Boeing fired midlevel executive following embarrassing emails | Hacker News Reader

Boeing fired midlevel executive following embarrassing emails

wsj.com

176 pointssseveran93 comments

From the article:

Mr. Cooper didn’t send or receive the messages, the latest batch of which Boeing disclosed to lawmakers and the news media in January, this person said. Those messages show Boeing employees mocking airline officials, aviation regulators and even their own colleagues. In one, an employee said the 737 MAX had been “designed by clowns, who in turn are supervised by monkeys.”

Boeing Chief Executive David Calhoun, who has called the messages “totally appalling,” has said he aimed to stamp out such behavior and hold managers accountable. “Awareness in the leadership ranks around whether that’s happening or not is not an excuse if it’s happening,” Mr. Calhoun said in a call with reporters in January, shortly after taking over as CEO. “Disciplinary actions have to be taken.”

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To summarize:

They fired a guy for not knowing about emails he did not send or receive where engineers were voicing their internal concerns that the 737 MAX design was lacking.

Boeing's take away wasn't, "People knew something was wrong and didn't have a way to properly voice that concern."

Boeing's take away was, "Middle management should have sufficiently threatened those under their supervision into self-censoring their concerns."

Seems like a super-healthy corporate culture that would simultaneously be a fun place to work and produce the best products /s

This kind of an article sounds incredibly damning to me. It indicates that Boeing is essentially rotten on the inside and that anybody doing business with them should be wary.

This is a chemist's view from the trenches. A manager who hasn't been brought up in the engineering mindset wouldn't even be able to understand any of the points in that blogpost, which partially explains the trouble that pharmaceutical companies are finding themselves in. You cannot bribe or cheat observable reality.

As an engineer, I sort of disagree with this. Doing a shoddy job and trying to get away with it is inexcusable, but "good enough" is the gold standard in engineering. No one is helped by spending development time and money by making things better than they have to be.

Sometimes you have to go with a less capable result because the alternative will take too long or cost too much to develop, or (since we're talking aerospace here) weigh too much.

The trick, of course, is to know exactly how good is enough.

There are some companys who manage it though, by basically getting bi-furicated intwo two seperat internal divisions competing against one another.

Basically if you have a safe seat- or monopoly, you must learn to play catch against yourself or else.. boing, and important parts go flying.

> There are some companys who manage it though, by basically getting bi-furicated intwo two seperat internal divisions competing against one another.

Sometimes that competing becomes backstabbing between the divisions.

And then the company falls apart when you get a real competitor and the divisions are too busy attacking each other.

And Nokia was one such company, in the latter days of S60 smartphones. One (of many) re-orgs produced three main phone divisions called something like: entertainment, executive, and enterprise, with high-level features partitioned between them [1]. So "entertainment" gets the high-quality auto-focus camera because that's great for blogging hipsters, and "executive" gets the barcode reading software so suits can scan the QR codes on business cards [2] ... except they couldn't because without a decent auto-focus camera the QR code needed to be printed on A3 paper and stuck on the wall to be scanable. Yes, this was discovered in internal testing. Yes, it shipped anyway.

Down in the trenches we made bitter jokes about "three bald men fighting over a comb" as we watched our Lords and Masters engage with the looming competition by making snide public remarks about "that fruit company", having long before killed the touchscreen prototypes. But at least Boeing would have handled this situation differently: we'd have been fired for those jokes.

[1] and what if you're an "executive" working in an "enterprise" who likes to kick back with some "entertainment" on the commute? KA-CHING! you're gonna buy three Nokia phones! Or zero, more likely.

[2] that was seriously advanced as a leading use case. Quite probably by an in-house futurist.

This is a great idea. Can we think of any examples where this has worked? Famously, it didn't work at Kodak when they invented digital photography.

Kodak gets picked on unfairly I think. When you look at the revenue streams before digital photography took off, you can see that Kodak had their fingers in every part of it - cameras, film, processing, printing. They made money every time you took a picture. There's simply no revenue stream in digital that's big enough to replace that. It's impossible to shrink a company by 90% gracefully.

I guess they could have just invented Instagram or something

That would have been interesting, but they still would have needed to figure out how to monetize it.

Kodak may have been boned no matter what, but it's still not the example I seek, of a firm that successfully "played catch against itself".

I was just pointing out that there were reasons it wasn't successful beyond just not being a viable approach.

