No. Under nearly any other circumstance a company like Boeing would simply go under. If a car manufacturer pulled something like this they either have to fix it really fast or have to face severe financial consequences. You have to realize that Boeing's customers have no alternative. They will be buying planes from Boeing.
Unless the DoJ splits up Boeing, which is what they should do. If Apple's iPhone is a monopoly with dozens of Android alternatives, what does that say about Boeing?
The DoJ doesn't want to split up Boeing, because then it'll be even less competitive against Airbus. Economies of scale are important in large manufacturing operations.
Boeing at this point is a sort of nationalized industry.
Being forced as whistle-blower and being suicidal are again very different things. Especially when he was in the middle of proving he's right. And right in the middle of the fight, between the testimonies, after he spent so much effort to prove he's right, he decides "fuck it all" and quits abruptly? Doesn't add up. Maybe something else happened but I just am astonished how easily people dismiss it. Ah, he was anxiou…
>> We'll, it's only natural then. No it's not. If it isnt the case and you have proof the VA would love to hear from you. They have this tiny problem of soldiers coming home from war (to a happy place) with stress, anxiety and PTSD and then offing themselves.
He wasn't a soldier coming back from the war though. He was an engineer, in the middle of court proceedings. Soldiers have their own problems (and VA regularly and consistently fails at helping them, as the shining example of government efficiency) but that's completely different situation.
It makes me so angry reading this about managers criticizing employees for being 'too knowledgeable'. There are so many narratives nowadays which claim that performance is at odds with talent. People are embracing mediocrity and patting each other on the back for it... The idiots who got lucky, since they cannot pretend to be knowledgeable, reframe the narrative to portray themselves as geniuses who understood the va…
> CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had “overvalued experience and undervalued leadership”
Funny how everyone keeps blaming management and even the merger as the root cause, but fail to realize that the merger was effectively forced on Boeing by the US government.
> but fail to realize that the merger was effectively forced on Boeing by the US government.
Hey! FAA employees also want a nice and cushy job to retire to.. Them revolving doors are not gonna turn by themselves..
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.
Hey, them engineers are so good that, in the past, they even had a 737 transform mid-flight to a convertible. Without crashing!
Yup. In the incentives align to motivate you to play the current game of the day. Another example I can think of. Google search has sucked for awhile now. Some people pin it directly on to Google, but I think its much broader than that. There is an entire cottage industry around around gaming whatever Google does to improve search. Its a cat and mouse game. Google tries to implement a new pattern that will punish peo…
> There is an entire cottage industry around around gaming whatever Google does to improve search. Its a cat and mouse game. Google tries to implement a new pattern that will punish people gaming SEO, the people gaming SEO learn the new pattern and adjust for it, and we are back where we are. This implies that Google is helpless to do more, which I kind of doubt. I think the misaligned incentive here is that it's unp…
For sure I don't think Google is helpless. But its not as simple as just "make search good." And I agree with you on how you summarized the misalignment of incentives. Lets say Google already invests 100 million in search (probably under, but keep numbers small and simple). And we are able to quantify it at being 60% effective or 'good.' Does it make sense for Google to invest another 50 million to bump that up to 62%, probably not. And I imagine that it how the incentives are aligned. They could pay to make it more effective, but they won't see the same returns on the dollar amount. And that is what I am guessing the situation is like. They could make it better, but they now have diminishing returns on the money spent on making it better. I expect a lot of the diminishing returns comes from the fact that they have to fight a cottage industry to game whatever changes they make all along the way.
"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.
"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…
SpaceX manages to make things work despite rampant burnout induced quitting so its not impossible. Shorts used to make fun of Tesla and how any experience walks out the door with all the turnover but they seem to have a handle on things as well (less so than SpaceX). If management is checked out I agree that it is less likely to turn out good which is what I think happened here.