"But the average employee assigned to the 737 program has been at Boeing just five years, according to a longtime Boeing executive who is involved in various efforts to save the company; for comparison’s sake, he says the average employee assigned to the 777 program had between 15 and 20 years under their belt."
It don't think it's possible to overstate how bad, and sad, of a state of affairs that is. I've never seen a group at any organization that was composed predominantly of early career engineers that did not have issues (in the aerospace/defense industry). Those mid / late career engineers are irreplaceable and yet they were actively trying to get rid of them... There are no words.
Engineering is not only about know what to do, but also what not to do, and imho, knowing what not to do is way more important. Those C*O without an engineering background probably could not recognize that, but even they do, they probably don't care neither. Early career staffs are not only more energetic but also much cheaper comparing to those veterans in the field. Replacing those know what not to do with younger stuffs will definitely make numbers looking much better, but the consequences are not immediate, and most likely someone-else's problem when it indeed pops, as the one made the decisions would have pocketed a big fat bonus and walked away...
"when it indeed pops, as the one made the decisions would have pocketed a big fat bonus and walked away"
And this is exactly what happened here and criminal investigations are happening, but I kind of doubt, whether they will lead to much.
Much in the article is based on hearsay, so it will depend on whether there are more people willing to testify. But one main witness already suicided, despite telling others he won't do that. Either way, that is already a strong deterrent.
> “We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective.” Often attributed to Kurt Vonnegut, sometimes to Donella Meadows, it’s one of those quotes that’s so good, it seems to have multiple claims of ancestry.
> Wherever it came from and however accurately it may have described the blinkered bookkeepers, Akshat Rathi wants you to know it’s not true anymore. “It’s now cheaper to save the world than destroy it,” he declares at the opening of his new book, Climate Capitalism: Winning the Race to Zero Emissions and Solving the Crisis of Our Age.
I'd also blame flat hierarchy and lean management. When I started as a young engineer in aerospace in the late-nineties[1] this trend had already started, but we still had young people that tried to build a career and reputation. This culture is completely gone and replaced by move fast, break things and when you screw up start afresh somewhere else with minimal repercussions.
I don't say the old world was necessarily better and most certainly I don't want the 80s back, but something important has been lost and we yet have to find a replacement.
[1] I left aerospace after six years, got a computer science degree and built a career in IT. Never looked back.
I'm still early in my career in aerospace and am mulling over the same decision. What's stopping me is I'm already older and I do actually enjoy the work, whereas coding with no relation to a physical thing is not appealing. Currently thinking of trying to get into some inbetween role but haven't stumbled on something that struck me as an obvious path yet.
Writing software is nothing like building airplanes.
99% of the time it doesn't matter because most software is worthless or trivial. A sibling thread highlights the decline of Google: What a horror if someone were to receive subpar search results or view an advert that hadn't been auctioned at the most profitable rate.
SpaceX manages to make things work despite rampant burnout induced quitting so its not impossible. Shorts used to make fun of Tesla and how any experience walks out the door with all the turnover but they seem to have a handle on things as well (less so than SpaceX).
If management is checked out I agree that it is less likely to turn out good which is what I think happened here.
Alot of bright, energetic people out of school sign up because they are doing something unique and cool they truly have a passion for it. So even though the reviews of the place are terrible they will always have a line of talent at their door (atleast until they have more competition). If you are attracting the top tier talent every year, that can solve alot of problems, even if they aren't that experienced.
That being said you are still leaving yourself wide open for failures. Engineering failures often involve people being overworked, not having adequate experience, and working in areas with high churn. See Boeing as an example.
I’ve honestly wondered about this since those two 737 Max crashes.
How on the earth did they design in a non-redundant single point of failure, such as the single angle of attack sensor as in the 737 max? (if this type of component is typically redundant)
But if, “the average employee assigned to the 737 program has been at Boeing for just five years”.
It might explain how such a design decision happened.
Would be really interesting to hear from those the industry, how common a single angle of attack sensor is in other Boeing aircraft and Airbus aircraft?
I also don't understand how you can accept to do this job if there's almost nobody there with enough experience. "Well I have to make ends meet and don't want to look for a new job, so YOLO". What's going through these people's mind today? Especially those who worked on that non-redundant system? They just shrug it off and say "well stupid managers made us do it", or do they feel remorse, responsibility? I genuinely wonder.
I would say "incentives". There was an incentive to do it in a way that needs not be certified, that needs no training and that does not have to be disclosed to airlines/crews. Once that incentive is there management will push it through no matter what, if there isn't a senior enough person to say "this will have dire consequences".
I've been in software projects where the most anyone had under their belt on the team (outside of the managers) was maybe 4 years. It was bad. they were charging Senior rates, over promising and under delivering. The web stack was proprietary so very poor documentation, and no StackOverflow, you literally couldn't find anyone with literal experience with the stack in our town.
What's worse is I saw them turn away actual senior developers left and right. I suspect some fishiness with their hiring practices, but its been so long and nobody I ever worked with is there anymore.
I can't imagine actual engineering where people's lives are on the line. At least pull in some folk from elsewhere at Boeing and have them approve / disapprove of new changes / fixes.
I have to wonder if that entire line of planes is just doomed for the scrapyard.
FWIW, "Prince Jim" McNerney, who most of the article's ire is understandably directed towards, is no longer the CEO. He directed the 737 MAX's development, but retired before the scandals; his successor, Dennis Muilenburg (a 30+ year Boeing employee who started out in engineering), was fired for the poor quality of the 737 MAX despite it being developed under Prince Jim.
That being said, the current CEO — Dave Calhoun — is an old exec from from GE, where McNerney started out; I hope he's different from Jim, but I wouldn't bank on it. Unlike Muilenberg and pre-merger Boeing CEOs, he doesn't have a direct background in aviation. He's retiring at the end of the year, and I hope his replacement is more like the pre-merger CEOs than the accounting-focused recent ones.
> the current CEO — Dave Calhoun — is an old exec from from GE, where McNerney started out
From the article.
> None of the names floated thus far for the spot have been aerospace engineers, and the shoo-in for the position, GE’s Larry Culp, is not an engineer at all.
Maybe they should start bundling life insurance with flights on Boeing planes.
It's a strange anomaly when most of the current top Fortune 500 (US) companies have engineers as their CEO [1]. You would have expected that Boeing to be led by engineers due to the scale of engineering involved in the plane constructions but apparently it's not always the case.
>Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs.
So they devalued Wisdom, and Elders... and things fell apart. This seems to be a pattern repeated all over the modern world.
I don’t think healthcare for employees comes anywhere close to the list of top expenses for a company as large as Boeing.
Based on the article, it sounds like the expertise of more experienced workers was preventing the reckless management from shipping poorly tested products earlier, and this was the actual reason for terminating them.
> The day after Broken Dreams premiered, Swampy got an email informing him that he’d been put on a 60-day corrective action plan four weeks earlier. His alleged offense constituted using email to communicate about process violations
That is pretty shady. They didn't want to discuss violations in emails so it doesn't end up in a court case or found by the FAA during an investigation.
> the longtime former Boeing executive told me, “I don’t think one can be cynical enough when it comes to these guys.” Did that mean he thought Boeing assassinated Swampy? “It’s a top-secret military contractor, remember; there are spies everywhere,” he replied.
I am kind of surprised various executives don't order hits on each other more often. Or maybe they do but the assassinations are too subtle and they look like heart attacks and accidents? With billions on the line, what's a few millions in crypto found in a usb stick somewhere in the bushes for a "job well done". There is also the idea that sometimes it should look more an assassination to send a clear message to others: "you don't want to fall on the knife backwards, three times in as row, like so and so, now do you?"
I know that this is about Boeing, but it is just such a perfect epitaph for the end of the current decaying Valley elite. What took Boeing 20 years FAANG did in one:
“CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had ‘overvalued experience and undervalued leadership’ before he purged the veterans into early retirement.”
> Swampy knew he was caught in a prisoner’s dilemma. If he went along, he was breaking the law; if he didn’t, whistleblowers who complained about unsafe practices were routinely terminated on grounds of violating the same safety protocols they had opposed violating.
How is it a prisoner's dilemma? Is it about cooperating with whisleblowers or defecting them?
It seems to me to be a mere dilemma, two choices, both bad. There was no interplay of cooperate/defect strategies.
If you read this article looking for new or surprising insight, you won't find it. It is not new information that Boeing started a rapid decline shortly after the McDonnell Douglas merger, and it will be unsurprising to you to hear that shortly afterwards, Boeing began abusing its most senior employees into leaving.
What this article offers is new detail into exactly how Boeing has gone about cannibalizing itself. The specific things done to specific employees, the specific quality incidents that were swept under the rug, the lengths to which they went to ensure all prior institutional knowledge regarding how to properly build a plane was systematically destroyed.
It's worth reading, perhaps unless you're going to be flying on a Boeing plane anytime soon.
Fire all the longest-tenured, highest-salaried employees. Now you have a company that appears to look similar but with millions of dollars fewer per year in headcount expenses.
Boeing's stock price went up 10x in the time frame covered by the article. The people responsible for gutting the company have cashed out.
Y'all're gonna hate this, but financialization and the relentless pursuit of profits. Every time this stuff happens, people ask why, and it's because of greed. When you focus on making money above all else, this is what happens. It's not a mystery.
The intention wasn't to destroy institutional knowledge. The intention was to cut costs in the short term, largely through outsourcing and turnover. Why pay a senior engineer a huge salary when you could replace them with a consultant in their twenties? They just didn't think or care about the consequences.
Those old engineers cost too much! And we already know how to build planes. So, we can ditch them, my quarterly KPIs look good and with the money freed up from pushing them out it can land in my bonus check!
That's the million dollar question. Why talented people are forced out? Like managers/other key members have a mission and if you somehow not fit in their "world view", you get hell.
Are any of the executives who did this in jail? No? Well, carry on, then.
None of the executives responsible for this have paid any price. None of the investors or board members who allowed this paid any price.
And the worst part: it's not clear you can fix it, now. Even if you completely busted out every executive and wiped out the investors, there is no path forward since those executives pushed out all the engineering knowledge.
Perhaps because the senior people were at a higher pay grade? If you bump off the expensive employees, your overhead goes down. Better numbers next quarter so you get a bonus.
they did not. this article and many people are sensationalizing it to get attention and push whatever their angle is. it was short-sighted, stupid, greedy, and wrong, but not intentionally suicidal (let alone homicidal!).
a lot of people say things like 'stock price', but that's missing the point. the lesson is in the nuance.
its many factors, effecting all aspects of our lives now honestly.
- young people's disregard for the knowledge of people older than them.
This can be an essay in itself, but there's the idea that the reasons why people are doing things the way they are is because they are stupid, something like:
"you are young and you knows how to do everything right if only these dumb old people would get out of my way."
I had a friend do a start up to make bourbon in 3 months. He thought all those alcohol producers that take 5-30 years making them were doing it wrong. I am like, definitely give it a go but understand that "I am sure they thought about this'.
- management focuses on nonsensical metrics. In recent history, you have to be data driven, focus on metrics, ignore everything else, its the new religion. An example is how technical support teams focus on having 0 tickets open, so support engineers just close tickets even if the customer isn't helped. but hey, that red line is pointing down and to the left right? win! And as with boeing, they made their metrics look really good, look, no more defects! all you have to do is stop reporting them.
- companies willing to outsource critical components of their business. I never understood this one, I don't care how 'cheap' it is, you don't outsource critical parts of your business. at best, they don't have the same stakes as you do on the matter, at worst they steal your IP and/or become your competitors.
Because the value of expertise does not readily show on balance sheets. Boeing had been systematically eroding expertise for 25 years before its planes started to fall out of the sky.
Some people in organizations can't take no for an answer. They want to see their orders followed, and if they see you as a roadblock, you will be marginalized, sometimes with harm.
That's not always bad, sometimes employees drag their feet when they shouldn't. But in some situations (for instance, one arm of the company gaining the upper hand), the people in power are so convinced that their own perspective and goals are right, that they think they don't need to listen or understand the big picture.
Ad to this that sometimes an exec has sociopathic tendencies, and you have an explosive cocktail of harassment and destruction of valuable knowledge. The more resilient the company, the more entrenched this behaviour can get, and the more irreversible it will become.
The entire first half of this (tfp directly above this comment) article blindly supports the spin that there is some conspiracy where someone killed him. HIs own family goes into great detail all over the press about how he had anxiety and ptsd. That he quit his job on DR orders or the stress was going to give him a heart attack.
The shit Boeing did to him was awful (stress, anxiety and ptsd) and Boeing should be blamed for that. They should be held accountable for that. Making his sucicide "Fishy" discredits the pressure he was under and its cause. Playing at the edges of conspiracy theory also serves to discredit the author of the article and the validity of everything else they are saying.
The man killed himself. The actions of Boeing played a part in that.
>> It's worth reading, perhaps unless you're going to be flying on a Boeing plane anytime soon.
Just returned from Miami yesterday aboard a B757-200. I was intrigued because it has been so long since I've flown on one. The trip down was a 737-Max8 (or 9 I'm not sure). So I wondered if this was a plane that they had dragged out of retirement. Not like Newark-Miami is a backwater route.
> It's worth reading, perhaps unless you're going to be flying on a Boeing plane anytime soon.
This is all bad for Boeing, but at the end of the day, nobody has died on an American carrier in a Boeing plane in a very long time.
Aircraft safety is layers on layers on layers. Let's not FUD people into thinking that flying on the worst plane Boeing has ever put out is anywhere comparable to the daily risks of driving.
> but at the end of the day, nobody has died on an American carrier in a Boeing plane in a very long time.
This is coincidental. When the plug ripped out of the plane over Portland, it was pure luck that no one was sitting in that row. The seats were shredded. If someone had been sitting there, they also would have been shredded.
Boeing and their deteriorated quality culture is directly at fault for that one, and the only thing that prevented a fatality is a coincidence of seating arrangement.
As far as I'm concerned, that resets their safety clock.
If a new 737 were to literally disintegrate in midair, but by pure happenstance it was entirely staffed and occupied by skydivers wearing parachutes and as a result no one dies, that also shouldn't be handwaved off as "oh nobody has died in a long time" just because luck prevented an otherwise sure death in that specific scenario.
