Its crazy how tribalistic HN has become. The whole Boeing fiasco has produced SO MANY "gosh, all those MBAs are at fault. I assign 0 fault to the engineers!" and every. single. time. There is a problem relating to a management/engineering decision, blame from HN ALWAYS goes to "the MBA types" and very literally never to engineering.

I guess I just don't understand what the point of this type of tribalism is? Feeling better about your team while lamenting how everyone else is stupid seems pretty unhealthy.

It comes from the fact that all the people at the top refused to back down or slow down despite all the warning flags being raised in engineering, and persisted in maintaining a system of incentives that left engineers in a position to choose between having to do something unethical, and keeping food on their family's table; all in the name of stock price.

If it were Engineers at the top, we'd probably be lambasting them for abdication of their responsibility too if they made that decision.

Make no mistake. If you would be a leader of men, tread carefully. For where you lead they will follow, and if you ignore their warnings and protestations, and lead them to calamity, upon your shoulders will rest responsibility. If you try and admit you can't make it work; no one can blame you. If you rush in as the fool convinced everything will work itself out, you were either incompetent, or worse, deranged, and thus deserving if ostracization and example-making-of.

It's just how it works.

> It's just how it works.

Nitpick: that's how it should work, and how HN trys to make it work (hence the so-called tribalism), but in many cases those rushing fools get a golden parachute and a cushy retirement while leaving a straw-stuffed limited-liability corporation to be "held accountable" for liabilities it no longer has the assets to meet. And that's if they can't use superior legal funds, PR, and lobbying to shift those liabilities onto engineers or dismiss them entirely.

While I agree with your point, I don't agree with the idea, that the engineers there are some Dickensian exploited workers struggling to feed their starving family. Those are white collar middle class employees mostly.

How many other Aerospace companies are out hiring right now?

The answer? Not many. The industry is highly consolidated at this point. So the competition that normally ensures workers can vote with their feet isn't there.

So... Yeah. When you're already hired by the biggest actor in town, the ethical calculus changes whether you want to admit it or not.

How many would you consider a reasonable amount for competition? There's 15 showing up on a cursory Indeed search, not to mention civil service entities that hire AEs

Ethical decisions have consequences that include blame.

Engineers are well-paid, highly sought after individuals. As long as they manage their finances responsibly, walking away from a job should not be as dire as you make it sound.

Well I can only speak from the point of being the bread winner for my household which the last few years has been getting hit hard by medical crisis after medical crisis, and despite every effort at cost cutting and saving, what cushion I've built up slowly gets consumed. And I'm in software.

The Aerospace folks don't enjoy the luxury of the exaggerated salary, last I checked.

So maybe there's some bias there. However, the circles I wander tend to face the same financial struggles as well. Just speaking from experience.

Aerospace engineers trend higher than most software engineer salaries.[1][2][3][4]

I don't know if you work in SV, but that may skew your perception on salary.

[1] https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/17-2011.00

[2] https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/15-1133.00

[3] https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/15-1132.00

[4] https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/15-1131.00

It’s funny. If an article mentions how much someone in management gets paid, it’s all about how they don’t deserve it, they’re profiting off someone else’s sweat, they’re useless, it’s unfair, etc. Then you see something like a data breach or the Boeing fiasco and management belongs in jail because they didn’t put good processes in place for the engineers.

The problem is that the managers don't have accountability at the same level they are compensated.

If you are compensated better than 90% of your workforce, then you should receive better than 90% of the blame every single time something goes wrong. You're that important, no?

That is so mistaken I’m not sure where to start. I agree there should be accountability, but to say it should be commensurate with compensation is absurd. What happens around here is the engineers are never to blame and it’s always management. Even when it’s specifically an engineering problem it’s the managers’ fault for not preventing the engineers from making a mistake.

> That is so mistaken I’m not sure where to start.

Then you disagree with practically every military on the planet.

So, you're going to to have to provide at least a little bit of counterexample to support your position.

> Even when it’s specifically an engineering problem it’s the managers’ fault for not preventing the engineers from making a mistake.

There are VERY few times when engineering results in the failure of the project--Citicorp center, Tacoma Narrows, Therac-25, maybe I'll even give you Three Mile Island (the teletypewriter was producing bad data because it didn't have the capacity and got further behind as time went) ... I'm having to work hard after that but I'm sure I could come up with a few more. This is normally true because engineers almost always add a safety margin just in case something they can't account for goes wrong.

By contrast, most of our worst disasters have all been management failures. Chernobyl was a management-driven disaster. Fukushima was a management-driven disaster (spraying water on a core to prevent it melting down was a ferociously stupid management decision). The Navy Pacific fleet collisions are management-driven disasters. The first Johnstown Flood was a management-driven disaster. I can go on and on.

I agree that management is generally to blame but also think many (most?) mishaps have engineering related proximate (and potentially root) causes. For example, I think I remember hearing part of the Fukushima disaster is attributed to the engineering decision to place the diesel pump batteries in an area that could flood. The fact that these engineering risks weren’t adequately managed is why people blame management.

