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Boeing was once one of the country’s greatest companies and is now a national embarrassment. This is what you get when the MBAs and accountants take over and th
by brokencode 6y ago
Boeing was once one of the country’s greatest companies and is now a national embarrassment. This is what you get when the MBAs and accountants take over and the lust for profit begins.
An engineering company should have engineers as managers from the bottom level all the way up to the CEO. Or at the very least, somebody who cares about product over profit.
Take a look at Apple’s functional organizational structure for an example of an engineering company done right.
- _underfl0w_ 6y ago> Take a look at Apple’s functional organizational structure for an example of an engineering company done right. I don't have an actual refutation here (and certainly don't want to start some kind of Apple flame war) but something about this doesn't seem quite right.
- tomnipotent 6y agoThink about the quality of their hardware products.
- kiseleon 6y agoDo you mean the 2019 macbook pro that can't use the iGPU for multiple monitors so it overheats every time I plug in an external monitor? Or do you want the older macbooks that the keyboard would break from dust exposure requiring the entire laptop to be replaced? Or the airpods with non-replaceable batteries so you have to get new airpods for $49+ a piece every couple years? They aren't perfect and IMO haven't been in a long time. That said, the build quality is good, and I chose to get a macbook as my work computer as a software developer and don't regret it, but I wish people would stop putting apple on a pedestal as the example of perfection.
- tomnipotent 6y agoAll products have defects, and the Apple hardware defect rates are some of the lowest in the industry. That doesn't change their commitment to product quality and service, and how it compares to their peers. Take a look at eBay and compare any Apple products resale values to any other (and no, it's not just about brand).
- sdoering 6y agoThree in a row for me. I experience the exact same problems OP describes with three MB Pro laptops since 2018. More than 7000 bucks down the drain not calculating the 2100 for repairs. The company I work for had 1-2 percent of devices in repair every week. Not sure if this is just a strange coincidence, but I know of at least one other company in our town with the same scope of the described problem. I know this isn't a popular sentiment with some people, but from experience, I am done with Apple after 28 years of experience. My first was a beautiful Macintosh Classic I still have. Together with a SE 30. Somehow I miss my pre 2018 Macbook Pro.
- soperj 6y agoPeople still buy over a decade old thinkpads.
- valuearb 6y agoApple has the highest customer satisfaction levels in the business. Now the butterfly keyboard issues have hurt MBP customer sat levels, but not enough to fall to Lenova/IBM levels.
- the_duke 6y agoWhat's your source for the low defect numbers?
- tomnipotent 6y agoConsumer Reports ~2015 (little dated and wouldn't include latest gen laptops) https://www.computerworld.com/article/3012211/apples-macbook-air-takes-laptop-reliability-crown.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3012211/apples-macbook... This site includes a few different sources, and shows more or less the same reliability: https://www.geckoandfly.com/6311/the-most-reliable-laptop-survey-best-netbook-reliability-comparison/ https://www.geckoandfly.com/6311/the-most-reliable-laptop-su...
- valuearb 6y agoAre claiming the lack of replaceable batteries stopped the AirPods from becoming the biggest selling headphones in the world? Because they are.
- carabiner 6y agoThey prioritize form over function in their Lightning cables. Inadequate strain relief is a far more consequential problem in an airplane wing. I can't see Apple practices being applicable to mission critical fields like transport engineering (with high regulatory burden). They're different worlds. Apple also simply has a huge amount of money from hardware and software (App store etc.). I suspect they're far looser with resources for their teams than Boeing, whose mechanical/aerospace engineers have salaries a fraction of most Apple engineers. Edit: Overarching point is that Apple has a focus on aesthetics that is far less important in aerospace engineering, and has no experience on ensuring human safety.
- brokencode 6y agoYes, but they make consumer products and not airplanes. Why would you assume they’d build an airplane the same way they’d build a cheap cable?
