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What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane
- bradley13 3y agotl;dr: Pournelle's Iron Law.
- astrange 3y agoPournelle's Iron Law is just him saying "I am a Republican". You are not required to listen to him. For balance, I stopped reading this article at the end of the first page because it called Boeing "neoliberal", which doesn't mean anything except that the writer is a snotty humanities grad.
- rbancroft 3y agoPournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
- astrange 3y agoYes, he's a Republican. Typical engineering humor of that era where they'd make up "rules of the universe" that were just them saying something vaguely cynical.
- rbancroft 3y agoIt is cynical and is simplistic but there is an element of truth to it. Maybe is republican ideology, I don’t know about that.
- bradley13 3y agoHuh? His observation is politically neutral. It just notes that the people running organizations are, ultimately, selfish (as are most people). They will ultimately look after themselves, even at the cost of the organization they are supposed to be caring for. You see this everywhere. Crazy CEO salaries and golden parachutes, as CEOs sit on each other's boards approving such packages. Charities that prolong the problem they were set up to eliminate. "Old space" where NASA provided decades of unjustified cost-plus contracts.
- astrange 3y ago"All bureaucracies always fail" is not politically neutral and also not true!
- spking 3y agohttps://archive.ph/Oub0v https://archive.ph/Oub0v
- Bud 3y ago[dead]
- margalabargala 3y agoIf you read this article looking for new or surprising insight, you won't find it. It is not new information that Boeing started a rapid decline shortly after the McDonnell Douglas merger, and it will be unsurprising to you to hear that shortly afterwards, Boeing began abusing its most senior employees into leaving. What this article offers is new detail into exactly how Boeing has gone about cannibalizing itself. The specific things done to specific employees, the specific quality incidents that were swept under the rug, the lengths to which they went to ensure all prior institutional knowledge regarding how to properly build a plane was systematically destroyed. It's worth reading, perhaps unless you're going to be flying on a Boeing plane anytime soon.
- caycep 3y agoI am silently grateful to JetBlue for ordering Airbuses from the get go...
- BiteCode_dev 3y agoAirbus has a limited production capacity, and they are maxed out with this scandal. So Boing is still getting orders, because the world need planes.
- iaoat2d 3y ago"the lengths to which they went to ensure all prior institutional knowledge regarding how to properly build a plane was systematically destroyed." why do this intentionally?
- Tagbert 3y agoPerhaps because the senior people were at a higher pay grade? If you bump off the expensive employees, your overhead goes down. Better numbers next quarter so you get a bonus.
- alistairSH 3y agoIt's in the article. Not just senior = higher pay. Senior = more likely to stick to existing (known good) safety/QC processes. Boeing didn't want QC at all - they wanted the guys assembling the planes to do their own QC (which is likely illegal per FAA regulations). Toss in a side of union busting. And a dessert serving of outsourcing to the lowest bidder, regardless of that bidders history in the space.
- proc0 3y ago> Swampy believed relying on mechanics to self-inspect their work was not only insane but illegal This sounds like the changes that have taken place in the software industry in the past 10-20 years. Engineers are meant to do much more than engineering, including testing their own software, managing project timelines, etc., however with software nobody dies, you just get crappy software that constantly breaks and needs an update every other day. There's an overall theme here of underestimating how hard engineering is, and as a result expecting a lot more from engineers which then of course causes bad engineering. Not surprisingly this is caused by non-technical people with power. Perhaps the fix is a cultural shift and a renewed respect for people who want to spend all their time specializing in technical skills.
- necheffa 3y ago> however with software nobody dies Well...no actually. This may be the case for _some_ software. I happen to work on (software) products where public safety is a concern.
- seb1204 3y agoWell in the story is the point of an software error leading to the plane crash right...
- margalabargala 3y ago> however with software nobody dies The MCAS issue which crashed two Boeing planes was a software hack.
- SahAssar 3y agoWell, yes, but also no. It was a hardware design change that necessitated a software hack (to escape mandatory retraining of pilots) that relied on unreliable hardware, right? Sure, software played a big part in it, but I think it seems like it was more a management and communication failure. If it was just software it'd probably be much easier to diagnose and fix.
- ljsprague 3y agoAn intrusive popup took over my screen at that link.
- strict9 3y agoYou can click reader mode in your browser to read the article.
- buildsjets 3y agoI have zero patience for fools who are allegedly knowledge workers, yet complain about popups and ads in the year 2024. The ads are obnoxious, but they are there for the plebs, and we need to put obnoxious ads the faces of plebs to fund the internet. If you are not a pleb, you already have an adblocking solution installed, so please use it. If however, you are a pleb, please consume mass quantities of the product which is being advertised. There are a lot of adware developers who are counting on you to buy their next Porsche. Or, invent a decent micropayent solution so we can get rid of the damn ads.
