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Comment by sho_hn | Hacker News Reader

One of the takeaways of the MAX debate maybe was "yes, this should be happening to Boeing" as a result of specific steps to weaken the engineering leadership in the company from the top down. If that's the case we can only hope it makes for the case study.

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Kind of yes, but this is a different part of Boeing. If I were one of the astronauts who'll fly Starliner, eventually, I'd not be nearly as polite as the formal communications suggest. I'd probably be reading code, sitting next to an engineer, and asking them to explain to me what the code does.

The thruster map error should have been detected in simulation. If it wasn't, the simulator is also faulty.

I'll assume the thruster map was only slightly wrong and that whatever simulator runs they did with it were very subtly off.

Still... What a mess...

If you listen to the NASA update [1] you'll hear the audit team state that if Boeing was following the procedures that they stated they were doing they would have found the flaw at 4 separate places. Let's just say the auditors tone of voice says it all.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxQ_ZV26E04

That's an hour-long video, could you tell us where the auditors said that?

It starts right at the 47 minute mark, and the whole segment starts at 44:45

There are specific requirements to assure the fidelity of simulators so this still should have been caught if the design process was robust enough I think

> specific steps to weaken the engineering leadership

What in the world are you talking about? There’s been no reporting of anything like that. The MAX engineers failed all by themselves. No management told them to design MCAS in a brain dead fashion. Nobody “weakened” engineering leadership.

When management makes statements like "we don't need [to pay for] senior engineers here, these are mature products... ", and clearly putting finance first among corporate goals, the natural result is that engineering dies a death by a thousand cuts...

> When management makes statements like "we don't need [to pay for] senior engineers here

The problem is that Boeing management never said that. Moreover, the fired CEO was an engineer.

The important word being "was".

As an engineer, he was accountable to reality. As a CEO, he was accountable to the board and the financials.

Guess which won.

Muilenberg became CEO in 2015. The McDouglas thing happened in '97. He inherited an existing management structure that was already primarily interested in profit over all other concerns, especially engineering.

Moreover, the 737 Max program ran from 2011-2015. The CEO at the time was an MBA.

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