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If 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 t

If 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 ago
I am silently grateful to JetBlue for ordering Airbuses from the get go...
- BiteCode_dev 3y ago
  Airbus 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 ago
  Perhaps 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 ago
    It'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.
  - labster 3y ago
    Senior people also cost more because their health care costs more. Of course discriminating against older people is illegal, so they cut down on senior staff which just happens to have the same cost reduction. Funny that.
- hwbunny 3y ago
  That's the million dollar question. Why talented people are forced out? Like managers/other key members have a mission and if you somehow not fit in their "world view", you get hell.
- kwhitefoot 3y ago
  It's a side effect of reducing the power of those awkward people who want to spend money on well designed aeroplanes.
- Cheer2171 3y ago
  The intention wasn't to destroy institutional knowledge. The intention was to cut costs in the short term, largely through outsourcing and turnover. Why pay a senior engineer a huge salary when you could replace them with a consultant in their twenties? They just didn't think or care about the consequences.
  - margalabargala 3y ago
    They adopted a philosophy of management that explicitly assigned no value to institutional knowledge, and thus eliminated anyone who had it as they were not considered worth their salary. From the article: > 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.
    - swader999 3y ago
      This is true, they also cut costs by 'finding' less defects in QA, deferring them to production deployment several quarters out.
      - bumby 3y ago
        This is the irony of good QA. 1) Company starts to notice a lot of quality problems. 2) Company institutes a good QA program. 3) Company notices less quality problems. 4) Company cuts QA program because there seems to be less need for it. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. (The same can be said for safety when dealing with low probability events).
        FrustratedMonky 3y ago
        Yes. It is raining. I use an Umbrella. Still raining, but I am no longer getting wet. I must not need the umbrella. Close the Umbrella Get wet again.
- djbusby 3y ago
  Those old engineers cost too much! And we already know how to build planes. So, we can ditch them, my quarterly KPIs look good and with the money freed up from pushing them out it can land in my bonus check!
  - pseingatl 3y ago
    Or 20 billion in stock buy-backs, juicing the price.
- margalabargala 3y ago
  Stock price gains. Fire all the longest-tenured, highest-salaried employees. Now you have a company that appears to look similar but with millions of dollars fewer per year in headcount expenses. Boeing's stock price went up 10x in the time frame covered by the article. The people responsible for gutting the company have cashed out.
  - Rinzler89 3y ago
    >Boeing's stock price went up 10x in the time frame covered by the article. The people responsible for gutting the company have cashed out. Why does the stock market reward idiot shit like this? I've seen the same whit a a large US semiconductor company. In the 2008 crunch, the fired the most tenured employees and offshored the work abroad. Granted, the company didn't fail, their stock went up and now it's 5-7x that amount.
    - HumblyTossed 3y ago
      Because the market is barely better than a ponzi scheme. There's ___just___ enough laws around it to keep people somewhat okay with it.
      - JackFr 3y ago
        That’s nonsense. Markets are the best way we’ve come up with to allocate capital. Committees and commissars do not do a better job.
        Eisenstein 3y ago
        > Markets are the best way we’ve come up with to allocate capital. Properly regulated, competitive markets. Aerospace regulation is based on a lot of trust, which Boeing seems to have exploited, causing this problem. The market is not competitive; there are only two players and the output of only one of them cannot meet demand. > Committees and commissars do not do a better job. Dichotomies are good for making punctual arguments online, but you do yourself a huge disservice by using them to frame the options in your own mind. Do you honestly think that the options are 1. Antisocial free market allowed to do whatever it wants for capital gain, or 2. Despotic communism? You are smarter than that.
- forgotmyinfo 3y ago
  Y'all're gonna hate this, but financialization and the relentless pursuit of profits. Every time this stuff happens, people ask why, and it's because of greed. When you focus on making money above all else, this is what happens. It's not a mystery.
  - trilobyte 3y ago
    This is where regulation steps in. A regulatory body should make the cost of certain failure scenarios so painful that companies are incentivized to make better choices. We probably don't need regulations about the color choices of t-shirts, but safety & testing for mass-transit vehicles might be warranted.
    - jandrese 3y ago
      That's the future guy's problem. So long as it is possible to cash out before the consequences happen that sort of regulation won't move the needle much. Making it illegal to be a bad CEO is one of those things that sounds intriguing on paper, but would be a nightmare to implement in real life. Prosecutor: "You inflated investor returns by sabotaging the future survival of the company and made shoddy products that killed people." Former CEO: "So what?" The worst part is that this is a real problem. So many formerly strong companies have been brought down by this behavior that it is becoming notable when it doesn't happen. We are allowing these guys to destroy the American economy slowly just because it makes them and their close buddies ridiculous money. And of course the government is largely captured by these same people, so Washington isn't going to help. Just so frustrating.
      - rybosworld 3y ago