- ljsprague 3y agoOr how about pop-ups not take over my screen? I'm on a work computer without an ad blocker.
- type_Ben_struct 3y agoIt baffles me how this happens time and time again in companies as they grow (albeit rarely with this level of human life consequence), and nobody ever seems to learn from it.
- carom 3y agoStructural incentives that prioritize short term profits.
- Terr_ 3y agoThere's one technology where humanity's pace of progress has not been so swift: The programming and execution of organizations.
- noahtallen 3y agoThe companies are smart enough to learn from it. The problem is that in a late-stage capitalist market, companies have already grown so large that the easiest way to continue to grow profits is to cut costs as much as possible. It’s pretty obvious that in many cases, this incentive is entirely opposed to human health and flourishing. Sure, you can cut costs in consumer electronics like TVs without harming anyone. (Assuming regulations that enforce a baseline quality in electrical components.) You can’t do that in aviation or health care. Another aspect is that lower costs don’t make it back to consumers in many industries with little competition. A more “financially efficient” Boeing means more money for shareholders, not cheaper airplanes. A counterpoint is that disasters should provide an economic incentive to the company to fix problems that cause disasters. As you point out, this simply isn’t happening. There was apparently not enough market incentive after the B737max crashes to fix their quality control problems. That means it’s cheaper for Boeing to crash its planes than to have really strong quality control. Obviously, the capitalist incentives in this system are no longer working for society. These late stage, massive companies are not about making good products. They are legally about returning value to shareholders. The people in charge are therefore all about optimizing the company finances. The only way to counteract this frequently terrible incentive is by us people (the government) creating the incentives that work for society. That could mean huge, costly fines in these situations such that the only way to get money for shareholders is to make quality products, since what should be a market incentive has gotten so messed up.
- darth_avocado 3y ago> He mocked him in weekly meetings whenever he dared contribute a thought, assigned a fellow manager to spy on him and spread rumors that he did not play nicely with others, and disciplined him for things like “using email to communicate” and pushing for flaws he found on planes to be fixed. Sounds like a regular middle manager in any tech company. Sad unfortunate effect of the power asymmetries in corporate structure: managers have all the power but very few checks to keep them accountable. I’ve seen the same thing happen again and again in different companies (including to me), thankfully none of them building planes.
- sideshowb 3y agoUm so... what was he supposed to use email for, according to the manager?
- jldugger 3y agoLetting everyone know there are free bananas in the break room. Important stuff should be kept where opposing council can't find it, I guess.
- polygamous_bat 3y agoGenerally when companies seek to avoid liability, they push to have their employees use telephone to communicate so that compromising emails don’t come out during the discovery period of a lawsuit. I imagine this is one of such cases.
- TrackerFF 3y agoPaper trails: Sociopathic managers hate this one weird trick.
- JohnFen 3y ago> Sounds like a regular middle manager in any tech company. I bet this is true in some, but certainly not all, tech companies. I've only encountered one example of such a manager in my entire career (and quit just to get away from that nonsense).
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoRelated: Boeing's Dead Whistleblower Spoke the Truth https://www.thefp.com/p/boeings-dead-whistleblower-spoke-the-truth https://www.thefp.com/p/boeings-dead-whistleblower-spoke-the... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39838580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39838580)
- peepeepoopoo71 3y ago[flagged]
- dbrower 3y agoNot diversity. Younger cheaper quotas.
- peepeepoopoo71 3y ago[dead]
- ortusdux 3y ago"So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers." Steve Jobs (1995) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs:_The_Lost_Interview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs:_The_Lost_Interview
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- csours 3y agoSales and marketing - and financialization and capital efficiency. I got no beef with accountants, but I think companies need just enough focus on financialization and low to medium priority on capital efficiency (ie, look out for stupid wastes of capital).
- theragra 3y agoWeird to read from a "you are holding it wrong" man
- asah 3y agoPerspective: the S&M folks he's complaining about, don't even think at all about users holding products. Seriously, it's all spreadsheets and powerpoint, because they've never built anything with their hands, never worked on a team, and never worked on a "factory floor" (e.g. live server/database, etc). Steve Jobs and his generation all soldered boards that went to paying customers. Elon Musk slept on the NUMMI factory floor to deal with "production hell." Bill Gates personally debugged MS-DOS. The "bean counters" are not bad people, but doing this stuff creates a humility about quality and quality process, and not doing this stuff lulls people into a distaste/disdain/disrespect for it. Analogously, engineers who've never been responsible for financial statements literally don't appreciate the work to get them materially correct, let alone meet legit regulatory requirements because someone somewhere cheated in counting inventory or money or whatever.
- Simulacra 3y agoHow should a company promote diversity without jeopardizing safety?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y agoWhy do you think one is at odds with the other?
