[csours]

Who do you think should? An engineer who worked on the system? A manager? What law was broken? If you were in their position, how would you know you were breaking the law?

Diffuse responsibility is a real problem. 'Teaching to the test' is a real problem. Normalizing risk is a real problem.

Blaming individuals is very satisfying, and it's very easy to do with hindsight, but if you want large complex systems to work better, you have to get over individual blame. I'm not saying it's easy, and I'm not saying that we should stop looking for law-breakers, but I am saying that punishment will not lead to better outcomes in the absence of other positive actions.

[kryogen1c]

> Blaming individuals is very satisfying

"Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible."

Hyman G. Rickover, father of the US nuclear navy

[csours]

This is the best context I can find:

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Hearings/IcO0QpCJdQYC?h...

I strongly agree with his comments in their original context.

[kryogen1c]

>I strongly agree with his comments in their original context.

is the implication that you do not agree within this context?

[csours]

You used the quote in reply to my statement

> Blaming individuals is very satisfying

I was not sure how you intended it, as you did not provide any other comment, so I went looking for the original context.

Here's how I understood the original context: Congress was looking for who to blame nuclear incidents on. Adm Rickover pointed out that for Thresher, very many of the responsible people in the production and development process changed multiple times during the process. He also pointed out that Congress, as the funding body still maintained some responsibility.

In the context of Boeing, I think it does apply, in the sense that the development project was faulty, albeit in a different way than the development of Thresher. It also applies in the fact that the funding body bears responsibility (Boeing shareholders and management). This is my interpretation. Everyone is free to make their own.

[civilized]

Rental roommates are jointly and severally liable, but in a corporation everybody gets to pass the buck

[heymijo]

The CEO for starters.

Post-Enron accounting rules via Sarbanes-Oxley made it so that the CEO had to sign off on and certify the financial statements. The buck stopped there. [0]

Why not here as well?

Unless you are thinking about putting the system that incentivizes a CEO and company to do this on trial.

[0] https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2014-152

[spaetzleesser]

Top management definitely should lose their high salaries in such a case. The worst that seems to happen to them is to have to resign and get a huge severance package. That's not punishment.

[mayneack]

The DOJ certainly seems to think a law was broken. As I see it you charge the most obvious person and let them try to blame someone else. Eventually you either find people you can blame and if you can't go up a level until you reach the CEO.

If the CEO goes to prison, other CEOs will care more than this one, if some compliance officer does, the next one won't be as willing to bend to implied pressure from leadership.

[csours]

> The DOJ certainly seems to think a law was broken.

And they charged the corporation. They also have a consent decree. You can be sure that under the consent decree both the corporation and everyone in it are under a microscope. A consent decree is, among other things, like probation. If they mess up again, the DOJ will drop the hammer.

A lot of people seem to think that punishment makes people care more somehow, but punishment is always a distant possibility at the time of the wrongdoing. People don't generally think they are committing serious wrongdoing, humans are really good at rationalizing our actions, especially when each individual action is a small step.

[chii]

that just leads the blame onto a scapegoat. It doesn't fix the problem at heart - which is that the responsibility for safety has to be taken at the org at every level.

[Rexxar]

The CEO is the one who has the more power to avoid it and they have incredibly high salary often justified because they are "risk takers". They take the money, so they can take the responsibility with it. And for information, the law is like that in other countries I know.

[imtringued]

>which is that the responsibility for safety has to be taken at the org at every level.

The CEO has enough power to prevent such a thing from ever happening (by that I mean he can easily create a morally corrupt company culture) and there is a very big profit motive to do so.

[saiya-jin]

Things like company culture and focus on either shipping products fast to get as much cash as quickly as possible vs building quality products definitely comes from the top management. But this support needs to be something more than empty phrases in come corporate emails. Same principles as say in software development.

If middle managers and top engineers see that there is no reward in doing things right and taking time, in fact its shooting one's foot, then most folks +-align with this policy and move on. At the end almost everybody is in for the paycheck.

[BurningFrog]

> The DOJ certainly seems to think a law was broken.

That fortunately doesn't matter.

To send someone to jail, you need to convince a jury they committed a serious crime.

[mayneack]

I don't understand this comment. The DOJ bringing charges has to be step one towards that end. The same exact thing is happening with Boeing, we just didn't hear about it until after they negotiated a settlement. This happens all the time with plea deals. If they can't agree it goes to trial.

[BurningFrog]

> The DOJ bringing charges has to be step one towards that end.

Sure. My point is that it's quite different from a conviction.

[fgonzag]

I'd start with any one who decided not to ground the planes and deflected responsibility a soon as the first crash happened. They have direct responsibility over the second crash.

The I'd go over all the certification process. Any person who concealed information or misled in an official capacity goes to jail. That's the whole point of requiring titled engineers signatures. The buck stops with them.

