4 ms·

Employee Turnover Fueled Boeing's Quality Control Nightmare

20 points by pg_1234 3y ago

bell-cot 3y ago
NO, employee turnover (and minimal training for the new hires) are merely mid-string dominoes. But they're faceless, easily blamed, and few readers of a modern American business magazine will be bothered if you point fingers there. The real problem is upstream, with short-term-profit-is-our-one-and-only-God capitalism. If you optimize ruthlessly enough for that - well, d'oh, obviously everything will end up enshittified. Any freshman bright enough to get an 'A' in Business Math 111 could have told you that.
jqpabc123 3y ago
It's a cultural issue that exists at the very core of American business and by extension, American society. Technical people are expenses to be squeezed, restrained and controlled. Management and sales people are productive assets to be lavishly rewarded. It's a class oriented "country club" mentality with insiders and outsiders. Insiders would rather destroy their club than surrender too much to the outsiders who are essential to it's function.
- thegrim33 3y ago
  So if it's at the "core of American business/society" it has to have always been there, right? Is it only a problem now or was it always a problem? If it's "core" it has to have always been a problem, right? If so, how do you square that with the history of America's successes?
  - jqpabc123 3y ago
    If so, how do you square that with the history of America's successes? World War II. The production capacity of most industrialized nations was severely impacted by the war. The USA was one of the few that wasn't. Without too much real competition, US industry (Boeing for example) prospered for decades and built a middle class that was the envy of the world. But as the competition slowly recovered, the USA has ceded much of this to greed, income inequity and mismanagement. The vast majority of new income from increased productivity now goes to the top echelon at US corporations. In 2022, the CEO of Boeing made $23 million as the company lost $12 billion. The CEO of AirBus only made about $4 million as revenue increased 16%. The USA now has some of the highest paid and arguably least effective managers in the world --- Boeing is just one example. Working hard in the USA mainly just creates bigger bonuses for those at the top. American management and leadership style is fundamentally flawed and most of the available evidence shows that it is only getting worse over time, not better.
nine_zeros 3y ago
The real problem is that profit-minded shareholders are the bosses. They install the bosses, and they only want returns. They don't want to reward technical work at all if it doesn't bring outsized returns for shareholders and upper management. The solution is so simple it is almost a joke: Pay technical skills more than layers and layers of management. Pay for retention. Pay for responsibility. Give them autonomy. Sports teams have already figured this out where even the CEO of sports teams don't get paid as much as the players. It's simple. The players are the reason the business exists.
- devonkim 3y ago
  Sports teams may be a very poor example because they’re similar to movie stars - the workers are _also_ the sales folks in those labor markets. Not a lot of engineers have the kind of influence to bring entire swaths of investment and interest besides celebrity engineers basically. If we look at it from this lens Big Tech is what it is partly because we don’t have anything like a draft to help ensure fairness of access to highly skilled labor that is a massive influence upon the success of the organization. There’s nothing like SAG to help mere mortal engineers that struggle with ageism and have trouble breaking into more lucrative companies for whatever reasons either. But unlike sports we can’t really distill down everything an engineer does these days into a line item sheet of statistics because so much of engineering isn’t execution-focused but design and project focus. Also, I’ve realized that a ton of software companies - arguably the majority - basically exist to take existing proprietary business knowledge that engineers have little clue or concern about and put it online essentially. Technology in itself isn’t the competitive differentiator at all for these companies that is as opposed to more trade-like relationships, business know-how, etc. that basically acts as social mediation for a lot of incumbent wealthy people’s whims. These would be a lot of enterprise software companies where your sales team basically buys you access to certain accounts and unlocks markets. So this to me is the difference between a company that makes money because of its technology advantages like most of Big Tech rather than existing business domain and market influence advantages (I think this is really close to the classic rent term and in the technology area all that raw data could be considered rent maybe).
  - 3y ago
LispSporks22 3y ago
I think this kind of catastrophic failure starts with the leadership and a board that seems to be asleep, not with the intern program.
