If you want to be the change you want to see in the world, shout in the ether that this engineer will have a job at your organization.

That’s what is keeping so many of them silent: a mortgage, school fees, maybe a H1B.

A man with nothing to lose is the most dangerous.

By far the most effective leadership I’ve worked for are the ones that already have a very comfortable nest egg or are independently wealthy.

They’re the ones that aren’t afraid whatsoever to rock the boat or do what they think is right, and are actually able to drive change.

Just imagine how people would work if everyone had some basics assured!

I can imagine that some would be incredibly lazy and some efficient. Question is which group would be bigger.

No the question is which group will have a bigger influence.

Lazy people tend to self sort into irrelevance.

Not that I think assuring basics is a bad thing, quite the opposite — but I think we would see a lot more rude co-workers who are willing to take risks with their working relationships. That is, specifically those with basics assured and still early in their career and/or poor relationship skills to begin with.

Those issues already surface in any situation, but it's safe to assume that many hold their tongues because they're afraid of losing their income stream.

> They’re the ones that aren’t afraid whatsoever to rock the boat or do what they think is right, and are actually able to drive change.

I think a great deal of their ability to drive change is because they know the right things to say to the right people. I.e. they have some diplomatic skills.

Because while they might be able to afford to lose their job, they certainly won't drive any change if they actually do lose their job.

I have never seen an engineering project fail because of poor "relationship skills" - definitions pending.

Diplomacy helps, but mostly it is about being open about problems and about pushing that info up the chain of responsibility. If you need diplomacy for this point, you already have a severe problem here.

Otherwise the head will also fumble. I have been in expensive meetings talking a lot about parking space organization. This always happens if there is nothing interesting related to the business to talk about. Stuff gets off-topic quickly.

That said, change and disruption has a positive connotation in the business of today. But it isn't always positive.

> Diplomacy helps, but mostly it is about being open about problems and about pushing that info up the chain of responsibility.

Then, in my eyes at least, you're talking about either relatively minor things, or things which already fall in the bailiwick of the leader. I'm just a line person with no one under me who could last a max two months without a job but I have no problem communicating problems up the chain. I'm probably naive, but I'd think most other people wouldn't have such problems either. If they do have problems this seems like an organizational issue that even the leaders SteveNuts mentions in the GP wouldn't be able to change.

What a silly designation to assign to one of the cushiest, indoor, high paying jobs in our society.

Compared to the reality of the situation, I agree that it’s garish, but psychologically, people in cushy situations tend to over-dramatize their setbacks. If they _think_ they have nothing to lose, they will act foolishly just the same as if they really do.

If a billionaire slams his toe on the leg of a chair, it still hurts, and being sorry for his real pain isn’t denying his otherwise staggering privilege. It’s an excellent example to use to have him empathize with others. If you want to make them act in society’s interest, you can point out that paying taxes or enforcing environmental regulations won’t prevent them from being rich beyond words.

An engineer worried about being fired experiences genuine distress: you can empathize with that there and then because it’s real. Once they have a job, ask them to be more considerate when designing processes or buildings so that everyone can work comfortably in the shade or without having to fear how they are going to feed their family by the end of the week.

Should call them what they are, behavioural hacking to introduce compliant, seddated behaviour, without a longterm grasp of the damage the hacks inflict. Obvious solution? More law-ducttape on the imperfect ape.

> shout in the ether that this engineer will have a job at your organization.

This. Or crowdfund a mega million dollar bounty for evidence of certain types of malfeasance.

The market seems to generally punish whistleblowers, and understandably so. I have never worked for a company that wasn't violating some contract, regulation, or law. In my first job we were forging stuff for PCI compliance. The next job stored medical records in a Git repo.

So most people have something to lose if there is a whistleblower personality around, as much as we might admire them when they reveal the secrets of others.

I wouldn't want to work with one. I am not a manager and even as a low level individual contributor I cut regulatory and security corners to keep bosses happy.

You would get far more whistleblowers if it didn't essentially mean wrecking your livelihood, even if you are willing to sacrifice your career.

> crowdfund a mega million dollar bounty for evidence of certain types of malfeasance

Yes and:

Make whistleblowing-for-hire official.

IIRC, there's a law practice whose sole activity is suing prescription management practices. Basically forensic accounting meets administrative law.

I want more of that.

Further:

Winner-takes-all seems to be some kind of natural law. And by extension, regulatory capture. Civil society needs countervailing mechanisms that exist outside or separated somehow.

I most like ensuring pro-competition and anti-monopoly policies.

But monopolies will always exist, eg natural monopolies like utility districts and police, so we also need transparency and accountability hacks like you're suggesting.

How about, if you can proof your company engages in monopoly practices, you get as a reward, parts of the company to start your own?

