I’d say that it goes back fairly far to the early 2000s or so when they should have had a development cadence like “widebody, narrowbody, widebody, narrowbody” because narrowbody is 80% of the market but instead it has been “widebody, widebody, widebody, widebody, yet another widebody”. Airbus and Boeing colluded to compete with one hand behind their backs in this time period which was profitable in the short term but would kill Boeing in the long term if it were not “too essential to national defense to fail” —- that is, with fly-by-wire and better geometry the A320 has more of a future (can even steal some of the widebody business) not the mention Airbus bought the A220 which is a next-generation narrowbody which was developed not by a big manufacturer but a small manufacturer backed by the Canadian government.
Try getting a flight in a modern narrowbody like the E2-Jet or A220 on an airline like Breeze and you will se that nobody would put up with riding in a 737 if they had a choice; even though that kind of plane is small on the outside it feels big on the outside, comfort is much more like a huge plane. It’s one of those things you have to fly to believe.
It was…alright. It also felt very cramped. Seating was 2-3 across. People had noticeable trouble walking down the aisle. Opening the overhead bins seemed dangerous as it could easily bang someone’s head.
I last took a 737 (unsure of variant, but wasn’t a Max) in 2022, but I don’t remember it being as cramped as the A220.
The 'buzz' about the A220 is that you can fly more people further while using less fuel. All of this is super exciting if you are an airline, but nothing that directly benefits you as a passenger. There are various configurations of the A220, but the most 'efficient' ones are very cramped.
I looked up the Breeze example given, and while the seats and cabin do look amazing, I don’t see why the same couldn’t be equipped on a 737. That’s more a function of what the airline wants, isn’t it?
The A220 I rode definitely did not “feel big in the inside”.
A cheaper flight enables for this to happen, but does not guarantee it.
They are definitely felt much nicer and quieter than smaller planes like Embraer E175 or E195.
A simple example could be you asking your lawyer to prepare a contract for a deal. The deal is sealed but when shit hits the fan you realize the contract had huge holes in it.
Your lawyer is accountable for botching the contract, but at the end of the day you signed it so you're the one having full responsibility.
And we have that in spades in our work: you buy a license for a service, they're accountable but you're responsible.
1) You will have responsibility outlined in the botched contract.
2) You'll lawyer will have responsibility defending completing a contract with huge holes.
Lawyers don't like suing other lawyers but it happens every day and lawyers keep insurance for this.
Accountability means something enirely different to responsibility. Being accountable means being able to explain the reasoning behind a decision to a jury of peers -- literally being able to account for the considerations that went into the decision.
A person is accountable with no responsibility if they expect to have to be able to explain their decision, but they don't have to take personal blame or credit for it.
A person is responsible but not accountable if they take personal blame or credit, but nobody is given the right to question their judgment and ask for details around it.
Accountability is a somewhat bureaucratic idea. We want good reasoning, but in the name of efficiency we don't want people to explain their reasoning when they communicate decisions. We also don't want to give people responsibility, and without responsibility we don't trust them to reason well on their own accord, so we reserve the right to grill them about their reasoning after the fact if the outcome turns out bad. (In fully formed bureaucracies this accounting must be recorded in a long report to be filed away for nobody ever to read.)
That's not how I would understand the word. It also isn't how dictionaries understand it.
Accountability means being subject to punishment. (That is, you can be "called to account".) It is, technically, different from responsibility - the word for someone who has accountability, but not responsibility, is scapegoat.
However, it is generally agreed that operating with scapegoats is both morally bad and bad for productivity (and the same goes for giving people responsibility without accountability), so responsibility and accountability aren't supposed to be separate concepts.
I'd argue that higher management is usually accountable, but not responsible. Like, they can't guarantee fulfillment of the individual pieces of the work, but are still accountable for the whole effort anyway.
(this is going by the dictionary definition that responsibility is "task-oriented")
> accountable 1. (of a person, organization, or institution) required or expected to justify actions or decisions; responsible. "parents could be held accountable for their children's actions"
So, it seems to mean you can justify your decision, which relates very directly to what the parent was talking about. You face punishment if, when called to account, you cannot explain what you did and why in a way that justifies your actions.