Eastman, which was spun out of Kodak in 1994, is doing quite well. Demand for resins, plastic sheets and intermediates to make plastics products hasn't dropped. Kodak had no idea what their core product was going to be, and bulk chemicals would have been a good bet.

Interestingly, Fuji managed to pivot into polarized films for LCD panels when faced with the same problem. https://petapixel.com/2018/10/19/why-kodak-died-and-fujifilm...

Fully agreed. And “good enough” for some software that does not interface with human digestive systems is a whole lot different than pills that people might take daily.

Right, there's a difference between, "because of these unavoidable constraints, we are deliberately making this design compromise" vs "meh, no one feels like following the standards so we'll just pressure everyone into pretending they don't exist".

> "good enough" is the gold standard in engineering.

This doesn't really make sense given any common meaning of good enough. A well engineered system or product is optimized. If you want to say that good enough means solving the inherent tradeoffs between safety margins and cost with careful design and precise specs, then you're not talking about the same thing as that blog post, nor would that accurately describe the way Boeing appears to design commercial aircraft nowadays.

Development time and costs are major dimensions to be optimized.

Isn't the common meaning of "good enough" "sufficiently good to meet my requirements, even though I can imagine it being even better"?

But you're right, I'm clearly not talking about the same thing as that blog post. What I'm arguing is that there's this appropriation of language where people use "good enough" to mean exactly "not good enough", and I don't think that's helpful.

> but "good enough" is the gold standard in engineering

Your post does a dis-service to the 350+ who died.

Nobody agrees that using one external sensor on the 737 MAX that is subject to weather, bird strikes and ground handling damage was nearly good enough.

You're arguing from two different perspectives. Engineering is about producing an deliverables that just meet spec. If someone orders a temperature sensor that they ask to be 1° accurate then you are wasting your time designing something better^.

However the engineers in question at Boeing clearly failed to produce a design that performed to spec in normal operating conditions.

^ Yes, there are scaling factors where it might be cheaper to design a 0.1° accurate sensor and sell it to everyone because it would be more effort having two production lines but that's an optimization.

> You're arguing from two different perspectives.

Your comment doesn't make any sense in the English language.

Nobody ordered a sensor system that was unreliable, so no idea what you're talking about.

Exactly. It was obviously not "good enough", so they failed to meet that standard. That's my point.

There is a clear disparity in the understanding of the phrase “good enough.”

The “good enough” from an engineering perspective is, “meets the customer’s specifications and is the best we can do given the constraints of time and money.” It’s about the quality of the product.

The “good enough” in this essay relates to the expenditure of emotional effort in getting your work done to a known standard while management are applying pressure for you to reduce the amount of time and money invested. “Good enough” in this instance relates to the effort exerted. At some point you are not going to try any harder because further effort is counterproductive to your career prospects or financial well-being.

This “good enough” is the lab full of technicians who know the product doesn’t even come close to the specifications it is being marketed towards, but they continue to work because they need food on the table. It’s “good enough” as a dictum from management, not as an informed decision from the product team.

No, the "good enough" in Milkshake's essay means not conforming to accepted standards, it's good enough only for management, who consciously or unconsciously intend to deceive a client downstream and sell up before someone else notices.

Elsewhere, Milkshake has a story about a biological chemist on a project to develop a delivery vehicle for cancer drugs. This fellow found his results unconvincing, continued working on the problem and ended up demonstrating convincingly that in vivo the vehicle did not behave as intended. Now the company had a problem (the FDA demands that relevant results be reported) because management intended to sell the IP to a hapless bidder, and the chemist's action pierced the veil of plausible deniability: https://orgprepdaily.wordpress.com/2017/08/24/breaking-bad-i...

Would you say this researchers efforts were counterproductive to his career goals?

Good article on the subject: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-coming-boeing-bailout

>Boeing, one of the US’s largest and most important companies, acquired its longtime plane manufacturer rival, McDonnell Douglas, in what was then the country’s tenth-largest merger.

>The resulting giant took Boeing’s name. More unexpectedly, it took its culture and strategy from McDonnell Douglas

https://www.msn.com/en-za/money/news/how-the-mcdonnell-dougl...

Great article. It's an interesting framing, that Boeing's woes stem from a shift from "great engineering firm protected by airlines' government-mandated monopolies" to "lean engine of capitalism." The story about McDonnell-Douglas doing much better out of the merger than you would expect for the junior partner is interesting, too. It would be fascinating to read more about howthat happened.

