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Comment by logjammin | Hacker News Reader

"Apparently the only design of the MCAS system the FAA saw was limited to a 0.6 degree deflection [of the stabilizer] at high speeds and only single deflection only. And that was changed and ... it is still unclear how that could happen ... it was changed to multiple activations, even at high speed, and each activation could move the stabilizer as much as 2.5 degrees, and there was no limit to how often it could activate." (~28min; emphasis added)

For me, in a crisis with a lot of burning questions, one I haven't seen raised much is: who changed the MCAS behavior after the FAA "saw" the first version? Someone decided this should happen, and someone implemented it (perhaps the same person). Forget the C-suite for a moment; someone in middle management made this call. Shouldn't they answer for it?

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No, "they" shouldn't.

When stuff like this happens, it's a process issue, not an issue with a particular engineer. It's human nature to try to assign blame to people and that's why it's so important to avoid that. Whatever process created the flawed product is where the blame lies.

Somewhere in the group that produced MCAS, there's a process to permit changes to be submitted, reviewed, accepted or rejected, implemented and tested along with the documentation produced at each stage.

Maybe that process is broken, maybe it isn't. From the outside we can't tell. However, as responsible professional software developers what we should do is understand that these are system problems and not just look around for someone to pin the blame on.

Yeah, my first reaction after watching the video (it was a good video to watch over a morning coffee!) was that the author used passive voice several times without making it clear _who_ took a particular action ("It was decided" and other phrases like that). You make a good point that no one person might've made the call, however someone _must_ be accountable for it even if no single party is responsible (a single person at some level, possibly the CEO, probably below that level). That's what I'm personally curious to know.

as people died, now you need both: to identify the issue with the process that caused the problem to happen, sure, but also to identify key figures that signed off the design and trough the justice system identify whether exists a direct cause between their decisions and people deaths.

Are holding people to (moral, ethical) account and looking at problems from a systems perspective mutually exclusive?

These are systems problems, I fully agree, but they aren't only systems problems. The systems in question are people. They have minds, personalities, and agency. Eliding this - sorry for saying so - makes phrases like "whatever process created the flawed product [...]" sound absurd, borderline callous.

I hate to resort to what by now is a web forum trope, but would you look the MAX victims' families in the eye and say, word for word, what you wrote above: "No, 'they' shouldn't" be held to account? Come on dude.

In some different articles I read, the change from 0.6 to 2.5 came after flight testing of the aircraft when it became apparent that the MCAS system needed greater authority to function properly. That part of it was totally normal. The major error, however, was that the documentation was not updated following the changes. That created a situation where some people were looking at documentation that no longer reflected the true system.

You can read about it in more detail here.[0] Likely responsibility for the (series of) decisions was diffuse enough that perhaps no one person made the call.

[0] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/the...

That must be one sorry bastard...

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