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Comment by xjwm | Hacker News Reader

More negative press for Boeing, which they probably don't need after all the 737 MAX issues. From the layman's perspective, I can't tell if Engineers have gotten lazy/complacent in their designs, OR if the FAA has gotten significantly better at screening for potential issues, OR if we're operating so close to the edge of the design envelope that these issues are inevitable. I sincerely hope it is number 2 or 3, but my gut feel is that cost cutting and efficiency are winning over safety and good engineering analysis.

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The whole 737 Max debacle made two things clear.

First, Boeing doesn't prioritize safety anymore. Profit is the driving factor in their decision making. You can read about the issues they have assembling the 787 in South Carolina. It is so bad some airlines are refusing to take delivery unless the plane is validated by the assembly line in Washington.

Second, the FAA was caught being complacent with the 737 Max. It will take some time to fix that, but it is clear they don't want to make the same mistake. Also, the EASA is no longer just rubber stamping approvals following the FAA. Both agencies are combining to improve safety, which is highlighting the management problems at Boeing.

Just an FYI, it's North Charleston in South Carolina.

Thanks -- fixed.

Also worth noting, the South Carolina plant is NON-union, while the Washington (state) plants are unionized.

I speculate that focus on safety and quality of work are easier at the unionized plants.

That is pure speculation. Seems to me the far more simple explanation is that Washington is the traditional home that had decades of buildup and engineering and tightly integrated. Not to mention massive amounts of engineering talent in the region.

While the South Carolina plant was probably set up in a place with far less history, far less integration with engineering, far less historical knowledge and far less engineering talent in the area.

And quite likely a much smaller overall labor pool willing to move there.

There are reports about the SC plant making the 787 from Al Jazeera [1] where they investigate exactly that. And the unionisation helps a lot in the Washington plant to allow employees to speak up with no fear of reprimands.

I do believe being unionised impacts a lot the work environment psychological safety, allowing employees of the plant to halt production if they don't think work is being performed up to their standards, in NC there is no such provision and the employees themselves are caught on video stating "I wouldn't fly on a plane made here".

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvkEpstd9os

Many of these issues are not directly related to unions. Its a question of company culture if they want that sort of feedback.

I was simply point out what to me seem clearly the most reasonable explanation. If tomorrow there was a union in the SC plant and no longer one in Washington I at least would still pick the Washington built plan every time.

And again, its a totally different question if union in SC would help. They might well improve quality, I still would much rather fly the Washington plane even if they had unions.

> That is pure speculation.

To not acknowledge the outsized effects of power dynamics in human hierarchies limits your analysis' scope IMHO. In some of my more dysfunctional clients, I've had to assiduously work to gain the trust of junior engineers to speak candidly to me so I could get the information I need to build my deliverables.

I didn't 'not acknowledge' anything. I simply pointed out what to me seems to be the most reasonable explanation.

I didn't present a complete analysis of the problem. And even if you do take into account 'power dynamics' to jump from that to 'therefore union' would not be correct. Company culture on how errors get handled is likely more important.

A Union worker might be safer from being fired, but that doesn't mean is actually listen to when he speaks up. A company with a strong union culture of workers vs might be separable exactly that.

To me this feel like point to the issue that you like. I'm simply saying that the the better explanation is that one place is the historic home of the company the other is a cheap manufacturing location.

Consider if SpaceX started producing rocket and rocket engine in South Carolina. Would you not consider it likely that the quality there would be worse then in Hawthorne? SpaceX employs are not unionized.

Now on the other hand, what if you had the workers in Hawthorne be non unionized and those in South Carolina be unionized. Would you expect the quality of the rockets/engines from South Carolina to be higher?

I certainty wouldn't bet on that. I much rather have non-unionized workers at a historic company head quarters where the whole engineering sits in a region with likely a 10x higher density of engineering talent and a 10x higher approval as a relocation destination then a far away manufacturing center selected for cheap land and labor.

The same goes for Boeing as well. If you told me I had to make 10000 flights in plane built by the unionized workers from South Carolina and the now no longer unionized workers in Washington. I would still pick the Washington plane every single time.

This is totally outside of if it would be a good idea for the South Catalina workers to unitized and if that might have a improved effect on quality. I think that reasonable argument, but to me its a far smaller factor.

Having worked in large manufacturing facilities that cost billions, there is almost a comical and blatant tribalism that kicks in between workers/teams simply because they are located in different sites. The Chinese sites talk down on Vietnamese factories. Texas factories gawk at the ones located in Massachussetts. I think this happens in non-manufacturing industries as well (Microsoft org chart anyone?), but I've seen that the bonds between workers are stronger when they get together and build something like a giant aeroplane. Leadership has a hardtime navigating the waters, especially if something critical (safety) has been neglected. It is easy to look at this in union/non-union differences, but it's not so simple. I would question the leadership and the way they inspire people to build something together. I suspect this is what's lacking at Boeing and once the culture of not caring about quality kicks in, it is difficult eradicate toxicity from this culture.

There is almost an obsession to find out if your BMW was manufactured in South Africa or Germany, the latter being desirable, on BMW enthusiast forums despite of being made with exacting specifications and factory processes.

The culture of quality differs between sites at different auto makers. You can easily tell by just comparing interior trim fit between same model cars made in Japan vs southern us. Manufacturing sites do not share common value typically core sites favor quality and non core optimize for rate/cost

> Also, the EASA is no longer just rubber stamping approvals following the FAA

This to me speaks volumes about our regulatory environment. Once upon a time the US regulations were so thorough that other countries would just Me-Too certification if the US had certified something. That's no longer the case and the EU has rightly started to question everything.

