Comment by sisu2019 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sisu2019 | Hacker News Reader

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Sorry, I don't believe that our perspective on this is especially valuable or insightful. Everyone with an average IQ can explain in 5 sentences what went wrong with this plane. Yes new engines didn't fit the plane, fixed with software, well done.

But why? It's not profits. Boeing has been for profit from the start.

It's something more. We are getting bad at doing hard things. Here in Germany we can't seem to finish a new airport (BER). Or a new train station (Stuttgart 21). Or the new ICE trains. Or keep the autobahn bridges maintained.

And software? There is an article about problems with Win 10 updates ever day now it seems. And what about all these new SPA type websites that pull down 30 megs of javascript in order to keep failing at basic tasks in new and exciting ways? On latest android there is a packet fragmentation bug that has gone unfixed for 6 month and counting now. Oh it only prevents people from using amazon and netflix so no big deal.

I grew in a time where we expected stuff to get better and better but lately it seems we'd do well to just hang on to what we have.

It was profits. Airbus did effectively same thing with the A320 Neo in 2010, and it became the fastest selling commercial aircraft in history [0]. Boeing clearly was unhappy with that and needed to do something to compete.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A320neo_family#Orders_a...

okay let's back up and remember that you can't compete with a plane that crashes all the time. So the reason is clearly not profit, in fact they will lose a big chunk of money from this and that wasn't hard to predict at all.

I think it's a mistake to imply the managers making this decision had our hindsight knowledge. Of course if they knew this would happen they would've taken a different course, for profits and other reasons.

To your larger point, I think as systems get more complex it's much more difficult for management to make accurate risk/benefit decisions. Take the Shuttle Challenger disaster. In Feynman's report, the management estimated something along the lines of a 1-in-100,000 chance of catastrophic failure. I think the actual number was ultimately reported around 1-in 1,000. The exact numbers from memory may be off, but the point is as systems get highly complex, increased interfaces and interactions lead to more failure modes. Understanding them all is really tough

You are assuming long term strategic thinking. I guess that didn’t happen here.

From my experience I disagree. It's not that we can't do hard things, it's that there's frequently more profitable approaches than taking difficult challenges. This is becoming systemic across our culture as ideas drawn from capitalism begin invading all aspects of our lives (including how we interact in personal relationships), not just business.

Pushing quicker time to market and cost saving solutions to the brink is part of the driving optimization problem businesses aim to do.

This search is done across various contributing costs but inevitably, safety becomes one of factors on the board. I have previous experience with the coal mining industry and I can attest that safety is frequently hit in the name of cost savings.

When you think about it, you rarely converge on an optimization solution across a search space from one direction, you typically have to cross boundaries to find the an optimum, especially for highly complex problems with many variables. Inevitably in this search, business interests will conflict with their profit motives as costs are cut down tighter and tighter in convergence. If we're lucky, it's a local optimum and some new technology or finding makes cost savings possible outside of cutting safety.

Boeing was capitalist from the start. Why fail now in such a stupid way?

Obviously Boeing didn't think they'd have planes falling out of the air (that's bad for business), but I suspect the drive to remain competitive and keep shareholders happy led those further down in the organization to push sloppy solutions (as the article described). That's been my lifelong experience working professionally in the US. It's hard to believe those design oversights mentioned were missed by multiole teams of people.

As the article pointed out, Boeing did their best to keep these software system changes as quiet as they could, so they wouldn't have to go through a new certification process, which is extremely costly (less costly than having planes crash though). That's not something you do when safety is the top priority but it is when the priority is profit.

My central point though is that inherently in the framework of capitalism, the endless pursuit to increase profits by reducing costs (and increasing revenue) will inevitably lead you to the opposite in order to find the optimums you seek. Sometimes, business choices that seem good lead to losses or choices that seem bad lead to gains. You often have to fail (cross the boundaries) in order to see where the boundaries of success lie for various cost saving attributes. All businesses play this game and safety is one of many factors always on the chopping block. Sometimes you have to push safety to see exactly how much investment in safety is truly needed.

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