Boeing's Managerial Revolution Created the 737 Max Disaster - <AUTHOR> https://newrepublic.com/article/154944/boeing-737-max-investigation-indonesia-lion-air-ethiopian-airlines-managerial-revolution <comment><USER2> _> Everybody thinks his business is different, because everybody is the same. Nobody. Is. Different. [from a wall street analyst about Boeing]_

This in a nutshell represents the core failure of modern managerial thinking. What started as "scientific management" many decades ago, an attempt to systematically understand how corporations should operate, quickly evolved into a group think belief that management could function as fungible & completely replaceable units of work-- that a "manager" could be trained up in various basic principles and plugged into any role

There are of course commonalities across businesses, and commonalities across managers for necessary skill, but each business is, in some core, fundamental way, _different_ from others. Good management of a company doesn't following a paint-by-numbers rule book, it requires deep understanding of the particulars of _that_ business, the market & industry it operates in.

I think this is changing, slowly, but the legacy of this flawed thinking is a long one.

<comment><USER3> Yea, this whole "management is a profession in itself" thing is incredibly toxic on so many levels... If you're American you should count yourself lucky that this thinking has not swallowed the whole economy. Where I am (in Sweden) it pretty much has. :(

<comment><USER4> It's the same, or maybe even worse in Germany.

On a previous job I was working on a component for the project that was a well known Audi model. In 18 months, Audi replaced the manager for that project 3 times.

Managerial careers in German corps are a revolving door where incompetents go in, do nothing, slap the prestigious company name in their resume, then, when the shit hits the fan, jump ship to next prestigious company. Rinse and repeat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Early in my career when I encountered outsourcing initiatives I perceived them as management choosing cost over quality. A couple of decades later my view has changed on that mostly thanks to having worked more directly within the management structure of numerous companies (ranging from startup to ConglomCo Megasized).

In most cases those making the decision really believe they can achieve comparable results by outsourcing while also taking advantage of global wage differences and also converting the continual overhead of personnel into just- in-time overhead that only has to be taken on as needed. This is not unlike the devops trend towards using cloud-based infrastructure.

The problem is that the thinking that you achieve comparable results by outsourcing is woefully naive. In-house teams have a vested interest in understanding the business problems as well as filling in the communications gap between what is asked for vs what is actually desired as an outcome. Outsourced contracted labor does not share those same interests. Additionally, when you outsource technical labor you MUST have the ability internally to create very good designs, specifications, and oversight/feedback mechanisms to ensure that you're getting what you wanted rather than what you asked for via sloppy communication. For those companies that have previously had internal teams and decide to transition to external resources they almost never have someone with that ability and in fact are unaware of the impedance mismatch between their asks and the results delivered by internal teams.

Outsourcing means trading the overhead of personnel costs for the overhead of a much more complex and difficult communications burden. It is extraordinarily rare that the company that opts to transition from internal to outsourced talent has the capability or even awareness of that trade, resulting in predictably poor results.

<comment> swagasaurus-rex Even if designs are done in house for outsourced production, it's stealing a great resource away from the designers: feedback.

They never see the process it takes to be created, the communication pipeline between the designer and builder is throttled, their designs are only tweaked when large or obvious flaws are found.

<comment><USER6> This is a wonderful comment. I think someone on this site said that coding is the process of understanding the solution. This is what that means.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Couldn't resist posting this excerpt:

\---

 _And while Boeing's engineers toiled to get McDonnell's lemon planes into the sky, their own hopes of designing a new plane to compete with Airbus, Boeing's only global market rival, were shriveling. Under the sway of all the naysayers who had called out the folly of the McDonnell deal, the board had adopted a hard-line "never again" posture toward ambitious new planes. Boeing's leaders began crying "crocodile tears," Sorscher claimed, about the development costs of 1995's 777, even though some industry insiders estimate that it became the most profitable plane of all time. The premise behind this complaining was silly, Sorscher contended in PowerPoint presentations and a Harvard Business School-style case study on the topic. A return to the "problem-solving" culture and managerial structure of yore, he explained over and over again to anyone who would listen, was the only sensible way to generate shareholder value. But when he brought that message on the road, he rarely elicited much more than an eye roll. "I'm not buying it," was a common response. Occasionally, though, someone in the audience was outright mean, like the Wall Street analyst who cut him off mid-sentence:_

 _"Look, I get it. What you're telling me is that your business is different. That you're special. Well, listen: Everybody thinks his business is different, because everybody is the same. Nobody. Is. Different."_

 _And indeed, that would appear to be the real moral of this story: Airplane manufacturing is no different from mortgage lending or insulin distribution or make-believe blood analyzing software—another cash cow for the one percent, bound inexorably for the slaughterhouse._

<comment><USER8> The 777 program is a case study in program management and engineering excellence, and that aircraft is still an amazing piece of quality design and engineering.

It is so sad that the Boeing of those days is dead and buried. Everything since the MD takeover ("merger") has been a race to the bottom.

<comment><USER9> Might there be a literal case study of the 777? I read a book about the development of the 747 and it was absolutely fascinating--particularly the (now extinct?) Boeing obsession with engineering safety.

[0] Jumbo: The Making of the Boeing 747

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22849121-jumbo](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22849121-jumbo)

<comment><USER10> As you liked that, consider "Twenty-First-Century Jet: The Making and Marketing of the Boeing 777" by Karl Sabbagh. I believe there is also a video series from PBS. The 777 development program might have been Boeing's technical apotheosis.