        This phenomenon also explains some others that may or may not be surprising: 1. Founder led companies have higher returns. And it's by A LOT. Hard to quantify exactly but, I've seen quoted numbers as high as 20% outperformance for founder led companies. 2. The biggest corporations never remain the biggest. Where is the Dutch East India company today? More recent examples: IBM was overtaken by Nippon Telephone, was overtaken by Exxon Mobil, was overtaken by GE, was overtaken by Microsoft etc. 3. It's not very common that a company stays in the S&P 500 for more than 30 years. The average lifespan is 21 years. The common thread is that as soon as the sociopath MBA's take over, they Boeing the whole business.
- autokad 3y ago
  a lot of people say things like 'stock price', but that's missing the point. the lesson is in the nuance. its many factors, effecting all aspects of our lives now honestly. - young people's disregard for the knowledge of people older than them. This can be an essay in itself, but there's the idea that the reasons why people are doing things the way they are is because they are stupid, something like: "you are young and you knows how to do everything right if only these dumb old people would get out of my way." I had a friend do a start up to make bourbon in 3 months. He thought all those alcohol producers that take 5-30 years making them were doing it wrong. I am like, definitely give it a go but understand that "I am sure they thought about this'. - management focuses on nonsensical metrics. In recent history, you have to be data driven, focus on metrics, ignore everything else, its the new religion. An example is how technical support teams focus on having 0 tickets open, so support engineers just close tickets even if the customer isn't helped. but hey, that red line is pointing down and to the left right? win! And as with boeing, they made their metrics look really good, look, no more defects! all you have to do is stop reporting them. - companies willing to outsource critical components of their business. I never understood this one, I don't care how 'cheap' it is, you don't outsource critical parts of your business. at best, they don't have the same stakes as you do on the matter, at worst they steal your IP and/or become your competitors.
  - tomthehero 3y ago
    Don't blame this on young people, it's probably mostly post-40 dudes who run the board of these large companies
    - autokad 3y ago
      young dudes of the time, that are now hitting their 40s. Dont get me wrong, the new young are doubling down on that world view.
  - samatman 3y ago
    > I had a friend do a start up to make bourbon in 3 months. He thought all those alcohol producers that take 5-30 years making them were doing it wrong. I am like, definitely give it a go but understand that "I am sure they thought about this'. I realize this is focusing on the example, but no, established bourbon distillers aren't going to stop barrel aging. It's part of the brand, it's part of what people pay for, and they have no reason to. Your friend might have been overconfident, I don't know, but macerating oak chips at high temperature, getting the process right, adding flavorants: if he succeeds in making a high-quality product, great! Am I skeptical? Yes. But again, the established distillers didn't consider and reject the idea of making liquor this way because it's a bad idea, they wouldn't do it because that's not bourbon. If he's successful, they still won't do it, because it's not bourbon. He can sell to people who don't care, though. If it's good, I'd get a bottle.
- tanseydavid 3y ago
  >> why do this intentionally? Myopia + greed is a hell of a drug.
- vpribish 3y ago
  they did not. this article and many people are sensationalizing it to get attention and push whatever their angle is. it was short-sighted, stupid, greedy, and wrong, but not intentionally suicidal (let alone homicidal!).
- pyrale 3y ago
  Some people in organizations can't take no for an answer. They want to see their orders followed, and if they see you as a roadblock, you will be marginalized, sometimes with harm. That's not always bad, sometimes employees drag their feet when they shouldn't. But in some situations (for instance, one arm of the company gaining the upper hand), the people in power are so convinced that their own perspective and goals are right, that they think they don't need to listen or understand the big picture. Ad to this that sometimes an exec has sociopathic tendencies, and you have an explosive cocktail of harassment and destruction of valuable knowledge. The more resilient the company, the more entrenched this behaviour can get, and the more irreversible it will become.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  "intentionally" is too strong a word here. More -> intentionally cut cost by eliminating experienced people. Not -> intentionally getting rid of knowledge. even the worst managers wouldn't admit to wanting to loose knowledge.
- bsder 3y ago
  Are any of the executives who did this in jail? No? Well, carry on, then. None of the executives responsible for this have paid any price. None of the investors or board members who allowed this paid any price. And the worst part: it's not clear you can fix it, now. Even if you completely busted out every executive and wiped out the investors, there is no path forward since those executives pushed out all the engineering knowledge.
- zero_shift 3y ago
  It's a lot easier to make your outsourcing strategy stick, if you no longer have an alternative.
- Brian_K_White 3y ago
  Most of the article is spent describing exactly why.
- tremon 3y ago
  Because the value of expertise does not readily show on balance sheets. Boeing had been systematically eroding expertise for 25 years before its planes started to fall out of the sky.
stephenhuey 3y ago
I learned some things reading this article from 2 days ago: 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... The Free Press
- zer00eyz 3y ago