I’m sorry, why does it matter that no one has died on an American carrier for a while? Not so long ago, Boeing sent over 300 people to their deaths with their shoddy MCAS scheme. It’s pure chance that this didn’t happen in the USA so I’m not sure I understand the relevance of the nationalities of the deceased.
What do you mean by "down hill"? Boeing has developed incredible technologies since the MD merger. They have been profitable w/ these technologies. You make a claim they were going down hill, what do you mean?
I have a number of family members that work for Boeing, that have been in executive management, engineering and research. None of them ever mentioned MD as being the beginning of a decline.
All of them tell a different story. The problems began with James McNerney. Harry Stonecipher came from MD, and was one of the best CEO's to ever touch that company. The 787 wouldn't have been a thing if it were not for McNerney.
This is a discussion of an article. You'll find a link to it at the top of the page. If you read the article, I am sure someone as intelligent as yourself will be able to use context clues to figure out what I mean by "down hill". That article is what I am backing up my claim with.
Ha. That’s not the story I have heard from greybeard engineers there before and after the merger.
I got the story that Stonecipher wrecked the engineering culture and valued/promoted management at the expense of engineering. Management becoming the only path to promotion and career advancement leaving important engineering groups hollowed out.
> Swampy believed relying on mechanics to self-inspect their work was not only insane but illegal
This sounds like the changes that have taken place in the software industry in the past 10-20 years. Engineers are meant to do much more than engineering, including testing their own software, managing project timelines, etc., however with software nobody dies, you just get crappy software that constantly breaks and needs an update every other day. There's an overall theme here of underestimating how hard engineering is, and as a result expecting a lot more from engineers which then of course causes bad engineering. Not surprisingly this is caused by non-technical people with power. Perhaps the fix is a cultural shift and a renewed respect for people who want to spend all their time specializing in technical skills.
The real fix is popularizing the notion that management is just as commoditizatable than those they seek to commoditize.
Note that in the recent dialogue about AI eating jobs, there's zero mention of whether it could come for management positions. Nothing. Curious, isn't it? Why wouldn't an LLM be good enough at this? I mean, it's really data-driven, right?
The real fix is popularizing the notion that management is just as commoditizatable than those they seek to commoditize.
What's described here is exactly what happens when you have "generic" management. Generic management finds unneeded expenses and eliminates them. The only way a senior expert isn't a cost to be eliminated is if you have managers focused on and understanding the enterprise they are managing (and no promises with that, however).
> AI eating jobs, there's zero mention of whether it could come for management positions. Nothing. Curious, isn't it? Why wouldn't an LLM be good enough at this?
There's a whole book about this, called Rainbows End. Highly recommended.
Well, yes, but also no. It was a hardware design change that necessitated a software hack (to escape mandatory retraining of pilots) that relied on unreliable hardware, right?
Sure, software played a big part in it, but I think it seems like it was more a management and communication failure. If it was just software it'd probably be much easier to diagnose and fix.
Great idea but how will the bean counters and schmoozers get their multi-million dollar bonuses if they can't force engineers to do 5 jobs while paying them for 1? Will never work.
Had a manager that does this try and tell the Challenger story once. He had the lessons of the report exactly backwards. Instead of the managers creating an environment of risk by not understanding the engineering and overriding the engineers, he claimed it was engineers not listening to or informing managers properly.
It was wild to me to sit there and hear this manager say the exact wrong lesson of that tragedy.
Software that runs systems which can directly kill people does tend to get a lot of scrutiny, but there is also a lot of software which can indirectly kill someone that doesn’t get the same level of attention
Unless that software is running a life-critical or potentially life-threatening piece of equipment. People have died from software bugs in such things.
U.S. companies have a management problem. I specifically mean that the terminal career path for most professions is "management". Depending where you work, management can mean:
- giving orders
- delegating work (usually this is work the manager specifically doesn't want to do themselves)
- clearing blockers in front of your employees
That the third one is the rarest is a problem.
American corporate culture has devolved into: get promoted into management and coast.
There are obviously exceptions. But a lot of people will agree they've had their fair share of terrible managers. I dare say that's the norm.
Boeing is just the most current example of what happens when a company fetishizes management. That is, there comes a time when the leeches have sucked the body dry.
I admit that I've not and so in that regard, I'm speaking from the perspective of an outside observer. I have worked in middle management before switching back to IC for personal satisfaction reasons.
If I had to guess, this statement that I made is the one you are honing in:
> American corporate culture has devolved into: get promoted into management and coast.
Generalizations are what they are. There are always exceptions etc. And I fully recognize that there are talented, hard-working managers out there.
But, what I'm specifically getting at is that American corporate culture encourages far too many cooks in the kitchen. Managers are necessary. But I think most corporations have far too many. And part of that is because it's the norm to promote your top IC's into management. Eventually the structure becomes top heavy and overly bureaucratic.
To be honest, I don't think what I'm describing is particularly original/surprising.
It makes me so angry reading this about managers criticizing employees for being 'too knowledgeable'.
There are so many narratives nowadays which claim that performance is at odds with talent. People are embracing mediocrity and patting each other on the back for it... The idiots who got lucky, since they cannot pretend to be knowledgeable, reframe the narrative to portray themselves as geniuses who understood the value of idiocy and revel in their mediocrity.
> CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had “overvalued experience and undervalued leadership”
> “Prince Jim”—as some long-timers used to call him—repeatedly invoked a slur for longtime engineers and skilled machinists in the obligatory vanity “leadership” book he co-wrote. Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were “phenomenally talented assholes,”
Decline in attention to quality at Boeing is a known thing. But this attitude towards engineering and specially to machinist is just utterly f*king stupid. Especially to machinists, because experienced one are hard to find, not even talking about toolmakers. It seems that the starting salary for machinists isn't that great and many shops lost to outsource. And experienced folks retire leaving a wide gap behind. Of course, this does not excuse such an attitude toward engineers either.
It baffles me how this happens time and time again in companies as they grow (albeit rarely with this level of human life consequence), and nobody ever seems to learn from it.
Every hour that a Boeing employee spends trying to design or build a good airplane is one less hour that he can spend angling for power within the organization. So the people who care the most about the original purpose of the organization will be systematically outcompeted by the people who care the most about obtaining power within the organization. A widespread and profound problem.
When companies are small, the machinations of political types and their inadequate contributions to the core product are too obvious, and they get weeded out.
But when the company grows large and successful (due to the efforts of the people who cared about the original mission), it has a brand and long-term customers. At that point, the political types can burrow in without any immediately obvious effects, since there are enough other people doing the real work and the company has enough momentum to keep moving for some time.
This is broadly why I'm in favour of aggressive antitrust and pro-competition regulation. Companies should be kept medium-sized and competitive. Economies of scale should be sought through cooperation, not conglomeration.
The companies are smart enough to learn from it. The problem is that in a late-stage capitalist market, companies have already grown so large that the easiest way to continue to grow profits is to cut costs as much as possible.
It’s pretty obvious that in many cases, this incentive is entirely opposed to human health and flourishing. Sure, you can cut costs in consumer electronics like TVs without harming anyone. (Assuming regulations that enforce a baseline quality in electrical components.) You can’t do that in aviation or health care.
Another aspect is that lower costs don’t make it back to consumers in many industries with little competition. A more “financially efficient” Boeing means more money for shareholders, not cheaper airplanes.
A counterpoint is that disasters should provide an economic incentive to the company to fix problems that cause disasters. As you point out, this simply isn’t happening. There was apparently not enough market incentive after the B737max crashes to fix their quality control problems. That means it’s cheaper for Boeing to crash its planes than to have really strong quality control. Obviously, the capitalist incentives in this system are no longer working for society.
These late stage, massive companies are not about making good products. They are legally about returning value to shareholders. The people in charge are therefore all about optimizing the company finances.
The only way to counteract this frequently terrible incentive is by us people (the government) creating the incentives that work for society. That could mean huge, costly fines in these situations such that the only way to get money for shareholders is to make quality products, since what should be a market incentive has gotten so messed up.
> The only way to counteract this frequently terrible incentive is by us people (the government) creating the incentives that work for society. That could mean huge, costly fines in these situations such that the only way to get money for shareholders is to make quality products, since what should be a market incentive has gotten so messed up.
The US government could also get more aggressive about blocking mergers and breaking large companies up for being large. If you blew up Meta as an example, you'd force all of its ventures to compete with each other on the open market again. If you blew it up in to regional or state-level companies and prevented them from merging with each other they would all have to figure out how to work as they each invaded each others' markets. That "inefficiency" of the market would naturally create jobs and upward wage pressure as companies attempted to hire each others' staff away from each other.
They absolutely learn! These jackasses got paid in stock, inflated their income 10x, cashed out, and then when shit hits the fan, the corporation is on the hook. These leaders never go on trial for this shit because destroying culture isn't a crime.
And then when there is an investigation, it's just a general cultural issue and no one person is at fault, so the company pays out a lawsuit, the current guy gets fired with a huge bonus to cover the fact that he couldn't inflate the stock and the pattern repeats.
So, basically, there's high upside and no downside so why not?
They learn. It's a feature, not a bug. Some executive is chilling next to his third infinity pool, chuckling. It's someone else's problem now, suckers.
Exactly. They did learn from it -- and it is by far the best way to optimize around short term gains.
Just like people who join a company, grow the company to unsustainable bounds, then leave for the next company while the previous company struggles to maintain or fulfill previous obligations.
This situation highlights why startups can outperform established companies. It's not only about innovation or asymmetric motivation but also due to the internal decay of incumbents like Boeing and General Electric. This presents an opportunity for an aeronautics startup to emerge - mission focused on building the best airplanes.
> The bosses hit Swampy with a new initiative called “Multi-Function Process Performer,”
Performance metrics are how bad employees level the playing field with good ones. Everyone wants to _quantifiably_ know why Swampy got a 9% raise when they got an 8%, "because his expertise saved the company a $1bn fine last quarter that you nearly caused." Not once, anywhere I've worked, has that kind of metric been tracked.
Not just planes and fairly recently too. I was working at a Boeing subsidiary when the
737 Max MCAS happened. They dumped everyone they could on loathsome “$9000 USB cable” type time and materials defense work. I was a senior Java architect and they quickly “retrained” me to do HIL component testing in plain old C. It might have been seen as a move to improve cash flow but realistically it had the effect causing almost all of the software staff to leave in short order which I guess also improved cash flow. The subsidiary is still struggling several years later to rebuild their software team.
The problem here is that large corporations trusted with public safety - be it flight safety in the case of Boeing; electical generation and transmission safety in the case of PG&E here in California - is that companies cater to Wall Street and bean counters rather than anything else. This is where the CPUC has failed in the case of PG&E and the FAA failed in the case of Boeing.
There should be oversight and public safety should play into private corporate governance for such things.
I am more convinced that Boeing has exceeded their and human ability to cooperate and explain everything that goes into a modern plane - more than I am willing to say Boeing just sucks now.
It’s not just them. It’s everyone and everything.
We are in a complexity crisis and no one sees it happening.
I have a serious question that might sound not serious. The articles I read about boeing seem to focus on assembly line issues. As someone who flies a lot, assembly problems scare me, but so far assembly qv hasn’t been catastrophic (right?). It seems the real issue is a design flaw in the 737max pilot interface. Aside from some articles that feel vague (like competition with airbus led to some poor decision making); the chain of decisions that led to the design flaw aren’t really reported on (right?). Do you all have the same read?
The door plug that blew out of a plane because the screws weren't installed didn't kill anyone, but only because the nearest passengers had their seatbelts fastened.
Is there any reason to think that a plane that's missing screws on a door plug doesn't have improperly torqued fuel lines or defective emergency oxygen generators or metal burrs rubbing on the control lines to to tail, or a software crash in all three "triple-redundant" computers?
The "funny" thing to me is that I'm old enough to remember when the merger occurred that people were predicting exactly what came to pass. It just took 25 years to finally happen.
"Quality inertia" is one thing which allows for giant amounts of damage to be done long before the wheels visibly come off, as deviance gets normalised (and even mandated in cases such as Boeing) and the company eats its reserve of quality and goodwill, it starts going off-track in small ways before it falls off a cliff.
It took closer to 20 years than 25 for the wheels to come off of Boeing. Lion Air 610 crashed on October 29, 2018, the MDD merger was on August 1, 1997.
And that crash was the first major externally visible symptom[0], the decisions which led to it happened years earlier (2014-2015).
[0] unless you count the dreamliner's joke of a rollout, which probably should have been the warning shot that things were getting unwell
I call this "quality momentum". A leader can come in, look at whatever "engine" that drives quality, decide it's not essential, remove it entirely, and coast on the momentum of previous quality practices for years before entropy sets in. But by this time, the board and shareholders have already rewarded the leader for "eliminating waste".
I disagree it happened instantly, it's just that Boeing didn't make any new planes for 20 years that made it to the sky. Even the Max was a redesign of an existing design.
That description you have of quality inertia certainly seems applicable to other areas of life as well.
I’m certainly seeing a few troubling issues brewing but don’t see as many people as myself taking them as serious warning signs.
But when the collapse happens it’s rapid because the entire foundation has rotted away.
It keeps happening because that’s what the system rewards, short sightedness, and is also why founder led companies have more success, because they are able to execute in years not quarters.
Ironically, Boeing's stock price was at about $140 at the start of 2014 -- and rose pretty steadily to a peak of $422 in March 2019.
So in addition to pushing out whatever sorts of financial results that Wall Street wanted, Boeing's perhaps questionable approach to quality was not registering with its financial overlords. This happened in spite of the Al-Jazeera investigative piece of 2014, a $2.5 billion penalty paid in 2021 in connection with the 787 crashes, etc. Not to mention steady coverage of problems in the Seattle Times, Wall Street Journal, etc.
Boeing's stock is still above $100 now, which suggests that it's got a strong enough monopoly/duopoly position that investors do not regard quality issues as being all that detrimental to the "investment thesis."
To me the big question is, why did it take 25 years for this to become common knowledge? Why is our system of evaluating public corporations so messed up that a public company, and one with huge government contracts to boot, could get away with this for that long?