I think one reason the original claim is weird is that leadership should own the blame irrespective of their compensation. (E.g., if a manager has $1 salary they aren’t magically off the hook). It’s one of the core tenets of good leadership.

I think engineers sometimes are quick to jump on management because of 1) a hindsight bias and 2) because engineers often have a myopic view of risk. For example, a software engineer tends to only focus on software risks, while management must balance software risks, hardware risks, customer risks, labor risks, etc.

Well, one thing that research into engineering disasters shows is that these things are almost always chains of things going wrong. Generally because managers do something with no engineering justification--either cutting safety margins, continuing in the face of evidence that is indicating operating outside normalcy, or doing something to "save money" with zero thought to the implications.

You will note that I specifically chose the spraying of water at Fukushima as a management failure (we can argue about the lack of failsafe for the cooling ponds)--because some idiot counting dollars decided to try to "save the core" they caused a hydrogen explosion which made things orders of magnitude worse.

In both Fukushima and Three Mile Island, for example, if everybody had simply SAT ON THEIR HANDS AND DONE NOTHING, the situation would have turned out far better than it eventually did. Yes, the Fukushima core would have still melted down, but it wouldn't have sprayed radioactive material all over the place.

Yes, James Reason's "swiss cheese" model that is often used to portray mishaps that occur as a string of subsequent latent failures. My point is that engineering failures are often part of this chain. To the parent comments broader point, many on HN are quick to dismiss the engineer's culpability. Engineers are one of the few professions that have an ethical obligation to society and their role in the process shouldn't be minimized.

In my experience, the result of bad decisions is usually due to incomplete information and risk assessments, whether by an engineer or management. Management usually has more risks to balance than the engineer. Engineers are typically only concerned with technical risk while management has both technical and programmatic risks to balance. When the balance tips towards programmatic risks, it may be due to a poor understanding of the technical risks as well as a bad incentive structure. When the technical risks aren't well understood, it's generally not because management is too dumb to grasp it. It's more likely the culture and organizational structure don't foster good communication or accurate assessments of those risks. For example, if you look at the Challenger disaster, neither the engineering staff or management has great estimates about the risk. (However, the engineers were much closer to the true risk probabilities). It came down to a concrete schedule risk vs. a somewhat nebulous technical risk and the absolute risk won out in the management decision process. In your Fukushima example, I'd bet the "idiot" probably didn't have an assessment (in terms of a failure-modes-effects-analysis or hazards analysis) to properly gauge the risk of their action. (Or there were likely communication failures of that risk, or both.)

I think the important point is that to really fix these issues, they have to be addressed as part of a process failure rather than pointing fingers distilling it down to a simplified notion that it's somehow the fault of an "MBA mindset"

Why should blame be tied to compensation?

Compensation tends to be tied to perceived impact. The perceived impact of a manager with 10 reports who are all focused and delivering individually is much higher than the impact of a manager with the same number of reports where half the team meets few of their goals.

The first manager is ultimately going to be seen as more effective and will get larger bonuses and will be more frequently promoted and ultimately grow the scope of what they own. That they happen to get paid more than individuals reporting to them is entirely appropriate based on their overall impact.

That managers sometimes blame the people on their team for the failure of the team is bad management (and worse if the people above them blindly accept that) but I don’t think you can assign all blame to a manager just because they happen to be the manager and certainly not because of their relative pay.

> Why should blame be tied to compensation? Compensation tends to be tied to perceived impact. The perceived impact of a manager with 10 reports who are all focused and delivering individually is much higher than the impact of a manager with the same number of reports where half the team meets few of their goals.

Maybe because when those goals involve cutting corners on safety and hundreds of people die as a result, that's one heck of a lot of "impact"?

Again, how is that the same as saying that blame should be tied to compensation?

Separate out management for a moment. So an engineer who gets paid 50% more than another deserves 50% more blame for a failure?

I thought HN was a place where people attempted to form good arguments based on fact, not one where people let emotion rule the day.

> Again, how is that the same as saying that blame should be tied to compensation? Separate out management for a moment. So an engineer who gets paid 50% more than another deserves 50% more blame for a failure? I thought HN was a place where people attempted to form good arguments based on fact, not one where people let emotion rule the day.

To entertain the naive pedantry for a second: first, I think a heck of a lot of people would tolerate that 50% scenario more than the status quo, and second, it's not exactly outrageous to suggest the impact you have on a design goes hand-in-hand with how much blame you deserve for it when it breaks (or how much praise you deserve for it when it works). Now, you yourself say compensation should also be tied to impact. Apply the transitive property. You might be surprised what you get.

