return to table of content

Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes

supernova87a
223 replies
11h19m

Our governmental methods of punishment for corporations strike me as lacking. This seems similar to Wells Fargo, where ok, the company was fined, sued, made to pay restitution (somewhat) to victims. But underlying it all, the culture and incentives at the company that produced the situation didn't get fundamentally changed. Which often perpetuates across specific leaders, boards, and is a part of what a company is -- and doesn't just get replaced by removing one or two people.

What does it take? You have to dismantle a company before it changes these kinds of deep-rooted issues? Or can a government penalty call for that? That is hard to achieve. Who's going to change the evaluation procedures that HR has in place to measure what rating or bonus you get this year? That seems to me as important as who is CEO.

None of the penalties courts mete out (short of dissolution/fined into bankruptcy) seem to be able to achieve this level of change needed.

constantcrying
123 replies
10h45m

The problem is that finding the people responsible can be extremely hard, so you have to go against the corporation itself.

Punishing a corporation is easy, but the government hates doing it for obvious reasons. It means ruining something which is useful to you and punishing tens of thousands of completely innocent people, with inevitable layoffs.

What Boeing really needs is a complete change in management culture, as that was the real root cause for the MAX disasters, but that is impossible to enforce, you can't even really verify that it has happened.

I also think people don't understand how extremely lucky Boeing is. If all of this had happened during a time of low demand the company would be facing a far more dire situation, likely with many major airlines canceling orders. But since airplane demand is very high and order books are full, airlines have to keep their orders at Boeing if they want new planes.

davedx
78 replies
10h14m

The problem is that finding the people responsible can be extremely hard

What Boeing really needs is a complete change in management culture

Who is ultimately responsible for management at a company though? The CEO and the other C-level people. This isn't really the daunting difficult problem you make it out to be: the buck stops at the C-suite. Who else could possibly be ultimately responsible??

constantcrying
67 replies
10h4m

You can not punish someone for a crime they didn't commit and had no knowledge of. That is ridiculous and a perversion of justice.

VBprogrammer
12 replies
9h53m

There were two crashes. After the first crash Boeing were quite happy to pin the blame on the Lion Air pilots. At that point the C suite were definitely involved in every decision.

zarzavat
11 replies
9h21m

Exactly this. The first crash was negligent design of a technical system. The second crash was murder.

The regulators are also culpable since the design of the system was in the public domain before the second crash and they did nothing about it.

swarnie
10 replies
8h56m

The second crash was murder.

No civilised justice system in the world is getting to murder from these facts.

Manslaughter via negligence if you're feeling really lucky

zarzavat
8 replies
7h29m

Depends on if it could be shown that the decision to not ground was motivated by a desire for profit or not.

gruez
6 replies
6h19m

Still not murder unless they intended for the deaths to occur.

immibis
5 replies
6h11m

The felony murder rule is a rule that allows a defendant to be charged with first-degree murder for a killing that occurs during a dangerous felony, even if the defendant is not the killer.
gruez
4 replies
5h51m

Is whatever Boeing did a "dangerous felony"? Wikipedia suggests not every crime qualifies:

To avoid the need for reliance upon common law interpretations of what felony conduct merges with murder, and what offenses do and do not qualify for felony murder, many U.S. jurisdictions explicitly list what offenses qualify in a felony murder statute. Federal law specifies additional crimes, including terrorism, kidnapping, and carjacking.
shakna
1 replies
5h26m

Knowingly placing thousands of lives at risk, including possible state actors - risking international relationships, whilst also risking damages to critical infrastructure, such as airports, certainly would seem to qualify as a dangerous felony.

gruez
0 replies
4h37m

The legal system doesn't operate on "seem".

Nuzzerino
1 replies
4h50m

If they can do it to Trump, they can do it to Boeing.

gruez
0 replies
4h37m

Trump wasn't prosecuted for felony murder, he was prosecuted for a misdemeanor which was upgraded to a felony because it was used to violate campaign finance laws.

bluGill
0 replies
5h14m

There are different degrees of murder. First degree requires you to plan in advance kill someone (either particular person or a specific group). Second degree murder doesn't require the plan to kill, and so negligence for financial gain COULD be second degree murder depending on the details. (Boeing knew or should have known that their mistakes could lead to death and so mitigated this)

Note that US states are not consistent on what is second degree murder. I cannot find a federal definition (I'm not a lawyer - this should be seen as me not knowing the right search terms). There are many other countries with their own definitions of murder which are all slightly different.

SJC_Hacker
0 replies
2h26m

No civilised justice system in the world is getting to murder from these facts.

Felony murder statutes disagree.

roenxi
11 replies
9h5m

And the level of risk the CEO/C Suite would have to take on would be insane. Who would want to be in charge of an aerospace company if there was a real risk that you'd get charged with murder if you don't have an almost psychic insight into the technical decisions of your company?

There'd be a filtering effect where the best and brightest avoid industries where we need them to be. That standard would likely reduce the quality of the leadership and bias it further towards people who are delusional about safety.

tossandthrow
4 replies
8h50m

Why, again, are the c suite being paid as much as they do if not to take on this risk?

roenxi
2 replies
8h45m

To fullfill their role? Management and making decisions? Taking on personal risk has never been a part of the C suite beyond the tradition of giving them shares as part of their compensation.

Shareholders use positive incentives, not negative ones. Because positive incentives generally lead to better results in this case.

tossandthrow
0 replies
8h15m

Seems like the US has some really weird rules in this regard then. For the C-suite to take on personal risk is literally a part of the role where I live. the central business registry register those holding these roles for that exact reason.

TheOtherHobbes
0 replies
5h19m

In this case they've clearly done the opposite.

You seem to be arguing that the C-suite can do anything it wants to. As long as it does it in an official capacity, it can cause whatever harm it wants.

That seems like a very strange argument. Do you believe corporations and corporate officers have no moral obligation to act ethically?

Because if so, I'm finding it hard to understand the difference between a corporation and a crime family.

actionfromafar
0 replies
8h42m

We need them energetic and vigorous! /s

maxsilver
1 replies
5h6m

Who would want to be in charge of an aerospace company if there was a real risk that you'd get charged with murder if you don't have an almost psychic insight into the technical decisions of your company?

You say this like it's crazy, but we literally already do this with Doctors and Surgeons, it's not as tricky as you make it sound.

There's no valid reason that CEO/C-Suite folks get to forever escape any responsibility and accountability.

Nuzzerino
0 replies
4h44m

it's not as tricky as you make it sound.

Citation needed + dubious analogy

soco
0 replies
8h3m

If what Boeing management has to offer means "quality" then I'll gladly take less of it, thank you. Same with VW and all those managers which went away unscathed enjoying their golden parachutes, for basically leading schemes for killing people.

sgarland
0 replies
5h44m

Gee, maybe we’d get people who are knowledgeable and care about engineering rigor, instead of MBAs whose sole goal is to make the share price go up.

perilunar
0 replies
5h17m

Sounds good to me. We'd end up with aerospace companies run by engineers who understand the technical decisions in detail, instead of MBAs and accountants.

TylerE
0 replies
3h43m

Will that make the best and brightest avoid it, or the worst, cheatingest, and laziest?

michaelt
10 replies
9h54m

If the ship's captain was asleep in a drunken stupor while the 17 year old helmsman crashed the ship into an iceberg, should the captain go unpunished?

I feel that punishing sobriety and rewarding drunkenness is probably not a good idea, if we want to avoid our ships hitting icebergs.

constantcrying
4 replies
9h44m

Bad analogies won't help anyone. Did the CEO believe his people were incompetent to develop and verify the software?

consp
1 replies
9h14m

Did the CEO believe his people were incompetent to develop and verify the software?

Did the CEO create the culture in which they could not despite being able to?

vmladenov
0 replies
8h13m

IIUC the decisions that led to the 737 Max happened under the prior CEO Muilenburg. Calhoun is just the fall guy. He wasn’t even CEO when the crashes happened.

He should bear responsibility for the door plugs, though.

pyrale
0 replies
6h39m

Your question is also far from the mark.

Plenty of people have to respect a much higher standard of accountability: did the CEO take actions to ensure that proper adherence to industry standard was respected? Which processes were put in place to ascertain the continued respect of these standards?

In many jobs, incompetence will get you in jail. Sure, sometimes your reports go out of their way to conceal issues, but aside from extreme cases, a CEO should have to show what they did to prevent issues, and merely "believing" should land them in jail.

close04
0 replies
8h55m

Analogies don't have to be perfect unless you don't want see inconvenient arguments. Boeing CEO(s) shot hundreds of people in the head and then claimed they had no idea the gun was loaded and the safety was off. "My assistants said it's fine to point and shoot".

It's not about the result or what the CEO "believes", it's about what they reasonably did to avoid bad outcomes. Did the CEO do anything to be certain his people are competent, or that an incompetent person cannot tank the quality of the product? Did they take any reasonable measures, implemented checks, ordered audits, spent more to prioritized safety and quality?

The CEO has the highest executive authority and the highest pay. This means the highest level of accountability. Until the shit hits the fan, or the ground, and then the employees were incompetent, the processes were weak, the consultants that weren't picked by the CEO said it's all good.

The reason they get away with this isn't that the law protects them, it's that they fill pockets and buy laws to protect them. Random "Empty Pockets" Joe won't get a pass for building something that kills people because they didn't bother to verify anything.

tialaramex
2 replies
8h53m

A vessel's master will always leave standing orders to be followed while they're asleep. Typically these orders solve only some routine choices that were anticipated, and for anything extraordinary the master should be awoken at once and consulted.

The junior watch officer should have summoned the master long before the ship hit an iceberg, if they are inattentive (e.g. they fall asleep in the warm dark of a bridge at night) the BNWAS will alarm to try to wake them, then eventually summon senior officers (typically the master, but maybe also a chief engineer and others) to the bridge. The master is responsible for ensuring the BNWAS is operable.

It would be extremely unusual for a commercial vessel (not to mention military vessel) to allow officers to drink booze, especially enough booze to fall "asleep in a drunken stupor". Of course just because something is prohibited doesn't mean it won't happen, but now we're talking about culpability and of course you're culpable if as a foreseeable consequence of your prohibited actions bad things happen, that's negligence at best.

ionwake
0 replies
5h0m

I can’t believe I’m reading comments from people who think leadership comes without responsibility I can only assume it’s someone being defensive.

If it really is your philosophy then who is to blame?

ionwake
0 replies
5h1m

I can’t believe I’m reading comments from people who think leadership comes without responsibility I can only assume it’s someone being defensive

robertlagrant
0 replies
9h22m

If the ship's captain was asleep in a drunken stupor while the 17 year old helmsman crashed the ship into an iceberg, should the captain go unpunished?

No. But also, this is not the situation.

bluGill
0 replies
4h42m

There should be a second/third in command on duty when the captain is drinking or sleeping. (and the captain should be off duty long enough for whatever he was drinking to wear off - my understanding in ships often run 4 hour shifts so there may not be enough time but sometimes the second will take a longer shift to allow the captain time to celebrate.)

Of course no good captain would leave the ship in control of a new second in command in hard conditions. However sometimes the second in command would be captain years ago if there was need for a captain but there isn't, and then there is flexibility.

squigz
7 replies
9h55m

It seems to me the real perversion of justice is executives constantly avoiding consequences for their actions

constantcrying
6 replies
9h50m

It is not illegal to be a bad CEO.

CEOs, surprisingly are protected by the law as well.

thoronton
1 replies
9h0m

If you are such a bad CEO that over 200 People die because of your bad management, then that should definitely be illegal. For what do they get the millions if not for taking responsibility?

ryandrake
0 replies
7h1m

LOL To these guys, “taking responsibility” means simply making a sad face and issuing a press release saying “we’re sorry.”[1]. Not actually taking responsibility and going to prison.

1: https://youtu.be/15HTd4Um1m4

asimpletune
1 replies
9h28m

Maybe in some cases it should be?

Arnt
0 replies
8h49m

It is in some cases.

orbital-decay
0 replies
7h34m

It is illegal to be a bad engineer or a doctor, in certain cases. Why not CEO?

diffeomorphism
0 replies
5h1m

So you want to argue that it was not criminal fraud but blatant incompetence? Interesting angle of defense, but I wouldn't give it a high chance of success.

tremon
3 replies
6h29m

Prime counterexample: Sarbanes-Oxley. Yes, you can punish people for failing to comply with legal obligations, even if they had no specific knowledge of the obligation not being met.

bluGill
2 replies
5h12m

Ignorance of the law has never been an excuse. You are expected to know all the laws that apply to you.

zdw
1 replies
4h4m

The law being so wide ranging, complicated, and subject to interpretation based on previous decisions (in may jurisdictions) it's practically impossible to know definitively every law that applies to you, even for an expert.

Now, knowing what the law is in specific, narrow areas that you're operating in, or with sufficient budget to hire experts, that's something different, and might be closer to knowable.

bluGill
0 replies
3h17m

I fully agree with you, but that doesn't change anything about my statement. Even if you don't know what the law is you are still responsible for following it correctly.

jltsiren
3 replies
8h57m

In the legal culture I'm familiar with, the CEO and the board of directors can be held liable for everything the company does. If they are not aware of the crime but they should have been, it can be seen as gross negligence.

As far as I understand, the legal theory is that the CEO and the directors are organs of the company rather than natural persons when acting in their roles. Therefore some of the usual legal protections do not apply. Assigning liability like that is an inherent part of the social trade-off that allows limited liability companies to exist.

bilbo0s
2 replies
5h56m

You are all arguing irrelevant points. Because the premise is false.

You can identify the people responsible. I won't bother to explain it all, but at very step of the manufacturing process different workers signed off on the integrity of their work. All of that paperwork was logged with the US government. If you let me peruse those papers I could tell you who designed each and every component of the landing gear, and which workers assembled that landing gear on each and every MAX out there. I can tell you which executives signed off on it, and if you subpoena the documents I could even tell you what they were all emailing back and forth. More importantly, I can tell you which QA engineers and executives were involved in the QA and testing process for that landing gear and give you the results of the tests they ran. So on and so forth, all the way up to the CEO.

We can identify people. We've simply decided that we won't. You guys are arguing an orthogonal point as to whether or not to hold C level executives accountable. I can tell you right now you're going to effect much better change if you target key executives at the director-VP level than if you target C level people.

We do need to get rid of the rats. And a lot of those are C level executives, but it's important right now to get rid of all the rats. And right now, many of those rats are being promoted.

hobs
0 replies
4h38m

There's a very simple legal phrase which is "knew or should have known" - the CEO knew or should have known. It's that simple.

If you are the CEO and you did not, you should have, and you are responsible. It doesn't really need to be more complicated to incentivize rooting out evil - if we hold people responsible authorities (those with power) who should have known, they will figure out a way to increase integrity of their organizations instead of spreading accountability through infinity vendors.

ImPostingOnHN
0 replies
5h28m

The CEO is accountable for culture and hiring, good or bad. If someone below them hired poorly, the CEO failed by hiring a poor hiring manager. As the poster above said, the buck stops at the top.

If some random person on the floor didn't properly log a maintenance activity, that is the CEO's fault for not creating a culture in which proper documentation is properly stressed. Again, the buck stops at the top.

That person on the floor must be, and usually is, indemnified, because it's more important to get open and honest feedback from them on what happened. That way we know the changes the CEO failed to implement to prevent it from happening, and should now implement to prevent it from happening again. This is because the buck stops at the top.

mihaic
2 replies
5h4m

What about a crime that was in their job description to have knowledge of? Would a doctor not be liable if he didn't properly diagnose a patient? There is an assumption of minimal professional competency when you assume the responsibility of that role.

fwip
1 replies
4h55m

Doctors are definitely not liable for misdiagnoses.

mihaic
0 replies
4h4m

I'm pretty sure that you can sue for malpractice should the misdiagnosis fall below a minimum standard of conduct. In practice, misdiagnosis is not easy to prove, but we're talking Boeing executive level of incompetence here.

whaleofatw2022
0 replies
6h4m

Parents can absolutely be responsible (at least financially) for crimes that a minor child under their care did. Doesn't matter if they weren't around at the time and told them not to do it.

Besides, Understaffed/Poorly staffed orgs tend to have more issues like this anyway... which tends to be the result of executive decisions, right?