- valuearb 6y agoApple isn’t perfect, no one is. But it’s better than almost everyone else, including Boeing because it does one thing very well. It doesn’t ship products unless they meet a high bar. It never puts schedule first over product quality. Example: original iPad was canceled by Steve Jobs because he didn’t think it was good enough. Instead he had the team enter the Apple phone competition, where it best out the iPod team with its design for the iPhone. Five years later they got to apply all their improvements to make and release a much better iPad. Apple canceled their AirPower charging mat rather than release something that didn’t meet their standards, even after pre-announcing it. When I ran an product development organization, I made it clear that QA wasn’t responsible for our schedules. Sure they needed to test well and quickly to ensure that Product Management had the necessary info to make good release decisions. But their job was journalistic, to fairly and honestly report all issues. It was up to the engineers to find ways to meet quality goals in our schedules. Boeing had test pilots misleading regulators to hide known issues. That’s the exact opposite of a test Organisation should be run.
- JohnTHaller 6y agoI'm not sure if the years of poor and failing keyboards on the MacBook or the ongoing stage light screen failures due to the poor decision to permanently connect the ribbon to the screen (turning a $5 repair into a $500 repair) bare this out.
- N1H1L 6y ago> Think about the quality of their hardware products. I thought about their butterfly keyboards and didn't want to think further.
- brokencode 6y agoHere’s a great article about their organizational structure: https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-apple-is-organized-for-innovation https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-apple-is-organized-for-innovatio... Like their products or not, Apple has been extraordinarily successful both in terms of sales and critical reception of their products compared to most companies. They have flops too (Siri, HomePod, others), but are mostly successful. The recent buzz about the M1 chip is a perfect example of their industry-leading engineering.
- AshWolfy 6y agoIs the M1 that revolutionary? It seems more like the culmination of technology that has been around for years. Rosetta 2 is the most impressive part, and even that is kinda the most obvious method of x86 emulation that doesnt suck
- dbuder 6y agoIt looks like an implementation of TSMC's process and similar chips will be available to everyone soon enough.
- heavenlyblue 6y agoAre you trying to say that engineers are inherently more moral in their decisions?
- tomnipotent 6y agoTraining certainly influences execution and only one of these groups was trained for financial engineering.
- 0xffff2 6y agoEngineers tend to look at technical, rather than business, considerations first.
- aclsid 6y agoThey certainly don't go on counting pennies
- orange_tee 6y agoI think he is saying engineers care more about engineering, just purely because they enjoy and take pride in their own work. Whereas MBAs don't have much to be proud of, except short term profit goals.
- lumost 6y agoThe implication is that Engineers can manage an engineering product better than a career CEO. There are several examples of turnarounds such as AMD where technical CEO's delivered significant product and ultimately financial wins over organizations run by career managers. Boeing's choice to pursue the Max vs. a new airframe was entirely motivated by perceived cost benefits and resulted in a flawed and delayed product. Had the decision makers had an aerospace background they may have made different decisions.
- jiggawatts 6y agoI was listening to an interview with AMD's CEO Dr. Lisa Su, and I was surprised at how casually she was using technical terminology while explaining complex industrial process optimization techniques her company was working on. I was just so used to the top three or four tiers of corporate management having literally no idea what their company's engineering department actually does day to day. Hearing a CEO knowledgeable about their main product line was a bit of a shock. But it shouldn't be a shock! It should be the norm. I work for a small IT-only company. If I start using "technical" terms like "IP address" with our CEO, his eyes glaze over...
- tidepod12 6y agoI'm so tired of seeing this ridiculous "mba and accountants are evil" trope. You realize Tim Cook is one of those evil MBA people, right? And the CEO that oversaw Boeing during the launch of the MAX was a career aerospace engineer?
- linuxftw 6y agoI guess he gets a pass because Apple was using slave labor before he took the reins.
- brokencode 6y agoTim Cook is also an industrial engineer, and this is easily available information. My point is more that you don’t want people focused on business and profits instead of people who have deep knowledge in the area and passion for the product. Accountants and business majors are better at managing insurance companies, banks, etc, because they understand the space. Engineers are better at managing engineering companies for the same reason.
