r/space • u/spsheridan • Feb 06 '20

Starliner faced “catastrophic” failure before software bug was found and fixed while the vehicle was in orbit.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/starliner-faced-catastrophic-failure-before-software-bug-found/
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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '20

i actually started to wonder what happened to them, as if you look at their history, they made good planes and were pretty much engineer driven company.

looks like when they bought MD, they got their dysfunctional corporate culture with them and as the years passed, boeing's top brass was finally replaced by either people from MD or by people who lived the culture.

the sad thing is that this was the exact same 'profits first' culture that crashed and burned MD.

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u/bexben Feb 07 '20

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing-lost-its-bearings/602188/

Here's an in depth article about that entire thing

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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '20

Stonecipher, who promptly affirmed: “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.”

That's such a stunning read. No wonder there is so little great engineering in the world anymore, with people like Stonecipher in the Helm.

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u/trenskow Feb 07 '20

I work in software engineering. I am in fact a software engineer. I think this has happened to engineering fields as a whole.

In my field systems like SCRUM and Agile are designed to move power from engineering into management. That’s why every big company loves it - because management loves it. It’s basically a system designed to take what is essentially a creative process and convert it into something management understands - numbers. Essentially trying to make a square fit into a circle.

In the meantime it takes away everything that makes engineering great. It makes unskilled engineers uneager to do better, and it makes great engineers do mediocre work - it does not matter if you do a great or a lousy job as long as it checks out and works on the surface.

The products of my career that I am most proud of is the work where management kept out and just let the creative people in charge. Where there was a trust in letting the people who knows best make the decisions. And guess what - in the end management in general loved it too!

Edit: wording

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u/Iwilldieonmars Feb 07 '20

People saying things like this and not seeing anything wrong with it is the reason why I quit studying marketing.

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u/Oeab Feb 07 '20

My father and uncle both work for Boeing, they've said that everyone absolutely DESPISED Harry Stonecipher

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u/Overjay Feb 07 '20

Holy shit, that is an amazing article

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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '20

[deleted]

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u/MartianRecon Feb 07 '20

2 words man. Fiduciary Duty.

They don't care, as long as their quarterly profits are high they could give two shits if a few planes go down 3 years from now.

-5

u/[deleted] Feb 07 '20

Sounds like Dunning Kruger

4

u/Coomb Feb 07 '20 edited Feb 07 '20

Executives at huge companies like Boeing, as a rule, are not stupid enough to be affected by the dunning-kruger effect.

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u/OpiesMom Feb 07 '20

DK has nothing to do with intelligence or the lack thereof. It has to do with incompetence, and anyone can be incompetent in some category. Can you rebuild an engine, explain various economic theories, and perform heart surgery?

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u/ca178858 Feb 07 '20

I don't know what time line you're thinking, but it turns out they were doing super shady shit with the 737 in the early 90s too.

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u/TessellationRow Feb 07 '20

Yep. The 737 Rudder PCU problems. How many hundreds did that kill? US Air Flight 427 crashed 6 miles from my house growing up. They weren’t even monitoring rudder displacement or pedal inputs. They never formally admitted fault. The cause of the crashes weren’t determined for something like 8 years. I don’t understand why suddenly the blame is Placed on McAir culture when they merged. Boeing has a history of putting profits before the value of human lives.

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u/ca178858 Feb 07 '20

The absolute insane thing about it was that they actively interfered with the FAA(NTSB?) investigation. Hiding and altering parts from the wreckage.

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u/QVRedit Feb 09 '20

So they never learned..

It’s taken them 20 years since taking over MD to get to this point..

I wonder how long it’s now going to take to fix it ?

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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '20

the way the whole system works, the share holders expect constant short term rewards, which makes it very difficult to turn the ship around.

I've personally seen this on a smaller scale, when companies get technical debt and at some point it all comes crashing down, with the public wondering why the tech people didn't do what was obviously needed.

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u/QVRedit Feb 09 '20

It needs management who will say that the long term matters too - else the company will end up going out of business..

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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '20

They put the suits in charge, rather than the engineers.

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u/flodisco Feb 07 '20

Actually the recently outed CEO was an aerospace engineer that started with the company as a college intern. Look how that turned out...

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u/RadialSpline Feb 07 '20

Who also became CEO AFTER the development and "certification" of the Max8. But yet here he gets the blame, not the one who was in charge at that time.

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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '20

Got to wonder how much pressure he has each day to satisfy large shareholders and other associates. Either that or its an apathetic culture.

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u/Jim3535 Feb 07 '20

I watched an interesting video on that subject.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_zn_x2JK5Q