But surely you realize you're making a strawman out of the points people are trying to make? It's not literally the "same thing", it's an approximation meant to get a point across, and it's based on the assumption that you apply some common sense instead of treating it like a mathematical proposition. Like the understanding that you literally can't fire 98.3% of one guy and 1.7% of another, so clearly everyone understands "blame" will get out of sync with compensation; that in itself is obviously not the literal point. And the understanding what people are clearly upset about is the fact that those who are given more responsibility and power over a product (which just so happens to go hand-in-hand with their pay) frequently appear to bear far less blame than those whom they manage and give directions to. Nitpicking on why it should be proportional to the guy's salary is literally missing the gigantic problem the other person is trying to point out.

Apparently "risk" is tied to compensation. And so is talent.

So if you have someone telling you they're more talented than you are, and they take bigger risks, and that's why they're paid a lot more than you, why would you not expect them to take more responsibility than everyone else when things go wrong?

The problems that MBAs are trying to solve are not those at which your average engineer is particularly good. Also, these problems are usually ill defined and not easily testable. On top of that, to "deploy" your solution you need to show a schizophrenic amount of confidence for the amount of ambiguity and risk you plan to take, and you have to do it all in the form of a PowerPoint slide deck for people who are most likely have no clue what you are talking about and have an attention span of a 5 year old child. All this leads to a relatively high error rate.

So, it's easy for engineers to ridicule them, while still keeping well within their own comfort zone. It doesn't add credibility though, I agree.

So you're basically saying, MBA's are making decisions based on guesses and feelings, which would then be formalized in PowerPoint slides.

I as an engineer like neither of those things. Research the market, create a product per spec, then write documents in markdown. The idea of business are not foreign to us, there are plenty of engineers who start business. And I think the balance is tipping over to the engineers.

In my opinion we don't need a dedicated decision making class. decision making is a skill that engineer can acquire - no need to involve people with no technical understanding into the equation.

>we don't need a dedicated decision making class. decision making is a skill that engineer can acquire

This statement seems to trivialize the skills necessary for good decision making. I would argue good risk based decisions and awareness of cognitive biases (not to mention more “science” based decisions from fields like operations research) probably should be based in formal mentoring/instruction.

> a schizophrenic amount of confidence

What does that mean? "A lot"?

Yes.

With high position came great responsibility. If the engineer instead of management were making those decision, we would blame correspondingly.

Are you under the impression that management contains 0 engineers and that engineers had nothing to do with the decisions made...?

I'm under the impression that MBA culture has issues with taking responsibility for failure, and will always try to assign blame somewhere - anywhere - else.

That’s just shitty leadership. Happens A LOT even without MBAs.

So the MBA's arent responsible for the people they manage? Or are the engineers rogue and answer to no one at Boeing?

The point is not that it's completely the other way around. It's that it's not black nor white, but rather gray. In other words, engineers also have responsibility, as well as management.

It's management's job to manage. That's the definition of management - motivating, steering, and directing teams and organisations.

If engineers are doing unsatisfactory work, it's management's responsibility to recognise the problem and fix it - whether that means finding better engineers, or developing better systems and processes for motivation, direction, quality control and oversight, or simply communicating strategy and culture more clearly.

Of course here the subtext is that "tribal" engineers were just as responsible for Boeing's many recent failures as the C-suite were.

And that's a particularly toxic and dishonest view, because we know from records that engineers were desperately trying to fix the 737 Max issues, while senior management were desperately putting short-term profits ahead of long-term consequences - with fatal results.

There is no "also" here. The suggestion that there might be is a naked attempt to displace blame and rewrite history.

"how could you say we're really tribalistic and blame mbas for everything? Are you implying they werent 100% responsible and that engineers MIGHT have shared in the blame slightly? hahaha."

Well this, if nothing else, certainly proved my original point?

Speaking of that bias, I just read this:

https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merg...

(Sorry about the 'amp' link)

All you need to do is remove ‘/amp’ from the end.

Thanks for the tip! I'll definitely do that in the future!

The tech community has always had that element. It's nicer here than on Slashdot but it's here too.

We've been through a boom for strong-man tech ceos with elon and amaz launching all kinds of projects. There's going to be a natural pendulum swing the other way for a bit.

How so? If a certain group of people always CHOSE profit over doing the right thing other people or groups or teams or whatever you want to call them have every right to criticize them.

"How could you possibly imply that us engineers blame MBAs for everything? Here is me following this question by saying that MBAs ALWAYS choose profit over doing the right thing and that all other teams do not so therefore we should criticize MBAs and engineers are above criticism.

Do you think you'd understand my point if you had self awareness?

Having been through business school, the MBAs are much more likely to be complete numbnuts, an observation which is very strongly correlated with most of the CEOs and managers I have spent time with close-up

"boy, people who aren't me sure are stupid!"

Finally someone on the internet comes through!

Never said I wasn't one of those b-school idiots... it was a ghetto, full of big (shitty) ideas, five-dollar words, and a cohort that couldn't think for themselves if you stuck a gun to their head. I like to think I rose above but... sometimes I have my doubts