"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.
I simply enjoyed coding more. The engineering job had its upsides too, especially the hardware we used, made for some good stories I could never have as a programmer again;-)
Still, I don't regret the switch, CS is just more my thing.
I was already a my mid-thirties and had a child when I finished my computer science degree.
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.
There is a lot of software used in finance, medicine, transportation, logistics, aerospace, manufacturing, and robotics where a simple whoopsies isn't going to undo the loss of money and the loss of life.
I think I am. I'm disagreeing with you on the volume of software that's critical and relevant. I think you're understating the amount.
I've been in this business for 40 years and I've worked in several verticals. You'd be amazed at how much software is critical to the continued operations of modern civilization. Software has increased the carrying capacity of the planet, and without it, literally billions of people would die.
This isn't as innocuous as you make it. Add up wasted minutes for millions of users and you're looking at thousands of lifetimes.
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that access to information is a force multiplier. Google doesn't have a monopoly on that, but it's hardly worthless or trivial.
Google (and most web software firms) are very lucky to operate in an industry where getting it more-or-less right 70% of the time is extraordinarily profitable, and the consequences for getting it wrong in any individual case are trivial.
There are many industries where this is not the case: aerospace, medical device engineering, and live TV production all come to mind.
I don't think his point is to say subpar search results aren't "impactful" but that they aren't going to cause a loss of life. If you work anywhere in the aerospace industry mistakes often can have that result.
Anecdotally, the average member of the team I'm in (in Europe) is probably mid-30s with at least 10 years of experience.
Less than 5 years of experience at Google is, to be fair, common. But the company doubled in size over that time, so it's inevitable. And higher turn over in tech is common (and I don't think that is necessarily reflective of anything other than the fact it's easy to get another job as a software engineer).
I can't state much on the layoffs because my team was not heavily affected.
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.
Remember people are willing to do just about anything if someone in a position of authority tells them to. New engineers have little "intuition" of what is an isn't appropriate, we rely on the experienced engineers to learn this, along with experience we get along the way, as school mostly teaches us how to learn, not the particulars of whatever job we end up in (speaking mostly of aero's/meche's). You hope you end up in a good place that will train you well but often you are just the newest meat to enter the grinder.
And yes, we often do worry and feel responsibility if something goes wrong or could go wrong. I remember working on a job where I was incredibly out of my depth, where no one in my group had any experience to check what I was doing, which would have had serious implications for peoples lives if my work had an error. I was so stressed I got grey hairs. I know many people who've been in similar positions, or positions of trying to meet impossible deadlines, deal with an unreasonable amount of work that makes doing it correctly unfeesable, or be put in a position where they have to accept practices that they would never put up with later in their careers.
I’m going through something like this, though in a _much_ lower stakes industry. On one side, management always seems to say the right thing to counteract my fears of mediocrity. And then months later a major problem needs fixed in production. I guess I’ll keep going like this until a problem is big enough that it can’t be fixed.
But they treat me well. And my last job was in a different industry that’s known for treating employees badly. So I stay. Again my job is very low stakes but it still eats me up, I can’t imagine how these engineers feel.
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 stopped considering engineering and manufacturing to be their core competency after the MDD merger, that is expressly why they moved the HQ away from Seattle and closer to financial markets.
Was about to say the same. I guess the most of recent engineering in Boeing is just scaling, I mean, making it bigger without changing anything else, if you can call that engineering by any chance...
>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.
Which is why healthcare and pension shouldn't be paid by the employer, employers shouldn't be punished for keeping old people around.
If someone doubled the workers salary to leave you wouldn't say "but the company loyally gave you a job for 10 years, how can you desert them?", same thing here. We should incentivize companies to do the right thing, not punish them for it.
Doubt anything at Boeing would have changed if everyone had state healthcare. These pernicious decisions weren't driven by healthcare at all. Younger employees can be more easily coerced to an executive's vision, forced to break compliance laws and also be paid lesser than senior folks.
This is the terrible rot of modern business culture - all driven by short-term profit making at the cost of long-term sustainability.
> 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.
>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.
Why does the stock market reward idiot shit like this?
I've seen the same whit a a large US semiconductor company. In the 2008 crunch, the fired the most tenured employees and offshored the work abroad. Granted, the company didn't fail, their stock went up and now it's 5-7x that amount.
> Why does the stock market reward idiot shit like this?
Well at a first order, the answer is that the stock market as a system for promoting value creation is an imperfect approximation of an ideal value creator, and more and more we are beginning to see the myriad of ways this concept produces antisocial results. (See for example the state of hospitals and schools, and the rising rate of individuals with crippling medical and college debt.)
More directly there has been some criticism of the stock market for rewarding short term gain over long term value, which among other things has led to the creation of the Long Term Stock Exchange:
I should add that our short term market-based approach to economic activity fails to produce appropriate housing outcomes, and that the approaches in Vienna or Singapore could end our homelessness crisis and make everyone happier. I recently read a doctor’s account of the homeless people who use the ER as a community space by complaining of minor illnesses, and it seems so clear to me it would be cheaper to give them small private subsidized housing (not the awful and alienating “shelters” that offer no privacy or storage and have strict rules, making the street more appealing). Fixing housing could be cheaper than them using the ER or paying for their prison space, and it would also make the streets of San Francisco smell a LOOOT better (and BART), but our short term market based system just chops up everything good, sells it for parts, and speculates on all the land and buildings.
>I should add that our short term market-based approach to economic activity fails to produce appropriate housing outcomes
>Fixing housing could be cheaper than them using the ER or paying for their prison space, and it would also make the streets of San Francisco smell a LOOOT better (and BART)
It's extremely unfair to blame "market based solutions" for failing to fix SF housing problems when it's pretty clear the largest hurdle is NIMBYism politically blocking new housing developments.
People defile them, use them for shelters, or drug ingestion stations. There's no innovative way to solve homelessness. It's an insidious problem that defies any method to redress. Any angle you try to approach it from will be abused or defeated in some way.
Well, you can either have human rights (non-authoritarian states who won't use the police to crack down on this behaviour) or clean public toilets. Of course Singapore for instance has the cleanest public toilets, but you can also pay a 2k fine for chewing gum.
Vienna's approach worked because it happened after WW2 when the country was bombed and broken, land, construction materials and labor were dirt cheap, so the state built over half the city's homes and turned them into public housing cheaply no problem.
But fast forward to today where most of the land and buildings in a city are privately owned, how to you expect a city, any city, to buy up over half the buildings in the city at today's market and turn them into public housing?
The city would probably have to go broke or into huge amounts of debt and everyone would be screaming communism.
Even in the rest of Austria, this approach today would not be feasible due to how insane the cost of urban housing ahs reached no city could afford to buy up over half of it.
The monetary appreciation of housing prices and and turning it into an speculative asset is the west's biggest policy failure. You'd have to undo this first before you can think of implementing Vienna's policies.
> Vienna's approach worked because it happened after WW2
It didn't though, they already started in the 1920ies! The most famous builing, Karl-Marx-Hof, started construction in 1927.
And they are building new public housing to this day, making use of inner city land that comes available from old factories, storage facilities, rail yards or alongside private construction projects etc. Other austrian cities do this too.
>And they are building new public housing to this day,
Sure, a bit yes, but the bulk was acquired/made back when property was dirt cheap, not at today's prices. Vienna couldn't replicate the same move from scratch today.
You cannot start to do today in any city what Vienna started 100 years ago. It's too late now. The fiscal policies of the last decades have made that unfeasible.
>Other austrian cities do this too.
Not even remotely as much as Viena. Graz has next to no public housing, it's mostly private.
Right so you’re saying Vienna’s approached worked but we would have to change things to make it work for us. That is exactly what I am saying too.
I’m also saying that it could be worth considerable effort to try to make those changes, because the reward is a much better system.
For example we might introduce bills now that help stabilize (reduce) housing prices by limiting large scale corporate speculation on housing, such as these two bills [below] introduced into congress. With cheaper housing available, the need for social housing goes down and so does the cost to build it, dramatically lowering the total cost to implement.
Yes and part of what I’m saying is that we might want to stop doing that and think about what is actually going to fix our problems, even if gasp the government is involved. Nobody can afford housing and our planes are falling out of the sky and we’re having a cold-war political debate while every other major country offers cheaper medical care and education.
That would require actually listening to each other and experts, and not using demagoguery to villainize people who disagree with us on minor culture issues. Again, the financial incentives align for the anti-social aspect, since yelling at each other draws in more engagement and viewers and sells more ad-space.
> the stock market as a system for promoting value creation is an imperfect approximation of an ideal value creator
yet
> See for example the state of hospitals and schools, and the rising rate of individuals with crippling medical and college debt.
Ummmm. State hospitals and schools are not traded on our stock exchanges. If there's a failure here, it's not with equities markets.
There's an obvious common denominator between the examples you give, and that these are the most highly-regulated industries in America. My first guess as to where to lay blame would be on those regulations - although we'd really need to dig into whatever the specific failures you're thinking of, if we want to be sure.
“See the state of hospitals” meaning the situation with hospitals, many of which it seems are private. Our schools are a mixture of state and publicly owned (I’m including college) but even state funded schools suffer due to their reliance on stock market driven suppliers such as textbook companies and the housing the teachers live in.
> My first guess as to where to lay blame would be on those regulations
Considering medical and educational costs (total system costs including government expense) are much higher here than they are for example in Germany which has State run institutions for both, I would see this as a poor assumption.
However I’m not actually advocating for State-run institutions, as I would rather see locally owned cooperatives for housing and schools, and larger federations of cooperatives for medical research. My point is that short term market-based winner-take-all approaches are hurting us.
I should add that the broad topic of discussion here is Boeing, which degraded in critical safety metrics after moving to a relaxed regulation environment and focusing on market based short term optimization.
Because the entire rewards system is built around short-medium term financial gains.
It is a very old story. People build a company with deep knowledge and caring about what actually makes great products. Financial managers get involved to manage the money aspects of the business. Financial types want a lot more control to make the company more profitable.
The financial management has no actual clue what makes the company valuable. They only know what makes more or less cash flow in this or that direction. But, credit where due, they DO know how to make that work.
They start financially 'engineering' the company for near-term profits and higher stock prices. This works. This works fantastically well. Everything looks leaner, teams of younger workers are sometimes orders of magnitude cheaper than the highly experienced teams, and no one can tell the difference from outside. Profits are higher, stock prices hit record high after record high. Cash is spent on stock buybacks and not R&D or retaining institutional knowledge. Warning flags start showing up in product and service quality indicators, but are ignored and even suppressed. The problems start multiplying at increasing rates, then exponentially increasing rates.
Eventually, it starts to get serious. But by then, the "financial geniuses" have long since cashed out and the core of the company's workforce, ethos, and institutional knowledge has been so gutted that there is no recovery. The death spiral starts in earnest.
The only questions are whether for Boeing, being a critical keystone in the US aerospace and defense industry can or will be allowed to fail, and, if not, if there will be an actual engineering-based turnaround, or if it will be a Soviet-like zombie company for how many years?
Because, depressingly, the stock market is correct.
Boeing is one of two manufacturers for planes of this size. The other is totally backlogged with orders. The stock market has assessed, correctly, that Boeing can withstand this loss of knowledge and keep generating profit. Does it result in shit equipment that literally kills people? Sure. But how many people are going to stop flying because of it? Not many. Throw in the lucrative military connections and you’ve got yourself a sure bet.
I think that many of the managers honestly didn’t understand where the quality and safety came from. They probably thought that they could just coast and the quality would continue.
As a counterpoint, I work at very large financial firm in technology and in general, the 20+ year veterans who’ve been here forever are terrible. They are hidebound in their actions, years behind in industry best practices and they maintain little fiefdoms simply because of their intimate knowledge of the banks arcane and idiosyncratic policies. The place would be better of without the bulk of them.
That is to say we are the complete opposite of what Boeing was. But the most charitable interpretation you could offer the Boeing management is that they thought they were in the situation of my company rather than the situation they actually had.
You're being too generous. Boeing actively retaliated against people raising safety concerns. That's not the action of people who didn't know any better.
People won't stop flying until they do - or at least stop flying on Boeing aircraft. And if airlines can't make a profit on a Boeing aircraft flight, there won't be any more Boeing aircraft flights.
I don't know whether the point where the market for Boeing aircraft travel is one disaster away or ten disasters away, but it is out there. When it comes, people won't stop flying, but they will fly less, and it will cost more. It can happen.
Objectivly speaking flying with Boeing is still safe. People like us think news about planes and crashes are big but they really arent.
Most people dont have the faintest idea of who makes planes, and what plane models exist or how save they are.
And there isn't any system to activly avoid certain planes even if you wanted too.
Sure at some point with enough failures this can happen. But this is unlikely. Most Boeing plans are already built and are already flying and they are mostly very safe. They are flight proven.
Boeing wont interduce a truely new model for the next 10 years.
And after that, such a plane would need to comply to very strict regulation and it would take a long time for that plane to be built in large numbers.
So practically speaking the scenrio you suggest is impossible.
People aren't rational. Particularly in very large groups.
If a half-dozen (or whatever the magic number ends up being to set the zeigeist on fire) of Boeing aircraft suffer fatal or near-fatal accidents in the near future, everyone will suddenly know who makes which planes, and there will be systems to make sure you don't fly Boeing.
And while I think such a scenario is unlikely, it's hardly impossible. The real driver would be a combination of years of Boeing's own neglect coming together with margin-cutting airlines (you'd think they be extra safety conscious now, but any large organization is its own worst enemy), and any other of dozens of factors that could add up to push aircraft travel in an unsafe direction.
Or to put it another way, my intuition is that air travel (particularly in the US) has been very safe for a very long time, because it has operated with a very large safety margin. There are any number of perverse incentives to cut that safety margin, and it is largely possible to get away with cutting corners because of how deep the margin is. But if you keep cutting, eventually you run out of margin - and the sorts of people who do that sort of cutting can easily have have no idea how much margin there really is, or how much is actually needed to keep operating safely. So eventually things get to the point where you're not operating safely anymore, and then you can get multiple bad outcomes in a short period of time.
> And while I think such a scenario is unlikely, it's hardly impossible.
Witch is why I said 'practically'.
> So eventually things get to the point where you're not operating safely anymore, and then you can get multiple bad outcomes in a short period of time.
I'm not getting on a Boeing plane again. More on principle than fear of my life. And yeah, I'm probably in a group that is not statistically important.
Because if you look at it by the numbers, expenses went down whilst output remained. If you’re an investor that investigates annual reports on finances, this would pique your interest. There is no way to price the talent and knowledge of your workforce until after they have left.
I really like that last sentence. 'There is no way to price the talent and knowledge of your workforce until after they have left.' I think that captures so much in such a simple to understand way.
Yup. In the incentives align to motivate you to play the current game of the day. Another example I can think of. Google search has sucked for awhile now. Some people pin it directly on to Google, but I think its much broader than that. There is an entire cottage industry around around gaming whatever Google does to improve search. Its a cat and mouse game. Google tries to implement a new pattern that will punish people gaming SEO, the people gaming SEO learn the new pattern and adjust for it, and we are back where we are.
In both cases of the stock market and a popular search engine, I don't really know if there is a solution that prevents people from trying to game it.
> There is an entire cottage industry around around gaming whatever Google does to improve search. Its a cat and mouse game. Google tries to implement a new pattern that will punish people gaming SEO, the people gaming SEO learn the new pattern and adjust for it, and we are back where we are.
This implies that Google is helpless to do more, which I kind of doubt. I think the misaligned incentive here is that it's unprofitable to do more to fight spam. They already have the vast majority of the market, making search 40% better isn't going to get them 40% more money.
I think it's just a calculated decision to keep search "good enough" to not lose too much market share, while not having to spend too much on engineer salaries.
