441–450 of 568 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a strange anomaly when most of the current top Fortune 500 (US) companies have engineers as their CEO [1]. You would have expected that Boeing to be led by engineers due to the scale of engineering involved in the plane constructions but apparently it's not always the case. [1] Top CEOs have this degree: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39680613
Boeing stopped considering engineering and manufacturing to be their core competency after the MDD merger, that is expressly why they moved the HQ away from Seattle and closer to financial markets.
Yup, these topics explain that some managers can feel threatened by especially competent subordinates.
"But the average employee assigned to the 737 program has been at Boeing just five years, according to a longtime Boeing executive who is involved in various efforts to save the company; for comparison’s sake, he says the average employee assigned to the 777 program had between 15 and 20 years under their belt." It don't think it's possible to overstate how bad, and sad, of a state of affairs that is. I've never seen…
Something very similar is happening, at a very rapid pace, in software development.
Software has been like that for st least three decades.
If you read this article looking for new or surprising insight, you won't find it. It is not new information that Boeing started a rapid decline shortly after the McDonnell Douglas merger, and it will be unsurprising to you to hear that shortly afterwards, Boeing began abusing its most senior employees into leaving. What this article offers is new detail into exactly how Boeing has gone about cannibalizing itself. Th…
"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?
"But the average employee assigned to the 737 program has been at Boeing just five years, according to a longtime Boeing executive who is involved in various efforts to save the company; for comparison’s sake, he says the average employee assigned to the 777 program had between 15 and 20 years under their belt." It don't think it's possible to overstate how bad, and sad, of a state of affairs that is. I've never seen…
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…
Airbus is the only company in the world which has actually managed to get off the ground in that market. And only because they were essentially a state run business which were subsidized to the extreme, until they actually managed to get into the market.
COMAC in China is trying to do the same, infinite subsidies in the hope of competing.
>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.
It is not like they aren't trying, but it is extremely hard. You absolutely need massive amounts of funding and an investor which basically does not care how big of a money pit your company is.
One major reason for this is that modern airliners aren't that much of an engineer problem, but they are a gigantic management and integration problem. Typical start up approaches do not work.
> 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…
The real fix is popularizing the notion that management is just as commoditizatable than those they seek to commoditize. Note that in the recent dialogue about AI eating jobs, there's zero mention of whether it could come for management positions. Nothing. Curious, isn't it? Why wouldn't an LLM be good enough at this? I mean, it's really data-driven, right?
There's a whole book about this, called Rainbows End. Highly recommended.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy. Every hour that a Boeing employee spends trying to design or build a good airplane is one less hour that he can spend angling for power within the organization. So the people who care the most about the original purpose of the organization will be systematically outcompeted by the people who care the most about obtaining power within the organization. A widespread and profound pro…
This is broadly why I'm in favour of aggressive antitrust and pro-competition regulation. Companies should be kept medium-sized and competitive. Economies of scale should be sought through cooperation, not conglomeration.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if this opens up an opportunity for Bombardier and Embraer to move up market into the 737s space.
Isn't Bombardier now owned by Airbus? But you make a good point: why hasn't Embraer moved into this space?
Money?