Being too insulated from day to day ops is a symptom, not an excuse.

sumedh
0 replies
5h57m

Does management get to enjoy profits/bonuses when things are going good, if yes then why can they share the pain as well?

philipov
0 replies
4h34m

Yes you can, it's called Strict Liability. That's the risk they're getting payed billions of dollars to make sure they get right. It's their job to have the knowledge and make sure it doesn't get committed.

josefx
0 replies
8h20m

and had no knowledge of.

A the time honored excuse of "sorry mister officer I did not know the car I was driving was stolen, I just found it on the road a few days ago and had no idea I swear".

jajko
0 replies
6h33m

No its called a healthy society. The reason - There is usually surprisingly little actual skill gap between good seasoned (higher) middle managers and c-suite. What gets you up there is politics, clever sociopathic games, tenacity, connections, and often a bit of luck. If you look for words like additional competence among that list, you wouldn't find it.

The only reasons some folks push up there to the top are 2 - power, and money. They receive extra money because they are holding massive responsibility for their part or whole corporation. Lets stop finding reasons why there is actually 0 real responsibility on them. Its literally part of the deal they sign up for, and they know it very well.

Yes, it may sometimes mean that they get the heat for something caused by their predecessors, its part of the risk they take on themselves by pushing into such role. Its still firmly their failure, ie to a) identify it; b) act upon it. But as we see this wasn't a priority in Boeing, and I presume it still isn't.

ionwake
0 replies
7h21m

They did commit it by accepting their role, their responsibility for their team, the higher salary for the higher responsibility and the dereliction of their duties.

You are the one person on the planet (I hope) who believes a leader is not responsible for those under his leadership.

Before you take offence understand this is just a difference of opinion of what a leader is, nothing against you personally.

hnthrow289570
0 replies
5h54m

We should certainly do something about CEOs being in charge of large multi-billion dollar companies, rarely having direct consequences, and still being rich. It is currently reasonable that a CEO might not know everything when something happens the first time in a huge company. We shouldn't have only one person responsible, but likely a group. This is more important in safety critical industries, but less so for something like a luxury goods company, so you wouldn't want to force every company to this structure.

This is currently an advantageous single point-of-failure for companies and CEOs, and the advantage grows the more safety critical the industry that they're in. The company structure prevents any real responsibility except when the crime is blatant (like the CEO was recorded or wrote down something).

harimau777
0 replies
5h52m

CEOs get paid massive amounts for supposedly being responsible for the company. So why shouldn't they be held responsible for the company?

glimshe
0 replies
7h48m

Part of the reason the C suite makes outrageous salaries is that they have much more responsibility than the rest of us. They didn't have the intention to harm people but it's nonetheless their fault if they didn't put in place proper and reasonable procedures to prevent the problems.

davedx
0 replies
8h12m

Who didn't have any knowledge of what, here? Are you saying the CEO of Boeing had no idea what was going on with the 737 MAX program?

bombcar
0 replies
4h45m

Why not? It happens all the time, to various degrees of "punish", especially in civil cases.

You are responsible for your property (land) and can be sued quite successfully for issues you had no knowledge of and no way of knowing.

alwa
0 replies
3h17m

If you incentivize ignorance, then that’s what you get more of. If all I have to do to avoid responsibility is to cover my eyes and plug my ears after I chuck the figurative grenade into the operation, then then expect me to develop an enthusiastic case of “la la la I can’t hear you!” even in reaction to normal decisions, just in case.

It feels like maybe the financial industry made some reforms along these lines, right? Where they established that somebody specific in an executive position was required to sign personally guaranteeing that various financial filings were not fraudulent?

Presumably that personal risk incentivized said executive staff to want to know more rather than less, and the residual risk (of having to stand by your word) became priced into the pay packages.

rob74
2 replies
9h18m

Well, ultimately responsible are the shareholders who demand ever higher profits, and the top management has to deliver that, even if it hurts the company long term; or, to generalize even more, capitalism.

adwn
1 replies
8h56m

ultimately responsible are the shareholders who demand ever higher profits, and the top management has to deliver that

That's not how this works. The shareholders don't have direct authority over the decisions made by the company's chief officers. They can demand "higher profits" all day long, but that doesn't absolve the board of directors or management from their responsibility, and it doesn't give them a blank check to behave unethically or even criminally.

or, to generalize even more, capitalism.

Ugh, that is such a knee-jerk, fallacious take. Short-sightedness and misalignment of incentives are traits that are hardly specific to capitalism.

llamaimperative
0 replies
5h41m

A problem doesn’t need to be specific to capitalism in order to be caused by it. Of course this is all a result (a predictable one) of a certain type of capitalist theory, namely extreme shareholder primacy.

AndrewKemendo
2 replies
4h2m

Boards run corporations on behalf of investors through vague and soft guidance so as not to directly be considered officers

CEOs are appointed based on their ability to do what the board wants while shielding the board - this is why they get paid the most

Until investors and the board significantly hurt, to the point where their investment is either a total loss, or they are liable for additional financial inputs then nothing will change

account42
1 replies
2h19m

Ok but are you arguing for or against holding CEOs liable?

If that big CEO paycheck came with some actual risks if you ignored ethics then maybe there would be fewer CEOs willing to do that.

AndrewKemendo
0 replies
1h51m

I’m saying that its all a ruse

Boards want the media to focus on the CEO because they are literally there to shield the board from accountability while “taking the brunt” of the bad PR - and also being a show piece for the company in good times

So, the real answer IMO is to change the law to implicate board members and investors directly as though they are officers equivalent with the CEO is setting corporate direction and incentives

Of course they have intentionally made the law such that any actions taken by the corporation, limit the liability of the board legally, while not taking the power away from the board to drive the direction and priorities and incentives of the corporation

The whole thing is an accountability shell game - Wherein a CEO is the whipping boy for whatever the board needs them to be the whipping boy for - and there’s a balance and ownership

The simplest way to put it is that the CEO is there to ensure that everything, the company does benefits investors primarily.

Until it is legally the case that corporate leadership must prioritize the benefits to labor above investors, nothing functionally is going to change.

smackeyacky
0 replies
5h19m

The board is responsible for keeping the C suite honest. They need to be removed.

sitkack
0 replies
4m

The board and the c-suite of Boeing should be replaced, and they should personally have to pay life changing fines and serve jail time.

doctor_eval
0 replies
9h53m

Who is ultimately responsible for management at a company though?

Technically the board is ultimately responsible for management. It’s the board’s responsibiity to hire delegates and to monitor their performance.

That’s how it’s supposed to work, but it seems to me it’s been a very long time since board have been anything other than rubber stamps for the CEO.

BSDobelix
0 replies
9h7m

The CEO and the other C-level people.

Yes the Captain of a Ship is always responsible for everything that happens on his ship 100%.

archerx
22 replies
10h13m

Make the CEO responsible, want those big rewards (high ceo pay) get ready to deal with big responsibility. I’m sure if CEOs were criminally liable things would change very quickly.

constantcrying
10 replies
10h1m

The criminal precedent of punishing a person for a crime they didn't commit and had no knowledge of is so bad that I honestly didn't think any reasonable person could come up with this.

doctor_eval
5 replies
9h52m

There were two crashes. The CEO most certainly should have known about the problems after the first one.

It’s the CEO’s job to ensure that sufficient measures are in place to prevent failure. They should not be punished for accidents; they should be punished if the accidents were reasonably predictable.

Which was most certainly the case when they decided to the redundant AoA sensor an optional extra.

robertlagrant
2 replies
9h21m

There were two crashes. The CEO most certainly should have known about the problems after the first one.

Possibly, but not if it were a one-off. Are the airlines that chose to keep flying Boeing 737 MAX not equally (or more) responsible?

doctor_eval
1 replies
9h3m

After the first accident, Boeing was said to be blaming the pilots, in private, despite knowing about MCAS but not revealing it. They deliberately misrepresented the design (and in particular they minimised the severity of the failure modes) of MCAS to the FAA during the certification process. There are transcripts of the test pilots discussing this stuff. Boeing also heavily lobbied the FAA not to ground the Max 8 despite other jurisdictions grounding the aircraft.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that Boeing knew what was going on, and if the CEO didn’t know then he wasn’t doing his job.

There really is no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt.

bombcar
0 replies
4h40m

What amazes me is that the first crash is arguably "pilot error compounded by MCAS" but they didn't just immediately pay the tens of millions it would have cost to retrofit all existing planes with the double-sensors that were an option but not required.

constantcrying
1 replies
9h48m

There were two crashes. The CEO most certainly should have known about the problems after the first one.

Then drag him to court for that. But this is totally different to charging him with the crimes of other people he couldn't have known about.

doctor_eval
0 replies
9h39m

What are you talking about?

From [1] in 2021:

The airplane manufacturer broke the agreement by “failing to design, implement, and enforce a compliance and ethics program to prevent and detect violations of the U.S. fraud laws throughout its operations,” the DOJ said.

He’s not being held responsible for the crime, he’s being held responsible for looking the other way.

The CEO is 100% responsible for designing programs to ensure that the business operates within the parameters of the law.

What else do you think their job is?

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/07/doj-fines-boeing-over-2point...

sudosysgen
2 replies
9h53m

There is immense precedent to punish a person for a crime they were responsible for and that they should have known was happening.

constantcrying
1 replies
9h49m

The software issues definitely were not something the CEO should have known about.

pmontra
0 replies
9h0m

The CEO has the responsibility to make the company work well. If a company build products that injure or kill people, the CEO should be in trouble too. Instead of looking the other way and still get big paychecks and bonuses, improve design, testing, all company processes and make the company build products that work.

lordnacho
7 replies
10h11m

Yeah, this is key. I don't see why the system shouldn't be set up that way. Company does something criminal, now boss is considered a criminal.

constantcrying
6 replies
10h3m

That is a perversion of justice. You can not transfer criminal liability for money.

Your employees can be criminals regardless of culture. The precedent this would set is ridiculous.

abenga
3 replies
9h46m

Who should be responsible for a company's crimes if not the people who make decisions in the company? If we want companies to have legal personhood, how about they suffer the same perils of breaking the law (prison time, etc)? Fines are just a price we set on breaking the law.

constantcrying
2 replies
9h41m

Who should be responsible for a company's crimes if not the people who make decisions in the company?

The person committing that crime.

If we want companies to have legal personhood, how about they suffer the same perils of breaking the law (prison time, etc)?

Companies can not be put to jail.

abenga
1 replies
9h23m

The people committing the crime include those who make the decisions. Hiring an assassin makes me guilty of murder.

endominus
0 replies
8h29m

I'm almost certain that's not true (at least, not in my own jurisdiction). Conspiracy to commit murder, perhaps. "Murder for hire" is apparently the DoJ term (https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/murder-hire-convict-sen...).

But that's not the situation here anyway. Is an architect guilty of murder if a building he designs collapses? Flaws in his design may have contributed. What about the construction company that built it? Perhaps they were incompetent and sloppy in their construction. The suppliers might be at fault as well; they could have sold inferior steel or concrete. What about the politicians that passed faulty legislation for building codes? Does some of the blame not fall on them too? Or the maintenance company that skimped on their maintenance checks and could possibly have seen the cracks forming?

There is very rarely, despite the assurances of five-whys and other incident response practices, a clear-cut and obvious point of failure when complex systems break. The Boeing situation was a failure of culture, people say. Maybe. They justify criminal charges on the C-suite as a result. Maybe even that is just, for a certain definition of justice. But the buck doesn't have to stop there. Where are the criminal charges for the shareholders, who chose to keep these criminals at the head of the company? Where are the charges against the FAA, who continued to do leave Boeing to be its own regulator? Why not cast blame on the previous CEOs as well? After all, culture takes a long time to change, and the current CEO has only been in the role since 2020 - the MAX's first flight was in 2016!

thoronton
0 replies
8h49m

The people in charge have to ensure that the right measures are in place to prevent illegal behavior. If they do not do that, then they are liable. At Boeing, effective measures are obviously not in place.

ben_w
0 replies
9h12m

1) It's the CEOs job to know. Carelessness, recklessness, wilful ignorance, malice, these are all terms of art and can lead to different liabilities; as a non-lawyer I don't trust my own understanding as to the exact boundaries between them.

2) If the CEO knows, then the word "conspiracy" comes to mind, does not require them to perform the criminal act, only their agreement to act.

Arnt
2 replies
8h15m

So the CEO says in court: «I am now aware that some of the issues on your jira backlog caused damage to our customers. The very-well-compensated programming team leader and the highly paid programmers reported to me that there were no such issues in the backlog, and based on their written assessment I decided to release the new version. It would be impossible for me to check every detail, and therefore unreasonable for the jury to expect that.» And the jury agrees, and someone goes to prison but it isn't the CEO.

archerx
0 replies
7h39m

Nice strawman. The prosecution reminds the jury that the CEO got paid 33 million before bonuses and the programmers only got 150k.

A4ET8a8uTh0
0 replies
5h20m

Eh, my current project manager does not even seem to check every detail and we appear to be moving by pretty dashboards, so I expect CEO will have even smaller, simpler dashboard. Fwiw, if CEO got in front of the jury, I would expect things to look bleak for the CEO ( it is not exactly a favored class now ). There is a reason it does not happen often ( for example outright fraud ala Bankman ).

lordnacho
5 replies
10h19m

Why can't the government mandate a board replacement? The board can figure out for themselves who is responsible, I would guess the finger would typically point at the CEO.

davedx
3 replies
10h13m

Boards are often toothless though, just look at Tesla's.

Replace the C-suite. This is done frequently in M&A's and other corporate strategies in extremis. Fire the guys at the top and replace them with people with good track records.

ryandrake
2 replies
6h51m

You can rotate people in and out of the C-suite, but incentives and culture aren’t going to change. These people are largely figureheads that get paid a lot of money because they are Ivy Leaguers whose friends on company boards who set their salaries are all Ivy Leaguers, too.

It’s not like Boeing is going to get a new CEO and then suddenly middle management is going to start prioritizing safety, engineering rigor, and risk management over profit.

quotemstr
0 replies
6h39m

Counterexample: Nadella

fwip
0 replies
4h47m

If the new CEO doesn't want to go to jail, then they'll make the changes.

sonzohan
0 replies
9h50m

You would keep the status quo. The problem with Boeing is the replacement of a strong engineering-first culture with a profit-first culture over decades. It's a classic playbook: acquire company, erode product quality and culture for profit, pay out shareholders, discard hollowed-out husk.

lupusreal
3 replies
10h15m

How do you even "change management culture" without punishing people who are innocent of any crime other than being a manager who embodies the sort of management culture you're trying to stamp out? If you limit yourself to firing/prosecuting the specific managers that committed fraud/etc this time nothing will change because those guys only existed in the org and operated that way because of the broader management context. Sweeping layoffs are probably a necessarily prerequisite for fixing Boeing.

immibis
2 replies
10h11m

"How do you eliminate fraud from a company without punishing managers who are innocent of any crime other than being a manager who embodies a management culture that promotes fraud?"

Idk, doesn't sound like a problem to me.

lupusreal
0 replies
10h4m

My point is that this should be done, and trying to avoid those sweeping layoffs is misguided.

Sakos
0 replies
10h9m

Agree. Seems like great incentive for the next replacement manager to not turn a blind eye or be willfully ignorant like it's not their problem.

tgv
2 replies
10h0m

This is such a "this looks tough, I don't feel like doing it" take. Who is responsible? As others have said, the structure of a corporation defines that. If person A has to do what person B says, then B is responsible. If B "didn't know", then B has been lacking.

It also avoids sacking the "innocent people" and it sets an example for other companies. The greedy corporate culture really needs a bit of check-and-balance.

bluGill
1 replies
5h4m

We do however have to allow for person A intentionally hiding from person B what they are doing. Person A should check, but it is impossible to see everything so we do have to allow for person B committing fraud to hide from audits.

tgv
0 replies
4h57m

Sure. But then B should prove that A did so. And even then, if B had threatened A, even implicitly, B can still be considered responsible for the fact that A didn't inform.

underseacables
0 replies
7h25m

The CEO. America does not put CEOs in prison anymore. Yes, the occasional CEO will go to jail for fraud, but when people actually die, like this, the CEO and the executive suite goes unpunished. When the justice system starts putting CEOs in jail, is when we will see their behavior change. Until then, all of this with Boeing is nothing more than lawyers and legal fees.

treflop
0 replies
3h40m

What Boeing needs is competition. There is Airbus, which apparently doesn’t scare them enough, but there used to be a lot more in Boeing’s earlier years.

Unfortunately an airplane building company has high upstart costs and is also not a cool industry to get into.

snewman
0 replies
3h59m

What Boeing really needs is a complete change in management culture, as that was the real root cause for the MAX disasters, but that is impossible to enforce, you can't even really verify that it has happened.