- tidepod12 6y agoTim Cook has a bachelor engineering degree but he hasn't been involved in engineering work since the 90s. He's been the head of operations, making business decisions like closing down factories and outsourcing production, since his days at IBM. He is a supply chain wonk, which is why he got an MBA (supply chain management is a core part of business school teachings). This is also easily available information. Cook has been "focused on business and profits" for decades, and yet you act like he is an example of a great "engineer" in charge.
- brokencode 6y agoBelieve it or not, managing the supply chain is a specialty of industrial engineering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_engineering#Sub-disciplines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_engineering#Sub-dis...
- trilinearnz 6y agoModern MBAs (at least the one I'm doing) very much take care to focus on factors beyond solely profit. Examples are the concepts of business sustainability and the different levels of maturity organisations can occupy within that, and the 'triple bottom line' (taking into account impact on society and the environment, as well as economic impact). Awareness of these factors can go from simply recognising them (lip service), to defining business performance by them (living and embracing them).
- lotsofpulp 6y ago>Examples are the concepts of business sustainability and the different levels of maturity organisations can occupy within that, and the 'triple bottom line' (taking into account impact on society and the environment, as well as economic impact). If someone doesn't pick these things growing up, a course in grad school isn't going to change their motivations.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sseveran 6y agoThe CEO that Boeing fired at the end of 2019 was an aerospace engineer who had been with the company since 1985. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Muilenburg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Muilenburg
- fsh 6y agoHe only became CEO in 2015. His handling of the Max crashes was shameful, but you can't blame him for Boeing's long-term strategy faults.
- sseveran 6y agoOh, I don't blame him at all. A commercial airliner is a decade long project to undertake. However its clear he was not the leader to lead a company through a crisis.
- astrange 6y agoIt seems like the problem with Boeing is that they acquired a failing company (McDonnell-Douglas), but then kept all the executives and let them run Boeing, even though they'd just ruined the last company. Maybe they preferred that over letting some pleb engineer into the executive aristocracy.
- brokencode 6y agoSure but I’m not talking about just the CEO. I’m talking engineering managers all the way down. And I guess I’m not really talking about specific college degrees either, but a culture and mindset of engineering. Here’s an interesting article about how engineers lost influence in Boeing: https://perell.com/essay/boeing-737-max/ https://perell.com/essay/boeing-737-max/
- dennis_jeeves 6y ago>Sure but I’m not talking about just the CEO. I’m talking engineering managers all the way down. And I guess I’m not really talking about specific college degrees either, but a culture and mindset of engineering. Many here have misunderstood you,conflating the the stereotypical MBA type ( who is a essentially a con man) with an MBA degree. A 'mindset' of engineering BTW has to to be explained to the non-engineering personalities. Besides the obvious inclination for technical things, the next best trait is perhaps that of integrity. You really cannot put together a working great product unless there is there is a commitment at several levels, all of which could be loosely lumped under the personality trait of integrity.
- plandis 6y agoDisagree with solely the CEO but in general Boeing’s leadership seems to be somewhat disconnected from their actual product. Just take a look at Boeing’s HQ in relation to where they actually make things. Boeing’s c-suite is now in Chicago whereas their engineers/plant workers are on other ends of the country (Washington and South Carolina, mostly).
- esoterica 6y agoConsidering how hard people on this website try to push remote work it's funny how a broad consensus has emerged that Boeing putting workers and management in different offices is responsible for their cultural failures.
- johnl1479 6y agoAll things considered, there is a stark difference between a job whose primary focus is to build a physical thing and a job whose primary focus is to build a digital thing.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- wrkronmiller 6y agoBoeing isn’t a remote company, so it’s not a contradiction. If you read into most of the arguments for remote-friendly workplaces, step one is cultural changes.
- lm28469 6y agoOne could argue there are differences between us mere code monkeys playing with fancy gadgets and a company in charge of the lives of thousands of people every single day.
- esoterica 6y agoThere are code monkeys working on safety-critical systems too.
