11 ms·

It'll be interesting to see if they still can design and build a new ground-up airplane design. The last all-new design was the 787, initiated in 2003 and laun

It'll be interesting to see if they still can design and build a new ground-up airplane design. The last all-new design was the 787, initiated in 2003 and launched in 2009, and its design was fraught with problems. Before then was the 777 in the early 90s (pre-McDonnell takeover), and the 757/767 in the early 80s. There's a phenomena that ofter occurs with large organizations where once their markets mature, everybody who can build a product end-to-end leaves or gets forced out, leaving only people with highly specialized maintenance skillsets. The former group has no work to do, after all, so why should the company keep them around? But then if the market ecosystem shifts, and a new product is necessary, they no longer have the capacity to build ground-up new products. All those people have left, and won't come anywhere near the company. Steve Jobs spoke eloquently about this phenomena in an old interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1WrHH-WtaA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1WrHH-WtaA

scrlk 1y ago
To add to this & the Jobs interview - an oil industry proverb: a healthy oil company has a geologist in charge, a mature one has an engineer in charge, a declining one has an accountant in charge, and a dying one has a lawyer in charge.
- SirHumphrey 1y ago
  A bit ironic though because the CEO of Boing during their best years was William McPherson Allen, a lawyer.
  - sitharus 1y ago
    He initially turned down the job because he felt that a lawyer wasn't the right person to run an engineering company, and from reports of people who worked with him he knew his knowledge limits and listened to the engineers. He took serious risks with the 707 and 747 projects because he trusted the people who understood the technology. MBAs and final-gasp lawyers concentrate on making the reported number go up in the short term, they won't take a hit now for a payoff in ten years.
    - grepfru_it 1y ago
      Fun fact the 707 had the first implementation of “MCAS” because the plane had a tendency to pitch up in a certain flaps configuration. They added a stick nudger which applied light pressure in said config. Not a stick pusher, as it did not alert the pilots, it simply applied an extra input independent of the pilots. However this was made aware to all pilots of the plane and likely contributed to its certification. Also the 707 tail was extended by 40ft to give it better minimum ground speed control, this was retroactively applied to already built planes. Very interesting to see how this was applied in the past with a lawyer at the helm vs the current ceo during the launch of the 737Max
      - quacksilver 1y ago
        Assume 40 inches rather than 40ft Adding 12 meters to an aircraft is quite a big change.
        grepfru_it 1y ago
        Mistake on my part they extended the tail to 40ft from 32ft
      - exidy 1y ago
        I think there might be some confusion here. The vertical stabiliser (not the tail) was extended by 40 inches [0] to combat concerns about poor yaw control. Although the Wikipedia article cites the UK ARB as the influence, it was also in response to the 1959 crash [1] of a 707 being used for training, in which Dutch roll was induced and later became so violent it ripped 3 engines off the wings. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_707#707-420 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_707#707-420 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1959_Washington_Boeing_707_crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1959_Washington_Boeing_707_cra...
    - izacus 1y ago
      Hmm, you now highlighted an interesting thing - every company (I've seen) being run to the ground by MBAs and Lawyers was done so because they outright refused to trust their employees. The usual playbook is severance of any transparency and communication and implementation of more and more paperwork and oversight over their employees with no nuance. In other words - complete lack of trust into employed specialists being able to do their work.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    There are always people who work out despite common sense saying they shouldn't that doesn't mean common sense is wrong, it just means we don't understand what the real factors are.
    - potato3732842 1y ago
      Or we don't care because it's a rule of thumb not a law of physics.
  - flkiwi 1y ago
    One of the most exceptional CEOs I've worked with was a lawyer. I still think the proverb is largely correct, along with the other proverb about the exception proving the rule.
    - parineum 1y ago
      That's not what "the exception proves the rule" means. It means, when you see a sign that says an exception, "no parking Wednesdays between 8 and 12", it proves the rule that parking is allowed otherwise.
      - embwbam 1y ago
        I have heard that phrase a million times and never understood it until your example. Thank you
      - cgio 1y ago
        A phrase does not mean anything by itself. People mean something when they use it. You could argue that expressions carry some meaning, by virtue of shared use. But your definition does not align with the meaning most people make of this specific expression as you can witness above.
        parineum 1y ago
        The way most people use it is wrong though and not in the normal "language evolves" way. The exception of a lawyer being a good CEO does not, in any way, prove that lawyers are not good CEOs .
        tsimionescu 1y ago
        The phrase "most people mean the wrong thing by this phrase" makes no sense. A phrase means what most people mean by saying it, or understand by hearing it. So, "the exception that proves the rule" is, as its main modern meaning, a joking way of admitting that a rule (especially one that the speaker had argued for) is not actually a universal rule, while maintaining that it generally holds true. The examples of legal signs and so on are a more specific, technical, meaning that is only used in certain contexts, such as actual legal proceedings or at least informal discussions about laws or contract terms. When /u/flkiwi above said this phrase, they obviously meant it in the joking sense I gave, and which they had actually explained above. They agree that, in general, lawyers make bad CEOs, but they also personally know of exceptions. This is not "wrong usage", as proven by the fact that everyone who read the comment understood exactly what they meant. This whole thing reminds me of the people who complain about the use of literally as an amplifier instead of for its primary meaning as "wrong", with seemingly no understanding of how flourishes and rhetoric work (nor even of the history of words like "very", which used to be quite similar to "literally" a long time ago).
  - taneq 1y ago
    I’d wager he wasn’t just a lawyer.
    - dennis_jeeves2 1y ago
      Exactly, mostly likely he would have made a great engineer if that were his line of expertise.
  - dennis_jeeves2 1y ago
    He was talking about stereotypes ... And yes professions have stereotypical personalities. Like the used car salesman.
  - ExoticPearTree 1y ago
    > A bit ironic though because the CEO of Boing during their best years was William McPherson Allen, a lawyer. Just as there are good engineers, there are also bad ones. Same for every profession. I guess the question is: can Boeing really design a new plane where cost cutting, regulation interpretation and skirting, and greed are _not_ the driving factors? It feels like what Boeing is saving from all the nickel-and-dime it does on everything it ends up paying lawyers, fines and damages. I wonder how they manage to see this as good business. Or maybe they hope that "the next" time they'll score big without any penalties?
    - deleted 1y ago
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  - deleted 1y ago
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- pavlov 1y ago
  Nokia’s CEO between 2006 and 2010 was their former chief lawyer. It’s like they knew they were dying even before Apple delivered the actual blow.
  - davidkwast 1y ago
    Nokia is the best case study of what not to do. In 2005 Nokia launched the 770 Internet Tablet. It was the groundwork for the modern smartphone. But the management did not allow it to have a GSM modem. So it was not a smartphone. Only after the iPhone Nokia launched the N900 but it was too late. Nokia did not believe in touch screen too.
    - zdw 1y ago
      The 770 and Maemo environment were pretty amazing back in the day - high resolution screen for the time, but a somewhat laggy interface given the compute available at the time. Hardware was somewhat compromised - the half-height MMC storage expansion was particularly difficult to find. I still have one sitting around somewhere. It did support touch, with a stylus built in - I forget if the stylus was needed or if you could use your bare fingers.
      - davidkwast 1y ago
        True. But Nokia could do many improvements before Apple launched iPhone. But Nokia decided to stay only with Symbian without touch. And we had to wait 4 years to Android show what a Linux with Java smartphone would be. And we saw Nokia going down with Microsoft. It was interesting times back then.
        tim-- 1y ago