<comment><USER11> The PBS documentary is linked in the above article:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oyWZjdXxlw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oyWZjdXxlw)

with this quote:

"There is a scene in the first episode of a five-part 1996 PBS series on the making of the 777, Boeing's first plane to employ "fly-by-wire" technology, in which an engineer discusses the company's philosophy of computer-assisted aviation:

One of the things that we do in the basic design is the pilot always has the ultimate authority of control. There's no computer on the airplane that he cannot override, or turn off if the ultimate comes, but, in terms of any of our features, even those that are built to prevent the airplane from stalling, which is the lowest speed you can fly and beyond which you would lose the control. We don't inhibit that totally; we make it difficult, but if something in the box should inappropriately think that it's stalling when it isn't, the pilot can say, this is wrong and he can override it. That's a fundamental difference in philosophy that we have versus some of the competition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> You often hear about required ethics courses for engineers, but it strikes me that it is management that most requires this. The whole MBA thing & the implied notion of managerialism has been a straight up disaster to everything it has touched (other than, of course, the enriching of the 0.1%)

<comment><USER13> I would argue that the mba program is basically irrelevant. The problem is that the incentive structures for management in these companies is overwhelmingly to produce short term gains in order to secure promotion and bonuses, since the metric of success is to _not_ stay in your role very long.

The ideal situation for a manager is to be promoted through/across the company every few years. Long enough to deliver some large project (that was certainly already in the pipeline) but short enough not to be responsible for the long term impact of that project.

You don't fix that by giving the management lectures on morality, you fix it by reducing their ability to hide the issues that happens in their organisation so that when lines are crossed the manager can't be confident they can sweep it under the rug.

<comment><USER14> >I would argue that the mba program is basically irrelevant.

It is definitely relevant. The programs will pump students full of notions of "corporate social responsibility", right before they send them off to consulting gigs for the summer where short-termism _is how you get the offer_. It's a self reinforcing system. It would maybe be different if MBA programs weren't a cash cow for universities (especially universities that cater to international students), and instead were essentially apprenticeships at the companies themselves. I agree with the general sentiment of your comment, but I'm not ready to forgive the MBA programs' part in this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Also worth noting is the House Aviation Subcommittee's take on the problem:

 _The panel's majority members were best embodied by subcommittee Chairman Rick Larsen, an ex-lobbyist New Democrat who delivered an opening statement of head-scratching insipidness: "As I have said before, if the public does not feel safe about flying then they won't fly; if they don't fly, airlines don't need to buy airplanes; if they don't need to buy airplanes, then airplanes don't need to be built; and if there is no need to build airplanes, then there will be no jobs in aviation."_

Followed by Congressman Paul Mitchell's lambasting of Captain Dan Carey, the outgoing president of the Allied Pilots Association, for having the temerity to go public with his concerns: _" What's the value [of releasing a secret recording] to the system or the families?... Explain to me what warranted that, sir!"_ Clearly, the problem here is that the travelling public, and victims' families, have come to learn about MCAS and its role in recent crashes.

When you are trying to spin a story, however, it can be difficult to keep it straight. Here's Sam Graves, ranking Republican on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee:

 _"It's not the plane I'm concerned about; I think the plane is very safe. We need to concentrate on the pilot ... being trained [for] the aircraft, and being able to fly a plane and not just fly the computer."_

His blame-the-pilots rhetoric does not look so good for Boeing now that we are learning the lengths it went to in order to avoid there being any additional training for pilots.

<comment><USER15> Quick the nose is pitching down and you didn't command it. What do you do? Flip the trim cutouts. True before MCAS true after.

<comment><USER10> Firstly, on previous variants, opposing the trim runaway with the yoke was sufficient to cut out the electric trim, but this was necessarily changed for MCAS-commanded trim changes. It is conceivable that a trim runaway might not be stopped by that action, but it is apparently highly unlikely -- such situations are apparently not part of current 737 simulator training [1].

This is significant, because stopping a runaway by opposing it with the yoke leaves the airplane close to being in trim, and toggling the cutout switches becomes a clean-up operation to prevent a recurrence. This, apparently, is as far as pilot simulator training for trim runaway goes. In the case of MCAS, however, toggling the swiches is the only way to stop it, and it leaves the airplane significantly out of trim.

This is what the Ethiopian Airlines flight crew did, but then they found it impossible to put the airplane back in trim because the load on the stabilizer jackscrew was resisting their attempts at manual trimming. This problem is mentioned in the documentation (though not, significantly, in the checkist that the FAA's response to the Lion Air crash directed pilots' attention to), but in that documentation, it rather vaguely says this might be a problem, and if so, it might be necessary to pitch the airplane further in the direction of the mis-trim to reduce the load on the jackscrew so that it can be cranked in manually. It suggests that several cycles may be necessary to complete the action.

If you are, as the Ethiopian Airlines crew were, at low alttude in an airplane mis-trimmed to dive, this is not a viable option, which is why they re-engaged the electric trim in the hope of correcting the problem. The article mentions a video, that was briefly available, of an exercise to test this scenario, in which the professional pilots struggled to maintain control.

It is clear from this that MCAS runaway is sufficiently different from the sort of trim runaways that pilots have previously experienced, either for real or in their simulator training, and this alone should arguably have been sufficient reason for additional training to prepare for MCAS failure. Even after the Lion Air crash, the response of Boeing and the FAA failed to make this distinction clear -- the message was 'this is merely a form of trim runaway, just like what you have trained for', which it is not.

