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

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

#171

Post by deanCommie »

theragra wrote: post #135
ortusdux wrote: post #42

"So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no co…

Weird to read from a "you are holding it wrong" man

Let's be clear, "you are holding it wrong" was an ass-covering lie to carry Apple through an era of bad press for a device that was otherwise monumental, and when you look back at iPhone adoption history. 4 was the inflection point of growth that never stopped. 3, 3G, and 3GS were all fine, but 4 is when iPhone took over the world.

It was bold-faced, it was arrogant, it wasn't true, but it let them fix the issues and never look back.

The product was otherwise good save a frustrating flaw that was easy to fix, but probably wouldn't have ushered in the era of dominance if they had to do a total recall.

Would I have been happy if I was an iPhone user at the time? No, I would've been livid.

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

#172

Post by gigel82 »

ortusdux wrote: post #42

"So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no co…

That's so ironically sad coming from Jobs seeing where Apple got now (partly due to the direction he set).

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

#173

Post by layer8 »

isleyaardvark wrote: post #83
segasaturn wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And they generally don’t tell a friend “if anything happens to me, it's not suicide”.

From TFA, it seems that it was someone else (still alive) who said that.

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

#174

Post by joe_the_user »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #64
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?

The real fix is popularizing the notion that management is just as commoditizatable than those they seek to commoditize.

What's described here is exactly what happens when you have "generic" management. Generic management finds unneeded expenses and eliminates them. The only way a senior expert isn't a cost to be eliminated is if you have managers focused on and understanding the enterprise they are managing (and no promises with that, however).

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

#175

Post by lyu07282 »

zer00eyz wrote: post #98
segasaturn wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>>> or their car. Not in the parking lot outside a courthouse. NO: Barnett's body was found in a vehicle in a Holiday Inn parking lot in Charleston on Saturday, police said. Or you know this The family says Barnett's health declined because of the stresses of taking a stand against his longtime employer. "He was suffering from PTSD and anxiety attacks as a result of being subjected to the hostile work environment at…

It's not like we know or will ever know the details of and the extend of the investigation, the note was actually reported as a "white piece of paper that closely resembled a note,", what was on the note? Were his fingerprints on the note? Was handwriting analysis done? Did the gun belong to him? That wasn't reported either. Was it registered to him/ when/where did he buy it? Was there gunpowder residue on his hand? Does the trajectory and blood splatter analysis all match? Was there surveillance footage of the car? What was his last cellphone usage?

Part of the reason why people jump to conclusions is because of a distinct lack of rationalist reporting by police and media. They don't tell us the empirical evidence because we are supposed to just believe them, and trust in their competent investigation, but that doesn't really work, at least not everyone is going to be satisfied by that demand.

That's not to say it wasn't a suicide, it just means we don't know either way and will likely never know. But it crucially also doesn't mean sufficient evidence couldn't be presented to convince a reasonable observer.

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

#176

Post by zer00eyz »

euroderf wrote: post #87
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…

A billion dollars here, a billion dollars there, pretty soon someone needs to be taken out of the picture.

What billions of dollars.

The man had already been on film. He already has written statements everywhere. The FAA already agreed that what he said had happened.

He was in court for AIR21 case... to get money out of boeing for himself, for 10 years of early retirement. Candidly Boeing was probably paying more for the lawyers they were using to fight him than they would have paid just settling.

There weren't billons on the line with this.

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

#177

Post by dralley »

ladzoppelin wrote: post #128
dralley wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It. was. a. defamation. lawsuit. The second of two, because he lost the first one. People act like this was a criminal proceeding. It was not. He'd already been testifying and speaking publicly about Boeing for more than 5 years. He sued them because of Boeing's attempts to defame his character to downplay the allegations which have been public for a long time.

I am not saying your wrong but who were the faulty suppliers for all these claims? Is it possible things would start unraveling for something much bigger than it already has? The other motive would also be to send a message which it definitely did. I find it weird that he would ruin the chance of future whistle blowers coming forward by doing this the day after the court appearance, its strange.

What was his testimony in a civil (not criminal) lawsuit which had already been given many times before both in public and in other lawsuits going to unravel? Especially given the number of additional investigations going on?

Why would I just assume that it exists?

And why would it ruin the chance of future whistle blowers coming forwards? Was he supposed to imagine that everyone was going to start believing conspiracy theories about his death?

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

#178

Post by matthewfcarlson »

My paternal grandfather worked for Boeing as an airfoil modeling engineer (figuring out the right shape for wings and creating computer models) from 1960s-2000s. As a nerdy kid he had some of most entertaining engineering stories. One of my favorites was when a coworker brought a boomerang to work and due to some union/budget shenanigans at the time, all the engineers were at work with nothing to do. So they designed and machined a 3 foot boomerang out of clear acrylic. They went out to the field and gave their heavy new toy a good throw, only to have it promptly vanish out of sight on a sunny day. After a moment to process what just happened, they all hit the dirt as they heard it whoosh overhead.

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

#179

Post by toss1 »

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…

Because the entire rewards system is built around short-medium term financial gains.

It is a very old story. People build a company with deep knowledge and caring about what actually makes great products. Financial managers get involved to manage the money aspects of the business. Financial types want a lot more control to make the company more profitable.

The financial management has no actual clue what makes the company valuable. They only know what makes more or less cash flow in this or that direction. But, credit where due, they DO know how to make that work.

They start financially 'engineering' the company for near-term profits and higher stock prices. This works. This works fantastically well. Everything looks leaner, teams of younger workers are sometimes orders of magnitude cheaper than the highly experienced teams, and no one can tell the difference from outside. Profits are higher, stock prices hit record high after record high. Cash is spent on stock buybacks and not R&D or retaining institutional knowledge. Warning flags start showing up in product and service quality indicators, but are ignored and even suppressed. The problems start multiplying at increasing rates, then exponentially increasing rates.

Eventually, it starts to get serious. But by then, the "financial geniuses" have long since cashed out and the core of the company's workforce, ethos, and institutional knowledge has been so gutted that there is no recovery. The death spiral starts in earnest.

The only questions are whether for Boeing, being a critical keystone in the US aerospace and defense industry can or will be allowed to fail, and, if not, if there will be an actual engineering-based turnaround, or if it will be a Soviet-like zombie company for how many years?

Forkin' MBAs, they'll kill it every time.

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