        Interesting times indeed. It was also just before the Nokia acquisition that Microsoft was selling their first Android phone (under the Nokia brand) so they could see the winds of change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_X Nokia already had Android phones released months before the Microsoft acquisition closed. Makes me wonder if Nokia would have pulled out completely from making Windows phones had Microsoft not purchased them. Even Microsoft changed their tune, releasing Android phones themselves years later under the Surface brand.
- wnc3141 1y ago
  In most cases,the successor to a founder CEO is a finance person - because their mandate is to massage the stock on the behalf of the appointing board.
- buildsjets 1y ago
  Dennis Muilenberg has a BS in Aerospace Engineering and a MS in Aeronautics and Astronautics. He was Boeing’s CEO during and after the MAX disaster. He cannot be blamed for the first crash, but he absolutely bears a direct responsibility for every person who died in the second crash, as by that point he knew that he had delivered a product that had not been correctly and fully certified by the regulatory authority. An ethical person with that knowledge, whether they be an engineer, lawyer, or a circus clown, would have fought tooth and nail to ensure the aircraft was grounded. I am much more interested in the ethics of any particular leader, than their credentials.
  - goku12 1y ago
    The mistake was committed willfully well before the first crash. Their emails during the development and testing of the Max 8 show some strongly worded exchanges clearly indicating their full awareness of the troubles with the MCAS system. There was one simulated flight by a test pilot where the MCAS had activated and was deemed a catastrophic failure. In another instance, the chief test pilot said, "I basically lied to the regulators, unknowingly" - a mistake that he chose not to rectify. It was abundantly clear at that point that business as usual was going to cost lives. The entire top management knew this and yet, not one of them decided to step in. The first crash was already too late for them. A team that behaved so callously earlier wasn't going to stop at that point without an external intervention. They were in fact attempting to scapegoat the pilots even after the second crash. Therefore, putting the blame on one CEO at the time of the first crash is illogical. The blame must fall on the team that established such an unbelievably flawed safety culture in the first place. Who was that? And why? I'm not insisting that accountants and lawyers are unfit for top management. There are corporate portfolios that they're the best fit for - like accounting and law firms. Then there are the exceptions who do a sensible job even outside their portfolio. But I have seen both engineering heavy and accounting heavy managements. As expected, their priorities and operational philosophies are drastically different. But their influence doesn't end there. They also define the wider company culture - A culture that not even a CEO can change without significant personal effort against institutional inertia. So, accountants or lawyers may be sufficient to lead IT companies. But if they choose to lead an industry where so many lives are at stake, they better hold back their profit-seeking instincts and understand the safety culture and the consequences of their decisions damn well.
- black_13 1y ago
  [dead]
- gamblor956 1y ago
  declining one has an accountant in charge, and a dying one has a lawyer in charge. You would think by now that HN would understand that there is a difference between the accountants and the finance guys. The greatest con that Finance achieved is convincing everyone that the accountants were to blame for everything finance did. But the accountants just handle the transactional details. They don't make the financial decisions. And generally a dying company should have a lawyer in charge because their mandate is to try to negotiate selling off the company or its assets, or to run it through bankruptcy.
lisper 1y ago
> with large organizations where once their markets mature, everybody who can build a product end-to-end leaves or gets forced out, leaving only people with highly specialized maintenance skillsets It's not just building a product end-to-end. Tim Cook is a supply-chain guy. He knows how to build a product. What he doesn't know how is how to design a new one. This is the reason that all of the "new" stuff that has come out of Apple since Cook took over is actually just riffs on old degrees of freedom: thinner phones. New colors. Different UI skins. The only thing I can think of that Apple has done in the Cook era that was actually new was the Apple Vision Pro. That was really cool, but it was a commercial disaster, the modern equivalent of the Lisa or the NeXT. Jobs took Lisa and NeXT failures and turned them into the Mac and OS/X. There is no hint that Apple intends to do anything with the Vision Pro, and they've already been scooped by Meta.
- Gee101 1y ago
  What about the Apple watch?
  - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
    The Apple Watch seems to have suddenly found its pace. I am seeing them everywhere, around here. I suspect that quite a few are SEs and maybe last year's model, but I do see a lot of Ultras.
    - ghaff 1y ago
      Battery does seem to be a limiting factor and I don't wear mine unless I'm doing activities where it's especially useful. But, for a lot of people, something else to charge doesn't seem a big impediment.
  - ghaff 1y ago
    When we heard young people don't wear watches any longer at the time. And certainly many people didn't think yet another bluetooth earphones were anything to get excited about. AR does seem to be a potential big deal. But the tech and implementation probably has a ways to go before it's interesting outside of a bubble audience.
nonethewiser 1y ago
This is eerily similar to the comment on the thread about LLMs that says software teams have to maintain a "theory" or model about how the software works and when they cant, they can no longer function beyond limited forms of maintenance. And in that comment the idea was that LLMs are accelerating this dynamic. I dont want to stretch the analogy too thin but in this case instead of LLMs being a catalyst, perhaps its a monopoly.
- hinkley 1y ago
  Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Has a degree that’s basically informatics management. My coworker took a class with case studies and the theory presented by that class was that all successful projects have at least one person who has fit the entire system into their head. They can tell you what happens if you pull on this thread. What the consequences are of trying to remove this feature. Lose them and you are fucked. Until or unless someone else steps up and does the same. If they can’t it’s the beginning of the end.
  - cptroot 1y ago
    That sounds like a very interesting theory, with an actionable result. Do you have any links for more reading?
    - hinkley 1y ago
      I haven’t talked to that guy in a while. The way the class was described I expect there’s a bibliography somewhere though.
  - procaryote 1y ago
    For software, the easiest way to design for this is to keep systems small enough that fitting it in your head is relatively feasible in a reasonable time for a competent engineer. Connect them with clear APIs that don't have to change all that often, and you can build pretty big things. I imagine this is doable with hardware too
hinkley 1y ago
I worked on the 787 but far from the engineering team. Boeing vowed to never build a plane like that again. They gave the wing design away to Mitsubishi for fucks sake. You never do that. They were neck deep in the McDonnell Douglas metastasis at the time, and doing an impression of Captain Ahab in trying to union bust in Seattle by fucking off to South Carolina. Boeing customers would figure out which plane numbers were produced in SC and avoid purchasing them. The thing about Boeing though is if you think the 737 team learns anything from the 747 team you’d be mostly wrong. Each airplane design builds up a new company inside Boeing to design that plane. They have their own meetings with each other and vendors. You’ll get some staff migration between the projects but if I saw any I didn’t notice. Toward the end during ramp down I’m sure some people moved onto the various -8 and -9 projects that were trying to stick composite wings onto existing lines. I was asked if I was interested in porting my software to the C-17, after they figured out how to turn it into a bomber. I said fuck no, and that was the last I heard about it. Not that our code was particularly opaque. Some of the cleanest code I’ve ever done (knowing it would be maintained by someone else for as much as 30 years).
- tracker1 1y ago
  Assuming it was more of a philosophical aversion to working on the C-17... it's interesting where different people may draw different lines at differing points in their careers. I worked on a contract project for an email marketing management solution for a major CC/Bank... I hated it, it made me feel icky and after my 6mo term was up, I was completely out. I also once outright rejected an in-company project for the RIAA (and another for MPAA) workplace as I just couldn't support them. I'm a little more flexible in terms of military applications, depending on what they are. I've worked on systems training for military aircraft (not the weapons systems themselves), and wouldn't necessarily be averse to it again. In the end it just depends... I think everyone should have at least some moral line they won't cross, even if that line, subject or level may vary. Not that I support every action in terms of "resisting" a given thing when it comes to counter-action.
  - hinkley 1y ago
    If I’m remembering the timeline correctly, we already knew how shitty we were being in Afghanistan by the point the question was asked.
