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

prospect.org

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

#421

Post by bradley13 »

astrange wrote: post #148
bradley13 wrote: post #102

tl;dr: Pournelle's Iron Law.

Pournelle's Iron Law is just him saying "I am a Republican". You are not required to listen to him. For balance, I stopped reading this article at the end of the first page because it called Boeing "neoliberal", which doesn't mean anything except that the writer is a snotty humanities grad.

Huh? His observation is politically neutral. It just notes that the people running organizations are, ultimately, selfish (as are most people). They will ultimately look after themselves, even at the cost of the organization they are supposed to be caring for.

You see this everywhere. Crazy CEO salaries and golden parachutes, as CEOs sit on each other's boards approving such packages. Charities that prolong the problem they were set up to eliminate. "Old space" where NASA provided decades of unjustified cost-plus contracts.

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

#422

Post by fargle »

asah wrote: post #154
theragra wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird to read from a "you are holding it wrong" man

Perspective: the S&M folks he's complaining about, don't even think at all about users holding products. Seriously, it's all spreadsheets and powerpoint, because they've never built anything with their hands, never worked on a team, and never worked on a "factory floor" (e.g. live server/database, etc). Steve Jobs and his generation all soldered boards that went to paying customers. Elon Musk slept on the NUMMI facto…

bill gates was a very subpar developer. that's not help, that's narcissistic meddling and micromanaging. if he was good at anything technical, or arguably business strategy, ms-dos wouldn't have been the utter garbage that it was.

musk sleeping on the floor is a publicity stunt, not totally dishonest, but 98% maybe.

jobs? complete a-hole and basket case. a lazy crappy worker who physically smelled bad. if he ever spent a couple hours doing honest work soldered boards, it was 100% for the ability to claim some kind of heroic epic later, or maybe just a manic fit.

the bean-counter stereotype isn't entirely false. it's a specialization of any number of process-bound, organizationally-loyal, myopic, useless cogs. any rare good talented "bean-counter" clearly knows that they are outnumbered and out-gunned by the other inept assholes and bureaucrats in their dept.

there are a large number, probably a majority of people, that are honest and want to do a hard day's work. they are stabbed in the back, trampled, and betrayed by the aforementioned personalities.

the problem is here is just that we keep rewarding, with attention and money, entirely the wrong folks. these famous and very rich folks are merely a combination of survivorship bias, luck, and the fact that to win big you really do need a narcissist who is not afraid to make irrational enormous bets with other peoples money.

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

#423

Post by donmcronald »

reissbaker wrote: post #54

FWIW, "Prince Jim" McNerney, who most of the article's ire is understandably directed towards, is no longer the CEO. He directed the 737 MAX's development, but retired before the scandals; his successor, Dennis Muilenburg (a 30+ year Boeing employee who started out in engineering), was fired for the poor quality of the 737 MAX despite it being developed under Prince Jim. That being said, the current CEO — Dave Calhou…

> the current CEO — Dave Calhoun — is an old exec from from GE, where McNerney started out

From the article.

> None of the names floated thus far for the spot have been aerospace engineers, and the shoo-in for the position, GE’s Larry Culp, is not an engineer at all.

Maybe they should start bundling life insurance with flights on Boeing planes.

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

#424

Post by donmcronald »

rdtsc wrote: post #195

> The day after Broken Dreams premiered, Swampy got an email informing him that he’d been put on a 60-day corrective action plan four weeks earlier. His alleged offense constituted using email to communicate about process violations That is pretty shady. They didn't want to discuss violations in emails so it doesn't end up in a court case or found by the FAA during an investigation. > the longtime former Boeing execu…

> They didn't want to discuss violations in emails so it doesn't end up in a court case or found by the FAA during an investigation.

Thankfully big tech is able to provide these companies with retention policies that allow the pesky paper trail to be auto-purged on a schedule.

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

#425

Post by z3phyr »

JackFr wrote: post #156
HumblyTossed wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the market is barely better than a ponzi scheme. There's ___just___ enough laws around it to keep people somewhat okay with it.

That’s nonsense. Markets are the best way we’ve come up with to allocate capital. Committees and commissars do not do a better job.

The potential for benevolence of a market is lesser than an enlightened individual.

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

#426

Post by OhMeadhbh »

I wonder if I could get a job at Boeing and ask for put options. My thoughts are that it's going to take a while to fix the company, during which time it will be focused on rebuilding instead of financial games and quality shenanigans. So the stock going down may be a sign of increased long term value. So give me 4 years of put options and then another 4 years of call options.

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

#427

Post by Gibbon1 »

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…

I remember here when the first 737 Max crashed and then after the second, people here were swearing up and down the cause was that the pilots were wogs.

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

#428

Post by vkou »

JackFr wrote: post #156
HumblyTossed wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the market is barely better than a ponzi scheme. There's ___just___ enough laws around it to keep people somewhat okay with it.

That’s nonsense. Markets are the best way we’ve come up with to allocate capital. Committees and commissars do not do a better job.

> Committees and commissars do not do a better job.

Then why is internal governance and resource allocation inside companies done by committees and commissars and dictators, instead of by an unplanned free market?

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

#429

Post by slim »

patrickhogan1 wrote: post #420
ZoomerCretin wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, all you have to do is get several billion dollars in funding and hope Boeing doesn't use its vast resources to poach your engineers. Boeing is not going to be disrupted any more than TSMC or ASML will be disrupted. Planes are too complex and too expensive to manufacture correctly.

The best engineers wont work for companies that don’t ship great product. Funding and complexity are obstacles, but there are many examples of overcoming the obstacles with innovation and conviction. Rockets - Lockheed -> SpaceX AI - Google -> OpenAI Electric Cars - Toyota -> Tesla Shipping - Maersk -> Flexport CPUs - Intel -> ARM

Flexport has it's own ships ?

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

#430

Post by gostsamo »

mikewarot wrote: post #202

>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 “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs. So they devalued Wisdom, and Elders... and things fell apart. T…

Purging elder employees is the logical result of making the employer pay for the health care of their employees.
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