I'm not asking why Boeing continued to make money. I'm asking why the system as a whole didn't spot much sooner that their engineering had been trashed, and some kind of intervention wasn't made before two fatal airline accidents and other near misses happened. The point of the oversight we have is supposed to be to spot problems before they reach that level.
If your answer is that not just Boeing, but our whole system is in fact that corrupt...well, that's not a very comforting answer, is it?
Most people nowadays are trying to optimize dollars for amount of work, without the dedication to the craft that was prevalent in previous generations. Large companies exacerbate this issue with all the layers of abstraction between a person's work and seeing the fruits of their labor.
There's way less pride from work: most people don't judge themselves too much on coworkers opinions since jobs are more changing, and it's unlikely for you to develop lifetime friendships with people who remain on your team.
Large corporations have too many regulations and HR policies to meaningfully pay based on performance, so there's little monetary incentive to be a strong performer.
You rarely get to see the product you've built get used in a meaningful way where someone would say something about it. It's likely that only one or two disinterested people quality check your work, and in this case you're either within spec (expected), "close enough to pass" (which wasn't getting reported), or failing miserably. The QA people hate getting the last one, but there's so much apathy these days from what I've seen because everyone just wants to be somewhere else doing something else.
So basically they've evolved to take away any dopamine one can get from pushing for quality from anyone but the most intrinsically motivated workers. They got rid of those people systemically and purposefully, and made a lot of money doing it.
The system is corrupt. From planes to tampons, it's self-checking and self-reporting and a conflict of interests: the regulators have no incentive to do more work (or are paid-out not to do), the companies are corrupt to the bone, the public is blissfully not interested to hear, the C level suite is there just for the money, middle management is hired and promoted based on weird criteria, the "fake it" system works too well and people hop through jobs before anyone takes action. Modern company management is not a science, but a smoke and mirrors act.
> why the system as a whole didn't spot much sooner that their engineering had been trashed
Current brokenthink of the management class is that their job is to wage war on their own workforce and labour rights. In the process destroying human capital. This isn't just my conclusion based on the fact that FANG was fined for having anti-poaching agreement - country-wide, corporate spending on workforce training and upskilling has been falling for the past 20 years.
You're sort of assuming it happened in some sort of explicit clear way. It doesn't and didn't. I've participated in this process and shrugged it off as kind of their fault and not my place. Until it was my turn.
When it's not you, it's just training data on the "wrong thing to do", and it's usually described as "being disagreeable" which accelerates the collapse - this seems perfectly reasonable at the time, they were overly difficult and an outlier.
Without explicit intent or some sudden accident, there's nothing to point at, especially in such a simplistic "what corrupt corporate or government official ignored this? Obviously someone reported it" way
> Without explicit intent or some sudden accident, there's nothing to point at
I disagree. As the article shows, there were plenty of technically competent people who did point at specific things. But management did not listen to them, and indeed actively suppressed them and drove them out. And since the FAA had outsourced all of its "independent" inspection responsibility to Boeing, there was no effective third party that the technically competent people could go to to raise a red flag.
Well there's the FAA oversight... Which has also hollowed out. NTSB is still an amazing accident investigator but better to prevent these things than wait for NTSB to step in
Maybe the FAA should hire three engineering firms to go over the designs and manufacturing and have them compete to see who can find the worst flaws. Just having one big entity (FAA) check up on one other big entity (Boeing) leads to problems.
Think about all the different things Boeing works on, all the details involved in the design of a modern airplane or spacecraft. How is a third party supposed to audit all that, when the designs are so complex and in such a relatively niche field? The most they can do is look for obvious things and make sure the data makes sense.
The problem isn't that the system is corrupt, it's that you're expecting a third party to both be close enough to be intimately familiar with all the details of the airplanes and spacecraft and yet separated enough from the company they're monitoring to not have conflicts of interest.
There is no comforting answer. Welcome to unchecked capitalism, it's short-term-profit-driven thinking all the way down. In every industry it's the same. The guard rails have been systematically dismantled for decades by opportunists just like this, hoping to make some quick cash and jump ship before it falls down.
Whenever anyone points this out, they get labeled as cynics who hate capitalism and industry, and their complaints are swept under the rug -- after all, the company hasn't collapsed yet, so the worries must be unfounded!
This is exactly why strong government regulations and oversight is necessary. Strictly profit driven companies don't care about externalities like pollution or human lives. Literally, they only care about making one number go up, everything else (including the long term value of the number) means nothing at all.
We have the largest governments in human history. You might as well say "we just need stronger companies" for all the good it does to say better governments would help and remove the indirection.
If you think Boeing management was insufficiently respectful of or deferential to technical people and their expertise, I’ve got bad news for you about voters.
Engineers can sometimes be indispensable enough to finagle power from alliances with capital. We don’t win popularity contests.
If your answer is that not just Boeing, but our whole system is in fact that corrupt...well, that's not a very comforting answer, is it?