Boeing, and the United States as a whole, have been very richly endowed with capital. When you decide to stop adding to your seed corn and start to eat it down, but you began with an enormous mountain of it, you can eat well for a very long period of time.
GE seems like another firm / conglomerate that has lost its way - although we have heard about Jack Welch's management disaster, I do not know if they lost engineers the way it happened at Boeing.
Last year, I bought GE Monogram kitchen appliances and was pleased that they work so well, until I found that it is a Chinese firm that has bought the use of GE's name along with their operations. Maybe that is why the appliances work well, and Chinese century is already on its way
Our major system for evaluating companies is market-driven pricing of the company. That in turn is based mostly on the views of investors and traders, that is people who want to turn money into more money and generally aren't fussy about how it happens. So the market price for a company tends to favor short-term cash extraction over long-term value creation.
That is to say, this is basically what our "system of evaluating public corporations" rewards, and it's been that way for quite some time. We're just paying more attention here because lots of us fly and airline crashes capture the attention nicely. When Facebook enshittifies to juice revenues we all just kind of put up with it, but we're not so chill about a window blowing out at 15,000 feet.
It's not about the size of the company, it's about the barrier to entry of the market they're in, how much competition they have and the amount of vendor lock-in.
And civil aviation in general scores top marks in all those fields. It's a duopoly with an insane barrier to entry both technical, legal and financial with very long and complex vendor lock-in.
Yep… I wish it were possible to easily invest in the downfall of obviously poorly run companies coughSirius XMcough, but things like puts and shorts really only work if you know when it will fail, and that it will be very soon.
Remember the big rollout of the Dreamliner in 2014 to show it was all done, but it was actually an empty metal tube with landing gear duct taped on it? And remember the venom that people got for bringing up the fact that, you know, you could see the sky from the wheel wells? Or the second rollout, when they had to strap the fuse segments together because no one knew where the fasteners were?
Oh we could go on and on, for pages and pages. This story's not anything new.
I think a lot of people in the industry have just been waiting for the thud, but everyone underestimated just how good A&P mechanics are[1], and how tight aircrew is. As we approach the days when aircrew have to punch a de-ice button every five minutes, we're hitting the limits of those staff.
Something to think about: name a commercially successful Boeing-designed product from the 21st century. Something that can legitimately be called "Successful", and "Boeing"
[1] Who are not required in the Boeing fab - oh no - they are far too expensive. But wait, you might ask . . what credentials are required in the plant? Heh heh heh heh heh . . . oh that is a fun question.
> Remember the big rollout of the Dreamliner in 2014 to show it was all done, but it was actually an empty metal tube with landing gear duct taped on it?
It was in 2007 (on July 8th, a date obviously picked for the memes). Maiden flight was supposed to be two months or so away with introduction in 2008.
Maiden flight was on December 15, 2009. Commercial service started October 2011.
> name a commercially successful Boeing-designed product from the 21st century
The MAX was commercially successful before it started falling out the sky. Orders even picked back up after the dip and cancellations from the MCAS crisis.
It's not like customers have much of a choice if they need a new frame, there are 7000 outstanding orders for the A320neo family and in 2023 Airbus built 45 a month, with plans to eventually reach 75 a month (and stabilise there) circa 2026.
>name a commercially successful Boeing-designed product from the 21st century. Something that can legitimately be called "Successful", and "Boeing"
Boeing is still able to sell planes to customers, they still have a lot of orders in their backlog. This would only change if their are mass cancellations by their customers.
There is a massive demand for planes right now, airlines rather would own a "good enough" plane from Bowling than no plane at all.
The problem isn't the lack of commercial success, the problem is that Boeing is commercially successful and that there is absolutely no punishment from the market or their customers, because everyone knows that they will continue to make and sell planes.
More broadly, what percentage of mergers are successful? I'd guess less than 20% if compared to the analyses that make them attractive to companies.
I've been involved (at the worker bee level) in multiple mergers and in every case where they attempted to merge systems it easily took 5-10X the estimated time, cost and resources.
The most successful mergers were the ones where they either left the companies separate (minimizing the ability to reduce costs) or the ones where they just threw away one of the company's systems, got rid of most of their employees, most of their products, and just acquired their customers.
Indexes of SP500 without Boeing should outperform ones including Boeing, if you’re predicting that Boeing will underperform in 25 years. You don’t have to short; you can use the knowledge to tune your retirement holdings.
You could even weight the index ratios by how self-cannibalizing you believe each company will be.
Requires a broker that does fractional shares or a lot of money, though.
You can buy options (puts and calls) for three years out.
Shorting a stock for that long would be a recipe for disaster, at some point it's going to go up and you're going to lose it all. Remember when you buy long your positive upside is infinite and your downside limited to 100%, when you short it's the opposite.
This is the Systems Thinking concept of systems delay, the time lapse between cause and effect, of an action and its downstream effects. Someone applying this cognitive skill, when informed of material changes like that fact that Boeing usurped some of the FAA's oversight, merged with with MD with its colorful history, etc., is bound to come to think of the effects of such changes and when their effects may start manifesting downstream, especially externally. In the case of Boeing, that means the safety of their aircraft.
When it comes to orgs that make essential contributions to society such as in commercial passenger aviation, I strongly prefer thorough and effective oversight by a competent and impartial body of that org's inner workings and output. Boeing had earlier established a strong reputation for safety and engineering competence. I have no problem with profits; that is what motivates capitalists in the system we have today, but I do have a problem with risking the lives and welfare of the uninformed public. With recent events, we learned the situation changed to foxes guarding the hen house.
Trust but verify indeed. That Boeing was able to so rampantly cut quality in the pursuit of revenues under the cloak of their sterling reputation seems in part to be a condemnation of greater society.
That is what oversight is supposed to be for, the delegation of trust so that we need not overwhelm ourselves in general life.
My paternal grandfather worked for Boeing as an airfoil modeling engineer (figuring out the right shape for wings and creating computer models) from 1960s-2000s. As a nerdy kid he had some of most entertaining engineering stories. One of my favorites was when a coworker brought a boomerang to work and due to some union/budget shenanigans at the time, all the engineers were at work with nothing to do. So they designed and machined a 3 foot boomerang out of clear acrylic. They went out to the field and gave their heavy new toy a good throw, only to have it promptly vanish out of sight on a sunny day. After a moment to process what just happened, they all hit the dirt as they heard it whoosh overhead.
Larry Culp may not be an engineer, but if you want someone who can take a storied American manufacturer that got infected with MBA bs and brought it back to its roots … I mean he’s the only one whose done it, right?
> He mocked him in weekly meetings whenever he dared contribute a thought, assigned a fellow manager to spy on him and spread rumors that he did not play nicely with others, and disciplined him for things like “using email to communicate” and pushing for flaws he found on planes to be fixed.
Sounds like a regular middle manager in any tech company. Sad unfortunate effect of the power asymmetries in corporate structure: managers have all the power but very few checks to keep them accountable. I’ve seen the same thing happen again and again in different companies (including to me), thankfully none of them building planes.
> Sounds like a regular middle manager in any tech company.
I bet this is true in some, but certainly not all, tech companies. I've only encountered one example of such a manager in my entire career (and quit just to get away from that nonsense).
Control via emotional abuse. I've currently got a middle manager who is perhaps the most clueless person I have ever worked for (we gave him the nickname "Bumble" which is short for what we actually call him).
He has no leadership abilities, doesn't understand the tech, can't mentor us, can't pathfind for us and every vendor we deal with he has managed to upset.
To make up for all these shortcomings, he is manipulative and two faced, micro-managing to an extreme degree and generally when he does find something he half understands he's all over it (and you) to a degree that reduces your productivity to nothing.
Control is the aim. Everything is out of control, so the one thing he does have (seniority, the ear of upper management) he uses wilfully.
At one point this guy got an alert on one of the monitoring services, so he panicked and called customers, dragged in senior management and only after that started sending texts that I urgently had to look at it even though I had already dismissed the error as a minor fault in the monitor itself. I made the mistake of telling him to fuck off after the 6th text message in 2 minutes.
I, of course, got a formal warning from HR. He bumbles on regardless.
Plenty of things: control, gain more authority at the expense of others, decrease someone’s value out of pure jealousy, have a scapegoat ready for when you make a mistake, create an opening where you can hire your buddies, satisfy your ego, etc.
Even aside from business incentives, there are plenty of people in the workplace who act cruelly due to prejudices, perceived threat, spite/vengeance, a need for control, perceived threat, general emotional unhealthiness, or just plain old personality disorders. Some end up as managers.
So you can ship your shitty product and get paid. That’s almost always the reason. Engineers have this annoying quality of asking prickly questions and many managers, or people in general, aren’t exactly thrilled by someone constantly questioning them or pointing out errors in their reasoning.
There’s other reasons sometimes. Control maybe. Maybe they have damage themselves and don’t realize what they are doing. But the big one I’d say is the desire to control the product release timeline.
Btw we all keep saying managers, but I’ve seen structures where the lead engineer is in this position of having personell controls along with technical control and it can be, and in my experience was, even worse.
Generally when companies seek to avoid liability, they push to have their employees use telephone to communicate so that compromising emails don’t come out during the discovery period of a lawsuit. I imagine this is one of such cases.
Tremendously detailed for how short it is. I struggle to understand how outsourcing the engineer was sold as good for shareholders. Anyone watching someone write a longer book on this publicly?
It's not about being good for shareholders. They are far away and generally know nothing about what is good or bad decision in long run. We have replaced human QC with computers in many industries. C-suite cares about company profit, middle management cares about KPI.
It's about maximizing individual management KPI despite being wrong for a company as a whole. Problems are for other guys/gals down the line.
so you could argue that those people setting the KPI is either incompetent, or they themselves benefit from such a KPI (at the cost of the company going down).
Back in ~ 2003-2004 I was working for an American company that did exactly that. The story was simple, they outsourced all IT (a few thousands) to a well known tech company. The selling point? "The tech company has a lot of expertise and scale and we will benefit from that". The results? The tech company took all the good engineers, moved them to work in other areas for other clients and replaced them with entry level technicians. It took a few years to start feeling the pain of what they did and a few more years to start reversing the change. By that time the C level people already retired rich, even today, 20 years later, the IT in that company is a terrible shade of "great leaders" and very low engineering skills outsourcing left and right anything more complicated than basic project management.
Nothing new here, but it's certainly a well-articulated redux.
Reading about this Boeing debacle is gut-wrenching because it totally contradicts what I believe in. Nihilism isn't supposed to win. Not like this, at least. I'm an engineer. I'm proud of what I do, and I care deeply about what I make. I'll admit it, I'm even proud of my country and I believe in the notion that I'm not the only person around here who gives a damn. Apparently there aren't enough people who do.
Funny how everyone keeps blaming management and even the merger as the root cause, but fail to realize that the merger was effectively forced on Boeing by the US government.
I wonder if I could get a job at Boeing and ask for put options. My thoughts are that it's going to take a while to fix the company, during which time it will be focused on rebuilding instead of financial games and quality shenanigans. So the stock going down may be a sign of increased long term value. So give me 4 years of put options and then another 4 years of call options.
One of the fundamental problems with organizations, no matter what economic system you live under[0], is that you cannot give your boss a problem that they don't want to deal with. So if your job is to find problems, and your boss does not want to deal with problems, then your job will suuuuuuuuuuuuck.
0. I acknowledge that capitalism has caused a lot of problems, including Boeing problems.
They killed 346 people just 3 years ago due to badly managed MCAS software testing. I guess I can't disagree as you as years is plural and, try, more than one year ago.
I wonder if Boeing’s institutional investors have had the foresight to get controlling stakes in business jet manufacturers to prevent them from going down the same path, just so that they can still get places by plane in reasonable safety.
Money trumps even the personal safety of the person getting the money. Look at the guy with the carbon fibre submarine. He literally sacrificed his life in the pursuit of profit.
If he wanted money he would have invested in something more sensible, I don’t think OceanGate would have ever been profitable even if the submersible had worked.
The Boeing execs obviously love money, but I think they get their biggest kicks simply from remaking Boeing itself in their own depraved image.
I was reading the part about making employees sign a declaration about taking responsibility for their work and thought that was pure genius. Sounds like managers should also sign something like that.
From the article:
>Discussing Swampy’s death and the whistleblower lawsuit he left behind, the longtime former Boeing executive told me, “I don’t think one can be cynical enough when it comes to these guys.” Did that mean he thought Boeing assassinated Swampy? “It’s a top-secret military contractor, remember; there are spies everywhere,” he replied.
Me:
Aaaaand no way I'm ever applying to work at an MIC defense contractor conglomerate ever again.
Corporate greed.
Simple and truthful answer…it’s also applicable for many many other companies who have abandoned their ways and have fallen victim of the dark side profit, dividend, share price and all the other similar capitalistic ideas :-(
A nonconformance is generally a physical thing. For instance a part my be out of tolerance or have have damage that makes it nonconforming.
A noncompliance is generally referring to procedures. For instance not documenting a step in a quality review or not following the assembly procedures for a door plug and ending up with some extra bolts.
There are real problems at Boeing and those are real issues, but let's beware of the BS that comes with the kind of widespread pile-on that's happening now.
This article reads like an Internet rant to me, with the sarcasm, hyperbole, and ridicule. Those things aren't awful in themselves (though they've become very overused and tiresome to me), but they crowd out actual facts, details, nuance, complexities. If you write 'it's the worst thing ever', you omit where and how it's bad, where it's not, the consequences, the trade-offs, etc. I don't learn what happened, how, or why, just that you are really, really, really pissed off.
Examples:
* pieces are flying off the Boeing planes actually in use at an alarming rate
* to train the workforce to properly put together a plane.
* obligatory vanity “leadership” book - note the ridicule and scare quotes.
* suppliers, many of which lacked engineering departments* -- now using fonts for emphasis
* in a perpetual state of unlearning all the lessons it had absorbed over a 90-year ascent to the pinnacle of global manufacturing
* Qatar Airways had become so disgusted ..., coincidentally matching the author's emotion
* one of the most pathetic plea bargains in the history of American justice
It's like series of Reddit comments, and the world certainly doesn't need more of that. The author's and American Prospect's quality is no better than Boeing's.
