5 ms·

> I feel bad for Boeing. I don't quite understand this. Boeing is a for-profit company that chose to try to optimize profits over anything else, and now that's

by diggan 2y ago

> I feel bad for Boeing. I don't quite understand this. Boeing is a for-profit company that chose to try to optimize profits over anything else, and now that's biting them in the butt. What's to feel bad about? That the executives made the wrong decision?

mym1990 2y ago
There are still some, even many, people there that are doing their jobs as well as they can at the expense of bad executive decisions. I’m sure morale there is not great. I don’t feel bad for the executives at all, or the company really, but there are likely some great people that are just getting kicked around based on the crisis of the week.
- diggan 2y ago
  But it's exactly the same at Facebook/Google/Amazon/Palantir and countless of other places, yet people chose to work at those places. Why feel bad for them? They've made their choices, and if they're not happy with those anymore, they can make new choices.
Mistletoe 2y ago
>“between 2013 and 2019, Boeing spent 43 billion dollars on stock buybacks (a hundred and four per cent of its profits) rather than spending resources to address design flaws in some of its popular jet models,”
- KennyBlanken 2y ago
  Not excusing it, but it was very popular pre-pandemic and when the pandemic hit, many corps got caught with their cash reserve pants down. Of course we taxpayers (corporate share of tax revenue is miniscule compared to 50 years ago) bailed them out... https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/business/coronavirus-bailouts-buybacks-cash.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/business/coronavirus-bail...
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    Coronavirus problems are not Boeing's fault.
    - DiggyJohnson 2y ago
      No, but Boeing was going this way before the pandemic. I left in 2021 for context.
    - mlyle 2y ago
      If companies voluntarily choose to operate with lower cash reserves and then end up unable to weather hard times or make necessary investments in their products, do they have any fault for what happens next?
      - WalterBright 2y ago
        You can't operate a successful company (i.e. with a decent ROI) if you're sitting on a Scrooge McDuck cash vault. It wasn't Boeing's fault that the governors shut down the economy, something that had never happened before in the US.
        mlyle 2y ago
        Boeings choice to not sufficiently invest in its core products while pumping its stock through buybacks belongs solely to Boeing and Boeing’s board. The impact to their reputation was a predictable and ignored consequence. In Boeing’s case it has very little to do with coronavirus, which was just a related example: some businesses set aside enough seed corn to survive without help, and others didn’t.
        lmm 2y ago
        > You can't operate a successful company (i.e. with a decent ROI) if you're sitting on a Scrooge McDuck cash vault. Of course you can. There are thousands of examples around the world - not least the great success story of the last decade or so, Apple. Minimising your cash holdings is a microoptimization. It might get you a fraction of a percent more return in good times, but that doesn't make it wise.
haliskerbas 2y ago
Completely agree with you, not only are they for profit but they’ve gotten a lot of help from Uncle Sam along the way too!
vardump 2y ago
I don't think anyone is feeling bad for Boeing's executives. But can feel sorry for the rest of the organization and the subcontractors. Blameless parties are going to suffer a lot of collateral damage.
upon_drumhead 2y ago
Boeing is made up of a lot of people, some who have done their absolute best. They don't deserve the failure that their leadership caused. I feel bad for Boeing employees, but I don't feel bad for their management.
- lysace 2y ago
  This trope that anyone who is not a manager is Good and anyone who is a manager is Bad rubs me the wrong way. The reality is often a lot more complex and nuanced.
  - scarmig 2y ago
    Most of the time, workers and managers are smart, well-meaning, and hard-working. Even executives (though as you get higher and higher up, you see more and more people whose qualification is political skills and not expertise). The issue with Boeing is less any individual and more institutional decay. Over time, a spigot of effectively unconditional cash corrupts an organization, especially once anyone with enough internal weight to fight against it is no longer involved in the day-to-day. Give it 20 years, and SpaceX will be the same way.
    - hackernewds 2y ago
      It could be individual incompetence as well, why discount that and thumb our ears?
      - upon_drumhead 2y ago
        Because while the issues are serious and many, Boeing is still making extremely safe and working airplanes. It's impressive and shows that in general, things are going right. It doesn't excuse the decay and issues, but this isn't a case where everything they do is faulty. they're just held to an extremely high bar.
        nottorp 2y ago
spacemadness 2y ago
I think they meant they feel bad for the people actually doing work, not the people strategizing around wringing out the company for short-term profits so they can move on and do it again someplace else. At least I really hope that’s what they meant. You never know on HN.
- diggan 2y ago
  But wouldn't you say "I feel bad for the people working at X" in that case? And besides, isn't that also a quite strange sentiment? Replace Boeing with Facebook/Google, and it still sounds strange to feel bad for the workers at those companies when the executives make bad decisions like chasing profits over all. I mean, why? People obviously like it there, otherwise they wouldn't work there, so why feel bad for them?
  - tass 2y ago
    There is a lot of pride to be had from seeing something you worked on, with your own hands, successfully work - look at mission control videos for examples of how excited people get. Conversely, if it fails, there’s a lot of disappointment. You can’t compare something like these massive pieces of hardware with people inside failing and taking all your work with it, with some software launch that maybe fails and takes a couple of bugs to be fixed before relaunch. The Boeing story is tragic because they were a source of pride for America overall, played a huge part in winning WW2, made some great technological advances, but succumbed to MBAs fleecing all their goodwill. There are still world class aerospace engineers working there, and sure they could probably get a job somewhere else, but they might need to uproot their lives to do so.
    - jordanb 2y ago
      Interestingly the market for Aerospace engineers is really small. For many of those guys, they could only go work at Airbus or Embraer. Some could potentially get jobs in military with Lockheed or something. Very few may be able to find work with Textron or similar.
  - 2y ago
mlhpdx 2y ago
Treating Boeing as a single entity is absurd. The people there have done great work and their collective contributions to the people of the US and world at large is very much appreciated by many (including myself). It is a tragedy that what was even greater has been so badly diminished by the greed and incompetence of a few. Hating what’s happened to Boeing (and perhaps those responsible for it) is very different than hating Boeing.
- cokeandpepsi 2y ago
  [dead]
db48x 2y ago
They didn’t really try to optimize for maximum profits. That memo from 20 years ago talks about how Boeing management was optimizing their earnings to capital expenses ratio by selling off factories and manufacturing lines to their contractors. The idea was that this would make Boeing more efficient. In theory they would have the same profits but lower capital expenses. The memo points out how fallacious this is, because while it does improve _this year’s_ numbers, next year’s profits will drop because they no longer own the factory that makes the profits. The memo points out that the contractors will now be earning a larger and larger share of the profits that Boeing used to collect, while Boeing keeps all of the risks. When you buy a whole fuselage from one supplier and a pair of wings from another, you take on all the risk that they won’t fit together properly while the suppliers pad their profits by making you pay extra for every change you ask for.