Welcome to any large company that's been around for a while. Especially successful ones.

And especially ones who bid on US government contracts

Isn't that the main reason why people from governments want to do business with them?

If a company is not corrupt, it's not able to backchannel a big part of the money.

I was working as a contractor at Boeing for 2 years. None of this surprises me.

Yeah. As the company, you don't want emails like that coming out, but getting rid of messages like that damages the so called safety culture.

I think a good answer as a CEO would be to tell managers to be more careful in emails, but no real punishment. However, the criticism in the emails was pretty low content, it's not like this was a message that said, man those monkeys really screwed up the MCAS or something. I think you might see messages like that even on well designed products, people get frustrated.

>> Yeah. As the company, you don't want emails like that coming out

Which, honestly shocked me they were sending emails like that in the first place. Talk among yourselves at the lunch table, complain in private and try to talk to someone in management who will listen.

It was 2018 for god's sake. Do these engineers still not know how stupid it is to be sending emails like that around the company? Maybe it just highlights how out of touch the culture was there to begin with? It just seems reckless and these people should be smart enough to know better.

But the emails ("designed by clowns", "wouldn't put my family on it") are just the symptom. Even if the whole engineering division had kept its mouth firmly shut the aircraft would still have been designed by clowns, and no one's family should be put on it. This is shared reality. The goal should be to prevent such commentary by picking up on well-founded engineering concerns before management commits to building a product that is not viable because it cannot perform.

>Do these engineers still not know how stupid it is to be sending emails like that around the company?

I've started to wonder over the past few years myself: maybe in some cases they very much do, and it's not stupid at all? If you know such emails may come out in case of trouble, then it can in turn become a tool for a low level of whistleblowing/accountability in a hard situation. A lot of us are fortunate enough to not be placed in professional/personal situations where we'd see something with life-safety consequences and not be able to blow the whistle or feel comfortable walking away. But what if one were, or what if the situation is genuinely gray? Like, you get the feeling something may be off the tracks in process, and your management chain/reporting processes aren't responsive, but it's not actually at all clear from your level that it's really important. Maybe it's just you. Sending a "private" email with your concerns to a coworker over official email might be then be a good way to bookmark that. If nothing ever happens it'll forever remain an undiscovered internal email. But if things ever go so wrong that the company actually faces subpoenas from the government over it than there will be a record.

I mean, what you're saying seems to imply that the engineers should have been concerned about keeping Boeing's bad behavior private right? Well, should they? Yeah the company under its modern McDonnell Douglas leadership certainly doesn't want emails like that coming out following the deaths of hundreds of people due to a bunch of company blunders. But I don't think it follows that engineers shouldn't want emails like that coming out. If they're angry enough, they may even actively want such emails to reveal exactly how bad things had gotten internally, in ways that really would embarrass leadership in a newspaper headline or Congressional hearing.

Indeed. Hell, isn't the whole deal with real engineering (as opposed to software "engineering") and professional licenses that engineers have obligations going beyond the company?

People who aren’t in either IT, HR, or legal tend to not know or forget that all corporate emails are archived for years

That’s changed. The corporate board, boarding school roommate pay-pal set (so called because they sit on each other’s corporate boards and vote to raise each other’s pay) now delete everything they are aware of. Think, “dvd burners glued shut and SVN repo is fucking gone, what?” mentality.

What is with this thread of conversation?

"Don't send emails like that because they could end up in eDiscovery."

How about, don't do things in a way where eDiscovery is likely to be an outcome, and actually foster processes that act on quality issues instead of telling the people you're shouldering with making this work with enough weight on their conscience that the only way they feel like they can cope with the foreseeable tragedy is to at least make sure there is some note in the record somewhere that they tried and could do nothing despite it all?

I have absolutely no respect for for anyone who is so caught up with these messages sound, that they can't read between the lines to see the picture of the completely dysfunctional dynamic these people had to be operating within.

The lower an engineer ends up stooping, the worse and more endemic the problems they are facing likely are. If your company has those types of email at all, whether they get out should be the least of your concerns!

The mentality being demonstrated admonishing delivery and sweating on the damage from dirty laundry being aired instead of the fact there is dirty laundry to air at all is like worrying whether or not you left the faucet on when your house is below sea level, and the tsunami is already on the way.

