[haltingproblem]

There is a notion that Boeing is/was a company with an insanely great engineering culture and their engineers lived in an idyllic culture of building great and safe products. This great culture was all lost as a result of the merger with McDonnell Douglas [1], [2], [3].

This argument is frequently put forth by ex-Boeing engineers. This is an apologia for Boeing's behavior which killed 346 people and endangered the lives of 1000s more and destroyed jobs/wealth around the world. These apologists want you to think that the unholy trinity of the McDonnell Douglas culture which infected Boeing, the decisions of Harry C. Stonecipher, CEO of McDonnell Douglas at the time of the merger and Dennis Muilenburg, the last CEO of Boeing who greenlighted the 737 MAX are responsible for this outcome.

So strong is the apologists conviction in the purity of Boeing's engineering culture that they ignore the fact that thousands of engineers worked on the 737 Max. Not a single engineer raised issues with the engineering of the aircraft. Not a single engineer wrote a blistering memo calling out its failing or quit in protest. They were all held in thrall, paralyzed and forced to go against their ethics, professionalism, decency by the power of this unholy trinity!

Eventually, all stellar organizations, public or private, become complacent (e.g. Israeli Intelligence Failure, 1973). Boeing made an unstable plane with a dangerous MCAS to get it to market fast. They then topped it off by making it rely on a single sensor. They then made the dual-sensor an upgrade. An undergraduate engineering student with a basic course on probability can see that this is tailor-made for disaster. Boeing made an essential safety feature an upgrade!! But wait there is more. They then proceeded to hide this monstrosity from every regulator and airline on the planet and insisted that the plane was no different in every aspect of its flight behavior than its predecessor which was over 30 years old and did not require additional safety training.

Boeing had become so criminally blatant that the head of airline training at Lion Air inquired about extra training for the 737 Max and they rebuffed him. After the Lion Air crash, Boeing proceeded to cast aspersion on the safety practices of Lion Air. Lion Air does have a spotty safety record but in this case, Boeing rebuffed their requests for additional training because it would set a precedent for other airlines in SE Asia. When that lack of training was a factor in the crash, Boeing proceeded to blame Lion Air. Chutzpah!

Released transcripts of messages show how Boeing employees worked in unison to ensure no extra simulator training was required. Great engineering culture obsessed with safety, this aint!

We need to start accepting that whatever stellar engineering culture existed at Boeing is dead. We as a society need to stop scapegoating imaginary forces in the past and giving Boeing engineers a pass. Let's agree that strong regulation is necessary to ensure the safety of Boeing Products.

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

[2] https://fortune.com/longform/boeing-737-max-crisis-sharehold...

[3] https://www.perell.com/blog/boeing-737-max

[blendergeek]

You fully and entirely misunderstand the argument. The argument is that after the McDonnel Douglas merger, the "idyllic culture of building great and safe products" was pillaged and destroyed by greedy corporate overlords. At this point (so goes the argument) all the "good engineers" who would have most certainly spoken up were laid off and were replaced with dime-a-dozen engineers who were overworked, underpaid, and didn't know what they were doing.

In essence, the great engineering culture at Boeing was dead at the time of the 737 MAX debacle and the death of Boeing's previously near perfect engineering culture was directly responsible for the failure of the 737 MAX.

[grogenaut]

Side note, there is a definite trend of blaming this on McDonnel Douglas. Growing up in St. Louis and now living in Seattle I notice it all the time.

I do think the way you said it may be more true (with no evidence) that a management culture which had switched more to acquisition choked out good engineering culture. You are essentially correlating it with the acquisition in timeline.

Note I'm in no way attacking you, just adding what I've seen online and heard in bars.

[haltingproblem]

Sigh. The mythmaking contines. In the theory of causation, we distinguish between proximate vs. ultimate causality. Every proximate event can plausibly be claimed to be the cause for a subsequent event. As they say for want of a nail the war was lost. We don't say the war was lost because the nail was missing because 20 years ago they changed the way they cataloged the nails in the hardware store which sold the nails because the owner of the store changed their inventory system.

What is plausibly the cause for the engineering fiasco of the 737 Max? Why go back to the merger in 1997 and why not blame the 9/11 attacks or the election of G.W Bush or Obama's for this disaster?