Serious question: why not? Why couldn't we require Boeing to change its culture, and then verify and enforce that change? Verification might involve periodically interviewing employees across all levels of the organization, performing spot checks and audits to make sure that procedures are being followed (no more failing to enter a work item into the system), and so forth.

(I don't mean to imply that this would be feasible under current regulatory law – I have no idea whether that is the case or not. I'm just saying that you could imagine a world where this could be done.)

ralferoo
0 replies
5h42m

I also think people don't understand how extremely lucky Boeing is.

Disagree. I think most people can see how lucky it is for them that they can avoid an expensive and protracted court case, just say "oh yeah, we're guilty of a serious fraud" and the only consequence is some fines that amount to about 1% of their annual revenue. With consequences like that, it seems like the government is actively encouraging them to commit fraud...

pmontra
0 replies
9h7m

This is simplistic, but it's a start for a discussion: you look at the organizational chart, start from the bottom where the people working on the product are, punish all the line from there up to the board (all the C*).

Then people will start asking questions about what they are told to do, because they know that if they do something wrong they're going to jail or have to pay the fines themselves, not a bank account of the company. And they won't have much else to go to get shielded from responsibility, because all jobs will be like that. Even our own jobs.

marcosdumay
0 replies
1h6m

It means ruining something which is useful to you and punishing tens of thousands of completely innocent people, with inevitable layoffs.

There are no layoffs of you apply the punishment into the shareholders. Confiscate enough of the company proportionally to the fine value.

Shareholders are, of course, free to sue the actual decision makers afterwards to pin down any non-mandated illegal behavior and recover their losses.

dralley
0 replies
5h39m

I also think people don't understand how extremely lucky Boeing is. If all of this had happened during a time of low demand the company would be facing a far more dire situation, likely with many major airlines canceling orders. But since airplane demand is very high and order books are full, airlines have to keep their orders at Boeing if they want new planes.

And as it stands they've already been losing money for the past 5 years. They could be losing a lot more money.

Granted a lot of those losses are due to their own mismanagement of projects like KC-46, Starliner, AF1, etc.

ajsnigrutin
0 replies
4h36m

The problem is that finding the people responsible can be extremely hard, so you have to go against the corporation itself.

It's funny... when some people get paid A LOT of money, it's because they have "a lot of responsibilities", but when something goes wrong, those responsibilities suddenly vanish.

iSnow
25 replies
10h43m

You have to get the leadership by the balls. The CEO isn't going to change a company's culture alone, but she has leverage and connections. If they know they face prison if the company plays foul in a major way, they will put pressure on their deputies to change culture.

Also, fines that go up to say 10% of global revenue. That ensures that even activist shareholders take note and do not pressure the CEO to cut corners.

constantcrying
21 replies
10h33m

If they know they face prison if the company plays foul in a major way, they will put pressure on their deputies to change culture.

It is completely ridiculous to criminally prosecute leadership for crimes which happened without their knowing/consent/acknowledgment. It would be a perversion of justice to jail someone because many levels down someone else committed a crime. The best corporate culture does not prevent criminality.

cycomanic
16 replies
10h18m

Well what are the ridiculously high salaries for if they don't even take responsibility. I mean parents are liable for their children, so why should a CEO not be made responsible for the culture of the corporation underneath them?

constantcrying
10 replies
10h6m

Because that would be a perversion of justice. You can not pay someone to take on criminal liability for crimes they didn't commit and could not have any knowledge of. Just imagine what precedent this would set if it was allowed. If courts would accept that criminal liability can be transferred in exchange of cash, how would the justice system look like?

"Culture" is completely ephemeral and having a court of law determine that the CEO "caused" some change in culture which then caused criminal behavior is ridiculous. This obviously can not be proven "beyond a reasonable doubt".

I mean parents are liable for their children

Parents do not take on the crimes of their children. They are criminally liable for not overseeing their children's action and/or for not preventing their actions, which is something totally different.

amelius
4 replies
10h2m

So you are saying that in a case like Boeing's the CEO was completely unaware of the shitshow at their company and couldn't have taken appropriate actions?

constantcrying
3 replies
9h56m

A dysfunctional company with bad management is not a crime. Putting a CEO in jail because he is bad, not because any crime had been committed, is an even worse idea.

The specific case here about criminally negligent software design errors almost certainly never came up to the CEO. If there is evidence otherwise and the CEO was aware of the problem and decided that the risks were acceptable then he obviously should go to jail. This was not the case here as far as I am aware.

Knowing of the issue is the important thing here. If you want another case you can look at the Diesel Gate Scandal at VW, it is German law, but the single most important question is always "who knew", because if the person did not know and had no reason to want to know he HAS to be innocent, regardless whether it is the CEO or anyone else.

ryandrake
0 replies
6h43m

The specific case here about criminally negligent software design errors almost certainly never came up to the CEO.

It’s the CEO’s job to make sure these things “come up” to him. If he didn’t know about an engineering problem that got people killed then he is negligent and still should go to prison.

I don’t get all this simping for CEOs. CEOs don’t need us to defend them on HN. Trust me, they are doing fine without passioned arguments in support of them.

consp
0 replies
9h10m

The specific case here about criminally negligent software design errors almost certainly never came up to the CEO.

He or she is responsible for the culture and governing within the company. So either way they are involved either by knowing and ignoring or by setting the precedent for this to go ahead without their knowledge. The punishment for those might differ but it's not a free pass.

amelius
0 replies
6h26m

What is the problem with CEOs starting internal investigations to see if there are any (safety/criminal) issues?

Why does the cost of investigation have to be paid by society?

sudosysgen
2 replies
9h50m

The responsibility doesn't come from the money, it comes from being the Chief Executive, with nearly unlimited operational authority. The money would be compensation for liability that would be inherent to their position.

constantcrying
1 replies
9h46m

Criminal liability can not be transferred. The idea would be rejected by every sane court as it is a perversion of justice and sets unimaginably bad precedent.

sudosysgen
0 replies
3h24m

Criminal liability cannot be transferred, but additional liability based on having the authority to oversee and direct a crime where one should have been aware is something that already exists: see RICO. No one is saying that the employees who committed a crime should be absolved, people are saying the chief executive should be additionally liable as they are responsible and, if they didn't know, should have known by this point.

thoronton
1 replies
8h36m

Parents do not take on the crimes of their children. They are criminally liable for not overseeing their children's action and/or for not preventing their actions, which is something totally different.

It is not completely different. The CEOs should be liable for not properly overseeing their company and for not preventing the illegal actions of the company they're in charge of.

robertlagrant
0 replies
5h41m

Their company is filled with humans, though. A human can do something illegal.

For example: if someone breaks into a bank, do you always fire the CEO?

Then: if an employee of the bank breaks into a bank, now do you always fire the CEO?

lupusreal
4 replies
10h10m

Parents are generally not criminally liable for the crimes their kids commit. They might catch some related negligence charges or something, but if little Jimmy decides to rob a 7-11 his mom doesn't get sent to prison for armed robbery.

krisoft
3 replies
9h31m

The way i see it (and here I describe how I think the law should work, not how it works):

If a Boeing engineer has a breakdown and robs a 7-11, the C suite of Boeing is not responsible for that.

If the Boeing engineer murders people in their course of duty because of the incentive structure set up by the C suite then they are responsible for that. How do you prove that? The same way how you prove anything. Lots of discovery which reveals concrete evidence of the C suite setting up and maintaining said incentive structure and then the prosecutorial team describing the connection to a jurry of their peers.

It is the difference between little Jimmy deciding to rob a 7-11 because they are dumb as a rock, vs doing the same because they grown up in an organised crime family.

lupusreal
2 replies
4h55m

Under this theory I think maybe you could get the C suite for negligent homicide, but murder seems like a huge stretch for anything but a kangaroo court.

krisoft
1 replies
3h24m

I don't think that I mentioned a specific crime in my comment.

amelius
0 replies
1h27m

Huh, you mentioned at least robbing and murder.

amelius
3 replies
10h4m

They should be liable by default. But of course people at a lower position can be liable for their own crimes. That is for a court to decide.

constantcrying
2 replies
9h51m

That is a perversion of justice and sets unimaginably bad precedent.

ryandrake
1 replies
6h41m

You just keep saying “perversion of justice” over and over as of it is self-evident.

bombcar
0 replies
4h34m

And as if precedent doesn't already exist - check https://treeandneighborlawblog.com for tons of (smaller) examples and also the concepts of "attractive nuisance" and such.

Juries are unlikely to criminally convict in a true case of "didn't know and couldn't know" but they also are likely to award large civil settlements even in those cases.

grecy
0 replies
6h24m

Also, fines that go up to say 10% of global revenue.

10% ?

What? if you or I were found negligent that resulted in hundreds of deaths we would be in jail for the rest of our lives, effectively fining us 100% of ALL revenue FOREVER.

At a minimum they should have a massive fine (like 100% of revenue for a year) and do whatever it takes to halve the stock price, thus punishing the stockholders too - after all, they invested in a business that killed people, they should be punished too.

davedx
0 replies
10h12m

The C-level people have already failed catastrophically, they need replacing wholesale. This is done frequently as other corporate actions like M&A's or bankruptcies. There are specialists whose entire career is dedicated to being temporary CEO's. They are out there. They should be used at Boeing.

amelius
0 replies
1h25m

Yes, pressure them to do internal investigations (if they like to stay out of prison).

That will also keep the costs at the company and not with society and after the fact.

BiteCode_dev
22 replies
11h1m

Companies are persons, except they are not.

They cannot die. They cannot go to prison.

This concept of a moral person is a totally unfair advantage that they exploit again and again.

quonn
20 replies
10h1m

I hear this claim a lot but is it really true? Corporations in most countries are „legal persons“ in the sense that they can act like a person. This is what limited liability is all about. In fact the very name „incorporation“ comes from giving a sort of „body“ to an entity that otherwise doesn‘t have one in order to shield the owners from liability as it should be.

I do not think that a corporation is considered to be a person beyond that. It‘s merely a way to establish limited liability for shareholders which requires a mechanism for the corporation to sign contracts without an owner signing on it‘s behalf.

BiteCode_dev
19 replies
9h25m

They can make investments, sue, go bankrupt, have bank accounts, like a person, in their own name instead of the owner.

robertlagrant
18 replies
9h18m

Can you explain why that matters? Yes a company can have a bank account. A company also has a name, like a person. An age, like a person. But what does that matter?

oersted
8 replies
8h40m

Certain laws apply to any person, which includes companies. A company can own things like you own things, and has similar protections. A company is accountable to its promises (contracts, fraud...), like you would be, although punishments might be different.

It's like a union type: `type Person = Human | Company`. Or like inheritance: `class Human(Person)`, `class Company(Person)`. Or a typeclass/trait/interface...

It allows you to reuse many laws for both humans and companies, without having to specify them or define special cases every time it is mentioned.

robertlagrant
7 replies
8h8m

Sorry, again I don't understand why this matters.

oersted
6 replies
5h51m

I think the point of OP was that in many ways companies have many of the same rights and privileges as individuals, but cannot be punished in the same ways.

robertlagrant
5 replies
5h48m

I don't really understand that as a point, though. What would punishing a company look like? Why wouldn't we want to figure out how to punish (or hold accountable) individuals, instead of focusing on the fact that we can't punish legal entities?

We can't punish countries either, even though they can also do these things. We can only punish people. So what?

BiteCode_dev
3 replies
5h38m

Actually, it's the same point.

We are currently trying to punish entities (with fines), and it's ineffective.

We should move back to punishing people more, and moving back the responsibility to people, instead of pretending companies are people, and therefore responsible.

robertlagrant
2 replies
5h12m

But it's such a strange angle. Should we stop companies having bank accounts in order to do that? Who cares if they have a bank account?

BiteCode_dev
1 replies
5h8m

Quite the opposite, since they have bank accounts, let's:

- Make them more liable.

- Make the people behind them more liable.

- Give companies limitations. What would be the equivalent of jail for a company ? Unable to sale for x years ? How long a company should be able to exist ?

Right now there is way too much power and shielding at the same time.

robertlagrant
0 replies
3h34m

What would be the equivalent of jail for a company ? Unable to sale for x years ? How long a company should be able to exist ?

If they can't sell then they don't have money, and everyone is fired. Is that what you mean? Why are you trying to make companies into physical people who can be punished separately to their employees/shareholders, instead of thinking of the actual outcome you want and coming up with something to achieve that?

oersted
0 replies
3h32m

You can definitely punish countries as an independent entity: with trading sanctions, refusal to give in on certain diplomatic compromises, or different degrees of military retaliation.

Same with companies: mostly fines, but also limits on how they can operate, additional oversight...

Of course, the consequences trickle down to people, but these punishments are not meant to target any given individual, and if the individuals in charge change, the ones that leave don't necessarily carry the punishment with them.

This makes sense, legal entities like companies are guided by incentives. And it sometimes makes more sense to punish the legal entity to change its behaviour, by imposing disincentives, rather than punishing whichever people are running it at the time.

For example, people within a company might pressure an individual to commit a crime, because even if that individual might get punished, the company may benefit as a whole. But if the company's (financial) survival is at stake, everyone is more likely to collaborate to prevent that situation, including the shareholders, if the punishments are big enough.

The point here is, that for issues like negligence and fraud, the current punishments are not significant enough to act as a real deterrent. The punishment on the companies is too lenient (they can absorb the fines, they are rarely an existential threat), and the punishment on the individuals responsible is too lenient (difficult to attribute culpability, limited liability...).

We do want to figure out how to hold individuals more accountable, as you said, we are just having a conversation about why it works like that right now and what could be changed to improve it.

BiteCode_dev
8 replies
8h15m

We moved the power from the human to something we said is "human enough" to have them. But this thing is a concept, it doesn't exist. It can't die. It can change forms until it doesn't pay taxes. It can't experience pain or go to prison.

Basically, we gave the power to the company without the responsibilities to the humans behind it because there is less consequences, less skin in the game.

robertlagrant
7 replies
8h7m

Sorry - we moved what power?

BiteCode_dev
6 replies
7h43m

The power of having a bank account, of moving funds around, of signing contracts, etc.

Before that, companies had to have everything attached to a human, not the company. So the human was responsible.

You are so used to it that you think it's normal, but it's not.

It's a concept we have created: that companies can act in their own name, like they are actually something concrete.

But when we did that, we failed to give companies expiration date, something like inheritance tax, the equivalent of prison and so forth.

Something that doesn't exist, a concept, enjoy many things a concrete human can do, but won't pay nearly the same consequences.

In fact, it's sometimes in the title: limited liability company. It's by design.

And of course, it allowed humans to do a lot of things without risking to lose all their life if they failed. But we went to far and now, we have companies that can enjoy all those benefits but with much less limitations than the humans counterpart.

It makes them too powerful.

robertlagrant
5 replies
7h8m

The power of having a bank account, of moving funds around, of signing contracts, etc.

I don't think companies can sign contracts. What is the power of having a bank account and moving funds around? It's still people deciding to do this, and doing it, just under a group name. What power?

Something that doesn't exist, a concept, enjoy many things a concrete human can do, but won't pay nearly the same consequences

People are still doing it. You seem to have totally mis-framed this. If you say "people can get away with doing things inside a company" you'd have a point, perhaps, but you're talking as though companies are sentient.

actionfromafar
4 replies
5h3m

It doesn't matter if they are sentient or not, does it? Maybe in the future they will be or act as if they were, but the result will be the same.

robertlagrant
3 replies
4h57m

Of course it matters. What does it meant to punish something that isn't sentient? It's like bemoaning the fact that you can't punish the car that was driven into someone.

actionfromafar
2 replies
4h38m

Depends on if you care about outcome or morality. Already now we use terms like punishment, reward and adverserial competition between neural networks.

robertlagrant
1 replies
3h36m

We do have those terms. The way they are used is not relevant here.

actionfromafar
0 replies
1h32m

If the entity (be it a corporation or AGI-driven corporation) learns from the punishment (or its peers learn by observation) it doesn't matter if the entity is sentient, the outcome is less of the unwanted behaviour. I didn't mean anything more complicated than that.

oersted
0 replies
8h49m

Modern companies are a lot like we expect AGIs to be.

It's an interesting thought that I keep coming across, I'm not sure if I necessarily agree with it.