- hosh 6y agoThere was an article about how, when Boeing bought out Mcdonnal Douglas, executives from the latter company took control and changed the culture to focus on profits over engineering.
- bumby 6y ago“How Boeing Lost its Way” https://www.forbes.com/sites/josephholt/2020/02/03/how-boeing-lost-its-way/?sh=34b46c7f3f14 https://www.forbes.com/sites/josephholt/2020/02/03/how-boein...
- xenihn 6y ago>An engineering company should have engineers as managers from the bottom level all the way up to the CEO. So should our government.
- AlotOfReading 6y agoAs technical people, we tend to have a bias that we're better equipped to understand things than anyone else, but that's often not the case. Many, many of the things out there don't just require the ability to use Google and do math, but also those things engineers are notoriously bad at like understanding human systems, compromising, and communication. We also don't have any particular advantages in knowing things outside our domain of expertise. An all-engineer government is definitely not an ideal.
- nytgop77 6y agoI dont think that techies are outlier here. Despite the profession, most people think they can do their boss's job better.
- bigger_cheese 6y agoOne thing to keep in mind is a lot of engineers don't want to work in management and/or don't have management aspirations. Steve Wozniak is a pretty good example. Personally, I work as a chem/materials engineer if I were to move into a management position I'd have to give up doing technical work and step into a more administrative role and that is something that does not really appeal to me. I think similar thing for politics, there doesn't tend to be many scientist or engineers running for government because that sort of thing isn't very appealing to people like me.
- refurb 6y ago“I’m smart enough to program a computer and that’s really hard so anything else would be easy for me to do.”
- xxs 6y ago>Take a look at Apple’s functional organizational structure for an example of an engineering company done right. Apple has to be one of the worst examples - both about not being run be MBAs and quality engineering.
- bumby 6y agoI think this runs deeper than an “MBA vs Engineer” perspective. Having worked in the industry but no direct knowledge of how this project was run (outside of what’s been reported in the news) here my take: If I were a betting person, my guess is they have created a culture of “schedule first”. Other orgs managed by engineers have been chastised for this in the past (looking at you, NASA). The problem is the risk/reward is asymmetrical managing these projects. Even though the severity can be extremely high, the probabilities of an error of this magnitude tend to be very small. This creates an incentive for ambitious souls to be aggressive and continually role the dice to meet schedule. As a former manager once told me when I was in a safety role, “you don’t want to get a reputation for slowing things down.” To oversimplify things, say there’s a 1% chance any project can end in disaster. You can literally create an entire career ignoring that risk and still look like a star. Probability is on the individuals side. Meanwhile, the manager pushing to do things the right way to minimize that risk almost certainly will bear a higher cost/schedule burden. But in aggregate, that probability will catch up to the organization. What makes me think this? There’s ample reporting Boeing didn’t follow their own procedures because they didn’t want to delay. Hazard analysis documentation wasn’t reflective of the design because the paperwork wasn’t getting updated. Their didn’t follow their own procedures regarding redundancy in design of items identified in the HA. I suspect they knew this was wrong which is why they obfuscated details in the investigation. Culture matters, irrespective of academic degrees.