Far for me to challenge the idea of a fund and bounties. But that’s a lot of money—more than I can personally fork and more than I’d be comfortable advocating to collect. Again, no criticism of your ambition; I’m just a regular guy trying to do his thing.

I do believe that good engineers like their work and drive a lot of self-esteem from it being valued—more than living off a stipend because they shot their career in the foot. It’s well-paid enough they rarely think they need to rely on the generosity of strangers, and that’s not a bad mindset to keep.

In circumstances like these, people talk about loyalty, notably to their employer; I don’t think loyalty is a bad value, but in that case, you want to advocate for loyalty to the craft and the corps, not the organization profiting from putting people in danger. Engineering values, like the brass ring some get in Canada, are things that you want to support not by saying “we’ll support you if that blows in your face” but “We want people like you to speak up during our meetings.”

Giving engineers a guarantee that their craft, their talent and their willingness to ask tough questions is what you value, as a team lead, is something I occasionally can do (not now, though: changing team) and something I’m happy to compensate at fair market value, because it’s objectively a good thing for me too — not because that would put me at odds with my organization, but I’m willing to sacrifice that for some ideal misaligned with profit.

We need to work on getting eggheads at Boeing understand that their cost-cutting was a bad idea (SkyScanner letting you filter-out plane time is beautifully aggressive that way), but in the meantime, we need to tell people facing tough decisions that engineering is full of hard trade-offs but that security is not one of them, and not one that should need charity.

Or require the government to give a proportion of the fine to the whistleblower, like the SEC has. We find out about a lot of shady finance through that program.

This is what I'm hoping for the future, so many will be so poor we won't have mortgages or kids, nothing to lose. But I doubt it.

An MBA designed MCAS?

An MBA designed the door plug installation process?

Maybe it’s the Boeing engineers that need some scrutiny?

Engineering failures don’t just happen in some contextless organizational vacuum

> Engineers can't fail, it's always management's fault.

or, what can engineers possibly know about engineering: https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=213075

Unironically, yes? Management is where the buck stops.

Engineering needs to be embedded in a system that can handle the fact that engineers fail and still produce reliable and effective outputs. The primary purpose of management is making sure such as system exists and functions. Managers are the engineers of the entire meta-system, basically.

Engineers can fail, and when they don't QA may, but it's management that chose to believe otherwise

Yes, in fact the Captain is always responsible for literally everything that happens on the ship.

If management don't want to take responsibility, they could take a pay cut and give the money to the engineers.

Normally I would agree if an engineer directly knew what they were doing was bad and didn't say no but in the case of MCAS: pilots had no idea it was there. Yes, it also wasn't properly redundant and that is bad but had the pilots known it had existed in the first place and understood it was operating off a single data source they would have acted accordingly and a lot of people would still be alive. Door plug I can't speak to.

Hiding MCAS to avoid recertification was well above the paygrade of an engineer at a bench poking a circuit.

Also, if you want a short version of how this stuff goes very wrong even when engineers do say something, the challenger disaster[1] movie is great. Chase it with the NASA documents[2] for the long version.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvv2-7iOD_8

[2]: https://www.nasa.gov/history/rogersrep/genindex.htm

Edit: typo

The three dimensions of every project are always:

Cost

Quality

Time

MBA push for cost, then time (to market), above quality.

Cost and time can't really be fudged. There are multiple ways to deflect and obfuscate issues with quality, so of course that comes last.

Maybe the QA engineers were fired because they were doing their job but the MBAs optimised for the wrong metric?

Ding ding ding.

Found an MBA! It's fascinating how obvious hints miss you people by a mile :)

Curious who believe makes so-called "executive" decisions in an organization...

If you believe it should be engineers, we're fully in agreement, but then why do we have managers...

They don't put Boeing engineers in management or executive positions these days.

Heck, they fired the last CEO over the 737 crashes but he was literally only on the job for 3 years and had no involvement with the 737 design. The problem? He was an engineer and he was already stirring up shit inside. So they threw him under the bus and replaced with him another useless goon that spouts PR bullshit and has no technical experience other than milking companies dry.

Read about the Space Shuttle Disasters. There are several good books on them.

I think MCAS was one of those organizational failures. I could see myself implementing something like that. I imagine the conversation would go a little like this:

"We need to replicate the pitch performance of the 737-800. These engines pitch the plane up when accelerating and it messes up go-arounds."

"What if we have the computer just pitch down to compensate? We know the angle of attack and the engine thrust output."

<implements>

Meanwhile in another conference room:

"United is telling us that Airbus is giving them an A321 for 10% less than us. What can we cut?"

"No regulation requires us to have 3 angle of attack sensors. We could get by with 1 and stick it on the Minimum Equipment List if it fails."

"That sounds great."

