Comment by maxharris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxharris | Hacker News Reader

I have a different view of the situation. I believe that the 737 Max disaster was directly caused by the idea that management is a valuable skill on its own, that management is somehow separable from the domain-specific knowledge required in order to make an honest buck.

There are plenty of examples of engineers that make terrible managers, to be sure. But there are also plenty of examples of managers with business backgrounds that have absolutely no idea about the consequences of their decisions. An optimal result requires skill in both domains.

By this point, you might be thinking, "Hey wait, isn't it true that cost-cutting also had a role in the crisis? Wasn't there at least one engineer that sounded the alarm in a memo?" And my answer to that is a resounding yes. But the question remains, where the hell did that idea come from? At no point did anyone think, "I'd love to spike my profits this quarter here and have huge disaster that will tank us in the next quarter." Therefore the problem isn't one of simple pursuit of the profit motive, because it is quite clear that Boeing hasn't profited from this situation long-term. And that's why I have focused explicitly on this foolish, self-defeating management fashion at the top of my mini essay here.

This brings us to the topic of Boeing's future. I could be wrong about him, but the fact that they have selected a person who majored in accounting to be their new CEO does not bode well for them. At the very least he has a major gap in his background to overcome, and at best I can only see them just managing to hang on instead of growing.

How does this relate to the merger issue? This management fashion I am speaking would have likely infected both McDonnell-Douglas and Boeing had they remained separate. That's because companies hire people out of the same pool of people that learn this stuff in their universities! Maybe there is a case to be made that having separate companies would make it slightly harder for them to both fail, but I believe that this isn't a very strong argument.

While I agree with some of your sentiment, I think it's worth pointing out that the recently-fired CEO on whose watch this debacle happened, was a lifetime aviation employee with an engineering background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Muilenburg

That's true. But people do change. Once you stop wearing your engineering hat, most of the benefit goes out the window. Yes, of all people, he should've known better to heed to his engineers' warning. He also should've ensured the properly management structure was in place such that the warning was given proper due diligence and risk management.

I think you can still be an effective CEO of Boeing as long as you have right composition of senior leadership in place. Decades of major design-flow related crashes made everyone complacent.

He’d been the CEO since ... 2015. I think it’s entirely unfair to push all the responsibility on him. He didn’t build the modern Boeing culture. He inherited it, and by accounts I’ve read so far, was unable to change it sufficiently to prevent the accidents. It’s hard to change company culture once entrenched and I’m hesitant to scapegoat him when there are obviously a lot of other significant factors at play.

I agree he wasn't entirely to blame. Regardless, the handling of the MAX incidents was inexcusable. The moral deficiencies were innumerable.

Yes, of course. He didn't handle it well at all. The problems aren't going away with him stepping down, unfortunately, and considering his replacement, it doesn't seem like there's any interest in fixing the real issues that are plaguing the company.

He's just the fool who lost the hot potato game.

Boeing lost the moment they didn't realize the aging 737 would be a dead-end and was imperative they'll take risks and say "no, but" to the airlines. Given how the corporate world works that was very difficult or almost impossible to someone actually do this.

Among other things it's the classic example of short term obsession demolishing the future.

I don't think deregulation, mergers or accountants killed the Max or its passengers. I think it was an engineering culture in love with the simplicity of an idea that on the face of it was genius. What made the Max work was the idea that you could use software - something Boeing in its military work already was very good at - to create essentially a new plane without all the rigors and costs of creating a new plane. This vision allowed Boeing to believe in its own BS that rather than have a collection of static designs incapable of evolution, it had a platform. The concept of the platform was the differentiator that Airbus had that Boeing did not have until it marketed the Max. Through software, the 737 became a way to create the illusion of a platform that could serve most if not all markets (wide body being the obvious exception). Once Boeing was in love with this idea, it never put it back through the rigors needed because to do so would have been to admit that the 737 wasn't a platform and that they were in fact building a new plane. I won't find it surprising that in a forum (HN) visited by engineers this comment doesn't receive the mother of all downvotes. However, I think if you're looking at Boeing honestly and not clouding your views with a whole bunch of economist-mumbo-jumbo about deregulation, you'll see that Boeing is just a leading indicator for what's about to happen in a lot of industries if it isn't already. My view, stop loving the elegance of your engineering and start thinking about the lives you actually impact. <-- That -- is what was lost.

MCAS was “elegant”...? Where did you get your engineering degree?

I've got a huge issue with all the stories about the "software" being supposedly at fault. The problem was never about the software per se; it was about the avionic specs on system level.

You can do very complex things without even involving software - including non linear things - or by involving it but not necessarily in a primary characterizing way. What happened here was in no way a software failure except if you generalize the meaning of "software" to include the whole lifecycle of the domain it's applied to, and the comprehensive corresponding engineering. And that's what tons of "purely" software people (by that I mean people working in a field where the non-software components are only ancillary to making the software run, in huge contrast with what happens in avionics) are doing too often in that case. Except what failed here was good old boring engineering, risk analysis, and properly conforming to regulations. The software "worked", in the sense that it did precisely what it was designed to do. But what it was designed to do was stupid. And deciding what it should do was not a "software" thing. It was an avionics one. It is not possible to conflate the tech and the domain in this area, in contrast with what you can do for e.g. some websites or some smartphone apps.

There was software involved, but it is not more interesting in this case than noting that there was electronics involved. And it could also have been done through a mainly mechanical apparatus, but the only reason it did not is that software is more convenient. But that's an implementation detail that played very little role in the tragedy (unless Boeing is waaaay more fucked up than we are even all discussing about, but I actually don't expect that).

> But what it was designed to do was stupid

You mean like making unflyable planes flyable as software does for the f16 and a host of other military aircraft?

Another example is the Swedish fighter jet Gripen. So sure, it’s doable, but not as a quick hack (“if the single angle-of-attack sensor goes above X degrees force the nose down by changing stabilizer angle”). Any engineer worth his salt should be able to tell the difference.

I agree with this analysis, and find it overall reasonable, but it seems to need a little more evidence, e.g. do we have any data that shows companies who put "generic managers" on top on regular fail more than those who put engineers on top.

I'm disappointed that you're being downvoted, I wish someone who downvoted you wrote a reply.

Apple.

> I agree with this analysis, and find it overall reasonable, but it seems to need a little more evidence, e.g. do we have any data that shows companies who put "generic managers" on top on regular fail more than those who put engineers on top.

That could be hard data to gather systematically. It's not like businesses fail immediately when you put a "generic manager" in change. A company can coast for decades before problems become obvious, and generic management confusing things even further by focusing on manipulating the most visible metrics (e.g. stock price) while taking actions that damage long term prospects.

+1

This was my comment too on the last MCAS story I read here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21037572

> that management is a valuable skill on its own

Arguably an issue back in the heyday of hereditary nobility too, come to think of it. I wonder how much of modern executive culture echoes some of those older patterns.

I believe that the 737 Max disaster was directly caused by the idea that management is a valuable skill on its own, that management is somehow separable from the domain-specific knowledge required in order to make an honest buck.

I don't think that's a fundamentally different idea, though. I think that's exactly the idea that drives any leveraged buyout or any cost cutting measure - that "good management" can make up for jettisoning whatever previously enabled a company or division to succeed.

I think them being separate companies would allow one to learn from the other without being tainted.

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