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

prospect.org

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

#61

Post by TaylorAlexander »

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…

> 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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Stock_Exchange

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

#62

Post by segasaturn »

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…

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.

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

#63

Post by Clent »

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.

People need their mortality taken for future deterrence. Anything less is our collective moral weakness saying this is OK.

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

#64

Post by mattgreenrocks »

proc0 wrote: post #5

> 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 need…

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?

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

#65

Post by ljsprague »

buildsjets wrote: post #56
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 whi…

Or how about pop-ups not take over my screen? I'm on a work computer without an ad blocker.

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

#66

Post by alistairSH »

Tagbert wrote: post #14
iaoat2d wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the lengths to which they went to ensure all prior institutional knowledge regarding how to properly build a plane was systematically destroyed." why do this intentionally?

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.

It's in the article.

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.

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

#67

Post by lstamour »

segasaturn wrote: post #62
zer00eyz wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

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

#68

Post by polygamous_bat »

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…

> Why does the stock market reward idiot shit like this?

Goodhart’s law, unfortunately. Whatever metric the stock market rewards gets gamed like there is no tomorrow (or next quarter, here.)

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

#69

Post by margalabargala »

SahAssar wrote: post #44
margalabargala wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> however with software nobody dies The MCAS issue which crashed two Boeing planes was a software hack.

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.

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.

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