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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

#281

Post by singleshot_ »

lstamour wrote: post #67
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.

The article above and every other article I've read says, "he was found in his truck". That's a personal vehicle, and assuming it was locked, enough to suggest that it was self-inflicted.

Prime Boeing juror material

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

#282

Post by stevula »

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?

Even aside from business incentives, there are plenty of people in the workplace who act cruelly due to prejudices, perceived threat, spite/vengeance, a need for control, perceived threat, general emotional unhealthiness, or just plain old personality disorders. Some end up as managers.

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

#283

Post by sitkack »

zer00eyz wrote: post #221
lyu07282 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I care infinitely more about the questions I asked than whatever the family had to say. Because questions about fingerprints and gunpowder residue are concerning the physical evidence that could prove suicide to a reasonable degree. I don't really care about talking about circumstantial evidence when the physical is right there. The reason why people aren't convinced by the “this wasn't even about his whistleblowing,…

>>> it's about the chilling effect for other potential, current employees. We agree on this 1000% "If this hadn't gone on so long, I'd still have my son, and my sons would have their brother and we wouldn't be sitting here. So in that respect, I do," Vicky Stokes said when asked if she places some of the blame for her son's death on Boeing. FROM: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/john-barnett-boeing-whistleblow... Let me…

She should sue Boeing for wrongful death. If they really continued this behavior, and she doesn't sue, they got exactly what they wanted.

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

#284

Post by selimthegrim »

deanCommie wrote: post #171
theragra wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This sounds like Audi “Americans don’t know how to drive”

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

#285

Post by sitkack »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #219
zer00eyz wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reason you don’t settle is to discourage others from doing the same thing. It would also be the reason to ‘suicide’ someone even if they were not costing you much money.

Exactly, they weren't stopping him, they were stopping every other future whistleblower. Imagine if even 3 more people stepped forward.

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

#286

Post by zamalek »

> The bosses hit Swampy with a new initiative called “Multi-Function Process Performer,”

Performance metrics are how bad employees level the playing field with good ones. Everyone wants to _quantifiably_ know why Swampy got a 9% raise when they got an 8%, "because his expertise saved the company a $1bn fine last quarter that you nearly caused." Not once, anywhere I've worked, has that kind of metric been tracked.

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

#287

Post by selimthegrim »

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…

It’s funny you bring up Jobs because this author (Mo Tkacik) is probably responsible for the best obituary of him written.

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

#288

Post by AdrianB1 »

skeptrune wrote: post #193

Tremendously detailed for how short it is. I struggle to understand how outsourcing the engineer was sold as good for shareholders. Anyone watching someone write a longer book on this publicly?

Back in ~ 2003-2004 I was working for an American company that did exactly that. The story was simple, they outsourced all IT (a few thousands) to a well known tech company. The selling point? "The tech company has a lot of expertise and scale and we will benefit from that". The results? The tech company took all the good engineers, moved them to work in other areas for other clients and replaced them with entry level technicians. It took a few years to start feeling the pain of what they did and a few more years to start reversing the change. By that time the C level people already retired rich, even today, 20 years later, the IT in that company is a terrible shade of "great leaders" and very low engineering skills outsourcing left and right anything more complicated than basic project management.

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

#289

Post by freeopinion »

c-linkage wrote: post #253
constantcrying wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>name a commercially successful Boeing-designed product from the 21st century. Something that can legitimately be called "Successful", and "Boeing" Boeing is still able to sell planes to customers, they still have a lot of orders in their backlog. This would only change if their are mass cancellations by their customers. There is a massive demand for planes right now, airlines rather would own a "good enough" plane f…

Its not like airlines really have a lot of choice in manufacturer. Just because the backlog is there doesn't mean airlines wouldn't prefer a different supplier. And standing up a competitor is not really an option.

> standing up a competitor is not really an option

This is the part that bothers me. Why isn't it an option?

Standing up a new orbital rocket company was not really an option in 2000.

If Boeing can deliver 400 aircraft a year, why can't a startup deliver 6 in the next six years. I don't mean 6/year. I mean take 6 years to build your first 6. Or maybe it takes 12 years to deliver the first 6.

Then aim to deliver one per month for the next two years. Get FedEx and UPS and Amazon to fund you for the next 15 years. By then you could have two dozen aircraft flying real miles, building up experience and trust. Then you ramp to up to 25 aircraft per year for the next two years.

Sure, this means that after 20 years you still haven't replaced Boeing.

But Tesla didn't have to replace GM to revolutionize the industry.

When you become a real threat to take away 50 orders per year you cause visible activity among your competition. Just ask Bombardier.

(I wish I hadn't used Elon as an example twice in the same post, but it is what it is. Like him or hate him, his history is relevant when you talk about what is possible in giant established industries.)

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

#290

Post by dgoldstein0 »

FredPret wrote: post #267
pdonis wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Well there's the FAA oversight... Which has also hollowed out. NTSB is still an amazing accident investigator but better to prevent these things than wait for NTSB to step in
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