I also kind of suspect the markets left to try to capture are either less profitable or more difficult to serve (specializing in niche content).
For sure I don't think Google is helpless. But its not as simple as just "make search good." And I agree with you on how you summarized the misalignment of incentives. Lets say Google already invests 100 million in search (probably under, but keep numbers small and simple). And we are able to quantify it at being 60% effective or 'good.' Does it make sense for Google to invest another 50 million to bump that up to 62%, probably not. And I imagine that it how the incentives are aligned. They could pay to make it more effective, but they won't see the same returns on the dollar amount. And that is what I am guessing the situation is like. They could make it better, but they now have diminishing returns on the money spent on making it better. I expect a lot of the diminishing returns comes from the fact that they have to fight a cottage industry to game whatever changes they make all along the way.
> Committees and commissars do not do a better job.
Then why is internal governance and resource allocation inside companies done by committees and commissars and dictators, instead of by an unplanned free market?
> Markets are the best way we’ve come up with to allocate capital.
Properly regulated, competitive markets. Aerospace regulation is based on a lot of trust, which Boeing seems to have exploited, causing this problem. The market is not competitive; there are only two players and the output of only one of them cannot meet demand.
> Committees and commissars do not do a better job.
Dichotomies are good for making punctual arguments online, but you do yourself a huge disservice by using them to frame the options in your own mind. Do you honestly think that the options are 1. Antisocial free market allowed to do whatever it wants for capital gain, or 2. Despotic communism? You are smarter than that.
>Why does the stock market reward idiot shit like this?
Because Boeing is in an absolutely unique position where they are part of a duopoly in a market where demand for airplanes massively outstrips supply. Boeing's customers have no alternative and Boeing will be selling them planes and the market knows that.
Additionally the stock market can only look a tangible results. There is no measure of "engineering competency" which you could track year over year, which makes these mistakes hard to realize unless you are inside the system.
> Why does the stock market reward idiot shit like this?
Wall St geniuses are not engineers.
That said, I bought Boeing stock and held over that time frame. I did so because I could see that humans were going to need more planes over the long term, and there are only two vendors. Also I visited the Everett plant with my family on vacation. It didn't occur to me that it would be worthwhile introducing KPI BS and McDonald's management style when constructing things worth 100 million and safety-critical.
Quite simply because investors are often chasing after money only (ie profitability), not necessarily a company's productivity or product quality. And the quicker the profits the better (meaning short term is valued over long term).
Additionally, not all investors are savvy on what's going on with companies, so they decide to invest in ETFs (which mind you, is now the lion's share of investment activity). Now not all ETFs are the same basket of stocks. Some may have 15 stocks, whereas others may consist of 50. This is done so people can "choose their risk tolerance", which is calculated based on various things such as how diversified the fund is (50 stocks is more diversified than 15), what the market caps of the companies are, etc. Anyhow, the point is, choosing to invest in said investment vehicles, has little to do with investing based upon fundamentals, or rewarding productive companies, and more to do with managing a person's personal investment risk. The result? Companies are detached from fundamentals because, quite literally, the majority of investors are not investing based on fundamentals, but based on risk.
> Why does the stock market reward idiot shit like this?
I don’t think the market rewards it, at least not by itself.
The problem is that the real money isn’t in the market, the institutional investors make most of their money on commissions. So while short term gains are a nice bonus, it’s only secondary to driving volatility and with it trade volume. So the incentive is to just stir shit up, because that’s what makes them money, both as stock prices go up and down.
Also institutional investors have disproportionate voting power that lets them put their own shit stirrers on the board and subsequently in the C-suite.
> Why does the stock market reward idiot shit like this?
Because as someone buying stock, I have no idea whether these kinds of things are right and necessary to reduce bloat and redundancies in the firm, or idiotic and self-destructive.
All I know is that I probably want to be buying stock in firms that are more profitable, as opposed to less profitable. Or, at least, firms that other people think are going to be more profitable.
I blame index funds. Pump the % gain, index funds buy it up because it looks like a better ROI. Abuse that by doing short term shit and ride the wave of self fulfilling prophecy by the index funds buying into it (amplifying noise into a signal) and leave retail/workers holding the bags.
I get that statistically DIY'ing your portfolio will almost always lead to worse returns but I really do wish I could exclude certain stocks from my index funds.
1) That's not how index funds work: they attempt to track a target market index. At most, it happens indirectly: get your company into the major indices by a short-sighted depletion of capital, and you can get some level of lift from index funds blindly purchasing your stock (though IIRC it's not a huge effect).
2) You can effectively remove certain companies from an index using derivatives in addition to the index fund. Alternatively, look into direct indexing, where you attempt to track an index by directly owning an appropriately weighted basket of stocks, though it tends to be more complicated, have greater tracking errors, and have higher fees.
Oh this is exactly what I was trying to claim. I don't have any source for it though, just general distrust of our financial system and awareness that there's many incredibly smart people trying to find every loop hole and turn every random fluctuation to their advantage.
Thanks for the info on how to effectively remove certain companies from an index though, I'll put that to use
I don't think the timing adds up for this explanation. Friedman introduced the shareholder value doctrine in 1970, and Jack Welch's Pierre Hotel speech that kicked off the era of slash-and-burn management was in 1981. Meanwhile, index funds were a tiny fraction of assets under management until well into the 2000s.
I am starting to believe more and more that the shareholder value movement has done enormous damage to the social fabric. It basically declares that the only stakeholders of an economy are owners. Anybody else doesn’t count. If this doesn’t change, then progress in AI and robotics will lead to a very dystopian society with a few haves and many have nots.
It seems like this is the same pattern that we've seen happen more broadly in the tech industry over the past year--the big tech companies think they can juice the bottom line by reducing headcount, and the increased profitability will outweigh any negative impact on their engineering performance. It's a perverse incentive that seems very difficult to turn around once it starts happening.
> millions of dollars fewer per year in headcount expenses.
I don't know how much they saved by forcing out highly-paid employees, but it was a tiny amount compared to the 40 billion in additional revenue earned between 2008 and 2018 (60 to 101 billion). The stock market rewarded the company primarily because of the revenue gains.
How about eliminate your employees to pump up the stock selling price or whatever and instead of removing the best subordinates, keep them, give them automation capabilities, and remove the unintelligent dross?
That's much better than basically destroying your own company because you don't know how to progress forward and upward. This privilege is reserved for the few who can I guess.
The only thing that seems to work nowadays is name-and-shame (unless you run for president, apparently).
Who are these folks that deserve to be outted for gutting an American institution? I'm sure they're still around, practicing their strain of vulture capitalism.
UPDATE:
Looks like the article points out the following main culprits:
* Jim McNerney
* Dave Calhoun
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.
It’s this, absolutely. Professional managers trained in finance who either don’t know or don’t care about the actual business they’re managing. Work = moving money around a spreadsheet and all else is incidental at best and something to be avoided at worst, doubly so if it can’t be captured in a spreadsheet with a dollar value attached.
This is where regulation steps in. A regulatory body should make the cost of certain failure scenarios so painful that companies are incentivized to make better choices. We probably don't need regulations about the color choices of t-shirts, but safety & testing for mass-transit vehicles might be warranted.
That's the future guy's problem. So long as it is possible to cash out before the consequences happen that sort of regulation won't move the needle much.
Making it illegal to be a bad CEO is one of those things that sounds intriguing on paper, but would be a nightmare to implement in real life.
Prosecutor: "You inflated investor returns by sabotaging the future survival of the company and made shoddy products that killed people."
Former CEO: "So what?"
The worst part is that this is a real problem. So many formerly strong companies have been brought down by this behavior that it is becoming notable when it doesn't happen. We are allowing these guys to destroy the American economy slowly just because it makes them and their close buddies ridiculous money. And of course the government is largely captured by these same people, so Washington isn't going to help. Just so frustrating.
This phenomenon also explains some others that may or may not be surprising:
1. Founder led companies have higher returns. And it's by A LOT. Hard to quantify exactly but, I've seen quoted numbers as high as 20% outperformance for founder led companies.
2. The biggest corporations never remain the biggest. Where is the Dutch East India company today? More recent examples:
IBM was overtaken by Nippon Telephone, was overtaken by Exxon Mobil, was overtaken by GE, was overtaken by Microsoft etc.
3. It's not very common that a company stays in the S&P 500 for more than 30 years. The average lifespan is 21 years.
The common thread is that as soon as the sociopath MBA's take over, they Boeing the whole business.
>IBM was overtaken by Nippon Telephone, was overtaken by Exxon Mobil, was overtaken by GE, was overtaken by Microsoft etc.
And where is GE these days? They even sold off their consumer appliance division to the Chinese company Haier. They still make jet engines and some other big industrial stuff, but they're not as huge as they used to be.
Unless the DoJ splits up Boeing, which is what they should do. If Apple's iPhone is a monopoly with dozens of Android alternatives, what does that say about Boeing?
The DoJ doesn't want to split up Boeing, because then it'll be even less competitive against Airbus. Economies of scale are important in large manufacturing operations.
Boeing at this point is a sort of nationalized industry.
I’m less interested in judging most things. Started actively jettisoning that impulse in my 20s.
It’s the “pft, but that’s just morality and like that’s relative and stuff therefore we should disregard it” sort of thing that I increasingly have less patience for. I’m less quick to dismiss terms like “greed”.
Even most economists these days would agree that this is a really bad take (invisible hand). You should read more than the punchline of that Adam Smith book and you would find that even he would agree
you are inventing and projecting an argument. the op's comment is effectively "the root problem with crime is evil in the heart of man", which presents only emotional lament and no actionable content . it's handwaving grandstanding that serves only a social signaling purpose.
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.
In that case, the causality is easy to determine. But that’s not the case with more complex systems, so it’s easier to rationalize a bias (I don’t need this expensive QA)
This doesn't explain Microsoft though, as that's probably a special case. They simply eliminated the Windows QA department, and instead let users do the QA. Why not? It's not like their users are going to switch OSes.
I don’t know about that specifically, but I’ve seen that as a common occurrence as a cost cutting measure in low risk situations. In that case, the risk is low because 1) it’s not safety critical and 2) the switching moat is large enough to ensure they don’t lose customers
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.
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."
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.
Not just senior = higher pay. Senior = more likely to stick to existing (known good) safety/QC processes. Boeing didn't want QC at all - they wanted the guys assembling the planes to do their own QC (which is likely illegal per FAA regulations).
Toss in a side of union busting. And a dessert serving of outsourcing to the lowest bidder, regardless of that bidders history in the space.
Senior people also cost more because their health care costs more. Of course discriminating against older people is illegal, so they cut down on senior staff which just happens to have the same cost reduction. Funny that.
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.
> 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'.
I realize this is focusing on the example, but no, established bourbon distillers aren't going to stop barrel aging. It's part of the brand, it's part of what people pay for, and they have no reason to.
Your friend might have been overconfident, I don't know, but macerating oak chips at high temperature, getting the process right, adding flavorants: if he succeeds in making a high-quality product, great! Am I skeptical? Yes. But again, the established distillers didn't consider and reject the idea of making liquor this way because it's a bad idea, they wouldn't do it because that's not bourbon.
If he's successful, they still won't do it, because it's not bourbon. He can sell to people who don't care, though. If it's good, I'd get a bottle.
I was going to make a comment along these lines. I don't know much about bourbon, but as an alcoholic drink, basically it's relying on chemical reactions to create the final product. The current way of making it, which takes a lot of time, has been designed by trial-and-error over many, many generations, as with most alcoholic drinks, and this was mostly done in times before we understood the science of chemistry.
It should be certainly possible (I'm not sure how) to replicate this process in a speedier way.
However, I think the thing being missed by the start-up guy is that, like Louis Vitton crap and genuine De Beers diamonds, most people aren't looking for something that replicates the "genuine" product, they want "the real thing" because there's some kind of emotional factor in owning some massively overpriced shirt made by sweatshop workers and sold in a fancy store by appointment, or a rock that was really dug out of the ground by an enslaved child in Africa. I suspect barrel-aged bourbon is similar.
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.
You say it like "anxiety" and "stress" are synonymous to suicidal. I am a pretty anxious person, and sometimes have a lot of stress at work, and experienced burnout in the past too. That doesn't mean I am about to shoot myself in a motel parking lot - or anywhere else, for that matter. This binary view of mental health - either a person is "healthy" which means 100% perfect, or he's not - and then anything can be expected, including a suicide at any arbitrary time - is nonsense. It's completely legit to ask how comes the person who wasn't suicidal, and actually told people that he's not - suddenly turns to commit suicide in the middle of court testimony, without any warning signs or explanation. Saying "oh, he was anxious and stressed about work" is not a good explanation to this. Maybe there was an explanation, maybe there wasn't, but pretending "anxiety" explains it is nonsense.
His whole lawsuit was about being forced to retire 10 years early because Boeing forced him out for whistleblowing.
Thats whistleblowing as in past tense. He complained to the FAA and the FAA said 'yes John you're right'.
Not to diminish your mental heath but the whole argument here is that what Boeing around "stress", "pressure" and "anxiety" was far worse.
Its not like is anti whistleblower retaliation case (AIR21) was going to be some massive blemish for Boeing. It's not like it was going to be a 100 million dollar write down. It is basically "wrongful termination" that they are fighting. And it would be round 2 on this case (the first was "dismissed").
https://archive.is/iUzxR#selection-995.134-995.139 does a bit better job of surfacing more of the details. Ones that paint boeing in a far worse light without the sensationalism of a tv script murder plot.
Being forced as whistle-blower and being suicidal are again very different things. Especially when he was in the middle of proving he's right. And right in the middle of the fight, between the testimonies, after he spent so much effort to prove he's right, he decides "fuck it all" and quits abruptly? Doesn't add up. Maybe something else happened but I just am astonished how easily people dismiss it. Ah, he was anxious and stressed? We'll, it's only natural then. No it's not.
If it isnt the case and you have proof the VA would love to hear from you. They have this tiny problem of soldiers coming home from war (to a happy place) with stress, anxiety and PTSD and then offing themselves.
He wasn't a soldier coming back from the war though. He was an engineer, in the middle of court proceedings. Soldiers have their own problems (and VA regularly and consistently fails at helping them, as the shining example of government efficiency) but that's completely different situation.
Stress and anxiety make you more vulnerable to bad decisions like suicide. Stop trying to turn stress and anxiety into an aesthetic personality trait and fashionable dress. Mental illness is not a dress that you can wear. It's toxic stuff to get rid of or at least mitigate.
Then maybe stressed anxious people who are both high performing and mentally ill isn't ridiculous? Which makes sense because mediocre people have no stress, anxiety, or mental illness. They're "sane and healthy" instead.
Yes. And stress, anxiety, and mental illness positively correlate with high performance. Because mediocre people don't care about quality metrics and stuff. Nor should they. They contrast their superiors in the hierarchy. The good people at the top and the mundane people at the bottom. The universe is in balance. As it should be.
This is actually the starting premise for some interesting and powerful theories. You can't have this kinda progress with aesthetic based generalizations that are part of a quick-to-assume epistemology.
The best ghetto intuitions can do is paint pretty yet vain pictures with metaphors about sea harbors and bays. Inferior science and knowledge doesn't lead anywhere.
There's more than enough circumstantial evidence to support the allegations of foul play here. When people kill themselves, they usually do it somewhere private and personal to them, like inside their home, or their car. Not in the parking lot outside a courthouse.
Unless its one last troll against boeing on the way out. Why go quietly if you are going to go when you have a shot to majorly embarrass the company one last time?
On the other hand, he might have wanted to go out leaving exactly this sort of mess of optics for boeing PR to deal with. Most people who commit suicide probably aren’t in the national spotlight against the very thing that brought them this point beforehand.
The article above and every other article I've read says, "he was found in his truck". That's a personal vehicle, and assuming it was locked, enough to suggest that it was self-inflicted.
