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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

#271

Post by Cornbilly »

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…

It appeals to the "free thinkers"/"heterodox" (empty-headed contrarian) crowd that TFP caters to and that infests every tech website on the net.

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

#272

Post by TrackerFF »

sideshowb wrote: post #47
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…

Um so... what was he supposed to use email for, according to the manager?

Paper trails: Sociopathic managers hate this one weird trick.

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

#273

Post by baggy_trough »

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…

I have bad news.

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

#274

Post by refulgentis »

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…

You're sort of assuming it happened in some sort of explicit clear way. It doesn't and didn't. I've participated in this process and shrugged it off as kind of their fault and not my place. Until it was my turn.

When it's not you, it's just training data on the "wrong thing to do", and it's usually described as "being disagreeable" which accelerates the collapse - this seems perfectly reasonable at the time, they were overly difficult and an outlier.

Without explicit intent or some sudden accident, there's nothing to point at, especially in such a simplistic "what corrupt corporate or government official ignored this? Obviously someone reported it" way

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

#275

Post by mook »

bfrog wrote: post #145
margalabargala wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Does it matter to the MBAs? The effect is on long enough terms that they'll be gone by the time everything falls over. They're not there to maximize long-term value, just to get good enough to get promoted and then maybe switch companies.

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

#276

Post by vundercind »

rybosworld wrote: post #186
vundercind wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A lot of people (sizeable majority?) seem to go the opposite way when they get older, so that's pretty interesting.

I’m less interested in judging most things. Started actively jettisoning that impulse in my 20s.

It’s the “pft, but that’s just morality and like that’s relative and stuff therefore we should disregard it” sort of thing that I increasingly have less patience for. I’m less quick to dismiss terms like “greed”.

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

#277

Post by necheffa »

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…

> however with software nobody dies

Well...no actually.

This may be the case for _some_ software. I happen to work on (software) products where public safety is a concern.

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

#278

Post by singleshot_ »

makerdiety wrote: post #262
smsm42 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Stress and anxiety are foundational to high performance. Imagining that stressed anxious people are mentally ill is ridiculous.

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

#279

Post by acdha »

ctrw wrote: post #249
masklinn wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That sounds like inertia to me: they had a ton of institutional knowledge and practice around mature designs, which kept things from going too badly when the financial engineers first started – and since nothing fell from the sky, clearly that meant they had earned those bonuses and should go further!

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

#280

Post by class3shock »

layer8 wrote: post #165

> noncompliance (and nonconformance, which is similar but not identical) Anyone who can explain the difference?

A nonconformance is generally a physical thing. For instance a part my be out of tolerance or have have damage that makes it nonconforming.

A noncompliance is generally referring to procedures. For instance not documenting a step in a quality review or not following the assembly procedures for a door plug and ending up with some extra bolts.

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