tracker1 1y ago
Boeing in particular has been about "maximizing shareholder value" to detrimental levels for decades now. Absolutely pushing out its most experienced (and expensive) employees in favor of less skilled and experienced staff often with an ageist bent. Beyond this has been a cultural shift and ever expanding increase to woke HR policies and practices to levels that are more harmful than good. I should note that I'm entirely in favor of diversity of background and thought, not to mention various educational backgrounds. That said, actually having "unofficial" policies against promoting people of a certain race and gender combination (no white men hired or advancing in management, especially old white men) is as problematic as any other racial/gender/ageist bigotry. I don't work for Boeing as I don't have a formal education that prevents me from ever being considered. I do know several people that do. Opinions are my own and not that of my employer or anyone else.
phkahler 1y ago
>> There's a phenomena that ofter occurs with large organizations where once their markets mature, everybody who can build a product end-to-end leaves or gets forced out, leaving only people with highly specialized maintenance skillsets. A coworker from China once told me (and I can see it) everything in China is considered ephemeral. Companies in the US want to invest capital to generate ROI and recurring revenue (or monetize/enshittify everything) or one could say be lazy. Even big manufacturers want to invest in a plant and then enjoy the profits from ongoing production (Boeing doesn't even want to do production). This is why China has been booming, everything is temporary so everyone scrambles and is willing to take on smaller more short term production because nothing is forever. Well, that and they have the capacity since we gave it up.
- imoverclocked 1y ago
  > A coworker from China once told me (and I can see it) everything in China is considered ephemeral (n of 1 observation) Yeah, I just purchased an OrangePI ultra and that fact gushes through like a flood in a canyon. I wonder if I will ever have a u-boot for the board that isn't based on 10 repositories glued together with references to unchangeable branches which are patterned after dates like 2017. There are official images with binaries and dog-knows-what-else in them. It's like the computer wasn't meant to operate for more than a few years (at most.) AFAICT, a person working on so many parts of the OrangePI ultra just stopped as the money ran out and there is a mess of repositories left behind. Don't get me started on the security mindset of the whole situation. /rant
- georgeburdell 1y ago
  I work with a lot of Chinese. I can confirm that they like to work in 1st gear a lot, rebuilding the same stuff over and over in reaction to changing requirements. Because of their immense capacity for work, it more than compensates for what westerners might desire in long term planning. I have gained quite a bit of respect for this way of work due to the results they have gotten.
- TheLegace 1y ago
  Not to mention their customer service is amazing. I travelled several times, been to Shenzen, but mostly travelled to Shanghai for training and procurement of large manufacturing machines. To be honest I am a software person and was never really trained or taught fixing and maintaining moulds/machines. But they have always been gracious and insanely dedicated to making sure my problems are solved and they show me how to rebuild everything. I have a dedicated WeChat group with their engineers and get back to me 7 days a week. Compare that with a Candian machine, where I can rarely get a hold of a technican and they lack any deep expertise on anything even just to have a informal conversation on how to improve things at my plant.
imoverclocked 1y ago
The biggest tell will be just how over budget the development process becomes. Another issue in large companies trying to build something new is the scope creep which leads to committees and then decision by committee. If the folks leading this effort in Boeing are smart, they will keep the size of the team as small as possible. Maybe they will even hire some people back to lead this effort... assuming they can find them. My bet is that they will produce something not unlike what they already have in their lineup. It won't be boldly different in any way as technology that has worked elsewhere will just be cargo-culted forward into the "new" design. The biggest thing that will change are the handling characteristics since they won't have to match that of a previous aircraft. Given that outcome, I (from the peanuts gallery) would design the aircraft to handle in some ideal way using MCAS-like automation to fix any deviation from that ideal, from the beginning. Of course, that's starting to head down the road of a more-Airbus-like design. Also, passengers are probably going to start waking up to the realities of just how bad the air-travel experience in the US has become compared to so many foreign counterparts. If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines.
- intrasight 1y ago
  They will use a very small team and will mostly let AI design the plane ;)
  - reactordev 1y ago
    Can’t wait to fly in the 737-AI.
    - dsr_ 1y ago
      All the executives first, please.
  - baby_souffle 1y ago
    Doors can't fall off if they were hallucinated to begin with!
- 1y ago
captainkrtek 1y ago
This feels apt to my years at $large_cloud_provider, where the current cohort of folks manage some of the largest web services, but would not be able to develop them from the ground up today. The brain drain from these orgs, the shift to maintenance / KTLO, and the focus on sales/AI "features" rather makes this feel spot on.
- neilv 1y ago
  A couple years ago, when I was interested in working at a huge cloud provider (and, in less-humble moments, imagine myself as one of the people who could've helped build that up from scratch)... I was recruited directly by a manager(!), and to work on a relatively small new piece that I thought my systems programming skills would be up to... but then the big company required me to do a corporate grunt screening in Python, as well as memorize some behavioral corporate drone interview answers. I decided this would be a litmus test for whether the manager would be able to insulate me well enough from megacorp drone BS, and from some of the more aggressive org chart culture that the company was said to have. Nope, it turns out, the huge cloud provider really does insist that I do the corporate drone screening first. I could've passed the screen with a day of memory refreshing prep on Python. (The last time I used it at that point, I had been switching back and forth each day between it and Swift, and had to look up details like how to get the length of a string. Yet I built something in Python with perfect uptime, over a year, in a critical production line, despite tricky complicating factors. And other comparable track record.) Though I think I could've passed the nonsense screening, I decided that I already had enough negative signal, to bow out of the tempting cloud provider job. (I had a very positive impression of the manager. I was only scared of corporate culture outside of the team. If you're going to be a corporate drone, and jump through nonsense hoops, you should do it at a company widely regarded as treating its employees well.)
hitekker 1y ago
Andy Grove, Steve Job's friend (if not mentor), agreed: "Not only did we lose an untold number of jobs, we broke the chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution. ....abandoning today’s 'commodity' manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow’s emerging industry." https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-high-tech-manufacturing-base-erosion-breaks-chain-of-experience/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-high-tech-manufacturing-bas... No one listened to him, certainly not Intel.
ryandrake 1y ago
Here's a link to the same video but without the awful music inserted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4
tpurves 1y ago
You forget, they also clean-sheet designed the starliner starting in 2014 and that project... also happens to exactly prove your point. (at least 2B over budget, and 8 years after it's original operational target of 2017, has yet to fly a fully successful mission)
gman83 1y ago
This dynamic is a core theme in Asimov's "Foundation." The Empire's technological stagnation is defined by its inability to create new atomic devices. They had the old ones, and they had technicians to maintain them, but the actual knowledge of how to design and construct one from the ground up had been lost to institutional rot. They could patch the old world together, but they couldn't build the new one.
- alexey-salmin 1y ago
  Asimov was such a visionary he managed to predict the year 2025 in France.
- techas 1y ago
  Very true! Unfortunately that is not present at all in the Apple series of Foundation…
FrustratedMonky 1y ago
Microsoft seems to do ok re-inventing itself, maybe through internal conflict and cage fights. I wonder who the IBM/Xerox of today is? Amazon? Facebook?
jmyeet 1y ago
One of the reasons the 787 was fraught with problems is because it was peak decision-making by finance and accounting people. Specifically, Boeing outsourced everything for the 787s. There were layers of subcontractors upon subcontractors to produce the different parts because, you know, outsourcing was "cheaper" or "more efficient". So of course the logistics pipeline is hellishly complicated. All because Boeing just didn't want to employ people directly who can build up expertise.
