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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

#291

Post by samatman »

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…

I had the 4 for years. Bought another one even.

Great phone. Never any problems with reception. And no, I didn't keep the first one in a case, ever, thought it was too pretty for that. Hence the second one ;)

Being a hackerish sort, I certainly tried to "hold it wrong", often enough. Couldn't get the damn thing to cut out, though.

Learned something about the press from that.

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

#292

Post by AdrianB1 »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #89
Simulacra wrote: post #43

How should a company promote diversity without jeopardizing safety?

Why do you think one is at odds with the other?

In some industries when you have diversity targets you need to lower the standards a lot. Why? Because the competence-based hiring and promotion process will not get you enough good candidates to meet the diversity targets, so you take shortcuts like Boeing did with QC.

According to StackOverflow survey a few years ago with a huge (relevant) number of answers, about 8% of people in the domain were women. Some companies have targets of 50 to 70% women. How do you think these targets are met? My company had 70% target and we are close; we hired any woman that ever applied, no questions asked, no tech interview. I managed the IT recruiting for an entire region over 5 years, I quit that role when the tech interviews were forbidden in order to meet targets.

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

#293

Post by CamperBob2 »

FooBarBizBazz wrote: post #228
jgeada wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a recent discussion right here on HN about "trading trust": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39394990 Basically, many of these companies took decades to reach these positions where they're trusted. A bunch of managers rightfully figured out this was an asset that could be easily traded away for increased profits and they'd be gone by the time anyone noticed the devastation they left behind.

Also called "brand harvesting". (If you built the brand yourself and did this all intentionally, I think it could also simply be called "the long con".)

"Exit scam," just on a longer timeline than usual.

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

#294

Post by zo1 »

hammock wrote: post #168
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…

Where can I read more about quality inertia , find other case studies, etc?

Case studies are all around us in different forms. The example closest to me is the country I live in:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa

It's been slowly cannibalized and is barely running on Inertia left by the previous government. Took almost the same as Boeing, about 25years. We barely have electricity, and now we're unable to supply clean drinking water to vast amounts of the country, including the capital.

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

#295

Post by sitkack »

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.

This is what Google is actively doing. The layoffs continue and they are culling the most senior employees.

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

#296

Post by AdrianB1 »

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 system is corrupt. From planes to tampons, it's self-checking and self-reporting and a conflict of interests: the regulators have no incentive to do more work (or are paid-out not to do), the companies are corrupt to the bone, the public is blissfully not interested to hear, the C level suite is there just for the money, middle management is hired and promoted based on weird criteria, the "fake it" system works too well and people hop through jobs before anyone takes action. Modern company management is not a science, but a smoke and mirrors act.

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

#297

Post by _yb2s »

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.

Yep… I wish it were possible to easily invest in the downfall of obviously poorly run companies coughSirius XMcough, but things like puts and shorts really only work if you know when it will fail, and that it will be very soon.

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

#298

Post by scottyah »

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…

Most people nowadays are trying to optimize dollars for amount of work, without the dedication to the craft that was prevalent in previous generations. Large companies exacerbate this issue with all the layers of abstraction between a person's work and seeing the fruits of their labor.

There's way less pride from work: most people don't judge themselves too much on coworkers opinions since jobs are more changing, and it's unlikely for you to develop lifetime friendships with people who remain on your team.

Large corporations have too many regulations and HR policies to meaningfully pay based on performance, so there's little monetary incentive to be a strong performer.

You rarely get to see the product you've built get used in a meaningful way where someone would say something about it. It's likely that only one or two disinterested people quality check your work, and in this case you're either within spec (expected), "close enough to pass" (which wasn't getting reported), or failing miserably. The QA people hate getting the last one, but there's so much apathy these days from what I've seen because everyone just wants to be somewhere else doing something else.

So basically they've evolved to take away any dopamine one can get from pushing for quality from anyone but the most intrinsically motivated workers. They got rid of those people systemically and purposefully, and made a lot of money doing it.

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

#299

Post by galangalalgol »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #293
FooBarBizBazz wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also called "brand harvesting". (If you built the brand yourself and did this all intentionally, I think it could also simply be called "the long con".)

"Exit scam," just on a longer timeline than usual.

How do companies not have a defense against this? It seems rampant. Is it just more visible for some reason?

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

#300

Post by wolverine876 »

quantified wrote: post #263
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?

> Subtract some adjectives, would that make a difference?

That would help, but that's secondary. They need to add the information I discussed on the GP. That info is incompatible with sweeping, absolutist adjectives, so they would go away.

Sweeping, extreme statements are a tip-off to BS for anything: Reality isn't that simple.

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