This kind of an article sounds incredibly damning to me. It indicates that Boeing is essentially rotten on the inside and that anybody doing business with them should be wary.

Perhaps related: https://orgprepdaily.wordpress.com/2007/04/22/on-keeping-you...

This is a chemist's view from the trenches. A manager who hasn't been brought up in the engineering mindset wouldn't even be able to understand any of the points in that blogpost, which partially explains the trouble that pharmaceutical companies are finding themselves in. You cannot bribe or cheat observable reality.

As an engineer, I sort of disagree with this. Doing a shoddy job and trying to get away with it is inexcusable, but "good enough" is the gold standard in engineering. No one is helped by spending development time and money by making things better than they have to be.

Sometimes you have to go with a less capable result because the alternative will take too long or cost too much to develop, or (since we're talking aerospace here) weigh too much.

The trick, of course, is to know exactly how good is enough.

Right, there's a difference between, "because of these unavoidable constraints, we are deliberately making this design compromise" vs "meh, no one feels like following the standards so we'll just pressure everyone into pretending they don't exist".

> "good enough" is the gold standard in engineering.

This doesn't really make sense given any common meaning of good enough. A well engineered system or product is optimized. If you want to say that good enough means solving the inherent tradeoffs between safety margins and cost with careful design and precise specs, then you're not talking about the same thing as that blog post, nor would that accurately describe the way Boeing appears to design commercial aircraft nowadays.

Isn't the common meaning of "good enough" "sufficiently good to meet my requirements, even though I can imagine it being even better"?

But you're right, I'm clearly not talking about the same thing as that blog post. What I'm arguing is that there's this appropriation of language where people use "good enough" to mean exactly "not good enough", and I don't think that's helpful.

Development time and costs are major dimensions to be optimized.

Fully agreed. And “good enough” for some software that does not interface with human digestive systems is a whole lot different than pills that people might take daily.

There are some companys who manage it though, by basically getting bi-furicated intwo two seperat internal divisions competing against one another.

Basically if you have a safe seat- or monopoly, you must learn to play catch against yourself or else.. boing, and important parts go flying.

> There are some companys who manage it though, by basically getting bi-furicated intwo two seperat internal divisions competing against one another.

Sometimes that competing becomes backstabbing between the divisions.

And then the company falls apart when you get a real competitor and the divisions are too busy attacking each other.

And Nokia was one such company, in the latter days of S60 smartphones. One (of many) re-orgs produced three main phone divisions called something like: entertainment, executive, and enterprise, with high-level features partitioned between them [1]. So "entertainment" gets the high-quality auto-focus camera because that's great for blogging hipsters, and "executive" gets the barcode reading software so suits can scan the QR codes on business cards [2] ... except they couldn't because without a decent auto-focus camera the QR code needed to be printed on A3 paper and stuck on the wall to be scanable. Yes, this was discovered in internal testing. Yes, it shipped anyway.

Down in the trenches we made bitter jokes about "three bald men fighting over a comb" as we watched our Lords and Masters engage with the looming competition by making snide public remarks about "that fruit company", having long before killed the touchscreen prototypes. But at least Boeing would have handled this situation differently: we'd have been fired for those jokes.

[1] and what if you're an "executive" working in an "enterprise" who likes to kick back with some "entertainment" on the commute? KA-CHING! you're gonna buy three Nokia phones! Or zero, more likely.

[2] that was seriously advanced as a leading use case. Quite probably by an in-house futurist.

This is a great idea. Can we think of any examples where this has worked? Famously, it didn't work at Kodak when they invented digital photography.

Kodak gets picked on unfairly I think. When you look at the revenue streams before digital photography took off, you can see that Kodak had their fingers in every part of it - cameras, film, processing, printing. They made money every time you took a picture. There's simply no revenue stream in digital that's big enough to replace that. It's impossible to shrink a company by 90% gracefully.

Kodak may have been boned no matter what, but it's still not the example I seek, of a firm that successfully "played catch against itself".

I was just pointing out that there were reasons it wasn't successful beyond just not being a viable approach.

Eastman, which was spun out of Kodak in 1994, is doing quite well. Demand for resins, plastic sheets and intermediates to make plastics products hasn't dropped. Kodak had no idea what their core product was going to be, and bulk chemicals would have been a good bet.

Interestingly, Fuji managed to pivot into polarized films for LCD panels when faced with the same problem. https://petapixel.com/2018/10/19/why-kodak-died-and-fujifilm...

I guess they could have just invented Instagram or something

That would have been interesting, but they still would have needed to figure out how to monetize it.

There is a clear disparity in the understanding of the phrase “good enough.”

The “good enough” from an engineering perspective is, “meets the customer’s specifications and is the best we can do given the constraints of time and money.” It’s about the quality of the product.