I can close a locked door after shooting someone in the head. I'm not sure how this follows that "it's enough". After years of criticizing Boeing, he kills himself during his deposition? I don't think so.
This is clearly false. "He did it in the parking lot" is nothing like enough evidence to convict anyone. It isn't remotely enough even on the balance of probabilities. I have seen zero evidence for the conspiracy theory, and strong evidence against it, including the fact that his own family think his death was suicide.
Please do not casually spread conspiracy theories. They poison democratic debate, make us all stupider, and distract attention from important, evidenced realities, like the others mentioned in the article.
>>> or their car. Not in the parking lot outside a courthouse.
NO: Barnett's body was found in a vehicle in a Holiday Inn parking lot in Charleston on Saturday, police said.
Or you know this
The family says Barnett's health declined because of the stresses of taking a stand against his longtime employer.
"He was suffering from PTSD and anxiety attacks as a result of being subjected to the hostile work environment at Boeing," they said, "which we believe led to his death."
The man was found dead, with a sucide note (hand written) and his own gun in his hand.
You know what happens when gun owners get the urge to kill themselves. They kill themselves. Guns make suicide less of a cry for help and more or less "effective".
Any article that doesn't mention what his family had to say about the matter is not only creating a narrative, but they are openly disrespecting the family of a dead man to grab attention and headlines.
How about todays interview with his OWN FAMILY:
FROM HIS MOTHER: If this hadn't gone on so long, I'd still have my son, and my sons would have their brother and we wouldn't be sitting here. So in that respect, I do," Vicky Stokes said when asked if she places some of the blame for her son's death on Boeing.
OR THIS: Stokes and her son Rodney Barnett said they do not want to comment on whether they believe he died by suicide until the investigation by the Charleston police department concludes.
It's not like we know or will ever know the details of and the extend of the investigation, the note was actually reported as a "white piece of paper that closely resembled a note,", what was on the note? Were his fingerprints on the note? Was handwriting analysis done? Did the gun belong to him? That wasn't reported either. Was it registered to him/ when/where did he buy it? Was there gunpowder residue on his hand? Does the trajectory and blood splatter analysis all match? Was there surveillance footage of the car? What was his last cellphone usage?
Part of the reason why people jump to conclusions is because of a distinct lack of rationalist reporting by police and media. They don't tell us the empirical evidence because we are supposed to just believe them, and trust in their competent investigation, but that doesn't really work, at least not everyone is going to be satisfied by that demand.
That's not to say it wasn't a suicide, it just means we don't know either way and will likely never know. But it crucially also doesn't mean sufficient evidence couldn't be presented to convince a reasonable observer.
Handwriting analysis and blood spatter is mostly garbage. If he was shot with a gun inside the car from a reasonable angle its not going to be immediately obvious whether he did it or not unless they left bloody fingerprints on the door handle after shooting him twice.
What we do know: this was an AR21 case. It was him suing boeing for forcing him to retire early and not promoting him because he was "whistle blowing". This is a case that had already been dismissed once.
On the matter of that, the FAA already got his reports and agreed with him. The harm to Boeing from his wistle blowing was finished. They were probably paying more for lawyers to fight this than it was going to cost to settle. So this wasnt about Boeing loosing anything other than cash at this point. If we're going to speculate we should be asking if Boeing was fighting this out of spite rather than making a good business decision.
The family themselves have spoken up: that he was troubled, and they firmly blame Boeing for his death. The way they are going about it says "we know he killed himself" ... they just think Boeing drove him to do it. They are coy with the conspiracy theory angle cause it just make boeing look bad...
There is a really interesting narrative here about stress, mental heath, and suicide for gun owners. Topics that the press wants to touch less than the ones your suggesting they ignore....
I care infinitely more about the questions I asked than whatever the family had to say. Because questions about fingerprints and gunpowder residue are concerning the physical evidence that could prove suicide to a reasonable degree.
I don't really care about talking about circumstantial evidence when the physical is right there.
The reason why people aren't convinced by the “this wasn't even about his whistleblowing, he already disclosed everything, so Boeing has no motive“ argument is because it isn't just about stopping whistleblowers, it's about the chilling effect for other potential, current employees.
We can brush it all aside as crazy conspiracy theories, but I think that's actually very harmful to society. Conspiracy thinking is very damaging, our response shouldn't be “shut up and trust authority“ when somebody asks about forensic evidence.
>>> it's about the chilling effect for other potential, current employees.
We agree on this 1000%
"If this hadn't gone on so long, I'd still have my son, and my sons would have their brother and we wouldn't be sitting here. So in that respect, I do," Vicky Stokes said when asked if she places some of the blame for her son's death on Boeing.
Let me restate that: THE MANS OWN MOTHER SAYS BOEING DROVE HIM TO KILL HIMSELF
They didn't need to hold a gun to his head and pull the trigger. The just needed to fuck him over badly enough for long enough for this to be the inevitable outcome.
Blow the whistle all you want kids, Pappa Boeing gonna take your job and fuck you over and there aint nothing you can do about it... Thats the chilling narrative if there ever was one.
People act like this was a criminal proceeding. It was not. He'd already been testifying and speaking publicly about Boeing for more than 5 years. He sued them because of Boeing's attempts to defame his character to downplay the allegations which have been public for a long time.
I am not saying your wrong but who were the faulty suppliers for all these claims? Is it possible things would start unraveling for something much bigger than it already has? The other motive would also be to send a message which it definitely did. I find it weird that he would ruin the chance of future whistle blowers coming forward by doing this the day after the court appearance, its strange.
Right... defamation is a good analog for this. Its under AIR21...
This case was him suing Boeing for money. The claim was that his whistleblowing was the reason he didn't get promoted and was forced to retire early. Thats whistleblowing past tense, the FAA already said the things he was whistleblowing on were in fact true, and Boeing was at fault.
He had lost this case once, but his lawyers felt that he could win this 2nd time around as there was a preponderance of evidence. The table stakes for this were in the 10's of millions at best, a trivial sum of money.
>>> I am not saying your wrong but who were the faulty suppliers for all these claims?
What was his testimony in a civil (not criminal) lawsuit which had already been given many times before both in public and in other lawsuits going to unravel? Especially given the number of additional investigations going on?
Why would I just assume that it exists?
And why would it ruin the chance of future whistle blowers coming forwards? Was he supposed to imagine that everyone was going to start believing conspiracy theories about his death?
I mean, do you really think this will not deter future whistle blowers lol? "conspiracy theories about his death" You mean like that 30 year coordinated Epstein situation?
On a previous HN discussion, plenty of people here believed it was fully possible that someone at Boeing essentially pulled the trigger and gave plenty of examples, even from a huge successful Silicon Valley company, of corporate folks doing stranger nefarious things than would be believable in film. As someone who has known multiple people who committed suicide, I'm not sure I can feel as certain as you that this was a suicide without more evidence.
After reading the story of ebay execs harassing a random completely unimportant couple, to the point of repeatedly mailing them threatening or disgusting packages, I can't discredit killing a witness for a real tangible reason.
Oh yeah, I remember that one [1]. One of the bastards got five years in prison - one of the very very few exceptions to my general line of calling for prison abolishment.
Prefaced with, while horrifying, that may also have been one of the funnier corporate stories I've read in the last several years. Note, horrifying from the Steiner's perspective. People with private jets who can fly across America to leave bloody masks on your porch.
Yet, it's cartooonishly preposterous. Seven people charged, seven guilty pleas, and the heads of Security and "Resiliency"? They flew across the country to do the equivalent of college harassment and B&E ... in a residential garage? Baugh worked for the CIA? His wife works for the CIA? Running Charlie's Angels as the security team (sorry, Jim's Angels)? Mandatory pop culture videos? What did I just read?
Unfortunately, it always has a Nelson response, no matter how funny. "Aww, those are the people who run corporate America..." They run my economy.
The man had already been on film. He already has written statements everywhere. The FAA already agreed that what he said had happened.
He was in court for AIR21 case... to get money out of boeing for himself, for 10 years of early retirement. Candidly Boeing was probably paying more for the lawyers they were using to fight him than they would have paid just settling.
The reason you don’t settle is to discourage others from doing the same thing. It would also be the reason to ‘suicide’ someone even if they were not costing you much money.
I don't really even get the conspiracy theory that he was murdered, if Boeing etc are all so knowing and powerful why didn't they kill him years ago, well before he could tell his tale? Now they kill him because he already spoke out and they want to put the spotlight on themselves? The whole thing doesn't really make a lot of logical sense.
It sounds like you have some unrealistic overestimate of your safety against a determined criminal. This just an older gentleman, far away from home, alone, with no security.
One method is to hire a junky, or a homeless person, or some other desperate person to commit a crime. Affordable to the middle class! And even if they are caught, they would not know your identity.
"Boeing etc are all so knowing and powerful" Wait Boeing makes most of its money through military contracts, downplaying its "power" and importance is slightly disingenuous .
You completely missed the point that...if Boeing knew he was going to blow the whistle, and they are so powerful...they'd have killed him beforehand. Not very smart of them to kill someone AFTER they blew the whistle and then make everyone think you did it. That just puts you even more into the spotlight and his testimony is already publicly available. Doesn't sound like a great conspiracy, much less a theory.
>> 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.
and while the fact related to the risk of flying vs. driving are probably true, they are off-topic and irrelevant.
the reason that large airline safety in the US is so overwhelmingly good is the preceding 20, 30, 40, 50? years of continuous improvements. until the last 5-10 years that is. we haven't even seen the tip of the iceberg yet. when these 2010's and 2020 planes are 15-30 years old, it's going to be a shit-show.
so if you believe that the airlines are too safe, that there is too much margin, they are over-engineered, over-regulated, etc. then that wouldn't be at all irrational. you could trade some gold-plated engineering for profit. you could trade bureaucracy for faster production, maintenance, etc. you could reduce the cost of travel (by how much? it's already cheap). this would be an interesting argument to make. but these decisions should be made in the light of day by the NTSB/FAA, congress, the public, and the shareholders, etc. even then, it's likely that theory would have negative consequences (remember the better-faster-cheaper NASA theory of operation).
the problem is that, instead of an honest choice made in public by the appropriate stakeholders and the flying public, these choices and short-cuts were made in secret, illegally, with extreme dishonestly, repeatedly, for at least a decade, for extremely selfish gains, by FAA and boeing executives.
that's what's not ok. we're told and we expect the nearly perfect safety to continue. what we got was back to the 1950's-1970's era shit-show.
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.
It's not pure chance. It was a plane error, but trained pilots following procedure would have responded appropriately and avoided a crash. In response to a plane malfunction, the pilots panicked, did the wrong thing, and everyone died.
This does not excuse Boeing, but it's just the way it is. Training standards are higher in the US than, for example, Ethiopian airlines.
> trained pilots following procedure would have responded appropriately and avoided a crash.
Boeing acted like there was nothing different about the new aeroplanes and therefore did not train the pilots in how to react to the new system. Indeed, that was the original point of MCAS - to avoid pilot re-training. The pilots were not trained in doing the "right thing" and so had no chance of recovering the aircraft. I don't think it's right to blame them. Regardless of whether their overall training was of higher standard, I don't think American pilots would have fared any better since they, too, would have been in the dark.
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).
When the AI has QA/QC as part of the over all requirements...
Well, Modern neural networks and LLMs aren't constructed using any requirements, specifications or hard constraint at all - they just heuristically give a context-aware approximation of their massive input data set.
So getting to X being part of "requirements" is a bigger step than the layman imagines. Especially, 'cause an LLM outputs approximated recipes for action when asked, LLMs struggle to consistently achieve goals since goal-seeking requires constant little adjustments.
But even more, if an AI somehow reached the level where you could inject goals into it, it seems very likely it's goal would be maximize investor profits and this wouldn't solve the problem of the system discarding human experts but rather compound it.
> 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.
I disagree. The hardware design of the cockpit is intended to be such that any computer inputs also move the pilot's controls, so that the pilots can countermand computer inputs if necessary. In this case, software was written such that this was not possible. The software that operates MCAS operates on a garbage-in-garbage-out model, like most software. There was no software written to determine if the incoming data was garbage, thus the software decided to crash two planes.
> When the flight computer trims the airplane to descend, because the MCAS system thinks it’s about to stall, a set of motors and jacks push the pilot’s control columns forward. It turns out that the Elevator Feel Computer can put a lot of force into that column—indeed, so much force that a human pilot can quickly become exhausted trying to pull the column back, trying to tell the computer that this really, really should not be happening.
> Indeed, not letting the pilot regain control by pulling back on the column was an explicit design decision. Because if the pilots could pull up the nose when MCAS said it should go down, why have MCAS at all?
> MCAS is implemented in the flight management computer, even at times when the autopilot is turned off, when the pilots think they are flying the plane. In a fight between the flight management computer and human pilots over who is in charge, the computer will bite humans until they give up and (literally) die.
At the end of the day, if the person who wrote that software had written it differently, then those planes would not have crashed and hundreds of people would not have died.
> At the end of the day, if the person who wrote that software had written it differently, then those planes would not have crashed and hundreds of people would not have died.
You can't really blame the software engineers. This was all thought out and tightly specified by Boeing to their avionics subcontractor (Collins, IIRC). This is how it was designed and engineered to work at a systems level - it is a design hack. As far as I know there weren't any software bugs or 'hacks' involved, and the avionics operated as designed (aside from the AoA DISAGREE alert, which was due to a requirements miscommunication, not a bug). It was broken by design, which happened long before implementation, at Boeing.
> When the flight computer trims the airplane to descend, because the MCAS system thinks it’s about to stall, a set of motors and jacks push the pilot’s control columns forward. It turns out that the Elevator Feel Computer can put a lot of force into that column—indeed, so much force that a human pilot can quickly become exhausted trying to pull the column back, trying to tell the computer that this really, really should not be happening.
The Elevator Feel Computer is a part of the 737NG as well, and would behave the same way in those airplanes when receiving such erroneous AoA data; it's nothing new in the MAX. It certainly did not help the crews during the fatal MAX incidents, and is clearly not an ideal design, but it's also barely a footnote in the root cause analysis, along with the stick shaker and stall warnings blaring at them constantly. The pilots would easily be able to overcome it long enough to get safely on the ground. What was a bigger problem for those crews was that the MCAS has enough trim authority to make it impossible, with any amount of elevator input, to restore level flight - limiting its trim authority was part of the 'fixes' required to get them airborne again.
I don't think it's reasonable to blame the implementation of MCAS for the accidents, its existence is to blame, and really highlights how nothing about the 737 platform has been designed holistically - it is a patchwork of hacks on hacks dating from the 1970s, which is difficult to reason about as a whole, and has dark corners. To truly 'fix' MCAS, you need to consider AoA as critical air data (which the 737 does not), and you need to integrate it holistically with the rest of the flight controls (which the 737 cannot, since it is not fly-by-wire), and you need to consider it critical equipment (it's an 'augmentation' and not considered critical on the 737, 'justifying' the lack of redundancy). Once you've done those things, you've basically got the bones of a proper envelope protection system in place, and you've obviated the need for MCAS in the first place. Of course the 737 team couldn't do this, because the business decided that it was more important to avoid (and hide) any differences than to bring the aircraft in line with modern standards.
Realistically, this should have been trapped by the safety analysis of the flawed design, which should have considered its effect on the whole flight control system when evaluating it, but Boeing again only considered MCAS to be an 'augmentation' and it got an abbreviated safety review as a result. Some engineers did express concern about some of these factors, but given the environment outlined in TFA, those concerns did not go anywhere, because they would have basically scuttled the idea and sent everyone back to the drawing board, which Boeing was desperate to avoid having already been caught flat-footed with the launch of the A320neo.