> Subtract some adjectives, would that make a difference?
That would help, but that's secondary. They need to add the information I discussed on the GP. That info is incompatible with sweeping, absolutist adjectives, so they would go away.
Sweeping, extreme statements are a tip-off to BS for anything: Reality isn't that simple.
As I was reading this it reminded me 100% of GE. Another manufacturing giant that put profit above all else and many people suffered for it as the company collapsed under the weight of its own incompetence... though many also became staggeringly wealthy.
GE is absolutely a place where leadership is the only “skill” that matters. Leaders are all that’s needed and everyone else is a commodity. Leader worship and success theater killed GE.
I could only shake my head when I got to the part where a former GE leader is in the running to be the new CEO.
Make sure your affairs are in order before boarding a Boeing aircraft.
This isn't unique to Boeing. All large companies will eventually get to this state. People who usually makes it to management positions have no clue about what they are managing. Then they will always shit on the actual worked so they can keep their job.
Anecdotal story: A few years ago I worked with ex-Boeing employees from Altus AFB. They were disgusted by the quality control of the delivered C-17 Globemasters. Construction garbage in the wall panels, etc. Like the article, their complaints only succeeded in labeling them as "troublemakers" within the company.
But racist white supremacists like Elon Musk blamed it on "DEI" (which is their new dog whistle for the n-word). Same thing they say caused a container ship to hit the Francis Scott Key Bridge.
‘A Black guy’ didn’t cause Boeing’s midair blowout. Capitalism did:
>"Listen, I know and we all know and you know very well that Black men and young Black men in particular have been the boogeyman for those who are racist and think that only straight wealthy white men should have a say in anything," Scott said. "What they mean by DEI, in my opinion, is duly elected incumbent. We know what they want to say but they don’t have the courage to say the N-word."
>Scott was elected in 2020 with 70% of the popular vote. He is one among five mayors of color to have led the city since 2007. Over 60% of Baltimore residents are Black, according to Census data.
Lyman blames DEI for Baltimore bridge collapse, but admits he didn’t write social media post:
>Utah Republican Phil Lyman, an outgoing state representative and current gubernatorial candidate, suggested diversity, equity and inclusion programs were to blame, at least in part, for the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore on Tuesday.
Ah, so that was where this "Boeing was DEI" meme coming from. Papa Elon, of course!
I was wondering why multiple commenters brought up DEI when the story was about a beloved American company getting destroyed by clueless upper-class CEOs (all being old white men, incidentally). Like, did we read the same article?
I remember here when the first 737 Max crashed and then after the second, people here were swearing up and down the cause was that the pilots were wogs.
"So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.
They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers."
Sales and marketing - and financialization and capital efficiency. I got no beef with accountants, but I think companies need just enough focus on financialization and low to medium priority on capital efficiency (ie, look out for stupid wastes of capital).
Perspective: the S&M folks he's complaining about, don't even think at all about users holding products. Seriously, it's all spreadsheets and powerpoint, because they've never built anything with their hands, never worked on a team, and never worked on a "factory floor" (e.g. live server/database, etc).
Steve Jobs and his generation all soldered boards that went to paying customers.
Elon Musk slept on the NUMMI factory floor to deal with "production hell."
Bill Gates personally debugged MS-DOS.
The "bean counters" are not bad people, but doing this stuff creates a humility about quality and quality process, and not doing this stuff lulls people into a distaste/disdain/disrespect for it.
Analogously, engineers who've never been responsible for financial statements literally don't appreciate the work to get them materially correct, let alone meet legit regulatory requirements because someone somewhere cheated in counting inventory or money or whatever.
Let's be clear, "you are holding it wrong" was an ass-covering lie to carry Apple through an era of bad press for a device that was otherwise monumental, and when you look back at iPhone adoption history. 4 was the inflection point of growth that never stopped. 3, 3G, and 3GS were all fine, but 4 is when iPhone took over the world.
It was bold-faced, it was arrogant, it wasn't true, but it let them fix the issues and never look back.
The product was otherwise good save a frustrating flaw that was easy to fix, but probably wouldn't have ushered in the era of dominance if they had to do a total recall.
Would I have been happy if I was an iPhone user at the time? No, I would've been livid.
Since we live in a capitalist society, maybe the past golden times of Boeing are the exception, not the rule. Boeing is just another for-profit company now.
I am not exaggerating to say that Jim McNerney should be dragged in front of Congress and be forced to explain what he did to an incredibly important American company. It's important to push back against the shareholder value theory where appropriate and humiliation is an underrated component of that.
A public hearing isn't going to change anything. Look at...well, literally any powerful organization or individual brought before Congress for excoriation. The pound of flesh they want is press and votes, and you don't have to change anything to get that.
It's not like they're going to break up Boeing. They can't actually do anything to improve Boeing. All they can do is wag their finger. It's not like there's an alternative American company to give our billions of dollars to. And it's not like other companies will suddenly fear being brought forward to be gummed to death by whining bureaucrats.
You want real pain? Have them pass a law that says the entire executive leadership's bonuses are forfeit, retroactively, if the company fails to maintain an adequate safety record. Shit will change there real quick. (That law will never happen but it's funny to think of)
I think culture is underrated. Acting like he did should not be considered a dignified behavior and I think that will meaningfully constrict behavior even in the absence of new laws. Think about how business culture varies across jurisdictions: there's more than just profit-maximization at work.
Also, to be clear, Boeing's safety record is still good. The only recent deaths are associated with less-trained pilots in the earlier days of the 737 MAX. My frustration is they took this organization from an engineering leader to an organization that can't ship a plane. The 787, 737 MAX, and now 777X were/are insanely delayed.
The nightmare scenario of a US-China war and Boeing being unable to ship a plane honestly haunts me. Boeing is extremely important to the West, broadly defined and this jerk didn't uphold his commensurate responsibilities.
The entire neoliberal ideology needs to be reevaluated at every level of business in this country. We're destroying our skilled labor forces and our economy to pursue short term gains and it's going to have a negative impact on our national security.
I disagree with this. I don't really care if a video game company is run in a profit-maximizing way. We should probably be a bit more skeptical with important companies, particularly ones that seem irreplaceable (for all their faults, only one other company can do what Boeing does).
Pournelle's Iron Law is just him saying "I am a Republican". You are not required to listen to him.
For balance, I stopped reading this article at the end of the first page because it called Boeing "neoliberal", which doesn't mean anything except that the writer is a snotty humanities grad.
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
Huh? His observation is politically neutral. It just notes that the people running organizations are, ultimately, selfish (as are most people). They will ultimately look after themselves, even at the cost of the organization they are supposed to be caring for.
You see this everywhere. Crazy CEO salaries and golden parachutes, as CEOs sit on each other's boards approving such packages. Charities that prolong the problem they were set up to eliminate. "Old space" where NASA provided decades of unjustified cost-plus contracts.
I have zero patience for fools who are allegedly knowledge workers, yet complain about popups and ads in the year 2024.
The ads are obnoxious, but they are there for the plebs, and we need to put obnoxious ads the faces of plebs to fund the internet. If you are not a pleb, you already have an adblocking solution installed, so please use it. If however, you are a pleb, please consume mass quantities of the product which is being advertised. There are a lot of adware developers who are counting on you to buy their next Porsche.
Or, invent a decent micropayent solution so we can get rid of the damn ads.
If you are selecting for anything besides competence, your chances of getting competence is effectively random. It says nothing about one group of people being more or less competent than another.
I have observed that selecting for competence leads to diversity, and I believe that diversity is a strength. But it is best achieved organically.
Personally I think the shortcomings we have with achieving diversity is in the framing stage, not the hiring stage.
In some industries when you have diversity targets you need to lower the standards a lot. Why? Because the competence-based hiring and promotion process will not get you enough good candidates to meet the diversity targets, so you take shortcuts like Boeing did with QC.
According to StackOverflow survey a few years ago with a huge (relevant) number of answers, about 8% of people in the domain were women. Some companies have targets of 50 to 70% women. How do you think these targets are met? My company had 70% target and we are close; we hired any woman that ever applied, no questions asked, no tech interview. I managed the IT recruiting for an entire region over 5 years, I quit that role when the tech interviews were forbidden in order to meet targets.
>The plan would save money while busting unions, a win-win, he promised investors. Instead, McNerney’s plan burned some $50 billion in excess of its budget and went three and a half years behind schedule.
They have a moral obligation to disclose their conflicts of interest in being unionized themselves.
The staff at The American Prospect are all part of a News Guild, with their employer mandated into exclusive collective bargaining with their bargaining unit:
"But the average employee assigned to the 737 program has been at Boeing just five years, according to a longtime Boeing executive who is involved in various efforts to save the company; for comparison’s sake, he says the average employee assigned to the 777 program had between 15 and 20 years under their belt."
It don't think it's possible to overstate how bad, and sad, of a state of affairs that is. I've never seen a group at any organization that was composed predominantly of early career engineers that did not have issues (in the aerospace/defense industry). Those mid / late career engineers are irreplaceable and yet they were actively trying to get rid of them... There are no words.
Engineering is not only about know what to do, but also what not to do, and imho, knowing what not to do is way more important. Those C*O without an engineering background probably could not recognize that, but even they do, they probably don't care neither. Early career staffs are not only more energetic but also much cheaper comparing to those veterans in the field. Replacing those know what not to do with younger stuffs will definitely make numbers looking much better, but the consequences are not immediate, and most likely someone-else's problem when it indeed pops, as the one made the decisions would have pocketed a big fat bonus and walked away...
> Early career staffs are not only more energetic but also much cheaper comparing to those veterans in the field.
They're also easier to persuade and coerce into doing something a person with a longer carrier would have never done.
"when it indeed pops, as the one made the decisions would have pocketed a big fat bonus and walked away"
And this is exactly what happened here and criminal investigations are happening, but I kind of doubt, whether they will lead to much.
Much in the article is based on hearsay, so it will depend on whether there are more people willing to testify. But one main witness already suicided, despite telling others he won't do that. Either way, that is already a strong deterrent.
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> what not to do
I think that's the unique skill that old and experienced people bring.
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>...irreplaceable and yet they were actively trying to get rid of them... There are no words.
Best response I can offer is Kurt Vonnegut's quote:
"We'll go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost-effective."
> "We'll go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost-effective."
Meta: Is it Vonnegut?
* https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11432253-we-ll-go-down-in-h...
> “We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective.” Often attributed to Kurt Vonnegut, sometimes to Donella Meadows, it’s one of those quotes that’s so good, it seems to have multiple claims of ancestry.
> Wherever it came from and however accurately it may have described the blinkered bookkeepers, Akshat Rathi wants you to know it’s not true anymore. “It’s now cheaper to save the world than destroy it,” he declares at the opening of his new book, Climate Capitalism: Winning the Race to Zero Emissions and Solving the Crisis of Our Age.
* https://www.nationalobserver.com/2024/03/18/opinion/climate-...
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So it goes...
I'd also blame flat hierarchy and lean management. When I started as a young engineer in aerospace in the late-nineties[1] this trend had already started, but we still had young people that tried to build a career and reputation. This culture is completely gone and replaced by move fast, break things and when you screw up start afresh somewhere else with minimal repercussions.
I don't say the old world was necessarily better and most certainly I don't want the 80s back, but something important has been lost and we yet have to find a replacement.
[1] I left aerospace after six years, got a computer science degree and built a career in IT. Never looked back.
I'm still early in my career in aerospace and am mulling over the same decision. What's stopping me is I'm already older and I do actually enjoy the work, whereas coding with no relation to a physical thing is not appealing. Currently thinking of trying to get into some inbetween role but haven't stumbled on something that struck me as an obvious path yet.
What convinced you to make the jump?
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Something very similar is happening, at a very rapid pace, in software development.
Writing software is nothing like building airplanes.
99% of the time it doesn't matter because most software is worthless or trivial. A sibling thread highlights the decline of Google: What a horror if someone were to receive subpar search results or view an advert that hadn't been auctioned at the most profitable rate.
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https://www.wired.com/story/ageism-haunts-tech-workers-layof...
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Are you (ironically) new?
Software has been like that for st least three decades.
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Just look at Google
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SpaceX manages to make things work despite rampant burnout induced quitting so its not impossible. Shorts used to make fun of Tesla and how any experience walks out the door with all the turnover but they seem to have a handle on things as well (less so than SpaceX).
If management is checked out I agree that it is less likely to turn out good which is what I think happened here.
Alot of bright, energetic people out of school sign up because they are doing something unique and cool they truly have a passion for it. So even though the reviews of the place are terrible they will always have a line of talent at their door (atleast until they have more competition). If you are attracting the top tier talent every year, that can solve alot of problems, even if they aren't that experienced.
That being said you are still leaving yourself wide open for failures. Engineering failures often involve people being overworked, not having adequate experience, and working in areas with high churn. See Boeing as an example.
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I’ve honestly wondered about this since those two 737 Max crashes.
How on the earth did they design in a non-redundant single point of failure, such as the single angle of attack sensor as in the 737 max? (if this type of component is typically redundant)
But if, “the average employee assigned to the 737 program has been at Boeing for just five years”. It might explain how such a design decision happened.
Would be really interesting to hear from those the industry, how common a single angle of attack sensor is in other Boeing aircraft and Airbus aircraft?
I also don't understand how you can accept to do this job if there's almost nobody there with enough experience. "Well I have to make ends meet and don't want to look for a new job, so YOLO". What's going through these people's mind today? Especially those who worked on that non-redundant system? They just shrug it off and say "well stupid managers made us do it", or do they feel remorse, responsibility? I genuinely wonder.
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I would say "incentives". There was an incentive to do it in a way that needs not be certified, that needs no training and that does not have to be disclosed to airlines/crews. Once that incentive is there management will push it through no matter what, if there isn't a senior enough person to say "this will have dire consequences".
I've been in software projects where the most anyone had under their belt on the team (outside of the managers) was maybe 4 years. It was bad. they were charging Senior rates, over promising and under delivering. The web stack was proprietary so very poor documentation, and no StackOverflow, you literally couldn't find anyone with literal experience with the stack in our town.
