Even though Boeing will be sue to hell, the CEOs will run off with big smiles on their faces and pockets lined in gold. Prison time!
Boeing Engineers Lost Control of the Company
71–80 of 234 posts
Re: Boeing Engineers Lost Control of the Company
#72Reminds me of what a Steve Jobs warned about marketing people taking over and product people being pushed out:
Re: Boeing Engineers Lost Control of the Company
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are different kinds of outsourcing. One is where a subcontractor has an existing and superior product, which incurs integration cost, but results in a superior product. The other is exporting a core competence to an inexperienced subcontractor for less cost, which incurs training costs, integration costs, loss of intellectual capital, logistics loss, and results in an inferior product.
> which incurs training costs, integration costs, loss of intellectual capital, logistics loss, and results in an inferior product What I'm arguing is that, in order to effectively outsource, one must get good at the so-referred training and integration costs, while hedging against logistics issues. Otherwise you will get, as you prophesy, an inferior product. But I'm not convinced that's inevitable. Of note, keeping…
But it's still top-down, which means that existing processes are interpreted imperfectly at best, and there is no accumulation of knowledge and incentive for innovation. Spin-offs used to be popular for this reason, but that seems to be out of favor with Wall St today. It seems they'd rather watch startups kill their empires than plant their own seeds.
Re: Boeing Engineers Lost Control of the Company
#74> Why did Boeing buy McDonnell-Douglas? Because the airplane manufacturing industry is consolidating, and Boeing is pursuing profit at the expense of human lives. Was it really necessary to add the second part to explain why the merger occured? 'industry is consolidating' seems reason enough. The mixing of explanation with moralism in every sentence is grating. Put the moralism and ethics in it's own paragraph so we…
>The mixing of explanation with moralism in every sentence is grating.
At the fundamental level, Engineering is a social/ethical process, not a technical one. Yes, engineers tend to have technical skills but when you use those skills to design a bridge you must always keep society (the users of your product) at the forefront of your mind. What separates engineers from "skilled people" is professional ethics. An engineer (structural, software, aerospace, chemical or whatever) who does not consider the ethics of their work cannot credibly claim to be an engineer at all.
To "put the moralism and ethics in its own paragraph" is to sequester the ethical considerations somewhere where they can be conveniently ignored in service of the cult of CEO worship.
edit: Instead of anonymous downvotes, would anyone care to let me know why they find this comment so inappropriate for HN?
Re: Boeing Engineers Lost Control of the Company
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s a hyperbolic statement. Boeing employees and engineers also fly on those planes with their families. It isn’t like they are making decisions with the intent of compromising safety.
> It isn’t like they are making decisions with the intent of compromising safety. That really is actually exactly what they did and are doing. When you don’t do tests because you are confident something will pass, that doesn’t change that you aren’t testing, and you are compromising quality on the basis of productivity. Here Boeing decided to go against the safe practice because that would have classified the plane a…
There's a level of engineering judgement involved here though.
If product A has passed testing and I made minor changes and made a product B if I can avoid running the whole battery of tests as if product B is brand new and not derivative then I totally will and Aerospace and Automotive operate like this all the time in every country in the world it's not poor practice.
Re: Boeing Engineers Lost Control of the Company
#76Silly corporations, pursuing profit instead of the good of everyone. Why would we expect any corporation to cut corners to improve profits, which is definitely not what private for-profit corporations are explicitly organized to accomplish? What a weird thing that nobody could have predicted. Really tickles my nose. Makes me want to sneeze actually. aaaa AAAA AAAAAACHSEIZETHEMEANSOFPRODUCTION that was a weird one, so…
The problem with ‘seize the means of production’ is that it has roughly zero value. When I worked in manufacturing, I saw that we bought capital equipment for billions and sold it 3-5 years later for millions. Everything in between, all the profit we squeezed from it, was due to the combined efforts, knowledge, loyalty, and goodwill of the employees that worked there. A good CEO, greedy as he may be, understands this…
So why not elect good CEOs? Why do we have to let the wall street hacks pick our CEOs?
Re: Boeing Engineers Lost Control of the Company
#77Re: Boeing Engineers Lost Control of the Company
#78When the 737 was first created, iterating a known type of aircraft was much less of a concern. It was not a key design constraint.
As time went by and we learned more and the good idea faeries had time to think about things, we now have all kinds of regulation that makes the cost of making a new plane much higher if it is not an iteration on an existing design.
This sort of regulatory pressure has a tendency to nix innovation in favor of stability, and that's what we see here.
Re: Boeing Engineers Lost Control of the Company
#79Note two contradictory popular trends: 1. AI is going to replace cheap labor 2. Engineering companies are outsourcing because of cheap labor The reality is that trend #2 is orders of magnitude larger. Any reversal of that by ‘AI’ would be the biggest jobs boom in decades for western nations, and according to this article, would increase quality and therefore trade balance as well. The other reality is that manufactur…
That reminds me of an article I read about the new Toyota Supra and Toyota & BMW's collaboration to create it and (either the Z4 or an M-car? Sorry, I don't remember).
Anywho, the thing that was interesting to me was how much Toyota and BMW were willing to invest in what is more or less an engineer's bootcamp- like baseball teams playing out-of-league teams in practice to get better- and that that was seen as a worthy investment by the engineering team's superiors.
Some companies still value engineers. That's where I want to be.
Re: Boeing Engineers Lost Control of the Company
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with ‘seize the means of production’ is that it has roughly zero value. When I worked in manufacturing, I saw that we bought capital equipment for billions and sold it 3-5 years later for millions. Everything in between, all the profit we squeezed from it, was due to the combined efforts, knowledge, loyalty, and goodwill of the employees that worked there. A good CEO, greedy as he may be, understands this…
So why not elect good CEOs? Why do we have to let the wall street hacks pick our CEOs?
Or just different CEO's?
How about fundamentally different CEO's?