- bell-cot 3y ago
  sed 's/that seems to be asleep,/that are wide awake, but far too self-serving to care,/'
salawat 3y ago
Career QA here. If your Quality Department has excessive turnover, there is one, and only one reason. Despair. That despair comes about as a consequence of being made responsible for ensuring Quality, but having their attempts to ensure it overridden time and time again by higher ups. When the CEO/CTO/CFO/COO are essentially escape hatches to escape the Quality process, it does not take long for anyone intelligent enough to do the job effectively to understand that their toils are largely pointless in the grand scheme of things. The central issue of Quality Management is fixing Companies; not products. Create an environment where your Quality Team can't get purchase to get everything they need done, then look to the top for what's more important than Quality. The answer usually isn't hard or long in terms of being found.
- everforward 3y ago
  > Create an environment where your Quality Team can't get purchase to get everything they need done, then look to the top for what's more important than Quality. The answer usually isn't hard or long in terms of being found. This sounds more like a failure of QA to recognize their role in a larger picture. It's a general problem, not specific to QA. I work on reliability engineering and have certainly been guilty of it. The company's bar for "enough quality/reliability" is likely lower than yours and mine. The company's is pragmatic and ours is likely ideological. I probably don't even care about quality control as much as you, and you likely don't care as much about reliability as me. We each over value our own niche because it's what we're trained to inspect, and we know how easy it is to fix some of those things. My tools for dealing with it mostly involve realigning my work with what the business wants, rather than what I'd ideologically prefer, and working to see why the business wants that. It's probably not to improve reliability, but it cuts costs somewhere or something I can get behind.
  - salawat 3y ago
    Your reliability goal, falls under my definition of quality. See, that which is not reliable has ill-defined behaviors/specs/implementations somewhere. My QA groups would be working hand-in-hand with you in order to not only meet your goals, but the rest of the org's. Your experience as an SRE doesn't even necessarily encompass the integrations that have to happen with other operational departments; or even extra-organizational interfaces; another aspect of organizational Quality that is often an issue except maybe in as much as there may be a token word thrown in edgewise or a backlog item from time to time to shore up tools needed by other departments. Quality assurance is often a level higher in that we're analyzing "is there a missing signal that needs to be propagated here. When the org makes it abundantly clear "Quality" is no longer a first order objective. "Pragmatism" is orthogonal to Quality, one can make a pragmatic decision without detrimentally effecting overall Quality as long as one is addressing all the points and dependencies one needs to in making the decision. That need is not used in the rhetorical, but mechanical sense. Once your management looks at you when you have a high quality culture, and then goes "Good, now find things to throw out to make it cheaper. We don't care what it takes. Or starts tacitly encouraging people to short circuit your Quality group, you have a cancerous growth that a Quality group is hierarchically unable to do anything about. If you wonder what it takes for a person to come in and spend day-in, and day-out, looking over every minute detail, pointing out faults, braving the risk of social stigma to keep orgs honest, and to do well at it; it's largely compassion, pride in a job well done, and a concern about who suffers down the road. The end result is the person being faced with a question: Am I okay with being responsible for this? Is this a cause I'm okay with perpetuating? Presto. Instant excessive turn-over. And short of being a player at the C-table or Board layer, there is nothing to be done about it. Quality cannot prevail without being an existential concern. Period.
mindslight 3y ago
If all four bolts were missing and the door still didn't fall off for months, then it should be sufficient to just attach the doors with one bolt instead of four. This will increase safety as one bolt is less likely to be forgotten, as well as saving 75% on those pointless cost centers of hardware purchasing and assembly labor. I am a real mover and shaker, a true champion of enlightened capitalism for figuring this out - unlike those overpaid engineers who were wasting three bolts on every door. I should pay myself a meager bonus of 40% of the total projected cost savings over the next 60 years due to my artful innovation that has made the shareholders, and therefore everyone, richer. - Some Boeing exec, whose biggest possible downside is having to move on and suck the life out of a different company.