The 737 airframe needs to be put to rest, it is simply not safe or sane to keep stacking more hacks onto it. But there's no indication Boeing's working on a successor so it's probably going to be on the market for another 20+ years. Hard to imagine folks will probably be flying on an airframe with a 100 year old design (2024 + 20 years before a new revision + 20 years life span = 2064, around 100 years from the 737 launch before they start retiring)!
As the pilots of the doomed Boeing jets in Ethiopia and Indonesia fought to control their planes, they lacked two notable safety features in their cockpits.
One reason: Boeing charged extra for them.
For Boeing and other aircraft manufacturers, the practice of charging to upgrade a standard plane can be lucrative. Top airlines around the world must pay handsomely to have the jets they order fitted with customized add-ons.
Boeing’s optional safety features, in part, could have helped the pilots detect any erroneous readings. One of the optional upgrades, the angle of attack indicator, displays the readings of the two sensors. The other, called a disagree light, is activated if those sensors are at odds with one another.
Boeing will soon update the MCAS software, and will also make the disagree light standard on all new 737 Max planes, according to a person familiar with the changes, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they have not been made public. Boeing started moving on the software fix and the equipment change before the crash in Ethiopia.
The angle of attack indicator will remain an option that airlines can buy. Neither feature was mandated by the Federal Aviation Administration. All 737 Max jets have been grounded.
“They’re critical, and cost almost nothing for the airlines to install,” said Bjorn Fehrm, an analyst at the aviation consultancy Leeham. “Boeing charges for them because it can. But they’re vital for safety.”
“There are so many things that should not be optional, and many airlines want the cheapest airplane you can get,” said Mark H. Goodrich, an aviation lawyer and former engineering test pilot. “And Boeing is able to say, ‘Hey, it was available.’”
But what Boeing doesn’t say, he added, is that it has become “a great profit center” for the manufacturer.
The three American airlines that bought the 737 Max each took a different approach to outfitting the cockpits.
American Airlines, which ordered 100 of the planes and has 24 in its fleet, bought both the angle of attack indicator and the disagree light, the company said.
Southwest Airlines, which ordered 280 of the planes and counts 36 in its fleet so far, had already purchased the disagree alert option, and it also installed an angle of attack indicator in a display mounted above the pilots’ heads. After the Lion Air crash, Southwest said it would modify its 737 Max fleet to place the angle of attack indicator on the pilots’ main computer screens.
United Airlines, which ordered 137 of the planes and has received 14, did not select the indicators or the disagree light. A United spokesman said the airline does not include the features because its pilots use other data to fly the plane.
When it was rolled out, MCAS took readings from only one sensor on any given flight, leaving the system vulnerable to a single point of failure. One theory in the Lion Air crash is that MCAS was receiving faulty data from one of the sensors, prompting an unrecoverable nose dive.
In the software update that Boeing says is coming soon, MCAS will be modified to take readings from both sensors. If there is a meaningful disagreement between the readings, MCAS will be disabled.
Yes, this was the root of the miscommunication. The AoA indicator (ie. an instrument that gives a numeric value of AoA to the pilots) was optional. The AoA disagree alert (ie. an indication that the two AoA sensors do not agree) was not intended to be optional, and I believe it's required equipment, but it ended up tied to the indicator option. What is worth noting about this is that Boeing knew about it for a long time (I forget the timeline, but at least a year, I believe), without telling airlines or releasing a fix.
> Boeing has publicly blamed its software supplier, a company now known as Collins Aerospace Systems, for tying the AOA Disagree alert, which was supposed to be a standard feature on all 737 MAX aircraft, to an optional AOA Indicator display714—the result of which rendered the AOA Disagree alert inoperable on more than 80 percent of the MAX aircraft.
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".
You can really get more efficient by cutting fat — until the next winter comes when it is needed. In a simpler society, leaders that proposed something like that once they were at least thrown out of the village. Today they get a golden parachute and are sent off to the next host to bleed dry.
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 sounds like inertia to me: they had a ton of institutional knowledge and practice around mature designs, which kept things from going too badly when the financial engineers first started – and since nothing fell from the sky, clearly that meant they had earned those bonuses and should go further!
What’s funny is I know from personal experience that many of the folks inside Boeing at the junior to mid levels (and up, selectively) were also aware of the major culture issue well before the accidents.
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."
Basically, many of these companies took decades to reach these positions where they're trusted. A bunch of managers rightfully figured out this was an asset that could be easily traded away for increased profits and they'd be gone by the time anyone noticed the devastation they left behind.
Which companies? The ones who had quality and lost it? There's not a lot of defense against being purchased on the open market, as happened with Boeing. Or Simmons is another good example: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/business/economy/05simmon...
The real problem here is the US's dominant business culture, which tends to value short-term cash extraction over long-term value creation. There are a lot of practical incentives for that, but the culture problem itself will have a lot of inertia, so I think we're going to have to look for a generational change.
Stockholders always want the company to survive, over short term profits. The problem is that stockholder interests are not the same as the custodian interests.
Custodians get paid on the basis of inmediate performance.
Thats the broken link.
Custodians are thus nominating board members that are incentivized by short term decision making. The nomination is based on relationships and based on trust.
And then you get in trouble.
If board members were elected as a sort of election by ultimate stockholders (which include actual employees, in fact) you would see a different board. Therefore different CEO.
It is a variation of the principal-agent problem [1].
It is extraordinarily hard to perfectly align the long term interests of shareholders and employees. It requires a level of oversight that most boards can't manage.
It's been slowly cannibalized and is barely running on Inertia left by the previous government. Took almost the same as Boeing, about 25years. We barely have electricity, and now we're unable to supply clean drinking water to vast amounts of the country, including the capital.
Depends on who you ask really, and what side of the aisle they're on.
Personally, I think at the core what started it, is the movement away from meritocracy. Other "things" took priority, and everyone on the ground was left trying to figure out how to not let the whole thing collapse whilst still servicing the new priorities given to them.
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.
I'm not asking why Boeing continued to make money. I'm asking why the system as a whole didn't spot much sooner that their engineering had been trashed, and some kind of intervention wasn't made before two fatal airline accidents and other near misses happened. The point of the oversight we have is supposed to be to spot problems before they reach that level.
If your answer is that not just Boeing, but our whole system is in fact that corrupt...well, that's not a very comforting answer, is it?
Most people nowadays are trying to optimize dollars for amount of work, without the dedication to the craft that was prevalent in previous generations. Large companies exacerbate this issue with all the layers of abstraction between a person's work and seeing the fruits of their labor.
There's way less pride from work: most people don't judge themselves too much on coworkers opinions since jobs are more changing, and it's unlikely for you to develop lifetime friendships with people who remain on your team.
Large corporations have too many regulations and HR policies to meaningfully pay based on performance, so there's little monetary incentive to be a strong performer.
You rarely get to see the product you've built get used in a meaningful way where someone would say something about it. It's likely that only one or two disinterested people quality check your work, and in this case you're either within spec (expected), "close enough to pass" (which wasn't getting reported), or failing miserably. The QA people hate getting the last one, but there's so much apathy these days from what I've seen because everyone just wants to be somewhere else doing something else.
So basically they've evolved to take away any dopamine one can get from pushing for quality from anyone but the most intrinsically motivated workers. They got rid of those people systemically and purposefully, and made a lot of money doing it.
The system is corrupt. From planes to tampons, it's self-checking and self-reporting and a conflict of interests: the regulators have no incentive to do more work (or are paid-out not to do), the companies are corrupt to the bone, the public is blissfully not interested to hear, the C level suite is there just for the money, middle management is hired and promoted based on weird criteria, the "fake it" system works too well and people hop through jobs before anyone takes action. Modern company management is not a science, but a smoke and mirrors act.
> why the system as a whole didn't spot much sooner that their engineering had been trashed
Current brokenthink of the management class is that their job is to wage war on their own workforce and labour rights. In the process destroying human capital. This isn't just my conclusion based on the fact that FANG was fined for having anti-poaching agreement - country-wide, corporate spending on workforce training and upskilling has been falling for the past 20 years.
You're sort of assuming it happened in some sort of explicit clear way. It doesn't and didn't. I've participated in this process and shrugged it off as kind of their fault and not my place. Until it was my turn.
When it's not you, it's just training data on the "wrong thing to do", and it's usually described as "being disagreeable" which accelerates the collapse - this seems perfectly reasonable at the time, they were overly difficult and an outlier.
Without explicit intent or some sudden accident, there's nothing to point at, especially in such a simplistic "what corrupt corporate or government official ignored this? Obviously someone reported it" way
> Without explicit intent or some sudden accident, there's nothing to point at
I disagree. As the article shows, there were plenty of technically competent people who did point at specific things. But management did not listen to them, and indeed actively suppressed them and drove them out. And since the FAA had outsourced all of its "independent" inspection responsibility to Boeing, there was no effective third party that the technically competent people could go to to raise a red flag.
Well there's the FAA oversight... Which has also hollowed out. NTSB is still an amazing accident investigator but better to prevent these things than wait for NTSB to step in
Maybe the FAA should hire three engineering firms to go over the designs and manufacturing and have them compete to see who can find the worst flaws. Just having one big entity (FAA) check up on one other big entity (Boeing) leads to problems.
Think about all the different things Boeing works on, all the details involved in the design of a modern airplane or spacecraft. How is a third party supposed to audit all that, when the designs are so complex and in such a relatively niche field? The most they can do is look for obvious things and make sure the data makes sense.
The problem isn't that the system is corrupt, it's that you're expecting a third party to both be close enough to be intimately familiar with all the details of the airplanes and spacecraft and yet separated enough from the company they're monitoring to not have conflicts of interest.
There is no comforting answer. Welcome to unchecked capitalism, it's short-term-profit-driven thinking all the way down. In every industry it's the same. The guard rails have been systematically dismantled for decades by opportunists just like this, hoping to make some quick cash and jump ship before it falls down.
Whenever anyone points this out, they get labeled as cynics who hate capitalism and industry, and their complaints are swept under the rug -- after all, the company hasn't collapsed yet, so the worries must be unfounded!
This is exactly why strong government regulations and oversight is necessary. Strictly profit driven companies don't care about externalities like pollution or human lives. Literally, they only care about making one number go up, everything else (including the long term value of the number) means nothing at all.
We have the largest governments in human history. You might as well say "we just need stronger companies" for all the good it does to say better governments would help and remove the indirection.
If you think Boeing management was insufficiently respectful of or deferential to technical people and their expertise, I’ve got bad news for you about voters.
Engineers can sometimes be indispensable enough to finagle power from alliances with capital. We don’t win popularity contests.
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
GE Appliances is an American home appliance manufacturer based in Louisville, Kentucky. It has been majority owned by Chinese multinational home appliances company Haier since 2016.
Think of all the money GE saved: no need for expensive employees or manufacturing costs in the appliances division. Just sit back and collect royalties on the use of the trademark.
It's possible, there just needs to be someone willing to put the work in and to present the data in a manner that makes it accessable, easy to parse, and profitable enough to cover at least time and costs.
The work is building a database of filing locations and feeds (eg: public document feeds of each and every stock exchange, corporate filing register, etc) and builder parses to extract new names, boards of directors, name changes, major stock holdings, etc.
It takes some doing (*) - but with LLM's and advances in open software it gets easier every day.
( * Myself and a small team did this for the global mineral sector some years (15+) ago )
Our major system for evaluating companies is market-driven pricing of the company. That in turn is based mostly on the views of investors and traders, that is people who want to turn money into more money and generally aren't fussy about how it happens. So the market price for a company tends to favor short-term cash extraction over long-term value creation.
That is to say, this is basically what our "system of evaluating public corporations" rewards, and it's been that way for quite some time. We're just paying more attention here because lots of us fly and airline crashes capture the attention nicely. When Facebook enshittifies to juice revenues we all just kind of put up with it, but we're not so chill about a window blowing out at 15,000 feet.
If your point is that generalizations aren't universals, I agree. That's why I said "tends to". I further agree that markets like more than one thing, and you can see that with things like "growth stocks", "meme stocks", and "pump and dumps".
Amazon is particularly notable for how long and how energetically they resisted investor pushes to take short-term gains. They were famous for it, or perhaps notorious. So although it's a counterexample to my point, it's also great proof of it.
Opinions differ on Uber, but personally I think of it (and WeWork) as pump and dumps. After Facebook and Google ended up with quasi-monopolies, investors were hungry for another "to the moon" technology stock. I should say that was true of both VCs and retail investors. The VCs saw an opportunity to make things that looked vaguely Google-shaped, which they did, trying to sell them off to the general public before anybody caught on. They succeeded with Uber and failed with WeWork. But in both cases, it's still VCs favoring short-term cash extraction over long-term value creation.
I think others would for the reason described in sentence directly before it. Which, as "so" indicates, is the logical predecessor.
I used to write code for financial traders. I promise you that there are a lot of people who do not give half a shit what a company's up to as long as they can buy it for $100 and sell it later for $101. And based on infinite news reports, we can all see there are plenty of CEOs who will do pretty much anything that will boost the stock price in the short term so that they get to keep their jobs longer.
> I promise you that there are a lot of people who do not give half a shit what a company's up to as long as they can buy it for $100 and sell it later for $101.
I'm sure there are. But you gotta fool the investors to make this work. The presumption that investors are stupid doesn't sound that plausible.
Depends on which proposition. Remember that that once they've sold it, they have no further exposure. So if what's happening is looting a company, then as long as they get out before the rot becomes obvious, they don't care.
And no investor has to be stupid for this to work. You just need some investors who are smarter, better informed, better prepared, or more experienced than others. And that's no presumption at all. If you talk to experienced people in the industry, they know that their living comes out of the pockets of other people's pockets. Literal billions of dollars are invested every year in being the winner in zero-sum games in finance.
That said, plenty of investors are stupid and/or naive enough. Boeing's a fine example here. As it WeWork. Or DJT. Or literally any pump and dump or Ponzi scheme. Or nearly all of crypto.
If you're really struggling to understand this, I suggest Dan Davies' "Lying for Money". Because parasitical actors assuming that investors are stupid enough is a huge, multi-century activity.
if you buy stock, but sell before others realize, then may be? If you could sniff out the quality momentum/inertia that the company is deriving revenue from, and sell shortly before it starts dropping, you'd have made profit.
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.
Exactly: look how fast the values of companies like MySpace and Yahoo tanked when they became irrelevant. They were highly valuable at some point, but they had serious competition and not much keeping their users locked-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.
It seems like Airbus should be a good investment opportunity: if investors poured billions of dollars into the company to help it rapidly expand production capacity, they'd have no trouble selling every plane they can make.
I should have been a little more precise. I mean a wholly Boeing designed product, from the 21st century. The MAX is still a 737 in its heart, and that design goes back a ways.
>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.
Its not like airlines really have a lot of choice in manufacturer. Just because the backlog is there doesn't mean airlines wouldn't prefer a different supplier.
And standing up a competitor is not really an option.
> standing up a competitor is not really an option
This is the part that bothers me. Why isn't it an option?
Standing up a new orbital rocket company was not really an option in 2000.
If Boeing can deliver 400 aircraft a year, why can't a startup deliver 6 in the next six years. I don't mean 6/year. I mean take 6 years to build your first 6. Or maybe it takes 12 years to deliver the first 6.
Then aim to deliver one per month for the next two years. Get FedEx and UPS and Amazon to fund you for the next 15 years. By then you could have two dozen aircraft flying real miles, building up experience and trust. Then you ramp to up to 25 aircraft per year for the next two years.
Sure, this means that after 20 years you still haven't replaced Boeing.
But Tesla didn't have to replace GM to revolutionize the industry.
When you become a real threat to take away 50 orders per year you cause visible activity among your competition. Just ask Bombardier.
(I wish I hadn't used Elon as an example twice in the same post, but it is what it is. Like him or hate him, his history is relevant when you talk about what is possible in giant established industries.)
> This is the part that bothers me. Why isn't it an option?
