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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

#241

Post by massysett »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #61
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…

> 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…

Hospitals and schools don’t support this thesis: in the USA, the bulk of the operators in both segments are either governments or non-profits.

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

#242

Post by pdonis »

baggy_trough wrote: post #227
pdonis wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It just took 25 years to finally happen. To me the big question is, why did it take 25 years for this to become common knowledge? Why is our system of evaluating public corporations so messed up that a public company, and one with huge government contracts to boot, could get away with this for that long?

Boeing, and the United States as a whole, have been very richly endowed with capital. When you decide to stop adding to your seed corn and start to eat it down, but you began with an enormous mountain of it, you can eat well for a very long period of time.

I'm not asking why Boeing continued to make money. I'm asking why the system as a whole didn't spot much sooner that their engineering had been trashed, and some kind of intervention wasn't made before two fatal airline accidents and other near misses happened. The point of the oversight we have is supposed to be to spot problems before they reach that level.

If your answer is that not just Boeing, but our whole system is in fact that corrupt...well, that's not a very comforting answer, is it?

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

#243

Post by Eisenstein »

JackFr wrote: post #156
HumblyTossed wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the market is barely better than a ponzi scheme. There's ___just___ enough laws around it to keep people somewhat okay with it.

That’s nonsense. Markets are the best way we’ve come up with to allocate capital. Committees and commissars do not do a better job.

> Markets are the best way we’ve come up with to allocate capital.

Properly regulated, competitive markets. Aerospace regulation is based on a lot of trust, which Boeing seems to have exploited, causing this problem. The market is not competitive; there are only two players and the output of only one of them cannot meet demand.

> Committees and commissars do not do a better job.

Dichotomies are good for making punctual arguments online, but you do yourself a huge disservice by using them to frame the options in your own mind. Do you honestly think that the options are 1. Antisocial free market allowed to do whatever it wants for capital gain, or 2. Despotic communism? You are smarter than that.

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

#244

Post by markus_zhang »

benced wrote: post #85

I am not exaggerating to say that Jim McNerney should be dragged in front of Congress and be forced to explain what he did to an incredibly important American company. It's important to push back against the shareholder value theory where appropriate and humiliation is an underrated component of that.

They might throw him under the bus or suicide him if it is bad enough. Right now he is still "one of us" so I don't think that's going to happen.

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

#245

Post by oglop »

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?

So you can ship your shitty product and get paid. That’s almost always the reason. Engineers have this annoying quality of asking prickly questions and many managers, or people in general, aren’t exactly thrilled by someone constantly questioning them or pointing out errors in their reasoning.

There’s other reasons sometimes. Control maybe. Maybe they have damage themselves and don’t realize what they are doing. But the big one I’d say is the desire to control the product release timeline.

Btw we all keep saying managers, but I’ve seen structures where the lead engineer is in this position of having personell controls along with technical control and it can be, and in my experience was, even worse.

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

#247

Post by ladzoppelin »

partiallypro wrote: post #206
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…

I don't really even get the conspiracy theory that he was murdered, if Boeing etc are all so knowing and powerful why didn't they kill him years ago, well before he could tell his tale? Now they kill him because he already spoke out and they want to put the spotlight on themselves? The whole thing doesn't really make a lot of logical sense.

"Boeing etc are all so knowing and powerful" Wait Boeing makes most of its money through military contracts, downplaying its "power" and importance is slightly disingenuous .

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

#248

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#249

Post by ctrw »

masklinn wrote: post #141
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 c…

I disagree it happened instantly, it's just that Boeing didn't make any new planes for 20 years that made it to the sky. Even the Max was a redesign of an existing design.

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

#250

Post by tycho-newman »

Boeing’s crappy planes killed hundreds of people, true. But that was years ago!

So a door blew off a plane. Did it crash? No.

So a tire fell off a plane. Did it crash? No.

It goes to show that even after a quarter century of decline, there’s enough engineering savvy to at least make some things fail to a known condition.

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