And then there is the separate issue of not using both AofA inputs, apparently just to keep the lie that there was nothing about MCAS that pilots needed to know about.

None of the above is my own opinion - they are issues that professional pilots, engineers and safety experts have forcefully raised. Captain Dan Carey himself initially went along with Boeing's take on the issue, until more information about the issue came out. If you have contrary experience of 737 training and operation, your point of view would be most welcome.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvpAsiwdM_E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvpAsiwdM_E)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Probably the most interesting and relevant part to HN

> It smacked of the sort of screwup a 23-year-old intern might have made—and > indeed, much of the software on the MAX had been engineered by recent grads > of Indian software-coding academies making as little as $9 an hour, part of > Boeing management's endless war on the unions that once represented more > than half its employees

<comment><USER17> Link to the original article: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-737-max- software-outsourced-to-9-an-hour-engineers)

"Boeing said the company did not rely on engineers from HCL and Cyient for the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, which has been linked to the Lion Air crash last October and the Ethiopian Airlines disaster in March. The Chicago-based planemaker also said it didn't rely on either firm for another software issue disclosed after the crashes: a cockpit warning light that wasn't working for most buyers."

but training HCL likely was taking tall:

"Still, for the 787, HCL gave Boeing a remarkable price – free, according to Sam Swaro, an associate vice president who pitched HCL's services at a San Diego conference sponsored by Avionics International magazine in June. He said the company took no up-front payments on the 787 and only started collecting payments based on sales years later, an "innovative business model" he offered to extend to others in the industry.

The 787 entered service three years late and billions of dollars over budget in 2011, in part because of confusion introduced by the outsourcing strategy. Under Dennis Muilenburg, a longtime Boeing engineer who became chief executive in 2015, the company has said that it planned to bring more work back in-house for its newest planes."

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think that a lot of times management believes it's only job is to cut corners. In those cases, maybe it's better not to have managers.

Maybe if engineers were properly incentivized by profit sharing or something, they could help maximize profits without throwing out everything else like managers keep urging them to.

<comment><USER19> Lawyers and accountants become partners in their firms and are incentivized to work towards the long term health of the firm so younger lawyers will buy in and they can retire and continue to enjoy the profits of the firm.

What do Civil, mechanical, electrical, non-software Engineers have as a career path? None are in upper management. Maybe you get some stock options? You certainly don't get to be in charge unless you start your own small, fledgling engineering company and then the chances are you only work on small projects since you aren't big enough to sue if anything goes wrong you can't get big contracts.

Hoping someone can shed some light on another path for career professional engineers.

<comment><USER20> I'm a big fan of the idea of codifying software "engineers" more clearly. When an architect, civil engineer, or doctor put their stamp on a job they are both civilally and in some cases criminally liable for that work. As such each profession has a professional society and legal framework for qualifying their members.

If you are building a webapp, it's probably fine that you haven't taken an ethical code, been legally qualified to write the code, etc, but those "engineers" that write code that keeps airplanes in the air or driverless cars on the road have, in my opinion, crossed that line into actual engineering work and as such should hold themselves to the same standards as other professionals in the space.

In the case of MCAS there would be a codebase with a signed commit by the responsible engineer, his or her name would be right there in bold when the first version was shipped and when hack upon hack was piled on. Of course this is no panacea but this has to be the way forward as software continues to extend it's reach into mission critical roles in our lives, right?

<comment><USER21> In aviation, DERs (Designated Engineering Representatives) fill that role [0]. They are responsible for ensuring rules/regulations are met, and need to sign off on everything before it's sent to the FAA.

[0] [https://www.faa.gov/other_visit/aviation_industry/designees_...](https://www.faa.gov/other_visit/aviation_industry/designees_delegations/individual_designees/der/)

<comment><USER20> So these software engineers would be referred to as Systems and Equipment Engineering leads in this case?

<comment><USER21> Take this post with a grain of salt - I've never worked directly with a DER. Hopefully others can correct me where needed.

> So these software engineers would be referred to as Systems and Equipment > Engineering leads in this case?

I suppose you could say so, however my understanding has always been that DERs are highly specialized. "Systems and Equipment" covers a wide variety of aircraft components; I would think that's more of a category than a title. As a software engineer, on a project level, we've always simply referred to them as "The DER".

While DERs certainly have a background in engineering, they don't actively help create the product - I wouldn't classify them as a "Engineering Lead". When it comes to designing something, its safety is derived from different internal groups with different goals continuously evaluating each other's work. At each level, everyone signs off on the work they performed or reviewed. As I understand it, the DER oversees all of this, and on a technical level, is ultimately responsible for convincing the FAA everything is safe. On the software side of things, whenever there's a release, a DER has to sign off on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think a much better view of the issue is in the NY Times [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-c...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max- crashes.html)

</comment><comment><USER23> This is a great article and now I am appalled at so many things. But the line that touched me profoundly is at the end where the father and the husband of 4 victims says this:

"I am empty," he told the committee. "My life has no meaning."

I can only imagine the pain he is experiencing.

</comment><comment><USER24> Everybody should read David Packard's address to HP Managers in 1960. This was a time when HP was truly a great company.

[https://gizmodo.com/the-hp-way-how-bill-hewlett-and-i- built-...](https://gizmodo.com/the-hp-way-how-bill-hewlett-and-i-built-our- company-5634378)

To me, this is what i consider as true "Management" and not the BS that passes for it today.

