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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

#261

Post by michaelmrose »

lyu07282 wrote: post #175
zer00eyz wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> 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?…

Handwriting analysis and blood spatter is mostly garbage. If he was shot with a gun inside the car from a reasonable angle its not going to be immediately obvious whether he did it or not unless they left bloody fingerprints on the door handle after shooting him twice.

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

#262

Post by makerdiety »

smsm42 wrote: post #191
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…

You say it like "anxiety" and "stress" are synonymous to suicidal. I am a pretty anxious person, and sometimes have a lot of stress at work, and experienced burnout in the past too. That doesn't mean I am about to shoot myself in a motel parking lot - or anywhere else, for that matter. This binary view of mental health - either a person is "healthy" which means 100% perfect, or he's not - and then anything can be exp…

Stress and anxiety make you more vulnerable to bad decisions like suicide. Stop trying to turn stress and anxiety into an aesthetic personality trait and fashionable dress. Mental illness is not a dress that you can wear. It's toxic stuff to get rid of or at least mitigate.

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

#263

Post by quantified »

wolverine876 wrote: post #185

There are real problems at Boeing and those are real issues, but let's beware of the BS that comes with the kind of widespread pile-on that's happening now. This article reads like an Internet rant to me, with the sarcasm, hyperbole, and ridicule. Those things aren't awful in themselves (though they've become very overused and tiresome to me), but they crowd out actual facts, details, nuance, complexities. If you wri…

If there were places it wasn't bad, does that affect this look at how it was bad?

I'd be honestly interested in what an appropriate set of edits would look like. Subtract some adjectives, would that make a difference?

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

#264

Post by rbancroft »

astrange wrote: post #201
rbancroft wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within…

Yes, he's a Republican. Typical engineering humor of that era where they'd make up "rules of the universe" that were just them saying something vaguely cynical.

It is cynical and is simplistic but there is an element of truth to it. Maybe is republican ideology, I don’t know about that.

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

#265

Post by samatman »

autokad wrote: post #31
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?

a lot of people say things like 'stock price', but that's missing the point. the lesson is in the nuance. its many factors, effecting all aspects of our lives now honestly. - young people's disregard for the knowledge of people older than them. This can be an essay in itself, but there's the idea that the reasons why people are doing things the way they are is because they are stupid, something like: "you are young a…

> I had a friend do a start up to make bourbon in 3 months. He thought all those alcohol producers that take 5-30 years making them were doing it wrong. I am like, definitely give it a go but understand that "I am sure they thought about this'.

I realize this is focusing on the example, but no, established bourbon distillers aren't going to stop barrel aging. It's part of the brand, it's part of what people pay for, and they have no reason to.

Your friend might have been overconfident, I don't know, but macerating oak chips at high temperature, getting the process right, adding flavorants: if he succeeds in making a high-quality product, great! Am I skeptical? Yes. But again, the established distillers didn't consider and reject the idea of making liquor this way because it's a bad idea, they wouldn't do it because that's not bourbon.

If he's successful, they still won't do it, because it's not bourbon. He can sell to people who don't care, though. If it's good, I'd get a bottle.

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

#266

Post by makerdiety »

margalabargala wrote: post #19
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?

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.

How about eliminate your employees to pump up the stock selling price or whatever and instead of removing the best subordinates, keep them, give them automation capabilities, and remove the unintelligent dross?

That's much better than basically destroying your own company because you don't know how to progress forward and upward. This privilege is reserved for the few who can I guess.

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

#267

Post by FredPret »

pdonis wrote: post #242
baggy_trough wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 syst…

The oversight we have into public companies is only financial. There's no annual third-party safety audit for engineering (yet).

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

#268

Post by zero_shift »

iaoat2d wrote: post #9
margalabargala wrote: post #3

If you read this article looking for new or surprising insight, you won't find it. It is not new information that Boeing started a rapid decline shortly after the McDonnell Douglas merger, and it will be unsurprising to you to hear that shortly afterwards, Boeing began abusing its most senior employees into leaving. What this article offers is new detail into exactly how Boeing has gone about cannibalizing itself. Th…

"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?

It's a lot easier to make your outsourcing strategy stick, if you no longer have an alternative.

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

#269

Post by class3shock »

"But the average employee assigned to the 737 program has been at Boeing just five years, according to a longtime Boeing executive who is involved in various efforts to save the company; for comparison’s sake, he says the average employee assigned to the 777 program had between 15 and 20 years under their belt."

It don't think it's possible to overstate how bad, and sad, of a state of affairs that is. I've never seen a group at any organization that was composed predominantly of early career engineers that did not have issues (in the aerospace/defense industry). Those mid / late career engineers are irreplaceable and yet they were actively trying to get rid of them... There are no words.

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

#270

Post by juancb »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #114
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.

Yes, large companies take a lot longer to fail than I ever imagined. A lot of time can pass riding on past excellence before the cracks start showing.

Imagine how that scales and then how that might scale to nation states.
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