The “good enough” in this essay relates to the expenditure of emotional effort in getting your work done to a known standard while management are applying pressure for you to reduce the amount of time and money invested. “Good enough” in this instance relates to the effort exerted. At some point you are not going to try any harder because further effort is counterproductive to your career prospects or financial well-being.

This “good enough” is the lab full of technicians who know the product doesn’t even come close to the specifications it is being marketed towards, but they continue to work because they need food on the table. It’s “good enough” as a dictum from management, not as an informed decision from the product team.

No, the "good enough" in Milkshake's essay means not conforming to accepted standards, it's good enough only for management, who consciously or unconsciously intend to deceive a client downstream and sell up before someone else notices.

Elsewhere, Milkshake has a story about a biological chemist on a project to develop a delivery vehicle for cancer drugs. This fellow found his results unconvincing, continued working on the problem and ended up demonstrating convincingly that in vivo the vehicle did not behave as intended. Now the company had a problem (the FDA demands that relevant results be reported) because management intended to sell the IP to a hapless bidder, and the chemist's action pierced the veil of plausible deniability: https://orgprepdaily.wordpress.com/2017/08/24/breaking-bad-i...

Would you say this researchers efforts were counterproductive to his career goals?

> but "good enough" is the gold standard in engineering

Your post does a dis-service to the 350+ who died.

Nobody agrees that using one external sensor on the 737 MAX that is subject to weather, bird strikes and ground handling damage was nearly good enough.

You're arguing from two different perspectives. Engineering is about producing an deliverables that just meet spec. If someone orders a temperature sensor that they ask to be 1° accurate then you are wasting your time designing something better^.

However the engineers in question at Boeing clearly failed to produce a design that performed to spec in normal operating conditions.

^ Yes, there are scaling factors where it might be cheaper to design a 0.1° accurate sensor and sell it to everyone because it would be more effort having two production lines but that's an optimization.

> You're arguing from two different perspectives.

Your comment doesn't make any sense in the English language.

Nobody ordered a sensor system that was unreliable, so no idea what you're talking about.

Exactly. It was obviously not "good enough", so they failed to meet that standard. That's my point.

>Boeing, one of the US’s largest and most important companies, acquired its longtime plane manufacturer rival, McDonnell Douglas, in what was then the country’s tenth-largest merger.

>The resulting giant took Boeing’s name. More unexpectedly, it took its culture and strategy from McDonnell Douglas

https://www.msn.com/en-za/money/news/how-the-mcdonnell-dougl...

Great article. It's an interesting framing, that Boeing's woes stem from a shift from "great engineering firm protected by airlines' government-mandated monopolies" to "lean engine of capitalism." The story about McDonnell-Douglas doing much better out of the merger than you would expect for the junior partner is interesting, too. It would be fascinating to read more about howthat happened.

Welcome to any large company that's been around for a while. Especially successful ones.

And especially ones who bid on US government contracts

Good article on the subject: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-coming-boeing-bailout

I was working as a contractor at Boeing for 2 years. None of this surprises me.

Isn't that the main reason why people from governments want to do business with them?

If a company is not corrupt, it's not able to backchannel a big part of the money.

By being part of the leadership ranks and being unaware, shouldn't the disciplinary actions extend upon himself as well?

Maybe being a total dick gives you a free pass at Boeing.

The current CEO, Calhoun, took over a month ago after his predecessor, Muilenberg, was fired for the exact reason you just mentioned

He was always on the Board, though.

Yeah that’s not a positive conclusion to come to in light of what their internal lack of negative feedback loops resulted in.

They should instead promote a system that discovers the clowns-and-monkeys comments in order to address the concerns revealed by the comments rather than attempt to stamp out the only negative feedback loop they had.

Instead they seem to have hired another “monkey” for CEO. Hope they hire a better person before even more damage to corporate culture happens.

Yeah. As the company, you don't want emails like that coming out, but getting rid of messages like that damages the so called safety culture.

I think a good answer as a CEO would be to tell managers to be more careful in emails, but no real punishment. However, the criticism in the emails was pretty low content, it's not like this was a message that said, man those monkeys really screwed up the MCAS or something. I think you might see messages like that even on well designed products, people get frustrated.

>> Yeah. As the company, you don't want emails like that coming out

Which, honestly shocked me they were sending emails like that in the first place. Talk among yourselves at the lunch table, complain in private and try to talk to someone in management who will listen.

It was 2018 for god's sake. Do these engineers still not know how stupid it is to be sending emails like that around the company? Maybe it just highlights how out of touch the culture was there to begin with? It just seems reckless and these people should be smart enough to know better.

>Do these engineers still not know how stupid it is to be sending emails like that around the company?