- rbancroft 3y agoIf you are selecting for anything besides competence, your chances of getting competence is effectively random. It says nothing about one group of people being more or less competent than another. I have observed that selecting for competence leads to diversity, and I believe that diversity is a strength. But it is best achieved organically. Personally I think the shortcomings we have with achieving diversity is in the framing stage, not the hiring stage.
- Ajay-p 3y agoCan you speak more about the framing? I think diversity should be encouraged, but I also believe to some extent that people of color have been left out of STEM education and jobs due to poor education and opportunities. Maybe a middle ground is to hire for both. Bring in women, people of color, and others who may not be as educated or experienced, but make a serious effort to pair them with more experienced employees and train them up to where they should be. Rather than hire and replace, as some have suggested, hire and partner to diversify and holistically improve the entire organization.
- rbancroft 3y agoI think you are right about starting early in education and exposing disadvantaged children to things they wouldn't otherwise have available to them, and supporting them throughout their education. This would benefit organizations that want to achieve good performance and is worth them investing in themselves, although government support is a decent second option that I agree with. However it's important to note that this is primarily an economic differentiation, not a racial one. Training can help but it is not sufficient for many tasks. You also need aptitude and desire. Culture is more about what is valued and rewarded in a society, and I think the primary driver of the desire component. What I meant about framing was that our economies, governments and businesses are framed in a cultural context, anglo-protestant american capitalism in this case. African-american/black communities have a challenging relationship with this for obvious reasons. Certain immigrant populations can integrate or interoperate more effectively than others. I think the key to achieving better results as a society and a planet is to incorporate more cultural diversity, allowing a broader range of desires and outcomes to be seen as valid and worth pursuing. I'm sorry I don't have more time to go into this right now, I hope it gives an idea what I was referring to.
- peepeepoopoo72 3y ago[flagged]
- reissbaker 3y agoFWIW, "Prince Jim" McNerney, who most of the article's ire is understandably directed towards, is no longer the CEO. He directed the 737 MAX's development, but retired before the scandals; his successor, Dennis Muilenburg (a 30+ year Boeing employee who started out in engineering), was fired for the poor quality of the 737 MAX despite it being developed under Prince Jim. That being said, the current CEO — Dave Calhoun — is an old exec from from GE, where McNerney started out; I hope he's different from Jim, but I wouldn't bank on it. Unlike Muilenberg and pre-merger Boeing CEOs, he doesn't have a direct background in aviation. He's retiring at the end of the year, and I hope his replacement is more like the pre-merger CEOs than the accounting-focused recent ones.
- peteradio 3y ago> I hope his replacement is more like the pre-merger CEOs than the accounting-focused recent ones. ... womp womp
- donmcronald 3y ago> the current CEO — Dave Calhoun — is an old exec from from GE, where McNerney started out From the article. > None of the names floated thus far for the spot have been aerospace engineers, and the shoo-in for the position, GE’s Larry Culp, is not an engineer at all. Maybe they should start bundling life insurance with flights on Boeing planes.
- teleforce 3y agoIt's a strange anomaly when most of the current top Fortune 500 (US) companies have engineers as their CEO [1]. You would have expected that Boeing to be led by engineers due to the scale of engineering involved in the plane constructions but apparently it's not always the case. [1] Top CEOs have this degree: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39680613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39680613
- masklinn 3y agoBoeing stopped considering engineering and manufacturing to be their core competency after the MDD merger, that is expressly why they moved the HQ away from Seattle and closer to financial markets.
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y agoThe "funny" thing to me is that I'm old enough to remember when the merger occurred that people were predicting exactly what came to pass. It just took 25 years to finally happen.
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoYes, large companies take a lot longer to fail than I ever imagined. A lot of time can pass riding on past excellence before the cracks start showing.
- Rinzler89 3y agoIt's not about the size of the company, it's about the barrier to entry of the market they're in, how much competition they have and the amount of vendor lock-in. And civil aviation in general scores top marks in all those fields. It's a duopoly with an insane barrier to entry both technical, legal and financial with very long and complex vendor lock-in.
- kelp 3y agoI wonder if this opens up an opportunity for Bombardier and Embraer to move up market into the 737s space.
- ricksunny 3y agoFrom the article: >Discussing Swampy’s death and the whistleblower lawsuit he left behind, the longtime former Boeing executive told me, “I don’t think one can be cynical enough when it comes to these guys.” Did that mean he thought Boeing assassinated Swampy? “It’s a top-secret military contractor, remember; there are spies everywhere,” he replied. Me: Aaaaand no way I'm ever applying to work at an MIC defense contractor conglomerate ever again.
- NKosmatos 3y agoCorporate greed. Simple and truthful answer…it’s also applicable for many many other companies who have abandoned their ways and have fallen victim of the dark side profit, dividend, share price and all the other similar capitalistic ideas :-(
- benced 3y agoI am not exaggerating to say that Jim McNerney should be dragged in front of Congress and be forced to explain what he did to an incredibly important American company. It's important to push back against the shareholder value theory where appropriate and humiliation is an underrated component of that.