20 points by pg_1234 3y ago

NO, employee turnover (and minimal training for the new hires) are merely mid-string dominoes. But they're faceless, easily blamed, and few readers of a modern American business magazine will be bothered if you point fingers there. The real problem is upstream, with short-term-profit-is-our-one-and-only-God capitalism. If you optimize ruthlessly enough for that - well, d'oh, obviously everything will end up enshittified. Any freshman bright enough to get an 'A' in Business Math 111 could have told you that.

jqpabc123 3y ago

It's a cultural issue that exists at the very core of American business and by extension, American society. Technical people are expenses to be squeezed, restrained and controlled. Management and sales people are productive assets to be lavishly rewarded. It's a class oriented "country club" mentality with insiders and outsiders. Insiders would rather destroy their club than surrender too much to the outsiders who are essential to it's function.

thegrim33 3y ago
So if it's at the "core of American business/society" it has to have always been there, right? Is it only a problem now or was it always a problem? If it's "core" it has to have always been a problem, right? If so, how do you square that with the history of America's successes?
- jqpabc123 3y ago
  If so, how do you square that with the history of America's successes? World War II. The production capacity of most industrialized nations was severely impacted by the war. The USA was one of the few that wasn't. Without too much real competition, US industry (Boeing for example) prospered for decades and built a middle class that was the envy of the world. But as the competition slowly recovered, the USA has ceded much of this to greed, income inequity and mismanagement. The vast majority of new income from increased productivity now goes to the top echelon at US corporations. In 2022, the CEO of Boeing made $23 million as the company lost $12 billion. The CEO of AirBus only made about $4 million as revenue increased 16%. The USA now has some of the highest paid and arguably least effective managers in the world --- Boeing is just one example. Working hard in the USA mainly just creates bigger bonuses for those at the top. American management and leadership style is fundamentally flawed and most of the available evidence shows that it is only getting worse over time, not better.

nine_zeros 3y ago

The real problem is that profit-minded shareholders are the bosses. They install the bosses, and they only want returns. They don't want to reward technical work at all if it doesn't bring outsized returns for shareholders and upper management. The solution is so simple it is almost a joke: Pay technical skills more than layers and layers of management. Pay for retention. Pay for responsibility. Give them autonomy. Sports teams have already figured this out where even the CEO of sports teams don't get paid as much as the players. It's simple. The players are the reason the business exists.

devonkim 3y ago
Sports teams may be a very poor example because they’re similar to movie stars - the workers are _also_ the sales folks in those labor markets. Not a lot of engineers have the kind of influence to bring entire swaths of investment and interest besides celebrity engineers basically. If we look at it from this lens Big Tech is what it is partly because we don’t have anything like a draft to help ensure fairness of access to highly skilled labor that is a massive influence upon the success of the organization. There’s nothing like SAG to help mere mortal engineers that struggle with ageism and have trouble breaking into more lucrative companies for whatever reasons either. But unlike sports we can’t really distill down everything an engineer does these days into a line item sheet of statistics because so much of engineering isn’t execution-focused but design and project focus. Also, I’ve realized that a ton of software companies - arguably the majority - basically exist to take existing proprietary business knowledge that engineers have little clue or concern about and put it online essentially. Technology in itself isn’t the competitive differentiator at all for these companies that is as opposed to more trade-like relationships, business know-how, etc. that basically acts as social mediation for a lot of incumbent wealthy people’s whims. These would be a lot of enterprise software companies where your sales team basically buys you access to certain accounts and unlocks markets. So this to me is the difference between a company that makes money because of its technology advantages like most of Big Tech rather than existing business domain and market influence advantages (I think this is really close to the classic rent term and in the technology area all that raw data could be considered rent maybe).
- 3y ago

LispSporks22 3y ago

I think this kind of catastrophic failure starts with the leadership and a board that seems to be asleep, not with the intern program.