SoftTalker 1y ago
> Before then was the 777 in the early 90s (pre-McDonnell takeover), and the 757/767 in the early 80s All of which are generally regarded as great aircraft by the people who fly them.
plun9 1y ago
Just ask ChatGPT how to design an airplane, easy.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
reaperducer 1y ago
The last all-new design was the 787, initiated in 2003 and launched in 2009 That seems very quick to design a whole jumbo jet. I know they're not starting from scratch, but how long does something like that typically take?
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> its design was fraught with problems The 787’s problems were mostly in its supply chain and product-market fit. The actual plane experienced fairly normal growing pains for a clean-sheet design, and has been an exceptional machine since then.
- tacticus 1y ago
  > The 787’s problems were mostly in its supply chain Which was a decision of boeing to outsource to their suppliers the design and development of those components. this combined with boeing doing some interesting pricing decisions lead to suppliers being rather screwed on the project. > The actual plane experienced fairly normal growing pains for a clean-sheet design Other than the design by vibes that boeing leading to spec issues.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > Other than the design by vibes that boeing leading to spec issues What are you referring to?
- shuckles 1y ago
  The Dreamliner had PMF issues? Hasn't it been a hugely successful point to point widebody?
Onavo 1y ago
What problems were there with the 787? IIRC it was the first major composite airliner and they had the advantage of hoovering up all the unemployed post Berlin Wall cream of the crop Soviet aerodynamicists to work on it for them. https://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/26/business/boeing-s-russian-edge.html https://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/26/business/boeing-s-russian...
- KevinMS 1y ago
  I think its too big and expensive for the market right now, its like a cadillac escalade in a corolla market
whycome 1y ago
Does this also apply to Apollo?
throw7 1y ago
Well, if I was CEO of Boeing, first day I'd basically be Microsoft and move heaven and earth getting the Dave Cutler of aviation (I have no idea who that is). He's in charge and if you don't like it you come to me. Second problem are the MBA's. I don't have a solution for that, other than keep them far away from Cutler's division. Honestly, the technical part is "easy"; it's the day to day politics that gets in the way when what is needed is longterm thinking. Take for example when NYC hired Andy Byford and Cuomo The Child couldn't stand not being in the spotlight. Shame.
duxup 1y ago
It's interesting how that infects every aspect of a company. I used to work tech support for a mid sized company selling some specialized networking eqipment, late 1990s and early 2000s. Our big deal was we answered the phone immediately, and we were good at what we did, we solved problems, resolved the issue right then and there on the phone. Customers paid through the nose for our support contracts because it was worth it and they were happy. Happy customers were actually happy customers. Company grew and was acquired and acquired other companies and so on. By the end of my time there happy customers was a metric. It really didn't reflect actually happy customers, it was an amalgam of arbitrary stats. We could hit or surpass those numbers, nothing really mattered. Nobody was more happy if the numbers went up, or more sad if the numbers went down. Someone closed a ticket, did it solve anything?, who knows, but it was one more ticket closed! Management who knew how to build a team, support people who cared, including myself, all just moved on. Sad stuff really.
ulfw 1y ago
Also people retire out. A new product every 15-20 years leads to a lot of aging out
fsckboy 1y ago
you're trying hard to paint a picture of fail, but your evidence doesn't stack up >It'll be interesting to see if they still can design and build a new ground-up airplane design. The last all-new design was the 787, initiated in 2003 and launched in 2009 2003 to 2009 is an incredibly short time line for a revolutionary new design (the heavy use of composites) The A350 developed in response was much less ambitious effort and took longer. The A380 also took a long time to plan and execute. Aircraft generations last at least a decade, and new designs every 15 years-ish is not a crazy ballpark >and its design was fraught with problems A380 had plenty of problems, hence the delays the problems with the 737MAX stemmed from Boeing trying to push the low-wing design of the older 737 through one more generation to avoid a complete redesign, to avoid the kind of cash flow pinch and never-paid-back development that Airbus suffered with the A380 (which was why they tried the "evolutionary" redesign on the cheap that led to the A350) >Before then was the 777 in the early 90s 777 was a revolutionary approach to developing a plane that led to its incredible success which continues through today (the clever idea they had? asking airlines what they wanted) Airbus has also chosen paths that have been quite successful, their "same cockpit" being one of them. 777 and Airbus's planes from that time all had very long commercial lives >everybody who can build a product end-to-end leaves or gets forced out, leaving only people with highly specialized maintenance skillsets I don't think anybody has ever designed a jetliner end to end, as piston planes crossed that hurdle earlier. >if ... a new product is necessary, they no longer have the capacity to build ground-up new products. All those people have left, and won't come anywhere near the company where else are aerospace engineers going to work? I'm not saying there's a surplus but with defense, aviation is a very big industry, and most any engineer would like to work on greenfield designs for marquis products. shoot from the hip copycat Jobs would find no jobs in aerospace. Different types of people have different personalities. Aircraft design is tight tolerance and exacting, and anybody who does it is going to be comfortable working in a that type of environment, lots of check, test, recheck, paperwork, etc.
raxxorraxor 1y ago
> why should the company keep them around? Smart companies should know that a large chunk of their value chain is knowledge work. For airplanes the danger of suddenly seeing a Boink 212 appearing on the market is probably quite low, but there certainly is engineering work to be done on planes, even if some of it won't see implementation for a long time. But long time strategy is probably not even a term in some companies.
Gravityloss 1y ago
But is there room for innovation in the airliner industry anymore? Let's have a thought experiment If you use the same engines from the same vendors, same aluminum, same carbon fiber, same landing gear. Almost everything just like the others, can you really differentiate anymore? Or if you are a component vendor, can you really innovate that much anymore? Ie maybe it can be argued it is the correct move, from the board's and investors' point of view. The machine is already pretty close to optimal, and has been since the nineties. Don't change the machine, just milk it. Fire most engineers, move production to the lowest cost non-unionised place, outsource as much as possible to vendors that you compete viciously against each other etc.
- positron26 1y ago
  > has been since the nineties There's still not a lot of ceramic fiber in use in the engines. That's a pure weight reduction and fuel efficiency increase, up to the point that NOx emissions can't be controlled. Given the rapidly advancing VTOL autonomous drone tech, harbor tug concepts may yet make an appearance. The funding for this could be driven from rescue aircraft, short range powerful VTOLs optimized to go pluck a struggling aircraft out of the sky and put it on the ground. The obvious evolution of that is ditching a lot of the landing weight. Reinforced undercarriage, landing gears, high-lift devices almost all exist to be used in a very short segment of the flight. Unlike roads, automation in the air has quite a bit less variability to deal with. Would you rather pilots try to put a plane with a mechanical issue on the ground by skillfully manipulating throttles or let an overgrown DJI take a swing?
  - Gravityloss 1y ago
    Good ideas. Boeing will probably not be involved much in those things? (Though I could be wrong...) Probably innovative motivated people go to work in software, SpaceX, EVTOL startups or now AI and so on. Even Walter Bright moved already decades ago to software. But it's interesting to look at Arianespace's VTOL rocket development. Can a "dinosaur" do rapid innovation, when there's massive enough incentive? The answer looks like, maybe!
palmotea 1y ago
> It'll be interesting to see if they still can design and build a new ground-up airplane design. The last all-new design was the 787, initiated in 2003 and launched in 2009, and its design was fraught with problems. I've listened to a fair number of podcasts about this, and consensus seemed to be they need to start designing a new airplane now, because if they wait as long as they'd previously been indicating, they'd have lost too much of their "new airplane design" experience.
UltraSane 1y ago
A big advantage for this kind of project today is the fact that the entire plane can be modeled in CAD with every single part verified to fit and work. The US Air Force claims this was heavily used for the B-21 and greatly accelerated development.