What's worse is I saw them turn away actual senior developers left and right. I suspect some fishiness with their hiring practices, but its been so long and nobody I ever worked with is there anymore.
I can't imagine actual engineering where people's lives are on the line. At least pull in some folk from elsewhere at Boeing and have them approve / disapprove of new changes / fixes.
I have to wonder if that entire line of planes is just doomed for the scrapyard.
While going through this, can't help but think about how ageism sneaks around in the Software Development world. Explains a lot, doesn't it?
> Those mid / late career engineers are irreplaceable and yet they were actively trying to get rid of them.
The famous enshittification process caused by the MBA view of existence.
FWIW, "Prince Jim" McNerney, who most of the article's ire is understandably directed towards, is no longer the CEO. He directed the 737 MAX's development, but retired before the scandals; his successor, Dennis Muilenburg (a 30+ year Boeing employee who started out in engineering), was fired for the poor quality of the 737 MAX despite it being developed under Prince Jim.
That being said, the current CEO — Dave Calhoun — is an old exec from from GE, where McNerney started out; I hope he's different from Jim, but I wouldn't bank on it. Unlike Muilenberg and pre-merger Boeing CEOs, he doesn't have a direct background in aviation. He's retiring at the end of the year, and I hope his replacement is more like the pre-merger CEOs than the accounting-focused recent ones.
> the current CEO — Dave Calhoun — is an old exec from from GE, where McNerney started out
From the article.
> None of the names floated thus far for the spot have been aerospace engineers, and the shoo-in for the position, GE’s Larry Culp, is not an engineer at all.
Maybe they should start bundling life insurance with flights on Boeing planes.
It's a strange anomaly when most of the current top Fortune 500 (US) companies have engineers as their CEO [1]. You would have expected that Boeing to be led by engineers due to the scale of engineering involved in the plane constructions but apparently it's not always the case.
[1] Top CEOs have this degree:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39680613
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> I hope his replacement is more like the pre-merger CEOs than the accounting-focused recent ones.
... womp womp
>Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs.
So they devalued Wisdom, and Elders... and things fell apart. This seems to be a pattern repeated all over the modern world.
Purging elder employees is the logical result of making the employer pay for the health care of their employees.
I don’t think healthcare for employees comes anywhere close to the list of top expenses for a company as large as Boeing.
Based on the article, it sounds like the expertise of more experienced workers was preventing the reckless management from shipping poorly tested products earlier, and this was the actual reason for terminating them.
> Purging elder employees is the logical result of making the employer pay for the health care of their employees.
The now-elder employee gave their best and healthy years to the company and its mission.
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No, it's only one incentive. Counterbalancing it is the value of expertise.
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I haven’t seen this suggested before! It seems like a very obvious factor in ageism.
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> The day after Broken Dreams premiered, Swampy got an email informing him that he’d been put on a 60-day corrective action plan four weeks earlier. His alleged offense constituted using email to communicate about process violations
That is pretty shady. They didn't want to discuss violations in emails so it doesn't end up in a court case or found by the FAA during an investigation.
> the longtime former Boeing executive told me, “I don’t think one can be cynical enough when it comes to these guys.” Did that mean he thought Boeing assassinated Swampy? “It’s a top-secret military contractor, remember; there are spies everywhere,” he replied.
I am kind of surprised various executives don't order hits on each other more often. Or maybe they do but the assassinations are too subtle and they look like heart attacks and accidents? With billions on the line, what's a few millions in crypto found in a usb stick somewhere in the bushes for a "job well done". There is also the idea that sometimes it should look more an assassination to send a clear message to others: "you don't want to fall on the knife backwards, three times in as row, like so and so, now do you?"
> They didn't want to discuss violations in emails so it doesn't end up in a court case or found by the FAA during an investigation.
Thankfully big tech is able to provide these companies with retention policies that allow the pesky paper trail to be auto-purged on a schedule.
> I am kind of surprised various executives don't order hits on each other more often.
Here is one case where it actually happened:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/xu-yao-death-sentence-poisoning...
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202403/22/WS65fd50dea31082fc...
I know that this is about Boeing, but it is just such a perfect epitaph for the end of the current decaying Valley elite. What took Boeing 20 years FAANG did in one:
“CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had ‘overvalued experience and undervalued leadership’ before he purged the veterans into early retirement.”
> Swampy knew he was caught in a prisoner’s dilemma. If he went along, he was breaking the law; if he didn’t, whistleblowers who complained about unsafe practices were routinely terminated on grounds of violating the same safety protocols they had opposed violating.
How is it a prisoner's dilemma? Is it about cooperating with whisleblowers or defecting them?
It seems to me to be a mere dilemma, two choices, both bad. There was no interplay of cooperate/defect strategies.
If you read this article looking for new or surprising insight, you won't find it. It is not new information that Boeing started a rapid decline shortly after the McDonnell Douglas merger, and it will be unsurprising to you to hear that shortly afterwards, Boeing began abusing its most senior employees into leaving.
What this article offers is new detail into exactly how Boeing has gone about cannibalizing itself. The specific things done to specific employees, the specific quality incidents that were swept under the rug, the lengths to which they went to ensure all prior institutional knowledge regarding how to properly build a plane was systematically destroyed.
It's worth reading, perhaps unless you're going to be flying on a Boeing plane anytime soon.
"the lengths to which they went to ensure all prior institutional knowledge regarding how to properly build a plane was systematically destroyed."
why do this intentionally?
Stock price gains.
Fire all the longest-tenured, highest-salaried employees. Now you have a company that appears to look similar but with millions of dollars fewer per year in headcount expenses.
Boeing's stock price went up 10x in the time frame covered by the article. The people responsible for gutting the company have cashed out.
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Y'all're gonna hate this, but financialization and the relentless pursuit of profits. Every time this stuff happens, people ask why, and it's because of greed. When you focus on making money above all else, this is what happens. It's not a mystery.
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The intention wasn't to destroy institutional knowledge. The intention was to cut costs in the short term, largely through outsourcing and turnover. Why pay a senior engineer a huge salary when you could replace them with a consultant in their twenties? They just didn't think or care about the consequences.
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Those old engineers cost too much! And we already know how to build planes. So, we can ditch them, my quarterly KPIs look good and with the money freed up from pushing them out it can land in my bonus check!
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That's the million dollar question. Why talented people are forced out? Like managers/other key members have a mission and if you somehow not fit in their "world view", you get hell.
Are any of the executives who did this in jail? No? Well, carry on, then.
None of the executives responsible for this have paid any price. None of the investors or board members who allowed this paid any price.
And the worst part: it's not clear you can fix it, now. Even if you completely busted out every executive and wiped out the investors, there is no path forward since those executives pushed out all the engineering knowledge.
Perhaps because the senior people were at a higher pay grade? If you bump off the expensive employees, your overhead goes down. Better numbers next quarter so you get a bonus.
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they did not. this article and many people are sensationalizing it to get attention and push whatever their angle is. it was short-sighted, stupid, greedy, and wrong, but not intentionally suicidal (let alone homicidal!).
a lot of people say things like 'stock price', but that's missing the point. the lesson is in the nuance.
its many factors, effecting all aspects of our lives now honestly.
- young people's disregard for the knowledge of people older than them. This can be an essay in itself, but there's the idea that the reasons why people are doing things the way they are is because they are stupid, something like: "you are young and you knows how to do everything right if only these dumb old people would get out of my way." I had a friend do a start up to make bourbon in 3 months. He thought all those alcohol producers that take 5-30 years making them were doing it wrong. I am like, definitely give it a go but understand that "I am sure they thought about this'.
- management focuses on nonsensical metrics. In recent history, you have to be data driven, focus on metrics, ignore everything else, its the new religion. An example is how technical support teams focus on having 0 tickets open, so support engineers just close tickets even if the customer isn't helped. but hey, that red line is pointing down and to the left right? win! And as with boeing, they made their metrics look really good, look, no more defects! all you have to do is stop reporting them.
- companies willing to outsource critical components of their business. I never understood this one, I don't care how 'cheap' it is, you don't outsource critical parts of your business. at best, they don't have the same stakes as you do on the matter, at worst they steal your IP and/or become your competitors.
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Because the value of expertise does not readily show on balance sheets. Boeing had been systematically eroding expertise for 25 years before its planes started to fall out of the sky.
"intentionally" is too strong a word here.
More -> intentionally cut cost by eliminating experienced people.
Not -> intentionally getting rid of knowledge. even the worst managers wouldn't admit to wanting to loose knowledge.
>> why do this intentionally?
Myopia + greed is a hell of a drug.
It's a side effect of reducing the power of those awkward people who want to spend money on well designed aeroplanes.
It's a lot easier to make your outsourcing strategy stick, if you no longer have an alternative.
Most of the article is spent describing exactly why.
Some people in organizations can't take no for an answer. They want to see their orders followed, and if they see you as a roadblock, you will be marginalized, sometimes with harm.
That's not always bad, sometimes employees drag their feet when they shouldn't. But in some situations (for instance, one arm of the company gaining the upper hand), the people in power are so convinced that their own perspective and goals are right, that they think they don't need to listen or understand the big picture.
Ad to this that sometimes an exec has sociopathic tendencies, and you have an explosive cocktail of harassment and destruction of valuable knowledge. The more resilient the company, the more entrenched this behaviour can get, and the more irreversible it will become.
I learned some things reading this article from 2 days ago:
Boeing’s Dead Whistleblower Spoke the Truth
https://www.thefp.com/p/boeings-dead-whistleblower-spoke-the...
The Free Press
The entire first half of this (tfp directly above this comment) article blindly supports the spin that there is some conspiracy where someone killed him. HIs own family goes into great detail all over the press about how he had anxiety and ptsd. That he quit his job on DR orders or the stress was going to give him a heart attack.
The shit Boeing did to him was awful (stress, anxiety and ptsd) and Boeing should be blamed for that. They should be held accountable for that. Making his sucicide "Fishy" discredits the pressure he was under and its cause. Playing at the edges of conspiracy theory also serves to discredit the author of the article and the validity of everything else they are saying.
The man killed himself. The actions of Boeing played a part in that.
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On the other hand... I can imagine after testifying, the feeling that one had done all one could do. That it was finished and it was his time.
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It's really hard to recover from a downgrade in culture. I hear the same kinds of things about IBM. I'm pretty sure there are other examples.
The tough part is - it is sad.
Read about boeing and Tex Johnston:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_M._Johnston#Boeing_Compa...
and IBM invented the PC:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer
Other examples include Xerox and Kodak.
I also wonder if it has happened in the past, with a subsequent recovery, to some American car companies? GM pre-2008 perhaps?
IMO the FAA’s approach and handling was the most shocking aspect. Not sure what purpose the FAA serves anymore.
Norminalization of Deviance: https://youtu.be/GN80sx3s4LA?si=de_4xxo1YhFVy0lD
>> It's worth reading, perhaps unless you're going to be flying on a Boeing plane anytime soon.
Just returned from Miami yesterday aboard a B757-200. I was intrigued because it has been so long since I've flown on one. The trip down was a 737-Max8 (or 9 I'm not sure). So I wondered if this was a plane that they had dragged out of retirement. Not like Newark-Miami is a backwater route.
it will be unsurprising to you to hear that shortly afterwards, Boeing began abusing its most senior employees into leaving.
Sounds a bit like what happened in newsrooms and at newspapers in the past decade and a half. (Except in that case, it was bottom-up, not top-down.)
Hm, i smell a google here. What a shame tbh.
I'll be on two 737 MAX planes going back and forth to Vegas in a couple weeks. Yay!
> It's worth reading, perhaps unless you're going to be flying on a Boeing plane anytime soon.
This is all bad for Boeing, but at the end of the day, nobody has died on an American carrier in a Boeing plane in a very long time.
Aircraft safety is layers on layers on layers. Let's not FUD people into thinking that flying on the worst plane Boeing has ever put out is anywhere comparable to the daily risks of driving.
> but at the end of the day, nobody has died on an American carrier in a Boeing plane in a very long time.
This is coincidental. When the plug ripped out of the plane over Portland, it was pure luck that no one was sitting in that row. The seats were shredded. If someone had been sitting there, they also would have been shredded.
Boeing and their deteriorated quality culture is directly at fault for that one, and the only thing that prevented a fatality is a coincidence of seating arrangement.
As far as I'm concerned, that resets their safety clock.
If a new 737 were to literally disintegrate in midair, but by pure happenstance it was entirely staffed and occupied by skydivers wearing parachutes and as a result no one dies, that also shouldn't be handwaved off as "oh nobody has died in a long time" just because luck prevented an otherwise sure death in that specific scenario.
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I’m sorry, why does it matter that no one has died on an American carrier for a while? Not so long ago, Boeing sent over 300 people to their deaths with their shoddy MCAS scheme. It’s pure chance that this didn’t happen in the USA so I’m not sure I understand the relevance of the nationalities of the deceased.
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Thanks
> Aircraft safety is layers on layers on layers.
This is true, but disasters occur because those layers and layers get eroded until there is only one layer left which then fails.
The problem is that Boeing has eroded layers and layers and layers of that safety. The question is "How many of those layers are left?"
I am silently grateful to JetBlue for ordering Airbuses from the get go...
Airbus has a limited production capacity, and they are maxed out with this scandal.
So Boing is still getting orders, because the world need planes.
What do you mean by "down hill"? Boeing has developed incredible technologies since the MD merger. They have been profitable w/ these technologies. You make a claim they were going down hill, what do you mean?
I have a number of family members that work for Boeing, that have been in executive management, engineering and research. None of them ever mentioned MD as being the beginning of a decline.
All of them tell a different story. The problems began with James McNerney. Harry Stonecipher came from MD, and was one of the best CEO's to ever touch that company. The 787 wouldn't have been a thing if it were not for McNerney.
If you make a claim, back it up.
This is a discussion of an article. You'll find a link to it at the top of the page. If you read the article, I am sure someone as intelligent as yourself will be able to use context clues to figure out what I mean by "down hill". That article is what I am backing up my claim with.