bell-cot 3y ago
sed 's/that seems to be asleep,/that are wide awake, but far too self-serving to care,/'

salawat 3y ago

Career QA here. If your Quality Department has excessive turnover, there is one, and only one reason. Despair. That despair comes about as a consequence of being made responsible for ensuring Quality, but having their attempts to ensure it overridden time and time again by higher ups. When the CEO/CTO/CFO/COO are essentially escape hatches to escape the Quality process, it does not take long for anyone intelligent enough to do the job effectively to understand that their toils are largely pointless in the grand scheme of things. The central issue of Quality Management is fixing Companies; not products. Create an environment where your Quality Team can't get purchase to get everything they need done, then look to the top for what's more important than Quality. The answer usually isn't hard or long in terms of being found.

everforward 3y ago
> Create an environment where your Quality Team can't get purchase to get everything they need done, then look to the top for what's more important than Quality. The answer usually isn't hard or long in terms of being found. This sounds more like a failure of QA to recognize their role in a larger picture. It's a general problem, not specific to QA. I work on reliability engineering and have certainly been guilty of it. The company's bar for "enough quality/reliability" is likely lower than yours and mine. The company's is pragmatic and ours is likely ideological. I probably don't even care about quality control as much as you, and you likely don't care as much about reliability as me. We each over value our own niche because it's what we're trained to inspect, and we know how easy it is to fix some of those things. My tools for dealing with it mostly involve realigning my work with what the business wants, rather than what I'd ideologically prefer, and working to see why the business wants that. It's probably not to improve reliability, but it cuts costs somewhere or something I can get behind.
- salawat 3y ago
  Your reliability goal, falls under my definition of quality. See, that which is not reliable has ill-defined behaviors/specs/implementations somewhere. My QA groups would be working hand-in-hand with you in order to not only meet your goals, but the rest of the org's. Your experience as an SRE doesn't even necessarily encompass the integrations that have to happen with other operational departments; or even extra-organizational interfaces; another aspect of organizational Quality that is often an issue except maybe in as much as there may be a token word thrown in edgewise or a backlog item from time to time to shore up tools needed by other departments. Quality assurance is often a level higher in that we're analyzing "is there a missing signal that needs to be propagated here. When the org makes it abundantly clear "Quality" is no longer a first order objective. "Pragmatism" is orthogonal to Quality, one can make a pragmatic decision without detrimentally effecting overall Quality as long as one is addressing all the points and dependencies one needs to in making the decision. That need is not used in the rhetorical, but mechanical sense. Once your management looks at you when you have a high quality culture, and then goes "Good, now find things to throw out to make it cheaper. We don't care what it takes. Or starts tacitly encouraging people to short circuit your Quality group, you have a cancerous growth that a Quality group is hierarchically unable to do anything about. If you wonder what it takes for a person to come in and spend day-in, and day-out, looking over every minute detail, pointing out faults, braving the risk of social stigma to keep orgs honest, and to do well at it; it's largely compassion, pride in a job well done, and a concern about who suffers down the road. The end result is the person being faced with a question: Am I okay with being responsible for this? Is this a cause I'm okay with perpetuating? Presto. Instant excessive turn-over. And short of being a player at the C-table or Board layer, there is nothing to be done about it. Quality cannot prevail without being an existential concern. Period.

mindslight 3y ago

If all four bolts were missing and the door still didn't fall off for months, then it should be sufficient to just attach the doors with one bolt instead of four. This will increase safety as one bolt is less likely to be forgotten, as well as saving 75% on those pointless cost centers of hardware purchasing and assembly labor. I am a real mover and shaker, a true champion of enlightened capitalism for figuring this out - unlike those overpaid engineers who were wasting three bolts on every door. I should pay myself a meager bonus of 40% of the total projected cost savings over the next 60 years due to my artful innovation that has made the shareholders, and therefore everyone, richer. - Some Boeing exec, whose biggest possible downside is having to move on and suck the life out of a different company.