by diggan 2y ago

mym1990 2y ago

There are still some, even many, people there that are doing their jobs as well as they can at the expense of bad executive decisions. I’m sure morale there is not great. I don’t feel bad for the executives at all, or the company really, but there are likely some great people that are just getting kicked around based on the crisis of the week.

diggan 2y ago
But it's exactly the same at Facebook/Google/Amazon/Palantir and countless of other places, yet people chose to work at those places. Why feel bad for them? They've made their choices, and if they're not happy with those anymore, they can make new choices.

Mistletoe 2y ago

>“between 2013 and 2019, Boeing spent 43 billion dollars on stock buybacks (a hundred and four per cent of its profits) rather than spending resources to address design flaws in some of its popular jet models,”

KennyBlanken 2y ago
Not excusing it, but it was very popular pre-pandemic and when the pandemic hit, many corps got caught with their cash reserve pants down. Of course we taxpayers (corporate share of tax revenue is miniscule compared to 50 years ago) bailed them out... https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/business/coronavirus-bailouts-buybacks-cash.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/business/coronavirus-bail...
- WalterBright 2y ago
  Coronavirus problems are not Boeing's fault.
  - DiggyJohnson 2y ago
    No, but Boeing was going this way before the pandemic. I left in 2021 for context.
  - mlyle 2y ago
    If companies voluntarily choose to operate with lower cash reserves and then end up unable to weather hard times or make necessary investments in their products, do they have any fault for what happens next?
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      You can't operate a successful company (i.e. with a decent ROI) if you're sitting on a Scrooge McDuck cash vault. It wasn't Boeing's fault that the governors shut down the economy, something that had never happened before in the US.
      - mlyle 2y ago
        Boeings choice to not sufficiently invest in its core products while pumping its stock through buybacks belongs solely to Boeing and Boeing’s board. The impact to their reputation was a predictable and ignored consequence. In Boeing’s case it has very little to do with coronavirus, which was just a related example: some businesses set aside enough seed corn to survive without help, and others didn’t.
      - lmm 2y ago
        > You can't operate a successful company (i.e. with a decent ROI) if you're sitting on a Scrooge McDuck cash vault. Of course you can. There are thousands of examples around the world - not least the great success story of the last decade or so, Apple. Minimising your cash holdings is a microoptimization. It might get you a fraction of a percent more return in good times, but that doesn't make it wise.

