Comment by Cheer2171
2 years ago
The intention wasn't to destroy institutional knowledge. The intention was to cut costs in the short term, largely through outsourcing and turnover. Why pay a senior engineer a huge salary when you could replace them with a consultant in their twenties? They just didn't think or care about the consequences.
They adopted a philosophy of management that explicitly assigned no value to institutional knowledge, and thus eliminated anyone who had it as they were not considered worth their salary. From the article:
> Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs.
This has been done so many times at this point, shouldn't MBAs have case studies covering the "how companies have rotted from shit decisions made by bean counters" 101 course?
Does it matter to the MBAs? The effect is on long enough terms that they'll be gone by the time everything falls over. They're not there to maximize long-term value, just to get good enough to get promoted and then maybe switch companies.
This is true, they also cut costs by 'finding' less defects in QA, deferring them to production deployment several quarters out.
This is the irony of good QA.
1) Company starts to notice a lot of quality problems.
2) Company institutes a good QA program.
3) Company notices less quality problems.
4) Company cuts QA program because there seems to be less need for it.
Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
(The same can be said for safety when dealing with low probability events).
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In my experience, the term "tribal knowledge" is a pejorative, and has been disparaged by many authors (some, that I respect).
Also, in my experience, "tribal knowledge" is an essential ingredient in classical Maximum Quality engineering. I'm not saying that it's the only way, but I have seen many, many other ways fail.
It's something that -no exaggeration- humans have been doing for thousands of years.
It's just that we have a crew at the top that sincerely believe they know better. Every now and then, one hits it out of the park.
The rest ... not so much.
Rather: Money > consequences. And so far, they've been right. How likely will old managers that have long left, but fully participated, be held accountable?
You may be right.. your comment reminded me of the formula from Fight Club. Maybe the airlines made that calculus, reasoning that, after all this time their planes were safe enough, and the chance of an accident were low. Even still, it was cheaper to settle lawsuits.
"A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
The Ford Pinto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Cost%E2%80%93benefi...
The airlines brought a high-quality aircraft. Up to the first failures of the Max, there was no reason at all to expect Boeings to be badly done.