</comment><comment><USER25> I like to imagine a fantasy United States where the FAA (et al) would have stepped in, removed all the MBAs, and set the company on a sane course. More practically, I wonder what could be done to create structural impediments to the kind of managerial death-cult described in the article. For instance, I see no reason a company should be allowed to buy its own stock. How about requiring corporate boards to have at least 51% of non-stockholders? We should remember that corporations are purely social constructs. There is no natural law that they must not be interfered with, that only market mechanisms should control then. We created corporations for social good, and can alter them.

</comment><comment><USER26> This call-out quote hits very close to home for me:

 _You are in a mature industry that is no longer innovative; it's a commodity business. The last great innovation capable of driving major growth in aviation was the jet engine back in the 1950s, and every technological advance since has been incremental. And so the emphasis of the business is going to switch away from engineering and toward supply-chain management. Because every mature company has to isolate which parts of its business add value, and delegate the more commoditylike things to the supply chain. The more you look to the market for pricing signals, the more the role of the engineer will shrink._

</comment><comment><USER27> I am as outraged at Boeing's ineptitude as anybody with a rational mind, but I can't read this kind of article without cringing. Sentences like "about two weeks after the system's unthinkable stupidity drove the two-month-old plane and all 189 people on it to a horrific death" should raise alarm bells in any reader's mind. This is probably a writer who knows nothing about aviation and/or software engineering yet feels very comfortable calling a system "unthinkably stupid". This smacks of oversimplification and just plain sloppiness. There are many articles on the entire debacle that are a lot more measured, and smart about their analysis, including quite a few great reads that were mentioned here in HN.

<comment> chroem- I used to work as a controls engineer. Sensor fusion and redundancy is one of the most basic concepts in controls, and yet it was totally absent from a system that was responsible for flying the aircraft. There is more redundancy built into your office building's HVAC system than was built into the 737's MCAS. That really is inexcusable.

<comment><USER28> Actually, per the article, the lack of redundancy was central to hiding the feature from the FAA, keeping it out of the FOM, and ensuring the avoidance of any scenario that would entail extra pilot training. Whether two or three sensors, any disagreement among them would have involved a more complex system, and would risk necessitating an in-cockpit notification of that disagreement, and the ensuing training so the pilots understand the exact consequences of the disagreement and a procedure for mitigating it.

And the article explicitly dings Southwest Airlines as having provided Boeing a financial incentive to avoiding them needing additional simulator training.

<comment><USER29> _> Whether two or three sensors, any disagreement among them would have involved a more complex system, and would risk necessitating an in-cockpit notification of that disagreement, and the ensuing training so the pilots understand the exact consequences of the disagreement and a procedure for mitigating it._

The in-cockpit notification light, "AOA Disagree," was a paid upgrade [1].

I don't know what the article is on about.

[1] [https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/boeing-bosses- una...](https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/boeing-bosses-unaware- of-737-max-aoa-glitch-before-457943/)

<comment><USER28> a. The AoA disagree alert is standard, not a paid upgrade.

b. The AoA indicator is a paid upgrade.

c. In most 737 MAX's, the disagree alert did not function correctly (did not function as they supposedly intended) unless you bought the paid upgrade for the indicator.

d. Neither the alert nor indicator were considered safety equipment, they were considered advisory.

e. If the alert indicates a caution or warning, it's going to be listed in the flight manual, and decently likely a procedure for understanding and handling that condition must exist, and if so it's going to be a part of a training regimen, the very thing airlines wanted to avoid.

The two changes already planned: decoupling the disagree alert and angle indicator. Upon disagreement, MCAS is disabled. That means the disagree alert is at least cautionary now, because it means the airplane's stall behavior will be different than other 737s. That absolutely will require simulator training for pilots.

One of the most central questions is whether the assessment that the disagree alert was not "safety equipment" was wrong. That MCAS, in an angle of attack disagree condition, can so quickly induce, entirely on its own, catastrophic mistrim at low altitude, is rather damning. It suggests the risk assessment process is flawed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The author states:

>"Southwest always had a lot to say about projected modifications to the 737, and Kelleher's team mostly wanted as few technical modifications as possible. With the MAX, they upped the ante: According to Rick Ludtke, a former Boeing employee, Boeing agreed to rebate Southwest $1 million for every MAX it bought, if the FAA required level-D simulator training for the carrier's pilots"

This seems like an important part of the story yet I'm not understanding if it's inclusion is meant to have significance to the tragedies of the 737. Could someone explain how of if this is germane to the crashes?

<comment><USER31> It's an incentive to make the differences between the planes seem as minimal as possible and avoid pilots being properly informed about all the details of the system, leading to pilots not knowing why the plane does what it does and how to fix it when it goes wrong?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Dup. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21014714](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21014714)

</comment><comment><USER32> The moral of this story seems to be "buy Airbus shares".

Maybe Lockheed Martin will buy up Boeing as distressed assets and do something with it?

</comment><comment><USER33> Lack of openness, and tolerance for politics at corporate offices ... jfk ... bane of many people's misery. VW is another one except that it was an on purpose.

</comment><comment><USER34> How can you guys take an article seriously that can't even be bothered to get basic factual information correctly.

</comment><comment><USER35> Just a symptom of late stage Capitalism.

</comment><comment><USER36> > It is understood, now more than ever, that capitalism does half-assed things > like that

Such a non-insightful aside. Boeing produced many excellent planes, and during that time functioned quite well in a capitalist system. In fact, was enabled by it. As if a non-functioning managerial class never could happen in a socialist bureaucracy.

