Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

prospect.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 568 posts

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

#311

Post by mp05 »

zo1 wrote: post #294
hammock wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 capit…

Was there a particular catalyst or just a combination of factors?

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

#312

Post by margalabargala »

benced wrote: post #224
__loam wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire neoliberal ideology needs to be reevaluated at every level of business in this country. We're destroying our skilled labor forces and our economy to pursue short term gains and it's going to have a negative impact on our national security.

I disagree with this. I don't really care if a video game company is run in a profit-maximizing way. We should probably be a bit more skeptical with important companies, particularly ones that seem irreplaceable (for all their faults, only one other company can do what Boeing does).

> (for all their faults, only one other company can do what Boeing does)

Two. Bombardier had the knowledge and capability to design and manufacture the A220. They could do it again.

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

#313

Post by redandblack »

pdonis wrote: post #225
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. 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?

GE seems like another firm / conglomerate that has lost its way - although we have heard about Jack Welch's management disaster, I do not know if they lost engineers the way it happened at Boeing.

Last year, I bought GE Monogram kitchen appliances and was pleased that they work so well, until I found that it is a Chinese firm that has bought the use of GE's name along with their operations. Maybe that is why the appliances work well, and Chinese century is already on its way

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

#314

Post by margalabargala »

tycho-newman wrote: post #250

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.

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

The only thing preventing a fatality was pure luck of seating arrangement.

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

#315

Post by wpietri »

galangalalgol wrote: post #299
CamperBob2 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

Which companies? The ones who had quality and lost it? There's not a lot of defense against being purchased on the open market, as happened with Boeing. Or Simmons is another good example: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/business/economy/05simmon...

The real problem here is the US's dominant business culture, which tends to value short-term cash extraction over long-term value creation. There are a lot of practical incentives for that, but the culture problem itself will have a lot of inertia, so I think we're going to have to look for a generational change.

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

#316

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

margalabargala wrote: post #25
Cheer2171 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The intention wasn't to destroy institutional knowledge. The intention was to cut costs in the short term, largely through outsourcing and turnover. Why pay a senior engineer a huge salary when you could replace them with a consultant in their twenties? They just didn't think or care about the consequences.

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…

In my experience, the term "tribal knowledge" is a pejorative, and has been disparaged by many authors (some, that I respect).

Also, in my experience, "tribal knowledge" is an essential ingredient in classical Maximum Quality engineering. I'm not saying that it's the only way, but I have seen many, many other ways fail.

It's something that -no exaggeration- humans have been doing for thousands of years.

It's just that we have a crew at the top that sincerely believe they know better. Every now and then, one hits it out of the park.

The rest ... not so much.

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

#317

Post by peblos »

freeopinion wrote: post #289
c-linkage wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

Selling 6 planes is nothing. It wouldn’t even cover the standby aircraft of many fleets. You need large orders to make it feasible, and you need a strong product to secure those orders. FedEx, UPS and co. aren’t going to fund you long term unless you have a product and you need good teams and good funding to even get you to that starting block.

Boom is probably the closest thing to what is suggested but many still doubt they will make it to production. That’s minimal investment though and mostly around options on orders, so they still need massive funding to get there. Rolls Royce and others have said it’s not viable to design an engine for them so now they have to design the airframe and the engine.

Bombardier is an example of why new entrants should be concerned. As soon as you become a close threat, you don’t really trigger competition you trigger massive protectionism which forces them to sell the design to airbus, further consolidating the market

I think the incumbents would have to be broken up to seed any new competition that is remotely viable. The Boeing story has some way to go yet though, who knows

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

#318

Post by jnwatson »

galangalalgol wrote: post #299
CamperBob2 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

It is a variation of the principal-agent problem [1].

It is extraordinarily hard to perfectly align the long term interests of shareholders and employees. It requires a level of oversight that most boards can't manage.

1. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/principal-agent-problem...

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

#319

Post by yongjik »

DonHopkins wrote: post #307

But racist white supremacists like Elon Musk blamed it on "DEI" (which is their new dog whistle for the n-word). Same thing they say caused a container ship to hit the Francis Scott Key Bridge. ‘A Black guy’ didn’t cause Boeing’s midair blowout. Capitalism did: https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/boeing-airplane-safety-dei-... Baltimore mayor claims 'racist' critics use 'DEI' instead of N-word to attack him: https://myn…

Ah, so that was where this "Boeing was DEI" meme coming from. Papa Elon, of course!

I was wondering why multiple commenters brought up DEI when the story was about a beloved American company getting destroyed by clueless upper-class CEOs (all being old white men, incidentally). Like, did we read the same article?

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

#320

Post by zo1 »

mp05 wrote: post #311
zo1 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 capit…

Was there a particular catalyst or just a combination of factors?

Depends on who you ask really, and what side of the aisle they're on.

Personally, I think at the core what started it, is the movement away from meritocracy. Other "things" took priority, and everyone on the ground was left trying to figure out how to not let the whole thing collapse whilst still servicing the new priorities given to them.

Post reply on HN