And apologies to those from New Orleans, or the Netherlands; to be fair I could have used leaving the burner on and fires on the way and pissed off the Californians and Aussies, but water was the first thing that came to mind.

And I'm not letting the engineers entirely off the hook either! If they felt that strongly, they should have walked away to, but I can forgive a lot more in the name of familial security than I can the pursuit of profit at all costs.

Huh? Legitimate concern can not be voiced in a humorous and combative way? I think the families of the 347 lives lost would like to have a few words. If ‘inappropriate’ words can bring back their loved one, I’m sure the current Boeing management will be buried under verbal abuse.

What about using PGP or something? They could require as a matter of corporate policy that internal e-mails be sent using PGP, and that storage be encrypted. More sensitive stuff they could use OTR for.

I suppose it's not a good look if you're looking at an archived conversation and they switch over to PGP, but it's better than this.

By being part of the leadership ranks and being unaware, shouldn't the disciplinary actions extend upon himself as well?

Maybe being a total dick gives you a free pass at Boeing.

The current CEO, Calhoun, took over a month ago after his predecessor, Muilenberg, was fired for the exact reason you just mentioned

He was always on the Board, though.

Seems like there are two possible takeaways. One is the one you called out. The other is to escalate issues your reports raise to you. "My pilots think this plane is trash. I better tell my boss." He could have taken either route and been safe at least from being canned. Boeing seems to be publicly expecting everyone to take the second approach.

>He could have taken either route and been safe at least from being canned.

I don't know? Unless I'm misunderstanding the story, I'm not sure the guy they fired could have escalated issues he was not informed of? I suppose we could assume that he was informed of the issues, just not via any documented method?

But based only on the information given in the article, I'm just not sure how someone not even in the loop on an issue, can reasonably be expected to escalate that issue?

Maybe I'm misapprehending the article?

No, you've got it right. I missed the negation on him receiving the messages. In that case, his firing is incomprehensible, at least if this is the sole cause.

An alternative take is that they just sacked one of the "monkeys". ;)

Yeah that’s not a positive conclusion to come to in light of what their internal lack of negative feedback loops resulted in.

They should instead promote a system that discovers the clowns-and-monkeys comments in order to address the concerns revealed by the comments rather than attempt to stamp out the only negative feedback loop they had.

Instead they seem to have hired another “monkey” for CEO. Hope they hire a better person before even more damage to corporate culture happens.

"the beatings will continue until morale improves"

I'm reminded a lot of the Challenger explosion investigation [1]. Specifically, Feynman's discoveries and analysis while investigating NASA. He discovered a huge disconnect between engineers and management. What's more, the commission seemed less intent on identifying the systemic issue and more on giving the appearance of a quick resolution, which Feynman hates. "For a successful technology," Feynman concluded, "reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

I feel like it's the same problems at Boeing, and the same pattern of addressing problems. It will be interesting to see if a publicly traded company will be more effective than a government organization at solving these problems.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report

Firing people is always an interesting way to prove you are doing something about a problem which has already happened and is already being addressed. Generally it try’s to show that you are “taking responsibility” but generally the people who are actually responsible are just doing the firing to avoid the stigma of being the screw up[1].

[1] At one group in Netflix (which has an aggressive fire fast culture) that I interviewed with, I came to realize the position existed primarily to provide shielding for the managers above it. I reached out to the former person in the role and they confirmed my suspicions. Not the behavior that Netflix was trying to encourage but there you go.

> I came to realize the position existed primarily to provide shielding for the managers above it

Basically, employees are used as ablative armor for management?

I’m curious, what was it that triggered your suspicions?

Boeing CEO David Calhoun vows to stamp out 'such behavior' and hold managers accountable. What behavior? Well he reassigns the Boeing pilot who lied to regulators, and fires the Boeing manager overseeing external pilots, who called out the bad design and incompetence within. Got it.

Looks like that for them building defective planes is not as bad as sending "embarrassing" emails

Note that this person did not write or receive any of these messages; he was a manager of those who did.

http://archive.is/hk4Cd

thank you - you are my favorite kind of person!

