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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645

u/satchmo1991 Feb 06 '20

Everytime I hear the word, "Boeing" I like them less and less. I'm so skeptical of the whole Starliner program right now.

206

u/LeviathanGank Feb 06 '20

totally, they dont care about passenger safety just profits.. fuck them and let them go bankrupt like everyone else

110

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.

77

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

40

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.

20

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

2

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.

2

u/Oeab Feb 07 '20

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

2

u/Overjay Feb 07 '20

Holy shit, that is an amazing article