Buying MD seems like it was mostly motivated by the profitability of defense contracts, which usually just end up distorting a company's priorities, and which are driven by decidedly non-capitalistic requirements of the military. HP avoided defense contracts for decades for this very reason.

Hopefully Boeing will return to its capitalist roots and realize that it needs to use the capital it has to satisfy the needs of its customers by building great planes.

<comment><USER37> I work with these large aerospace primes and see no consistent display of vision, long-term thinking, or integrity among them. I'm not saying these qualities don't exist within their ranks, just that they never become overriding management values. Take a look at the qualifications of Lockheed Martin's CEO or the President of Boeing Defense & Space. Yet, as the article notes, despite being helmed by non-engineers in undoubtedly one of the most technically-demanding sectors in society, these companies are richly rewarded in the public marketplace. Wall Street clearly does not give a shit that these "leaders" don't even truly understand their products.

Pretending that all these companies need to do is Adam Smith harder is crazy. As long as they have $300-$400+ share prices, there is no market incentive for them to not suck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> On the other hand, "Air Disasters" S13 E2 is about the crash of an Airbus A300 that stalled and crashed. The reason was because Airbus changed the way the "go round" mode worked, and the pilots were not aware of it nor were trained on it. The pilots kept pushing the nose down and the automation kept pulling it up, until it crashed.

Airbus also has an Airworthiness Directive out on it for pitch instability:

" This AD was prompted by analysis of the behavior of the elevator aileron computer (ELAC) L102 that revealed that excessive pitch attitude can occur in certain conditions and during specific maneuvers. This AD requires revising the airplane flight manual (AFM) to incorporate updated procedures and operational limitations, as specified in a European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) AD, which is incorporated by reference. The FAA is issuing this AD to address the unsafe condition on these products."

[http://rgl.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance_Library/rgad.nsf/...](http://rgl.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance_Library/rgad.nsf/0/6aeb8ae4513720768625845e00444321/$FILE/2019-15-02.pdf)

<comment><USER37> Air France 447, Qantas 32, and Qantas 72 all highlighted significant flaws in Airbus' Guidance/Nav/Controls subsystems and their automation approach. That doesn't make the article's criticisms of Boeing the slightest bit less valid.

<comment><USER38> I didn't say the criticisms weren't valid. Why isn't Airbus undergoing the same scrutiny? Causing a crash and losing everyone on board is just as serious a problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> _Nearly_ TWO DECADES _before Boeing's MCAS system crashed two of the plane- maker's brand-new 737 MAX jets, Stan Sorscher knew his company's increasingly toxic mode of operating would create a disaster of some kind. A long and proud "safety culture" was rapidly being replaced, he argued, with "a culture of financial bullshit, a culture of groupthink."_ (Emphasis added).

But, the situation is that US air travel got safer during a lot of those two decades. Indeed, the two crashes world aren't enough to push air travel back two decades and safety standards and the rarity of crashes were enough catch the problem.

The 737 Max is a huge problem for Boeing in particular, creating a situation where the endgame is hard to see. But not as much for air travel generally, which continues to be cheap and safe. And Boeing made a lot of planes and lot of money in the last two decades.

Which is to say when things are "pushed to boards", it's hard to say exactly when they give out. The 737 Max system was about minimizing costs everywhere in the system - costs in testing, costs in training and costs in operation. The multilevel Rube Goldberg approach finally failed but it's had a long run, the 737 800 is a workhorse of air travel.

Still, I suppose the lesson is multilevel optimization can result in a catastrophic systems failure. There are probably much processes where this could happen - just think when all the cars are Internet connected.</comment>


