, yet '3' would allow to ignore the 'bogus' reading.
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"dlc"? What does that mean
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Just want to say I think your response is well articulated, and has been sitting with me for days. Reflecting on how "schedule first" is driving things in my org...
The CEO that Boeing fired at the end of 2019 was an aerospace engineer who had been with the company since 1985.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Muilenburg
Sure but I’m not talking about just the CEO. I’m talking engineering managers all the way down. And I guess I’m not really talking about specific college degrees either, but a culture and mindset of engineering.
Here’s an interesting article about how engineers lost influence in Boeing: https://perell.com/essay/boeing-737-max/
>Sure but I’m not talking about just the CEO. I’m talking engineering managers all the way down. And I guess I’m not really talking about specific college degrees either, but a culture and mindset of engineering.
Many here have misunderstood you,conflating the the stereotypical MBA type ( who is a essentially a con man) with an MBA degree. A 'mindset' of engineering BTW has to to be explained to the non-engineering personalities. Besides the obvious inclination for technical things, the next best trait is perhaps that of integrity. You really cannot put together a working great product unless there is there is a commitment at several levels, all of which could be loosely lumped under the personality trait of integrity.
Incidentally, he was "the only engineer in the C-suites". [0] I think the problem ran much deeper than the CEO.
[0] https://newrepublic.com/article/154944/boeing-737-max-invest...
He only became CEO in 2015. His handling of the Max crashes was shameful, but you can't blame him for Boeing's long-term strategy faults.
It seems like the problem with Boeing is that they acquired a failing company (McDonnell-Douglas), but then kept all the executives and let them run Boeing, even though they'd just ruined the last company.
Maybe they preferred that over letting some pleb engineer into the executive aristocracy.
Oh, I don't blame him at all. A commercial airliner is a decade long project to undertake. However its clear he was not the leader to lead a company through a crisis.
So, is slick over here guilty of manslaughter?
I'm so tired of seeing this ridiculous "mba and accountants are evil" trope. You realize Tim Cook is one of those evil MBA people, right? And the CEO that oversaw Boeing during the launch of the MAX was a career aerospace engineer?
Those of us in the operations sides of buisnesses or doing research at universities really only see all the terrible hurtfull decisions these MBAs are making. Constant cost cutting and understaffing tend to lead to a lot of built up resentment. Maybe it is just a few bad eggs spoiling the broth, but to operations people it looks like the whole organisation is out to make their lives miserable.
I feel this.
Tim Cook is also an industrial engineer, and this is easily available information.
My point is more that you don’t want people focused on business and profits instead of people who have deep knowledge in the area and passion for the product.
Accountants and business majors are better at managing insurance companies, banks, etc, because they understand the space. Engineers are better at managing engineering companies for the same reason.
Tim Cook has a bachelor engineering degree but he hasn't been involved in engineering work since the 90s. He's been the head of operations, making business decisions like closing down factories and outsourcing production, since his days at IBM. He is a supply chain wonk, which is why he got an MBA (supply chain management is a core part of business school teachings). This is also easily available information. Cook has been "focused on business and profits" for decades, and yet you act like he is an example of a great "engineer" in charge.
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You need both. I've worked at places that were all subject-matter and no business expertise. Companies like that fail.
> My point is more that you don’t want people focused on business and profits instead of people who have deep knowledge in the area and passion for the product.
But isn't focusing on business and profits also focusing on safety of your products since you want to make sure your planes don't crash and passengers come to their destination alive and unharmed.
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The culture of company is much more than its CEO though. And it's the culture of Boeing that changed from an engineering culture to a profit-driven culture. This shift is pretty well-documented. It occurred with Boeing’s reverse takeover of McDonnell Douglas in the late 1990s. This new direction was in no small part the influence of McDonnell Douglas CEO Harry Stonecipher. The following are good reads on what exactly happened:
https://newrepublic.com/article/154944/boeing-737-max-invest...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing...
The Max was developed under James McNerney who is an MBA with no engineering background.