- throwaway458864 3y agoA public hearing isn't going to change anything. Look at...well, literally any powerful organization or individual brought before Congress for excoriation. The pound of flesh they want is press and votes, and you don't have to change anything to get that. It's not like they're going to break up Boeing. They can't actually do anything to improve Boeing. All they can do is wag their finger. It's not like there's an alternative American company to give our billions of dollars to. And it's not like other companies will suddenly fear being brought forward to be gummed to death by whining bureaucrats. You want real pain? Have them pass a law that says the entire executive leadership's bonuses are forfeit, retroactively, if the company fails to maintain an adequate safety record. Shit will change there real quick. (That law will never happen but it's funny to think of)
- benced 3y agoI think culture is underrated. Acting like he did should not be considered a dignified behavior and I think that will meaningfully constrict behavior even in the absence of new laws. Think about how business culture varies across jurisdictions: there's more than just profit-maximization at work. Also, to be clear, Boeing's safety record is still good. The only recent deaths are associated with less-trained pilots in the earlier days of the 737 MAX. My frustration is they took this organization from an engineering leader to an organization that can't ship a plane. The 787, 737 MAX, and now 777X were/are insanely delayed. The nightmare scenario of a US-China war and Boeing being unable to ship a plane honestly haunts me. Boeing is extremely important to the West, broadly defined and this jerk didn't uphold his commensurate responsibilities.
- xcv123 3y ago
- ordu 3y ago> Swampy knew he was caught in a prisoner’s dilemma. If he went along, he was breaking the law; if he didn’t, whistleblowers who complained about unsafe practices were routinely terminated on grounds of violating the same safety protocols they had opposed violating. How is it a prisoner's dilemma? Is it about cooperating with whisleblowers or defecting them? It seems to me to be a mere dilemma, two choices, both bad. There was no interplay of cooperate/defect strategies.
- jmspring 3y agoThe problem here is that large corporations trusted with public safety - be it flight safety in the case of Boeing; electical generation and transmission safety in the case of PG&E here in California - is that companies cater to Wall Street and bean counters rather than anything else. This is where the CPUC has failed in the case of PG&E and the FAA failed in the case of Boeing. There should be oversight and public safety should play into private corporate governance for such things.
- YeBanKo 3y ago> “Prince Jim”—as some long-timers used to call him—repeatedly invoked a slur for longtime engineers and skilled machinists in the obligatory vanity “leadership” book he co-wrote. Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were “phenomenally talented assholes,” Decline in attention to quality at Boeing is a known thing. But this attitude towards engineering and specially to machinist is just utterly f*king stupid. Especially to machinists, because experienced one are hard to find, not even talking about toolmakers. It seems that the starting salary for machinists isn't that great and many shops lost to outsource. And experienced folks retire leaving a wide gap behind. Of course, this does not excuse such an attitude toward engineers either.
- csours 3y agoOne of the fundamental problems with organizations, no matter what economic system you live under[0], is that you cannot give your boss a problem that they don't want to deal with. So if your job is to find problems, and your boss does not want to deal with problems, then your job will suuuuuuuuuuuuck. 0. I acknowledge that capitalism has caused a lot of problems, including Boeing problems.
- jongjong 3y agoIt makes me so angry reading this about managers criticizing employees for being 'too knowledgeable'. There are so many narratives nowadays which claim that performance is at odds with talent. People are embracing mediocrity and patting each other on the back for it... The idiots who got lucky, since they cannot pretend to be knowledgeable, reframe the narrative to portray themselves as geniuses who understood the value of idiocy and revel in their mediocrity.
- fransje26 3y ago> CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had “overvalued experience and undervalued leadership” I think this quote explains the problem nicely..
- stcredzero 3y agoBoeing had quietly assumed many of the roles traditionally played by its primary regulator, an arrangement that was ethically absurd. This is simply "vertical integration" applied to "regulatory capture."
- layer8 3y ago> noncompliance (and nonconformance, which is similar but not identical) Anyone who can explain the difference?
- class3shock 3y agoA nonconformance is generally a physical thing. For instance a part my be out of tolerance or have have damage that makes it nonconforming. A noncompliance is generally referring to procedures. For instance not documenting a step in a quality review or not following the assembly procedures for a door plug and ending up with some extra bolts.
- matthewfcarlson 3y agoMy paternal grandfather worked for Boeing as an airfoil modeling engineer (figuring out the right shape for wings and creating computer models) from 1960s-2000s. As a nerdy kid he had some of most entertaining engineering stories. One of my favorites was when a coworker brought a boomerang to work and due to some union/budget shenanigans at the time, all the engineers were at work with nothing to do. So they designed and machined a 3 foot boomerang out of clear acrylic. They went out to the field and gave their heavy new toy a good throw, only to have it promptly vanish out of sight on a sunny day. After a moment to process what just happened, they all hit the dirt as they heard it whoosh overhead.