scrlk 1y ago

To add to this & the Jobs interview - an oil industry proverb: a healthy oil company has a geologist in charge, a mature one has an engineer in charge, a declining one has an accountant in charge, and a dying one has a lawyer in charge.

SirHumphrey 1y ago
A bit ironic though because the CEO of Boing during their best years was William McPherson Allen, a lawyer.
- sitharus 1y ago
  He initially turned down the job because he felt that a lawyer wasn't the right person to run an engineering company, and from reports of people who worked with him he knew his knowledge limits and listened to the engineers. He took serious risks with the 707 and 747 projects because he trusted the people who understood the technology. MBAs and final-gasp lawyers concentrate on making the reported number go up in the short term, they won't take a hit now for a payoff in ten years.
  - grepfru_it 1y ago
    Fun fact the 707 had the first implementation of “MCAS” because the plane had a tendency to pitch up in a certain flaps configuration. They added a stick nudger which applied light pressure in said config. Not a stick pusher, as it did not alert the pilots, it simply applied an extra input independent of the pilots. However this was made aware to all pilots of the plane and likely contributed to its certification. Also the 707 tail was extended by 40ft to give it better minimum ground speed control, this was retroactively applied to already built planes. Very interesting to see how this was applied in the past with a lawyer at the helm vs the current ceo during the launch of the 737Max
    - quacksilver 1y ago
      Assume 40 inches rather than 40ft Adding 12 meters to an aircraft is quite a big change.
      - grepfru_it 1y ago
        Mistake on my part they extended the tail to 40ft from 32ft
    - exidy 1y ago
      I think there might be some confusion here. The vertical stabiliser (not the tail) was extended by 40 inches [0] to combat concerns about poor yaw control. Although the Wikipedia article cites the UK ARB as the influence, it was also in response to the 1959 crash [1] of a 707 being used for training, in which Dutch roll was induced and later became so violent it ripped 3 engines off the wings. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_707#707-420 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_707#707-420 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1959_Washington_Boeing_707_crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1959_Washington_Boeing_707_cra...
  - izacus 1y ago
    Hmm, you now highlighted an interesting thing - every company (I've seen) being run to the ground by MBAs and Lawyers was done so because they outright refused to trust their employees. The usual playbook is severance of any transparency and communication and implementation of more and more paperwork and oversight over their employees with no nuance. In other words - complete lack of trust into employed specialists being able to do their work.
- bluGill 1y ago
  There are always people who work out despite common sense saying they shouldn't that doesn't mean common sense is wrong, it just means we don't understand what the real factors are.
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    Or we don't care because it's a rule of thumb not a law of physics.
- flkiwi 1y ago
  One of the most exceptional CEOs I've worked with was a lawyer. I still think the proverb is largely correct, along with the other proverb about the exception proving the rule.
  - parineum 1y ago
    That's not what "the exception proves the rule" means. It means, when you see a sign that says an exception, "no parking Wednesdays between 8 and 12", it proves the rule that parking is allowed otherwise.
    - embwbam 1y ago
      I have heard that phrase a million times and never understood it until your example. Thank you
    - cgio 1y ago
      A phrase does not mean anything by itself. People mean something when they use it. You could argue that expressions carry some meaning, by virtue of shared use. But your definition does not align with the meaning most people make of this specific expression as you can witness above.
      - parineum 1y ago
        The way most people use it is wrong though and not in the normal "language evolves" way. The exception of a lawyer being a good CEO does not, in any way, prove that lawyers are not good CEOs .
        tsimionescu 1y ago
        The phrase "most people mean the wrong thing by this phrase" makes no sense. A phrase means what most people mean by saying it, or understand by hearing it. So, "the exception that proves the rule" is, as its main modern meaning, a joking way of admitting that a rule (especially one that the speaker had argued for) is not actually a universal rule, while maintaining that it generally holds true. The examples of legal signs and so on are a more specific, technical, meaning that is only used in certain contexts, such as actual legal proceedings or at least informal discussions about laws or contract terms. When /u/flkiwi above said this phrase, they obviously meant it in the joking sense I gave, and which they had actually explained above. They agree that, in general, lawyers make bad CEOs, but they also personally know of exceptions. This is not "wrong usage", as proven by the fact that everyone who read the comment understood exactly what they meant. This whole thing reminds me of the people who complain about the use of literally as an amplifier instead of for its primary meaning as "wrong", with seemingly no understanding of how flourishes and rhetoric work (nor even of the history of words like "very", which used to be quite similar to "literally" a long time ago).
- taneq 1y ago
  I’d wager he wasn’t just a lawyer.
  - dennis_jeeves2 1y ago
    Exactly, mostly likely he would have made a great engineer if that were his line of expertise.
- dennis_jeeves2 1y ago
  He was talking about stereotypes ... And yes professions have stereotypical personalities. Like the used car salesman.
- ExoticPearTree 1y ago
  > A bit ironic though because the CEO of Boing during their best years was William McPherson Allen, a lawyer. Just as there are good engineers, there are also bad ones. Same for every profession. I guess the question is: can Boeing really design a new plane where cost cutting, regulation interpretation and skirting, and greed are _not_ the driving factors? It feels like what Boeing is saving from all the nickel-and-dime it does on everything it ends up paying lawyers, fines and damages. I wonder how they manage to see this as good business. Or maybe they hope that "the next" time they'll score big without any penalties?
  - deleted 1y ago
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- deleted 1y ago
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pavlov 1y ago
Nokia’s CEO between 2006 and 2010 was their former chief lawyer. It’s like they knew they were dying even before Apple delivered the actual blow.
- davidkwast 1y ago
  Nokia is the best case study of what not to do. In 2005 Nokia launched the 770 Internet Tablet. It was the groundwork for the modern smartphone. But the management did not allow it to have a GSM modem. So it was not a smartphone. Only after the iPhone Nokia launched the N900 but it was too late. Nokia did not believe in touch screen too.
  - zdw 1y ago
    The 770 and Maemo environment were pretty amazing back in the day - high resolution screen for the time, but a somewhat laggy interface given the compute available at the time. Hardware was somewhat compromised - the half-height MMC storage expansion was particularly difficult to find. I still have one sitting around somewhere. It did support touch, with a stylus built in - I forget if the stylus was needed or if you could use your bare fingers.
    - davidkwast 1y ago
      True. But Nokia could do many improvements before Apple launched iPhone. But Nokia decided to stay only with Symbian without touch. And we had to wait 4 years to Android show what a Linux with Java smartphone would be. And we saw Nokia going down with Microsoft. It was interesting times back then.
      - tim-- 1y ago
        Interesting times indeed. It was also just before the Nokia acquisition that Microsoft was selling their first Android phone (under the Nokia brand) so they could see the winds of change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_X Nokia already had Android phones released months before the Microsoft acquisition closed. Makes me wonder if Nokia would have pulled out completely from making Windows phones had Microsoft not purchased them. Even Microsoft changed their tune, releasing Android phones themselves years later under the Surface brand.
wnc3141 1y ago
In most cases,the successor to a founder CEO is a finance person - because their mandate is to massage the stock on the behalf of the appointing board.
buildsjets 1y ago
Dennis Muilenberg has a BS in Aerospace Engineering and a MS in Aeronautics and Astronautics. He was Boeing’s CEO during and after the MAX disaster. He cannot be blamed for the first crash, but he absolutely bears a direct responsibility for every person who died in the second crash, as by that point he knew that he had delivered a product that had not been correctly and fully certified by the regulatory authority. An ethical person with that knowledge, whether they be an engineer, lawyer, or a circus clown, would have fought tooth and nail to ensure the aircraft was grounded. I am much more interested in the ethics of any particular leader, than their credentials.
- goku12 1y ago
  The mistake was committed willfully well before the first crash. Their emails during the development and testing of the Max 8 show some strongly worded exchanges clearly indicating their full awareness of the troubles with the MCAS system. There was one simulated flight by a test pilot where the MCAS had activated and was deemed a catastrophic failure. In another instance, the chief test pilot said, "I basically lied to the regulators, unknowingly" - a mistake that he chose not to rectify. It was abundantly clear at that point that business as usual was going to cost lives. The entire top management knew this and yet, not one of them decided to step in. The first crash was already too late for them. A team that behaved so callously earlier wasn't going to stop at that point without an external intervention. They were in fact attempting to scapegoat the pilots even after the second crash. Therefore, putting the blame on one CEO at the time of the first crash is illogical. The blame must fall on the team that established such an unbelievably flawed safety culture in the first place. Who was that? And why? I'm not insisting that accountants and lawyers are unfit for top management. There are corporate portfolios that they're the best fit for - like accounting and law firms. Then there are the exceptions who do a sensible job even outside their portfolio. But I have seen both engineering heavy and accounting heavy managements. As expected, their priorities and operational philosophies are drastically different. But their influence doesn't end there. They also define the wider company culture - A culture that not even a CEO can change without significant personal effort against institutional inertia. So, accountants or lawyers may be sufficient to lead IT companies. But if they choose to lead an industry where so many lives are at stake, they better hold back their profit-seeking instincts and understand the safety culture and the consequences of their decisions damn well.
black_13 1y ago
[dead]
gamblor956 1y ago
declining one has an accountant in charge, and a dying one has a lawyer in charge. You would think by now that HN would understand that there is a difference between the accountants and the finance guys. The greatest con that Finance achieved is convincing everyone that the accountants were to blame for everything finance did. But the accountants just handle the transactional details. They don't make the financial decisions. And generally a dying company should have a lawyer in charge because their mandate is to try to negotiate selling off the company or its assets, or to run it through bankruptcy.

