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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

#461

Post by Tabular-Iceberg »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #26
margalabargala wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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. Why does the stock market reward idiot shit like this? I've seen the same whit a a large US semiconductor company. In the 2008 crunch, the fired the most tenured employees and offshored the work abroad. Granted, the company didn't fail, their stock went up and now it's 5-7x that…

> Why does the stock market reward idiot shit like this?

I don’t think the market rewards it, at least not by itself.

The problem is that the real money isn’t in the market, the institutional investors make most of their money on commissions. So while short term gains are a nice bonus, it’s only secondary to driving volatility and with it trade volume. So the incentive is to just stir shit up, because that’s what makes them money, both as stock prices go up and down.

Also institutional investors have disproportionate voting power that lets them put their own shit stirrers on the board and subsequently in the C-suite.

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

#463

Post by renegade-otter »

type_Ben_struct wrote: post #11

It baffles me how this happens time and time again in companies as they grow (albeit rarely with this level of human life consequence), and nobody ever seems to learn from it.

They learn. It's a feature, not a bug. Some executive is chilling next to his third infinity pool, chuckling. It's someone else's problem now, suckers.

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

#464

Post by Jensson »

ignoramous wrote: post #460
gostsamo wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Purging elder employees is the logical result of making the employer pay for the health care of their employees. The now-elder employee gave their best and healthy years to the company and its mission.

Which is why healthcare and pension shouldn't be paid by the employer, employers shouldn't be punished for keeping old people around.

If someone doubled the workers salary to leave you wouldn't say "but the company loyally gave you a job for 10 years, how can you desert them?", same thing here. We should incentivize companies to do the right thing, not punish them for it.

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

#465

Post by camkego »

class3shock wrote: post #269

"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…

I’ve honestly wondered about this since those two 737 Max crashes.

How on the earth did they design in a non-redundant single point of failure, such as the single angle of attack sensor as in the 737 max? (if this type of component is typically redundant)

But if, “the average employee assigned to the 737 program has been at Boeing for just five years”. It might explain how such a design decision happened.

Would be really interesting to hear from those the industry, how common a single angle of attack sensor is in other Boeing aircraft and Airbus aircraft?

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

#466

Post by Tabular-Iceberg »

lucianbr wrote: post #456
Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #454

I wonder if Boeing’s institutional investors have had the foresight to get controlling stakes in business jet manufacturers to prevent them from going down the same path, just so that they can still get places by plane in reasonable safety.

Money trumps even the personal safety of the person getting the money. Look at the guy with the carbon fibre submarine. He literally sacrificed his life in the pursuit of profit.

Really hubris trumps everything else.

If he wanted money he would have invested in something more sensible, I don’t think OceanGate would have ever been profitable even if the submersible had worked.

The Boeing execs obviously love money, but I think they get their biggest kicks simply from remaking Boeing itself in their own depraved image.

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

#467

Post by iforgotpassword »

camkego wrote: post #465
class3shock wrote: post #269

"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…

I’ve honestly wondered about this since those two 737 Max crashes. How on the earth did they design in a non-redundant single point of failure, such as the single angle of attack sensor as in the 737 max? (if this type of component is typically redundant) But if, “the average employee assigned to the 737 program has been at Boeing for just five years”. It might explain how such a design decision happened. Would be re…

I also don't understand how you can accept to do this job if there's almost nobody there with enough experience. "Well I have to make ends meet and don't want to look for a new job, so YOLO". What's going through these people's mind today? Especially those who worked on that non-redundant system? They just shrug it off and say "well stupid managers made us do it", or do they feel remorse, responsibility? I genuinely wonder.

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

#468

Post by shiroiushi »

rybosworld wrote: post #199
jandrese wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the future guy's problem. So long as it is possible to cash out before the consequences happen that sort of regulation won't move the needle much. Making it illegal to be a bad CEO is one of those things that sounds intriguing on paper, but would be a nightmare to implement in real life. Prosecutor: "You inflated investor returns by sabotaging the future survival of the company and made shoddy products that ki…

This phenomenon also explains some others that may or may not be surprising: 1. Founder led companies have higher returns. And it's by A LOT. Hard to quantify exactly but, I've seen quoted numbers as high as 20% outperformance for founder led companies. 2. The biggest corporations never remain the biggest. Where is the Dutch East India company today? More recent examples: IBM was overtaken by Nippon Telephone, was ov…

>IBM was overtaken by Nippon Telephone, was overtaken by Exxon Mobil, was overtaken by GE, was overtaken by Microsoft etc.

And where is GE these days? They even sold off their consumer appliance division to the Chinese company Haier. They still make jet engines and some other big industrial stuff, but they're not as huge as they used to be.

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

#469

Post by shiroiushi »

bumby wrote: post #77
swader999 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, they also cut costs by 'finding' less defects in QA, deferring them to production deployment several quarters out.

This is the irony of good QA. 1) Company starts to notice a lot of quality problems. 2) Company institutes a good QA program. 3) Company notices less quality problems. 4) Company cuts QA program because there seems to be less need for it. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. (The same can be said for safety when dealing with low probability events).

This doesn't explain Microsoft though, as that's probably a special case. They simply eliminated the Windows QA department, and instead let users do the QA. Why not? It's not like their users are going to switch OSes.

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

#470

Post by julik »

camkego wrote: post #465
class3shock wrote: post #269

"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…

I’ve honestly wondered about this since those two 737 Max crashes. How on the earth did they design in a non-redundant single point of failure, such as the single angle of attack sensor as in the 737 max? (if this type of component is typically redundant) But if, “the average employee assigned to the 737 program has been at Boeing for just five years”. It might explain how such a design decision happened. Would be re…

I would say "incentives". There was an incentive to do it in a way that needs not be certified, that needs no training and that does not have to be disclosed to airlines/crews. Once that incentive is there management will push it through no matter what, if there isn't a senior enough person to say "this will have dire consequences".
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