Because a few years ago Bombardier did just that, and US government imposed a 300% tax on their planes. [1] And then a month later complained about Chinese protectionism or some such.
Selling 6 planes is nothing. It wouldn’t even cover the standby aircraft of many fleets. You need large orders to make it feasible, and you need a strong product to secure those orders. FedEx, UPS and co. aren’t going to fund you long term unless you have a product and you need good teams and good funding to even get you to that starting block.
Boom is probably the closest thing to what is suggested but many still doubt they will make it to production. That’s minimal investment though and mostly around options on orders, so they still need massive funding to get there. Rolls Royce and others have said it’s not viable to design an engine for them so now they have to design the airframe and the engine.
Bombardier is an example of why new entrants should be concerned. As soon as you become a close threat, you don’t really trigger competition you trigger massive protectionism which forces them to sell the design to airbus, further consolidating the market
I think the incumbents would have to be broken up to seed any new competition that is remotely viable. The Boeing story has some way to go yet though, who knows
Obviously, selling 6 planes is not the end goal. But you have to sell 6 before you sell 600. Pre-selling an aircraft or two to a few shipping companies would pose a low risk investment to those companies, but provide a great lift for a struggling new hopeful. Look at how that worked for Rivian.
Your example of engines is an excellent point. Repeat that story 100 times to begin to understand the enormous difficulty. Which is to say, it won't be easy. I hope I didn't communicate that I thought it would be easy.
The story of Bombardier is maddening because it demonstrates that if you achieve unbelievably great things technically, you can still be assassinated by a million other attacks. The non-technical parts are what really seem to make this all a non-starter. But victory belongs to the bold.
And wouldn't it be a worthwhile ride to spend the next 20 years building incredibly cool stuff that eventually fails for whatever reason? Sign me up.
>Standing up a new orbital rocket company was not really an option in 2000.
Airbus is the only company in the world which has actually managed to get off the ground in that market. And only because they were essentially a state run business which were subsidized to the extreme, until they actually managed to get into the market.
COMAC in China is trying to do the same, infinite subsidies in the hope of competing.
>If Boeing can deliver 400 aircraft a year, why can't a startup deliver 6 in the next six years. I don't mean 6/year. I mean take 6 years to build your first 6. Or maybe it takes 12 years to deliver the first 6.
It is not like they aren't trying, but it is extremely hard. You absolutely need massive amounts of funding and an investor which basically does not care how big of a money pit your company is.
One major reason for this is that modern airliners aren't that much of an engineer problem, but they are a gigantic management and integration problem. Typical start up approaches do not work.
So everyone else here brings up great points, but something else to consider is that the barriers to market entry are, to some extent, created by the OEMs themselves, by dominating the ISO and AS9100 committees and TWGs/TSGs[1]. This means a couple things.
First, Boeing never needs to take an external audit - they wrote the thing - but their suppliers need to cross every T and dot every I or else they owe Boeing money. In the worst case, a supplier can end up handing over product and STILL owing money. But Boeing - and especially BCA - they have never, and will never, undergo an actual AS9100 audit.
Second, since the standards are existing Boeing process, that represents a pretty much undefined cost for any market entrant. And that cost can be cranked arbitrarily if/when Boeing feels threatened, by amending the specs themselves - as they tried to do to SpaceX in 2010. That's probably a story for later, but it's pretty disgusting, although not as disgusting as what happened to the C-Series. OK, none of those are as disgusting as a million other things, but you get the point.
[1] And, to some extent, the FAA itself, but that's a whole other subject.
I think you need to think of the air company clients: us.
If we suddenly would decide "nope, not going to board a Boeing anymore" companies would stop ordering, and then Boeing would experience severe economic punishment for it's actions.
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.
Does quality matter as much for X as it does for Boeing? A closer example to Boeing is Tesla and SpaceX. Tesla is a mixed bag of good and bad stuff. But SpaceX is a marvel and essentially has no competitors.
Compare X to media. Since the bridge collapse in the Baltimore I have read interesting analysis on X and reddit, not the best medium, but yet did not come across a single decent article about it in the media.
>Does quality matter as much for X as it does for Boeing?
If Xitter returns 404s for 5 minutes, it's not the end of the world. Its users will come back after going to the bathroom. If Xitter spews garbage "news" stories, it doesn't really matter: its users will stick around anyway, and the people who think the stuff on Xitter is garbage are already gone anyway, or not paying attention to those channels anyway.
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.
My last manager wasn't quite to this level, but close. The only way I protected myself from burnout was by realizing early enough that I was definitely going to get laid off, but that largely it was out of my hands, because my manager/director was mental. At one point I posted an Ask HN simply asking how can I tell my manager to back off in a way that doesn't get me fired, because he was so destructive. I'm lucky to have lost that job with my sanity intact. Lunatic.
After I did get laid off, he either blocked me very effectively, or exercised his EU right to be forgotten, because I can't find a public record of him. Although it would be funny to start shitposting his name around out of spite, since those would be the only records that show up.
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.
bill gates was a very subpar developer. that's not help, that's narcissistic meddling and micromanaging. if he was good at anything technical, or arguably business strategy, ms-dos wouldn't have been the utter garbage that it was.
musk sleeping on the floor is a publicity stunt, not totally dishonest, but 98% maybe.
jobs? complete a-hole and basket case. a lazy crappy worker who physically smelled bad. if he ever spent a couple hours doing honest work soldered boards, it was 100% for the ability to claim some kind of heroic epic later, or maybe just a manic fit.
the bean-counter stereotype isn't entirely false. it's a specialization of any number of process-bound, organizationally-loyal, myopic, useless cogs. any rare good talented "bean-counter" clearly knows that they are outnumbered and out-gunned by the other inept assholes and bureaucrats in their dept.
there are a large number, probably a majority of people, that are honest and want to do a hard day's work. they are stabbed in the back, trampled, and betrayed by the aforementioned personalities.
the problem is here is just that we keep rewarding, with attention and money, entirely the wrong folks. these famous and very rich folks are merely a combination of survivorship bias, luck, and the fact that to win big you really do need a narcissist who is not afraid to make irrational enormous bets with other peoples money.
indeed, don't disagree. still toxic and more lucky than good (in the bill/jobs/musk) cases. don't even get me started on the non-technical CEOs. they suck even far worse.
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.
Great phone. Never any problems with reception. And no, I didn't keep the first one in a case, ever, thought it was too pretty for that. Hence the second one ;)
Being a hackerish sort, I certainly tried to "hold it wrong", often enough. Couldn't get the damn thing to cut out, though.
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.
> Also, to be clear, Boeing's safety record is still good.
Two complete losses within a few months is a fucking terrible safety record. The carnage only stopped when regulators forcibly grounded all 737 Max globally, while Boeing criminally denied any issues with the airplane design.
> The only recent deaths are associated with less-trained pilots in the earlier days of the 737 MAX.
The recent deaths are associated with criminal management at Boeing. It was not a pilot training issue. Boeing intentionally and criminally withheld information about the MCAS system from all pilots, airlines, and regulators. Literally no one had a clue about MCAS outside of Boeing. Furthermore, the MCAS design was fundamentally broken, falling below minimum aircraft engineering standards.
> 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.
Cutting corners and trying to ship planes quickly is partly what got them into this mess.
> 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.
This argument makes no sense. A repeatedly faulty plane that has crashed multiple times does not have a "good" safety record just because recoving from that fault is part of pilot training. In fact that's the definition of what I'd call a bad safety record.
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.
Can you speak more about the framing? I think diversity should be encouraged, but I also believe to some extent that people of color have been left out of STEM education and jobs due to poor education and opportunities. Maybe a middle ground is to hire for both. Bring in women, people of color, and others who may not be as educated or experienced, but make a serious effort to pair them with more experienced employees and train them up to where they should be. Rather than hire and replace, as some have suggested, hire and partner to diversify and holistically improve the entire organization.
I think you are right about starting early in education and exposing disadvantaged children to things they wouldn't otherwise have available to them, and supporting them throughout their education. This would benefit organizations that want to achieve good performance and is worth them investing in themselves, although government support is a decent second option that I agree with. However it's important to note that this is primarily an economic differentiation, not a racial one.
Training can help but it is not sufficient for many tasks. You also need aptitude and desire.
Culture is more about what is valued and rewarded in a society, and I think the primary driver of the desire component.
What I meant about framing was that our economies, governments and businesses are framed in a cultural context, anglo-protestant american capitalism in this case. African-american/black communities have a challenging relationship with this for obvious reasons. Certain immigrant populations can integrate or interoperate more effectively than others. I think the key to achieving better results as a society and a planet is to incorporate more cultural diversity, allowing a broader range of desires and outcomes to be seen as valid and worth pursuing. I'm sorry I don't have more time to go into this right now, I hope it gives an idea what I was referring to.
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:
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.
They're also easier to persuade and coerce into doing something a person with a longer carrier would have never done.
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.
I think that's the unique skill that old and experienced people bring.
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."
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-...
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.
What convinced you to make the jump?
Still, I don't regret the switch, CS is just more my thing.
I was already a my mid-thirties and had a child when I finished my computer science degree.
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.
There is a lot of software used in finance, medicine, transportation, logistics, aerospace, manufacturing, and robotics where a simple whoopsies isn't going to undo the loss of money and the loss of life.
I've been in this business for 40 years and I've worked in several verticals. You'd be amazed at how much software is critical to the continued operations of modern civilization. Software has increased the carrying capacity of the planet, and without it, literally billions of people would die.
This isn't as innocuous as you make it. Add up wasted minutes for millions of users and you're looking at thousands of lifetimes.
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that access to information is a force multiplier. Google doesn't have a monopoly on that, but it's hardly worthless or trivial.
There are many industries where this is not the case: aerospace, medical device engineering, and live TV production all come to mind.
That 1% of the time software is critital, it is messing too many lives... things like royal mail and what not.
Software has been like that for st least three decades.
Less than 5 years of experience at Google is, to be fair, common. But the company doubled in size over that time, so it's inevitable. And higher turn over in tech is common (and I don't think that is necessarily reflective of anything other than the fact it's easy to get another job as a software engineer).
I can't state much on the layoffs because my team was not heavily affected.
If management is checked out I agree that it is less likely to turn out good which is what I think happened here.
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.
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?
And yes, we often do worry and feel responsibility if something goes wrong or could go wrong. I remember working on a job where I was incredibly out of my depth, where no one in my group had any experience to check what I was doing, which would have had serious implications for peoples lives if my work had an error. I was so stressed I got grey hairs. I know many people who've been in similar positions, or positions of trying to meet impossible deadlines, deal with an unreasonable amount of work that makes doing it correctly unfeesable, or be put in a position where they have to accept practices that they would never put up with later in their careers.
But they treat me well. And my last job was in a different industry that’s known for treating employees badly. So I stay. Again my job is very low stakes but it still eats me up, I can’t imagine how these engineers feel.
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.
The famous enshittification process caused by the MBA view of existence.
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.
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.
[1] Top CEOs have this degree:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39680613
... womp womp
So they devalued Wisdom, and Elders... and things fell apart. This seems to be a pattern repeated all over the modern world.
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 now-elder employee gave their best and healthy years to the company and its mission.
If someone doubled the workers salary to leave you wouldn't say "but the company loyally gave you a job for 10 years, how can you desert them?", same thing here. We should incentivize companies to do the right thing, not punish them for it.
This is the terrible rot of modern business culture - all driven by short-term profit making at the cost of long-term sustainability.
FTFY
When did I say this?
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?"
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.
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...
“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.”
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.
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.
why do this intentionally?
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.
Why does the stock market reward idiot shit like this?
I've seen the same whit a a large US semiconductor company. In the 2008 crunch, the fired the most tenured employees and offshored the work abroad. Granted, the company didn't fail, their stock went up and now it's 5-7x that amount.
Well at a first order, the answer is that the stock market as a system for promoting value creation is an imperfect approximation of an ideal value creator, and more and more we are beginning to see the myriad of ways this concept produces antisocial results. (See for example the state of hospitals and schools, and the rising rate of individuals with crippling medical and college debt.)
More directly there has been some criticism of the stock market for rewarding short term gain over long term value, which among other things has led to the creation of the Long Term Stock Exchange:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Stock_Exchange
https://www.shareable.net/public-housing-works-lessons-from-...
>Fixing housing could be cheaper than them using the ER or paying for their prison space, and it would also make the streets of San Francisco smell a LOOOT better (and BART)
It's extremely unfair to blame "market based solutions" for failing to fix SF housing problems when it's pretty clear the largest hurdle is NIMBYism politically blocking new housing developments.
For example here: https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/s-f-housing-clash-yim...
The locals won't even LET other people build new housing. They definitely aren't going to start footing the bill and building the housing themselves
What happened to all the public toilets in US/UK? I remember there being many more, am I hallucinating this?
Many 2nd world countries still have them, for good reason!
See, while India is building public toilets and becoming more civilised, we, with this attitude, are moving in the opposite direction.
If we can manage to maintain a toilet in Russia and India, 1st world countries somehow cannot - that’s just a statement of social distinction.
> use them for shelters, or drug ingestion stations
I mean yes, dealing with that is the basic responsibility of running a toilet
Singapore on the other hand was close to 100%.
And we have human rights, and so does India
Why do you need to come up with wild excuses?
western-est west has decided they can’t be bothered to deal with some issues, like hygene, or, in case of UK, human waste in rivers
Vienna's approach worked because it happened after WW2 when the country was bombed and broken, land, construction materials and labor were dirt cheap, so the state built over half the city's homes and turned them into public housing cheaply no problem.
But fast forward to today where most of the land and buildings in a city are privately owned, how to you expect a city, any city, to buy up over half the buildings in the city at today's market and turn them into public housing?
The city would probably have to go broke or into huge amounts of debt and everyone would be screaming communism.
Even in the rest of Austria, this approach today would not be feasible due to how insane the cost of urban housing ahs reached no city could afford to buy up over half of it.
The monetary appreciation of housing prices and and turning it into an speculative asset is the west's biggest policy failure. You'd have to undo this first before you can think of implementing Vienna's policies.
It didn't though, they already started in the 1920ies! The most famous builing, Karl-Marx-Hof, started construction in 1927.
And they are building new public housing to this day, making use of inner city land that comes available from old factories, storage facilities, rail yards or alongside private construction projects etc. Other austrian cities do this too.
Agreed on the policy failure though.
Sure, a bit yes, but the bulk was acquired/made back when property was dirt cheap, not at today's prices. Vienna couldn't replicate the same move from scratch today.
You cannot start to do today in any city what Vienna started 100 years ago. It's too late now. The fiscal policies of the last decades have made that unfeasible.
>Other austrian cities do this too.
Not even remotely as much as Viena. Graz has next to no public housing, it's mostly private.
I’m also saying that it could be worth considerable effort to try to make those changes, because the reward is a much better system.
For example we might introduce bills now that help stabilize (reduce) housing prices by limiting large scale corporate speculation on housing, such as these two bills [below] introduced into congress. With cheaper housing available, the need for social housing goes down and so does the cost to build it, dramatically lowering the total cost to implement.
https://projects.propublica.org/represent/bills/117/hr9246
https://projects.propublica.org/represent/bills/117/s5151
> everyone would be screaming communism
Yes and part of what I’m saying is that we might want to stop doing that and think about what is actually going to fix our problems, even if gasp the government is involved. Nobody can afford housing and our planes are falling out of the sky and we’re having a cold-war political debate while every other major country offers cheaper medical care and education.
yet
> See for example the state of hospitals and schools, and the rising rate of individuals with crippling medical and college debt.
Ummmm. State hospitals and schools are not traded on our stock exchanges. If there's a failure here, it's not with equities markets.
There's an obvious common denominator between the examples you give, and that these are the most highly-regulated industries in America. My first guess as to where to lay blame would be on those regulations - although we'd really need to dig into whatever the specific failures you're thinking of, if we want to be sure.
