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> It just took 25 years to finally happen. To me the big question is, why did it take 25 years for this to become common knowledge? Why is our system of evalua

• baggy_trough 3y ago
  Boeing, and the United States as a whole, have been very richly endowed with capital. When you decide to stop adding to your seed corn and start to eat it down, but you began with an enormous mountain of it, you can eat well for a very long period of time.
  • pdonis 3y ago
    I'm not asking why Boeing continued to make money. I'm asking why the system as a whole didn't spot much sooner that their engineering had been trashed, and some kind of intervention wasn't made before two fatal airline accidents and other near misses happened. The point of the oversight we have is supposed to be to spot problems before they reach that level. If your answer is that not just Boeing, but our whole system is in fact that corrupt...well, that's not a very comforting answer, is it?
    • FredPret 3y ago
      The oversight we have into public companies is only financial. There's no annual third-party safety audit for engineering (yet).
      • dgoldstein0 3y ago
        Well there's the FAA oversight... Which has also hollowed out. NTSB is still an amazing accident investigator but better to prevent these things than wait for NTSB to step in
        • FredPret 3y ago
          Maybe the FAA should hire three engineering firms to go over the designs and manufacturing and have them compete to see who can find the worst flaws. Just having one big entity (FAA) check up on one other big entity (Boeing) leads to problems.
          • shiroiushi 3y ago
            The FAA doesn't even do that, they just let Boeing check up on themselves.
          • bobthepanda 3y ago
            That would require another Boeing sized entity in the US, or a few of them.
            • FredPret 3y ago
              If P does not equal NP, then you will ~always need fewer engineers to check work done by more engineers. So you don’t need a Boeing sized company to check up on Boeing.
          • deleted 3y ago
            [deleted]
    • baggy_trough 3y ago
      I have bad news.
    • refulgentis 3y ago
      You're sort of assuming it happened in some sort of explicit clear way. It doesn't and didn't. I've participated in this process and shrugged it off as kind of their fault and not my place. Until it was my turn. When it's not you, it's just training data on the "wrong thing to do", and it's usually described as "being disagreeable" which accelerates the collapse - this seems perfectly reasonable at the time, they were overly difficult and an outlier. Without explicit intent or some sudden accident, there's nothing to point at, especially in such a simplistic "what corrupt corporate or government official ignored this? Obviously someone reported it" way
      • pdonis 3y ago
        > Without explicit intent or some sudden accident, there's nothing to point at I disagree. As the article shows, there were plenty of technically competent people who did point at specific things. But management did not listen to them, and indeed actively suppressed them and drove them out. And since the FAA had outsourced all of its "independent" inspection responsibility to Boeing, there was no effective third party that the technically competent people could go to to raise a red flag.
        • refulgentis 3y ago
          Right. corporate America in a nutshell. And I'm not being glib: there is no external check on a slow drip of firings, and people will write you off.
    • AdrianB1 3y ago
      The system is corrupt. From planes to tampons, it's self-checking and self-reporting and a conflict of interests: the regulators have no incentive to do more work (or are paid-out not to do), the companies are corrupt to the bone, the public is blissfully not interested to hear, the C level suite is there just for the money, middle management is hired and promoted based on weird criteria, the "fake it" system works too well and people hop through jobs before anyone takes action. Modern company management is not a science, but a smoke and mirrors act.
      • invig 3y ago
        Humans are corrupt.
        • _hcuq 3y ago
          True. But you can still contrast the Boeing of 40 yrs ago vs today.....
          • invig 3y ago
            Yes, but it's all individuals making decisions.
    • scottyah 3y ago
      Most people nowadays are trying to optimize dollars for amount of work, without the dedication to the craft that was prevalent in previous generations. Large companies exacerbate this issue with all the layers of abstraction between a person's work and seeing the fruits of their labor. There's way less pride from work: most people don't judge themselves too much on coworkers opinions since jobs are more changing, and it's unlikely for you to develop lifetime friendships with people who remain on your team. Large corporations have too many regulations and HR policies to meaningfully pay based on performance, so there's little monetary incentive to be a strong performer. You rarely get to see the product you've built get used in a meaningful way where someone would say something about it. It's likely that only one or two disinterested people quality check your work, and in this case you're either within spec (expected), "close enough to pass" (which wasn't getting reported), or failing miserably. The QA people hate getting the last one, but there's so much apathy these days from what I've seen because everyone just wants to be somewhere else doing something else. So basically they've evolved to take away any dopamine one can get from pushing for quality from anyone but the most intrinsically motivated workers. They got rid of those people systemically and purposefully, and made a lot of money doing it.
    • ClumsyPilot 3y ago
      > why the system as a whole didn't spot much sooner that their engineering had been trashed Current brokenthink of the management class is that their job is to wage war on their own workforce and labour rights. In the process destroying human capital. This isn't just my conclusion based on the fact that FANG was fined for having anti-poaching agreement - country-wide, corporate spending on workforce training and upskilling has been falling for the past 20 years.