lisper 1y ago

> with large organizations where once their markets mature, everybody who can build a product end-to-end leaves or gets forced out, leaving only people with highly specialized maintenance skillsets It's not just building a product end-to-end. Tim Cook is a supply-chain guy. He knows how to build a product. What he doesn't know how is how to design a new one. This is the reason that all of the "new" stuff that has come out of Apple since Cook took over is actually just riffs on old degrees of freedom: thinner phones. New colors. Different UI skins. The only thing I can think of that Apple has done in the Cook era that was actually new was the Apple Vision Pro. That was really cool, but it was a commercial disaster, the modern equivalent of the Lisa or the NeXT. Jobs took Lisa and NeXT failures and turned them into the Mac and OS/X. There is no hint that Apple intends to do anything with the Vision Pro, and they've already been scooped by Meta.

Gee101 1y ago
What about the Apple watch?
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  The Apple Watch seems to have suddenly found its pace. I am seeing them everywhere, around here. I suspect that quite a few are SEs and maybe last year's model, but I do see a lot of Ultras.
  - ghaff 1y ago
    Battery does seem to be a limiting factor and I don't wear mine unless I'm doing activities where it's especially useful. But, for a lot of people, something else to charge doesn't seem a big impediment.
- ghaff 1y ago
  When we heard young people don't wear watches any longer at the time. And certainly many people didn't think yet another bluetooth earphones were anything to get excited about. AR does seem to be a potential big deal. But the tech and implementation probably has a ways to go before it's interesting outside of a bubble audience.

nonethewiser 1y ago

This is eerily similar to the comment on the thread about LLMs that says software teams have to maintain a "theory" or model about how the software works and when they cant, they can no longer function beyond limited forms of maintenance. And in that comment the idea was that LLMs are accelerating this dynamic. I dont want to stretch the analogy too thin but in this case instead of LLMs being a catalyst, perhaps its a monopoly.

hinkley 1y ago
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Has a degree that’s basically informatics management. My coworker took a class with case studies and the theory presented by that class was that all successful projects have at least one person who has fit the entire system into their head. They can tell you what happens if you pull on this thread. What the consequences are of trying to remove this feature. Lose them and you are fucked. Until or unless someone else steps up and does the same. If they can’t it’s the beginning of the end.
- cptroot 1y ago
  That sounds like a very interesting theory, with an actionable result. Do you have any links for more reading?
  - hinkley 1y ago
    I haven’t talked to that guy in a while. The way the class was described I expect there’s a bibliography somewhere though.
- procaryote 1y ago
  For software, the easiest way to design for this is to keep systems small enough that fitting it in your head is relatively feasible in a reasonable time for a competent engineer. Connect them with clear APIs that don't have to change all that often, and you can build pretty big things. I imagine this is doable with hardware too

hinkley 1y ago

I worked on the 787 but far from the engineering team. Boeing vowed to never build a plane like that again. They gave the wing design away to Mitsubishi for fucks sake. You never do that. They were neck deep in the McDonnell Douglas metastasis at the time, and doing an impression of Captain Ahab in trying to union bust in Seattle by fucking off to South Carolina. Boeing customers would figure out which plane numbers were produced in SC and avoid purchasing them. The thing about Boeing though is if you think the 737 team learns anything from the 747 team you’d be mostly wrong. Each airplane design builds up a new company inside Boeing to design that plane. They have their own meetings with each other and vendors. You’ll get some staff migration between the projects but if I saw any I didn’t notice. Toward the end during ramp down I’m sure some people moved onto the various -8 and -9 projects that were trying to stick composite wings onto existing lines. I was asked if I was interested in porting my software to the C-17, after they figured out how to turn it into a bomber. I said fuck no, and that was the last I heard about it. Not that our code was particularly opaque. Some of the cleanest code I’ve ever done (knowing it would be maintained by someone else for as much as 30 years).

tracker1 1y ago
Assuming it was more of a philosophical aversion to working on the C-17... it's interesting where different people may draw different lines at differing points in their careers. I worked on a contract project for an email marketing management solution for a major CC/Bank... I hated it, it made me feel icky and after my 6mo term was up, I was completely out. I also once outright rejected an in-company project for the RIAA (and another for MPAA) workplace as I just couldn't support them. I'm a little more flexible in terms of military applications, depending on what they are. I've worked on systems training for military aircraft (not the weapons systems themselves), and wouldn't necessarily be averse to it again. In the end it just depends... I think everyone should have at least some moral line they won't cross, even if that line, subject or level may vary. Not that I support every action in terms of "resisting" a given thing when it comes to counter-action.
- hinkley 1y ago
  If I’m remembering the timeline correctly, we already knew how shitty we were being in Afghanistan by the point the question was asked.