Ha. That’s not the story I have heard from greybeard engineers there before and after the merger.
I got the story that Stonecipher wrecked the engineering culture and valued/promoted management at the expense of engineering. Management becoming the only path to promotion and career advancement leaving important engineering groups hollowed out.
> Swampy believed relying on mechanics to self-inspect their work was not only insane but illegal
This sounds like the changes that have taken place in the software industry in the past 10-20 years. Engineers are meant to do much more than engineering, including testing their own software, managing project timelines, etc., however with software nobody dies, you just get crappy software that constantly breaks and needs an update every other day. There's an overall theme here of underestimating how hard engineering is, and as a result expecting a lot more from engineers which then of course causes bad engineering. Not surprisingly this is caused by non-technical people with power. Perhaps the fix is a cultural shift and a renewed respect for people who want to spend all their time specializing in technical skills.
The real fix is popularizing the notion that management is just as commoditizatable than those they seek to commoditize.
Note that in the recent dialogue about AI eating jobs, there's zero mention of whether it could come for management positions. Nothing. Curious, isn't it? Why wouldn't an LLM be good enough at this? I mean, it's really data-driven, right?
The real fix is popularizing the notion that management is just as commoditizatable than those they seek to commoditize.
What's described here is exactly what happens when you have "generic" management. Generic management finds unneeded expenses and eliminates them. The only way a senior expert isn't a cost to be eliminated is if you have managers focused on and understanding the enterprise they are managing (and no promises with that, however).
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> AI eating jobs, there's zero mention of whether it could come for management positions. Nothing. Curious, isn't it? Why wouldn't an LLM be good enough at this?
There's a whole book about this, called Rainbows End. Highly recommended.
Frankly I think ChatGPT 3.5 was already good enough to replace the majority of CxO positions
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> however with software nobody dies
The MCAS issue which crashed two Boeing planes was a software hack.
Well, yes, but also no. It was a hardware design change that necessitated a software hack (to escape mandatory retraining of pilots) that relied on unreliable hardware, right?
Sure, software played a big part in it, but I think it seems like it was more a management and communication failure. If it was just software it'd probably be much easier to diagnose and fix.
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I meant software only products like websites, apps, games, etc., but it should be clarified, good point.
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Great idea but how will the bean counters and schmoozers get their multi-million dollar bonuses if they can't force engineers to do 5 jobs while paying them for 1? Will never work.
quality control is most of the times unmeasurable in the short term…
100% agree.
Had a manager that does this try and tell the Challenger story once. He had the lessons of the report exactly backwards. Instead of the managers creating an environment of risk by not understanding the engineering and overriding the engineers, he claimed it was engineers not listening to or informing managers properly.
It was wild to me to sit there and hear this manager say the exact wrong lesson of that tragedy.
> however with software nobody dies
Well...no actually.
This may be the case for _some_ software. I happen to work on (software) products where public safety is a concern.
Well in the story is the point of an software error leading to the plane crash right...
> however with software nobody dies
Software that runs systems which can directly kill people does tend to get a lot of scrutiny, but there is also a lot of software which can indirectly kill someone that doesn’t get the same level of attention
https://www.technologydecisions.com.au/content/convergence/a...
> however with software nobody dies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
The difference is whether organizations are willing--or forced--to invest in it.
That's not automatically a wrong though, since different objects or processes merit different levels of quality.
> however with software nobody dies
Unless that software is running a life-critical or potentially life-threatening piece of equipment. People have died from software bugs in such things.
> however with software nobody dies
Eh, not a good hard-and-fast rule. Fujitsu's Horizon software drove some of its users to suicide.
Australia's robodebt scheme also caused suicides, but unlike the Fujitsu horizon shenanigans, the suffering was largely the point of robodebt
U.S. companies have a management problem. I specifically mean that the terminal career path for most professions is "management". Depending where you work, management can mean:
- giving orders
- delegating work (usually this is work the manager specifically doesn't want to do themselves)
- clearing blockers in front of your employees
That the third one is the rarest is a problem.
American corporate culture has devolved into: get promoted into management and coast.
There are obviously exceptions. But a lot of people will agree they've had their fair share of terrible managers. I dare say that's the norm.
Boeing is just the most current example of what happens when a company fetishizes management. That is, there comes a time when the leeches have sucked the body dry.
Have you been in upper management? It is stressful and if things don’t go well it’s quite likely that you’ll get canned, vs an IC
Grass is always greener
I admit that I've not and so in that regard, I'm speaking from the perspective of an outside observer. I have worked in middle management before switching back to IC for personal satisfaction reasons.
If I had to guess, this statement that I made is the one you are honing in:
> American corporate culture has devolved into: get promoted into management and coast.
Generalizations are what they are. There are always exceptions etc. And I fully recognize that there are talented, hard-working managers out there.
But, what I'm specifically getting at is that American corporate culture encourages far too many cooks in the kitchen. Managers are necessary. But I think most corporations have far too many. And part of that is because it's the norm to promote your top IC's into management. Eventually the structure becomes top heavy and overly bureaucratic.
To be honest, I don't think what I'm describing is particularly original/surprising.
The Onion was joking about this eventuality in 2010:
https://www.theonion.com/boeing-lays-off-only-guy-who-knows-...
Related:
Boeing's Dead Whistleblower Spoke the Truth
https://www.thefp.com/p/boeings-dead-whistleblower-spoke-the... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39838580)
It makes me so angry reading this about managers criticizing employees for being 'too knowledgeable'.
There are so many narratives nowadays which claim that performance is at odds with talent. People are embracing mediocrity and patting each other on the back for it... The idiots who got lucky, since they cannot pretend to be knowledgeable, reframe the narrative to portray themselves as geniuses who understood the value of idiocy and revel in their mediocrity.
> CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had “overvalued experience and undervalued leadership”
I think this quote explains the problem nicely..
Decline in attention to quality at Boeing is a known thing. But this attitude towards engineering and specially to machinist is just utterly f*king stupid. Especially to machinists, because experienced one are hard to find, not even talking about toolmakers. It seems that the starting salary for machinists isn't that great and many shops lost to outsource. And experienced folks retire leaving a wide gap behind. Of course, this does not excuse such an attitude toward engineers either.
https://archive.ph/Oub0v
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It baffles me how this happens time and time again in companies as they grow (albeit rarely with this level of human life consequence), and nobody ever seems to learn from it.
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
Every hour that a Boeing employee spends trying to design or build a good airplane is one less hour that he can spend angling for power within the organization. So the people who care the most about the original purpose of the organization will be systematically outcompeted by the people who care the most about obtaining power within the organization. A widespread and profound problem.
When companies are small, the machinations of political types and their inadequate contributions to the core product are too obvious, and they get weeded out.
But when the company grows large and successful (due to the efforts of the people who cared about the original mission), it has a brand and long-term customers. At that point, the political types can burrow in without any immediately obvious effects, since there are enough other people doing the real work and the company has enough momentum to keep moving for some time.
This is broadly why I'm in favour of aggressive antitrust and pro-competition regulation. Companies should be kept medium-sized and competitive. Economies of scale should be sought through cooperation, not conglomeration.
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There's one technology where humanity's pace of progress has not been so swift: The programming and execution of organizations.
The companies are smart enough to learn from it. The problem is that in a late-stage capitalist market, companies have already grown so large that the easiest way to continue to grow profits is to cut costs as much as possible.
It’s pretty obvious that in many cases, this incentive is entirely opposed to human health and flourishing. Sure, you can cut costs in consumer electronics like TVs without harming anyone. (Assuming regulations that enforce a baseline quality in electrical components.) You can’t do that in aviation or health care.
Another aspect is that lower costs don’t make it back to consumers in many industries with little competition. A more “financially efficient” Boeing means more money for shareholders, not cheaper airplanes.
A counterpoint is that disasters should provide an economic incentive to the company to fix problems that cause disasters. As you point out, this simply isn’t happening. There was apparently not enough market incentive after the B737max crashes to fix their quality control problems. That means it’s cheaper for Boeing to crash its planes than to have really strong quality control. Obviously, the capitalist incentives in this system are no longer working for society.
These late stage, massive companies are not about making good products. They are legally about returning value to shareholders. The people in charge are therefore all about optimizing the company finances.
The only way to counteract this frequently terrible incentive is by us people (the government) creating the incentives that work for society. That could mean huge, costly fines in these situations such that the only way to get money for shareholders is to make quality products, since what should be a market incentive has gotten so messed up.
> The only way to counteract this frequently terrible incentive is by us people (the government) creating the incentives that work for society. That could mean huge, costly fines in these situations such that the only way to get money for shareholders is to make quality products, since what should be a market incentive has gotten so messed up.
The US government could also get more aggressive about blocking mergers and breaking large companies up for being large. If you blew up Meta as an example, you'd force all of its ventures to compete with each other on the open market again. If you blew it up in to regional or state-level companies and prevented them from merging with each other they would all have to figure out how to work as they each invaded each others' markets. That "inefficiency" of the market would naturally create jobs and upward wage pressure as companies attempted to hire each others' staff away from each other.
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They absolutely learn! These jackasses got paid in stock, inflated their income 10x, cashed out, and then when shit hits the fan, the corporation is on the hook. These leaders never go on trial for this shit because destroying culture isn't a crime.
And then when there is an investigation, it's just a general cultural issue and no one person is at fault, so the company pays out a lawsuit, the current guy gets fired with a huge bonus to cover the fact that he couldn't inflate the stock and the pattern repeats.
So, basically, there's high upside and no downside so why not?
They learn. It's a feature, not a bug. Some executive is chilling next to his third infinity pool, chuckling. It's someone else's problem now, suckers.
Exactly. They did learn from it -- and it is by far the best way to optimize around short term gains.
Just like people who join a company, grow the company to unsustainable bounds, then leave for the next company while the previous company struggles to maintain or fulfill previous obligations.
Structural incentives that prioritize short term profits.
People need their mortality taken for future deterrence. Anything less is our collective moral weakness saying this is OK.
This situation highlights why startups can outperform established companies. It's not only about innovation or asymmetric motivation but also due to the internal decay of incumbents like Boeing and General Electric. This presents an opportunity for an aeronautics startup to emerge - mission focused on building the best airplanes.
Of course, all you have to do is get several billion dollars in funding and hope Boeing doesn't use its vast resources to poach your engineers.
Boeing is not going to be disrupted any more than TSMC or ASML will be disrupted. Planes are too complex and too expensive to manufacture correctly.
The best engineers wont work for companies that don’t ship great product.
Funding and complexity are obstacles, but there are many examples of overcoming the obstacles with innovation and conviction.
Rockets - Lockheed -> SpaceX
AI - Google -> OpenAI
Electric Cars - Toyota -> Tesla
Shipping - Maersk -> Flexport
CPUs - Intel -> ARM
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> The bosses hit Swampy with a new initiative called “Multi-Function Process Performer,”
Performance metrics are how bad employees level the playing field with good ones. Everyone wants to _quantifiably_ know why Swampy got a 9% raise when they got an 8%, "because his expertise saved the company a $1bn fine last quarter that you nearly caused." Not once, anywhere I've worked, has that kind of metric been tracked.
Not just planes and fairly recently too. I was working at a Boeing subsidiary when the 737 Max MCAS happened. They dumped everyone they could on loathsome “$9000 USB cable” type time and materials defense work. I was a senior Java architect and they quickly “retrained” me to do HIL component testing in plain old C. It might have been seen as a move to improve cash flow but realistically it had the effect causing almost all of the software staff to leave in short order which I guess also improved cash flow. The subsidiary is still struggling several years later to rebuild their software team.
The problem here is that large corporations trusted with public safety - be it flight safety in the case of Boeing; electical generation and transmission safety in the case of PG&E here in California - is that companies cater to Wall Street and bean counters rather than anything else. This is where the CPUC has failed in the case of PG&E and the FAA failed in the case of Boeing.
There should be oversight and public safety should play into private corporate governance for such things.
I am more convinced that Boeing has exceeded their and human ability to cooperate and explain everything that goes into a modern plane - more than I am willing to say Boeing just sucks now.
It’s not just them. It’s everyone and everything.
We are in a complexity crisis and no one sees it happening.
Boeing had quietly assumed many of the roles traditionally played by its primary regulator, an arrangement that was ethically absurd.
This is simply "vertical integration" applied to "regulatory capture."
I have a serious question that might sound not serious. The articles I read about boeing seem to focus on assembly line issues. As someone who flies a lot, assembly problems scare me, but so far assembly qv hasn’t been catastrophic (right?). It seems the real issue is a design flaw in the 737max pilot interface. Aside from some articles that feel vague (like competition with airbus led to some poor decision making); the chain of decisions that led to the design flaw aren’t really reported on (right?). Do you all have the same read?
> assembly qv hasn’t been catastrophic (right?)
The door plug that blew out of a plane because the screws weren't installed didn't kill anyone, but only because the nearest passengers had their seatbelts fastened.
Is there any reason to think that a plane that's missing screws on a door plug doesn't have improperly torqued fuel lines or defective emergency oxygen generators or metal burrs rubbing on the control lines to to tail, or a software crash in all three "triple-redundant" computers?
The "funny" thing to me is that I'm old enough to remember when the merger occurred that people were predicting exactly what came to pass. It just took 25 years to finally happen.
> It just took 25 years to finally happen.
"Quality inertia" is one thing which allows for giant amounts of damage to be done long before the wheels visibly come off, as deviance gets normalised (and even mandated in cases such as Boeing) and the company eats its reserve of quality and goodwill, it starts going off-track in small ways before it falls off a cliff.
It took closer to 20 years than 25 for the wheels to come off of Boeing. Lion Air 610 crashed on October 29, 2018, the MDD merger was on August 1, 1997.
And that crash was the first major externally visible symptom[0], the decisions which led to it happened years earlier (2014-2015).
[0] unless you count the dreamliner's joke of a rollout, which probably should have been the warning shot that things were getting unwell
I call this "quality momentum". A leader can come in, look at whatever "engine" that drives quality, decide it's not essential, remove it entirely, and coast on the momentum of previous quality practices for years before entropy sets in. But by this time, the board and shareholders have already rewarded the leader for "eliminating waste".