- nyolfen 6y agothey dlc'd the secondary/redundant AoA sensor, a critical safety feature and literally a direct cause of the crashes
- cutemonster 6y ago"dlc"? What does that mean
- 10000truths 6y agoDownloadable content, a reference to large game studios' reputations for nickel-and-diming players on what should be core gameplay features of a video game.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y agoThis is the stupidest HN techbro talking point. And tnere's plenty of competition. You think you're so analytical, free of emotion, smart, quantitative, evidence-led? Well here's a riddle: the CEO as well as the chief flight test engineer are massively implicated in this scam. Both are engineers, obviously. The system that failed was designed, approved, built, and tested by hundreds of engineers. How easily do these people fold under pressure? How come none of them used whistleblower laws for their and two planeloads' of passengers' advantage? Is it possible, maybe, that a tiny bit of you likes that argument? Yeah... that's called "emotion", and "identity". And contrary to popular opinion, it's neither bad nor exclusively for women, MBA, and other lesser beings. And here's a paper that shows engineering CEOs are no better than others, except for measures of social and environmental impact: https://journals.vgtu.lt/index.php/JBEM/article/view/10447 https://journals.vgtu.lt/index.php/JBEM/article/view/10447 If you actually want (statistically significant) better results, hire foreigners (above), or women: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10997-012-9224-7 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10997-012-9224-7
- frongpik 6y agoMoral Mazes describes in detail how this happens. The book explains how managers of all kinds "milked" chemical plants, i.e. deferred maintenance to meet schedules and pocket promos, and then jumped the ship right before the plant collapsed. Boeing was likely no different: a clique of quick-thinking managers figured that they could push for aggressive deadlines, pocket nice promos and bonuses, outsource responsibility via committes of all kinds and jump the ship when the wreck was imminent. The book even had a solution. These quick-thinking managers avoid responsibility (blame ability) like vampires avoid the sunlight. The corporate could implement a system to track responsibility, so it would follow smart assess in other departments and even other companies, but it of course would never do this because such a system would expose shenanigans of senior management. In theory, a regulator could develop such a responsibility tracking system and enforce it in public companies and federal contractors. That system needs to account for the fact that senior managers are experts in diffusing responsibility.
- dmix 6y agoYou're probably right but also missing the giant elephant in the room which is regulatory capture. aka politics. This being a partial byproduct of the mass centralization (aka conglomeration) of most every big industry that started in the 80s, accelerating in the 90s, when globalization became a hot thing. And [insert massive finance company's hackery here]. Tons of these conglomerates have strong legacy gov connections and are often the only shop in town for critical industries and are treated like special semi-national bodies. This puts plenty of natural pressure on regulatory bodies. Boeing is not the only one. This is a phenomenon wide across the western world. Plenty of this exists in Europe too.
- rland 6y agoWell, if I remember right, consolidation across the entire economy is at a record high. In every sector, there's more regulation, much fewer & larger players. If the rot at Boeing is a symptom of this, we're in for a bad time: every firm across the entire economy is now larger and has fewer competitors than previously.
- dmix 6y agoThe mainstream and most-politically-accepted economics of the day in western countries is state-capitalism (the levels of state vs capitalism is debatable in various countries and is obviously never stable). I think this is what the standard downside of that economic system looks like in practice... plenty of regulatory capture + moral hazards due to low punishments when 'caught' + little if any competition. Like most things in economics the best route is looking for the least-bad option. We will find out over time if the state-capitalism balancing act really is the best, assuming there are any realistic alternatives and/or the scales/ratios of state vs capitalism are meaningfully measurable. This experiment is only decades old in the modern technological era and one could argue it has only really peaked in the last two decades, with ever more industries getting merged to this day (which Corona will accelerate no doubt, just like 9/11 did with the US defense industry). The state/nationalism part of this means these potentially poorly run companies could stay propped up for decades, despite the industry's potential in other forms. I recently spent time reading about some chartered airline companies from the 70/80s and their stories is probably the best example of this sort of slow march towards industry conglomeration, with plenty of state involvement and protection. It probably provides a good timeline to base this stuff on and at a minimum plenty of analogies. One example (see History): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TUI_Airways https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TUI_Airways
- akandiah 6y ago> An engineering company should have engineers as managers from the bottom level all the way up to the CEO. Sun Microsystems had this. Didn't work too well for them. It's not at all as simple as this.
- anshumankmr 6y agoAMD has really shown the way in this aspect. They have a lady who was a PhD in a Semiconductor Electronics (I forgot what the exact name was) and she's worked as a techie and as a manager for a long time to get a grip of both. The results speak for themselves.
- wolfretcrap 6y agoAs if MBA and accountants are specially prone to greed. Greed can be found in any person regardless of his profession.
- dbuder 6y agoMBA programs self select for greed.