- jongjong 3y agoI was reading the part about making employees sign a declaration about taking responsibility for their work and thought that was pure genius. Sounds like managers should also sign something like that.
- wolverine876 3y agoThere are real problems at Boeing and those are real issues, but let's beware of the BS that comes with the kind of widespread pile-on that's happening now. This article reads like an Internet rant to me, with the sarcasm, hyperbole, and ridicule. Those things aren't awful in themselves (though they've become very overused and tiresome to me), but they crowd out actual facts, details, nuance, complexities. If you write 'it's the worst thing ever', you omit where and how it's bad, where it's not, the consequences, the trade-offs, etc. I don't learn what happened, how, or why, just that you are really, really, really pissed off. Examples: * pieces are flying off the Boeing planes actually in use at an alarming rate * to train the workforce to properly put together a plane. * obligatory vanity “leadership” book - note the ridicule and scare quotes. * suppliers, many of which lacked engineering departments* -- now using fonts for emphasis * in a perpetual state of unlearning all the lessons it had absorbed over a 90-year ascent to the pinnacle of global manufacturing * Qatar Airways had become so disgusted ..., coincidentally matching the author's emotion * one of the most pathetic plea bargains in the history of American justice It's like series of Reddit comments, and the world certainly doesn't need more of that. The author's and American Prospect's quality is no better than Boeing's.
- quantified 3y agoIf there were places it wasn't bad, does that affect this look at how it was bad? I'd be honestly interested in what an appropriate set of edits would look like. Subtract some adjectives, would that make a difference?
- wolverine876 3y ago> Subtract some adjectives, would that make a difference? That would help, but that's secondary. They need to add the information I discussed on the GP. That info is incompatible with sweeping, absolutist adjectives, so they would go away. Sweeping, extreme statements are a tip-off to BS for anything: Reality isn't that simple.
- skeptrune 3y agoTremendously detailed for how short it is. I struggle to understand how outsourcing the engineer was sold as good for shareholders. Anyone watching someone write a longer book on this publicly?
- mnau 3y agoIt's not about being good for shareholders. They are far away and generally know nothing about what is good or bad decision in long run. We have replaced human QC with computers in many industries. C-suite cares about company profit, middle management cares about KPI. It's about maximizing individual management KPI despite being wrong for a company as a whole. Problems are for other guys/gals down the line.
- chii 3y ago> It's about maximizing individual management KPI so you could argue that those people setting the KPI is either incompetent, or they themselves benefit from such a KPI (at the cost of the company going down).
- maximus-decimus 3y ago“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” -- Goodhart's law Could just be that chasing KPIs is inherently bad because people will game them no matter what.
- AdrianB1 3y agoBack in ~ 2003-2004 I was working for an American company that did exactly that. The story was simple, they outsourced all IT (a few thousands) to a well known tech company. The selling point? "The tech company has a lot of expertise and scale and we will benefit from that". The results? The tech company took all the good engineers, moved them to work in other areas for other clients and replaced them with entry level technicians. It took a few years to start feeling the pain of what they did and a few more years to start reversing the change. By that time the C level people already retired rich, even today, 20 years later, the IT in that company is a terrible shade of "great leaders" and very low engineering skills outsourcing left and right anything more complicated than basic project management.
- rdtsc 3y ago> The day after Broken Dreams premiered, Swampy got an email informing him that he’d been put on a 60-day corrective action plan four weeks earlier. His alleged offense constituted using email to communicate about process violations That is pretty shady. They didn't want to discuss violations in emails so it doesn't end up in a court case or found by the FAA during an investigation. > the longtime former Boeing executive told me, “I don’t think one can be cynical enough when it comes to these guys.” Did that mean he thought Boeing assassinated Swampy? “It’s a top-secret military contractor, remember; there are spies everywhere,” he replied. I am kind of surprised various executives don't order hits on each other more often. Or maybe they do but the assassinations are too subtle and they look like heart attacks and accidents? With billions on the line, what's a few millions in crypto found in a usb stick somewhere in the bushes for a "job well done". There is also the idea that sometimes it should look more an assassination to send a clear message to others: "you don't want to fall on the knife backwards, three times in as row, like so and so, now do you?"
- donmcronald 3y ago> They didn't want to discuss violations in emails so it doesn't end up in a court case or found by the FAA during an investigation. Thankfully big tech is able to provide these companies with retention policies that allow the pesky paper trail to be auto-purged on a schedule.
- sampo 3y ago> I am kind of surprised various executives don't order hits on each other more often. Here is one case where it actually happened: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/xu-yao-death-sentence-poisoning-netflix-producer-xu-yao-china/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/xu-yao-death-sentence-poisoning... https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202403/22/WS65fd50dea31082fc043be352.html https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202403/22/WS65fd50dea31082fc...