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I disagree it happened instantly, it's just that Boeing didn't make any new planes for 20 years that made it to the sky. Even the Max was a redesign of an existing design.
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That description you have of quality inertia certainly seems applicable to other areas of life as well.
I’m certainly seeing a few troubling issues brewing but don’t see as many people as myself taking them as serious warning signs.
But when the collapse happens it’s rapid because the entire foundation has rotted away.
It keeps happening because that’s what the system rewards, short sightedness, and is also why founder led companies have more success, because they are able to execute in years not quarters.
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Ironically, Boeing's stock price was at about $140 at the start of 2014 -- and rose pretty steadily to a peak of $422 in March 2019.
So in addition to pushing out whatever sorts of financial results that Wall Street wanted, Boeing's perhaps questionable approach to quality was not registering with its financial overlords. This happened in spite of the Al-Jazeera investigative piece of 2014, a $2.5 billion penalty paid in 2021 in connection with the 787 crashes, etc. Not to mention steady coverage of problems in the Seattle Times, Wall Street Journal, etc.
Boeing's stock is still above $100 now, which suggests that it's got a strong enough monopoly/duopoly position that investors do not regard quality issues as being all that detrimental to the "investment thesis."
Brrr!
Where can I read more about quality inertia , find other case studies, etc?
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https://youtu.be/GN80sx3s4LA?si=de_4xxo1YhFVy0lD
Analog enshitification
> It just took 25 years to finally happen.
To me the big question is, why did it take 25 years for this to become common knowledge? Why is our system of evaluating public corporations so messed up that a public company, and one with huge government contracts to boot, could get away with this for that long?
Boeing, and the United States as a whole, have been very richly endowed with capital. When you decide to stop adding to your seed corn and start to eat it down, but you began with an enormous mountain of it, you can eat well for a very long period of time.
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GE seems like another firm / conglomerate that has lost its way - although we have heard about Jack Welch's management disaster, I do not know if they lost engineers the way it happened at Boeing.
Last year, I bought GE Monogram kitchen appliances and was pleased that they work so well, until I found that it is a Chinese firm that has bought the use of GE's name along with their operations. Maybe that is why the appliances work well, and Chinese century is already on its way
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Our major system for evaluating companies is market-driven pricing of the company. That in turn is based mostly on the views of investors and traders, that is people who want to turn money into more money and generally aren't fussy about how it happens. So the market price for a company tends to favor short-term cash extraction over long-term value creation.
That is to say, this is basically what our "system of evaluating public corporations" rewards, and it's been that way for quite some time. We're just paying more attention here because lots of us fly and airline crashes capture the attention nicely. When Facebook enshittifies to juice revenues we all just kind of put up with it, but we're not so chill about a window blowing out at 15,000 feet.
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[flagged]
Yes, large companies take a lot longer to fail than I ever imagined. A lot of time can pass riding on past excellence before the cracks start showing.
It's not about the size of the company, it's about the barrier to entry of the market they're in, how much competition they have and the amount of vendor lock-in.
And civil aviation in general scores top marks in all those fields. It's a duopoly with an insane barrier to entry both technical, legal and financial with very long and complex vendor lock-in.
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Yep… I wish it were possible to easily invest in the downfall of obviously poorly run companies coughSirius XMcough, but things like puts and shorts really only work if you know when it will fail, and that it will be very soon.
Imagine how that scales and then how that might scale to nation states.
Remember the big rollout of the Dreamliner in 2014 to show it was all done, but it was actually an empty metal tube with landing gear duct taped on it? And remember the venom that people got for bringing up the fact that, you know, you could see the sky from the wheel wells? Or the second rollout, when they had to strap the fuse segments together because no one knew where the fasteners were?
Oh we could go on and on, for pages and pages. This story's not anything new.
I think a lot of people in the industry have just been waiting for the thud, but everyone underestimated just how good A&P mechanics are[1], and how tight aircrew is. As we approach the days when aircrew have to punch a de-ice button every five minutes, we're hitting the limits of those staff.
Something to think about: name a commercially successful Boeing-designed product from the 21st century. Something that can legitimately be called "Successful", and "Boeing"
[1] Who are not required in the Boeing fab - oh no - they are far too expensive. But wait, you might ask . . what credentials are required in the plant? Heh heh heh heh heh . . . oh that is a fun question.
> Remember the big rollout of the Dreamliner in 2014 to show it was all done, but it was actually an empty metal tube with landing gear duct taped on it?
It was in 2007 (on July 8th, a date obviously picked for the memes). Maiden flight was supposed to be two months or so away with introduction in 2008.
Maiden flight was on December 15, 2009. Commercial service started October 2011.
> name a commercially successful Boeing-designed product from the 21st century
The MAX was commercially successful before it started falling out the sky. Orders even picked back up after the dip and cancellations from the MCAS crisis.
It's not like customers have much of a choice if they need a new frame, there are 7000 outstanding orders for the A320neo family and in 2023 Airbus built 45 a month, with plans to eventually reach 75 a month (and stabilise there) circa 2026.
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>name a commercially successful Boeing-designed product from the 21st century. Something that can legitimately be called "Successful", and "Boeing"
Boeing is still able to sell planes to customers, they still have a lot of orders in their backlog. This would only change if their are mass cancellations by their customers.
There is a massive demand for planes right now, airlines rather would own a "good enough" plane from Bowling than no plane at all.
The problem isn't the lack of commercial success, the problem is that Boeing is commercially successful and that there is absolutely no punishment from the market or their customers, because everyone knows that they will continue to make and sell planes.
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More broadly, what percentage of mergers are successful? I'd guess less than 20% if compared to the analyses that make them attractive to companies.
I've been involved (at the worker bee level) in multiple mergers and in every case where they attempted to merge systems it easily took 5-10X the estimated time, cost and resources.
The most successful mergers were the ones where they either left the companies separate (minimizing the ability to reduce costs) or the ones where they just threw away one of the company's systems, got rid of most of their employees, most of their products, and just acquired their customers.
So what you are saying is that twitter, oh sorry x, is going to break down completely in around 2048? :)
I doubt xitter has as much quality buffer as Boeing had in '97, and Elon's brutalisation of it was a lot less gradual.
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Is it feasible to hold a short position on a stock for 25 years?
Indexes of SP500 without Boeing should outperform ones including Boeing, if you’re predicting that Boeing will underperform in 25 years. You don’t have to short; you can use the knowledge to tune your retirement holdings.
You could even weight the index ratios by how self-cannibalizing you believe each company will be.
Requires a broker that does fractional shares or a lot of money, though.
You can buy options (puts and calls) for three years out.
Shorting a stock for that long would be a recipe for disaster, at some point it's going to go up and you're going to lose it all. Remember when you buy long your positive upside is infinite and your downside limited to 100%, when you short it's the opposite.
Sure. Just hold a small short position.
As they say, you’ve gotta be careful. The market can stay crazy longer than you can stay solvent.
Do you remember any specific newspaper or trade mag articles? Or was the conversation more in private/back channel?
From 25 years ago? No.
> It just took 25 years to finally happen.
This is the Systems Thinking concept of systems delay, the time lapse between cause and effect, of an action and its downstream effects. Someone applying this cognitive skill, when informed of material changes like that fact that Boeing usurped some of the FAA's oversight, merged with with MD with its colorful history, etc., is bound to come to think of the effects of such changes and when their effects may start manifesting downstream, especially externally. In the case of Boeing, that means the safety of their aircraft.
When it comes to orgs that make essential contributions to society such as in commercial passenger aviation, I strongly prefer thorough and effective oversight by a competent and impartial body of that org's inner workings and output. Boeing had earlier established a strong reputation for safety and engineering competence. I have no problem with profits; that is what motivates capitalists in the system we have today, but I do have a problem with risking the lives and welfare of the uninformed public. With recent events, we learned the situation changed to foxes guarding the hen house.
Trust but verify indeed. That Boeing was able to so rampantly cut quality in the pursuit of revenues under the cloak of their sterling reputation seems in part to be a condemnation of greater society.
That is what oversight is supposed to be for, the delegation of trust so that we need not overwhelm ourselves in general life.
Why were people predicting this? What were the indicators?
My paternal grandfather worked for Boeing as an airfoil modeling engineer (figuring out the right shape for wings and creating computer models) from 1960s-2000s. As a nerdy kid he had some of most entertaining engineering stories. One of my favorites was when a coworker brought a boomerang to work and due to some union/budget shenanigans at the time, all the engineers were at work with nothing to do. So they designed and machined a 3 foot boomerang out of clear acrylic. They went out to the field and gave their heavy new toy a good throw, only to have it promptly vanish out of sight on a sunny day. After a moment to process what just happened, they all hit the dirt as they heard it whoosh overhead.
Sounds like Boeing has had a lot of what is often taught in business schools as goal subordination in organizational behavior.
Yup, these topics explain that some managers can feel threatened by especially competent subordinates.
Larry Culp may not be an engineer, but if you want someone who can take a storied American manufacturer that got infected with MBA bs and brought it back to its roots … I mean he’s the only one whose done it, right?
> He mocked him in weekly meetings whenever he dared contribute a thought, assigned a fellow manager to spy on him and spread rumors that he did not play nicely with others, and disciplined him for things like “using email to communicate” and pushing for flaws he found on planes to be fixed.
Sounds like a regular middle manager in any tech company. Sad unfortunate effect of the power asymmetries in corporate structure: managers have all the power but very few checks to keep them accountable. I’ve seen the same thing happen again and again in different companies (including to me), thankfully none of them building planes.
> Sounds like a regular middle manager in any tech company.
I bet this is true in some, but certainly not all, tech companies. I've only encountered one example of such a manager in my entire career (and quit just to get away from that nonsense).
Apart from pushing someone out who they don’t wanna pay severance for, what incentive does a manager have to treat one of their reports like dirt?
Control via emotional abuse. I've currently got a middle manager who is perhaps the most clueless person I have ever worked for (we gave him the nickname "Bumble" which is short for what we actually call him).
He has no leadership abilities, doesn't understand the tech, can't mentor us, can't pathfind for us and every vendor we deal with he has managed to upset.
To make up for all these shortcomings, he is manipulative and two faced, micro-managing to an extreme degree and generally when he does find something he half understands he's all over it (and you) to a degree that reduces your productivity to nothing.
Control is the aim. Everything is out of control, so the one thing he does have (seniority, the ear of upper management) he uses wilfully.
At one point this guy got an alert on one of the monitoring services, so he panicked and called customers, dragged in senior management and only after that started sending texts that I urgently had to look at it even though I had already dismissed the error as a minor fault in the monitor itself. I made the mistake of telling him to fuck off after the 6th text message in 2 minutes.
I, of course, got a formal warning from HR. He bumbles on regardless.
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Plenty of things: control, gain more authority at the expense of others, decrease someone’s value out of pure jealousy, have a scapegoat ready for when you make a mistake, create an opening where you can hire your buddies, satisfy your ego, etc.
Even aside from business incentives, there are plenty of people in the workplace who act cruelly due to prejudices, perceived threat, spite/vengeance, a need for control, perceived threat, general emotional unhealthiness, or just plain old personality disorders. Some end up as managers.
So you can ship your shitty product and get paid. That’s almost always the reason. Engineers have this annoying quality of asking prickly questions and many managers, or people in general, aren’t exactly thrilled by someone constantly questioning them or pointing out errors in their reasoning.
There’s other reasons sometimes. Control maybe. Maybe they have damage themselves and don’t realize what they are doing. But the big one I’d say is the desire to control the product release timeline.
Btw we all keep saying managers, but I’ve seen structures where the lead engineer is in this position of having personell controls along with technical control and it can be, and in my experience was, even worse.
Sociopathy...
Um so... what was he supposed to use email for, according to the manager?
Generally when companies seek to avoid liability, they push to have their employees use telephone to communicate so that compromising emails don’t come out during the discovery period of a lawsuit. I imagine this is one of such cases.
Letting everyone know there are free bananas in the break room. Important stuff should be kept where opposing council can't find it, I guess.
Paper trails: Sociopathic managers hate this one weird trick.
Tremendously detailed for how short it is. I struggle to understand how outsourcing the engineer was sold as good for shareholders. Anyone watching someone write a longer book on this publicly?
It's not about being good for shareholders. They are far away and generally know nothing about what is good or bad decision in long run. We have replaced human QC with computers in many industries. C-suite cares about company profit, middle management cares about KPI.
It's about maximizing individual management KPI despite being wrong for a company as a whole. Problems are for other guys/gals down the line.
> It's about maximizing individual management KPI
so you could argue that those people setting the KPI is either incompetent, or they themselves benefit from such a KPI (at the cost of the company going down).
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Back in ~ 2003-2004 I was working for an American company that did exactly that. The story was simple, they outsourced all IT (a few thousands) to a well known tech company. The selling point? "The tech company has a lot of expertise and scale and we will benefit from that". The results? The tech company took all the good engineers, moved them to work in other areas for other clients and replaced them with entry level technicians. It took a few years to start feeling the pain of what they did and a few more years to start reversing the change. By that time the C level people already retired rich, even today, 20 years later, the IT in that company is a terrible shade of "great leaders" and very low engineering skills outsourcing left and right anything more complicated than basic project management.
Nothing new here, but it's certainly a well-articulated redux.
Reading about this Boeing debacle is gut-wrenching because it totally contradicts what I believe in. Nihilism isn't supposed to win. Not like this, at least. I'm an engineer. I'm proud of what I do, and I care deeply about what I make. I'll admit it, I'm even proud of my country and I believe in the notion that I'm not the only person around here who gives a damn. Apparently there aren't enough people who do.
Funny how everyone keeps blaming management and even the merger as the root cause, but fail to realize that the merger was effectively forced on Boeing by the US government.
> but fail to realize that the merger was effectively forced on Boeing by the US government.
Hey! FAA employees also want a nice and cushy job to retire to.. Them revolving doors are not gonna turn by themselves..
I wonder if I could get a job at Boeing and ask for put options. My thoughts are that it's going to take a while to fix the company, during which time it will be focused on rebuilding instead of financial games and quality shenanigans. So the stock going down may be a sign of increased long term value. So give me 4 years of put options and then another 4 years of call options.