  The entire first half of this (tfp directly above this comment) article blindly supports the spin that there is some conspiracy where someone killed him. HIs own family goes into great detail all over the press about how he had anxiety and ptsd. That he quit his job on DR orders or the stress was going to give him a heart attack. The shit Boeing did to him was awful (stress, anxiety and ptsd) and Boeing should be blamed for that. They should be held accountable for that. Making his sucicide "Fishy" discredits the pressure he was under and its cause. Playing at the edges of conspiracy theory also serves to discredit the author of the article and the validity of everything else they are saying. The man killed himself. The actions of Boeing played a part in that.
  - sudden_dystopia 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - stephenhuey 3y ago
    On a previous HN discussion, plenty of people here believed it was fully possible that someone at Boeing essentially pulled the trigger and gave plenty of examples, even from a huge successful Silicon Valley company, of corporate folks doing stranger nefarious things than would be believable in film. As someone who has known multiple people who committed suicide, I'm not sure I can feel as certain as you that this was a suicide without more evidence.
    - thatguy0900 3y ago
      After reading the story of ebay execs harassing a random completely unimportant couple, to the point of repeatedly mailing them threatening or disgusting packages, I can't discredit killing a witness for a real tangible reason.
justrealist 3y ago
> It's worth reading, perhaps unless you're going to be flying on a Boeing plane anytime soon. This is all bad for Boeing, but at the end of the day, nobody has died on an American carrier in a Boeing plane in a very long time. Aircraft safety is layers on layers on layers. Let's not FUD people into thinking that flying on the worst plane Boeing has ever put out is anywhere comparable to the daily risks of driving.
- theragra 3y ago
  Thanks
- bsder 3y ago
  > Aircraft safety is layers on layers on layers. This is true, but disasters occur because those layers and layers get eroded until there is only one layer left which then fails. The problem is that Boeing has eroded layers and layers and layers of that safety. The question is "How many of those layers are left?"
- margalabargala 3y ago
  > but at the end of the day, nobody has died on an American carrier in a Boeing plane in a very long time. This is coincidental. When the plug ripped out of the plane over Portland, it was pure luck that no one was sitting in that row. The seats were shredded. If someone had been sitting there, they also would have been shredded. Boeing and their deteriorated quality culture is directly at fault for that one, and the only thing that prevented a fatality is a coincidence of seating arrangement. As far as I'm concerned, that resets their safety clock. If a new 737 were to literally disintegrate in midair, but by pure happenstance it was entirely staffed and occupied by skydivers wearing parachutes and as a result no one dies, that also shouldn't be handwaved off as "oh nobody has died in a long time" just because luck prevented an otherwise sure death in that specific scenario.
  - justrealist 3y ago
    Even if, worst case, 3 people had been sitting there and died (and people are tougher than seats), it would only move needle trivially vs cars.
stcredzero 3y ago
it will be unsurprising to you to hear that shortly afterwards, Boeing began abusing its most senior employees into leaving. Sounds a bit like what happened in newsrooms and at newspapers in the past decade and a half. (Except in that case, it was bottom-up, not top-down.)
deviantbit 3y ago
What do you mean by "down hill"? Boeing has developed incredible technologies since the MD merger. They have been profitable w/ these technologies. You make a claim they were going down hill, what do you mean? I have a number of family members that work for Boeing, that have been in executive management, engineering and research. None of them ever mentioned MD as being the beginning of a decline. All of them tell a different story. The problems began with James McNerney. Harry Stonecipher came from MD, and was one of the best CEO's to ever touch that company. The 787 wouldn't have been a thing if it were not for McNerney. If you make a claim, back it up.
- margalabargala 3y ago
  This is a discussion of an article. You'll find a link to it at the top of the page. If you read the article, I am sure someone as intelligent as yourself will be able to use context clues to figure out what I mean by "down hill". That article is what I am backing up my claim with.
- bullfightonmars 3y ago
  Ha. That’s not the story I have heard from greybeard engineers there before and after the merger. I got the story that Stonecipher wrecked the engineering culture and valued/promoted management at the expense of engineering. Management becoming the only path to promotion and career advancement leaving important engineering groups hollowed out.
m463 3y ago
It's really hard to recover from a downgrade in culture. I hear the same kinds of things about IBM. I'm pretty sure there are other examples. The tough part is - it is sad. Read about boeing and Tex Johnston: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_M._Johnston#Boeing_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_M._Johnston#Boeing_Compa... and IBM invented the PC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer
- margalabargala 3y ago
  Other examples include Xerox and Kodak. I also wonder if it has happened in the past, with a subsequent recovery, to some American car companies? GM pre-2008 perhaps?
jrs235 3y ago
Norminalization of Deviance: https://youtu.be/GN80sx3s4LA?si=de_4xxo1YhFVy0lD https://youtu.be/GN80sx3s4LA?si=de_4xxo1YhFVy0lD
markbnj 3y ago
>> It's worth reading, perhaps unless you're going to be flying on a Boeing plane anytime soon. Just returned from Miami yesterday aboard a B757-200. I was intrigued because it has been so long since I've flown on one. The trip down was a 737-Max8 (or 9 I'm not sure). So I wondered if this was a plane that they had dragged out of retirement. Not like Newark-Miami is a backwater route.
deburo 3y ago
Hm, i smell a google here. What a shame tbh.
atmosx 3y ago
IMO the FAA’s approach and handling was the most shocking aspect. Not sure what purpose the FAA serves anymore.
ryukoposting 3y ago
I'll be on two 737 MAX planes going back and forth to Vegas in a couple weeks. Yay!