In my opinion, their description of the distinction made a lot of sense and provided me with a valuable tool for separating the two concepts.
edit: as I've thought about this more, I do see that the google quote literally includes the word "responsible" inside the definition of accountable, which goes against my point. I still really feel the distinction, especially the with the example of a person responsible but not accountable, seems sound and useful.
> So, it seems to mean you can justify your decision
No, not at all. If you can justify your decision, that doesn't mean you're being held accountable for it. Being held accountable means being punished, whether you can justify a decision or not. If you cannot be punished for something, then you are not accountable for it.
RACI yes, it is exactly such a powerpoint-ready bleeding obvious crap so that crayon eating MBAs can figure out who to involve for each task
I have been feeling cynical about the "blameless" culture seeping into entire organizations recently. At the end of some quarters where my team has fallen behind, I run away from the question of "who was really at fault here?". I probably should not do that...
If people know there is a risk of blame, it changes their behavior. It creates incentives to destroy evidence, or avoid creating it in the first place. It creates incentives to stay inside your organizational and political boundaries rather than reach out to solve problems. Whereas if you have a successful blameless culture it is much easier to find out what actually happened.
The NASA ASRS system: https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/
FAR 91.3: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/91.3
The first of those is the aviation safety reporting system, which provides explicitly for immunity from sanction for inadvertent violations of FAA regulations (with certain limitations).
The second of those is basically the first aviation law clause for flight crews (after 91.1 which is the "this is what this section of law applies to" and 91.2 which doesn't exist) and gives broad discretion to deviate from any rule [in this part of federal law] as needed to address an emergency.
ASRS is directly and strongly supportive of the overall blameless culture in aviation. 91.3 is moderately supportive of it.
Those are often confused.
That doesn’t mean people aren’t accountable for their actions in “blameless” cultures, but problems are first assumed to be the result of systemic issues, deserving to be fixed, rather than individual issues, deserving to be punished.
Two of them relevant to this story were:
webservers.regenerate.all.cache.files
webservers.release-prep.stop.all.services
Guy's first day; I'm showing him the ropes; we push the marketing data update and set about regenerating all the cache files by manually picking the correct file from the folder of all possible files. I'm sure we can all guess what happened to make this a story remotely worth telling...
Complete site outage. Completely unnecessary. Completely human error.
Should we blame the guy who clicked on the file that was directly adjacent to the one he intended? Should we blame me as the guy overseeing the training? Or should we change the system so that files that we use multiple times everyday and are safe/innocuous are't right next to an E-stop/EPO button? Or maybe we should change the system so that pushing marketing data refreshes the caches files automatically?
Blameless culture favors the latter actions over the former and tends to make your operation stronger and more resilient over time. The experts (and the novices) who made the mistake can speak freely about what happened and how we might prevent it, without fearing reprisal.
If someone repeatedly kills the site by mistake time after time, despite reasonable safeguards being in place, they should face disciplinary action. But when they make an honest mistake because we left an idling chainsaw laying around on the workbench, it makes no sense to blame them for grabbing it by mistake.
As stated earlier, blameless postmortems are for RCA of a particular incident. If you shoot every engineer who causes a incident you will succeed in having no incidents because no one will bring them up or making any changes for fear of getting shot.
If you promise people that there will be no blame, no punishment, no nothing, then they may speak more forthrightly. Do you want that honesty or do you prefer to retain the option of punishment?
In my current role I promote a blameless culture and the result is my team proactively raise incidents. We have more incidents than other teams but the incidents are generally controlled and problems are visible, prioritised and closed off. Coincidentally, my teams have record high Mean Times Between Failures and I'm now working with the other teams to fix their safety culture.
The lack of thinking about safety culture in this way is one of the reason that I don't believe most "Software Engineers" should be considered engineers.
Of course you can go deeper and ask why was this process not done correctly etc but at the end of the day, it’s about actionable changes that ensure mistakes don’t get repeated.