tracker1 1y ago

Boeing in particular has been about "maximizing shareholder value" to detrimental levels for decades now. Absolutely pushing out its most experienced (and expensive) employees in favor of less skilled and experienced staff often with an ageist bent. Beyond this has been a cultural shift and ever expanding increase to woke HR policies and practices to levels that are more harmful than good. I should note that I'm entirely in favor of diversity of background and thought, not to mention various educational backgrounds. That said, actually having "unofficial" policies against promoting people of a certain race and gender combination (no white men hired or advancing in management, especially old white men) is as problematic as any other racial/gender/ageist bigotry. I don't work for Boeing as I don't have a formal education that prevents me from ever being considered. I do know several people that do. Opinions are my own and not that of my employer or anyone else.

phkahler 1y ago

>> There's a phenomena that ofter occurs with large organizations where once their markets mature, everybody who can build a product end-to-end leaves or gets forced out, leaving only people with highly specialized maintenance skillsets. A coworker from China once told me (and I can see it) everything in China is considered ephemeral. Companies in the US want to invest capital to generate ROI and recurring revenue (or monetize/enshittify everything) or one could say be lazy. Even big manufacturers want to invest in a plant and then enjoy the profits from ongoing production (Boeing doesn't even want to do production). This is why China has been booming, everything is temporary so everyone scrambles and is willing to take on smaller more short term production because nothing is forever. Well, that and they have the capacity since we gave it up.

imoverclocked 1y ago
> A coworker from China once told me (and I can see it) everything in China is considered ephemeral (n of 1 observation) Yeah, I just purchased an OrangePI ultra and that fact gushes through like a flood in a canyon. I wonder if I will ever have a u-boot for the board that isn't based on 10 repositories glued together with references to unchangeable branches which are patterned after dates like 2017. There are official images with binaries and dog-knows-what-else in them. It's like the computer wasn't meant to operate for more than a few years (at most.) AFAICT, a person working on so many parts of the OrangePI ultra just stopped as the money ran out and there is a mess of repositories left behind. Don't get me started on the security mindset of the whole situation. /rant
georgeburdell 1y ago
I work with a lot of Chinese. I can confirm that they like to work in 1st gear a lot, rebuilding the same stuff over and over in reaction to changing requirements. Because of their immense capacity for work, it more than compensates for what westerners might desire in long term planning. I have gained quite a bit of respect for this way of work due to the results they have gotten.
TheLegace 1y ago
Not to mention their customer service is amazing. I travelled several times, been to Shenzen, but mostly travelled to Shanghai for training and procurement of large manufacturing machines. To be honest I am a software person and was never really trained or taught fixing and maintaining moulds/machines. But they have always been gracious and insanely dedicated to making sure my problems are solved and they show me how to rebuild everything. I have a dedicated WeChat group with their engineers and get back to me 7 days a week. Compare that with a Candian machine, where I can rarely get a hold of a technican and they lack any deep expertise on anything even just to have a informal conversation on how to improve things at my plant.

imoverclocked 1y ago

The biggest tell will be just how over budget the development process becomes. Another issue in large companies trying to build something new is the scope creep which leads to committees and then decision by committee. If the folks leading this effort in Boeing are smart, they will keep the size of the team as small as possible. Maybe they will even hire some people back to lead this effort... assuming they can find them. My bet is that they will produce something not unlike what they already have in their lineup. It won't be boldly different in any way as technology that has worked elsewhere will just be cargo-culted forward into the "new" design. The biggest thing that will change are the handling characteristics since they won't have to match that of a previous aircraft. Given that outcome, I (from the peanuts gallery) would design the aircraft to handle in some ideal way using MCAS-like automation to fix any deviation from that ideal, from the beginning. Of course, that's starting to head down the road of a more-Airbus-like design. Also, passengers are probably going to start waking up to the realities of just how bad the air-travel experience in the US has become compared to so many foreign counterparts. If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines.

intrasight 1y ago
They will use a very small team and will mostly let AI design the plane ;)
- reactordev 1y ago
  Can’t wait to fly in the 737-AI.
  - dsr_ 1y ago
    All the executives first, please.
- baby_souffle 1y ago
  Doors can't fall off if they were hallucinated to begin with!
1y ago

captainkrtek 1y ago

This feels apt to my years at $large_cloud_provider, where the current cohort of folks manage some of the largest web services, but would not be able to develop them from the ground up today. The brain drain from these orgs, the shift to maintenance / KTLO, and the focus on sales/AI "features" rather makes this feel spot on.

neilv 1y ago
A couple years ago, when I was interested in working at a huge cloud provider (and, in less-humble moments, imagine myself as one of the people who could've helped build that up from scratch)... I was recruited directly by a manager(!), and to work on a relatively small new piece that I thought my systems programming skills would be up to... but then the big company required me to do a corporate grunt screening in Python, as well as memorize some behavioral corporate drone interview answers. I decided this would be a litmus test for whether the manager would be able to insulate me well enough from megacorp drone BS, and from some of the more aggressive org chart culture that the company was said to have. Nope, it turns out, the huge cloud provider really does insist that I do the corporate drone screening first. I could've passed the screen with a day of memory refreshing prep on Python. (The last time I used it at that point, I had been switching back and forth each day between it and Swift, and had to look up details like how to get the length of a string. Yet I built something in Python with perfect uptime, over a year, in a critical production line, despite tricky complicating factors. And other comparable track record.) Though I think I could've passed the nonsense screening, I decided that I already had enough negative signal, to bow out of the tempting cloud provider job. (I had a very positive impression of the manager. I was only scared of corporate culture outside of the team. If you're going to be a corporate drone, and jump through nonsense hoops, you should do it at a company widely regarded as treating its employees well.)

hitekker 1y ago

Andy Grove, Steve Job's friend (if not mentor), agreed: "Not only did we lose an untold number of jobs, we broke the chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution. ....abandoning today’s 'commodity' manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow’s emerging industry." https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-high-tech-manufacturing-base-erosion-breaks-chain-of-experience/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-high-tech-manufacturing-bas... No one listened to him, certainly not Intel.

ryandrake 1y ago

Here's a link to the same video but without the awful music inserted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4

tpurves 1y ago

You forget, they also clean-sheet designed the starliner starting in 2014 and that project... also happens to exactly prove your point. (at least 2B over budget, and 8 years after it's original operational target of 2017, has yet to fly a fully successful mission)

gman83 1y ago

This dynamic is a core theme in Asimov's "Foundation." The Empire's technological stagnation is defined by its inability to create new atomic devices. They had the old ones, and they had technicians to maintain them, but the actual knowledge of how to design and construct one from the ground up had been lost to institutional rot. They could patch the old world together, but they couldn't build the new one.

alexey-salmin 1y ago
Asimov was such a visionary he managed to predict the year 2025 in France.
techas 1y ago
Very true! Unfortunately that is not present at all in the Apple series of Foundation…

FrustratedMonky 1y ago

Microsoft seems to do ok re-inventing itself, maybe through internal conflict and cage fights. I wonder who the IBM/Xerox of today is? Amazon? Facebook?

jmyeet 1y ago

One of the reasons the 787 was fraught with problems is because it was peak decision-making by finance and accounting people. Specifically, Boeing outsourced everything for the 787s. There were layers of subcontractors upon subcontractors to produce the different parts because, you know, outsourcing was "cheaper" or "more efficient". So of course the logistics pipeline is hellishly complicated. All because Boeing just didn't want to employ people directly who can build up expertise.

SoftTalker 1y ago

> Before then was the 777 in the early 90s (pre-McDonnell takeover), and the 757/767 in the early 80s All of which are generally regarded as great aircraft by the people who fly them.

plun9 1y ago

Just ask ChatGPT how to design an airplane, easy.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

reaperducer 1y ago

The last all-new design was the 787, initiated in 2003 and launched in 2009 That seems very quick to design a whole jumbo jet. I know they're not starting from scratch, but how long does something like that typically take?