> My first guess as to where to lay blame would be on those regulations
Considering medical and educational costs (total system costs including government expense) are much higher here than they are for example in Germany which has State run institutions for both, I would see this as a poor assumption.
However I’m not actually advocating for State-run institutions, as I would rather see locally owned cooperatives for housing and schools, and larger federations of cooperatives for medical research. My point is that short term market-based winner-take-all approaches are hurting us.
I should add that the broad topic of discussion here is Boeing, which degraded in critical safety metrics after moving to a relaxed regulation environment and focusing on market based short term optimization.
Yes I forgot every aspect of state run hospitals are the same…
But except wait.. almost every aspect of what makes that hospital is on the stock market.
It is a very old story. People build a company with deep knowledge and caring about what actually makes great products. Financial managers get involved to manage the money aspects of the business. Financial types want a lot more control to make the company more profitable.
The financial management has no actual clue what makes the company valuable. They only know what makes more or less cash flow in this or that direction. But, credit where due, they DO know how to make that work.
They start financially 'engineering' the company for near-term profits and higher stock prices. This works. This works fantastically well. Everything looks leaner, teams of younger workers are sometimes orders of magnitude cheaper than the highly experienced teams, and no one can tell the difference from outside. Profits are higher, stock prices hit record high after record high. Cash is spent on stock buybacks and not R&D or retaining institutional knowledge. Warning flags start showing up in product and service quality indicators, but are ignored and even suppressed. The problems start multiplying at increasing rates, then exponentially increasing rates.
Eventually, it starts to get serious. But by then, the "financial geniuses" have long since cashed out and the core of the company's workforce, ethos, and institutional knowledge has been so gutted that there is no recovery. The death spiral starts in earnest.
The only questions are whether for Boeing, being a critical keystone in the US aerospace and defense industry can or will be allowed to fail, and, if not, if there will be an actual engineering-based turnaround, or if it will be a Soviet-like zombie company for how many years?
Forkin' MBAs, they'll kill it every time.
Boeing is one of two manufacturers for planes of this size. The other is totally backlogged with orders. The stock market has assessed, correctly, that Boeing can withstand this loss of knowledge and keep generating profit. Does it result in shit equipment that literally kills people? Sure. But how many people are going to stop flying because of it? Not many. Throw in the lucrative military connections and you’ve got yourself a sure bet.
As a counterpoint, I work at very large financial firm in technology and in general, the 20+ year veterans who’ve been here forever are terrible. They are hidebound in their actions, years behind in industry best practices and they maintain little fiefdoms simply because of their intimate knowledge of the banks arcane and idiosyncratic policies. The place would be better of without the bulk of them.
That is to say we are the complete opposite of what Boeing was. But the most charitable interpretation you could offer the Boeing management is that they thought they were in the situation of my company rather than the situation they actually had.
I don't know whether the point where the market for Boeing aircraft travel is one disaster away or ten disasters away, but it is out there. When it comes, people won't stop flying, but they will fly less, and it will cost more. It can happen.
Most people dont have the faintest idea of who makes planes, and what plane models exist or how save they are.
And there isn't any system to activly avoid certain planes even if you wanted too.
Sure at some point with enough failures this can happen. But this is unlikely. Most Boeing plans are already built and are already flying and they are mostly very safe. They are flight proven.
Boeing wont interduce a truely new model for the next 10 years.
And after that, such a plane would need to comply to very strict regulation and it would take a long time for that plane to be built in large numbers.
So practically speaking the scenrio you suggest is impossible.
If a half-dozen (or whatever the magic number ends up being to set the zeigeist on fire) of Boeing aircraft suffer fatal or near-fatal accidents in the near future, everyone will suddenly know who makes which planes, and there will be systems to make sure you don't fly Boeing.
And while I think such a scenario is unlikely, it's hardly impossible. The real driver would be a combination of years of Boeing's own neglect coming together with margin-cutting airlines (you'd think they be extra safety conscious now, but any large organization is its own worst enemy), and any other of dozens of factors that could add up to push aircraft travel in an unsafe direction.
Or to put it another way, my intuition is that air travel (particularly in the US) has been very safe for a very long time, because it has operated with a very large safety margin. There are any number of perverse incentives to cut that safety margin, and it is largely possible to get away with cutting corners because of how deep the margin is. But if you keep cutting, eventually you run out of margin - and the sorts of people who do that sort of cutting can easily have have no idea how much margin there really is, or how much is actually needed to keep operating safely. So eventually things get to the point where you're not operating safely anymore, and then you can get multiple bad outcomes in a short period of time.
Witch is why I said 'practically'.
> So eventually things get to the point where you're not operating safely anymore, and then you can get multiple bad outcomes in a short period of time.
Assuming no margin is ever added.
Goodhart’s law, unfortunately. Whatever metric the stock market rewards gets gamed like there is no tomorrow (or next quarter, here.)
In both cases of the stock market and a popular search engine, I don't really know if there is a solution that prevents people from trying to game it.
This implies that Google is helpless to do more, which I kind of doubt. I think the misaligned incentive here is that it's unprofitable to do more to fight spam. They already have the vast majority of the market, making search 40% better isn't going to get them 40% more money.
I think it's just a calculated decision to keep search "good enough" to not lose too much market share, while not having to spend too much on engineer salaries.
I also kind of suspect the markets left to try to capture are either less profitable or more difficult to serve (specializing in niche content).
There's ___just___ enough laws around it to keep people somewhat okay with it.
Markets are the best way we’ve come up with to allocate capital. Committees and commissars do not do a better job.
Then why is internal governance and resource allocation inside companies done by committees and commissars and dictators, instead of by an unplanned free market?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm
Properly regulated, competitive markets. Aerospace regulation is based on a lot of trust, which Boeing seems to have exploited, causing this problem. The market is not competitive; there are only two players and the output of only one of them cannot meet demand.
> Committees and commissars do not do a better job.
Dichotomies are good for making punctual arguments online, but you do yourself a huge disservice by using them to frame the options in your own mind. Do you honestly think that the options are 1. Antisocial free market allowed to do whatever it wants for capital gain, or 2. Despotic communism? You are smarter than that.
I do favor markets in general and I understand their limitations.
And with respect to allocating capital, stock markets have proven to be better than the varying degrees of state economies.
> You are smarter than that.
True. :-)
Because Boeing is in an absolutely unique position where they are part of a duopoly in a market where demand for airplanes massively outstrips supply. Boeing's customers have no alternative and Boeing will be selling them planes and the market knows that.
Additionally the stock market can only look a tangible results. There is no measure of "engineering competency" which you could track year over year, which makes these mistakes hard to realize unless you are inside the system.
Wall St geniuses are not engineers.
That said, I bought Boeing stock and held over that time frame. I did so because I could see that humans were going to need more planes over the long term, and there are only two vendors. Also I visited the Everett plant with my family on vacation. It didn't occur to me that it would be worthwhile introducing KPI BS and McDonald's management style when constructing things worth 100 million and safety-critical.
Additionally, not all investors are savvy on what's going on with companies, so they decide to invest in ETFs (which mind you, is now the lion's share of investment activity). Now not all ETFs are the same basket of stocks. Some may have 15 stocks, whereas others may consist of 50. This is done so people can "choose their risk tolerance", which is calculated based on various things such as how diversified the fund is (50 stocks is more diversified than 15), what the market caps of the companies are, etc. Anyhow, the point is, choosing to invest in said investment vehicles, has little to do with investing based upon fundamentals, or rewarding productive companies, and more to do with managing a person's personal investment risk. The result? Companies are detached from fundamentals because, quite literally, the majority of investors are not investing based on fundamentals, but based on risk.
I don’t think the market rewards it, at least not by itself.
The problem is that the real money isn’t in the market, the institutional investors make most of their money on commissions. So while short term gains are a nice bonus, it’s only secondary to driving volatility and with it trade volume. So the incentive is to just stir shit up, because that’s what makes them money, both as stock prices go up and down.
Also institutional investors have disproportionate voting power that lets them put their own shit stirrers on the board and subsequently in the C-suite.
They're exploiting the uninformed, which in this case are retail investors.
Because Boeing boosted revenue from $60 to 101 billion during the time frame. And had just a single competitor.
The current stock price is less than half of its 2019 peak.
Because as someone buying stock, I have no idea whether these kinds of things are right and necessary to reduce bloat and redundancies in the firm, or idiotic and self-destructive.
All I know is that I probably want to be buying stock in firms that are more profitable, as opposed to less profitable. Or, at least, firms that other people think are going to be more profitable.
I get that statistically DIY'ing your portfolio will almost always lead to worse returns but I really do wish I could exclude certain stocks from my index funds.
2) You can effectively remove certain companies from an index using derivatives in addition to the index fund. Alternatively, look into direct indexing, where you attempt to track an index by directly owning an appropriately weighted basket of stocks, though it tends to be more complicated, have greater tracking errors, and have higher fees.
Oh this is exactly what I was trying to claim. I don't have any source for it though, just general distrust of our financial system and awareness that there's many incredibly smart people trying to find every loop hole and turn every random fluctuation to their advantage.
Thanks for the info on how to effectively remove certain companies from an index though, I'll put that to use
I don't know how much they saved by forcing out highly-paid employees, but it was a tiny amount compared to the 40 billion in additional revenue earned between 2008 and 2018 (60 to 101 billion). The stock market rewarded the company primarily because of the revenue gains.
That's much better than basically destroying your own company because you don't know how to progress forward and upward. This privilege is reserved for the few who can I guess.
Who are these folks that deserve to be outted for gutting an American institution? I'm sure they're still around, practicing their strain of vulture capitalism.
UPDATE:
Looks like the article points out the following main culprits: * Jim McNerney * Dave Calhoun
Making it illegal to be a bad CEO is one of those things that sounds intriguing on paper, but would be a nightmare to implement in real life.
Prosecutor: "You inflated investor returns by sabotaging the future survival of the company and made shoddy products that killed people."
Former CEO: "So what?"
The worst part is that this is a real problem. So many formerly strong companies have been brought down by this behavior that it is becoming notable when it doesn't happen. We are allowing these guys to destroy the American economy slowly just because it makes them and their close buddies ridiculous money. And of course the government is largely captured by these same people, so Washington isn't going to help. Just so frustrating.
1. Founder led companies have higher returns. And it's by A LOT. Hard to quantify exactly but, I've seen quoted numbers as high as 20% outperformance for founder led companies.
2. The biggest corporations never remain the biggest. Where is the Dutch East India company today? More recent examples: IBM was overtaken by Nippon Telephone, was overtaken by Exxon Mobil, was overtaken by GE, was overtaken by Microsoft etc.
3. It's not very common that a company stays in the S&P 500 for more than 30 years. The average lifespan is 21 years.
The common thread is that as soon as the sociopath MBA's take over, they Boeing the whole business.
And where is GE these days? They even sold off their consumer appliance division to the Chinese company Haier. They still make jet engines and some other big industrial stuff, but they're not as huge as they used to be.
If a car manufacturer pulled something like this they either have to fix it really fast or have to face severe financial consequences.
You have to realize that Boeing's customers have no alternative. They will be buying planes from Boeing.
Boeing at this point is a sort of nationalized industry.
It’s the “pft, but that’s just morality and like that’s relative and stuff therefore we should disregard it” sort of thing that I increasingly have less patience for. I’m less quick to dismiss terms like “greed”.
> 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.
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).
It is raining.
I use an Umbrella.
Still raining, but I am no longer getting wet.
I must not need the umbrella.
Close the Umbrella
Get wet again.
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.
"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."
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.
Not just senior = higher pay. Senior = more likely to stick to existing (known good) safety/QC processes. Boeing didn't want QC at all - they wanted the guys assembling the planes to do their own QC (which is likely illegal per FAA regulations).
Toss in a side of union busting. And a dessert serving of outsourcing to the lowest bidder, regardless of that bidders history in the space.
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.
I realize this is focusing on the example, but no, established bourbon distillers aren't going to stop barrel aging. It's part of the brand, it's part of what people pay for, and they have no reason to.
Your friend might have been overconfident, I don't know, but macerating oak chips at high temperature, getting the process right, adding flavorants: if he succeeds in making a high-quality product, great! Am I skeptical? Yes. But again, the established distillers didn't consider and reject the idea of making liquor this way because it's a bad idea, they wouldn't do it because that's not bourbon.
If he's successful, they still won't do it, because it's not bourbon. He can sell to people who don't care, though. If it's good, I'd get a bottle.
It should be certainly possible (I'm not sure how) to replicate this process in a speedier way.
However, I think the thing being missed by the start-up guy is that, like Louis Vitton crap and genuine De Beers diamonds, most people aren't looking for something that replicates the "genuine" product, they want "the real thing" because there's some kind of emotional factor in owning some massively overpriced shirt made by sweatshop workers and sold in a fancy store by appointment, or a rock that was really dug out of the ground by an enslaved child in Africa. I suspect barrel-aged bourbon is similar.
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.
Myopia + greed is a hell of a drug.
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.
Boeing’s Dead Whistleblower Spoke the Truth
https://www.thefp.com/p/boeings-dead-whistleblower-spoke-the...
The Free Press
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.
Thats whistleblowing as in past tense. He complained to the FAA and the FAA said 'yes John you're right'.
Not to diminish your mental heath but the whole argument here is that what Boeing around "stress", "pressure" and "anxiety" was far worse.
Its not like is anti whistleblower retaliation case (AIR21) was going to be some massive blemish for Boeing. It's not like it was going to be a 100 million dollar write down. It is basically "wrongful termination" that they are fighting. And it would be round 2 on this case (the first was "dismissed").
https://archive.is/iUzxR#selection-995.134-995.139 does a bit better job of surfacing more of the details. Ones that paint boeing in a far worse light without the sensationalism of a tv script murder plot.
If it isnt the case and you have proof the VA would love to hear from you. They have this tiny problem of soldiers coming home from war (to a happy place) with stress, anxiety and PTSD and then offing themselves.
You'll need to zoom out if you want a better picture of phenomena. Increase your video resolution to arrive at awesome conclusions like I do.
This is actually the starting premise for some interesting and powerful theories. You can't have this kinda progress with aesthetic based generalizations that are part of a quick-to-assume epistemology.
The best ghetto intuitions can do is paint pretty yet vain pictures with metaphors about sea harbors and bays. Inferior science and knowledge doesn't lead anywhere.
Nobody's saying it's an "aesthetic personality trait", just that it doesn't make you suicidal.
https://abcnews4.com/news/local/if-anything-happens-its-not-...
It’s commonly used on HN.
That's where he killed himself. Inside his truck, in the parking lot.
Please do not casually spread conspiracy theories. They poison democratic debate, make us all stupider, and distract attention from important, evidenced realities, like the others mentioned in the article.
NO: Barnett's body was found in a vehicle in a Holiday Inn parking lot in Charleston on Saturday, police said.
Or you know this
The family says Barnett's health declined because of the stresses of taking a stand against his longtime employer.
"He was suffering from PTSD and anxiety attacks as a result of being subjected to the hostile work environment at Boeing," they said, "which we believe led to his death."
FROM: https://www.npr.org/2024/03/12/1238033573/boeing-whistleblow...
The man was found dead, with a sucide note (hand written) and his own gun in his hand.
You know what happens when gun owners get the urge to kill themselves. They kill themselves. Guns make suicide less of a cry for help and more or less "effective".
Any article that doesn't mention what his family had to say about the matter is not only creating a narrative, but they are openly disrespecting the family of a dead man to grab attention and headlines.
How about todays interview with his OWN FAMILY:
FROM HIS MOTHER: If this hadn't gone on so long, I'd still have my son, and my sons would have their brother and we wouldn't be sitting here. So in that respect, I do," Vicky Stokes said when asked if she places some of the blame for her son's death on Boeing.