- SilasX 3y agoThe Onion was joking about this eventuality in 2010: https://www.theonion.com/boeing-lays-off-only-guy-who-knows-how-to-keep-wings-on-1819571668 https://www.theonion.com/boeing-lays-off-only-guy-who-knows-...
- mikewarot 3y ago>Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs. So they devalued Wisdom, and Elders... and things fell apart. This seems to be a pattern repeated all over the modern world.
- gostsamo 3y agoPurging elder employees is the logical result of making the employer pay for the health care of their employees.
- sooheon 3y agoNo, it's only one incentive. Counterbalancing it is the value of expertise.
- ignoramous 3y ago> Purging elder employees is the logical result of making the employer pay for the health care of their employees. The now-elder employee gave their best and healthy years to the company and its mission.
- Jensson 3y ago
- rybosworld 3y agoU.S. companies have a management problem. I specifically mean that the terminal career path for most professions is "management". Depending where you work, management can mean: - giving orders - delegating work (usually this is work the manager specifically doesn't want to do themselves) - clearing blockers in front of your employees That the third one is the rarest is a problem. American corporate culture has devolved into: get promoted into management and coast. There are obviously exceptions. But a lot of people will agree they've had their fair share of terrible managers. I dare say that's the norm. Boeing is just the most current example of what happens when a company fetishizes management. That is, there comes a time when the leeches have sucked the body dry.
- twojobsoneboss 3y agoHave you been in upper management? It is stressful and if things don’t go well it’s quite likely that you’ll get canned, vs an IC Grass is always greener
- rybosworld 3y agoI admit that I've not and so in that regard, I'm speaking from the perspective of an outside observer. I have worked in middle management before switching back to IC for personal satisfaction reasons. If I had to guess, this statement that I made is the one you are honing in: > American corporate culture has devolved into: get promoted into management and coast. Generalizations are what they are. There are always exceptions etc. And I fully recognize that there are talented, hard-working managers out there. But, what I'm specifically getting at is that American corporate culture encourages far too many cooks in the kitchen. Managers are necessary. But I think most corporations have far too many. And part of that is because it's the norm to promote your top IC's into management. Eventually the structure becomes top heavy and overly bureaucratic. To be honest, I don't think what I'm describing is particularly original/surprising.
- collinmcnulty 3y agoLarry Culp may not be an engineer, but if you want someone who can take a storied American manufacturer that got infected with MBA bs and brought it back to its roots … I mean he’s the only one whose done it, right?
- karaterobot 3y ago> What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane That's not fair. They didn't murder all of them, at least not yet.
- nukeyoular 3y ago[dead]
- tycho-newman 3y agoBoeing’s crappy planes killed hundreds of people, true. But that was years ago! So a door blew off a plane. Did it crash? No. So a tire fell off a plane. Did it crash? No. It goes to show that even after a quarter century of decline, there’s enough engineering savvy to at least make some things fail to a known condition.
- mianos 3y agoThey killed 346 people just 3 years ago due to badly managed MCAS software testing. I guess I can't disagree as you as years is plural and, try, more than one year ago.
- margalabargala 3y ago> So a door blew off a plane. Did it crash? No. The only thing preventing a fatality was pure luck of seating arrangement.
- fransje26 3y agoHey, them engineers are so good that, in the past, they even had a 737 transform mid-flight to a convertible. Without crashing!
- bondolo 3y agoNot just planes and fairly recently too. I was working at a Boeing subsidiary when the 737 Max MCAS happened. They dumped everyone they could on loathsome “$9000 USB cable” type time and materials defense work. I was a senior Java architect and they quickly “retrained” me to do HIL component testing in plain old C. It might have been seen as a move to improve cash flow but realistically it had the effect causing almost all of the software staff to leave in short order which I guess also improved cash flow. The subsidiary is still struggling several years later to rebuild their software team.
- patrickhogan1 3y agoThis situation highlights why startups can outperform established companies. It's not only about innovation or asymmetric motivation but also due to the internal decay of incumbents like Boeing and General Electric. This presents an opportunity for an aeronautics startup to emerge - mission focused on building the best airplanes.
- ZoomerCretin 3y agoOf course, all you have to do is get several billion dollars in funding and hope Boeing doesn't use its vast resources to poach your engineers. Boeing is not going to be disrupted any more than TSMC or ASML will be disrupted. Planes are too complex and too expensive to manufacture correctly.
- patrickhogan1 3y agoThe best engineers wont work for companies that don’t ship great product. Funding and complexity are obstacles, but there are many examples of overcoming the obstacles with innovation and conviction. Rockets - Lockheed -> SpaceX AI - Google -> OpenAI Electric Cars - Toyota -> Tesla Shipping - Maersk -> Flexport CPUs - Intel -> ARM
- slim 3y agoFlexport has it's own ships ?