In a sense, companies are super-human intelligent autonomous beings, with much more power to act on the world than any individual. We are able to partially control them within a complex incentive and enforcement structure, but it is difficult to fully align them with what society needs.

It's good news in a sense, we can control AGIs with similar systems, they have the same resource constraints as any other entity if they want to have an impact in the real world.

MangoCoffee
11 replies
10h53m

The U.S. is not going to shut down Boeing. How many jobs would be lost if that happened, especially in this economy?

The fine is quite low.

akira2501
5 replies
9h42m

The U.S. is not going to shut down Boeing.

It's a monopoly. Just break it up.

How many jobs would be lost if that happened

"We don't negotiate with [economic] terrorists."

especially in this economy?

$77b annual revenue. Positive quarterly growth rate the last 8 out of 12 quarters. Two global wars we refuse to negotiate peace in and Boeing is a major weapons supplier.

Then again, if you kill and scare enough people with faulty planes, the state of the economy will be immaterial to what will happen to your interests.

robertlagrant
4 replies
9h17m

"We don't negotiate with [economic] terrorists."

This is just so silly. Shutting down a company results in people losing their jobs. No terrorists involved.

grecy
1 replies
6h19m

Shutting down a company results in people losing their jobs. No terrorists involved.

I'm always baffled by this unholy protection of "jobs".

Making asbestos essentially illegal resulted in tens of thousands of people losing their jobs and shutting down coal plants will do the same.

It makes no sense to protect jobs at all costs, and doing so can have very bad outcomes.

If a company is doing something illegal or dangerous or that does not serve society anymore, we shouldn't bend over backwards just because people will lose their jobs.

robertlagrant
0 replies
6h9m

I'm always baffled by this unholy protection of "jobs".

I wasn't invoking any unholy protection of jobs. It's very clear the context I was replying to: that "job loss" isn't "economic terrorism".

Can we not treat the comment section as that party game where people only read the previous sentence of the story and write a follow-on sentence? You have the whole thread available to you.

akira2501
0 replies
1h16m

Shutting down a company results in people losing their jobs.

And ending murder and child victims results in people (investigators, litigators, counselors) losing their jobs. Should we stop trying to solve these problems too?

Zigurd
0 replies
1h48m

Spirit Aerosystem will soon no longer exist. but the assets and almost all the jobs will be divided between Boeing and Airbus. If Boeing were split up the result would be similar.

immibis
4 replies
10h10m

The US has propped up Boeing, because it's primarily a military contractor.

dralley
3 replies
5h29m

People keep saying this but it borders on conspiracy talk. The Air Force leadership has been pissed off at Boeing for well over a decade. Every project they've been given has turned into a clusterfuck even moreso than average. They fortunately had the foresight to not give them any cost-plus contracts, so at least it's Boeing eating most of the cost overruns rather than the Air Force, but the point remains that Boeing mismanagement has been a headache for the military.

Politicians care about getting elected, which means they don't want layoffs on their watch. Politicians don't care what the military thinks or else they'd stop funding a lot of dumb projects that the military doesn't give a shit about - of which there are many.

There are so many examples of congress putting their hand on the scale that I really don't understand the popular insistence that the military is the problem here.

bombcar
1 replies
3h51m

The military isn't the problem, it's that the military has no other options.

Who else are they going to buy planes to bomb different-colored countries with? SpaceX? Airbus? It is to laugh.

When you get a company that is too big to fail, it rests directly on the government for not identifying and solving the issue earlier.

zokier
0 replies
2h26m

Boeing hasn't won any major military aircraft deals in recent decades.

The latest big bomber purchase, B-21, went to Northrop Grumman, as did the not so recent B-2. Fighters have been going to Lockheed (F-22 and F-35).

The biggest recent win for Boeing was KC-46 tanker airplane, which is just modified 767. I suppose there is also the handful of F-15EXes that are vestige from their McDonnell Douglas merger.

SJC_Hacker
0 replies
2h21m

The Air Force leadership has been pissed off at Boeing for well over a decade.

Military brass don't control procurement. That would be Congress. In fact the military often frequently has systems it doesn't want/need precisely because Congress. See the Zumwalt destroyer and the Littoral Combat Ship.

lenerdenator
8 replies
5h43m

You put in place an incentive to not do these things. Corporate executives and boards do these things because they're incentivized to do so through stock price-based compensation.

Great risk should come with great reward. We no longer assign risk to most executives at publicly-traded, multinational corporations, but the reward is still great.

I'll leave it to your imagination to figure out what the risk should be, but it should be something that a golden parachute shouldn't be able to resolve.

ChrisMarshallNY
3 replies
5h4m

> Great risk should come with great reward.

In today's culture, I often hear C-suiters talking about how much "risk" they are taking, to justify their outrageous salaries and stock holdings, but I almost never see them pay much, in the way of penalties, except for the very smallest, most "raw" companies, where they have, literally, sunk their entire net worth into the endeavor.

It seems that, once a company has reached a certain threshold, the only real "risk" that executives experience, is that they'll only get a 5% bonus, instead of 30%. So, only $5M, as opposed to $30M.

AUTHORITEH: "Put out your hand!"

GUILTEH: "OK"

AUTHORITEH: <SLAP> "Bad Executive! Bad, bad, Executive! Don't let it happen again! See you at the party on Saturday?"

cellis
1 replies
3h23m

Boeing employs millions (mostly indirectly via downstream cottage industries) of people and I think is the leading net exporter by revenue of the US. Politicians don’t want to hurt them too badly because all those employees vote.

lenerdenator
0 replies
55m

That's why you limit the liability of the company as a whole, but create great risk for the actual executives who decided that safety came second to the profit margin. Again, you can imagine what that would be, but when you compensation is in the tens of millions and there are hundreds dead, well... the risk has overcome the reward and the punishment should match.

Boeing's problem is its management. If you tell the rank-and-file worker to use the company's billions of dollars worth of production capital to build a quality airplane and hold them to it, they've shown they have the ability to do so in the past.

LargeWu
0 replies
3h55m

Additionally, even when they fail spectacularly, they often get golden parachute payments in the 10's of millions of dollars.

bluGill
2 replies
5h25m

I'll leave it to your imagination to figure out what the risk should be, but it should be something that a golden parachute shouldn't be able to resolve.

I agree with that statement, but want so add: I believe that whatever you propose will have significant problems and is likely worse than the status quo in some major way. Sometimes I'll only be able to tell you what those problems are in hindsight. Sometimes those problems are fixable sometimes not.

Don't let this dissuade you from thinking about the problem - it needs to be thought about. However do think about is in more than a shallow way, look at it from all viewpoints (including ones of people who disagree with) try to see what the downsides are and how to mitigate them. Good luck, if enough people do this maybe someone will come up with a good enough answer, (as opposed to perfect!) and you will understand the problem well enough to help debate why the downsides are worth it.

carapace
1 replies
4h14m

Planes are falling out of the sky. I'm a fan of nuance but we're a little past that now.

bluGill
0 replies
2h22m

Even with that, flying is still vastly safer than driving. We thus know there is a level of risk society is willing to accept.

thuuuomas
0 replies
5h21m

If your safety systems fail, we pierce the corporate veil.

TulliusCicero
5 replies
10h48m

You could also just send a lot of people to jail.

One of the problems here is that a lot of the time, the worst thing that happens to an individual from the company is just that they get fired. That's just not a very strong deterrent when the upside if you don't get caught is potentially huge raises/promotions/bonuses.

Imagine if the worst thing that could happen to you when robbing banks if you get caught is just that you can't rob banks in that area anymore. That's kind of how this works for individuals in corporations.

constantcrying
4 replies
10h42m

Proving something like criminal negligence is extremely hard.

The supply chain of software in aerospace is extremely long and finding out who exactly was acting negligent is near impossible.

onli
2 replies
10h2m

When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.

Yeah, hard to prove.

constantcrying
1 replies
9h52m

Stonecipher was CEO nearly 20 years ago. Are you proposing to put someone in jail for crimes which happened over a decade after he left the company. Someone which has certainly ZERO knowledge of anything related to the MAX?

It is not illegal to be a bad CEO.

onli
0 replies
9h31m

Absolutely. If he made systemic changes to the company (and those are proveable) that focused on profit over security he belongs in jail, no matter how long it took for the murder to take effect.

He lead an airplane maker, not a coffee shop. Focusing on profit the way Boeing did was planning a murder and trying to reap the profit in the meantime. All the participating management belongs in a court room.

lupusreal
0 replies
10h6m

The supply chain is long but it's supposed to have exceptionally detailed documentation. Follow that document trail and start prosecuting people when those documents start turning sour, because not documenting the work properly is a crime in itself.

This won't be sufficient to fix Boeing, but it would be a start.

sumedh
3 replies
5h59m

You have to dismantle a company before it changes these kinds of deep-rooted issues?

When you dismantle a company, people lose jobs, that does not look good on TV for politicians.

isolli
2 replies
5h39m

Wipe out existing shareholders and sell fresh shares on the open market. Nothing else needs to change.

perilunar
0 replies
5h14m

I think you'd probably want to replace the board and the top management also.

its_ethan
0 replies
2h25m

Who will buy those fresh shares, knowing that they could be "wiped out" by the discretion of ? the government? at any time? for actions that people they don't know committed?

hibikir
2 replies
6h9m

Most corporations end up building systems that spread responsibility and make it very difficult for anyone to believe they can say no to things they disagree with. How many decisions are supposed to be made by groups where nobody can claim actual responsibility? Commitments that are supposedly made by a team, but where it's clear to the team they have to say yes? People get very nervous, and reviews tend to suffer, when you just ask for dodgy work orders in writing. Remembered the whole idea of the Toyota model, where everyone can theoretically stop the line? We often build systems that guarantee the opposite.

Regulating decision making in companies, however, as to make sure people have to look at their own personal risk when bad things are on the line is going to get a lot of pushback, precisely because that's very inconvenient. But without something like this, the Wells Fargo situation is the natural outcome that will keep repeating.

virtue3
0 replies
5h51m

Toyota also failed miserably with the unintended accelerator pedals. And basically pulled some of the same stunts with denial and cover ups and blaming everyone but themselves (legally you have to do this I suppose).

So I don't think they're a great example of having excellent QA everywhere. And kind of helps with your point of if the ORG and the division of that org is really thinking about quality and what they ship then it carries through. But that might not be the case for every part of the company (I.E. Boeing)

Turned out to be extremely bad code and some potential mechanical issues from what I understand[1]

[1] https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/pubs/koopman14_toyota_ua_...

Varqu
0 replies
5h58m

How about we put responsibility on the CEOs and other C-levels?

When it comes to justifying the compensation packages, they are first to claim that they are responsible for the company achievements.

If they would actually face jail-time for non-disputable wrongdoing, then it would actually balance it out.

BartjeD
2 replies
9h28m

For spilling a hot coffee cup you get $ 2.7 million worth of punitive damages. But for killing more than 200 people and trying to hide the evidence, we'll charge you 200 million and call it a day.

That's less per person than the price of a hot-coffee spill.

esprehn
0 replies
1h49m

While I understand the spirit of what you're saying it does the woman a disservice to talk about it as being only spilling a cup of hot coffee. She was severely burned and required substantial medical treatment:

""" Liebeck went into shock and was taken to an emergency room at a hospital. She suffered third-degree burns on six percent of her skin and lesser burns over sixteen percent.[14][13] She remained in the hospital for eight days while she underwent skin grafting. During this period, Liebeck lost 20 pounds (9.1 kg), nearly 20 percent of her body weight, reducing her to 83 pounds (38 kg). After the hospital stay, Liebeck needed care for three weeks, which was provided by her daughter.[15] Liebeck suffered permanent disfigurement after the incident and was partially disabled for two years.[16][17] """

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Rest...

elsjaako
0 replies
9h23m

They didn't actually get those damages.

To quote wikipedia:

In addition, they awarded her $2.7 million in punitive damages. [...] The judge reduced punitive damages to $480,000, three times the compensatory amount, for a total of $640,000. The decision was appealed by both McDonald's and Liebeck in December 1994, but the parties settled out of court for an undisclosed amount.
kumarvvr
1 replies
6h3m

Corporations understand and fear only 2 things.

Money. Control.

Either the fine should be high enough to alert investors and ensure that they make the company change its ways..

Or

The govt. should provisionally or in a timebound manner take a seat or two on the board.

Let the govt. Do this for a few companies, and every otger company will fall in line.

Corporations must be treated as children of the country they are born in. Sure, they become big, earn money for the govt. and are essentially independent. But if the kid goes naughty, a watchful eye and a rap on the knuckles is how you teach manners.

tempaway4512641
0 replies
5h47m

how you teach manners

You can't teach a corporation manners. If you are going to talk about corporations as if they are people (and legally they want us to treat them as people) then you have to face that they are, technically speaking, artificial psychopaths (incapacity to experience guilt, failure to conform to social norms and respect the law, reckless disregard for the safety of others, deceitfulness in pursuit of profit, etc). Very powerful, immortal, artificial psychopaths.

scotty79
0 replies
4h41m

There should be capital punishment for legal persons.

raxxorraxor
0 replies
4h49m

Problem is that no nation is really keen on punishing their own industry.

Currently the overall culture for selecting business leaders is suboptimal in the western sphere and beyond. It incentivizes behavior that can lead to such problems. Nobody could sell a 10% growth in reliability to investors if it doesn't come with a similar revenue increase as well.

lobochrome
0 replies
10h24m

Wells Fargo’s balance sheet was also capped which led to massive shareholder losses arguably.

energy123
0 replies
9h29m

Just design the incentives so they want to fix themselves. Jail time etc.

ekianjo
0 replies
10h4m

jail time for CEO would be a start?

cwassert
0 replies
10h53m

Change the system.

A blind focus on the concentration of wealth will only improve tech if it helps profit, will only improve lifes if it helps profit, will only protect the environment if it helps profit, will only influence politics to increase profits. It will try to create poverty because that eases exploitation. As you already hinted, the motivation has to change.

azinman2
0 replies
4h8m

Basically jail need to be much more common, and/or these fines come directly from a CEO personally. Then you’ll see change.

atoav
0 replies
9h59m

This won't change if the buck can stop with a non-human legal entity. The people who are incentivized to make actively harmful decisions like these need to also carry personal risk for endangering human life.

Otherwise it is a decision where the manager who decides to stretch the limits will get praise and cash if it works out, without carrying much or any personal risk — even if they are fined or fired, chances are they already got their share.

If we want such things from happening the people taking these gambles need to be painfully aware that it might land them in prison for a long time, and fines need to be proportional to the money earned — that means higher by a magnitude or more so there is not even a doubt that it won't pay off.

I like to live in a society where people building critical infrastructure go to prison if they are willingly taking shortcuts.

akira2501
0 replies
9h47m

You have to dismantle a company before it changes these kinds of deep-rooted issues?

We used to have a law that two different types of banking institutions could not be owned and housed inside the same entity. So, effectively, and based on history, yes. You absolutely do need to do that.

That is hard to achieve.

Not particularly. Congress has broad and sweeping powers. They just don't use them.

Who's going to change the evaluation procedures that HR has in place to measure what rating or bonus you get this year?

These are publicly traded companies. In the case of Boeing, more than half is owned by institutions and not individuals, and these institutions are known to have questionable practices in all sorts of industries. Again, the solution seems annoyingly simple.

Zigurd
0 replies
1h56m

CEO on even numbered days: All assets are always tradable.

CEO on odd numbered days: We're systemically important and need to be shielded from liability.

WarOnPrivacy
0 replies
4h48m

Our governmental methods of punishment for corporations strike me as lacking.

The agencies that oversee this need to have the will and the power to act. Regarding the former, our elected officials are mostly divided into two camps 1) the ones who work to minimize the will of agencies and the ones who are sort of inept and feckless about safeguarding agencies' ability to act.

Regarding the latter, the recent scotus Chevron decision monkey-wrenches agency power (seemingly by design). Bad actors will inject judges into the oversight process, in an attempt to sabotage regulators ability to regulate; Chevron hugely amps up the effectiveness of that attack.

deeth_starr_v
72 replies
4h39m

From the article: Paul Cassell, a lawyer for victims’ family members, said he plans to ask the federal judge on the case to reject the deal and “simply set the matter for a public trial, so that all the facts surrounding the case will be aired in a fair and open forum before a jury.”

Hard to disagree

ActionHank
49 replies
3h34m

If it does go to trial it would be great for people behind this to be directly tried for their criminal actions as well.

The reality is that a company is on trial for the actions of individuals and if there is no follow through on that it will not change anything.

