Hacker News Reader

Comment by nvm0n2 | Hacker News Reader

The problem at Boeing is a sort of cultural decay in which safety and quality have been lost. Musk isn't wrong that changing their promotion criteria from safety/quality to safety/quality/climate/diversity is going to inevitably reduce the safety/quality dimensions. That's the whole point of changing the incentives - to cause a refocusing onto those other topics.

Some people will probably deny this, and claim that it's all additive. If your employees were 100% focused on safety and quality before, then adding more stuff just means they're now 200% as focused and nothing has to lose out. This is obviously incorrect.

The real question here is not whether climate/diversity focus over quality is bad because it obviously is. The question is whether it's a symptom or a cause of their culture issues.

View on HN

This is absolutely the wrong lesson to take from this debacle, especially as Musk’s own manufacturing lines are putting out complete garbage for very similar actual reasons as Boeing: excessive financialization exerting pressure on the engineering process.

And a culture that doesn't prioritize safety enough. At least Boeing isn't doing for the lol's.

> excessive financialization exerting pressure on the engineering process.

This is a quasi-Marxist analysis. All of Boeing and Tesla's competitors are exposed to the same "financialization", whatever that is, yet it's Boeing with the problem. Tesla meanwhile has focused on developing and shipping cutting or bleeding edge tech, their quality issues aren't due to management but because the thing they're trying to do is inherently very difficult.

You can argue they shouldn't have shipped their autopilot features, but not that it has defects due to bad manufacturing practice. The defects are due to it being a hard and new problem. Making sure bits of the plane don't fall off mid-flight is though not due to pushing the tech boundary, it's the opposite, the 737 MAX exists specifically to avoid introducing anything new.

1. I wasn’t referring to Autopilot. I was referring to e.g. panel gaps, which is a very solved problem.

2. Financialization is a specific term. Look it up if you don’t know what it means. Here’s a hint: “Calhoun [Boeing CEO] has a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Virginia Tech.”

What’s the path for an accountant to end up leading an aerospace engineering firm? That’s the effect of financialization.

Compare to Airbus: “Guillaume began his career in 1992 as a flight-test engineer for the Eurocopter Tiger helicopter in the Direction Générale de l’Armement (DGA).”

Toyota’s CEO: mechanical engineer.

Subject to the same external pressures maybe, yet some companies somehow didn’t end up ruled by an accountant. You can have every company subject to a bull market yet some do better than others. It’s not very confusing.

Everybody with a shred of industry knowledge links the issues at Boeing to the MDD merger and resulting management and culture changes.

Musk has, as usual, no idea what he's talking about.

So you argue it's not a cause but an effect. Fine, whatever. It's still a major problem, isn't it.

But: the MDD merger was 25 years ago. Boeing wasn't considered to be in dire quality straits until the MCAS disaster, which is recent. Maybe the people with "shreds of industry knowledge" are missing what's actually going wrong there, perhaps for ideological reasons? It wouldn't be the first time people have suddenly developed selective blindness over catastrophic decision making by "diverse" people. See the Harvard debacle for one in just the last few weeks.

I think we can safely say that promoting people because they hired lots of black women, over the head of someone who focused on safety, will yield poor safety outcomes regardless of whether the stupid decision making is ultimately traceable to a merger 25 years ago or not.

Culture changes take ages, and aerospace a very, very slow moving industry.

Diversity, and whatever right eing talking point non-sence people spit out, has nothing to do with any of the issues at Boeing. Or at any other company.

Sad that people actually believe that nonsense. Especially coming from a decidedly non"woke" manly man guy like Musk, who is also on record deprioritizing safety, and who's cars and facotories are as bad as it get nowadays outside of sweat shops.

The MCAS is what brought Boeing issues into the zeitgeist, but I was aware of issues at Boeing ~ 18 years ago from friends who had worked there and Al Jazeera did a great investigation ~ 9 years ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvkEpstd9os). Boeing used to be the gold standard and as someone who researches such gold standards it was disheartening to see them give that up. But that happened very slowly and started a long time ago.

Clearly diluting focus away from safety is an issue for whatever the reason especially when the safety of airplanes is declining. This should also be taken in context that many aspects of manufacturing have improved greatly over the past 20 years so even if everything else stayed the same the general safety should have been greatly improved. So the drag on safety by the culture is bad enough to overcome these 'free' gains and end up with even less safe planes should highlight just how bad that effect is.

Why is this post greyed out?

Musk is being a broken clock, he's right, even if it's for the wrong reasons.

It's aviation, SAFETY before ALL else.

This is, along with things like Medicine, one of the very last industries that should get involved with culture wars on any side.

He’s said:

“Do you want to fly in an airplane where they prioritized DEI hiring over your safety? That is actually happening.”

That is not only wrong for the wrong reasons but wrong in and of itself. You and Musk and the cacophony of right wing commentators attempting to shoehorn this week’s thing to be outraged by exhaust a lot of people. I’m only semi-surprised that (your?) group isn’t blaming Boeing’s failures on trans people participating in the “wrong” gender of sports.

How is it wrong?

Readers: this is the sort of engagement and dialogue you want to avoid if you’re arguing in good faith. This person is asking me to prove the negative. As the person making or supporting the claim, the onus is on them to support the claim they’re making, which is something like “DEI led to decreased safety” or something. I don’t blame them, if they’re arguing in good faith, for attempting to shift this because as far as I can tell there is zero evidence supporting this claim.

Additionally, I can tell from their comments elsewhere in the post that they’re definitely not arguing in good faith so this is likely an (pretty bad) attempt to just waste my time. If I were to engage in good they would certainly just post some nonsense or keep asking questions like “How is it wrong?” or “Why?”

I get the impression you don't realize this, but you subtly shifted what you're claiming to try and avoid the fact that you're in the wrong.

Original claim: they prioritized DEI hiring over your safety

What you're now saying: the claim they’re making, which is something like “DEI led to decreased safety” or something

Read again - the claim is that they have prioritized DEI hiring over safety, a claim amply backed up by Boeing's own statements which are very proud of this fact. Employees who were once told to focus on safety and quality exclusively are now told this is no longer their only priority, and now they must focus on recruiting racial minorities and women as well.

There isn't yet hard evidence this policy has led to a concrete safety problem, which is the claim you're now rejecting. But nobody said it had. Only that it's very, very likely to.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com