haliskerbas 2y ago

Completely agree with you, not only are they for profit but they’ve gotten a lot of help from Uncle Sam along the way too!

vardump 2y ago

I don't think anyone is feeling bad for Boeing's executives. But can feel sorry for the rest of the organization and the subcontractors. Blameless parties are going to suffer a lot of collateral damage.

upon_drumhead 2y ago

Boeing is made up of a lot of people, some who have done their absolute best. They don't deserve the failure that their leadership caused. I feel bad for Boeing employees, but I don't feel bad for their management.

lysace 2y ago
This trope that anyone who is not a manager is Good and anyone who is a manager is Bad rubs me the wrong way. The reality is often a lot more complex and nuanced.
- scarmig 2y ago
  Most of the time, workers and managers are smart, well-meaning, and hard-working. Even executives (though as you get higher and higher up, you see more and more people whose qualification is political skills and not expertise). The issue with Boeing is less any individual and more institutional decay. Over time, a spigot of effectively unconditional cash corrupts an organization, especially once anyone with enough internal weight to fight against it is no longer involved in the day-to-day. Give it 20 years, and SpaceX will be the same way.
  - hackernewds 2y ago
    It could be individual incompetence as well, why discount that and thumb our ears?
    - upon_drumhead 2y ago
      Because while the issues are serious and many, Boeing is still making extremely safe and working airplanes. It's impressive and shows that in general, things are going right. It doesn't excuse the decay and issues, but this isn't a case where everything they do is faulty. they're just held to an extremely high bar.
      - nottorp 2y ago

spacemadness 2y ago

I think they meant they feel bad for the people actually doing work, not the people strategizing around wringing out the company for short-term profits so they can move on and do it again someplace else. At least I really hope that’s what they meant. You never know on HN.

diggan 2y ago
But wouldn't you say "I feel bad for the people working at X" in that case? And besides, isn't that also a quite strange sentiment? Replace Boeing with Facebook/Google, and it still sounds strange to feel bad for the workers at those companies when the executives make bad decisions like chasing profits over all. I mean, why? People obviously like it there, otherwise they wouldn't work there, so why feel bad for them?
- tass 2y ago
  There is a lot of pride to be had from seeing something you worked on, with your own hands, successfully work - look at mission control videos for examples of how excited people get. Conversely, if it fails, there’s a lot of disappointment. You can’t compare something like these massive pieces of hardware with people inside failing and taking all your work with it, with some software launch that maybe fails and takes a couple of bugs to be fixed before relaunch. The Boeing story is tragic because they were a source of pride for America overall, played a huge part in winning WW2, made some great technological advances, but succumbed to MBAs fleecing all their goodwill. There are still world class aerospace engineers working there, and sure they could probably get a job somewhere else, but they might need to uproot their lives to do so.
  - jordanb 2y ago
    Interestingly the market for Aerospace engineers is really small. For many of those guys, they could only go work at Airbus or Embraer. Some could potentially get jobs in military with Lockheed or something. Very few may be able to find work with Textron or similar.
- 2y ago

mlhpdx 2y ago

Treating Boeing as a single entity is absurd. The people there have done great work and their collective contributions to the people of the US and world at large is very much appreciated by many (including myself). It is a tragedy that what was even greater has been so badly diminished by the greed and incompetence of a few. Hating what’s happened to Boeing (and perhaps those responsible for it) is very different than hating Boeing.

cokeandpepsi 2y ago
[dead]

db48x 2y ago

They didn’t really try to optimize for maximum profits. That memo from 20 years ago talks about how Boeing management was optimizing their earnings to capital expenses ratio by selling off factories and manufacturing lines to their contractors. The idea was that this would make Boeing more efficient. In theory they would have the same profits but lower capital expenses. The memo points out how fallacious this is, because while it does improve _this year’s_ numbers, next year’s profits will drop because they no longer own the factory that makes the profits. The memo points out that the contractors will now be earning a larger and larger share of the profits that Boeing used to collect, while Boeing keeps all of the risks. When you buy a whole fuselage from one supplier and a pair of wings from another, you take on all the risk that they won’t fit together properly while the suppliers pad their profits by making you pay extra for every change you ask for.