caycep 3y ago

I am silently grateful to JetBlue for ordering Airbuses from the get go...

BiteCode_dev 3y ago
Airbus 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 ago
Perhaps 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 ago
  It'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.
- labster 3y ago
  Senior people also cost more because their health care costs more. Of course discriminating against older people is illegal, so they cut down on senior staff which just happens to have the same cost reduction. Funny that.
hwbunny 3y ago
That's the million dollar question. Why talented people are forced out? Like managers/other key members have a mission and if you somehow not fit in their "world view", you get hell.
kwhitefoot 3y ago
It's a side effect of reducing the power of those awkward people who want to spend money on well designed aeroplanes.
Cheer2171 3y ago
The intention wasn't to destroy institutional knowledge. The intention was to cut costs in the short term, largely through outsourcing and turnover. Why pay a senior engineer a huge salary when you could replace them with a consultant in their twenties? They just didn't think or care about the consequences.
- margalabargala 3y ago
  They adopted a philosophy of management that explicitly assigned no value to institutional knowledge, and thus eliminated anyone who had it as they were not considered worth their salary. From the article: > 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.
  - swader999 3y ago
    This is true, they also cut costs by 'finding' less defects in QA, deferring them to production deployment several quarters out.
    - bumby 3y ago
      This is the irony of good QA. 1) Company starts to notice a lot of quality problems. 2) Company institutes a good QA program. 3) Company notices less quality problems. 4) Company cuts QA program because there seems to be less need for it. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. (The same can be said for safety when dealing with low probability events).
      - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
        Yes. It is raining. I use an Umbrella. Still raining, but I am no longer getting wet. I must not need the umbrella. Close the Umbrella Get wet again.
djbusby 3y ago
Those old engineers cost too much! And we already know how to build planes. So, we can ditch them, my quarterly KPIs look good and with the money freed up from pushing them out it can land in my bonus check!
- pseingatl 3y ago
  Or 20 billion in stock buy-backs, juicing the price.
margalabargala 3y ago
Stock price gains. Fire all the longest-tenured, highest-salaried employees. Now you have a company that appears to look similar but with millions of dollars fewer per year in headcount expenses. Boeing's stock price went up 10x in the time frame covered by the article. The people responsible for gutting the company have cashed out.
- Rinzler89 3y ago
  >Boeing's stock price went up 10x in the time frame covered by the article. The people responsible for gutting the company have cashed out. Why does the stock market reward idiot shit like this? I've seen the same whit a a large US semiconductor company. In the 2008 crunch, the fired the most tenured employees and offshored the work abroad. Granted, the company didn't fail, their stock went up and now it's 5-7x that amount.
  - HumblyTossed 3y ago
    Because the market is barely better than a ponzi scheme. There's ___just___ enough laws around it to keep people somewhat okay with it.
    - JackFr 3y ago
      That’s nonsense. Markets are the best way we’ve come up with to allocate capital. Committees and commissars do not do a better job.
      - Eisenstein 3y ago
        > Markets are the best way we’ve come up with to allocate capital. Properly regulated, competitive markets. Aerospace regulation is based on a lot of trust, which Boeing seems to have exploited, causing this problem. The market is not competitive; there are only two players and the output of only one of them cannot meet demand. > Committees and commissars do not do a better job. Dichotomies are good for making punctual arguments online, but you do yourself a huge disservice by using them to frame the options in your own mind. Do you honestly think that the options are 1. Antisocial free market allowed to do whatever it wants for capital gain, or 2. Despotic communism? You are smarter than that.
forgotmyinfo 3y ago
Y'all're gonna hate this, but financialization and the relentless pursuit of profits. Every time this stuff happens, people ask why, and it's because of greed. When you focus on making money above all else, this is what happens. It's not a mystery.
- trilobyte 3y ago
  This is where regulation steps in. A regulatory body should make the cost of certain failure scenarios so painful that companies are incentivized to make better choices. We probably don't need regulations about the color choices of t-shirts, but safety & testing for mass-transit vehicles might be warranted.
  - jandrese 3y ago
    That's the future guy's problem. So long as it is possible to cash out before the consequences happen that sort of regulation won't move the needle much. Making it illegal to be a bad CEO is one of those things that sounds intriguing on paper, but would be a nightmare to implement in real life. Prosecutor: "You inflated investor returns by sabotaging the future survival of the company and made shoddy products that killed people." Former CEO: "So what?" The worst part is that this is a real problem. So many formerly strong companies have been brought down by this behavior that it is becoming notable when it doesn't happen. We are allowing these guys to destroy the American economy slowly just because it makes them and their close buddies ridiculous money. And of course the government is largely captured by these same people, so Washington isn't going to help. Just so frustrating.