Show me the door - <AUTHOR>

It's now been deleted, but originally posted at http://ryanbigg.com/2010/06/wheres-the-love/
Where's the love? by Radar I get it. I fucking get it.
We're just the "backend" guys. We make sure everything's running smoothly so you can get the money from our awesome members to win an EBay auction to send a refugee-now-Australian-resident surfing with who could be the next prime minister. Yes, this is a monumental achievement. I fucking get it. I am happy for you that you raised that much money in a week and it's your biggest media coverage week of ALL TIME.
I fucking get it.
When the site received the massive traffic it did last night, who was there at 10pm to figure out what the fuck happened? The Online team. Rain or shine, the Online team are the only team who are capable of determining what happened to the website and then fixing the problem so it doesn't happen again. And that's what the other members of the team did. Pats on the back all round the next morning. Everything is fucking peachy. Good work, Online.
But that system's old. It's written in PHP for God's sake. Have you seen the code? It's ugly. It's barely maintainable and it's ramshackled. That's why you hired me. So we could re-write the site in Ruby on Rails. I'm training your guys to be elite Ruby on Rails ninjas. They're smart guys. They're learning, and at a rapid pace too.
So then you go and pull off one of "my" Rails devs to work back on the "v2″ site. Yeah, I'm fine with that. Sure. You've got to make sure that's ok for the election. I fucking get it. Yeah, one of the other developers is out with very severe RSI. He was too awesome. Or maybe one of you two (him, or you) worked him too hard. Or maybe you didn't and he was already prone to this. Whatever.
That leaves us three: the empathetic manager and The Other Developer, and me. Fine. I fucking get it. We'll still keep plodding along on v3.
Hey, did you hear about the fabulous progress we made this week? The Other Developer has finished what I think is one of the best features of the system: email blast previewing. Oh, you've got a campaign to run. Never mind, we'll do the meeting another day. You're busy. I fucking get it. The work I, The Other Other Developer, have been doing? I've "wrestled with the beast" known as PayPal all week, and won late this afternoon against everything it could throw at me. Let me tell you: PayPal is not nice to developers. It was a medium-stress-level week, but I just kept plodding along. And now it's done. It just needs the UI tidied up and it's ready to present.
Whenever you have the time. Oh. You're running another campaign. That's fine. We'll do the meeting another day. You're busy. I fucking get it.
But you had a busy week this week, didn't you? Good on you for everything you've done. Seriously. You fucking rock! When I hear family members say they've not only seen you on the TV, but read about you damn near everywhere, I feel I'm contributing to something amazing. Good stuff.
Then comes the weekly team meeting where we share our triumphs for this week. It's usually held at 4pm on the Friday. But this week's meeting was different. It was pushed back to 4:30 because you were so busy. Alright, so I worked on that Last Failing Test that always seems to hang around when I merge. Conquered that too. Oh look, it's 4:45. Ok, meeting's coming soon. I'll just catch up on the news of the day because to start anything now will not be worthwhile in this state of tiredness.
Then 5:00 comes around. No meeting.
5:15. Bam. Meeting.
Campaigns team kicked ass this week. Good stuff. We had donations coming out of ears. People singing our praises. Press galore!
Nobody asked what the Online team did this week.
Nobody asked what the Online team is going to do next week.
I could come in and make it look like I was doing work by working on my book instead and you wouldn't know the difference. But I won't do that. That's stupid and not what I'm being paid for. I fucking get it.
So how about showing some love next week? How about taking a break from your extraordinary lives and asking us "how are things are going?" "Is there anything you need my advice on?" "When would be a good time for you to schedule the meeting so we can go through the changes as a team?"
Show some love, or show me the door. <comment><USER2> It could be worse, at least the team you're on is succeeding. I'm in a situation where I'm a silent investor, the technical people are not completing anything, the CEO is not selling anything (he has TONS of stuff going on, costing 10 to 30 thousand dollars per month at least, but the results are damn near zero), and it seems they have stopped responding to my emails.

So, on the bright side, it could be worse, at least you're not losing money.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd never thought I'd do this on HN but I'm going to tempt the karma gods and do it anyway because you seriously need it:

 _< hug>_

</comment><comment><USER4> i can totally understand the frustration ...

for the last year, people at work used the "budget cuts" argument and hiring freeze and what not to justify any upgrades or raises. Now come around this year, I get the budget cut excuse for our department while people at higher positions get a promotion and a paygrade bump. I am just waiting for a few more days to see if they consider it again or i'm going out of the door because I ain't seeing any love or appreciation for busting my ass to keep things up and running and just am just getting tired of getting an empty pat on the back ..

</comment><comment><USER5> hah. it's often said that if your sysadmin is doing his job, you don't notice he exists.

So, really, getting ignored is something of a complement. It means you are doing your job.

</comment><comment><USER6> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sons_of_Martha>

</comment><comment><USER7> I totally understand where you're at… It's beyond frustrating!

You can either 1) educate them or 2) show yourself out. I'm sure a dev like you won't have much trouble finding a cool startup looking for talent… :)

</comment><comment><USER8> It seems you are at a wrong place or taken for granted and you probably need to walk out of that door yourself.

</comment><comment><USER9> I fail to see how you were wronged here.

</comment><comment><USER10> 'Aunt Irma'?

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't fucking get it.</comment>


Discovering Effective Pokémon Types Using Linear Optimization - <AUTHOR> http://aurellem.org/pokemon-types/html/lpsolve.html

<comment><USER2> There is some error in your LP problem: judging from your constraints, fertilizer for barley costs more than what the farmer will earn in the best case by selling barley, thus he should never do it. This comes from the fact that you should be maximizing profits (eg. price sold - cost) rather than maximizing price sold under the constraint that the cost is no more than what the farmer can spend</comment>


Show HN: Comparing performance of Twitter Streaming API libraries (help wanted) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mroth/twitter-streaming-showdown

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here -- I found some of my results to be a bit confusing, so I was hoping the HN community could help me improve on these.</comment>


People want to tell you who they think they are - <AUTHOR> http://gelform.com/blog/people-want-to-tell-you-who-they-think-they-are/ <comment><USER2> This is good! I wonder if this is another reason people like Typeform's UI - they only show you one question at a time.</comment>


The palaeogenetics of cat dispersal in the ancient world - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-017-0139 <comment><USER2> This topic comes up on HN in some variation every 2-3 weeks...

<comment><USER3> I too have noted the preponderance of cat related materials and subject matter on the internet.</comment></comment>


Getting Your SMS Apps Ready for KitKat - <AUTHOR> http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2013/10/getting-your-sms-apps-ready-for-kitkat.html <comment><USER2> Hmm, that last part about SMS Backup/Restore only working if you're the default SMS app seems a bit annoying.

The workaround they suggest - setting yourself as the default SMS app, then unsetting it - seems a bit hacky. I suppose you'll also need to handle the case where a SMS arrives whilst you are doing a restore/backup, and your app is set as the default SMS app.

