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Comment by noughtme | Hacker News Reader

> Those people have decades of institutional memory about what has worked in the past and what has not worked. Software people do not.

> The people who wrote the code for the original MCAS system were obviously terribly far out of their league and did not know it.

Hmmm... having met a few embedded aerospace software engineers, I'm not sure I would be pointing the finger in their direction, although I would love an insider account. All public information seems to indicate these were decisions made at the executive level.

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I'm sorry, but no. Such criminal negligence isn't excusable by "decisions were made higher up". Human lives are at stake with aviation, the engineers implementing this should have known better and refused.

I think you're really discounting the poisonous influence that management can have here. As a Quality Assurance person, my number one mental tic is the "I told you so" that inevitably follows an executive override.

I'm not discounting manager influence, I'm just saying that for such a matter the engineers should have refused.

Maybe they fear losing their jobs. As I understand it, with the healthcare system, this can itself be perilous.

Don't forget with the consolidation in that space, there isn't exactly a large swathe of competitors to get hired by.

Indeed, i had forgotten that nice part of the American labour system.

They could have blown the whistle anonymously then.

Sounds like a nice way to end up in a plea bargain.

It is bizarre to expect an embedded software engineer, who is coding from a specifications document, to know enough about aircraft control, control dynamics, pilot training, aerodynamics, etc to somehow figure out MCAS was a somewhat poorly designed/communicated "workaround".

It was the embedded software engineer (s) who didn't do any redundancy. Knowing this is for an airliner, how on earth do you reconcile the two?

Safety really is a systems level concern. Aircraft software should implement the requirements the systems level put on it and nothing else. If the specification is somehow insufficient this is fed back to the systems level for evaluation and requirements have to be added/changed. This is the entire point of DO-178C.

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