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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

#141

Post by masklinn »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #70

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.

> 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

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

#142

Post by huimang »

ljsprague wrote: post #65
buildsjets wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or you can not complain about a dismissable popup on quality article being presented to you for free.

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

#143

Post by smackeyacky »

twojobsoneboss wrote: post #94
darth_avocado wrote: post #12

> 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 structur…

Apart from pushing someone out who they don’t wanna pay severance for, what incentive does a manager have to treat one of their reports like dirt?

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.

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

#144

Post by masklinn »

krisoft wrote: post #116
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #70

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.

So what you are saying is that twitter, oh sorry x, is going to break down completely in around 2048? :)

I doubt xitter has as much quality buffer as Boeing had in '97, and Elon's brutalisation of it was a lot less gradual.

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

#145

Post by bfrog »

margalabargala wrote: post #25
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.

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 “un…

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?

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

#146

Post by jongjong »

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.

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

#147

Post by vundercind »

nyolfen wrote: post #104
forgotmyinfo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

I grow less and less tolerant of “stuff just is, you can’t, like, judge it, man” the older I get.

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

#148

Post by astrange »

bradley13 wrote: post #102

tl;dr: Pournelle's Iron Law.

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.

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

#149

Post by TaylorAlexander »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #108
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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…

“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.

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

#150

Post by Ajay-p »

rbancroft wrote: post #137
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think one is at odds with the other?

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 t…

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.
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