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Comment by sofixa | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully there will also be jail time, for executives and engineers alike.

"jail time" is a weird word for 8 figure severance pay.

Who got 8-figure severance pay?

Adam Neumann got a 1.7 billion severance package from soft bank for basically making one or multiple bad choices. Even if you subtract stock, the pure monetary component was 185 million $.

It might have been an exaggeration, but on a certain level responsibility means large amount of pay if you mess up.

Mullenberg, as I recall.

I wouldn't hold your breath

Pretty sure it's the executives that made all the wrong calls, not the engineers.

> In instant messages sent in April 2017 complaining about the Max’s flight management technology, an employee wrote: “This airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys.” They referred to its “piss poor design” and urged: “Let’s just patch the leaky boat”.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jan/09/boeing-737-...

And this is also a big time gov Defense contractor and space ship designer. No wonder people worry US is being caught up / potential surpassed by China.

Yes exactly, at least now there is a push by places like JAIC, DIU, IQT to get more startups (or even companies like Google) involved in natsec but these legacy defense companies give me no comfort that they can deliver anything other than overpriced weapons systems only useful to fight an adversary like Iraq that had capabilities from generations before and no real defenses.

While that may be true, people who were just “following orders” still need to be held to account. Tyrannical things happen when people simply follow orders and negate responsibility for their roles in society.

It's too easy to scapegoat the people with the least power and the least culpability with this attitude.

Sorry, my contract is with the corporation, not society.

If you are a member of a professional organisation, there will normally be some professional ethics rules which, if broken, will lose you your licence to work as a professional. Software developers don't have that yet, but civil engineers certainly do. As do lawyers, accountants and other professionals.

I absolutely agree with you. Living in the last stages of the Wild Digital West right now.

We should get rules like that for our industry, I agree.

I want this so terribly right now. You have no idea.

Your jail sentence on the other hand is handed out by society.

Society doesn't need a contract to hold you responsible for your actions.

Everyone has a contract with society. That’s exactly what society is!

If a manager makes a wrong call and the engineers know that it's so wrong it can lead to accidents, they absolutely do have a responsibility if they obey that call.

Then you need to pay engineers the same wage as managers since that is a lot of responsibility. 8 figure severance pay on errors included.

Managers aren't paid because their abilities, they are paid for responsibility. In any case it should be QA on the line.

QA was getting squashed by Boeing at the time. One rampant thing I've noticed in the tech industry in particular is the QA group not actually being independent from the Engineering group. You can only pretend the conflict of interests doesn't exist for so long.

Also, hiring for legit QA, as in, you're getting people who can socially stand up and trade blows with engineers and management is hard. You have to have that unique blend of perseverance, quick thinking and attention to detail that is astonishingly hard to find.

Been in the situation when I was my own QA. You can just not do it at that point because you won't find the errors you made anyway, otherwise you might not have made them in the first place. Was glad that changed at some point and QA can be incredibly helpful. But management just sees a cost center and low risk. Story of fight club insurance logic I believe. Same with car autopilots, you just try to not belong to the unlucky few who will be affected by negligence.

There's a difference between responsibility at all levels for all types of calls, which is the one of the managers; and responsibilities for doing things they know can cause accidents. Engineers are not machines that carry on orders mindlessly without accountability.

The engineers implemented those wrong calls. Following "superior orders" isn't an excuse for killing people through negligence.

Say that when your own livelihood is on the line, you do what you're told.

Nope, not for me. If i were an aircraft engineer in Seattle, knowing very well i have little chance of employment outside of moving to Toulouse or Moscow, I'd maybe think twice before leaking the story anonymously. However, the current SRE me who doesn't have such limits, wouldn't even think twice. Those are human lives we're talking about here.

So every single engineer on this project is a total piece of shit? That is my only logical conclusion to your statement.

It's probably not as simple as you put it, then someone would've done something about it. (Assuming this system wasn't built by a very small engineering team, then they could statistically all be "bad" people).

Nope, but every single engineer who knew about this ( i doubt everyone was fully aware of this, it's very complex hardware and probably few engineers know everything about everything) and let it happen is a total piece of shit who deserves at least a couple of months in jail. How do these bastards sleep at night knowing they let a terribly poor aircraft design out of the door and that cost people their lives? And why, just so that someone higher level than them can get a higher bonus for delivering the plane faster?

Note: for me MCAS isn't a problem per se. It would have been better to have a new design from scratch, but that's a whole other issue. Lying about it(chances of failure, risk when it fails), hiding it, and to top it off using a single sensor that is known for occasional failure. And making it near impossible to override even when the pilots knew about it ( which they didn't, thanks to Boeing hiding it from them). That's criminal negligence by tens if not hundreds of people every step along the way. Every single one of them should be tried and have to explain why their manager's or their bonus matters more than human lives.

You're still sitting on the high-horse saying that you're somehow a lot better than the rest of these people.

It's an organizational/economical problem.

I would like to argue that because recertification requirements are as strict as they are, Boeing were forced to do this to get their product flying.

I don't condone Boeings behavior, but it's not hard to imagine why it happened, and it's definitely not the engineers fault. It's just capitalism in action.

I think we need to be careful about what "this" is. The common person is probably referring to the implementation details of the system, while most engineers I've met (or what tech calls an engineer) only look at their immediate slice of the pie. It's your older or more seasoned folks that tend to watch over and integrate those pieces and watch over process, but details can get lost in the shuffle.

It really comes down to failure to cooperate with the regulator. Perception management is often times easier than proactive compliance. I keep dreaming one day I'll end up somewhere where I can get more than platitudes when people say "we're here to do it right, even if it is hard".

One day...

> ... in return for not seeking punitive damages against Boeing, limiting the potential financial liability for the manufacturer

So I guess not and this is the reason why they made the deal.

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