I doubt it goes to trial as I am 99% sure that the judge will rubber stamp the whole thing because the US is a corporate driven hellscape where peasants are accountable, but wealthy individuals and corporations are not.

tsunamifury
33 replies
3h8m

You really want the engineer who was last on the line of decisions to go to jail?

Because that’s how this will go.

WinstonSmith84
10 replies
3h3m

Such decisions are way above the pay grade of random engineers

lupusreal
4 replies
2h22m

Whether to do something you know is morally wrong or refuse and quit is always your pay grade.

And don't give me the Yuppie Nuremberg Defense. "I was just following orders... because I've got a mortgage!" That doesn't fly when lives are on the line.

tsunamifury
3 replies
1h47m

I think people seem to have a very romantic notion that there is some meeting where all the engineers get together and decide whether or not they are going to kill their users or not.

bumby
2 replies
1h29m

Not to "kill their users" but they realistically have meeting to vote on whether the system is "go/nogo". This is the basic structure of many aerospace designs. If you ever watch a rocket launch, they are literally checking in with every system owner for that decision. Prior to even getting to the launch date, there are meetings where they are checking with the designers for similar decisions. There are good documentaries/movies that show this dramatized in examples like the shuttle Challenger.

tsunamifury
1 replies
1h15m

Yea and with challenger only one engineer raised the alarm while a large group of well meaning engineers overrode him.

This is reality. Decisions aren’t kill/not kill.

bumby
0 replies
27m

Yeah we both agree that the decision isn’t “kill/not kill”.

It’s much more ambiguous and murky, especially when dealing with low probability events. That’s why it takes expertise, but it doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be accountability for those “expert” decisions. Other engineering domains already have this, there isnt anything that makes these decision inherently different.

onlyrealcuzzo
2 replies
2h57m

Never forget Kareem Serageldin - the one person who went to jail for the 2007 financial crisis.

In fairness, he was an exec making $7M per year - so not a nobody, but he was only managing 70 people (Credit Suisse was a ~50k person company), and obviously not the only person who should've went to jail.

sgammon
1 replies
1h48m

A systemic failure doesn't necessarily mean that people should go to jail; Kareem lied about the price of bonds and deserved jail time.

underlipton
0 replies
52m

Everyone lied about the price of bonds, that's why our major investment banks still exist (though, I suppose CS doesn't at this point; that's another story).

phone8675309
0 replies
1h57m

No they are not! You are responsible for what you sign off on/seal. If you don't want that responsibility then join another profession.

bumby
0 replies
20m

They aren’t in these industries. Relatively low-level engineers have the capability (some would say duty) to stop work. Typically, they have a different chain of command for that very reason.

cjbgkagh
7 replies
2h48m

Yes! Even as an engineer. I've quit jobs over ethics / safety concerns and I want that pushback to be the norm. When I need to convince other engineers I want to be able to point to such consequences as to why we shouldn't be dangerously cutting corners. And even if you only punish engineers it will decrease the pool of talent / cost effectiveness of workers available to the unscrupulous managers such that cutting corners could very well not be worth the cost. Money saved on cutting corners would be lost in trying to find competent engineers that were willing to cut those corners.

Of course I want the entire chain of those involved criminally punished but punishing people anywhere on that chain, even those at the bottom is a start.

WalterBright
3 replies
29m

When you start criminally charging people for mistakes in critical systems, what you're going to get is coverups.

With a no-fault system, mistakes are not covered up, but fixed.

With a fault system:

1. if a mistake is discovered, it will not be fixed because that would be an admission of criminal liability.

2. Quality will not be improved, because that is (again) an implicit admission that the previous design was faulty.

3. You won't get new airplane designs, because (again) any new design is an inherent risk.

I understand the desire for revenge, but there are heavy negative consequences for a revenge/punishment/fear based system.

P.S. I worked at Boeing on the 757 stabilizer trim system. At one point, I knew everything there was to know about it. It was a safety critical system. I did a lot of the double checking of other peoples' work on it.

I did not work in an atmosphere of fear.

The 757 in service proved an extremely reliable airplane. I've flown commercial on many 757s, and often would chat a bit with the flight crew. They were unanimous in their admiration for the airplane. Made me feel pretty good.

cjbgkagh
0 replies
12m

You're not the first person I've head of this idea from; it's from the NTSB charter

The NTSB does not assign fault or blame for an accident or incident; rather, as specified by NTSB regulation, “accident/incident investigations are fact-finding proceedings with no formal issues and no adverse parties … and are not conducted for the purpose of determining the rights or liabilities of any person”

But there was plenty of blaming / faulting going around outside of the NTSB. Hence the fraud we're currently talking about where Boeing tried to blame the pilots who rather conveniently for Boeing died and are no longer around to defend themselves.

I'm glad you feel personally assured though your enthusiastic personal connections but that does not work for me. That it works for you actually makes me feel less safe flying.

WalterBright
0 replies
22m

P.P.S. My work was checked by others, like the stress group, my lead engineer, and the test group.

JohnMakin
0 replies
6m

When you start criminally charging people for mistakes in critical systems, what you're going to get is coverups.

I would like to point out that this system has been working very well in the maritime industry. Most coast guard regulations put criminal liability onto the captain/crew for decisions that lead to large casualty incidents. There are many examples of this that were very prominent in the news that I shouldn't need to mention, one being the exxon-valdez disaster. Criminal charges were levied against individuals AND the corporation pretty successfully.

Ship captains are also in a position where they need to evaluate the demands of the business, which may not always be compliant with the law, and their own personal risk of the consequences of violating such a law. As such, many ship captains enjoy the ability to push back strongly against unscrupulous business decisions, which should be the norm. A no-fault environment absolutely does not incentivize this behavior and is far more reactive than preventative.

swozey
2 replies
59m

You had the privilege of being able to quit the job over ethics / concerns. I'm assuming you didn't wind up homeless with starving children. I have definitely not always had that in my career and many people don't.

cjbgkagh
1 replies
19m

I have ME/CFS which means for most of my life I've barely been able to make enough in the good times to cover the extended bad times. Running out of money for me is basically a death sentence as it would become increasingly impossible to dig my way out of such a hole. Normal people at their worst could probably stack shelves or wash dishes for a living but that option is not available to me. I'm better at managing my condition now but at the time I quit jobs for ethical reasons I did so knowing that if I didn't find something else quickly then I would eh. end up taking a long walk on a short pier. To make matters worse I'm highly noise intolerant and have to spend more money to live in quieter places otherwise my already precarious health would rapidly deteriorate.

As engineers we are often responsible for the creation of assets more valuable than ourselves and I think it's an essential part of the job to put our lives on the line in much the same way an airplane passenger does. And as engineers we are often also airplane passengers ourselves and must trust that other engineers that they too have put our safety ahead of their personal wellbeing.

As the middle class is crushed then sure, such ethical boundaries will fade out of necessity, and I see this as part of a descent into a low trust society and why I expect more planes to fall out of the sky, both metaphorically and literally. Once a culture tolerates such flexible ethics the boundaries will continue being pushed - there isn't a lower bound. This corruption inhibits the creation of valuable assets and will result in a massive erosion of our standard of living.

An often touted solution is Universal basic income (UBI) that would create a safety-net for engineers and those with my type of disability - but having experienced constant gaslighting on ME/CFS from doctors informed by state funded research and given the expansion of Canadian MAID style solutions to people like myself I'm very fortunate that the capitalists opportunities existed such that I did not have to rely on state 'care'.

swozey
0 replies
6m

I was homeless at 17 in high school before going into the Marines in 2002. I know what having negative money is like, health problems or not.

That doesn't change the fact that it comes from absolute privilege to tell someone that they should just quit their job because you don't agree with the ethics or morality of work they're doing.

If you HAVE the privilege, the savings, the good health not needing COBRA, etc, then by all means walk away. You also don't mention having children, I know a LOT of parents and they absolutely don't have the money to be able to just walk away and keep their kids lifestyles, healthcare, etc until finding something new.

But judging someone potentially desperate and on already on the edge for where they work in most cases is pretty off. You have your own story someone wouldn't be aware of without telling them that as you say may make it impossible to dig yourself out of a hole. Who knows what situation someones in?

quasse
6 replies
2h6m

Yes. This might be unfamiliar to software engineers, but there's a reason mechanical engineering and architecture (there might be more, but these are the ones I'm familiar with) schools put students through at least a semester of ethics classes.

We are literally the last line of defense in a lot of industries. From the first line of the ASME code of ethics:

Engineers shall hold paramount the safety, health and welfare of the public in the performance of their professional duties.

If you can't do that, you should be in another field. Maybe software engineering at Meta would be a better fit.

tsunamifury
4 replies
2h1m

This is a noble goal but unrealistic and unfair at scale. Also it belays just a wildly unrealistic understanding of how risk distribution works in corporations. It’s as if in your mind one engineer makes the singular call and sees the entire picture of the project and its risks. Where as more likely a downstream worker who very likely had an incomplete picture will be blamed.

Also the personal insult is not needed. It just makes you out to be an ass rather than someone making a point.

Consider your romantic notions might not be realistic.

underlipton
0 replies
59m

I don't see a personal insult, but maybe SWEs should take the ethics of their work more personally. Maybe the shape of our epidemic of social and psychological dysfunction would be different (if not smaller).

When I worked at a retailer, we were told to push buy-now-pay-later schemes on our customers (on top of the corporate credit card, and insurance plans, and service plans). Most of my coworkers simply decided that they weren't going to - in part, because such schemes are nakedly predatory, but also because it was yet another dumb metric we knew we'd be held to if it were successful. I don't know of anyone who was fired or docked pay or denied a promotion because of it, and it's not worth luring someone into financial ruin over a TV and an entry-level sales position. Which leads me to another thought: if you're so low in the chain that you have no say in how and what you work on, is it a job that's worth sacrificing your morals for? Maybe take advantage of that increased earnings potential from job-hopping and get out of dodge.

sho_hn
0 replies
1h55m

I didn't read it as a "personal insult".

It's true that most software engineers never work on safety-critical systems. The nature of the products they work on, or the nature of their contributions to those products, limits the possible impact of flaws and mistakes.

Once you work on a product with safety-critical features and/or become responsible for one, there really is a marked psychological change that takes place. I've lived through that change in my own career, and many comments (including some I've written, I'm sure) now strike me as callous and trivializing important matters to an extent that grates.

It's important to hold engineers accountable for their work in proportion to their impact, which is typically very significant. If you build machines that can kill, stakes should exist for you as well.

bumby
0 replies
1h44m

It’s as if in your mind one engineer makes the singular call and sees the entire picture of the project and its risks.

To a certain extent this is true. To extend the OP's example, a mechanical or civil engineer who stamps a building design takes responsibility for that design being safe enough for public use. The same could apply to the MCAS design, or the quality engineer who signs off on how the plane was put together. These are not "romatic notions"; the latter is already common practice in aerospace. Do you think if a QE stamped that the door bolts were installed should not bear responsibility for the bolts being missing?

In those cases where the engineer is supposed to be aware of the risks, there should be processes in place to account for, and mitigate, those risks. For the example of MCAS, the software was categorized as hazardous in the hazard analysis document. As such, Boeing processes required it to have redundant inputs as a default. It did not (the redundant sensor was sold an optional equipment); as such, I think the engineer who signed off on the hazard analysis may bear some responsibility. If, on the other hand, there were no business processes in place to require redundancy, that seems like a CEO responsibility.

FrojoS
0 replies
1h45m

To the contrary, there is usually _several_ engineers who see the ethical/safety problems and talk about them with colleagues. They just don't report it to the right authorities.

balls187
0 replies
1h9m

I went to a Science and Engineering school, and everyone had to take ethics: ME's, ChemE's, CompEng, Civs, etc.

This is such an important part of engineering as a profession.

vlan0
2 replies
2h56m

I'm sure they can try. But put yourself in the shoes of that engineer. Imagine what would go through your head. My entire MO would be CYA. Every 1on1 conversation, secretly recorded (thank you favorable NY state laws), and a paper trail a mile long. For just this reason.

harikb
1 replies
2h0m

I don't get what you are trying to say though. If companies can use 'a mile long paper trail', why can't the engineer do the same?. If it turns out they were forced to do X over their own objections (people do have mortgages and need medical coverage), then that manager gets the blame. Seems fair??

vlan0
0 replies
11m

A manager needs to do their own CYA. If they don't, well, that's on them. But you as an individual should only focus on what you can control.

sgammon
0 replies
1h50m

Yes. Absolutely.

mejutoco
0 replies
2h25m

it would be great for people behind this to be directly tried for their criminal actions as well.

How did you jump to engineering directly from this sentence?

cptaj
0 replies
3h2m

There's a code of ethics for a reason.

bumby
0 replies
1h47m

Professionally licensed engineers are required to take an oath to protect the public. What many don't realize is that manufacturers like Boeing operate under a licensing exemption, on the assumption that business and manufacturing processes are sufficient to protect the public. In cases like this, there is a case that is insufficient.

There has been a movement in some states to remove the manufacturing exemption, in which case the cognizant engineer would bear the responsibility. The optimistic view is that this will help balance the power between the engineer and the C-suite. The cynical view is that this will allow the C-suite to push responsibility down to the engineer.

diob
8 replies
1h22m

Don't worry, it's now legal for the judge and everyone else involved to get a nice present from Boeing, as long as it happens afterwards!

:(

mlekoszek
7 replies
1h16m

Wait... explain.

ssklash
3 replies
1h7m

A recent Supreme Court ruling allows pretty much exactly this...

squigz
2 replies
47m

What ruling? What, more precisely than "pretty much this", does it allow?

dboreham
1 replies
14m

Bribery.

sixothree
0 replies
3m

Well. Literally bribery. As long as you don’t document the interaction and as long as the payment is after the fact, yeah. Bribery.

tomp
1 replies
40m

Supreme Court simply limited the (in their opinion overbroad) lower court's interpretation of the law.

Congress is free to fix the law.

ilyagr
0 replies
33m

How long do you think it will take for Congress to fix the law?

Until then, the ancestor poster's interpretation of "Don't worry, it's now legal for the judge and everyone else involved to get a nice present from Boeing, as long as it happens afterwards!" is more or less correct AFAICT (though I'd appreciate more educated opinions).

eastbound
4 replies
2h12m

95% of US inmates are on plea deal, which means the prosecutor never had to prove the charges before the (potentially) criminal admitted it. It is unfair for those who admitted the charges because they believed they couldn’t defend themselves further.

So the Boeing trial being on plea deal would be on paar with that standard…

dfxm12
3 replies
2h2m

Can you explain your line of thinking for saying this?

Because to me, the standard for such a big company, getting so many public dollars, that is responsible for the safety of a ton of Americans (and more) should obviously be more strict (for at least those reasons) compared to an individual who can't afford a good lawyer who had just a little too much weed on them.

philwelch
2 replies
1h35m

The largest share of convicted inmates in the US were convicted of violent crimes such as murder, rape, robbery, or assault. Simple marijuana possession makes up a tiny share. And less than half of the violent crimes committed in the US lead to a conviction.

underlipton
1 replies
1h12m

Couple of things:

1) Citation needed. Particularly if you're talking about federal inmates, state, or both.

2) It's disingenuous (re: primacy bias) to lead off with murder and rape, which account for a far smaller portion of "violent" crime than robbery (which I assume includes burglary, in which the victim and perpetrator don't make contact) and assault (which, again, does not require the victim and perpetrator to physically make contact (that's battery)).

All of this is aside fact that an individual who allegedly commits a heinous act against another person or small group of people is in a completely different class from a large corporation whose products put millions at risk (and the executives and managers who sign off on those company's decisions). There is quite the destructive myopia behind the increasingly punitive (rather than rehabilitative) nature of incarceration for the former, when the latter get off so easy.

sitkack
0 replies
33m

Thank you for the call out.

I'd say the Sackler's committed premeditated violent crime, "at scale". One could even argue that they would be eligible for the death penalty and yet they keep half the winnings.

spacecadet
0 replies
3h33m

1000%

sandworm101
10 replies
4h32m

But who is to prosecute this? If the prosecution and the defendant have already cut a deal, and therefore neither party wants a trial, what is that trial going to look like? They might simply agree to not bring up certain facts or make certain arguments. What the families want is a different prosecutor, one that will do what they want them to do. But prosecutors work for and represent the government, not victims.

watwut
9 replies
4h18m

Prosecutors are not supposed to drop the ball intentionally if the judge rejects the deal. They are supposed to work the case.