[jvanderbot]

They were very likely assured by their program managers that the crash was a fluke, presented with convincing test data, and pressured by their bosses, the board, etc etc.

These things rarely happen by individual malfeasance. They are part of a system of small mistaken assumptions that compound into big lies.

[aprdm]

I agree with you but out of curiosity what do you suggest as a solution ? You believe all we need is the fine and then the company goes under ? If that's true then all the individuals who failed could just as easily go to another company and repeat their failures.

For doctors a failure can make their license get revoked (even tho it doesn't seem to happen very often in practice). Wonder if there could be something similar but indeed it is very hard to find "a person to blame", maybe the CEO? CTO? :)

[jvanderbot]

> You believe all we need is the fine and then the company goes under ?

No I don't believe that. There will be firings, demotions, lost bonuses, etc. Maybe there should be more of that, maybe not. A CEO may step down and have trouble finding a similar position, etc.

I don't actually have a suggestion of a better way, I just agree that you can't automatically throw one person into jail.

[ineedasername]

wouldn't it be the engineers the get the test data though? (at least directly) instead of the program manager?

[_jal]

I agree to a point. But clucking your tongue and ignoring it is also not the answer.

The way to get less of an undesirable behavior is to make it lead to undesirable outcomes. Unless there is some other operative reason, you're right in another way - we don't have to care where that (dis)incentive comes from.

The firm owners are ultimately responsible - they are responsible for hiring the execs responsible for the firms' actions. Fine the criminal company so hard that shareholders of their future potential employers will think twice about the risks they might impose on their savings.

Of course, this is a national security concern, and so TBTF. Man, isn't the US a great place, if you're filthy rich?

[floxy]

From the article:

>Boeing admitted that two of its 737 Max flight technical pilots “deceived” the FAA about the capabilities of a flight-control system on the planes, software that was later implicated in the two crashes, the Justice Department said.

...what exactly does that mean when "deceived" is in quotation marks? Seems like deceiving regulators would be a straightforward crime. Unless "deceived" means something other than the usual definition.

[samatman]

In context, the quotation marks mean that Boeing literally used the word "deceived".

It's a bit of a bug in the language that real quotes and "scare quotes" are delimited with the same symbols. But we're stuck with it.

[bazooka_penguin]

How about the guy who is handsomely compensated in assets, who's supposed to be ultimately responsible for the company and its operations?

[spaetzleesser]

At a minimum put a fine on them that's high so they really want to avoid it. Seems most fines are only large enough to not cause the company too much pain.

Or another way would be to temporarily send the company to "jail" meaning to suspend its operations for a while.

When you look at this example or what happens to banks when they support criminal activity like money laundering or tax evasion the fines are simply way too low for them to stop doing bad stuff.

[tibbydudeza]

"Volkswagen’s CEO Herbert Diess, chairman Hans Dieter Poetsch, and former CEO Martin Winterkorn are being hit with criminal charges for allegedly waiting to tell investors about the automaker’s rampant emissions cheating, German prosecutors announced on Tuesday."

Last time I checked neither of these individuals programmed the ECU of VWAG diesel engines to cheat emissions tests although some engineers were blamed and fired.

It all starts at the top.

[bergstromm466]

> Who do you think should?

Boeing should be forced to publish all trade secrets that were used in their planes which contributed to the deaths of these people (so basically all IP that Boeing owns), and they should have all their patents annulled.

[redis_mlc]

> What law was broken?

The above comment is very, very uninformed. Aviation is a heavily regulated industry, totally unlike IT.

There's several legal avenues for individual prosecution:

1) False certification documents about MCAS performance were submitted to the FAA, so it would be very easy to find out who those people were, and who their managers were. The US government has no problem prosecuting people for fraud in the aviation world. (FAA certification is almost totally dependent on paperwork, both in mfg. and operations.)

2) The manager of the test pilots who wrote the critical SMS messages was fired, so that is another easily traceable route related to the above.

3) Southwest asked for a penalty of $1 million per airplane if type-specific traning was required, so both Southwest and Boeing negotiators agreed in a reckless manner to disregard airliner safety with that perverse incentive. (Reckless is a catchall in the FARs for pilots, but could be applied to companies and mfgs.)

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/91.13

To give Congress credit, they are re-visiting the ODA delegation process because of MCAS, which Boeing abuses by having managers pressure ODAs:

https://www.aviationpros.com/aircraft/commercial-airline/new...

Boeing is the US' largest exporter, so should face intense government scrutiny as it affects not just passengers and suppliers, but all Americans.

Source: commercially-rated airplane pilot who has followed MCAS very closely, far more closely than anybody else on HN.

[csours]

To quote myself:

> I'm not saying it's easy, and I'm not saying that we should stop looking for law-breakers, but I am saying that punishment will not lead to better outcomes in the absence of other positive actions.

If laws were broken, by all means, use the justice system to pursue those lawbreaker; but do not expect that to solve everything.