I wonder if this is a permanent thing from Google, or if it's just a temporary thing until there's a proper SMS backup/restore permission.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Seems pretty likely that Hangouts will be the default SMS app in 4.4 now.</comment>


Judge accused of texting prosecutor to aid case - <AUTHOR> http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Judge-accused-of-texting-prosecutor-to-aid-in-case-4204137.php

<comment><USER2> Here's another article about this story that's not behind a paywall:

[http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/judge_accused_of_text...](http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/judge_accused_of_texting_prosecutor_about_case_during_trial_will_step_down_/)

Apparently the judge has been forced to resign:

" _A Texas judge hasn 't admitted any wrongdoing concerning her claimed texts to a prosecutor during trial.

But 258th District Judge Elizabeth Coker will give up her seat on the bench effective Dec. 6 and she is taking a voluntary leave of absence in the meantime, according to the Houston Chronicle and Your Houston News.

The settlement agreement also will preclude her working as a judge elsewhere in Texas._"

<comment><USER3> Thank you for finding another source!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I can't read the article without subscribing. Flagged.</comment>


Is swine flu panic caused primarily by people who are not egocentric? - <AUTHOR>

After all, if you are egocentric, then you would probably believe that nothing bad will happen to you.<p>If this is the case, then we can use the levels of panic vs threat in each country to compare egocentrism levels across countries. <comment><USER2> Rather than egocentricity, isn't it really measuring skepticism? I would expect rubing is a skeptic.

I noticed on the only 'tabloid' news site I ever look at that swine flu stories are now 'below the masthead'. They've decided for the time being at least that the story is running out of legs.

While I would consider myself a skeptic too it did at least prompt me to go and get my flu shot.

<comment><USER3> i saw a news story the other night about a graduation ceremony at northeastern was prohibiting congratulatory handshakes b/c of fear of swine flu. This speaks to the cowardliness learned men and women. They are the most sniveling cowardly and pathetic people on this planet. The students at the ceremony should have all held hands and mocked the professors/administrator. What buffoons!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> caused by a bunch of beauracrat ninnies with nothing better to do looking to justify their existence as well as news people scavenging for the next story</comment>


Solar powered autonomous RC boat travels from CA to Hawaii - <AUTHOR> http://www.seacharger.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> On July 22 2016 a 'rc' boat travelled 2413 miles under solar power. It then got within 300 miles of New Zealand before its rudder finally packed in.

(I couldn't find this on HN before, but please remove if it has been featured)</comment>


OpenTreeMap: Urban tree inventory and ecosystem services calculations tool - <AUTHOR> http://opentreemap.github.io/ <comment><USER2> I found their other website[0] to be a bit more informative about what the project was actually aiming for. (Of course, the github page is better for working with the code.)

It's an interesting (and useful) project idea, but the subscription rates seem _very_ steep to me. It also isn't clear why there isn't a minimum free version for individuals to utilize? It seems like having a free tier to encourage individuals to add info to the database (a la openstreemaps) would be the easiest way to grow the database of information -- once that database exists, it could be monetized using the subscriptions they have. I'd probably walk around and add info to their system, but I wouldn't pay $90/mo to do that. Is that the purpose of the open source code? Would I then have to run my own database?

[0] [https://www.opentreemap.org/](https://www.opentreemap.org/)

<comment><USER3> Hello! Glad you're interested in the OpenTreeMap project! My name is Andrew Thompson, and I work for Azavea _, the GIS company behind OpenTreeMap (OTM).

To answer your questions, I feel a clarification is needed. The subscription levels and pricing aren't really meant for end users like yourself, but for the larger governments and agencies, environmental nonprofits, schools and campuses, tree care companies, and other organizations that have a need to conduct urban tree inventories and ecosystem benefits analyses. We have several such organizations as clients, from TreePeople (nonprofit) in Los Angeles, the City of Edmonton, Canada (government), and the Open University in Great Britain (academic). For each of these maps and others where the map- owning organization has decided it wants public "crowdsourced" contributions to its tree inventory (OTM provides the option of private maps and editing permissions too, though we encourage clients to take advantage of crowd sourcing and open data), we provide FREE Android and iphone mobile apps (which are open source too) and a public tree map website that's free for public contributors to view and edit data.

If you live in Tampa, Grand Rapids, Philadelphia, Seattle, Asheville, San Francisco, Sacramento, Los Angeles, San Diego, Edmonton, or Great Britain, there's a public OpenTreeMap available for your area that would love to have your data contributions!

Also, the maps in Tampa, Asheville, and Seattle were created from the open source code we have at github.com/opentreemap. So we're glad to have a growing open source community around the project in addition to our SaaS subscription cloud offering.

_We're a certified "B Corporation" (bcorporation.net) that works on civic software for social impact. Interested in working on projects like OpenTreeMap that advance open data, open source, and open government? We have several positions open at [http://jobs.azavea.com/](http://jobs.azavea.com/) !

<comment><USER4> Are any of your clients sharing their raw data with the public?

(By 'raw' I mean in a format that is complete and convenient for machine processing)

<comment><USER3> Yes! Azavea built the City of Philadelphia's official open data catalog ([http://www.opendataphilly.org/](http://www.opendataphilly.org/)), we represent Philadelphia as a "node" in the Open Data Institute (theodi.org), and we are huge proponents of machine-readable, bulk, open data ([http://www.azavea.com/blogs/atlas/2014/05/which- candidates-f...](http://www.azavea.com/blogs/atlas/2014/05/which-candidates- for-governor-of-pennsylvania-support-open-data/))

Right now, most of our client tree maps have elected to make their raw data downloadable to the public. On most/all of the OpenTreeMap version 1 sites, on the bottom of the map, there's a few links: "Export this search: KML | CSV | Shapefile". KML is the format native to Google Earth but is really an XML- based, officially adopted open geographic data standard many tools support ([http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/kml](http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/kml)). Shapefile is a semi-open geodata format invented by Esri - even though it's only a de facto standard per se, the vast majority of GIS analysis tools use and support it ([http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Shapefiles](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Shapefiles)). CSVs are, well, CSVs. On our OpenTreeMap version 2 sites, running on our SaaS infrastructure (the only major public ones at the moment are Edmonton [http://www.opentreemap.org/edmonton/](http://www.opentreemap.org/edmonton/) and Los Angeles [http://treemapla.org/](http://treemapla.org/)), there is an "Export Search Results" button that allows you to download a CSV of bulk data. (I believe in the future we would like to support other formats than CSV again, but don't quote me yet and that's "down the roadmap" anyway...)

