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That is exactly the point I am refuting. That is non-falsifiable. The claim you are making that the merger changed culture which changed their safety outcomes i

That is exactly the point I am refuting. That is non-falsifiable. The claim you are making that the merger changed culture which changed their safety outcomes is as non-falsifiable as the dot-com crash killed their morale which changed safety culture. Of course the merger argument sounds more plausible i.e. it is a better rationalization but again non-falsifiable. Whatever killed Boeing's engineering culture is irrelevant. Arguing over that is a distraction from the fact that Boeing's current engineering culture pushed this product to market.

jcadam 7y ago
> Whatever killed Boeing's engineering culture is irrelevant. Oh I'd disagree. To fix the problem and prevent it from happening again at Boeing or elsewhere, it would be good to figure out how the culture at Boeing became so broken in the first place. I worked for Boeing back when the corporate HQ was moved from Seattle to Chicago. At the time I remember thinking how bizarre that seemed. Why would someone in a leadership position want to separate themselves from the rank and file and lose that valuable insight and visibility into operations? Eh. My problem was likely in assuming that most corporate leadership positions are filled with actual leaders.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  Condit needed an excuse to hide from his wife: Move girlfriend to Chicago and construct a reason to spend time there.
larsga 7y ago
I'm not discussing whether their safety outcomes were changed. My point is that management deliberately set out to create a completely different company culture that would no longer be engineering-driven. I don't see how anyone can seriously dispute that. > Whatever killed Boeing's engineering culture is irrelevant. Arguing over that is a distraction from the fact that Boeing's current engineering culture pushed this product to market. You know what? The insanity of this argument is going to be so obvious to any reader that rather than argue against it I'm just going to emphasize it by quoting it.
salawat 7y ago
>The claim you are making that the merger changed culture which changed their safety outcomes is as non-falsifiable as the dot-com crash killed their morale which changed safety culture. It is most assuredly not unfalsifiable when you have executive leadership on record as intending to shift the focus of Boeing away from "over thinking the box" and revolutionizing it as a shareholder value creator. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-05-09/former-boeing-engineers-say-relentless-cost-cutting-sacrificed-safety https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-05-09/former-bo... Which cascaded to: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/boeing-737-max-whistleblower-ed-pierson-ceo-faa-ntsb-ignored-2019-12-1028750496?op=1 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/boeing-737-m... Further, have you read https://www.msn.com/en-za/money/news/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merger-led-to-the-737-max-crisis/ar-BBYzJXz https://www.msn.com/en-za/money/news/how-the-mcdonnell-dougl... I mean there were other contributors, sure, but the McD merger is provably connected if you pay attention. Example of other factors: When confronting a bunch of Wall Street analysts, an engineer gets shouted down for daring to entertain the foolish idea that making safety critical machines was an altogether different in nature from a company that make consumer widgets. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/18/the-case-against-boeing https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/18/the-case-again... Unless you have just entered the workforce, and therefore are completely ignorant as to how executives propagate culture shift through what they decide to prioritize, in which case, this outburst can be forgiven. Honestly, I'd accept many alternative theories but you're striking me as being contrarian and disingenuous by just throwing the history that is there. And no, trying to only focus the current engineering culture as the main focus of what's wrong is the exact kind of thinking that leads to one repeating the history they should be learning from.
- haltingproblem 7y ago
  I appreciate your comment but we are talking about decidedly different things. I mean falsifiable as in how Karl Popper defined it [1]. Culture is ineffable and to even understand it will be like trying to define something like Art, to define 'broken culture' fairly impossible. There is no falsifiability criteria for your assertion. [1] https://explorable.com/falsifiability https://explorable.com/falsifiability

jcadam 7y ago

> Whatever killed Boeing's engineering culture is irrelevant. Oh I'd disagree. To fix the problem and prevent it from happening again at Boeing or elsewhere, it would be good to figure out how the culture at Boeing became so broken in the first place. I worked for Boeing back when the corporate HQ was moved from Seattle to Chicago. At the time I remember thinking how bizarre that seemed. Why would someone in a leadership position want to separate themselves from the rank and file and lose that valuable insight and visibility into operations? Eh. My problem was likely in assuming that most corporate leadership positions are filled with actual leaders.

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
Condit needed an excuse to hide from his wife: Move girlfriend to Chicago and construct a reason to spend time there.

larsga 7y ago

I'm not discussing whether their safety outcomes were changed. My point is that management deliberately set out to create a completely different company culture that would no longer be engineering-driven. I don't see how anyone can seriously dispute that. > Whatever killed Boeing's engineering culture is irrelevant. Arguing over that is a distraction from the fact that Boeing's current engineering culture pushed this product to market. You know what? The insanity of this argument is going to be so obvious to any reader that rather than argue against it I'm just going to emphasize it by quoting it.

salawat 7y ago

>The claim you are making that the merger changed culture which changed their safety outcomes is as non-falsifiable as the dot-com crash killed their morale which changed safety culture. It is most assuredly not unfalsifiable when you have executive leadership on record as intending to shift the focus of Boeing away from "over thinking the box" and revolutionizing it as a shareholder value creator. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-05-09/former-boeing-engineers-say-relentless-cost-cutting-sacrificed-safety https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-05-09/former-bo... Which cascaded to: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/boeing-737-max-whistleblower-ed-pierson-ceo-faa-ntsb-ignored-2019-12-1028750496?op=1 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/boeing-737-m... Further, have you read https://www.msn.com/en-za/money/news/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merger-led-to-the-737-max-crisis/ar-BBYzJXz https://www.msn.com/en-za/money/news/how-the-mcdonnell-dougl... I mean there were other contributors, sure, but the McD merger is provably connected if you pay attention. Example of other factors: When confronting a bunch of Wall Street analysts, an engineer gets shouted down for daring to entertain the foolish idea that making safety critical machines was an altogether different in nature from a company that make consumer widgets. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/18/the-case-against-boeing https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/18/the-case-again... Unless you have just entered the workforce, and therefore are completely ignorant as to how executives propagate culture shift through what they decide to prioritize, in which case, this outburst can be forgiven. Honestly, I'd accept many alternative theories but you're striking me as being contrarian and disingenuous by just throwing the history that is there. And no, trying to only focus the current engineering culture as the main focus of what's wrong is the exact kind of thinking that leads to one repeating the history they should be learning from.

haltingproblem 7y ago
I appreciate your comment but we are talking about decidedly different things. I mean falsifiable as in how Karl Popper defined it [1]. Culture is ineffable and to even understand it will be like trying to define something like Art, to define 'broken culture' fairly impossible. There is no falsifiability criteria for your assertion. [1] https://explorable.com/falsifiability https://explorable.com/falsifiability