- class3shock 3y ago"But the average employee assigned to the 737 program has been at Boeing just five years, according to a longtime Boeing executive who is involved in various efforts to save the company; for comparison’s sake, he says the average employee assigned to the 777 program had between 15 and 20 years under their belt." It don't think it's possible to overstate how bad, and sad, of a state of affairs that is. I've never seen a group at any organization that was composed predominantly of early career engineers that did not have issues (in the aerospace/defense industry). Those mid / late career engineers are irreplaceable and yet they were actively trying to get rid of them... There are no words.
- amtamt 3y agoSomething very similar is happening, at a very rapid pace, in software development.
- dbg31415 3y agohttps://www.wired.com/story/ageism-haunts-tech-workers-layoffs-race-to-get-hired/ https://www.wired.com/story/ageism-haunts-tech-workers-layof...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- holografix 3y agoJust look at Google
- xen0 3y agoAnecdotally, the average member of the team I'm in (in Europe) is probably mid-30s with at least 10 years of experience. Less than 5 years of experience at Google is, to be fair, common. But the company doubled in size over that time, so it's inevitable. And higher turn over in tech is common (and I don't think that is necessarily reflective of anything other than the fact it's easy to get another job as a software engineer). I can't state much on the layoffs because my team was not heavily affected.
- zamalek 3y ago> The bosses hit Swampy with a new initiative called “Multi-Function Process Performer,” Performance metrics are how bad employees level the playing field with good ones. Everyone wants to _quantifiably_ know why Swampy got a 9% raise when they got an 8%, "because his expertise saved the company a $1bn fine last quarter that you nearly caused." Not once, anywhere I've worked, has that kind of metric been tracked.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ETH_start 3y agoWhen journalists write about unions, like this: >The plan would save money while busting unions, a win-win, he promised investors. Instead, McNerney’s plan burned some $50 billion in excess of its budget and went three and a half years behind schedule. They have a moral obligation to disclose their conflicts of interest in being unionized themselves. The staff at The American Prospect are all part of a News Guild, with their employer mandated into exclusive collective bargaining with their bargaining unit: https://wbng.org/unit/the-american-prospect/ https://wbng.org/unit/the-american-prospect/ They thereby benefit from laws that enshrine union control at the expense of contract liberty.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- DonHopkins 3y agoBut racist white supremacists like Elon Musk blamed it on "DEI" (which is their new dog whistle for the n-word). Same thing they say caused a container ship to hit the Francis Scott Key Bridge. ‘A Black guy’ didn’t cause Boeing’s midair blowout. Capitalism did: https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/boeing-airplane-safety-dei-capitalism-20240118.html https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/boeing-airplane-safety-dei-... Baltimore mayor claims 'racist' critics use 'DEI' instead of N-word to attack him: https://mynbc15.com/news/nation-world/baltimore-mayor-claims-racists-use-dei-instead-of-n-word-dont-have-the-courage-msnbc-joy-reid-diversity-equity-inclusion-brandon-scott-maryland-francis-scott-key-bridge-collapse-cable-news-woke-city https://mynbc15.com/news/nation-world/baltimore-mayor-claims... >"Listen, I know and we all know and you know very well that Black men and young Black men in particular have been the boogeyman for those who are racist and think that only straight wealthy white men should have a say in anything," Scott said. "What they mean by DEI, in my opinion, is duly elected incumbent. We know what they want to say but they don’t have the courage to say the N-word." >Scott was elected in 2020 with 70% of the popular vote. He is one among five mayors of color to have led the city since 2007. Over 60% of Baltimore residents are Black, according to Census data. Lyman blames DEI for Baltimore bridge collapse, but admits he didn’t write social media post: https://utahnewsdispatch.com/2024/03/27/utah-governor-candidate-phil-lyman-blames-dei-for-baltimore-bridge-collapse/ https://utahnewsdispatch.com/2024/03/27/utah-governor-candid... >Utah Republican Phil Lyman, an outgoing state representative and current gubernatorial candidate, suggested diversity, equity and inclusion programs were to blame, at least in part, for the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore on Tuesday.
- yongjik 3y agoAh, so that was where this "Boeing was DEI" meme coming from. Papa Elon, of course! I was wondering why multiple commenters brought up DEI when the story was about a beloved American company getting destroyed by clueless upper-class CEOs (all being old white men, incidentally). Like, did we read the same article?
- Gibbon1 3y agoI remember here when the first 737 Max crashed and then after the second, people here were swearing up and down the cause was that the pilots were wogs.