OR THIS: Stokes and her son Rodney Barnett said they do not want to comment on whether they believe he died by suicide until the investigation by the Charleston police department concludes.
source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/john-barnett-boeing-whistleblow...
Part of the reason why people jump to conclusions is because of a distinct lack of rationalist reporting by police and media. They don't tell us the empirical evidence because we are supposed to just believe them, and trust in their competent investigation, but that doesn't really work, at least not everyone is going to be satisfied by that demand.
That's not to say it wasn't a suicide, it just means we don't know either way and will likely never know. But it crucially also doesn't mean sufficient evidence couldn't be presented to convince a reasonable observer.
What we do know: this was an AR21 case. It was him suing boeing for forcing him to retire early and not promoting him because he was "whistle blowing". This is a case that had already been dismissed once.
On the matter of that, the FAA already got his reports and agreed with him. The harm to Boeing from his wistle blowing was finished. They were probably paying more for lawyers to fight this than it was going to cost to settle. So this wasnt about Boeing loosing anything other than cash at this point. If we're going to speculate we should be asking if Boeing was fighting this out of spite rather than making a good business decision.
The family themselves have spoken up: that he was troubled, and they firmly blame Boeing for his death. The way they are going about it says "we know he killed himself" ... they just think Boeing drove him to do it. They are coy with the conspiracy theory angle cause it just make boeing look bad...
There is a really interesting narrative here about stress, mental heath, and suicide for gun owners. Topics that the press wants to touch less than the ones your suggesting they ignore....
I don't really care about talking about circumstantial evidence when the physical is right there.
The reason why people aren't convinced by the “this wasn't even about his whistleblowing, he already disclosed everything, so Boeing has no motive“ argument is because it isn't just about stopping whistleblowers, it's about the chilling effect for other potential, current employees.
We can brush it all aside as crazy conspiracy theories, but I think that's actually very harmful to society. Conspiracy thinking is very damaging, our response shouldn't be “shut up and trust authority“ when somebody asks about forensic evidence.
We agree on this 1000%
"If this hadn't gone on so long, I'd still have my son, and my sons would have their brother and we wouldn't be sitting here. So in that respect, I do," Vicky Stokes said when asked if she places some of the blame for her son's death on Boeing.
FROM: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/john-barnett-boeing-whistleblow...
Let me restate that: THE MANS OWN MOTHER SAYS BOEING DROVE HIM TO KILL HIMSELF
They didn't need to hold a gun to his head and pull the trigger. The just needed to fuck him over badly enough for long enough for this to be the inevitable outcome.
Blow the whistle all you want kids, Pappa Boeing gonna take your job and fuck you over and there aint nothing you can do about it... Thats the chilling narrative if there ever was one.
The second of two, because he lost the first one.
People act like this was a criminal proceeding. It was not. He'd already been testifying and speaking publicly about Boeing for more than 5 years. He sued them because of Boeing's attempts to defame his character to downplay the allegations which have been public for a long time.
This case was him suing Boeing for money. The claim was that his whistleblowing was the reason he didn't get promoted and was forced to retire early. Thats whistleblowing past tense, the FAA already said the things he was whistleblowing on were in fact true, and Boeing was at fault.
He had lost this case once, but his lawyers felt that he could win this 2nd time around as there was a preponderance of evidence. The table stakes for this were in the 10's of millions at best, a trivial sum of money.
>>> I am not saying your wrong but who were the faulty suppliers for all these claims?
It was all, already, long ago, unraveled:
https://archive.is/iUzxR#selection-1111.393-1111.775
Why would I just assume that it exists?
And why would it ruin the chance of future whistle blowers coming forwards? Was he supposed to imagine that everyone was going to start believing conspiracy theories about his death?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/sep/29/ebay-exec...
Yet, it's cartooonishly preposterous. Seven people charged, seven guilty pleas, and the heads of Security and "Resiliency"? They flew across the country to do the equivalent of college harassment and B&E ... in a residential garage? Baugh worked for the CIA? His wife works for the CIA? Running Charlie's Angels as the security team (sorry, Jim's Angels)? Mandatory pop culture videos? What did I just read?
Unfortunately, it always has a Nelson response, no matter how funny. "Aww, those are the people who run corporate America..." They run my economy.
NYT Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20201213125301/https://www.nytim...
WP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal
The man had already been on film. He already has written statements everywhere. The FAA already agreed that what he said had happened.
He was in court for AIR21 case... to get money out of boeing for himself, for 10 years of early retirement. Candidly Boeing was probably paying more for the lawyers they were using to fight him than they would have paid just settling.
There weren't billons on the line with this.
In what way, exactly? Because from where I am sitting, it appears Boeing would enjoy unconditional support of US government no matter what they do.
It sounds like you have some unrealistic overestimate of your safety against a determined criminal. This just an older gentleman, far away from home, alone, with no security.
One method is to hire a junky, or a homeless person, or some other desperate person to commit a crime. Affordable to the middle class! And even if they are caught, they would not know your identity.
Kadyrov regularly assassinates his critics in EU for example, and that's not even his 'territory' so to speak, https://warsawinstitute.org/kadyrovs-hitmen/
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
I also wonder if it has happened in the past, with a subsequent recovery, to some American car companies? GM pre-2008 perhaps?
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.
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.)
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.
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.
the reason that large airline safety in the US is so overwhelmingly good is the preceding 20, 30, 40, 50? years of continuous improvements. until the last 5-10 years that is. we haven't even seen the tip of the iceberg yet. when these 2010's and 2020 planes are 15-30 years old, it's going to be a shit-show.
so if you believe that the airlines are too safe, that there is too much margin, they are over-engineered, over-regulated, etc. then that wouldn't be at all irrational. you could trade some gold-plated engineering for profit. you could trade bureaucracy for faster production, maintenance, etc. you could reduce the cost of travel (by how much? it's already cheap). this would be an interesting argument to make. but these decisions should be made in the light of day by the NTSB/FAA, congress, the public, and the shareholders, etc. even then, it's likely that theory would have negative consequences (remember the better-faster-cheaper NASA theory of operation).
the problem is that, instead of an honest choice made in public by the appropriate stakeholders and the flying public, these choices and short-cuts were made in secret, illegally, with extreme dishonestly, repeatedly, for at least a decade, for extremely selfish gains, by FAA and boeing executives.
that's what's not ok. we're told and we expect the nearly perfect safety to continue. what we got was back to the 1950's-1970's era shit-show.
This does not excuse Boeing, but it's just the way it is. Training standards are higher in the US than, for example, Ethiopian airlines.
Boeing acted like there was nothing different about the new aeroplanes and therefore did not train the pilots in how to react to the new system. Indeed, that was the original point of MCAS - to avoid pilot re-training. The pilots were not trained in doing the "right thing" and so had no chance of recovering the aircraft. I don't think it's right to blame them. Regardless of whether their overall training was of higher standard, I don't think American pilots would have fared any better since they, too, would have been in the dark.
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?"
So Boing is still getting orders, because the world need planes.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
Well, Modern neural networks and LLMs aren't constructed using any requirements, specifications or hard constraint at all - they just heuristically give a context-aware approximation of their massive input data set.
So getting to X being part of "requirements" is a bigger step than the layman imagines. Especially, 'cause an LLM outputs approximated recipes for action when asked, LLMs struggle to consistently achieve goals since goal-seeking requires constant little adjustments.
But even more, if an AI somehow reached the level where you could inject goals into it, it seems very likely it's goal would be maximize investor profits and this wouldn't solve the problem of the system discarding human experts but rather compound it.
There's a whole book about this, called Rainbows End. Highly recommended.
The MCAS issue which crashed two Boeing planes was a software hack.
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.
Here's an article that goes into detail on the software: https://spectrum.ieee.org/how-the-boeing-737-max-disaster-lo...
> When the flight computer trims the airplane to descend, because the MCAS system thinks it’s about to stall, a set of motors and jacks push the pilot’s control columns forward. It turns out that the Elevator Feel Computer can put a lot of force into that column—indeed, so much force that a human pilot can quickly become exhausted trying to pull the column back, trying to tell the computer that this really, really should not be happening.
> Indeed, not letting the pilot regain control by pulling back on the column was an explicit design decision. Because if the pilots could pull up the nose when MCAS said it should go down, why have MCAS at all?
> MCAS is implemented in the flight management computer, even at times when the autopilot is turned off, when the pilots think they are flying the plane. In a fight between the flight management computer and human pilots over who is in charge, the computer will bite humans until they give up and (literally) die.
At the end of the day, if the person who wrote that software had written it differently, then those planes would not have crashed and hundreds of people would not have died.
You can't really blame the software engineers. This was all thought out and tightly specified by Boeing to their avionics subcontractor (Collins, IIRC). This is how it was designed and engineered to work at a systems level - it is a design hack. As far as I know there weren't any software bugs or 'hacks' involved, and the avionics operated as designed (aside from the AoA DISAGREE alert, which was due to a requirements miscommunication, not a bug). It was broken by design, which happened long before implementation, at Boeing.
> When the flight computer trims the airplane to descend, because the MCAS system thinks it’s about to stall, a set of motors and jacks push the pilot’s control columns forward. It turns out that the Elevator Feel Computer can put a lot of force into that column—indeed, so much force that a human pilot can quickly become exhausted trying to pull the column back, trying to tell the computer that this really, really should not be happening.
The Elevator Feel Computer is a part of the 737NG as well, and would behave the same way in those airplanes when receiving such erroneous AoA data; it's nothing new in the MAX. It certainly did not help the crews during the fatal MAX incidents, and is clearly not an ideal design, but it's also barely a footnote in the root cause analysis, along with the stick shaker and stall warnings blaring at them constantly. The pilots would easily be able to overcome it long enough to get safely on the ground. What was a bigger problem for those crews was that the MCAS has enough trim authority to make it impossible, with any amount of elevator input, to restore level flight - limiting its trim authority was part of the 'fixes' required to get them airborne again.
I don't think it's reasonable to blame the implementation of MCAS for the accidents, its existence is to blame, and really highlights how nothing about the 737 platform has been designed holistically - it is a patchwork of hacks on hacks dating from the 1970s, which is difficult to reason about as a whole, and has dark corners. To truly 'fix' MCAS, you need to consider AoA as critical air data (which the 737 does not), and you need to integrate it holistically with the rest of the flight controls (which the 737 cannot, since it is not fly-by-wire), and you need to consider it critical equipment (it's an 'augmentation' and not considered critical on the 737, 'justifying' the lack of redundancy). Once you've done those things, you've basically got the bones of a proper envelope protection system in place, and you've obviated the need for MCAS in the first place. Of course the 737 team couldn't do this, because the business decided that it was more important to avoid (and hide) any differences than to bring the aircraft in line with modern standards.
Realistically, this should have been trapped by the safety analysis of the flawed design, which should have considered its effect on the whole flight control system when evaluating it, but Boeing again only considered MCAS to be an 'augmentation' and it got an abbreviated safety review as a result. Some engineers did express concern about some of these factors, but given the environment outlined in TFA, those concerns did not go anywhere, because they would have basically scuttled the idea and sent everyone back to the drawing board, which Boeing was desperate to avoid having already been caught flat-footed with the launch of the A320neo.
The 737 airframe needs to be put to rest, it is simply not safe or sane to keep stacking more hacks onto it. But there's no indication Boeing's working on a successor so it's probably going to be on the market for another 20+ years. Hard to imagine folks will probably be flying on an airframe with a 100 year old design (2024 + 20 years before a new revision + 20 years life span = 2064, around 100 years from the 737 launch before they start retiring)!
It's more like buying an expensive car/enterprise software. There are options. Options cost extra....
excerpts from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/business/boeing-safety-fe...:
As the pilots of the doomed Boeing jets in Ethiopia and Indonesia fought to control their planes, they lacked two notable safety features in their cockpits.
One reason: Boeing charged extra for them.
For Boeing and other aircraft manufacturers, the practice of charging to upgrade a standard plane can be lucrative. Top airlines around the world must pay handsomely to have the jets they order fitted with customized add-ons.
Boeing’s optional safety features, in part, could have helped the pilots detect any erroneous readings. One of the optional upgrades, the angle of attack indicator, displays the readings of the two sensors. The other, called a disagree light, is activated if those sensors are at odds with one another.
Boeing will soon update the MCAS software, and will also make the disagree light standard on all new 737 Max planes, according to a person familiar with the changes, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they have not been made public. Boeing started moving on the software fix and the equipment change before the crash in Ethiopia.
The angle of attack indicator will remain an option that airlines can buy. Neither feature was mandated by the Federal Aviation Administration. All 737 Max jets have been grounded.
“They’re critical, and cost almost nothing for the airlines to install,” said Bjorn Fehrm, an analyst at the aviation consultancy Leeham. “Boeing charges for them because it can. But they’re vital for safety.”
“There are so many things that should not be optional, and many airlines want the cheapest airplane you can get,” said Mark H. Goodrich, an aviation lawyer and former engineering test pilot. “And Boeing is able to say, ‘Hey, it was available.’”
But what Boeing doesn’t say, he added, is that it has become “a great profit center” for the manufacturer.
The three American airlines that bought the 737 Max each took a different approach to outfitting the cockpits.
American Airlines, which ordered 100 of the planes and has 24 in its fleet, bought both the angle of attack indicator and the disagree light, the company said.
Southwest Airlines, which ordered 280 of the planes and counts 36 in its fleet so far, had already purchased the disagree alert option, and it also installed an angle of attack indicator in a display mounted above the pilots’ heads. After the Lion Air crash, Southwest said it would modify its 737 Max fleet to place the angle of attack indicator on the pilots’ main computer screens.
United Airlines, which ordered 137 of the planes and has received 14, did not select the indicators or the disagree light. A United spokesman said the airline does not include the features because its pilots use other data to fly the plane.
When it was rolled out, MCAS took readings from only one sensor on any given flight, leaving the system vulnerable to a single point of failure. One theory in the Lion Air crash is that MCAS was receiving faulty data from one of the sensors, prompting an unrecoverable nose dive.
In the software update that Boeing says is coming soon, MCAS will be modified to take readings from both sensors. If there is a meaningful disagreement between the readings, MCAS will be disabled.
I'm not sure where the NYT information comes form that AOA DISAGREE was an option. The congressional report https://democrats-transportation.house.gov/imo/media/doc/202... is pretty clear on this aspect:
> Boeing has publicly blamed its software supplier, a company now known as Collins Aerospace Systems, for tying the AOA Disagree alert, which was supposed to be a standard feature on all 737 MAX aircraft, to an optional AOA Indicator display714—the result of which rendered the AOA Disagree alert inoperable on more than 80 percent of the MAX aircraft.
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.
Well...no actually.
This may be the case for _some_ software. I happen to work on (software) products where public safety is a concern.
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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
That's not automatically a wrong though, since different objects or processes merit different levels of quality.
Unless that software is running a life-critical or potentially life-threatening piece of equipment. People have died from software bugs in such things.
Eh, not a good hard-and-fast rule. Fujitsu's Horizon software drove some of its users to suicide.
- 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.
Grass is always greener
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.
https://www.theonion.com/boeing-lays-off-only-guy-who-knows-...
Boeing's Dead Whistleblower Spoke the Truth
https://www.thefp.com/p/boeings-dead-whistleblower-spoke-the... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39838580)
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.
I think this quote explains the problem nicely..
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
There should be oversight and public safety should play into private corporate governance for such things.
It’s not just them. It’s everyone and everything.
We are in a complexity crisis and no one sees it happening.
This is simply "vertical integration" applied to "regulatory capture."
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?
"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 work in AI, where it's always about the learning signal, and how much that is delayed.
Humans (boards) really also suck at learning if the signal (crashes) is delayed (due to quality momentum)
This is where I started my career.
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.