(use https though)

You're most welcome. I always do this with WSJ articles I submit to HN. However, the paywall busting site I use — http://archive.is/ — doesn't have https

>However, the paywall busting site I use — http://archive.is/ — doesn't have https

This seems to have changed as the following works for me: https://archive.is/hk4Cd

Excellent. It works for me too. From now on, that will be my paywall buster of first resort.

I don't know why people comment with archive links for WSJ articles that were in the print edition

https://www.morningstar.com/news/dow-jones/202002128400/boei...

Because most HN readers don't have access to the print edition.

I suppose I should have been clearer. Dow Jones republishes all WSJ articles that make it to the print edition. The Morningstar website shows those. It is an ad supported way for people to read these articles without a subscription which still financially supports journalism.

I didn't know that: great info which I will use.

Typical PR move by Boeing, they're going to start beating the drum on accountability and turning a new corner. Which is all BS, but executive leadership will be applauded on wall street for their efforts. Sad to see especially when you consider the role the company has around the world.

> Boeing leaders have faced questions from federal lawmakers about who has been held accountable for the MAX crisis.

so, apparently the leakers?

He was a VP. I’m not aware VP is a mid level management job. I always thought director level and below would be the case.

Depends upon the place. Sometimes VP is above director or vice versa.

So, title inflation?

Depends on the company. In some companies, there are many VPs that themselves form a hierarchy... so you'll have a VP, Senior VP, Executive VP, etc. So VP can start to look an awful lot like directors (not board directors that is).

On the flip side, I'm working with a company where everyone that should have a "Director" title relative to their authority, knowledge, and experience has been given a VP title... probably because the company isn't very attractive as an employer.

A VP in an investment bank would be a middle manager.

Or in enterprise sales, someone who has 6 months tenure. Why? Because an angry customer call can always be handled with: "I will put you straight through to the Vice President."

> I’m not aware VP is a mid level management job

A lot of companies (especially finance) suffer from title inflation, and also flip Director and VP (i.e, Director is a higher rank than VP).

For example, at Goldman Sachs 30% of all employees are Vice Presidents.

Yeah, I work at a bank. The VP track is often on an 'Officer of the Company' track (Officer, Associate VP, VP, Senior VP, etc). Then there's the 'Job Title' track (Manager, Senior Manager, Director, Senior Director, Executive Director, etc). Usually, you have to be a minimum job title for certain officer title, but less the other way. So you can have a Manager who is a VP and a Director that's a AVP, but not a Manager that's a Senior VP. In any case, the job title is what gives you rank, and officer title is honorary.

Other places do weirder things. I have a buddy at an insurance company who's a "Second VP" and is basically an "Assistant CIO". Never figured that out.

i didn't understand that at all. i thought a director is a person elected by shareholders onto the board of directors. but i normally work for small companies!

It is that, too. Welcome to the totally non-standard world of job titles.

In most companies, it's both. On the employee side (non-finance) you have things like Manager -> Director -> VP -> C-level (often with "Senior" versions of some of those), but then the people who serve on the board are also called Directors.

+1. In Morgan Stanley, the title/promotion hierarchy is associate -> vice president -> executive director -> managing director. You can get VP within 5 years or so.

I work for a Fortune 150 company where VP is definitely a mid-level management job. It's insane how many VP we have. Just my small part of the company has 5 VPs and they are all at least 4 levels below the President of the company.

How does that even look on an org chart?

Normal: President -> Vice-President

Common: President -> Executive VP -> VP

Guessing: President -> Platinum VP -> Exec VP -> VP (It is related to airlines, so just borrowing their classes)

At a typical investment bank: President/CEO --> CTO (may also hold corp title of Managing Director, maybe "Senior Managing Director") --> Managing Director --> Director --> VP --> (possibly) AVP --> Peon.

When I last left the IB world, there were many VPs and a decent number of Directors that were individual contributors.

I find it amusing that someone would be closer to the CEO through six degrees of separation than through the levels of management.

Future: President -> Titanium VP -> Platinum VP -> etc.

It's funny how "titanium" is somehow such a big thing with marketing names these days, such as with car trim models. It's a pretty neat metal but it isn't particularly valuable. Steel and aluminum are pretty neat metals too, in different ways, but no one uses those in marketing this way.

In the airline industry, it might be

President -> Platinum VP -> Gold VP -> Silver VP -> Bronze VP

You forgot Senior VP.

But, it's more like President > C?O > some other C?O position > Senior VP > VP > etc.

https://archive.md/hk4Cd

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