Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

prospect.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 568 posts

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#51

Post by sudden_dystopia »

zer00eyz wrote: post #49
stephenhuey wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned some things reading this article from 2 days ago: Boeing’s Dead Whistleblower Spoke the Truth https://www.thefp.com/p/boeings-dead-whistleblower-spoke-the... The Free Press

The entire first half of this (tfp directly above this comment) article blindly supports the spin that there is some conspiracy where someone killed him. HIs own family goes into great detail all over the press about how he had anxiety and ptsd. That he quit his job on DR orders or the stress was going to give him a heart attack. The shit Boeing did to him was awful (stress, anxiety and ptsd) and Boeing should be bla…

[flagged]

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#52

Post by lotsofpulp »

hughesjj wrote: post #36
Rinzler89 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

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 certai…

Index funds do not buy shares because shares “look like a better ROI”. Index funds buy because non index funds buy (and same with selling).

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#54

Post by reissbaker »

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.

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#55

Post by Simulacra »

downrightmike wrote: post #30
Cheer2171 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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."

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#56

Post by buildsjets »

ljsprague wrote: post #6

An intrusive popup took over my screen at that link.

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.

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#57

Post by stephenhuey »

zer00eyz wrote: post #49
stephenhuey wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned some things reading this article from 2 days ago: Boeing’s Dead Whistleblower Spoke the Truth https://www.thefp.com/p/boeings-dead-whistleblower-spoke-the... The Free Press

The entire first half of this (tfp directly above this comment) article blindly supports the spin that there is some conspiracy where someone killed him. HIs own family goes into great detail all over the press about how he had anxiety and ptsd. That he quit his job on DR orders or the stress was going to give him a heart attack. The shit Boeing did to him was awful (stress, anxiety and ptsd) and Boeing should be bla…

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.

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#58

Post by scarmig »

hughesjj wrote: post #36
Rinzler89 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

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 certai…

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.

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#59

Post by JohnFen »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #26
margalabargala wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stock price gains. Fire all the longest-tenured, highest-salaried employees. Now you have a company that appears to look similar but with millions of dollars fewer per year in headcount expenses. Boeing's stock price went up 10x in the time frame covered by the article. The people responsible for gutting the company have cashed out.

>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…

The stock market is all about near-term gains, and as a result it is often irrational and rewards destructive behavior.

Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

#60

Post by throwway120385 »

noahtallen wrote: post #34
type_Ben_struct wrote: post #11

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.

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. (As…

> 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.

Post reply on HN