My coworker loves the Boeing legacy, and in her staunch advocacy, she showed me this.
https://avherald.com/
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!
Basically, many of these companies took decades to reach these positions where they're trusted. A bunch of managers rightfully figured out this was an asset that could be easily traded away for increased profits and they'd be gone by the time anyone noticed the devastation they left behind.
(If you built the brand yourself and did this all intentionally, I think it could also simply be called "the long con".)
The real problem here is the US's dominant business culture, which tends to value short-term cash extraction over long-term value creation. There are a lot of practical incentives for that, but the culture problem itself will have a lot of inertia, so I think we're going to have to look for a generational change.
Custodians get paid on the basis of inmediate performance.
Thats the broken link.
Custodians are thus nominating board members that are incentivized by short term decision making. The nomination is based on relationships and based on trust.
And then you get in trouble.
If board members were elected as a sort of election by ultimate stockholders (which include actual employees, in fact) you would see a different board. Therefore different CEO.
It is extraordinarily hard to perfectly align the long term interests of shareholders and employees. It requires a level of oversight that most boards can't manage.
1. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/principal-agent-problem...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa
It's been slowly cannibalized and is barely running on Inertia left by the previous government. Took almost the same as Boeing, about 25years. We barely have electricity, and now we're unable to supply clean drinking water to vast amounts of the country, including the capital.
Personally, I think at the core what started it, is the movement away from meritocracy. Other "things" took priority, and everyone on the ground was left trying to figure out how to not let the whole thing collapse whilst still servicing the new priorities given to them.
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?
If your answer is that not just Boeing, but our whole system is in fact that corrupt...well, that's not a very comforting answer, is it?
There's way less pride from work: most people don't judge themselves too much on coworkers opinions since jobs are more changing, and it's unlikely for you to develop lifetime friendships with people who remain on your team.
Large corporations have too many regulations and HR policies to meaningfully pay based on performance, so there's little monetary incentive to be a strong performer.
You rarely get to see the product you've built get used in a meaningful way where someone would say something about it. It's likely that only one or two disinterested people quality check your work, and in this case you're either within spec (expected), "close enough to pass" (which wasn't getting reported), or failing miserably. The QA people hate getting the last one, but there's so much apathy these days from what I've seen because everyone just wants to be somewhere else doing something else.
So basically they've evolved to take away any dopamine one can get from pushing for quality from anyone but the most intrinsically motivated workers. They got rid of those people systemically and purposefully, and made a lot of money doing it.
Current brokenthink of the management class is that their job is to wage war on their own workforce and labour rights. In the process destroying human capital. This isn't just my conclusion based on the fact that FANG was fined for having anti-poaching agreement - country-wide, corporate spending on workforce training and upskilling has been falling for the past 20 years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust...
When it's not you, it's just training data on the "wrong thing to do", and it's usually described as "being disagreeable" which accelerates the collapse - this seems perfectly reasonable at the time, they were overly difficult and an outlier.
Without explicit intent or some sudden accident, there's nothing to point at, especially in such a simplistic "what corrupt corporate or government official ignored this? Obviously someone reported it" way
I disagree. As the article shows, there were plenty of technically competent people who did point at specific things. But management did not listen to them, and indeed actively suppressed them and drove them out. And since the FAA had outsourced all of its "independent" inspection responsibility to Boeing, there was no effective third party that the technically competent people could go to to raise a red flag.
So you don’t need a Boeing sized company to check up on Boeing.
The problem isn't that the system is corrupt, it's that you're expecting a third party to both be close enough to be intimately familiar with all the details of the airplanes and spacecraft and yet separated enough from the company they're monitoring to not have conflicts of interest.
Whenever anyone points this out, they get labeled as cynics who hate capitalism and industry, and their complaints are swept under the rug -- after all, the company hasn't collapsed yet, so the worries must be unfounded!
This is exactly why strong government regulations and oversight is necessary. Strictly profit driven companies don't care about externalities like pollution or human lives. Literally, they only care about making one number go up, everything else (including the long term value of the number) means nothing at all.
Engineers can sometimes be indispensable enough to finagle power from alliances with capital. We don’t win popularity contests.
Then why do companies' value go up long term? I own many stocks that have increased 10-fold in value over the last 10 years.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_Appliances
Thanks, McKinsey!
https://electrek.co/2020/08/03/tesla-made-in-china-cars-lead...
https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-tesla-best-quality-giga-...
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/big-difference-betwe...
https://old.reddit.com/r/TeslaModelY/comments/14upjkq/my_tes...
A free market requires the consumer to be fully informed and rational, I just don't see that being possible in this environment.
The work is building a database of filing locations and feeds (eg: public document feeds of each and every stock exchange, corporate filing register, etc) and builder parses to extract new names, boards of directors, name changes, major stock holdings, etc.
It takes some doing (*) - but with LLM's and advances in open software it gets easier every day.
( * Myself and a small team did this for the global mineral sector some years (15+) ago )
https://www.businessinsider.com/10-companies-control-the-foo...
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.
Then why did markets favor companies that literally made no profits for years, Amazon and Uber being examples?
Amazon is particularly notable for how long and how energetically they resisted investor pushes to take short-term gains. They were famous for it, or perhaps notorious. So although it's a counterexample to my point, it's also great proof of it.
Opinions differ on Uber, but personally I think of it (and WeWork) as pump and dumps. After Facebook and Google ended up with quasi-monopolies, investors were hungry for another "to the moon" technology stock. I should say that was true of both VCs and retail investors. The VCs saw an opportunity to make things that looked vaguely Google-shaped, which they did, trying to sell them off to the general public before anybody caught on. They succeeded with Uber and failed with WeWork. But in both cases, it's still VCs favoring short-term cash extraction over long-term value creation.
Would you buy stock in a company that does this? Why do you think others would?
I used to write code for financial traders. I promise you that there are a lot of people who do not give half a shit what a company's up to as long as they can buy it for $100 and sell it later for $101. And based on infinite news reports, we can all see there are plenty of CEOs who will do pretty much anything that will boost the stock price in the short term so that they get to keep their jobs longer.
I'm sure there are. But you gotta fool the investors to make this work. The presumption that investors are stupid doesn't sound that plausible.
And no investor has to be stupid for this to work. You just need some investors who are smarter, better informed, better prepared, or more experienced than others. And that's no presumption at all. If you talk to experienced people in the industry, they know that their living comes out of the pockets of other people's pockets. Literal billions of dollars are invested every year in being the winner in zero-sum games in finance.
That said, plenty of investors are stupid and/or naive enough. Boeing's a fine example here. As it WeWork. Or DJT. Or literally any pump and dump or Ponzi scheme. Or nearly all of crypto.
If you're really struggling to understand this, I suggest Dan Davies' "Lying for Money". Because parasitical actors assuming that investors are stupid enough is a huge, multi-century activity.
How is one going to keep that secret long term?
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.
Money?
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.
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.
I should have been a little more precise. I mean a wholly Boeing designed product, from the 21st century. The MAX is still a 737 in its heart, and that design goes back a ways.
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.
And standing up a competitor is not really an option.
This is the part that bothers me. Why isn't it an option?
Standing up a new orbital rocket company was not really an option in 2000.
If Boeing can deliver 400 aircraft a year, why can't a startup deliver 6 in the next six years. I don't mean 6/year. I mean take 6 years to build your first 6. Or maybe it takes 12 years to deliver the first 6.
Then aim to deliver one per month for the next two years. Get FedEx and UPS and Amazon to fund you for the next 15 years. By then you could have two dozen aircraft flying real miles, building up experience and trust. Then you ramp to up to 25 aircraft per year for the next two years.
Sure, this means that after 20 years you still haven't replaced Boeing.
But Tesla didn't have to replace GM to revolutionize the industry.
When you become a real threat to take away 50 orders per year you cause visible activity among your competition. Just ask Bombardier.
(I wish I hadn't used Elon as an example twice in the same post, but it is what it is. Like him or hate him, his history is relevant when you talk about what is possible in giant established industries.)
Because a few years ago Bombardier did just that, and US government imposed a 300% tax on their planes. [1] And then a month later complained about Chinese protectionism or some such.
1 - https://theweek.com/trade/88867/us-imposes-300-import-tariff...
Boom is probably the closest thing to what is suggested but many still doubt they will make it to production. That’s minimal investment though and mostly around options on orders, so they still need massive funding to get there. Rolls Royce and others have said it’s not viable to design an engine for them so now they have to design the airframe and the engine.
Bombardier is an example of why new entrants should be concerned. As soon as you become a close threat, you don’t really trigger competition you trigger massive protectionism which forces them to sell the design to airbus, further consolidating the market
I think the incumbents would have to be broken up to seed any new competition that is remotely viable. The Boeing story has some way to go yet though, who knows
Your example of engines is an excellent point. Repeat that story 100 times to begin to understand the enormous difficulty. Which is to say, it won't be easy. I hope I didn't communicate that I thought it would be easy.
The story of Bombardier is maddening because it demonstrates that if you achieve unbelievably great things technically, you can still be assassinated by a million other attacks. The non-technical parts are what really seem to make this all a non-starter. But victory belongs to the bold.
And wouldn't it be a worthwhile ride to spend the next 20 years building incredibly cool stuff that eventually fails for whatever reason? Sign me up.
tl;dr The main obstacles are supply chain inefficiencies and that no one buys planes that aren't cost-effective.
[0] Japan's Commercial Jet Failure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkmtrsE9Jfg
I still say, sign me up.
As long as we're playing with somebody else's money it would be amazing to try and try again.
Airbus is the only company in the world which has actually managed to get off the ground in that market. And only because they were essentially a state run business which were subsidized to the extreme, until they actually managed to get into the market.
COMAC in China is trying to do the same, infinite subsidies in the hope of competing.
>If Boeing can deliver 400 aircraft a year, why can't a startup deliver 6 in the next six years. I don't mean 6/year. I mean take 6 years to build your first 6. Or maybe it takes 12 years to deliver the first 6.
It is not like they aren't trying, but it is extremely hard. You absolutely need massive amounts of funding and an investor which basically does not care how big of a money pit your company is.
One major reason for this is that modern airliners aren't that much of an engineer problem, but they are a gigantic management and integration problem. Typical start up approaches do not work.
First, Boeing never needs to take an external audit - they wrote the thing - but their suppliers need to cross every T and dot every I or else they owe Boeing money. In the worst case, a supplier can end up handing over product and STILL owing money. But Boeing - and especially BCA - they have never, and will never, undergo an actual AS9100 audit.
Second, since the standards are existing Boeing process, that represents a pretty much undefined cost for any market entrant. And that cost can be cranked arbitrarily if/when Boeing feels threatened, by amending the specs themselves - as they tried to do to SpaceX in 2010. That's probably a story for later, but it's pretty disgusting, although not as disgusting as what happened to the C-Series. OK, none of those are as disgusting as a million other things, but you get the point.
[1] And, to some extent, the FAA itself, but that's a whole other subject.
You might consider that Boeing's stock is down by half.
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.
Compare X to media. Since the bridge collapse in the Baltimore I have read interesting analysis on X and reddit, not the best medium, but yet did not come across a single decent article about it in the media.
Tesla accepts that there will be some accidents at the cost of progress.
SpaceX does not. (Or specifically lines up launches so that accidents have negligible consequences)
If Xitter returns 404s for 5 minutes, it's not the end of the world. Its users will come back after going to the bathroom. If Xitter spews garbage "news" stories, it doesn't really matter: its users will stick around anyway, and the people who think the stuff on Xitter is garbage are already gone anyway, or not paying attention to those channels anyway.
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.
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.
As they say, you’ve gotta be careful. The market can stay crazy longer than you can stay solvent.
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.
Yup, these topics explain that some managers can feel threatened by especially competent subordinates.
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.
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).
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.
After I did get laid off, he either blocked me very effectively, or exercised his EU right to be forgotten, because I can't find a public record of him. Although it would be funny to start shitposting his name around out of spite, since those would be the only records that show up.
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.
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).
Could just be that chasing KPIs is inherently bad because people will game them no matter what.
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.
Hey! FAA employees also want a nice and cushy job to retire to.. Them revolving doors are not gonna turn by themselves..
0. I acknowledge that capitalism has caused a lot of problems, including Boeing problems.
That's not fair. They didn't murder all of them, at least not yet.
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 :)
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.
The only thing preventing a fatality was pure luck of seating arrangement.
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.
Me: Aaaaand no way I'm ever applying to work at an MIC defense contractor conglomerate ever again.
Anyone who can explain the difference?
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.
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.
I'd be honestly interested in what an appropriate set of edits would look like. 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.
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.
I stopped reading here. I thought it was an article not a political flame presenting opinions as facts
‘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.
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?
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
What do you mean?
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.
musk sleeping on the floor is a publicity stunt, not totally dishonest, but 98% maybe.
jobs? complete a-hole and basket case. a lazy crappy worker who physically smelled bad. if he ever spent a couple hours doing honest work soldered boards, it was 100% for the ability to claim some kind of heroic epic later, or maybe just a manic fit.
the bean-counter stereotype isn't entirely false. it's a specialization of any number of process-bound, organizationally-loyal, myopic, useless cogs. any rare good talented "bean-counter" clearly knows that they are outnumbered and out-gunned by the other inept assholes and bureaucrats in their dept.
there are a large number, probably a majority of people, that are honest and want to do a hard day's work. they are stabbed in the back, trampled, and betrayed by the aforementioned personalities.
the problem is here is just that we keep rewarding, with attention and money, entirely the wrong folks. these famous and very rich folks are merely a combination of survivorship bias, luck, and the fact that to win big you really do need a narcissist who is not afraid to make irrational enormous bets with other peoples money.
The truly non-technical folks don't understand what corners they're cutting.
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.
Great phone. Never any problems with reception. And no, I didn't keep the first one in a case, ever, thought it was too pretty for that. Hence the second one ;)
Being a hackerish sort, I certainly tried to "hold it wrong", often enough. Couldn't get the damn thing to cut out, though.
Learned something about the press from 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)
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.
Two complete losses within a few months is a fucking terrible safety record. The carnage only stopped when regulators forcibly grounded all 737 Max globally, while Boeing criminally denied any issues with the airplane design.
> The only recent deaths are associated with less-trained pilots in the earlier days of the 737 MAX.
The recent deaths are associated with criminal management at Boeing. It was not a pilot training issue. Boeing intentionally and criminally withheld information about the MCAS system from all pilots, airlines, and regulators. Literally no one had a clue about MCAS outside of Boeing. Furthermore, the MCAS design was fundamentally broken, falling below minimum aircraft engineering standards.
> 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.
Cutting corners and trying to ship planes quickly is partly what got them into this mess.
This argument makes no sense. A repeatedly faulty plane that has crashed multiple times does not have a "good" safety record just because recoving from that fault is part of pilot training. In fact that's the definition of what I'd call a bad safety record.
Two. Bombardier had the knowledge and capability to design and manufacture the A220. They could do it again.
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.
Typical engineering humor of that era where they'd make up "rules of the universe" that were just them saying something vaguely cynical.
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.
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.
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.
Training can help but it is not sufficient for many tasks. You also need aptitude and desire.
Culture is more about what is valued and rewarded in a society, and I think the primary driver of the desire component.
What I meant about framing was that our economies, governments and businesses are framed in a cultural context, anglo-protestant american capitalism in this case. African-american/black communities have a challenging relationship with this for obvious reasons. Certain immigrant populations can integrate or interoperate more effectively than others. I think the key to achieving better results as a society and a planet is to incorporate more cultural diversity, allowing a broader range of desires and outcomes to be seen as valid and worth pursuing. I'm sorry I don't have more time to go into this right now, I hope it gives an idea what I was referring to.
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:
https://wbng.org/unit/the-american-prospect/
They thereby benefit from laws that enshrine union control at the expense of contract liberty.