7 ms·
When the MBA guys and Wall Street starts drinking their own cool-aid and believes that finance is what creates money - you have a problem. Lee Hutchinson of Ar
by N1H1L 6y ago
When the MBA guys and Wall Street starts drinking their own cool-aid and believes that finance is what creates money - you have a problem.
Lee Hutchinson of Ars Technica once wrote that a junior engineer now at Boeing has no viable path for promotion towards the C-suite. The middle rank engineering teams have all been divested and the only way to rise up the ranks is to actually leave Boeing, work at a different company, rise up the ranks there and come back a decade later.
- api 6y agoAs I've said a thousand times: the sorts of MBA types you are describing here are the US equivalent to Soviet "apparatchiks."
- tharne 6y agoThis is the best kept secret in corporate America. The McKinsey and private equity crowds like to think of themselves as these innovative and wild capitalist cowboys, when really they're just a bunch of Soviet rent-seekers with better haircuts.
- mrybczyn 6y agoTo add to the metaphor - for many behind the curtain - the soviet aparatchiks came imposed from a foreign country - Russia. The only difference is that you're less likely to be sent to Gulag, or worse.
- api 6y agoUS apparatchiks come from a foreign country of sorts too: coastal elite cities and coastal top-ten universities. That world is as far from most of America as Moscow was from Ukraine.
- nojito 6y agoJust because you're a good engineer doesn't immediately make you a good executive.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoOf course not, but if none of your execs have any engineering chops then you're setting up for a world of pain.
- nine_k 6y agoWhen C-level people in an aircraft company start to lack engineering background en masse, we see what happens :( Boeing was once great.
- lumost 6y agoSteve Jobs had a great explanation for this phenomena. Companies with monopoly power do not require or benefit from product development in any form on most reasonable investment horizons. In practice they can only benefit from increasing their market via marketing, or increasing profits by financial engineering. Eventually the promotion process of the company will leave you with Sales, Marketing, and Finance folks running the show.
- edisonchee 6y agoDo you have a source for this? I’d love to read more about it.
- askl56 6y agoThis is the clip, but the whole interview is worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4
- Polylactic_acid 6y agoAMD is what happens when you have someone who is both.
- jasonwatkinspdx 6y agoI grew up in Wichita and knew a few aerospace engineers as friends when I was still a teenager. The revolving door between the big companies is well known and has been going since the 90s at least. They told me pretty clearly that you wanted to be jumping companies every couple of years because the poaching offers were always way better for advancement than demonstrating loyalty.