I've started to wonder over the past few years myself: maybe in some cases they very much do, and it's not stupid at all? If you know such emails may come out in case of trouble, then it can in turn become a tool for a low level of whistleblowing/accountability in a hard situation. A lot of us are fortunate enough to not be placed in professional/personal situations where we'd see something with life-safety consequences and not be able to blow the whistle or feel comfortable walking away. But what if one were, or what if the situation is genuinely gray? Like, you get the feeling something may be off the tracks in process, and your management chain/reporting processes aren't responsive, but it's not actually at all clear from your level that it's really important. Maybe it's just you. Sending a "private" email with your concerns to a coworker over official email might be then be a good way to bookmark that. If nothing ever happens it'll forever remain an undiscovered internal email. But if things ever go so wrong that the company actually faces subpoenas from the government over it than there will be a record.

I mean, what you're saying seems to imply that the engineers should have been concerned about keeping Boeing's bad behavior private right? Well, should they? Yeah the company under its modern McDonnell Douglas leadership certainly doesn't want emails like that coming out following the deaths of hundreds of people due to a bunch of company blunders. But I don't think it follows that engineers shouldn't want emails like that coming out. If they're angry enough, they may even actively want such emails to reveal exactly how bad things had gotten internally, in ways that really would embarrass leadership in a newspaper headline or Congressional hearing.

Indeed. Hell, isn't the whole deal with real engineering (as opposed to software "engineering") and professional licenses that engineers have obligations going beyond the company?

But the emails ("designed by clowns", "wouldn't put my family on it") are just the symptom. Even if the whole engineering division had kept its mouth firmly shut the aircraft would still have been designed by clowns, and no one's family should be put on it. This is shared reality. The goal should be to prevent such commentary by picking up on well-founded engineering concerns before management commits to building a product that is not viable because it cannot perform.

What is with this thread of conversation?

"Don't send emails like that because they could end up in eDiscovery."

How about, don't do things in a way where eDiscovery is likely to be an outcome, and actually foster processes that act on quality issues instead of telling the people you're shouldering with making this work with enough weight on their conscience that the only way they feel like they can cope with the foreseeable tragedy is to at least make sure there is some note in the record somewhere that they tried and could do nothing despite it all?

I have absolutely no respect for for anyone who is so caught up with these messages sound, that they can't read between the lines to see the picture of the completely dysfunctional dynamic these people had to be operating within.

The lower an engineer ends up stooping, the worse and more endemic the problems they are facing likely are. If your company has those types of email at all, whether they get out should be the least of your concerns!

The mentality being demonstrated admonishing delivery and sweating on the damage from dirty laundry being aired instead of the fact there is dirty laundry to air at all is like worrying whether or not you left the faucet on when your house is below sea level, and the tsunami is already on the way.

And apologies to those from New Orleans, or the Netherlands; to be fair I could have used leaving the burner on and fires on the way and pissed off the Californians and Aussies, but water was the first thing that came to mind.

And I'm not letting the engineers entirely off the hook either! If they felt that strongly, they should have walked away to, but I can forgive a lot more in the name of familial security than I can the pursuit of profit at all costs.

What about using PGP or something? They could require as a matter of corporate policy that internal e-mails be sent using PGP, and that storage be encrypted. More sensitive stuff they could use OTR for.

I suppose it's not a good look if you're looking at an archived conversation and they switch over to PGP, but it's better than this.

Huh? Legitimate concern can not be voiced in a humorous and combative way? I think the families of the 347 lives lost would like to have a few words. If ‘inappropriate’ words can bring back their loved one, I’m sure the current Boeing management will be buried under verbal abuse.

People who aren’t in either IT, HR, or legal tend to not know or forget that all corporate emails are archived for years

That’s changed. The corporate board, boarding school roommate pay-pal set (so called because they sit on each other’s corporate boards and vote to raise each other’s pay) now delete everything they are aware of. Think, “dvd burners glued shut and SVN repo is fucking gone, what?” mentality.

"the beatings will continue until morale improves"

An alternative take is that they just sacked one of the "monkeys". ;)

Seems like there are two possible takeaways. One is the one you called out. The other is to escalate issues your reports raise to you. "My pilots think this plane is trash. I better tell my boss." He could have taken either route and been safe at least from being canned. Boeing seems to be publicly expecting everyone to take the second approach.

>He could have taken either route and been safe at least from being canned.

I don't know? Unless I'm misunderstanding the story, I'm not sure the guy they fired could have escalated issues he was not informed of? I suppose we could assume that he was informed of the issues, just not via any documented method?

But based only on the information given in the article, I'm just not sure how someone not even in the loop on an issue, can reasonably be expected to escalate that issue?

Maybe I'm misapprehending the article?

No, you've got it right. I missed the negation on him receiving the messages. In that case, his firing is incomprehensible, at least if this is the sole cause.