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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

The 737 Max fiasco is a tragedy and these emails are damning.

That said, it's likely one could find similar remarks in other high pressure / high stakes situations; what we would need to see to know, are other email exchanges regarding other plane certification processes.

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I think in any large organization, you are going to find people that think like this/talk like this. These emails are bad and the culture definitely needs to change, but who hasn't heard someone refer to their manager as a clown? No matter how good or bad your boss is, sometimes people are just going to complain.

"this airplane is designed by clowns, who in turn are supervised by monkeys."

I'm sure most people at one point or another have been critical of management, were anyone to dig through my IM history they'd certainly find something.

what's more damming are the efforts made to cover up to safety regulators

Agreed. In any large org, you’ll have thoughts and opinions all over the place and I’m sure you could find much more damaging stuff than these comments.

Folks just need to learn not to write this stuff down.

Isn't this the point of every third or forth Dilbert cartoon? This seems pretty universal. Humans are very flawed. There are those who accept that reality and those who like to believe in some fairy tale that for really "important" things that somehow we can put some management and twenty point processes in place, some motivational posters, a big team building group hug and then we will walk on water(NOT).

> who hasn't heard someone refer to their manager as a clown?

I have never personally heard anyone do this in writing, even when their manager was a clown. But I'm sure that I'm the exception, not the rule.

I think (based on seeing how many of these types of messages are coming up in discovery in recent cases) that many people these days don't think of "text messages" (email, SMS, WhatsApp, Slack, FB, you name it) qualify as "in writing". Doubtful most people would dare write a printed memo and sign their name to it with the same content that they would write in a text or email.

True, but when I said "in writing", I meant including various instant messaging and email.

I wasn't being specific with the word "clown", but every organization has employees critical of their manager. If you are a manager, you just have to accept that some people won't agree with your methods and will share their thoughts with others.

Yes, I understood.

What I mean is that I've never personally seen anyone engage in a personal attack toward a manager in written form, not the use of "clown" in particular.

I've seen plenty of criticism about various managerial practices, but that's entirely different from personal attacks.

What I found most concerning was the reference to Singapore being tough, while "the FAA were neither thorough nor demanding and failed to write up many issues".

Definitely reinforces the impression the FAA has gotten way too cozy with industry.

Well in one exchange, one person asked another if they would be willing to fly their family on a MAX plane, to which they responded no. And perhaps more importantly than the content of these messages is their volume. There's 100 pages of this stuff. This isn't an isolated case of disgruntled employees like you'd find at most companies. This is an entire project in which just about everyone working on it had something bad to say about it, and was acknowledged to be dangerous, and it still got rammed through.

These emails are good. They’re only Bad for Boeing. 346 people are dead.

The result of this, unfortunately, is probably going to be management at Boeing and elsewhere to step up corporate email monitoring and in a visible way so that employees will know they are being monitored and punished for documenting it.

Employees will have to resort to non corporate communications, used off hours, with a kill cord.

One wonders what has led society to a place where this is so sadly unsurprising. Why should employees ever feel the need to deliver results quickly, even at the expense of safety? How have we managed to flood engineering with incompetent people to the extent that they manage to infiltrate such critical systems without thinking twice.

We've clearly screwed up somewhere in setting incentives for these companies...

I think one of the root problems is that there are too many "public" companies, that serve not the public, but their shareholders instead, with the additional problem being that public companies are required to put their shareholders first; thus "public company" is a complete oxymoron.

As we've seen so many times, this results in the public interest being put aside, with negative consequences to the public in order to benefit the shareholders.

But how many of those situations have “plane falls out of sky and kills hundreds” as one of the end scenarios?

The important barrier to such thinking is company culture, as long as only a few people think this way others will correct their mistakes.

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