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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

#151

Post by stcredzero »

margalabargala wrote: post #3

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…

it will be unsurprising to you to hear that shortly afterwards, Boeing began abusing its most senior employees into leaving.

Sounds a bit like what happened in newsrooms and at newspapers in the past decade and a half. (Except in that case, it was bottom-up, not top-down.)

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

#152

Post by labster »

Tagbert wrote: post #14
iaoat2d wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

Perhaps because the senior people were at a higher pay grade? If you bump off the expensive employees, your overhead goes down. Better numbers next quarter so you get a bonus.

Senior people also cost more because their health care costs more. Of course discriminating against older people is illegal, so they cut down on senior staff which just happens to have the same cost reduction. Funny that.

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

#153

Post by darth_avocado »

twojobsoneboss wrote: post #94
darth_avocado wrote: post #12

> He mocked him in weekly meetings whenever he dared contribute a thought, assigned a fellow manager to spy on him and spread rumors that he did not play nicely with others, and disciplined him for things like “using email to communicate” and pushing for flaws he found on planes to be fixed. Sounds like a regular middle manager in any tech company. Sad unfortunate effect of the power asymmetries in corporate structur…

Apart from pushing someone out who they don’t wanna pay severance for, what incentive does a manager have to treat one of their reports like dirt?

Plenty of things: control, gain more authority at the expense of others, decrease someone’s value out of pure jealousy, have a scapegoat ready for when you make a mistake, create an opening where you can hire your buddies, satisfy your ego, etc.

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

#154

Post by asah »

theragra wrote: post #135
ortusdux wrote: post #42

"So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no co…

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 factory floor to deal with "production hell." Bill Gates personally debugged MS-DOS.

The "bean counters" are not bad people, but doing this stuff creates a humility about quality and quality process, and not doing this stuff lulls people into a distaste/disdain/disrespect for it.

Analogously, engineers who've never been responsible for financial statements literally don't appreciate the work to get them materially correct, let alone meet legit regulatory requirements because someone somewhere cheated in counting inventory or money or whatever.

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

#156

Post by JackFr »

HumblyTossed wrote: post #35
Rinzler89 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

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.

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

#157

Post by deviantbit »

margalabargala wrote: post #3

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…

What do you mean by "down hill"? Boeing has developed incredible technologies since the MD merger. They have been profitable w/ these technologies. You make a claim they were going down hill, what do you mean?

I have a number of family members that work for Boeing, that have been in executive management, engineering and research. None of them ever mentioned MD as being the beginning of a decline.

All of them tell a different story. The problems began with James McNerney. Harry Stonecipher came from MD, and was one of the best CEO's to ever touch that company. The 787 wouldn't have been a thing if it were not for McNerney.

If you make a claim, back it up.

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

#158

Post by bsder »

iaoat2d wrote: post #9
margalabargala wrote: post #3

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?

Are any of the executives who did this in jail? No? Well, carry on, then.

None of the executives responsible for this have paid any price. None of the investors or board members who allowed this paid any price.

And the worst part: it's not clear you can fix it, now. Even if you completely busted out every executive and wiped out the investors, there is no path forward since those executives pushed out all the engineering knowledge.

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

#159

Post by dboreham »

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?

Wall St geniuses are not engineers.

That said, I bought Boeing stock and held over that time frame. I did so because I could see that humans were going to need more planes over the long term, and there are only two vendors. Also I visited the Everett plant with my family on vacation. It didn't occur to me that it would be worthwhile introducing KPI BS and McDonald's management style when constructing things worth 100 million and safety-critical.

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

#160

Post by rbancroft »

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.

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
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