One of the fundamental problems with organizations, no matter what economic system you live under[0], is that you cannot give your boss a problem that they don't want to deal with. So if your job is to find problems, and your boss does not want to deal with problems, then your job will suuuuuuuuuuuuck.
0. I acknowledge that capitalism has caused a lot of problems, including Boeing problems.
> What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane
That's not fair. They didn't murder all of them, at least not yet.
Is anyone here who still has the courage to board a Boeing plane after reading this?
Parts flying off the planes, a non-existent QC culture... it sounds like the next bad accident is about to happen.
If Boeing -somehow- survives this though, it's planes might be the safest most thoroughly inspect that exist :)
Boeing’s crappy planes killed hundreds of people, true. But that was years ago!
So a door blew off a plane. Did it crash? No.
So a tire fell off a plane. Did it crash? No.
It goes to show that even after a quarter century of decline, there’s enough engineering savvy to at least make some things fail to a known condition.
> So a door blew off a plane. Did it crash? No.
The only thing preventing a fatality was pure luck of seating arrangement.
They killed 346 people just 3 years ago due to badly managed MCAS software testing. I guess I can't disagree as you as years is plural and, try, more than one year ago.
Hey, them engineers are so good that, in the past, they even had a 737 transform mid-flight to a convertible. Without crashing!
I wonder if Boeing’s institutional investors have had the foresight to get controlling stakes in business jet manufacturers to prevent them from going down the same path, just so that they can still get places by plane in reasonable safety.
Money trumps even the personal safety of the person getting the money. Look at the guy with the carbon fibre submarine. He literally sacrificed his life in the pursuit of profit.
Really hubris trumps everything else.
If he wanted money he would have invested in something more sensible, I don’t think OceanGate would have ever been profitable even if the submersible had worked.
The Boeing execs obviously love money, but I think they get their biggest kicks simply from remaking Boeing itself in their own depraved image.
I was reading the part about making employees sign a declaration about taking responsibility for their work and thought that was pure genius. Sounds like managers should also sign something like that.
From the article: >Discussing Swampy’s death and the whistleblower lawsuit he left behind, the longtime former Boeing executive told me, “I don’t think one can be cynical enough when it comes to these guys.” Did that mean he thought Boeing assassinated Swampy? “It’s a top-secret military contractor, remember; there are spies everywhere,” he replied.
Me: Aaaaand no way I'm ever applying to work at an MIC defense contractor conglomerate ever again.
Corporate greed. Simple and truthful answer…it’s also applicable for many many other companies who have abandoned their ways and have fallen victim of the dark side profit, dividend, share price and all the other similar capitalistic ideas :-(
> noncompliance (and nonconformance, which is similar but not identical)
Anyone who can explain the difference?
A nonconformance is generally a physical thing. For instance a part my be out of tolerance or have have damage that makes it nonconforming.
A noncompliance is generally referring to procedures. For instance not documenting a step in a quality review or not following the assembly procedures for a door plug and ending up with some extra bolts.
There are real problems at Boeing and those are real issues, but let's beware of the BS that comes with the kind of widespread pile-on that's happening now.
This article reads like an Internet rant to me, with the sarcasm, hyperbole, and ridicule. Those things aren't awful in themselves (though they've become very overused and tiresome to me), but they crowd out actual facts, details, nuance, complexities. If you write 'it's the worst thing ever', you omit where and how it's bad, where it's not, the consequences, the trade-offs, etc. I don't learn what happened, how, or why, just that you are really, really, really pissed off.
Examples:
* pieces are flying off the Boeing planes actually in use at an alarming rate
* to train the workforce to properly put together a plane.
* obligatory vanity “leadership” book - note the ridicule and scare quotes.
* suppliers, many of which lacked engineering departments* -- now using fonts for emphasis
* in a perpetual state of unlearning all the lessons it had absorbed over a 90-year ascent to the pinnacle of global manufacturing
* Qatar Airways had become so disgusted ..., coincidentally matching the author's emotion
* one of the most pathetic plea bargains in the history of American justice
It's like series of Reddit comments, and the world certainly doesn't need more of that. The author's and American Prospect's quality is no better than Boeing's.
If there were places it wasn't bad, does that affect this look at how it was bad?
I'd be honestly interested in what an appropriate set of edits would look like. Subtract some adjectives, would that make a difference?
> Subtract some adjectives, would that make a difference?
That would help, but that's secondary. They need to add the information I discussed on the GP. That info is incompatible with sweeping, absolutist adjectives, so they would go away.
Sweeping, extreme statements are a tip-off to BS for anything: Reality isn't that simple.
As I was reading this it reminded me 100% of GE. Another manufacturing giant that put profit above all else and many people suffered for it as the company collapsed under the weight of its own incompetence... though many also became staggeringly wealthy.
GE is absolutely a place where leadership is the only “skill” that matters. Leaders are all that’s needed and everyone else is a commodity. Leader worship and success theater killed GE.
I could only shake my head when I got to the part where a former GE leader is in the running to be the new CEO.
Make sure your affairs are in order before boarding a Boeing aircraft.
This isn't unique to Boeing. All large companies will eventually get to this state. People who usually makes it to management positions have no clue about what they are managing. Then they will always shit on the actual worked so they can keep their job.
> Like most neoliberal institutions
I stopped reading here. I thought it was an article not a political flame presenting opinions as facts
Anecdotal story: A few years ago I worked with ex-Boeing employees from Altus AFB. They were disgusted by the quality control of the delivered C-17 Globemasters. Construction garbage in the wall panels, etc. Like the article, their complaints only succeeded in labeling them as "troublemakers" within the company.
But racist white supremacists like Elon Musk blamed it on "DEI" (which is their new dog whistle for the n-word). Same thing they say caused a container ship to hit the Francis Scott Key Bridge.
‘A Black guy’ didn’t cause Boeing’s midair blowout. Capitalism did:
https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/boeing-airplane-safety-dei-...
Baltimore mayor claims 'racist' critics use 'DEI' instead of N-word to attack him:
https://mynbc15.com/news/nation-world/baltimore-mayor-claims...
>"Listen, I know and we all know and you know very well that Black men and young Black men in particular have been the boogeyman for those who are racist and think that only straight wealthy white men should have a say in anything," Scott said. "What they mean by DEI, in my opinion, is duly elected incumbent. We know what they want to say but they don’t have the courage to say the N-word."
>Scott was elected in 2020 with 70% of the popular vote. He is one among five mayors of color to have led the city since 2007. Over 60% of Baltimore residents are Black, according to Census data.
Lyman blames DEI for Baltimore bridge collapse, but admits he didn’t write social media post:
https://utahnewsdispatch.com/2024/03/27/utah-governor-candid...
>Utah Republican Phil Lyman, an outgoing state representative and current gubernatorial candidate, suggested diversity, equity and inclusion programs were to blame, at least in part, for the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore on Tuesday.
Ah, so that was where this "Boeing was DEI" meme coming from. Papa Elon, of course!
I was wondering why multiple commenters brought up DEI when the story was about a beloved American company getting destroyed by clueless upper-class CEOs (all being old white men, incidentally). Like, did we read the same article?
I remember here when the first 737 Max crashed and then after the second, people here were swearing up and down the cause was that the pilots were wogs.
"So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.
They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers."
Steve Jobs (1995) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs:_The_Lost_Interview
That's so ironically sad coming from Jobs seeing where Apple got now (partly due to the direction he set).
> partly due to the direction he set
What do you mean?
Sales and marketing - and financialization and capital efficiency. I got no beef with accountants, but I think companies need just enough focus on financialization and low to medium priority on capital efficiency (ie, look out for stupid wastes of capital).
It’s funny you bring up Jobs because this author (Mo Tkacik) is probably responsible for the best obituary of him written.
Weird to read from a "you are holding it wrong" man
Perspective: the S&M folks he's complaining about, don't even think at all about users holding products. Seriously, it's all spreadsheets and powerpoint, because they've never built anything with their hands, never worked on a team, and never worked on a "factory floor" (e.g. live server/database, etc).
Steve Jobs and his generation all soldered boards that went to paying customers. Elon Musk slept on the NUMMI factory floor to deal with "production hell." Bill Gates personally debugged MS-DOS.
The "bean counters" are not bad people, but doing this stuff creates a humility about quality and quality process, and not doing this stuff lulls people into a distaste/disdain/disrespect for it.
Analogously, engineers who've never been responsible for financial statements literally don't appreciate the work to get them materially correct, let alone meet legit regulatory requirements because someone somewhere cheated in counting inventory or money or whatever.
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Let's be clear, "you are holding it wrong" was an ass-covering lie to carry Apple through an era of bad press for a device that was otherwise monumental, and when you look back at iPhone adoption history. 4 was the inflection point of growth that never stopped. 3, 3G, and 3GS were all fine, but 4 is when iPhone took over the world.
It was bold-faced, it was arrogant, it wasn't true, but it let them fix the issues and never look back.
The product was otherwise good save a frustrating flaw that was easy to fix, but probably wouldn't have ushered in the era of dominance if they had to do a total recall.
Would I have been happy if I was an iPhone user at the time? No, I would've been livid.
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Since we live in a capitalist society, maybe the past golden times of Boeing are the exception, not the rule. Boeing is just another for-profit company now.
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I am not exaggerating to say that Jim McNerney should be dragged in front of Congress and be forced to explain what he did to an incredibly important American company. It's important to push back against the shareholder value theory where appropriate and humiliation is an underrated component of that.
A public hearing isn't going to change anything. Look at...well, literally any powerful organization or individual brought before Congress for excoriation. The pound of flesh they want is press and votes, and you don't have to change anything to get that.
It's not like they're going to break up Boeing. They can't actually do anything to improve Boeing. All they can do is wag their finger. It's not like there's an alternative American company to give our billions of dollars to. And it's not like other companies will suddenly fear being brought forward to be gummed to death by whining bureaucrats.
You want real pain? Have them pass a law that says the entire executive leadership's bonuses are forfeit, retroactively, if the company fails to maintain an adequate safety record. Shit will change there real quick. (That law will never happen but it's funny to think of)
I think culture is underrated. Acting like he did should not be considered a dignified behavior and I think that will meaningfully constrict behavior even in the absence of new laws. Think about how business culture varies across jurisdictions: there's more than just profit-maximization at work.
Also, to be clear, Boeing's safety record is still good. The only recent deaths are associated with less-trained pilots in the earlier days of the 737 MAX. My frustration is they took this organization from an engineering leader to an organization that can't ship a plane. The 787, 737 MAX, and now 777X were/are insanely delayed.
The nightmare scenario of a US-China war and Boeing being unable to ship a plane honestly haunts me. Boeing is extremely important to the West, broadly defined and this jerk didn't uphold his commensurate responsibilities.
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They might throw him under the bus or suicide him if it is bad enough. Right now he is still "one of us" so I don't think that's going to happen.
The entire neoliberal ideology needs to be reevaluated at every level of business in this country. We're destroying our skilled labor forces and our economy to pursue short term gains and it's going to have a negative impact on our national security.
I disagree with this. I don't really care if a video game company is run in a profit-maximizing way. We should probably be a bit more skeptical with important companies, particularly ones that seem irreplaceable (for all their faults, only one other company can do what Boeing does).
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tl;dr: Pournelle's Iron Law.
Pournelle's Iron Law is just him saying "I am a Republican". You are not required to listen to him.
For balance, I stopped reading this article at the end of the first page because it called Boeing "neoliberal", which doesn't mean anything except that the writer is a snotty humanities grad.
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
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Huh? His observation is politically neutral. It just notes that the people running organizations are, ultimately, selfish (as are most people). They will ultimately look after themselves, even at the cost of the organization they are supposed to be caring for.
You see this everywhere. Crazy CEO salaries and golden parachutes, as CEOs sit on each other's boards approving such packages. Charities that prolong the problem they were set up to eliminate. "Old space" where NASA provided decades of unjustified cost-plus contracts.
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Not diversity. Younger cheaper quotas.
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An intrusive popup took over my screen at that link.
You can click reader mode in your browser to read the article.
I have zero patience for fools who are allegedly knowledge workers, yet complain about popups and ads in the year 2024.
The ads are obnoxious, but they are there for the plebs, and we need to put obnoxious ads the faces of plebs to fund the internet. If you are not a pleb, you already have an adblocking solution installed, so please use it. If however, you are a pleb, please consume mass quantities of the product which is being advertised. There are a lot of adware developers who are counting on you to buy their next Porsche.
Or, invent a decent micropayent solution so we can get rid of the damn ads.
Or how about pop-ups not take over my screen? I'm on a work computer without an ad blocker.
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How should a company promote diversity without jeopardizing safety?
Why do you think one is at odds with the other?
If you are selecting for anything besides competence, your chances of getting competence is effectively random. It says nothing about one group of people being more or less competent than another.
I have observed that selecting for competence leads to diversity, and I believe that diversity is a strength. But it is best achieved organically.
Personally I think the shortcomings we have with achieving diversity is in the framing stage, not the hiring stage.
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In some industries when you have diversity targets you need to lower the standards a lot. Why? Because the competence-based hiring and promotion process will not get you enough good candidates to meet the diversity targets, so you take shortcuts like Boeing did with QC.
According to StackOverflow survey a few years ago with a huge (relevant) number of answers, about 8% of people in the domain were women. Some companies have targets of 50 to 70% women. How do you think these targets are met? My company had 70% target and we are close; we hired any woman that ever applied, no questions asked, no tech interview. I managed the IT recruiting for an entire region over 5 years, I quit that role when the tech interviews were forbidden in order to meet targets.
When journalists write about unions, like this:
>The plan would save money while busting unions, a win-win, he promised investors. Instead, McNerney’s plan burned some $50 billion in excess of its budget and went three and a half years behind schedule.
They have a moral obligation to disclose their conflicts of interest in being unionized themselves.
The staff at The American Prospect are all part of a News Guild, with their employer mandated into exclusive collective bargaining with their bargaining unit:
https://wbng.org/unit/the-american-prospect/
They thereby benefit from laws that enshrine union control at the expense of contract liberty.