JumpCrisscross 1y ago

> its design was fraught with problems The 787’s problems were mostly in its supply chain and product-market fit. The actual plane experienced fairly normal growing pains for a clean-sheet design, and has been an exceptional machine since then.

tacticus 1y ago
> The 787’s problems were mostly in its supply chain Which was a decision of boeing to outsource to their suppliers the design and development of those components. this combined with boeing doing some interesting pricing decisions lead to suppliers being rather screwed on the project. > The actual plane experienced fairly normal growing pains for a clean-sheet design Other than the design by vibes that boeing leading to spec issues.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > Other than the design by vibes that boeing leading to spec issues What are you referring to?
shuckles 1y ago
The Dreamliner had PMF issues? Hasn't it been a hugely successful point to point widebody?

Onavo 1y ago

What problems were there with the 787? IIRC it was the first major composite airliner and they had the advantage of hoovering up all the unemployed post Berlin Wall cream of the crop Soviet aerodynamicists to work on it for them. https://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/26/business/boeing-s-russian-edge.html https://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/26/business/boeing-s-russian...

KevinMS 1y ago
I think its too big and expensive for the market right now, its like a cadillac escalade in a corolla market

whycome 1y ago

Does this also apply to Apollo?

throw7 1y ago

Well, if I was CEO of Boeing, first day I'd basically be Microsoft and move heaven and earth getting the Dave Cutler of aviation (I have no idea who that is). He's in charge and if you don't like it you come to me. Second problem are the MBA's. I don't have a solution for that, other than keep them far away from Cutler's division. Honestly, the technical part is "easy"; it's the day to day politics that gets in the way when what is needed is longterm thinking. Take for example when NYC hired Andy Byford and Cuomo The Child couldn't stand not being in the spotlight. Shame.

duxup 1y ago

It's interesting how that infects every aspect of a company. I used to work tech support for a mid sized company selling some specialized networking eqipment, late 1990s and early 2000s. Our big deal was we answered the phone immediately, and we were good at what we did, we solved problems, resolved the issue right then and there on the phone. Customers paid through the nose for our support contracts because it was worth it and they were happy. Happy customers were actually happy customers. Company grew and was acquired and acquired other companies and so on. By the end of my time there happy customers was a metric. It really didn't reflect actually happy customers, it was an amalgam of arbitrary stats. We could hit or surpass those numbers, nothing really mattered. Nobody was more happy if the numbers went up, or more sad if the numbers went down. Someone closed a ticket, did it solve anything?, who knows, but it was one more ticket closed! Management who knew how to build a team, support people who cared, including myself, all just moved on. Sad stuff really.

ulfw 1y ago

Also people retire out. A new product every 15-20 years leads to a lot of aging out

fsckboy 1y ago

you're trying hard to paint a picture of fail, but your evidence doesn't stack up >It'll be interesting to see if they still can design and build a new ground-up airplane design. The last all-new design was the 787, initiated in 2003 and launched in 2009 2003 to 2009 is an incredibly short time line for a revolutionary new design (the heavy use of composites) The A350 developed in response was much less ambitious effort and took longer. The A380 also took a long time to plan and execute. Aircraft generations last at least a decade, and new designs every 15 years-ish is not a crazy ballpark >and its design was fraught with problems A380 had plenty of problems, hence the delays the problems with the 737MAX stemmed from Boeing trying to push the low-wing design of the older 737 through one more generation to avoid a complete redesign, to avoid the kind of cash flow pinch and never-paid-back development that Airbus suffered with the A380 (which was why they tried the "evolutionary" redesign on the cheap that led to the A350) >Before then was the 777 in the early 90s 777 was a revolutionary approach to developing a plane that led to its incredible success which continues through today (the clever idea they had? asking airlines what they wanted) Airbus has also chosen paths that have been quite successful, their "same cockpit" being one of them. 777 and Airbus's planes from that time all had very long commercial lives >everybody who can build a product end-to-end leaves or gets forced out, leaving only people with highly specialized maintenance skillsets I don't think anybody has ever designed a jetliner end to end, as piston planes crossed that hurdle earlier. >if ... a new product is necessary, they no longer have the capacity to build ground-up new products. All those people have left, and won't come anywhere near the company where else are aerospace engineers going to work? I'm not saying there's a surplus but with defense, aviation is a very big industry, and most any engineer would like to work on greenfield designs for marquis products. shoot from the hip copycat Jobs would find no jobs in aerospace. Different types of people have different personalities. Aircraft design is tight tolerance and exacting, and anybody who does it is going to be comfortable working in a that type of environment, lots of check, test, recheck, paperwork, etc.

raxxorraxor 1y ago

> why should the company keep them around? Smart companies should know that a large chunk of their value chain is knowledge work. For airplanes the danger of suddenly seeing a Boink 212 appearing on the market is probably quite low, but there certainly is engineering work to be done on planes, even if some of it won't see implementation for a long time. But long time strategy is probably not even a term in some companies.

Gravityloss 1y ago

But is there room for innovation in the airliner industry anymore? Let's have a thought experiment If you use the same engines from the same vendors, same aluminum, same carbon fiber, same landing gear. Almost everything just like the others, can you really differentiate anymore? Or if you are a component vendor, can you really innovate that much anymore? Ie maybe it can be argued it is the correct move, from the board's and investors' point of view. The machine is already pretty close to optimal, and has been since the nineties. Don't change the machine, just milk it. Fire most engineers, move production to the lowest cost non-unionised place, outsource as much as possible to vendors that you compete viciously against each other etc.

positron26 1y ago
> has been since the nineties There's still not a lot of ceramic fiber in use in the engines. That's a pure weight reduction and fuel efficiency increase, up to the point that NOx emissions can't be controlled. Given the rapidly advancing VTOL autonomous drone tech, harbor tug concepts may yet make an appearance. The funding for this could be driven from rescue aircraft, short range powerful VTOLs optimized to go pluck a struggling aircraft out of the sky and put it on the ground. The obvious evolution of that is ditching a lot of the landing weight. Reinforced undercarriage, landing gears, high-lift devices almost all exist to be used in a very short segment of the flight. Unlike roads, automation in the air has quite a bit less variability to deal with. Would you rather pilots try to put a plane with a mechanical issue on the ground by skillfully manipulating throttles or let an overgrown DJI take a swing?
- Gravityloss 1y ago
  Good ideas. Boeing will probably not be involved much in those things? (Though I could be wrong...) Probably innovative motivated people go to work in software, SpaceX, EVTOL startups or now AI and so on. Even Walter Bright moved already decades ago to software. But it's interesting to look at Arianespace's VTOL rocket development. Can a "dinosaur" do rapid innovation, when there's massive enough incentive? The answer looks like, maybe!

palmotea 1y ago

> It'll be interesting to see if they still can design and build a new ground-up airplane design. The last all-new design was the 787, initiated in 2003 and launched in 2009, and its design was fraught with problems. I've listened to a fair number of podcasts about this, and consensus seemed to be they need to start designing a new airplane now, because if they wait as long as they'd previously been indicating, they'd have lost too much of their "new airplane design" experience.

UltraSane 1y ago

A big advantage for this kind of project today is the fact that the entire plane can be modeled in CAD with every single part verified to fit and work. The US Air Force claims this was heavily used for the B-21 and greatly accelerated development.