Not just planes and fairly recently too. I was working at a Boeing subsidiary when the
737 Max MCAS happened. They dumped everyone they could on loathsome “$9000 USB cable” type time and materials defense work. I was a senior Java architect and they quickly “retrained” me to do HIL component testing in plain old C. It might have been seen as a move to improve cash flow but realistically it had the effect causing almost all of the software staff to leave in short order which I guess also improved cash flow. The subsidiary is still struggling several years later to rebuild their software team.
What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane
251–260 of 568 posts
Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
Weird to read from a "you are holding it wrong" man
Let's be clear, "you are holding it wrong" was an ass-covering lie to carry Apple through an era of bad press for a device that was otherwise monumental, and when you look back at iPhone adoption history. 4 was the inflection point of growth that never stopped. 3, 3G, and 3GS were all fine, but 4 is when iPhone took over the world. It was bold-faced, it was arrogant, it wasn't true, but it let them fix the issues and…
Maybe. I am just always sceptical of apple. Ever since I had Iphone 3g and APIs were limited so much, and often for arbitrary reasons.
Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
Remember the big rollout of the Dreamliner in 2014 to show it was all done, but it was actually an empty metal tube with landing gear duct taped on it? And remember the venom that people got for bringing up the fact that, you know, you could see the sky from the wheel wells? Or the second rollout, when they had to strap the fuse segments together because no one knew where the fasteners were? Oh we could go on and on,…
>name a commercially successful Boeing-designed product from the 21st century. Something that can legitimately be called "Successful", and "Boeing" Boeing is still able to sell planes to customers, they still have a lot of orders in their backlog. This would only change if their are mass cancellations by their customers. There is a massive demand for planes right now, airlines rather would own a "good enough" plane f…
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.
Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane
#254Earlier 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…
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Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane
#255This situation highlights why startups can outperform established companies. It's not only about innovation or asymmetric motivation but also due to the internal decay of incumbents like Boeing and General Electric. This presents an opportunity for an aeronautics startup to emerge - mission focused on building the best airplanes.
Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
The entire neoliberal ideology needs to be reevaluated at every level of business in this country. We're destroying our skilled labor forces and our economy to pursue short term gains and it's going to have a negative impact on our national security.
I disagree with this. I don't really care if a video game company is run in a profit-maximizing way. We should probably be a bit more skeptical with important companies, particularly ones that seem irreplaceable (for all their faults, only one other company can do what Boeing does).
Why are competitors not around to make Boeing less important? There's a national security reason to avoid monopolies/duopolies.
Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane
#257The "funny" thing to me is that I'm old enough to remember when the merger occurred that people were predicting exactly what came to pass. It just took 25 years to finally happen.
> It just took 25 years to finally happen. To me the big question is, why did it take 25 years for this to become common knowledge? Why is our system of evaluating public corporations so messed up that a public company, and one with huge government contracts to boot, could get away with this for that long?
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Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane
#258It 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.
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.
Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane
#259"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…
That's so ironically sad coming from Jobs seeing where Apple got now (partly due to the direction he set).
> partly due to the direction he set
What do you mean?
Re: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, large companies take a lot longer to fail than I ever imagined. A lot of time can pass riding on past excellence before the cracks start showing.
It's not about the size of the company, it's about the barrier to entry of the market they're in, how much competition they have and the amount of vendor lock-in. And civil aviation in general scores top marks in all those fields. It's a duopoly with an insane barrier to entry both technical, legal and financial with very long and complex vendor lock-in.
I wonder if this opens up an opportunity for Bombardier and Embraer to move up market into the 737s space.