Practically, their career would be affected by it too.

sandworm101
8 replies
3h56m

There are nuances between jurisdictions, but while a US judge can reject a plea deal they generally cannot reject a guilty plea. A judge cannot force a trial between parties that don't want one. And a trial isn't really possible where the parties agree the facts. The judge can certainly impose a sentence different than that which was agreed between the parties, but any such punishment would have to be based on the agreed facts/charges/pleadings. If the prosecution decides to only charge a lesser offense, the judge's power would be limited to the maximum penalty associated with those reduced charges.

anikom15
5 replies
3h44m

Hunter Biden’s guilty plea got rejected.

sandworm101
4 replies
3h31m

No. His plea deal was rejected. That is not the same thing.

qingcharles
1 replies
3h22m

Right. Plea deals are "I'll plead guilty and save you the trial in exchange for this sentence."

Depending on the court, plea deals can be a horrible gamble by a defendant. Generally you have to enter your guilty plea first, and then the judge decides if they want to let you have that sweet, sweet sentence the prosecution offered.

I know someone who went to court having been offered a plea deal for probation and got 80 years instead when the judge rejected it and sentenced them.

thetedhogan
0 replies
14m

Yeah, this shocked me when I learned it. The actual "deal" is the defendant agrees to plea guilty in exchange for the prosecution giving a specific recommendation of sentence. (In most cases, there are some exceptions of course)

alistairSH
1 replies
3h21m

What's the difference (in practice)?

Boeing isn't pleading guilty on its own - it's also agreed to damages.

I agree that a defendant pleading guilty on their own (and throwing themselves on the mercy of the court) would be hard to reject. That isn't what's happened here - the prosecution has, presumably, agreed to the damages, so this is a plea deal, right?

sandworm101
0 replies
2h50m

Without turning this into a criminal procedures lecture, the practical difference surrounds who decides the punishment. When a judge rejects a deal they are asserting control over punishment. But a prosecutor can fight back by dropping charges, or reducing to lesser-but-included charges [insert lecture re elements] which would place a cap on the max punishment the judge could adopt. It is a back-and-forth fight between the prosecutor and the judge about who decides punishment, who represents the wishes of the people.

sitkack
0 replies
26m

People committed the crimes but Boeing is making the deal, which we haven't seen. I don't understand how "a company" can plead guilty to a crime but shield individuals?

Can I form an LLP before I rob a bank?

qingcharles
0 replies
3h25m

Right. And prosecutions aren't between the victim and the offender. Prosecutions are between The People and the offender. Regardless of how the offender harmed the victim, it's The State that is seeking justice in the matter.

Now, criminal prosecutions take into account the thoughts and feelings of the complainant, but they're not usually bound by them.

credit_guy
5 replies
3h7m

Hard to disagree

But hard to agree too. How exactly can you prevent someone from pleading guilty?

5636588
2 replies
2h25m

Judge needs to approve a plea deal. See Hunter's Biden case.

philwelch
1 replies
1h24m

The Hunter Biden case was totally different: in that case, Biden was pleading guilty to a lesser charge in exchange for near-blanket immunity for a vast category of other crimes he may have committed. It was a patently corrupt deal.

dboreham
0 replies
10m

vast category of other crimes he may have committed

Which curiously have never been charged nor manifested in any form besides conspiracy theory disinformation.

skissane
0 replies
2h13m

The judge is allowed to reject the plea deal. At which point the defendant can either withdraw their guilty plea and try their luck with a jury - or maintain it and accept whatever sentence the judge wants to impose-which could potentially be a lot harsher than what was agreed in the plea deal.

Unlikely relevant to this case, but judges are legally required to reject guilty pleas if they conclude that the defendant is being coerced, doesn’t understand what they are pleading to and the likely consequences of their plea, lacks competence to plea (due to severe mental illness/etc), or that the plea lacks a “factual basis” (e.g. if the conduct alleged by the prosecution and admitted by the defendant fails to legally constitute the elements of the crime; or if the judge has good reason to believe that the conduct in question never actually happened despite both prosecution and defence agreeing that it did)

On the last point-the prosecution is allowed to offer the defendant a plea deal for a lesser included offense, but not an unrelated crime that doesn’t correspond with what they are accused of doing-e.g. you can plead drug charges down to lesser drug charges, but you can’t plead drug charges down to possession of stolen goods if there is no evidence anything was actually stolen-in such a scenario the judge is supposed to reject the guilty plea

alistairSH
0 replies
2h8m

You don’t. But the judge can reject the plea deal that’s leading to the guilty plea.

Boeing isn’t pleading guilty in a vacuum - there’s a deal in place. Judge can reject that now, wait until after guilty plea and impose whatever sentence he wants (within law), or accept the deal as-is.

gunapologist99
2 replies
3h3m

This is for a criminal case. The victims don't play a prosecutorial role here and are not actually parties to this case.

The appropriate venue for the victims is a civil jury trial (lawsuit), where recovery of losses is possible because the victims then become party to the case (plaintiff).

The reason this lawyer is requesting this is so that the government will be forced to lay its cards on the table during trial, which provide much stronger proof/evidence of Boeing's wrongdoing (which otherwise would likely be much harder to discover), and make it far more likely for a jury to award a huge award to the plaintiffs.

So this is completely rational on the part of the lawyer, but the judge doesn't have to go along with it at all, and might not.

philwelch
0 replies
1h21m

Is a trial really the only mechanism by which the government could share that evidence with civil plaintiffs?

jessriedel
0 replies
2h41m

This is for a criminal case. The victims don't play a prosecutorial role here and are not actually parties to this case.

The desires of the victim in making formal accusations (“pressing charges”) are certainly considered by the prosecutors even if the victim is not a party to the trial. I’d image the prosecutor takes it into account in other situations too, like the terms of accepting a guilty plea. Do you have a link to something that suggests otherwise?

kingofheroes
1 replies
1h46m

Juries can be manipulated. Allowing this to go to public trial risks the danger of Boeing getting off lighter or not facing punishment at all.

lolinder
0 replies
1h1m

The punishment in the plea deal isn't even a wrist slap. $244 million is not even a half a percent of their annual revenue of $77.8 billion—it's literally a rounding error.

justinclift
21 replies
10h55m

Seems an extremely soft ball approach:

• Under the deal, Boeing agreed to pay a $243.6 million fine and for an third-party monitor to be installed to monitor the company’s compliance.

~$240M seems pretty low for an industry where billions are commonly thrown about.

• The deal spares Boeing from a trial just as the planemaker is trying to turn a corner in its safety and manufacturing crises.

Sparing them from a trial means no further discovery/uncovering of other illegal shit they've been up to meanwhile?

BartjeD
12 replies
9h22m

For spilling a hot coffee cup you get $ 2.7 million worth of punitive damages. But for killing more than 200 people and trying to hide the evidence, we'll charge you 200 million and call it a day.

That's less per person than the price of a hot-coffee spill.

chakintosh
5 replies
9h11m

For spilling a hot coffee cup you get $ 2.7 million worth of punitive damages.

What's the context here?

razakel
1 replies
7h50m

A woman spilled McDonald's coffee on herself, fusing her labia together and receiving third-degree burns. She needed skin grafts.

McDonald's knew that their coffee was dangerously hot and had been repeatedly warned about it, so the jury awarded punitive damages.

lupusreal
0 replies
2h14m

FYI their coffee is still just as hot, but they changed their cups.

CoastalCoder
1 replies
6h6m

Adding to the sibling comments:

There was also a lot of public mockery and political grandstanding, at the time, based on a mischaracterization of the suit.

aitchnyu
0 replies
4h53m

Wonder whether the victim should have sued the bad PR machine and set precedent, since this year a woman suffered an injury of similar order of magnitude (I assume) and all the papers go "woman gets wedgie in water slide muhahaha" due to PR spin.

justinclift
1 replies
6h22m

Bulk discount. :(

temporarely
0 replies
4h55m

Bulk MIC discount.

darby_nine
1 replies
3h48m

For spilling a hot coffee cup you get $ 2.7 million worth of punitive damages

Dude it literally melted her labia together. She deserved that 2.7 million and only got a small portion of it.

mrguyorama
0 replies
1h15m

Nevermind that she only asked McDonalds to cover like five figures worth of medical bills, which they rejected. The JURY selected that figure, explicitly as a fuck you to the corporation that had a documented history of giving people coffee hotter than industry recommendations for safety, people getting really hurt from that coffee, and McDonalds sweeping those instances under the rug without making any changes to their coffee temperature.

Now, instead it is a definitive PR win, with an entire generation of entitled asshole business owners swearing up and down that we need "Tort reform" because "a lady spilled coffee on herself and got $2.7 million", which was explicitly caused by a megacorp going out of their way to be dangerous.

sitkack
0 replies
17m

Please learn the specifics of the case before regurgitating this low effort trope.

gruez
0 replies
4h7m

For spilling a hot coffee cup you get $ 2.7 million worth of punitive damages

Unless you're talking about a different case the actual amount was way less than that.

The trial judge reduced the punitive damages to three times the amount of the compensatory damages, totalling $640,000. The parties settled for a confidential amount before an appeal was decided.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...

More to the point, it's the difference between a jury trial where jurors are likely to award high amounts from a unsympathetic defendant (a big faceless multinational) to a sympathetic plaintiff (79 year old women), and a settlement (presumably the government didn't think they had a strong case so they didn't take to trial).

underseacables
1 replies
7h23m

For the wealthy, it's always just pay a fine. The financial crisis is a great example. Wealthy CEOs rarely go to jail.

account42
0 replies
2h23m

And often enough a fine smaller than the total profit from the illicit activity - so it's just a cost of doing business.

janice1999
1 replies
8h6m

It's even softer when you dig into the details.

third-party monitor

For just three years. Lawyers for the victims said yesterday Boeing would select the monitor the DOJ would appoint. I hope this is no longer the case but can't find confirmation. If so, it's insane. Self-certification was a major source of corruption and rot in Boring.

https://www.newsweek.com/boeing-pleads-guilty-fraud-sweethea...

malfist
0 replies
2h13m

Weren't they already obligated to do this as part of a previous plea deal and it didn't do anything to prevent this case?

When you or I commit a crime during probation that was the same type of crime that lead to probation in the first place, we get a much much harsher sentence the second time around. For boeing, it seems this plea deal would just be "probation a second time"

dvhh
1 replies
9h46m

I think someone else was fined 355~450 millions for fraud recently

cootsnuck
0 replies
6h6m

If you scam the powers that be out of some real money (or just slightly expose their financial incompetence) that's when they suddenly know how how to hold individuals responsible. Pharma bro, Elizabeth Holmes, Delvey, SBF, etc.

The system views individual lives as less important than the confidence / stability / illusion of power of the holy market and those it is meant to benefit.

nullindividual
0 replies
4h58m

There must be some standard calculation going into that number. US law forbids proportional fines (i.e., scaling with income).

Havoc
0 replies
6h48m

Sparing them from a trial means no further discovery/uncovering of other illegal shit

It’ll be uncovered. Just via they “fk it we’ll do it live” in air method

keiferski
20 replies
9h48m

The people saying “send the CEO to jail” or “make the board liable” are vastly oversimplifying the complexity of the issue here, which is about how to enforce regulations and standards without torpedoing your economy. One of the single most important reasons why the US has such a successful business culture is because of its approach to liability - virtually all business debt can be erased in a bankruptcy, and the entrepreneur is not personally responsible. This is not the case in many other developed countries, with one consequence being that the entrepreneurial culture there is nowhere near as developed as in the US.

https://swz.it/europes-failure-to-deal-with-failure/

And so you really don’t want to set up a situation where the operators of a company are by-default responsible for anything that their company does. Of course, that has limits and people can still be individually charged for crimes, but the point here is that this is not a by-default thing. This problem is magnified by a thousand with a company like Boeing that is so intertwined with the government and not easily replaceable.

It seems to me that the solution to this kind of issue might come from studying successful occupations done by the US - post-WW2 Japan is the one that comes to mind. The Allies (mainly the Americans) managed to defeat an enemy state, punish some (but not all) of the people it deemed to have done wrong, and then set up systems which turned out to be largely effective at putting the country on a good path. Fixing an entity like Boeing seems similar in nature, if much smaller than an actual country.

rlpb
7 replies
9h31m

And so you really don’t want to set up a situation where the operators of a company are by-default responsible for anything that their company does.

I think you're conflating criminality with civil liability here (covering legal risk taking and mere incompetence). The former is what's under discussion here. The latter is what allows entrepreneurs to take risk for economic benefit.

keiferski
6 replies
9h23m

Sure they are different things, but culturally I do think they are treated interchangeably. The average person on the street probably couldn’t tell you if X celebrity was embroiled in a civil or criminal trial, merely that they’re in a trial.

I still think it would be very anti-entrepreneurial culture to make company operators liable by default for everything their company does. Again the key word phrase here is “by default” and that obviously excludes executives knowingly committing crimes. But this distinction doesn’t seem to be understood by many commenters on this Boeing topic.

mxkopy
3 replies
8h47m

The average person on the street probably couldn’t tell you if X celebrity was embroiled in a civil or criminal trial, merely that they’re in a trial.

Source?

I think the difference between criminal and civil cases is great enough that a precedent for one need not apply to the other. If you’re investigating dead bodies it’s a vastly different situation than a he-said-she-said whatever case and should be persecuted differently.

keiferski
2 replies
8h41m

What kind of source do you expect me to give you? A study that interviews random people and asks them if they know the difference between civil and criminal law? I’d be very surprised if that has ever been done.

It’s merely my opinion that the difference between civil and criminal law is largely unclear to the average person. In defense of that I’d say my own anecdotal experience, the behavior of people during the recent ex-president’s trials, and the plethora of questions asking about it online. I think most people put “law” and “court” into one big bucket and don’t make too many sub divisions.

I’m not sure what else I could give as evidence here.

mxkopy
1 replies
8h28m

My experience is way different, I think most people understand criminal and civil cases as “the cops arrest you” vs “you need to go to a hearing”, which in most cases is the practical difference. Either way I think your overall point of not disincentivizing entrepreneurship is correct, unless people are dying or otherwise being hurt as a result of it.

rlpb
0 replies
4h45m

which in most cases is the practical difference

I would argue that the main difference is that a civil judgement usually results in "only" some combination of a damages award and (when damages cannot remedy) an injunction, but only a criminal case can result in sanctions such as imprisonment.

rlpb
1 replies
9h15m

I still think it would be very anti-entrepreneurial culture to make company operators liable by default for everything their company does.

Again, by missing out the distinction in this sentence, you're using the implied (valid) case to limit civil liability to make it sound like the same should apply for criminal liability. You're failing to explain why arguments for this in the civil liability case should also apply in the criminal case.

keiferski
0 replies
9h5m

Because I think it would still result in a culture that is hostile to entrepreneurship not dissimilar to how bankruptcy is treated in other countries.

And just to be clear here, I’m arguing against the idea that company operators should be by-default guilty if the company they operate commits a crime. Because that is what a lot of commenters here are arguing for. Not that they should be not be liable for crimes they personally, knowingly, commit.

kristjank
4 replies
9h32m

I do not care about the economy bottom line. I want deaths of people caused by the arguably same motivation of penny-pinching and ever-growing profits translate into at the very least jail times of people that represented and concurred with these horrendously dangerous decisions.

When economists are left alone too long, their results do not differ very much from those of serial killers.

keiferski
3 replies
9h17m

The real world isn’t that simple. If you just dismantled Boeing and sent everyone to jail, thousands of people would lose their jobs. America would lose a competitive edge compared to foreign adversaries.

As I said in the original comment, the difficulty is in punishing the people responsible while maintaining/rebuilding systems that have better outcomes. Blowing everything up doesn’t do that.

Dah00n
1 replies
6h32m

America would lose a competitive edge compared to foreign adversaries.

So murder is okay in a private company if it is important enough for "a competitive edge"? That means specifically that they are above the law.

keiferski
0 replies
6h2m

Did I say that? I said it’s complicated and the world isn’t as simple as destroying things because people do evil things.

The lack of nuance in this conversation is getting tiring.

ryandrake
0 replies
6h27m

“But people are going to lose jobs” is always the excuse used when arguing to treat a criminally fraudulent company with kid gloves. Do we really think ~100k people temporarily losing their job (at a criminal enterprise) is going to make America lose its edge?

EDIT: Also: if America’s “edge” largely comes from its business leaders’ immunity from their company’s wrongdoing, then I’m not sure that’s an edge worth keeping.

