Active discussion already going for 7 hours:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22008091" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22008091</a>
The response is shocking:<p>"These communications do not reflect the company we are and need to be, and they are completely unacceptable"<p>Boeing appears outraged that employees raised issues in writing, not about the issues themselves. That's reflective of a very, very bad culture. A response like that -- and an internal house cleaning about what gets put in email which will surely follow -- will lead to MORE safety issues. You can't address safety issues if you can't raise them.<p>This whole response will just make it harder to investigate and understand failures in engineering processes. That's not just the investigations by regulators. You can't have working internal RCAs and similar processes if you have filtered records.<p>Boeing can't even see this is wrong. This response went to press from an official PR department.
Playing devil's advocate but I have worked for Airbus for a couple of years and for each aircraft designed in the past 20 years (A380, A400M, A350), I can find dozens of workers ready to say that plane was 'designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys'.<p>Such an unsubstantiated declaration is covered in news just because is is compliant with what is known because of other, better documented sources about the failures at Boeing that led to the 737MAX fiasco but it brings zero information.
It's still stange to me that killing 1 person means that a person goes to prison immediately, but after a manslaughter of hundreds of people the people who did it are still making decisions for the company and prison isn't even discussed.
Just remember, if one lowly employee does it, it's negligent homicide, and they go to prison. And if they blame everyone but themselves, the judge adds a few more years to the sentence.<p>But if a big bunch of nameless managers and executives in a corporation do it, just shrug and say "that's life".
"These communications do not reflect the company we are and need to be, and they are completely unacceptable."<p>A stronger response from some emails than the death of ~350 passengers.
I think that the <i>healthiest</i> part of the culture indicated by this story is that people are in fact willing to use company systems to raise serious issues about the design and safety of their products. That behaviour should be encouraged.<p>Unfortunately that is probably the part the Boeing management is most embarrassed about.
"designed by clowns who were supervised by monkeys", to be exact. And, with hindsight, this assessment turns out to be tragically spot on - if you commit (or approve) the gross negligence of implementing a system which can command a nosedive based on data from only one sensor, you deserve to be called a clown or a monkey...
The scariest part:<p><pre><code> The documents also appear to show problems with the simulators being discussed.
In February 2018, a Boeing worker asked a colleague: "Would you put your family on a Max simulator-trained aircraft? I wouldn't."
"No," came the reply.</code></pre>
I wouldn’t condemn a company because of what employees say in internal chat rooms, but given what happened and what we already know it’s pretty clear they are guilty of e everything.<p>Unfortunately the company will pay a couple millions or more, but the people who said that will pay with their livelihood.
This is in part a problem with the structure of Boeing as a commercial company: The owners appoint people who make the strategic decisions, and those must be followed by a chain of command down to the last employee. It's like an autocracy, based on the sanctity of property-ownership.<p>Instead, the _employees_ - especially those with technical expertise - must be able to participate in the decision making, and have some veto power over it in certain cases. One of these cases should be health & safety hazards.