The US is in rapid decline on all fronts as half our country stands in the way of anyone trying to fix the problems while ignoring our rapid erosion or blaming it on immigrants and leftists.

> Profit is the driving factor in their decision making.

No profit means no airplanes.

Airplanes that kill everyone on them means no profit.

That's right.

Furthermore, airplanes that kill nobody are too heavy to fly. There is a kind of Laffer curve of aviation risk

Not really true - the USG will ensure the survival of these companies for strategic reasons, even if they always lost money.

Many airframe companies have gone bankrupt and no longer exist.

True, but orthogonal and perhaps not as relevant in the modern era. Do you think the USG would let Boeing get into such a bad financial spot that Boeing would stop manufacturing planes? I don't.

Boeing was my first job out of college (BS in Aero Eng but I was hired as a software dev). I worked there for a few years in both commercial aviation and defense projects. I've since moved out of the aerospace industry entirely in favor of tech.

Boeing is a huge company and I saw just a small slice of it at my time there. So with that caveat, in my opinion the root cause of Boeing's problems are mismanagement. Mismanagement flows down from the top of the organization and impacts everything they do.

Here's just one example, off the top of my head: There is no "psychological safety" in the workplace. I wasn't aware of this term at the time, but it's crystal-clear with the benefit of hindsight and a decade more working experience. There is no good way to fix irrational or ineffective processes; or at least, I've never seen it happen. What I did see, several times, is course changes and "new approaches" that result in whole departments (dozens of engineers) getting pink slips. So as a result there was inherent mistrust of change, because "we're going to stop doing X and start doing Y" meant "everyone currently doing X needs to scramble to find a new project before the hammer drops". It is impossible to build a culture of continuous improvement and engineering excellence in such an environment.

Again, this is just one example. There's probably hundreds, thousands, more. It's mismanagement all the way down.

What is psychological safety? I don't think I have ever worked at a place that had that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_safety

https://web.mit.edu/curhan/www/docs/Articles/15341_Readings/...

Reading this should hit hard for a lot of people in infosec.

Psychological safety is that quality of culture that tends to empower people to do what's right, even if it goes against the grain.

Without it, people will not stick their necks out or call out problems. They won't tell you the truth or that they are having a hard time.

As someone new to the management sphere, but coming from an engineering background, it was the absolute first thing I've gone out of my way to establish.

> As someone new to the management sphere, but coming from an engineering background, it was the absolute first thing I've gone out of my way to establish.

The pattern recognition that has kicked in for me watching managers in many clients is the ones that can effectively lead because they've established this psychological safety within their teams and can stand up to pressure from above, are the ones that have also established a narrative upwards the management chain that they're practically nearly FIRE'd, and could essentially leave at any time without much adverse impact.

Empty nesters, on the home stretch towards retirement, working just because the missus wants a few more years at trade/career/profession/etc., whatever form the story takes, it immediately defangs any implicit threats of "do this with your team or else you're fired" that seem ever-present in higher hierarchy levels of many organizations. In fact, these leaders engender such strongly-cohesive teams, sometimes the implied threat goes the other way up the management chain: "if that manager leaves under a cloud, some/many/most/all of the most effective team members will follow them wherever they go at the same time".

Many of the FAA's comment point at Boeing trying to push the regulatory timeline along despite elements (specifically software/firmware/avionics) appearing to be not sufficiently complete. This isn't the same thing as the design being fundamentally bad, or even the implementation being fundamentally flawed - it's just not done.

What's not clear is why this is happening. To be clear, nearly all possible outcomes point at either a broken management, and/or engineering culture at Boeing, but all have different flavors. What points at it being a broken management culture (predominantly... this certainly doesn't rule out engineering problems) is this particular section:

> Citing a “lack of data” and the absence of a Preliminary Safety Assessment for the FAA to review, the agency’s letter declares that Boeing hasn’t even met its own process requirements.

> Boeing’s CCS “review dates have continuously slid over a year,” the letter notes.

This section indicates that someone told regulatory to start a TIA process with FAA despite having not completed a review of a vendor supplied critical component (ie, follow their own plan). This indicates that multiple areas within the company which should have been involved (engineering, quality, and regulatory, as well as areas of the company concerned primarily with internal development, and out-sourced systems) were likely all overruled. These are all areas of the company that are supposed to be setup to stop bullshit other areas getting through. All of them have slightly misaligned interests relative to each other that generally tends to keep stuff in check.

Quality is usually very very concerned with at the very least, following your own plan ('meeting its own process requirements'). No one at regulatory would have looked at these gaps (like not at least papering over missing their own process requirements), and thought that formally engaging would be a good idea.

As someone working in medical devices, this definitely smells like something that management rammed through. This doesn't absolve any of other parties/groups of responsibility though. It just means that you have a problem beyond just your documented process, or technical capabilities/competence.

> Within the FAA, the person said, “there’s a general feeling that Boeing has kind of lost a step,” referring to the slide away from a historic reputation for engineering prowess.

Unfortunately this hits at the development of a culture of complacency.

> [...] after all the 737 MAX issues.

I think using the word issues here is diluting the facts. A more accurate wording would use disasters or catastrophes.

The biggest factor right now is the actual design problems. They caused disasters, but they are not themselves disasters, they are issues.

It may not be lazy engineers so much as senior engineers leaving, and new seniors not effectively mentored and grown.

I don’t think it’s any of the above. I think management shortsightedness and greed are the primary culprits. Safety and engineering excellence took the back seat for quarterly profits.

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