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Comment by noodlesUK | Hacker News Reader

'The company official said the language used and sentiments expressed in these communications "are inconsistent with Boeing values, and the company is taking appropriate action in response."'

The company is taking action in response. Against its employees. Not the ones responsible for killing hundreds of people, but the ones who were calling the program out on its flaws that led to those deaths? If I were working on a safety critical program and I thought it was risking lives I'd lose my shit. The employees that said this should be getting an "I told you so" badge, and the executive team should be going to prison. Fuck Boeing for this.

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That's just not how massive companies work. Sometimes the leaf-level employee knows a secret to improve the entire system in significant ways, but they'll never be heard. Sometimes the root employee (we'll say CEO) catches a earful from any given section of their company they don't like, regardless of how accepted or pervasive it the sentiment is, and that employee could be picked from the tree. It's just how it works in a massive structure. Someone at one end thinks the values and ethic is one way, and the people at the other end have an entirely different understanding.

There’s a difference between knowing something that would improve a system and knowing that there are specific flaws with a significant degree of lethality. It should be acceptable to miss someone telling you the first (if perhaps a missed opportunity), but it’s negligent to miss the second. It sounds to me that these people were taken aback and appalled by the cavalier attitude towards safety. If you have a decent number of professionals telling you something is unsafe and you ignore their cries, and then you kill people, you’ve fucked up in a big way.

Edit: more to my original point though, the response should be to improve internal processes to prevent this kind of tragedy again, rather than to throw the people doing the right thing by speaking up under the bus, saying it’s against company culture to call out dangerous risks.

To me, your attitude is that problems shouldn't exist because we should solve them, as if there's a magical process that guarantees perfection. But what happens when we miss something? What happens when an employee has a thought about an engineering technique that maybe didn't quite make sense, but speaking out would disrupt an entire chain of command within the culture we invest into day-in day-out, and they get distracted by one of the million ways to do it these days and don't end up dealing with their thought? What if we miss this moment and some things get by that shouldn't. Is this not human to some degree?

We can cross that bridge when we get there. At the moment, getting there seems to be the problem because if you hide problems and you ignore the people complaining about them, then you get the situation we are in.

> if you're human, then you get the situation we are in.

Fixed that for you...

For every truly insightful potential whistle-blower, you have plenty of disgruntled Peter-principle know-it-alls.

Still, it's management's job to create an environment that distills signal from noise.

Completely irrelevant to the point you're replying to.

He's mostly saying the employee shouldn't be punished for saying this in some internal chat(but the CEO should).

> Someone at one end thinks the values and ethic is one way, and the people at the other end have an entirely different understanding.

Like, how is this relevant to the employee getting punished being bad?

I came back to the comments to reference this exact quote! If the actions are inconsistent with Boeing values, then Boeing has the wrong values.

Same. Sure firing competent employees is the right and only necessary move here. /s

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