    - rybosworld 3y ago
      This phenomenon also explains some others that may or may not be surprising: 1. Founder led companies have higher returns. And it's by A LOT. Hard to quantify exactly but, I've seen quoted numbers as high as 20% outperformance for founder led companies. 2. The biggest corporations never remain the biggest. Where is the Dutch East India company today? More recent examples: IBM was overtaken by Nippon Telephone, was overtaken by Exxon Mobil, was overtaken by GE, was overtaken by Microsoft etc. 3. It's not very common that a company stays in the S&P 500 for more than 30 years. The average lifespan is 21 years. The common thread is that as soon as the sociopath MBA's take over, they Boeing the whole business.
autokad 3y ago
a lot of people say things like 'stock price', but that's missing the point. the lesson is in the nuance. its many factors, effecting all aspects of our lives now honestly. - young people's disregard for the knowledge of people older than them. This can be an essay in itself, but there's the idea that the reasons why people are doing things the way they are is because they are stupid, something like: "you are young and you knows how to do everything right if only these dumb old people would get out of my way." I had a friend do a start up to make bourbon in 3 months. He thought all those alcohol producers that take 5-30 years making them were doing it wrong. I am like, definitely give it a go but understand that "I am sure they thought about this'. - management focuses on nonsensical metrics. In recent history, you have to be data driven, focus on metrics, ignore everything else, its the new religion. An example is how technical support teams focus on having 0 tickets open, so support engineers just close tickets even if the customer isn't helped. but hey, that red line is pointing down and to the left right? win! And as with boeing, they made their metrics look really good, look, no more defects! all you have to do is stop reporting them. - companies willing to outsource critical components of their business. I never understood this one, I don't care how 'cheap' it is, you don't outsource critical parts of your business. at best, they don't have the same stakes as you do on the matter, at worst they steal your IP and/or become your competitors.
- tomthehero 3y ago
  Don't blame this on young people, it's probably mostly post-40 dudes who run the board of these large companies
  - autokad 3y ago
    young dudes of the time, that are now hitting their 40s. Dont get me wrong, the new young are doubling down on that world view.
- samatman 3y ago
  > I had a friend do a start up to make bourbon in 3 months. He thought all those alcohol producers that take 5-30 years making them were doing it wrong. I am like, definitely give it a go but understand that "I am sure they thought about this'. I realize this is focusing on the example, but no, established bourbon distillers aren't going to stop barrel aging. It's part of the brand, it's part of what people pay for, and they have no reason to. Your friend might have been overconfident, I don't know, but macerating oak chips at high temperature, getting the process right, adding flavorants: if he succeeds in making a high-quality product, great! Am I skeptical? Yes. But again, the established distillers didn't consider and reject the idea of making liquor this way because it's a bad idea, they wouldn't do it because that's not bourbon. If he's successful, they still won't do it, because it's not bourbon. He can sell to people who don't care, though. If it's good, I'd get a bottle.
tanseydavid 3y ago
>> why do this intentionally? Myopia + greed is a hell of a drug.
vpribish 3y ago
they did not. this article and many people are sensationalizing it to get attention and push whatever their angle is. it was short-sighted, stupid, greedy, and wrong, but not intentionally suicidal (let alone homicidal!).
pyrale 3y ago
Some people in organizations can't take no for an answer. They want to see their orders followed, and if they see you as a roadblock, you will be marginalized, sometimes with harm. That's not always bad, sometimes employees drag their feet when they shouldn't. But in some situations (for instance, one arm of the company gaining the upper hand), the people in power are so convinced that their own perspective and goals are right, that they think they don't need to listen or understand the big picture. Ad to this that sometimes an exec has sociopathic tendencies, and you have an explosive cocktail of harassment and destruction of valuable knowledge. The more resilient the company, the more entrenched this behaviour can get, and the more irreversible it will become.
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
"intentionally" is too strong a word here. More -> intentionally cut cost by eliminating experienced people. Not -> intentionally getting rid of knowledge. even the worst managers wouldn't admit to wanting to loose knowledge.
bsder 3y ago
Are any of the executives who did this in jail? No? Well, carry on, then. None of the executives responsible for this have paid any price. None of the investors or board members who allowed this paid any price. And the worst part: it's not clear you can fix it, now. Even if you completely busted out every executive and wiped out the investors, there is no path forward since those executives pushed out all the engineering knowledge.
zero_shift 3y ago
It's a lot easier to make your outsourcing strategy stick, if you no longer have an alternative.
Brian_K_White 3y ago
Most of the article is spent describing exactly why.
tremon 3y ago
Because the value of expertise does not readily show on balance sheets. Boeing had been systematically eroding expertise for 25 years before its planes started to fall out of the sky.