BartjeD
2 replies
9h38m

`without torpedoing your economy`

It's OK to kill people, just let the company go bankrupt afterward... Better luck next time!

What an immensely unsatisfying bunch of intellectually corrupt market-speak regurgitation.

There are laws. Those laws should apply the same to service workers as they do to service operators and CEO's. That is: If you believe in the integrity of your own society.

Flouting the law to do influential people a favor, under the guise of not-torpedoing-your-economy, is just another way to have favoritism appear justified.

A societies' law already decided on - and struck a balance on the question of -'not-torpedoing'. Ignoring that later on is inherently political and smacks of corruption and sweetheart-dealing.

---

For spilling a hot coffee cup you get $ 2.7 million worth of punitive damages. But for killing more than 200 people and trying to hide the evidence, we'll charge you 200 million and call it a day.

That's less per person than the price of a hot-coffee spill.

keiferski
1 replies
9h33m

Nowhere did I write that Boeing shouldn’t be punished or that killing people is absolved by bankruptcy. I said that making company operators by default liable would have bad economic consequences.

In fact, I suggested that Boeing ought to be treated like Occupied Japan, which to me seems like it ought to be treated pretty harshly.

jampekka
0 replies
6h30m

In fact, I suggested that Boeing ought to be treated like Occupied Japan, which to me seems like it ought to be treated pretty harshly.

Seven were hanged and sixteen sentenced to life in prison as the result of Tokyo Trials.

computerex
1 replies
9h42m

Maybe something needs to change because America's "strong business culture" seems to only benefit the presently wealthy get wealthier at the expense of the working class.

keiferski
0 replies
9h21m

I don’t think that is contradictory with what I wrote. It is possible (and I think the actual case) that all American classes benefit from the strong American economy compared to say, Europe, while intra-economically inequality grows.

wasmitnetzen
0 replies
4h48m

Boeing killed 200 people, but now Europe needs to change its failure culture? No thanks.

Dah00n
0 replies
6h38m

punish some (but not all) of the people it deemed to have done wrong,

In other words it punished those that couldn't add something to the US -like engineers that could build rockets for example. Basically what you are saying is crime has no upper limit of evil if the criminal is seen as better unpunished for the state than not. That's how a lot of Nazis and Japanese that did mass murder and human experiments became US citizen in good standing. To me giving them this out was more evil than the deeds they did.

heymijo
19 replies
6h19m

Regarding the "Can/should a CEO or officer be held liable?" dialogue, there is already at least one precedent.

The 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act:

The law states that if top corporate executives knowingly sign off on a false financial report, they’re subject to a prison term of up to 10 years and a fine of up to $1 million, with penalties escalating to 20 years and $5 million if their misconduct is willful. [0]

Now, would it work? The linked article details reasons that make it challenging in the SOX context.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/idUS3512973425/

Joel_Mckay
12 replies
4h26m

Actually in most places, technically as president/CEO of a firm you are already liable for any criminal conduct by your firm/employees-on-the-job. The corporate lawyers should have clearly warned them about this already. Additionally, any criminal lawyer should have warned Boeing people it is often around a 10 year jail term for criminal negligence.

Unless the president/CEO can prove they enforced policy to mitigate the issues, than the board may still be in real trouble internationally.

Their best bet is to delay long enough that the general public loses interest in the case.

Have a great day, and remember free parachutes is not a real solution... =3

semiquaver
8 replies
4h6m

  > technically as president/CEO of a firm you are already liable for any criminal conduct by your firm/employees-on-the-job.
Citation needed. Limited liability is at the foundation of the very concept of incorporation.

tracker1
1 replies
3h59m

The intention is to limit the liability of investors, not those in control of the company.

Joel_Mckay
0 replies
2h16m

Agreed, the key phrase here is _limited_ liability not immunity.

I am still trying to figure out how Boeing got around their commercial insurance companies? There is a bag of vipers also waiting for their turn with the CEO for sure... =3

philipov
1 replies
3h50m

Limited liability only protects the shareholders. It exists because shareholders have no control over the corporation. It does not protect agents of the corporation, such as management, because they do have control of the corporation.

Joel_Mckay
0 replies
2h28m

This is true up to a point for shareholders, as for civil liability it is not guaranteed protection in some places.

For example, if you hold shares of a firm that makes something locally illegal in another jurisdiction. =3

brianwawok
1 replies
4h3m

Isn’t LL about protecting your assets not you from jail time? I can’t start a LLC, have the LLC pay someone to kill you, and be scott free. “Sorry you can’t go after me, go after this shell company and try to put it in jail ha ha”

Joel_Mckay
0 replies
2h20m

Yep, people should talk with a real local corporate lawyer or AMCHAM if unsure.

The hubris on YC from those that assume the rules don't apply to them is hilarious. But, I guess someone has to pay for the lawyers kids to get though university.

Have a wonderful day =3

bumby
0 replies
2h56m

In the US, sometimes the court may “pierce the corporate veil” when actions are particularly egregious or unlawful and hold the shareholders or directors personally liable.

Rather than go into all the specifics of law (since I'm not a lawyer), I'll cite some examples where corporate executives were charged personally:

(Tax evasion):

-https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/ceo-multibillion-dollar-softw...

(Securities fraud):

- https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/ceo-medical-device-company-ch...

(Identity theft and fraud):

- https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/ceo-medical-device-company-ch...

(RICO - Providing encryption to avoid law enforcement):

- https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdca/pr/sky-global-executive-an...

Joel_Mckay
0 replies
3h15m

It is right on the incorporation forms prior to entity approval, and in my jurisdiction the Lawyer made this very clear as I make choices hiring ex-servicemen contractors/staff (numerous PTSD issues can limit roles... like "dealing" with aggressive/rude customers can be a bad idea etc.) Additionally, blindly using Lexis Nexis forms can cause issues too, as the same clauses have different legal definitions in different regions.

While a C firm does _often_ protect board member personal assets from civil cases, it also does not guarantee protection.

Also, international investors do not usually create a US LLC given it usually trips 2 tax codes. Talking with awesome AMCHAM reps about this area is probably in your best interest, but most international firms create a Type C corporation on US soil.

Ask your local corporate tax lawyer about liabilities to confirm whether your jurisdiction has harmonized corporate laws.

Being a president/CEO is not what most assume, and even a shareholder can get messy too. Despite pop-culture urban legends, it is not a role for clowns or cons. =3

Aurornis
1 replies
3h29m

Actually in most places, technically as president/CEO of a firm you are already liable for any criminal conduct by your firm/employees-on-the-job.

This isn't true as written. CEOs aren't automatically liable for crimes of the company or employees.

If a CEO intentionally facilitates or participates in those crimes: Yes, open to liability.

If an employee or department commits crimes without the knowledge of the CEO: Very different situation.

The cynical take is that CEOs are always aware of crimes or that they're encouraging the crimes to happen. I've personally seen several cases of people committing fraud and even a federal crime on the job, and in every case it was done secretly with the belief that it was going to be an undiscovered way of advancing the person's career. People try to game the advancement system at every level, including executive levels.

Joel_Mckay
0 replies
3h8m

According to the corporate lawyers in my jurisdiction, a CEO is personally liable if one of the staff did something illegal to you while on the job.

This includes criminal negligence.

Have a nice day, and good luck out there... =)

sitkack
0 replies
21m

criminal negligence

It is beyond criminal negligence, because Boeing was charging extra to make the MCAS system redundant, which it should have been in the first place.

tzs
2 replies
3h35m

"Knowing" and "willful" can be a bit confusing. Generally in statutes you do something "knowingly" if you have knowledge of it. If you know the report is false when you sign it you have "knowingly" signed off on a false report.

"Willful" means that you knew that you were doing something that the law forbids. If you knew the reports was false but did not know that the law forbids doing that then it would not be willful.

Here's a more detailed explanation from the DoJ [1]. That's in general rather than specifically about Sarbanes-Oxley but a quick grep in SOX didn't turn up any SOX-specific definitions for those terms.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...

jgeada
1 replies
2h38m

I've always found those distinctions in legal code to have the (possibly deliberate) side effect of encouraging deliberate ignorance. It is not wilful or knowing if they make no effort to know or understand what the implications of their decisions were. I strongly believe this to be a wrong approach that does nothing to change MBA approach to decision making: It is all about a buck now and the less they know about consequences later the better (for them personally, not for the rest of us)

pdabbadabba
0 replies
2h29m

The law tries to address this. If a defendant is aware that there is a significant risk of [X], but deliberately avoided information that might confirm [X], then knowledge that [X] can often be imported to them under the "willful blindness" doctrine. Though, as you can imagine, it can be difficult to apply this in practice since it is difficult to articulate the level of suspicion a defendant must have had in order to have been "willfully blind" rather than just ignorant.

https://scholarship.law.uci.edu/faculty_scholarship/803/

psunavy03
0 replies
3h31m

So the TL;DR is a) SOX forced companies to improve internal controls, which we can all agree is a good thing, and b) when things still go wrong, the execs are usually committing other crimes that make it more feasible to prosecute those instead.

Seems to me to me more legal inside baseball than an indication execs are getting away with more fraud than before. Seems prosecutors are just choosing to charge other crimes when they know they have a good case.

gruez
0 replies
4h12m

1. sounds like a variant of "everything is securities fraud"[1], where you can't prosecute someone for [bad thing] so you prosecute them for lying about [bad thing], where [bad thing] could be anything between causing global warming to getting hacked.

2. It's highly unlikely they'll ever get anywhere near the maximum[2].

[1] https://archive.is/p2YHV

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20130208124604/https://www.popeh...

georgeplusplus
0 replies
4h58m

I believe how they try RICO cases would be a useful precedent.

buildbot
18 replies
12h9m

"The guilty plea would brand the planemaker a felon and could complicate its ability to sell products to the U.S. government. About 32% of Boeing’s nearly $78 billion in revenue last year came from its defense, space and security unit."

Well that's a fun little fact

labster
8 replies
12h0m

I’m sure we can come up with national security reasons to hire convicted felons with their own lobbyists and captured administrators.

KingOfCoders
7 replies
11h47m

The convicted felon in the White House next year will make sure his fellow felons get what they want.

justinclift
5 replies
11h0m

If such a convicted felon were to pardon themselves, would they be a convicted felon any more?

HeatrayEnjoyer
3 replies
10h46m

The president can only pardon federal crimes.

manquer
2 replies
10h25m

I don’t think he needs to.

they will appeal based on the insanely broad immunity ruling and get the conviction overturned on procedural loophole created by the ruling - no evidence from his presidency even for unofficial acts and justice department will not retry a sitting president.

He is likely to get the convictions even in the caroll defamation case for the same reason.

Only the fraudulent valuation case is likely survive this Supreme Court ruling.

mminer237
1 replies
6h7m

His conviction was based on criminal acts entirely when he was not president.

manquer
0 replies
1h19m

No this is a common misconception.

He was convicted for falsifying business records nothing else. All the records that were fraudulently submitted were starting Jan 2017.

The hush money payment wasn't illegal, hiding it was.

It rose to a felony instead of misdemeanor because it was done in service another crime which is campaign finance violation, the other crime need not be proven and he was not charged with that.

All they got him for paying cohen illegally.

Also there was some evidence introduced from his time as president , he would argue that evidence is now inadmissible and in a favourable court they will declare mistrial and ask the lower court to do it again.

If he wins again the prosecution will have to pause and he gets the delay he wants.

razakel
0 replies
7h52m

Yes. Pardons are clemency - they don't overturn the conviction, it just means the person doesn't receive any punishment.

metadat
0 replies
11h14m

Let's hope not.

monero-xmr
7 replies
11h18m

Banks are declared “too big to fail”. Banks! How can a bank be so important, and ostensibly private, that it can’t fail and let its shareholders take their licks?

There is no world - none - literally no possible universe - that Boeing cannot sell to the government, or that it fails, or that its planes get grounded indefinitely, or anything even remotely close to this outcome.

There are 2 plane makers of appreciable size on earth, Boeing and Airbus. They are essentially government owned enterprises.

Boeing has made a strategic decision and nothing of consequence whatsoever will come of this. Maybe a few people go to jail for a few months. That’s literally it

mulmen
3 replies
10h36m

Banks are not declared too big to fail. They are sometimes described that way. But banks fail all the time. It’s why the FDIC exists.

Boeing and the US government have a long and intimate relationship but it is mutual. Boeing was fully vertically integrated until it was favorable to encourage competition in the aviation industry and the US government broke the company up. Boeing is not untouchable.

lordnacho
2 replies
10h16m

Think he means certain banks. Think JP Morgan, Citi, that kind of bank, rather than banks as a whole.

chaostheory
1 replies
4h16m

You’re describing a GSIB. There are only 4-6 banks in the US that’s considered a GSIB

dabraham1248
0 replies
2h12m

8 (1). And I think that, in this context, those 8 plus the 22 US D-SIBs (2) means that there's 30.

FWIW, I _think_ I'm not just pedantically correcting a particular number. I think I'm asserting that keeping track of n organizations is roughly O(n^2), so it's not 4 times as much work to keep track of them all, but more like 56 times as much work. I think that's a real difference that requires a different approach.

I get that _you're_ not saying anything re: approach, just terminology. But I think the number matters to this subthread.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_systemically_important... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_systemically_important...

robertlagrant
0 replies
9h13m

How can a bank be so important, and ostensibly private, that it can’t fail and let its shareholders take their licks?

They probably should fail, except it might be more than shareholders that get ruined by that happening.

jajko
0 replies
6h22m

You know whose money those failing banks have/had? Its hardly its own, nor investor's as much as you would like, its mostly regular joes. The same regular joes that screams 'eat the rich' and 'let them fail'. I wonder what would the same joe say if government listened and next day same joe would be without his pension or savings.

And as written by others banks do fail, and literally end their existence or are sold for peanuts to competition (Credit Suisse just recently). Using few cases from 2008 and making claims like whole universe always runs like that ain't very close to reality and doesn't help the discussion.

burkaman
0 replies
4h50m

When a company fails, its employees and factories don't all explode or something. It's just a financial issue, everything still exists. So one possible universe is that Boeing the corporation fails, and the government rescues it and makes it an actual government owned enterprise. Investors and executives lose some money but we still get our planes.

Just pass a law and nationalize and/or break it up. Here's someone more knowledgeable than me discussing this idea: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/its-time-to-nationalize-a....

mfritsche
0 replies
12h0m

Well yeah. Don't wait for Boeing supply to be replaced by AliExpress orders.

a012
15 replies
12h4m

So Boeing is a felon, but at the same time nobody is going to jail.

everyone
5 replies
12h3m

That's the purpose of creating a corporation.

potsandpans
2 replies
11h52m

To commit criminal fraud with impunity?

immibis
1 replies
10h7m

Kind of, yes. The legal purpose of a corporate structure is that the corporation is a liability shield for the people in it.

mminer237
0 replies
5h55m

It's to provide limited financial liability for the shareholders; the actual employees don't get any. And it has nothing to do with criminal liability.

philipov
1 replies
11h24m

Shareholders have limited liability. Management does not.

surfingdino
0 replies
10h40m

Management evolved language of avoiding responsibility. For example, instead of saying "use cheaper parts" they'll say "we need to focus on better use of our financial resources for increasing shareholder value". No court can pin them down for telling designers to use cheap parts, but the designers get the message. And if the designers don't get it, lower management will tell them in plain language. That shift the blame onto lower ranks while the top management is laughing all the way to the bank and move on to another high-paying job.

Animats
5 replies
12h0m

Wikipedia:

"In 2022, Calhoun (Boeing CEO) received $22.5 million from Boeing. Most of his 2022 compensation was in the form of estimated value of stock and option awards. He received the same $1.4 million salary as in 2021. Boeing announced in March 2023 that Calhoun would not receive a $7 million performance-based bonus, which had been tied to getting the new widebody 777X into service by the end of 2023. In February 2023, Boeing awarded Calhoun an incentive of about $5.29 million in restricted stock units to 'induce him to stay throughout the company's recovery.' In March 2023, Boeing announced Calhoun was being given shares worth $15 million that will vest in installments over three years."

uejfiweun
4 replies
11h55m

Was Calhoun really the problem? This company is one of those massive, glacial companies that have enormous inertia. Whatever changes in process led to all these disasters, it was something that started long before Calhoun's reign, I personally blame Jim McNerney.

somenameforme
1 replies
11h34m

One of the reasons we generally excuse extremely high levels of executive compensation is that when things go well, the executives take full credit for it. Does it not seem reasonable that they should also take full credit, in ways beyond words, when things do not go well? I'm very much opposed to the increasing trend of socializing costs and privatizing profits which I feel this is a sort of a spin on. 'Privatize success, socialize failure.'

uejfiweun
0 replies
1h46m

Fair enough. But I think that former executives should also be looked at, too. Otherwise, the incentive becomes to trash the company for short term profits and GTFO before shit hits the fan.

cycomanic
1 replies
10h16m

So you're saying a CEO doesn't really change anything about a corporation, so what is he being paid for?

uejfiweun
0 replies
1h47m

Do you seriously think what I'm saying is "a CEO doesn't change anything about a corporation" !?