Then the 1 angle of attack sensor fails the system that was designed for 3. Was it the engineer who agreed to hack 737-800 handling emulation onto the 737 MAX that failed here? Was it the engineer that agreed that the AoA sensors didn't need to be redundant, perhaps before MCAS was even invented?

These complex failures are rarely the result of one individual failing. Everyone did their job; the business saved United 10% (I actually have no idea who their launch customer was), the engineer saved thousands of pilots from being pulled off the line for re-training. But combined, it was a tragedy. Ultimately, it's the organization and its processes that failed, not an individual. As a manager, you own the organization and the processes.

Minor correction about the Max8 that makes it worse.

Turns out the Max8 does have two angle of attack (AoA) sensors.

But the MCAS system only read from AoA1, and never validated it against AoA2. It was recieving info from AoA2, but never used it!

Makes sense. Two sensors are about as useful as 2-node Consul cluster.

What do you do with 2 sensors?

You can do something with 3 or more, but 2 are completely useless.

You can signal an immediate, specific warning if they disagree.

Why would it be useless? Boeing's update for the Max8 MCAS (to make the FAA happy), was to make the system validate the two values.

If there is a mismatch, the system outputs an error and MCAS will disable itself.

In fact, that is literally one of the requirements set by the FAA to begin flying the Max8 again

> FAA Airworthiness Directive approved design changes for each MAX aircraft, requiring input from two AoA sensors for MCAS activation, elimination of the system's ability to repeatedly activate, and allowing pilots to override the system if necessary.

Turn on the AOA sensor error idiot light

Stick pushers aren't anything new, and the sad irony is that except for the two tragedies, MCAS worked so well that in the thousands of flight hours the Max had, no pilot had even noticed it.

It absolutely was the fault of the engineers who failed to realize what would happen with an AOA fault. I'd love to be corrected, I don't believe a single email from the engineers to management telling them would would happen was ever dug up. And, there's never been an engineer whistleblower saying "I warned them."

Has a single PE lost their license over the Max?

> that in the thousands of flight hours the Max had, no pilot had even noticed it.

This is false. At the time of the incident (>1month) The FFA and NTSB found 23 reports of uncommanded pitch down attitudes during takeoff.

Quick Google gave me this.

https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/it-pitched-nose-down-us-...

Sounds like you suggest that an MBA have no influence on the production and output of the organization, the performance, not at all, they just stand there watching helplessly while others do something some to them uncontrolable way.

Can they all be fired and the wealth they leach redistributed then please? :)

Can we just agree to not glorify and denigrate people based on title or role? It's a bit silly.

If you’re flying at 500 MPH and 30,000 feet, what department do you want the manufacturer to have paid attention to the most: engineering, or sales?

But it's that specific caste that ran Boeing into the ground. Let's call a spade a spade.

> what has to be done

Add story points to your JIRA tickets and make sure they're either 1, 2, 3 or 5 points, but if they're more than 5 points, they have to be split into multiple 5-point stories, and points don't really mean anything but they also mean exactly how many days you're going to spend on them.

Oh, yeah, and meet your commitments! We'll tell you what your commitments were.

I'm seeing that same pattern now. How did that weirdo version of scrumbut become so popular?

> that weirdo version

It's actually exactly the same as they way they "managed" projects before Scrum (and before XP, which Scrum itself is a bastardized version of): "tell me everything you're going to do, and then tell me how long it's going to take, and I'll provide value by asking you every day if you're done with it yet. See, I'm justifying why I make more money than you do!"

I want to believe that you are joking, but I'm afraid you are completely serious and also correct. I'm seeing an increasing drift with both this pattern and "safE" toward exactly what you describe.

Don't forget your tps reports.

It works better when you realize a lot of corporate senior leadership doesn't actually want to empower their employees. They only want to say they want to empower their employees. And then go back to being the Big Important Manager in the Big Important Office making Big Important Decisions.

That's true. Sometimes it is flatly stated too.

You see, this is how scrum really works as without this, how would we be able to control development timelines? Also mumbling compliance means it just has to be this way for unspecified reasons!

I remember being on a team that spent a little over 2 weeks doing detailed project planning and estimating. We said the project would take 8 months.

The leadership team came back and said upon further review, the project would take 3 months.

I was so relieved to hear we could get 8 months of work done in just 3!

That’s why executives get paid the big bucks!

I’ve seen teams do 2 weeks of detailed project planning and estimating where the entire project could have been done in 2 weeks by a good team if they just set their nose to grindstone and did the work.

It’s unbelievable how useless some of these planning and estimating sessions are.

Dealing with that right now. I have multiple PMs and directors involved in requesting another team to literally do five minutes of work because we didn't insist they put it in the current iteration and they put it several iterations away.

In a lot of places that was the real waterfall method, and also how waterfall earned its illustrious reputation.