stephenhuey 3y ago

I learned some things reading this article from 2 days ago: 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... The Free Press

zer00eyz 3y ago
The entire first half of this (tfp directly above this comment) article blindly supports the spin that there is some conspiracy where someone killed him. HIs own family goes into great detail all over the press about how he had anxiety and ptsd. That he quit his job on DR orders or the stress was going to give him a heart attack. The shit Boeing did to him was awful (stress, anxiety and ptsd) and Boeing should be blamed for that. They should be held accountable for that. Making his sucicide "Fishy" discredits the pressure he was under and its cause. Playing at the edges of conspiracy theory also serves to discredit the author of the article and the validity of everything else they are saying. The man killed himself. The actions of Boeing played a part in that.
- sudden_dystopia 3y ago
  [flagged]
- stephenhuey 3y ago
  On a previous HN discussion, plenty of people here believed it was fully possible that someone at Boeing essentially pulled the trigger and gave plenty of examples, even from a huge successful Silicon Valley company, of corporate folks doing stranger nefarious things than would be believable in film. As someone who has known multiple people who committed suicide, I'm not sure I can feel as certain as you that this was a suicide without more evidence.
  - thatguy0900 3y ago
    After reading the story of ebay execs harassing a random completely unimportant couple, to the point of repeatedly mailing them threatening or disgusting packages, I can't discredit killing a witness for a real tangible reason.

