Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens • Hacker News Board

Re: Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens

#181

Post by ThrowawayR2 » Mon, Dec 23, 2019, 4:55 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #141

dmix wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s funny how people treats unions as panaceas to all problems. It’s strange to present them as some sort of solution in this case, where there was widespread engineering and management cultural issues, and would therefore somehow have prevented major air disasters. Workers rights and forcing higher wages might be great for the working poor and it might actually make economic sense in certain niche industries where…

Unions still make sense today. Without them labor conditions would likely go down quickly. There is plenty wrong with unions but to dispel the need for them without giving careful thought to their good sides is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

So if unions want to be more attractive, why are they not actively trying to fix their problems?

Re: Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens

#182

Post by dredmorbius » Mon, Dec 23, 2019, 4:57 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #145

dredmorbius wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know the smell of gas? That's the smell of 300 souls: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_London_School_explosion Pretty much all safety measures are written in blood.

I knew natural gas had an additive so we could smell it, but I didn't realize it came on the heals of this disaster. I guess that makes sense though. We have culturally evolved to care more about physical safety today; a good sign that our State worked by being held accountable to people. The stuff that is happening with Boeing is a total regression, and it will be interesting to see how regressions like this can be…

It's a story I'd only stumbled across a few years ago myself. It (and numerous other technological disasters) make for fascinating reading.

I very highly recommend Charles Perrow's work, particulary Normal Accidents and The Next Disaster. Perrow himself died just this past November.

https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3APerrow%2C+Charles%2C&...

I've been clipping similar stories, under a set of themes which I find related:

- Risk

- Accidents

- Technological Debt

- Techology as Debt

- Manifestation -- this is the notion of manifest vs. latent phenomena, perceptibility, and awareness. See Robert K. Merton among others.

- Denial. Itself one of the stages of grief, which seems more generally a response to a change in worldview and/or an invalidation of previously reliable models.

- Motivated asset inflation. The desire to sustain high levels of valuation of extant assets (real property, IP, technological mechansism, rents), often through activities which decrease net social welfare. Bernhard J. Stern's "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations", 1937, is fascinating reading in this regard. Stern doesn't quite fully make the case, but he sets the board for the final mate. NIMBYism, Merchants of Doubt, "fake news", and numerous other phenomena can be tied to this.

In whole, the narrative, if it is valid and holds, undermines many of the sacred cows of technological optimism and property-based market economics.

Re: Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens

#183

Post by ilamont » Mon, Dec 23, 2019, 4:57 PM UTC

It was typical behavior for Mr. Muilenburg, an introverted engineer who prefers Diet Mountain Dew to alcohol, but it left other executives baffled.

Wasn't it Boeing's supposed MBA-led culture that got it into this mess?

Re: Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens

#184

Post by mihaaly » Mon, Dec 23, 2019, 4:57 PM UTC

philshem wrote: post #25

pseudolus wrote: post #16

The story of the ouster to inevitably be followed by the story of the massive compensation package he'll receive.

They already rewarded him after the first crash, not to say they won’t again. > On December 17th, less than two months after the Lion Air crash, Boeing’s board of directors approved a twenty-per-cent increase in the company dividend and a twenty-billion-dollar stock-repurchase program, allowing Muilenburg, who had replaced McNerney as C.E.O. in 2015, to carry out even larger buybacks than in previous years. The board…

People sometime reason that the big compensations (salary, bonus) are for recognizing the responsibility the position entails.

Then I try to remain calm: what responsibilities they really take?! The consequences hit those remain, they should be compensated instead. Plus the salary given in vain taken back. Then we still listen about the damages caused!

They take it because they can. If they cared they wouldn't feel right taking so big portion of the profit generated by the teamwork of so many.

