The HN discussion of this issue is fairly revealing in that it points towards the people on this site wanting a simple explanation with a short list of people to punish, when it is more likely a long list of small details with many people who might have made relatively minor mistakes or simply not foreseen the issue in question. Working in IT (and also formerly at Boeing, so there's some crossover in experience), I find this unsurprising, as IT systems become more and more complex the answers are not "theres a bug in Vendor X's product" or "system Y was misconfigured" but a long litany of small errors, oversights or unforeseen issues that culminated in some larger issue. It does not help that many of these people are unwilling to adjust their conclusions based on emerging evidence. Fortunately in aviation there is a culture of understanding all the details of accidents, identifying all the possible improvements and implementing them. I suspect that the IT industry is on the verge of a crisis as I don't see this sort of attitude prevalent in it, which is funny because lots of the terminology and some of the techniques are common, just not the culture.
For context, I'm a licensed pilot and my father spent most of his career working at Transport Canada, basically Canada's FAA. So this is one of those topics I probably know more than the average HNer about.
What I've noticed more broadly is that there are lots of people on HN with high general intelligence who believe it automatically translates to specific domain knowledge in aviation, medicine, etc., when if quizzed they would likely know far less than they believe they do.
So when it comes to quality improvement, for example, they likely haven't spent time at a car factory, or at a Boeing plant, and understand it via bastardized analogies (i.e. Kaizen in software development really isn't the same as in manufacturing) rather than domain expertise. Deep domain expertise is difficult to obtain unless you're really immersed in an industry.
The desire to "make someone pay" when errors happen is antithetical to a culture of quality improvement. The accident report for the Lion Air incident actually paints a picture of a complex failure rather than simply being the fault of the software, but that doesn't really get reported on.
Hence my issue with the media. Inflammatory headlines and speculation cause people to believe they know more than they actually do about something, and the public pressure drives action that may be totally inappropriate.