The max was developed and launched by Dennis Muilenberg. Muilenberg was President and then CEO of Boeing for 7 of the 8 years that the MAX was under development and launch. McNerney was only there for 4 of those years.
You can argue all you want about who shoulders more responsibility, but Muilenberg was an executive throughout the entire program, and more importantly, was the CEO who oversaw the decision for the certification of the MAX prior to first flight, which was the critically faulty decision.
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I guess he gets a pass because Apple was using slave labor before he took the reins.
Exactly. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, YouTube are all led by these MBAs and seem to be doing just fine.
If Boeing's products went down that frequently, I wouldn't fly.
Moral Mazes describes in detail how this happens. The book explains how managers of all kinds "milked" chemical plants, i.e. deferred maintenance to meet schedules and pocket promos, and then jumped the ship right before the plant collapsed. Boeing was likely no different: a clique of quick-thinking managers figured that they could push for aggressive deadlines, pocket nice promos and bonuses, outsource responsibility via committes of all kinds and jump the ship when the wreck was imminent.
The book even had a solution. These quick-thinking managers avoid responsibility (blame ability) like vampires avoid the sunlight. The corporate could implement a system to track responsibility, so it would follow smart assess in other departments and even other companies, but it of course would never do this because such a system would expose shenanigans of senior management. In theory, a regulator could develop such a responsibility tracking system and enforce it in public companies and federal contractors. That system needs to account for the fact that senior managers are experts in diffusing responsibility.
You're probably right but also missing the giant elephant in the room which is regulatory capture. aka politics.
This being a partial byproduct of the mass centralization (aka conglomeration) of most every big industry that started in the 80s, accelerating in the 90s, when globalization became a hot thing. And [insert massive finance company's hackery here].
Tons of these conglomerates have strong legacy gov connections and are often the only shop in town for critical industries and are treated like special semi-national bodies. This puts plenty of natural pressure on regulatory bodies.
Boeing is not the only one. This is a phenomenon wide across the western world. Plenty of this exists in Europe too.
Well, if I remember right, consolidation across the entire economy is at a record high.
In every sector, there's more regulation, much fewer & larger players. If the rot at Boeing is a symptom of this, we're in for a bad time: every firm across the entire economy is now larger and has fewer competitors than previously.
The mainstream and most-politically-accepted economics of the day in western countries is state-capitalism (the levels of state vs capitalism is debatable in various countries and is obviously never stable). I think this is what the standard downside of that economic system looks like in practice... plenty of regulatory capture + moral hazards due to low punishments when 'caught' + little if any competition.
Like most things in economics the best route is looking for the least-bad option. We will find out over time if the state-capitalism balancing act really is the best, assuming there are any realistic alternatives and/or the scales/ratios of state vs capitalism are meaningfully measurable.
This experiment is only decades old in the modern technological era and one could argue it has only really peaked in the last two decades, with ever more industries getting merged to this day (which Corona will accelerate no doubt, just like 9/11 did with the US defense industry).
The state/nationalism part of this means these potentially poorly run companies could stay propped up for decades, despite the industry's potential in other forms.
I recently spent time reading about some chartered airline companies from the 70/80s and their stories is probably the best example of this sort of slow march towards industry conglomeration, with plenty of state involvement and protection. It probably provides a good timeline to base this stuff on and at a minimum plenty of analogies.
One example (see History): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TUI_Airways
> Take a look at Apple’s functional organizational structure for an example of an engineering company done right.
I don't have an actual refutation here (and certainly don't want to start some kind of Apple flame war) but something about this doesn't seem quite right.
Here’s a great article about their organizational structure: https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-apple-is-organized-for-innovatio...
Like their products or not, Apple has been extraordinarily successful both in terms of sales and critical reception of their products compared to most companies.
They have flops too (Siri, HomePod, others), but are mostly successful. The recent buzz about the M1 chip is a perfect example of their industry-leading engineering.