justrealist 3y ago

> It's worth reading, perhaps unless you're going to be flying on a Boeing plane anytime soon. This is all bad for Boeing, but at the end of the day, nobody has died on an American carrier in a Boeing plane in a very long time. Aircraft safety is layers on layers on layers. Let's not FUD people into thinking that flying on the worst plane Boeing has ever put out is anywhere comparable to the daily risks of driving.

theragra 3y ago
Thanks
bsder 3y ago
> Aircraft safety is layers on layers on layers. This is true, but disasters occur because those layers and layers get eroded until there is only one layer left which then fails. The problem is that Boeing has eroded layers and layers and layers of that safety. The question is "How many of those layers are left?"
margalabargala 3y ago
> but at the end of the day, nobody has died on an American carrier in a Boeing plane in a very long time. This is coincidental. When the plug ripped out of the plane over Portland, it was pure luck that no one was sitting in that row. The seats were shredded. If someone had been sitting there, they also would have been shredded. Boeing and their deteriorated quality culture is directly at fault for that one, and the only thing that prevented a fatality is a coincidence of seating arrangement. As far as I'm concerned, that resets their safety clock. If a new 737 were to literally disintegrate in midair, but by pure happenstance it was entirely staffed and occupied by skydivers wearing parachutes and as a result no one dies, that also shouldn't be handwaved off as "oh nobody has died in a long time" just because luck prevented an otherwise sure death in that specific scenario.
- justrealist 3y ago
  Even if, worst case, 3 people had been sitting there and died (and people are tougher than seats), it would only move needle trivially vs cars.

stcredzero 3y ago

it will be unsurprising to you to hear that shortly afterwards, Boeing began abusing its most senior employees into leaving. Sounds a bit like what happened in newsrooms and at newspapers in the past decade and a half. (Except in that case, it was bottom-up, not top-down.)

deviantbit 3y ago

What do you mean by "down hill"? Boeing has developed incredible technologies since the MD merger. They have been profitable w/ these technologies. You make a claim they were going down hill, what do you mean? I have a number of family members that work for Boeing, that have been in executive management, engineering and research. None of them ever mentioned MD as being the beginning of a decline. All of them tell a different story. The problems began with James McNerney. Harry Stonecipher came from MD, and was one of the best CEO's to ever touch that company. The 787 wouldn't have been a thing if it were not for McNerney. If you make a claim, back it up.

margalabargala 3y ago
This is a discussion of an article. You'll find a link to it at the top of the page. If you read the article, I am sure someone as intelligent as yourself will be able to use context clues to figure out what I mean by "down hill". That article is what I am backing up my claim with.
bullfightonmars 3y ago
Ha. That’s not the story I have heard from greybeard engineers there before and after the merger. I got the story that Stonecipher wrecked the engineering culture and valued/promoted management at the expense of engineering. Management becoming the only path to promotion and career advancement leaving important engineering groups hollowed out.

m463 3y ago

It's really hard to recover from a downgrade in culture. I hear the same kinds of things about IBM. I'm pretty sure there are other examples. The tough part is - it is sad. Read about boeing and Tex Johnston: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_M._Johnston#Boeing_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_M._Johnston#Boeing_Compa... and IBM invented the PC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer

margalabargala 3y ago
Other examples include Xerox and Kodak. I also wonder if it has happened in the past, with a subsequent recovery, to some American car companies? GM pre-2008 perhaps?

jrs235 3y ago

Norminalization of Deviance: https://youtu.be/GN80sx3s4LA?si=de_4xxo1YhFVy0lD https://youtu.be/GN80sx3s4LA?si=de_4xxo1YhFVy0lD

markbnj 3y ago

>> It's worth reading, perhaps unless you're going to be flying on a Boeing plane anytime soon. Just returned from Miami yesterday aboard a B757-200. I was intrigued because it has been so long since I've flown on one. The trip down was a 737-Max8 (or 9 I'm not sure). So I wondered if this was a plane that they had dragged out of retirement. Not like Newark-Miami is a backwater route.

deburo 3y ago

Hm, i smell a google here. What a shame tbh.

atmosx 3y ago

IMO the FAA’s approach and handling was the most shocking aspect. Not sure what purpose the FAA serves anymore.

ryukoposting 3y ago

I'll be on two 737 MAX planes going back and forth to Vegas in a couple weeks. Yay!