Unless you just call everything a process: "His childhood was difficult and that's why he fouls people. Let's call his childhood a process."
I think at some point you have to say that some things are not processes, or cannot usefully described as such. Or they devolve into Zeno's paradox.
Well... attempting to prevent stuff like bullying or domestic violence is a worthwhile goal in itself.
For the example of the soccer player, one might also question other incentives (e.g. bonuses tied to winning games no-matter-what), or why a player with a known history was hired in the first place.
Obviously a worthwhile goal, but not a process failure on the part of the football team.
I hope we aren't using football as an analogy for avionic engineering with 1000's of people.
The process that hasn't cut you from the football team.
I mean in theory, you're absolutely right but so rarely does it ever actually shake out that way. It seems like corporations continue to make the same mistakes while simultaneously being held less and less accountable.
Literally hundreds of people have died due to Boeing's negligence recently and the prevailing opinion seems to be that no one is ultimately going to be held accountable. (at least not meaningfully)
Ideals are great and all but if it results in zero accountability when hundreds of people die, maybe its time for us to re-evaluate.
Making it clear who did it does not mean firing that person or making them feel like shit internally, it's a learning process, but the higher up you go the more you should feel bad (presumably you went through the learning process and earning big bucks as a result, so wtf)
That may have been the case, but their are entire company values that insist on the blameless culture. This certainly sends a message organization wide to all levels that blame is not tolerated.
You can 100% blame people for doing bad things. But in an engineering incident you want to find the RCA.
In SDE you may find the single git commit that took down everything, it has a author. Fine, there is blame. But why was there no review, no unit tests, no functional tests, QA, etc....
So you fire the engineer but make no other changes and it happens again, how is that helpful?
Leadership is always to blame if something goes wrong, it's only fair as they will get the credit if things go right. That's the price of leadership.
Quite a logical leap to say that everyone in a corp deserves to be held 'blameless' except the CEO - imo, you can't have it both ways.
Maybe we need a new way of expressing "blameless" that still expresses that personal responsibilty for quality work should be expected, but that punitive blame politics are simply a very ineffective way of encouraging that or finding the truth when problems inevitably occur.
A good example for this is Dieselgate, where management asked for "creativity" from James Liang and other engineers, knowing very well that they were driving their employees into muddy water without getting dirty themselves.
This is the tendency of all bureaucracies, everywhere, always. At least companies can be outcompeted - not so easy with governments.
I somewhat agree, but the way the current antitrust configuration is in the US, the DOJ or perhaps a state attorney can bring the case. All of them are elected and part of one of those parties.
Rickover was apparently a fan of simple hierarchies. In contrast, Andy Grove like matrix organisation. From "High Output Management":
> It's not because Intel loved ambiguity that we became a hybrid organization. We have tried everything else, and while other models may have been less ambiguous, they simply didn't work. Hybrid organizations and the accompanying dual reporting principle, like a democracy, are not great in and of themselves. They just happen to be the best way for any business to be organized.
He does not shy away from taking responsibility (and loudly boasting about it / taking credit on Twitter/x).
The speech is well worth a read in its entirety and it feels prescient in regards to Boeing. I think this paragraph more than any other hits at the core problem at Boeing:
> Unless the individual truly responsible can be identified when something goes wrong, no one has really been responsible. With the advent of modern management theories it is becoming common for organizations to deal with problems in a collective manner, by dividing programs into subprograms, with no one left responsible for the entire effort. There is also the tendency to establish more and more levels of management, on the theory that this gives better control. These are but different forms of shared responsibility, which easily lead to no one being responsible—a problems that often inheres in large corporations as well as in the Defense Department.
To contrast here is a statement from Calhoun: “We caused the problem. And we understand that. Over these last few weeks, I've had tough conversations with our customers, with our regulators, congressional leaders, and more. We understand why they are angry, and we will work to earn their confidence,” Calhoun said.
That we is him failing to take personal responsibility and choosing instead to spread responsibility to all employees, making no one responsible for the state of Boeing.
Boeing needs a leader who will take personal responsibility.