Is the M1 that revolutionary? It seems more like the culmination of technology that has been around for years. Rosetta 2 is the most impressive part, and even that is kinda the most obvious method of x86 emulation that doesnt suck
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Think about the quality of their hardware products.
Do you mean the 2019 macbook pro that can't use the iGPU for multiple monitors so it overheats every time I plug in an external monitor? Or do you want the older macbooks that the keyboard would break from dust exposure requiring the entire laptop to be replaced?
Or the airpods with non-replaceable batteries so you have to get new airpods for $49+ a piece every couple years?
They aren't perfect and IMO haven't been in a long time. That said, the build quality is good, and I chose to get a macbook as my work computer as a software developer and don't regret it, but I wish people would stop putting apple on a pedestal as the example of perfection.
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They prioritize form over function in their Lightning cables. Inadequate strain relief is a far more consequential problem in an airplane wing. I can't see Apple practices being applicable to mission critical fields like transport engineering (with high regulatory burden). They're different worlds. Apple also simply has a huge amount of money from hardware and software (App store etc.). I suspect they're far looser with resources for their teams than Boeing, whose mechanical/aerospace engineers have salaries a fraction of most Apple engineers.
Edit: Overarching point is that Apple has a focus on aesthetics that is far less important in aerospace engineering, and has no experience on ensuring human safety.
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> Think about the quality of their hardware products.
I thought about their butterfly keyboards and didn't want to think further.
I'm not sure if the years of poor and failing keyboards on the MacBook or the ongoing stage light screen failures due to the poor decision to permanently connect the ribbon to the screen (turning a $5 repair into a $500 repair) bare this out.
AMD has really shown the way in this aspect. They have a lady who was a PhD in a Semiconductor Electronics (I forgot what the exact name was) and she's worked as a techie and as a manager for a long time to get a grip of both. The results speak for themselves.
Modern MBAs (at least the one I'm doing) very much take care to focus on factors beyond solely profit. Examples are the concepts of business sustainability and the different levels of maturity organisations can occupy within that, and the 'triple bottom line' (taking into account impact on society and the environment, as well as economic impact).
Awareness of these factors can go from simply recognising them (lip service), to defining business performance by them (living and embracing them).
>Examples are the concepts of business sustainability and the different levels of maturity organisations can occupy within that, and the 'triple bottom line' (taking into account impact on society and the environment, as well as economic impact).
If someone doesn't pick these things growing up, a course in grad school isn't going to change their motivations.
As if MBA and accountants are specially prone to greed.
Greed can be found in any person regardless of his profession.
MBA programs self select for greed.
>Take a look at Apple’s functional organizational structure for an example of an engineering company done right.
Apple has to be one of the worst examples - both about not being run be MBAs and quality engineering.
There was an article about how, when Boeing bought out Mcdonnal Douglas, executives from the latter company took control and changed the culture to focus on profits over engineering.
“How Boeing Lost its Way”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/josephholt/2020/02/03/how-boein...
> An engineering company should have engineers as managers from the bottom level all the way up to the CEO.
Sun Microsystems had this. Didn't work too well for them.
It's not at all as simple as this.
Disagree with solely the CEO but in general Boeing’s leadership seems to be somewhat disconnected from their actual product. Just take a look at Boeing’s HQ in relation to where they actually make things. Boeing’s c-suite is now in Chicago whereas their engineers/plant workers are on other ends of the country (Washington and South Carolina, mostly).
Considering how hard people on this website try to push remote work it's funny how a broad consensus has emerged that Boeing putting workers and management in different offices is responsible for their cultural failures.
One could argue there are differences between us mere code monkeys playing with fancy gadgets and a company in charge of the lives of thousands of people every single day.
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All things considered, there is a stark difference between a job whose primary focus is to build a physical thing and a job whose primary focus is to build a digital thing.
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Boeing isn’t a remote company, so it’s not a contradiction.
If you read into most of the arguments for remote-friendly workplaces, step one is cultural changes.