      • karp773 3y ago
        Facebook was not part of the agreement. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust...
    • diputsmonro 3y ago
      There is no comforting answer. Welcome to unchecked capitalism, it's short-term-profit-driven thinking all the way down. In every industry it's the same. The guard rails have been systematically dismantled for decades by opportunists just like this, hoping to make some quick cash and jump ship before it falls down. Whenever anyone points this out, they get labeled as cynics who hate capitalism and industry, and their complaints are swept under the rug -- after all, the company hasn't collapsed yet, so the worries must be unfounded! This is exactly why strong government regulations and oversight is necessary. Strictly profit driven companies don't care about externalities like pollution or human lives. Literally, they only care about making one number go up, everything else (including the long term value of the number) means nothing at all.
      • invig 3y ago
        We have the largest governments in human history. You might as well say "we just need stronger companies" for all the good it does to say better governments would help and remove the indirection.
      • baggy_trough 3y ago
        Commercial aerospace and military contracting is your example of "unchecked capitalism"? Boeing is practically a federal agency!
      • closeparen 3y ago
        If you think Boeing management was insufficiently respectful of or deferential to technical people and their expertise, I’ve got bad news for you about voters. Engineers can sometimes be indispensable enough to finagle power from alliances with capital. We don’t win popularity contests.
      • WalterBright 3y ago
        > Welcome to unchecked capitalism, it's short-term-profit-driven thinking all the way down Then why do companies' value go up long term? I own many stocks that have increased 10-fold in value over the last 10 years.
    • dotnet00 3y ago
      Think about all the different things Boeing works on, all the details involved in the design of a modern airplane or spacecraft. How is a third party supposed to audit all that, when the designs are so complex and in such a relatively niche field? The most they can do is look for obvious things and make sure the data makes sense. The problem isn't that the system is corrupt, it's that you're expecting a third party to both be close enough to be intimately familiar with all the details of the airplanes and spacecraft and yet separated enough from the company they're monitoring to not have conflicts of interest.
• makerdiety 3y ago
  [flagged]
• redandblack 3y ago
  GE seems like another firm / conglomerate that has lost its way - although we have heard about Jack Welch's management disaster, I do not know if they lost engineers the way it happened at Boeing. Last year, I bought GE Monogram kitchen appliances and was pleased that they work so well, until I found that it is a Chinese firm that has bought the use of GE's name along with their operations. Maybe that is why the appliances work well, and Chinese century is already on its way
  • pseingatl 3y ago
    Think of all the money GE saved: no need for expensive employees or manufacturing costs in the appliances division. Just sit back and collect royalties on the use of the trademark. Thanks, McKinsey!
    • jorvi 3y ago
      Honestly, Chinese manufacturing with Western quality control strapped on top is probably the best bang for buck a consumer can get.
      • WNFB 3y ago
        Like Volvo?
        • toomuchtodo 3y ago
          Chinese built Teslas are top notch fwiw. https://electrek.co/2020/08/03/tesla-made-in-china-cars-lead-market-quality/ https://electrek.co/2020/08/03/tesla-made-in-china-cars-lead... https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-tesla-best-quality-giga-shanghai/ https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-tesla-best-quality-giga-... https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/big-difference-between-us-and-china-build-quality.290138/ https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/big-difference-betwe... https://old.reddit.com/r/TeslaModelY/comments/14upjkq/my_tesla_model_y_will_be_made_in_shanghai_is_this/ https://old.reddit.com/r/TeslaModelY/comments/14upjkq/my_tes...
  • 3y ago
• wpietri 3y ago
  Our major system for evaluating companies is market-driven pricing of the company. That in turn is based mostly on the views of investors and traders, that is people who want to turn money into more money and generally aren't fussy about how it happens. So the market price for a company tends to favor short-term cash extraction over long-term value creation. That is to say, this is basically what our "system of evaluating public corporations" rewards, and it's been that way for quite some time. We're just paying more attention here because lots of us fly and airline crashes capture the attention nicely. When Facebook enshittifies to juice revenues we all just kind of put up with it, but we're not so chill about a window blowing out at 15,000 feet.
  • WalterBright 3y ago
    > So the market price for a company tends to favor short-term cash extraction over long-term value creation. Would you buy stock in a company that does this? Why do you think others would?
    • chii 3y ago
      if you buy stock, but sell before others realize, then may be? If you could sniff out the quality momentum/inertia that the company is deriving revenue from, and sell shortly before it starts dropping, you'd have made profit.
      • WalterBright 3y ago
        > if you buy stock, but sell before others realize, then may be? How is one going to keep that secret long term?
    • wpietri 3y ago
      I think others would for the reason described in sentence directly before it. Which, as "so" indicates, is the logical predecessor. I used to write code for financial traders. I promise you that there are a lot of people who do not give half a shit what a company's up to as long as they can buy it for $100 and sell it later for $101. And based on infinite news reports, we can all see there are plenty of CEOs who will do pretty much anything that will boost the stock price in the short term so that they get to keep their jobs longer.