Ekaros
1 replies
11h59m

Maybe there should be some similar effect for corporations. Maybe ban then from giving out dividends of performing stock buy backs until sentence is served. Here I think something reasonably light like 10 to 50 year per victim non concurrent would do the trick.

joha4270
0 replies
11h20m

Don't be ridiculous. Yeah, we truly need consequences for corporations (and arguably their leaders) that isn't just cost of doing business, but the upper end of your suggested sentence is a span longer than written history.

Wanting a harsh sentence is fine, but lets limit it something we can likely see done before the end of our civilization in its current form.

c2xlZXB5Cg1
0 replies
12h0m

Too big to jail.

hdesh
10 replies
12h3m

I wonder if the outcome would have been any different if the 737 MAX crashes had happened on the American soil and involved loss of American lives.

jajko
4 replies
11h29m

Absolutely 0 doubt about that. Just look how at the beginning they tried to blame it all on incompetent african pilots. Human lives have wildly different values to us based on race, ethnicity, religion, remoteness etc., I don't like it but this is still very much part of human nature.

How much do you care if plane with 150 civilians falls down in remote russia or china and everybody burns to charcoal? Now compare it to same number of your neighbors or even just unknown people from your own town meeting the same fate.

kortilla
3 replies
10h15m

It had nothing to do with racism against the victims. It’s quite literally that the level of rigor to be a pilot in Africa is not the same as what the FAA requires.

Airlines very frequently get banned from US airspace because their procedures do not meet the strict safety bar set by the FAA. So it’s very reasonable to assume that what was identified as a training gap on the MCAS operations was due to sloppy regional airline training procedures.

So it’s true that it would have been taken more seriously in the US, but it’s because the FAA and NTSB set the bar for aviation safety and crash investigation rigor world wide.

mynameisvlad
1 replies
3h29m

The NTSB and FAA were both sent to help with the investigation (as they would for any US airplane manufacturer), so I’m not sure how them “[setting] the bar for aviation safety and crash investigation” comes into play here.

kortilla
0 replies
9m

“Help with investigation” after the fact is why we found out Boeing buried shit. It has nothing to do with initial assumptions.

Hikikomori
0 replies
4h47m

Why was this famous safety bar not looking at Boeing anymore?

kalleboo
1 replies
10h34m

Even on Hacker News I saw lots of comments blaming the pilots and saying a similar accident would be impossible with U.S.-trained pilots.

kortilla
0 replies
10h13m

It would not have been possible on any pilot (not up just US) trained on the auto stab trim. The mistake people made earlier was assuming that Boeing made this new critical piece a critically called out training area.

xnorswap
0 replies
4h10m

Look at how the story had all but disappeared until there was a non-fatal incident that happened to a US airline. Everyone across the media and anyone from regulators to legislators sprung into action focusing their attention and making demands of accountability.

I have zero doubt that had the door-plug came off the plane on a non-US airline, that excuses would have been made, the usual insinuations about poor quality maintenance, and issues would still be brushed under the carpet.

Likewise, had the first crash been a US airline, I'm sure there would have been an immediate grounding.

Instead, after the second crash on March 10:

On March 11, the FAA defended the MAX against groundings by issuing a Continued Airworthiness Notice to operators.
fuzztester
0 replies
11h47m

None did?

barryrandall
0 replies
3h23m

The Ethiopian airlines crash reportedly killed 8 Americans.

abeppu
7 replies
1h54m

If the deal is accepted, it could complicate Boeing’s ability to sell products to the U.S. government as a felon, though the company could seek waivers. About 32% of Boeing’s nearly $78 billion in revenue last year came from its defense, space and security unit.

My understanding is that getting security clearance involves a bunch of checks and statements about your character, and having a federal felony conviction on one's record would be a hard blocker.

Absolutely, I think that the real punishment, beyond the $245M fine, ought to be losing its many many billions of DoD contracts. After all, once a firm has demonstrated this kind of behavior, how on earth should we trust it with not only taxpayer dollars but the lives of servicemen/women and critical military resources?

abeppu
4 replies
1h48m

Also in the "corporations as people" x "criminal justice system" vein, I would be in favor of moving towards a standard where, if a person convicted of the same crime would receive a prison sentence, a company should be forced to cease operations for an equivalent period, and put all its assets into frozen fund which can only be used to pay out debts/obligations, and which earns no interest.

sureIy
3 replies
1h9m

As bad as this is, nobody wants an Airbus monopoly, so let’s hope that individuals are arrested and Boeing continues to exists instead.

abeppu
1 replies
39m

I think the DoD should make clear that the funds previously marked for Boeing would be open for new firms even if staffed by former Boeing employees -- provided diligence checks find no involvement by those parties in the current fraud case. Boeing, if it had no prospects of continued DoD contracts, would naturally want to offload teams and facilities dedicated to that work. If this situation was handled right, it could spark the creation of multiple new American firms with the means and know-how to deliver the various products and services that Boeing formerly provided, while simultaneously delivering a very clear message to shareholders and C-suite officers that this sort of conduct will not make them rich.

t_mann
0 replies
21m

the funds previously marked for Boeing would be open for new firms even if staffed by former Boeing employees

delivering a very clear message to shareholders and C-suite officers that this sort of conduct will not make them rich

And the best way to make that point is to create new investment opportunities that will make some former employees of the same company and many of the same investors rich?

sitkack
0 replies
24m

Then nationalize Boeing's commercial airplane unit and put the people who actually want to build quality airplanes back into leadership.

hdhshdhshdjd
0 replies
1h50m

DoD will continue to do business with Boeing because there aren’t enough options because we consolidated everything into a handful of mega corps and gutted competition in defense like we have across the entire economy.

This “punishment” is a joke, these people are mass killers they should be in jail.

causal
0 replies
1h25m

Making the corporate itself a felon is almost a joke. Zero chance this ends their defense contracts- they'll find a workaround. Assigning the felony to the corporation is just a sweet chance for the individuals responsible to offload responsibility.

Makes me think a lot of Taleb's "Skin in the Game", which emphasizes that a healthy system cannot have leaders who accept rewards without risks. This deal means Boeing leadership can continue to behave without skin in the game.

thangalin
4 replies
11h45m

"Whatever the reasons (market pressures, rushing processes, inadequate certifications, fear of being fired, or poor project management), Leveson’s insights are being ignored. For example, after the first fatal Boeing 737 Max flight, why was the entire fleet not grounded indefinitely? Or not grounded after an Indonesian safety committee report uncovered multiple failures? Or not grounded when an off-duty pilot helped avert a crash? What analysis procedures failed to prevent the second fatal Boeing 737 Max flight?"

https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/

June 6, 2019

iSnow
3 replies
10h40m

Racism. If the first fatal flight had happened to an US or European airline somewhere over US or European territory, the fleet would have been grounded for an investigation.

manquer
1 replies
10h33m

They even blamed the pilots badly for the accident .

grecy
0 replies
6h19m

I think it's time we stopped calling it an accident.

sva_
0 replies
6h41m

It was grounded temporarily in the US?

puzzledobserver
4 replies
11h46m

What does it mean for a corporation to plead guilty?

Does it mean that there is evidence to establish a crime beyond reasonable doubt, but there is insufficient evidence to implicate any employees in particular?

slim
2 replies
11h36m

I don't think if the company is found guilty it means people won't get prosecuted. I would think the contrary is true. IANAL

pdpi
1 replies
11h21m

I expect that this is part of the plea deal, though: the company pleads guilty, on the condition that key people get immunity.

consp
0 replies
11h17m

So those who catch the money because "they are the ones making the decisions and taking the blame" will only get the former and not the latter?

fuzzfactor
0 replies
10h3m

What does it mean for a corporation to plead guilty?

Same thing as for any other felon.

If they hadn't taken the plea, far worse things could have come to light that were even more egregious offenses.

coretx
4 replies
11h27m

Plea deals rob victims from the truth they need for closure and recovery. On top of that, plea deals also undermine public trust in the rule of law. I wonder how "happy" the Judge is for being forced to give it credibility...

constantcrying
3 replies
10h39m

The criminal justice system doesn't exist to emotionally satisfy the victims.

Etheryte
1 replies
10h23m

That depends on how you look at it, it would be pretty straightforward to take the philosophical stance that that's all that it exists for. Mostly it's just a matter of framing.

coretx
0 replies
9h59m

Law/legal philosophy indeed is different everywhere... Where i'm at, I was always told that the primary purpose of the process is to deter and prevent the crime from ever happening again.

In this particular Boeing case, I bet my ass that the corporate world is taking notes as the plea deal is a sweet deal; thus a incentive is provided to do the crime. It would be funny if the victims of the next Boeing sue over inciting the crime they will be a victim of.

nicce
0 replies
10h7m

It exist to prevent crimes happening. Looking at that $240M fine, seems like it will change nothing.

They probably made more money by not being so strict on safety. These fines are too low. Company should go close to bankruptcy if they do something serious.

paulnpace
2 replies
5h45m

I tend to think that a more just system would transfer ownership of criminal organizations to victims, which would also supersede all outstanding financial liabilities. Especially this last point would destroy credit options for companies suspected of criminal activity as the larger creditors will hire private investigators.

taspeotis
1 replies
5h41m

But then the shareholders wouldn't own the company anymore, so they'd be victims of the crime too, and get ownership transferred straight back to them.

paulnpace
0 replies
5h20m

I think you pretty much have to make that argument work for all cases of restitution (you can't), because at the base of the claim is that the previous owners are minimally negligent, thus should not own the property.

omerhac
2 replies
11h24m

"We plead guilty for our poor test coverage"

carlmr
1 replies
10h41m

It's more than test coverage though. Their spec had the same glaring error. It's a design, management agreement, spec, review failure. The tester could have said something because they realized the design is bullshit, but by that time no competent testers hired by Boeing any more, it was all outsourced to the cheapest bidder.

rafaelgoncalves
0 replies
1h43m

exactly, and what good "test coverage" would do if the design is flawed?

gomijacogeo
1 replies
10h36m

A truly fitting punishment would be that Boeing is prohibited from piggybacking certification of any further 737 variants.

fransje26
0 replies
9h41m

Not really, unfortunately. It's the 4th generation of 737, with 4 layers of control systems coexisting (and sometimes working against each other).

Slapping a 5th layer on top of the current crud for a new version is simply not realistic. Removing layers to allow for a new version is also not realistic, as the certification requirements would be pretty close to those of a clean-sheet aircraft.

So in conclusion, Boeing got away with certifying an aircraft that should never have been certified in the first place, and will reap the financial benefits of it. Minus some minor compensation to airlines and victims.

bradley13
1 replies
5h47m

Individuals need to be held accountable. Having the company plead guilty helps literally no one. Who were the relevant board members? The CEO? The COO. These people need to be charged.

jpgvm
0 replies
5h28m

Yeah but that isn't how the West works. Remember capital is always blameless, individuals that manage capital even more so.

Thoughts and prayers, an inconsequential fine and back to business as usual.

Instead we could be like China and actually punish people responsible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal#Arre...

The Intermediate People's Court in Shijiazhuang sentenced Zhang Yujun and Geng Jinping to death, and Tian Wenhua to life in prison, on 22 January 2009.

Zhang Yujun and Geng Jinping were executed on 24 November 2009.

A much more vile crime but accountability nonetheless. (you can argue about the morality of capital punishment.. but these guys poisoned babies)

b3lvedere
1 replies
10h42m

"Boeing also agreed for the board of directors to meet with crash victims’ family members, under the agreement."

So, what does this mean exactly?

anonzzzies
0 replies
10h39m

And is that CEO who got that crazy $$ package part of this delegation?

ungreased0675
0 replies
51m

It wasn’t the company that did fraud, individuals employed by Boeing did. Is it normal for the company to take the charge? How can “Boeing” plead guilty to anything?

tpl
0 replies
2h19m

Not enough. Boeing getting off easy once again, not enough sting to produce a change in behavior. Why executives are not held accountable is confusing to me.

sva_
0 replies
6h39m

Boeing also agreed for the board of directors to meet with crash victims’ family members, under the agreement.

Is this a normal thing? Seems odd.

souterrain
0 replies
54m

Would a criminal fraud charge result in federal debarment? If not, why not?

lolinder
0 replies
55m

Criminal charges against the company aside, aren't there licensed engineers inside of Boeing who signed off on all of this? Where are they in this discussion? Isn't the whole premise of having a licensed engineering discipline that the buck stops with you and you lose your license if you let something like this happen?

If we don't revoke licenses and permanently end careers over something like the MAX crashes, the incentives of engineers require them to say yes to the company at all costs, because it's not worth their job to say no. The consequences of saying yes to a bad plan have to be worse than being fired.

georgeplusplus
0 replies
4h59m

You need to actually prove the board and directors contributed to the criminal act to go after them or created the environment that enabled the lower level employees to act. Which I think they would attest to.

Unfortunately, You can't just blanket make CEOw responsible for every action of their employees. That would be insane.

Think of it like charging the top brass in the mafia, RICOs are hard to prove because getting the guy at the top is difficult.

dbg31415
0 replies
3h42m

Boeing agreed to pay a fine that's proportionally less than what I'd get if I didn't pay for my own health insurance.

Cool. Cool cool cool.

cooper_ganglia
0 replies
3h4m

Boeing made planes, and then later got into rockets... SpaceX makes rockets, I wonder if they should get into planes?

So long as you make a plane where the door doesn't fly off midair, it seems like a good way to print money and bring some manufacturing jobs back to the USA!

cloudhead
0 replies
2h9m

So are people going to jail?

can16358p
0 replies
48m

The criminal liability should be directly on the persons responsible who ignored safety warnings knowingly. If someone responsible for this doesn't go to jail, it's just a matter of time that a similar thing will happen again, given the company culture.

booleandilemma
0 replies
5h24m

And which Boeing leaders will get 30 years in prison? Who will lose their riches?

Who will resign in shame and vow to never take a leadership position again?

Oh? Nobody? Um, ok. Justice is served, I guess?

blackeyeblitzar
0 replies
3h56m

Public sentiment is very much against Boeing right now, especially their current executives, oddly enough (since the previous ones were overseeing things when MCAS was created). But are there arguments for the other side on any of these incidents, and have they been explored completely?

For example…

Is Boeing really at fault for the MCAS related crashes? Both happened at airlines from the developing world, where the pilot requirements (for hours of experience) is a lot lower than for airlines from the developed world. I recall reading that pilots from airlines in the US had also encountered MCAS in real flights but knew how to deal with the condition just using their basic piloting knowledge, by lowering flaps or turning the stabilizer trim off. MCAS activation is obvious because the trim wheels in the cockpit spin with its activation - so a pilot who doesn’t want trim can just flip the switch for them.

Another possibility: is regulation at fault? Recertification is expensive, and the associated training costs are expensive. I believe it caused Boeing to not seek to classify the 737 Max as a new aircraft and downplay changes like MCAS. Could an easier certification process have caused Boeing to be more transparent about changes with this plane?

MCAS itself activates only at high angles of attack and was put in to meet some of the standards of certification, not because there was a “real” problem, by my understanding. It had to do with the new engines’ cover, which does help with fuel efficiency, but changes the plane’s aerodynamics and so Boeing compensated using this system to automatically trim. Could different standards have caused Boeing to not create this system?

Are unions at fault? Boeing has immense cost pressures from all sides, and I’ve heard many stories of inefficiency, avoidable costs, and painful politics at their plants due to union rules. These pressures indirectly may cause the company to cut corners elsewhere.

I would be curious what HN thinks of these possibilities. There are probably other such theories as well. I’m not saying Boeing did nothing wrong, but that the public and media rarely gets complex stories right. It’s easier to latch onto simpler or more emotional explanations. But what’s actually true and how do you hand out blame?