This is the stupidest HN techbro talking point. And tnere's plenty of competition.
You think you're so analytical, free of emotion, smart, quantitative, evidence-led?
Well here's a riddle: the CEO as well as the chief flight test engineer are massively implicated in this scam. Both are engineers, obviously. The system that failed was designed, approved, built, and tested by hundreds of engineers. How easily do these people fold under pressure? How come none of them used whistleblower laws for their and two planeloads' of passengers' advantage?
Is it possible, maybe, that a tiny bit of you likes that argument? Yeah... that's called "emotion", and "identity". And contrary to popular opinion, it's neither bad nor exclusively for women, MBA, and other lesser beings.
And here's a paper that shows engineering CEOs are no better than others, except for measures of social and environmental impact: https://journals.vgtu.lt/index.php/JBEM/article/view/10447
If you actually want (statistically significant) better results, hire foreigners (above), or women: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10997-012-9224-7
>An engineering company should have engineers as managers from the bottom level all the way up to the CEO.
So should our government.
As technical people, we tend to have a bias that we're better equipped to understand things than anyone else, but that's often not the case. Many, many of the things out there don't just require the ability to use Google and do math, but also those things engineers are notoriously bad at like understanding human systems, compromising, and communication. We also don't have any particular advantages in knowing things outside our domain of expertise. An all-engineer government is definitely not an ideal.
I dont think that techies are outlier here. Despite the profession, most people think they can do their boss's job better.
One thing to keep in mind is a lot of engineers don't want to work in management and/or don't have management aspirations. Steve Wozniak is a pretty good example.
Personally, I work as a chem/materials engineer if I were to move into a management position I'd have to give up doing technical work and step into a more administrative role and that is something that does not really appeal to me.
I think similar thing for politics, there doesn't tend to be many scientist or engineers running for government because that sort of thing isn't very appealing to people like me.
“I’m smart enough to program a computer and that’s really hard so anything else would be easy for me to do.”
Are you trying to say that engineers are inherently more moral in their decisions?
The implication is that Engineers can manage an engineering product better than a career CEO. There are several examples of turnarounds such as AMD where technical CEO's delivered significant product and ultimately financial wins over organizations run by career managers.
Boeing's choice to pursue the Max vs. a new airframe was entirely motivated by perceived cost benefits and resulted in a flawed and delayed product. Had the decision makers had an aerospace background they may have made different decisions.
I was listening to an interview with AMD's CEO Dr. Lisa Su, and I was surprised at how casually she was using technical terminology while explaining complex industrial process optimization techniques her company was working on.
I was just so used to the top three or four tiers of corporate management having literally no idea what their company's engineering department actually does day to day. Hearing a CEO knowledgeable about their main product line was a bit of a shock.
But it shouldn't be a shock! It should be the norm.
I work for a small IT-only company. If I start using "technical" terms like "IP address" with our CEO, his eyes glaze over...
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The motivation was not perceived cost benefits, but actual costs of their customers. Retraining pilots and qualifying them would have meant new operational costs for airlines operating the 737 Max negating the benefit of the more efficient bigger engines. That pushed Boeing to try to make the Max series fly "like" a regular 737. Problem is that they couldn't hide the fact that crappy software written by $7/hour coders is a poor substitute for an airframe scaled up to match the bigger engine size. Deaths were inevitable when they decided to lie to the pilots about what was actually going on. Done correctly, the software fix could have been workable, but the design of MCAS was piss poor.
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I think he is saying engineers care more about engineering, just purely because they enjoy and take pride in their own work. Whereas MBAs don't have much to be proud of, except short term profit goals.
Training certainly influences execution and only one of these groups was trained for financial engineering.
No, but extra prod fires => unhappy engineers after and before the incident, vs unhappy managers only after.
The incentives just align better.
Engineers tend to look at technical, rather than business, considerations first.
The Volkswagen emissions scandal was done by engineers.
Er....?
The implementation sure was. As directed by company management + execs.
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They certainly don't go on counting pennies