Why go back to the 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas? Because it allows Boeing engineers to deflect blame for the terrible product they built and foisted on the flying public by coasting on their past reputations.

[1123581321]

This is uninteresting as the engineers are only making a limited point that the superior character of the engineering organization has been lost, relative to the demands of buyers and the FAA. It’s not a novel theory to suggest a merger or acquisition can cause this to happen more obviously than a national or world event.

[haltingproblem]

The theory is just that - a theory and a convenient one at that since it exonerates Boeing engineers.

The is no evidence supporting the theory (verification) and more interesting it is not falsifiable. It is just a narrative.

[1123581321]

It is falsifiable, given access to the record of management decisions and hiring data and some agreement on what a consequential company decision would look like.

Whether some people think it “exonerates” current engineers doesn’t matter. I don’t think it does, personally.

[tangjurine]

The evidence for the theory is that there are many Boeing 'apologists' as OP states - he is trying to debate them, not people that don't care if Boeing ever had a good engineering culture.

[pdonis]

> In the theory of causation, we distinguish between proximate vs. ultimate causality.

Yes, and you have them backwards. "The engineers failed to raise the issue" is a proximate cause, not an ultimate cause. If engineers in your company are failing to raise obvious technical issues, then either you're hiring incompetent engineers, or your corporate culture discourages engineers from speaking up and punishes those who do. Either way, the ultimate cause is a failure of the organization as a whole, which ultimately means its top management, not a failure of the engineers.

[haltingproblem]

How do I have them backwards? The theory attributes ultimate cause to something that is way way in the past. The event is chosen to maximize narrative plausibility. There is no way to verify the narrative or better falsify it.

The theory conveniently exonerates Boeing engineers without any supporting evidence, forget falsification.

[pdonis]

> The theory attributes ultimate cause to something that is way way in the past.

Yes, that's what "ultimate" cause means. Not necessarily way back in the past, but way back in the causal chain. Basically, you keep on asking "what caused that?" until you get to an answer that looks like a reasonable stopping point. Saying "the engineers failed" isn't a reasonable stopping point because the engineers weren't acting in isolation or on their own; they were acting as part of a larger organization that was not just an organization of engineers. So if they failed, it means the larger organization failed, and you have to look at why that happened to find the ultimate cause.

> The theory conveniently exonerates Boeing engineers

It does no such thing. It is perfectly possible for the engineers to be at fault and for the larger organization of the Boeing corporation to also be at fault. The reason for looking beyond the engineers is not to "exonerate" the engineers, but to make sure that "blame the engineers" does not get used as an excuse to exonerate others who also contributed to the failure and who should be held accountable.

[pdonis]

> Not a single engineer raised issues with the engineering of the aircraft. Not a single engineer wrote a blistering memo calling out its failing or quit in protest.

I don't think this is true. There was an HN thread some time ago on an article describing how one senior production manager, who was an engineer by background and had previously worked at Boeing as an engineer, looked at the design specs, talked to people he knew in engineering, realized there were problems coming, and did exactly what you describe: wrote a blistering memo, found it wasn't going to get listened to, and quit in protest.

[haltingproblem]

I would appreciate the citation, not doubting but would love to read it since I have not seen anything like it in the public domain.

[pdonis]

> I would appreciate the citation

Unfortunately I haven't been able to find it. If I do I'll post a link here.

[imtringued]

>So strong is the apologists conviction in the purity of Boeing's engineering culture that they ignore the fact that thousands of engineers worked on the 737 Max. Not a single engineer raised issues with the engineering of the aircraft. Not a single engineer wrote a blistering memo calling out its failing or quit in protest. They were all held in thrall, paralyzed and forced to go against their ethics, professionalism, decency by the power of this unholy trinity!

Why would this matter? The MCAS software is the only thing that failed. It probably only involved a dozen engineers and they did their job to a reasonable extent. What if none of them were told that the pilots are not trained to be aware of the MCAS?

The real failure is that there was a pseudo autopilot software that completely overrode pilot control. Why did it override pilot input? Because managers wanted to sell it as a 737 upgrade with 0 training required. Making the 737 MAX safe does not neccesarily require better engineering, pilot training alone would be more than enough.