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Comment by tim333 | Hacker News Reader

A lot of the issues may come down to whether management prioritize financial engineering / making huge bonuses / pleasing wall street vs making good vehicles. The same with Boeing - they used to be run by engineers who wanted to make great planes and then the shifted control to finance guys in Chicago who wanted to make big profits. You see the effect a bit with Tesla where I'm sure Musk would love to focus on quality but has to rush things out to make decent quarterly numbers or risk going bust by not getting ongoing financing.

The Japanese seem to have almost the opposite attitude to finance where they will keep putting money into loss making stuff for ages out of a kind of loyalty which may lead to it's own issues of course.

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I worked for years as an engineer and manager at a legendary Japanese corporation, known for their quality.

It was a frustrating experience. Their obsession with quality made even the smallest tasks difficult and tedious. 3,000-line testing spreadsheets, where even one failure pooched the whole deal.

But you can’t argue with the results.

Good quality is difficult and tedious. I like to think that the work I do is of exceptional quality, but I am often met with outright hostility by American engineers, when I talk about my methodology.

I’m not being snooty, or projecting onto others. I’m merely talking about what I do, and I’m treated as if I’m eating a ham sandwich in Temple.

> Their obsession with quality made even the smallest tasks difficult and tedious. 3,000-line testing spreadsheets, where even one failure pooched the whole deal.

Sounds good to me.

Yes. It taught me a lot. I am still obsessed with quality, to this day.

That obsession was not the problem. Frustrating, but it set them apart.

Note that I worked there for many years. That indicates that we probably shared many values, and that I was respected; despite sometimes holding orthogonal points of view.

I do feel as if we could have done more with software, though. What works for hardware does not necessarily scale to software.

It's funny, because this is the kind of philosophy that makes software engineering in Japan so difficult, but is very ideal for automotive mass production.

Yup. It hobbled our software engineering efforts, but they make excellent hardware.

I quickly learned never to use the word "agile" in Tokyo. Frowny faces everywhere.

Since leaving that company, I have gone to "ultra-agile" methodology, but quality is still one of my principal axes.

> You see the effect a bit with Tesla where I'm sure Musk would love to focus on quality but has to rush things out to make decent quarterly numbers or risk going bust by not getting ongoing financing

"Tesla CEO Elon Musk ordered his employees to stop putting nearly finished Model 3s through a critical test before leaving the company’s factory in Fremont, California, according to an internal document viewed by Business Insider. It’s called the brake-and-roll test, and it ensures the car is correctly aligned. An industry expert told Business Insider that every automaker does this test to ensure quality and function."†

Tesla constantly make short term decisions that cost them massively down the line.

† https://www.businessinsider.com.au/tesla-elon-musk-orders-en...

>A lot of the issues may come down to whether management prioritize financial engineering / making huge bonuses / pleasing wall street vs making good vehicles. The same with Boeing..

It's a funny thing to me that no one ever points this out in advance. Where were the articles about Boeing's move from an engineering culture to a financial one? Instead, we wait for the natural cycle of a business to arrive, then make up some answer, like "financialization" to explain it.

How come a hacker site doesn't acknowledge how difficult it is to "stay on top" as a business?

>You see the effect a bit with Tesla where I'm sure Musk would love to focus on quality but has to rush things out to make decent quarterly numbers or risk going bust by not getting ongoing financing

Again, more post hoc reasoning.

Elon Musk negotiated the biggest corporate pay package in history, but he didn't tie it to product quality, did he? Maybe that's why he focuses so much on share price and market cap and quarterly numbers? Nah, couldn't be...

>It's a funny thing to me that no one ever points this out in advance. Where were the articles about Boeing's move from an engineering culture to a financial one?

I had a google out of curiosity.

There was this from 2003: https://slate.com/business/2003/12/how-boeing-blew-it.html

>...The trouble is that his successor, Harry Stonecipher, is very much of the short-term-profits school... ...As one aircraft worker told a Seattle newspaper reporter after hearing the news of Stonecipher’s accession: “We are doomed.”

Although I don't know if that was really in advance - they had problems then too.

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