Sites with bulk downloads: Version 2 (SaaS): [https://www.opentreemap.org/latreemap/](https://www.opentreemap.org/latreemap/) \- LA [https://www.opentreemap.org/edmonton/](https://www.opentreemap.org/edmonton/) \- Edmonton Version 1 (self-hosted, sometimes Azavea built, sometimes built from open source code): [http://phillytreemap.org/map/](http://phillytreemap.org/map/) \- Philly [http://treemap.urbanforestproject.com/map/](http://treemap.urbanforestproject.com/map/) \- Grand Rapids, MI [http://urbanforestmap.org/map/](http://urbanforestmap.org/map/) \- San Francisco [http://greenprintmaps.org/map/](http://greenprintmaps.org/map/) \- Sacramento area [http://sandiegotreemap.org/map/](http://sandiegotreemap.org/map/) \- San Diego [http://treezilla.org/](http://treezilla.org/) \- Great Britain (yes, they are aiming to cover the entire country) [http://seattletreemap.org/map/](http://seattletreemap.org/map/) \- Seattle (open source and they re-wrote a lot of the client side in Dart!) [http://www.tampatreemap.usf.edu/map/](http://www.tampatreemap.usf.edu/map/) \- Tampa, FL (open source but with some consulting by Azavea) [http://ashevilletreemap.org/map/](http://ashevilletreemap.org/map/) \- Asheville, NC (open source)

<comment><USER4> I didn't try very hard, but I didn't see links to any maps from the main page (maybe this is on purpose, I don't know, I was curious what they looked like and no example was obvious).

The shp export from phillytreemap.org doesn't include trees.shp. Nor does a search in Grand Rapids and another in Seattle. Am I misunderstanding how the data is organized? The other formats seem to include the trees, but they are not especially conveniently organized.

For version 2, I tried to download "Edgemont" from Edmonton, 150 trees. The preparing box came up and nothing happened for several minutes and I gave up (well, really I tried it in a different browser that has a cleaner profile, but it didn't work there either).

I don't need the data for anything, just looking at how it works and what comes out.

<comment><USER3> Yes, the main page on opentreemap.org is mainly our marketing site about the system in general. Our clients really decide how they want to spread the word in their local region about their individual map URLs. Perhaps in the future we might make it easier for others to discover what maps there are from the homepage.

SHP exports: Correct, the SHP exports from v1 maps will only have a plots.shp file and no trees.shp file. However, if you open that file in Esri ArcMap or the open source QGIS, you'll find that the tree data does exist, it's just in a second "attribute table". The way OpenTreeMap is architected, we have two data concepts: plots or "planting sites", and trees. A particular plot has the latitude/longitude location associated with it, and a particular tree is associated with a particular plot (but the tree doesn't have a location, itself). This allows us to keep track of the history of a particular plot/planting site - which may host multiple trees over the years as they grow, die, or are cut down. I covered a bit of this in a blog exploring how to use exported OpenTreeMap data: [http://www.azavea.com/blogs/labs/2013/08/open- data-from-open...](http://www.azavea.com/blogs/labs/2013/08/open-data-from- opentreemap-visualizing-tree-data-with-cartodb/) You may want to use the CSV export option depending on what you want to do.

Version 2 exports: What you're describing is a bug we need to fix. Occasionally, when you're not logged into an account, exports don't work. As far as we've been able to test, exports always work when you are logged in. You can sign up for a free account on Edmonton's map at [https://www.opentreemap.org/edmonton/accounts/register/](https://www.opentreemap.org/edmonton/accounts/register/). (Actually, your account will work on any opentreemap.org map for editing/viewing, including TreeMap Los Angeles).

But since you just want to explore, I've put an example CSV export of the Edmonton neighborhood "Abbotsfield" up on my Google Drive for you to download and take a look: [https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3KytMYbF2eoQ08yZ1ZMQjJUdjg...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3KytMYbF2eoQ08yZ1ZMQjJUdjg/edit?usp=sharing)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does OpenTreeMap use OpenStreetMap?

<comment><USER6> I have the same question. OpenStreetMap definitely has the necessary infrastructure see: [http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:natural%3Dtree](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:natural%3Dtree)

People have also added a large number of trees on OpenStreetMap -- see: [http://sk53-osm.blogspot.com/2013/02/quicker-mapping-of- stre...](http://sk53-osm.blogspot.com/2013/02/quicker-mapping-of-street- trees.html)</comment></comment>


What Good is a GPT-3? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-scinder/what-good-is-a-gpt-3-ee8414a77c53 <comment><USER2> Meta: it distresses me that all the effort is being put into generating bullshit with little going into detecting it. Detecting bullshit would be far more valuable.</comment>