Re: Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens

#185

Post by lhopki01 » Mon, Dec 23, 2019, 4:57 PM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #68

PaulHoule wrote: post #21

The big question for Boeing is how they will transition to a post-737 world. Until now, Boeing's business plan is that they will be building a starship for NASA in 2060, but you will still be stuck with a 737 on Southwest Airlines, a A320 on Jetblue, and never know that aviation could be better. The 737 throws off a lot of cash, but the single-aisle monoculture makes flying miserable. A 737 replacement will be expens…

They won't until political winds shift and you get some regulatory intervention. I would project around 2030, when the major carriers are all ground away and the financial shenanigans of low cost airlines (example: Norwegian Airlines with NY->Europe trips that cost less than the parking) run out of gas. Without that, there's no motivation to do anything but shave every marginal dollar. Competitive forces are limited…

Low cost airlines have thrived in Europe for the last 30 years. The only thing that was protecting the trans Atlantic airlines was that there were designated airlines allowed to fly those routes.

Re: Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens

#186

Post by hanniabu » Mon, Dec 23, 2019, 4:57 PM UTC

jonnypotty wrote: post #6

Watched an aljazira documentary about falling standards at a Boeing factory a couple of years ago and been waiting to see if something like this would happen. Now they're gonna sacrifice a lamb, keep same corporate struture and philosophy, keep on making billions, remember to appologise even more next time.

> Now they're gonna sacrifice a lamb

Reminds me of the HBO show Succession. I'm sure they had very similar discussions.

Re: Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens

#187

Post by ogre_codes » Mon, Dec 23, 2019, 4:57 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #176

formercoder wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty standard new CEO move. Big impairment, net income goes way down, next few years look a lot better. Meanwhile cash flow doesn’t change.

But the cash flow will definitely change. They are selling fewer planes in the near term.

That's exactly why the new CEO will push for a big impairment immediately. That way the very-terrible-bad results are attributed to the former execs. The new CEO is essentially resetting the baseline and can post growth from there.

If the 787 recovers eventually, it's a windfall and the new CEO looks like a hero for implementing revolutionary change.

Re: Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens

#188

Post by softwaredoug » Mon, Dec 23, 2019, 4:58 PM UTC

Former Boeing employee here[1]: I remember when the company decided to do all 401k matching in Boeing stock in 2009. It seemed like a sketchy, borderline unethical way to keep the stock price afloat.

All to say I’m happy to have transitioned all my 401k years ago!

[1] I worked in the defense industry. Nothing to do with planes: my company was acquired by Boeing and operated relatively independently.

Re: Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens

#189

Post by hos234 » Mon, Dec 23, 2019, 4:59 PM UTC

solatic wrote: post #4

After both The Economist[1] and The New York Times [2] publicly undermined faith in Dennis Muilenberg. No question at this point that he needed to be replaced. The question is - why didn't the board act sooner? [1] https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/12/18/boeings-misplac... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/22/business/boeing-dennis-mu...

They did act. Muilenburg was Chairman & CEO and they removed him as Chairman in October. It probably took the new Chairman a month or two to work out what shit Muilenburg was feeding the board prior to that.

Re: Boeing CEO ousted as 737 Max crisis deepens

#190

Post by frenchyatwork » Mon, Dec 23, 2019, 5:00 PM UTC

dmix wrote: post #157

jacquesm wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unions still make sense today. Without them labor conditions would likely go down quickly. There is plenty wrong with unions but to dispel the need for them without giving careful thought to their good sides is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

There are a lot of good unions can do but I think they went way too far in their demands over the decades of their existence (like making it super hard to fire delinquent workers and hyper specialization where one guy does one job, and refuses to wear multiple hats like any modern business requires, because his union requires him only to do that one job). It’s not like unions are bad or evil, this sort of scope creep…

I've never worked with a union, but it seems a little bizarre to me how people seem to treat unions with the same sort of helplessness as the democratically elected lizards of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. If a union really gets that bad, vote them out, or replace them with another union.

That these unions stick around suggests to me that people like them more than they're willing to admit.