Waterfail FTW

I'm now curious. So for how long did it actually take?

Probably got cancelled after 2 months after they realized it was going to take 6 more months.

Not sure, my contract ended a year later.

Scrum is the equivalent of top-level management needing a baby rattle or else they'll start crying for metrics because they're lost without them. Trusting their engineers and seeing their progress for themselves, rather than an abstract bastardization of that progress, would destroy their er... productivity.

> points don't really mean anything but they also mean exactly how many days you're going to spend on them

Work in defense, can confirm. Add "increment planning" where we plan the sprints out 3 months. Also, voting on points? Naw, someone yell out a number and that's that.

> plan the sprints out 3 months

In an "agile" way, of course. You can be agile, you just have to say weeks in advance when you're going to be agile so we can plan around it.

I want to take “agile” proponents to a track and make them run Fibonacci multiples of 100m over and over with the only break being to ask how far they want to run next.

Who can sprint forever? It doesn’t make any sense! When do we rest? When do we train? What is this metaphor!?

Nice straw man you've got there. You're really beating the crap out of that thing. "Sprint" is just a term for something you can also call an "iteration." No one is expecting you to actually go full-throttle 24/7.

Then why not call it an iteration, or a round, or a week, or a month, or a cycle, or literally anything other than "sprint"?

Oh, right, because you're supposed to sprint it because that's maximally profitable (in the short-term, anyway).

What ever would our beloved boards of directors do if they found out we weren't working fast? ;)

Eh, that is exactly the omega-point that end-stage capitalism is converging on.

I love it when people use the phrases "end-stage capitalism" or "late-stage capitalism," because it's basically a flashing neon sign saying "you can ignore me, because I have absolutely zero credibility." Makes it easy to move on.

Speak for yourself, buddy.

Obviously he did. I guess you wanted to say "I disagree" but phrase it more aggressively?

Thanks. Now I'm going to have nightmare fuel about one of my experiences as a young software engineer at a well known Japanese auto manufacturer in a Research and Development position. They had a mess of a software project which involved endless meetings on Jira issues, which became more about using Jira than actually solving the issues and making a quality product. This was all done on impossible timelines with outsourced teams that seemed to change every couple months. We also can't forget about editing every Powerpoint presentation N to infinite times, which mostly involved moving a box or changing a color.

Any lowly Boeing engineers reading this - my condolences... Truly.

> outsourced teams that seemed to change every couple months

But, of course. The productivity of the team they hired last month was just horrible, they didn't manage to finish anything! Of course they were fired.

It’s just as bad at Toyota too, trust me.

My current day-to-day apparently revolves around pointing accountants towards approved Aconex Workflows and the documents contained therein, after they email me in a panic asking for me to send them said documents and they "Don't see them" on Aconex. Yes, I am following the published-by-accounting templates and naming protocols.

Someone kill me, please.

There's a circle of hell for senior managers who swear they're being "agile" and then butt into a team's estimations and expect totals of story points so they can "increase velocity." Shouldn't have ever called it velocity in the first place; it's just a fucking WIP limit.

Where I used to work, we had a “tech lead” who used to demand ICs to come up with story points.

When the actual engineers were blank about how much something costs, they had to sit through a 90 minute meeting of group-costing.

Naturally the team delivered very little despite being quite skilled. But luckily the blame fell on the lead and not on the ICs as it usually does.

It's not like there haven't been tons of books and studying done on the topic. We have an _almost_ ideal production methodology that ensures absolute quality (the Toyota Production System). I take issue with its just-in-time supply chain, but the quality factor is worth emulating, and basically any company who has has guaranteed themselves best quality outcome.

So this is willfully producing a less than superior product, which, when it comes to airplanes, is basically criminally negligent since it will result in a crashing plane that kills people.

Not sure how execs are so capable of dodging culpability, but I'd say the real issue is our justice system holds no one rich to account.

And these meetings mysteriously have a bunch of sticky notes everywhere, they're purpose is unknown, they're unintelligible, but load bearing for the project. Load bearing sticky notes.

Here's the change that needs to be made (more accurately, reversed):

>>Boeing outsources a lot of the production of components for its aircraft because it’s cheaper as part of an overall shift in strategy that dates to CEO Harry Stonecipher who had been CEO of McDonnell Douglas,

>>>> "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."

IOW, the McDonnel Douglas, now Boeing, CEO deliberately wrecked the engineering firm to make finance primary. In my book, that merits being tarred, feathered, drawn, and quartered. He's putting millions of lives at risk, risking the defense capabilities of the US, and already killed hundreds. All to line the pockets of himself and his cronies.

The only question is whether the engineering organization is too far lost to reconstitute.

unreasonably based. there's almost no other take than this, and if there is one, it must address this.