- data_maan 3y agoIs anyone here who still has the courage to board a Boeing plane after reading this? Parts flying off the planes, a non-existent QC culture... it sounds like the next bad accident is about to happen. If Boeing -somehow- survives this though, it's planes might be the safest most thoroughly inspect that exist :)
- benreesman 3y agoI know that this is about Boeing, but it is just such a perfect epitaph for the end of the current decaying Valley elite. What took Boeing 20 years FAANG did in one: “CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had ‘overvalued experience and undervalued leadership’ before he purged the veterans into early retirement.”
- Donaldwide 3y ago[dead]
- npk 3y agoI have a serious question that might sound not serious. The articles I read about boeing seem to focus on assembly line issues. As someone who flies a lot, assembly problems scare me, but so far assembly qv hasn’t been catastrophic (right?). It seems the real issue is a design flaw in the 737max pilot interface. Aside from some articles that feel vague (like competition with airbus led to some poor decision making); the chain of decisions that led to the design flaw aren’t really reported on (right?). Do you all have the same read?
- avidiax 3y ago> assembly qv hasn’t been catastrophic (right?) The door plug that blew out of a plane because the screws weren't installed didn't kill anyone, but only because the nearest passengers had their seatbelts fastened. Is there any reason to think that a plane that's missing screws on a door plug doesn't have improperly torqued fuel lines or defective emergency oxygen generators or metal burrs rubbing on the control lines to to tail, or a software crash in all three "triple-redundant" computers?
- germandiago 3y ago> Like most neoliberal institutions I stopped reading here. I thought it was an article not a political flame presenting opinions as facts
- UberFly 3y agoAnecdotal story: A few years ago I worked with ex-Boeing employees from Altus AFB. They were disgusted by the quality control of the delivered C-17 Globemasters. Construction garbage in the wall panels, etc. Like the article, their complaints only succeeded in labeling them as "troublemakers" within the company.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y agoI am more convinced that Boeing has exceeded their and human ability to cooperate and explain everything that goes into a modern plane - more than I am willing to say Boeing just sucks now. It’s not just them. It’s everyone and everything. We are in a complexity crisis and no one sees it happening.
- ryukoposting 3y agoNothing new here, but it's certainly a well-articulated redux. Reading about this Boeing debacle is gut-wrenching because it totally contradicts what I believe in. Nihilism isn't supposed to win. Not like this, at least. I'm an engineer. I'm proud of what I do, and I care deeply about what I make. I'll admit it, I'm even proud of my country and I believe in the notion that I'm not the only person around here who gives a damn. Apparently there aren't enough people who do.
- OhMeadhbh 3y agoI wonder if I could get a job at Boeing and ask for put options. My thoughts are that it's going to take a while to fix the company, during which time it will be focused on rebuilding instead of financial games and quality shenanigans. So the stock going down may be a sign of increased long term value. So give me 4 years of put options and then another 4 years of call options.
- graycat 3y agoSounds like Boeing has had a lot of what is often taught in business schools as goal subordination in organizational behavior. Yup, these topics explain that some managers can feel threatened by especially competent subordinates.
- Tabular-Iceberg 3y agoI wonder if Boeing’s institutional investors have had the foresight to get controlling stakes in business jet manufacturers to prevent them from going down the same path, just so that they can still get places by plane in reasonable safety.
- lucianbr 3y agoMoney trumps even the personal safety of the person getting the money. Look at the guy with the carbon fibre submarine. He literally sacrificed his life in the pursuit of profit.
- Tabular-Iceberg 3y agoReally hubris trumps everything else. If he wanted money he would have invested in something more sensible, I don’t think OceanGate would have ever been profitable even if the submersible had worked. The Boeing execs obviously love money, but I think they get their biggest kicks simply from remaking Boeing itself in their own depraved image.
- rodrigo5244 3y agoSince we live in a capitalist society, maybe the past golden times of Boeing are the exception, not the rule. Boeing is just another for-profit company now.
- IG_Semmelweiss 3y agoFunny how everyone keeps blaming management and even the merger as the root cause, but fail to realize that the merger was effectively forced on Boeing by the US government.
- fransje26 3y ago> but fail to realize that the merger was effectively forced on Boeing by the US government. Hey! FAA employees also want a nice and cushy job to retire to.. Them revolving doors are not gonna turn by themselves..
- berniedurfee 3y agoAs I was reading this it reminded me 100% of GE. Another manufacturing giant that put profit above all else and many people suffered for it as the company collapsed under the weight of its own incompetence... though many also became staggeringly wealthy. GE is absolutely a place where leadership is the only “skill” that matters. Leaders are all that’s needed and everyone else is a commodity. Leader worship and success theater killed GE. I could only shake my head when I got to the part where a former GE leader is in the running to be the new CEO. Make sure your affairs are in order before boarding a Boeing aircraft.
- hnaccountme 3y agoThis isn't unique to Boeing. All large companies will eventually get to this state. People who usually makes it to management positions have no clue about what they are managing. Then they will always shit on the actual worked so they can keep their job.