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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

#551

Post by makerdiety »

singleshot_ wrote: post #550
makerdiety wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a generalization. And the general is often blind to specific cases which disprove general principles. You'll need to zoom out if you want a better picture of phenomena. Increase your video resolution to arrive at awesome conclusions like I do.

Oh, it's a generalization, all right. But every harbor is a bay; not every bay is a harbor.

Yes. And stress, anxiety, and mental illness positively correlate with high performance. Because mediocre people don't care about quality metrics and stuff. Nor should they. They contrast their superiors in the hierarchy. The good people at the top and the mundane people at the bottom. The universe is in balance. As it should be.

This is actually the starting premise for some interesting and powerful theories. You can't have this kinda progress with aesthetic based generalizations that are part of a quick-to-assume epistemology.

The best ghetto intuitions can do is paint pretty yet vain pictures with metaphors about sea harbors and bays. Inferior science and knowledge doesn't lead anywhere.

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

#552

Post by Slava_Propanei »

mikewarot wrote: post #202

>Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs. So they devalued Wisdom, and Elders... and things fell apart. T…

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

#553

Post by Slava_Propanei »

canucker2016 wrote: post #181
error503 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the end of the day, if the person who wrote that software had written it differently, then those planes would not have crashed and hundreds of people would not have died. You can't really blame the software engineers. This was all thought out and tightly specified by Boeing to their avionics subcontractor (Collins, IIRC). This is how it was designed and engineered to work at a systems level - it is a design hack…

Buying an airplane is not the same as buying a consumer item from a big box retailer. It's more like buying an expensive car/enterprise software. There are options. Options cost extra.... excerpts from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/business/boeing-safety-fe... : As the pilots of the doomed Boeing jets in Ethiopia and Indonesia fought to control their planes, they lacked two notable safety features in their cockp…

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

#554

Post by zrn900 »

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…

> Those mid / late career engineers are irreplaceable and yet they were actively trying to get rid of them.

The famous enshittification process caused by the MBA view of existence.

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

#555

Post by hughesjj »

scarmig wrote: post #58
hughesjj wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I blame index funds. Pump the % gain, index funds buy it up because it looks like a better ROI. Abuse that by doing short term shit and ride the wave of self fulfilling prophecy by the index funds buying into it (amplifying noise into a signal) and leave retail/workers holding the bags. I get that statistically DIY'ing your portfolio will almost always lead to worse returns but I really do wish I could exclude certai…

1) That's not how index funds work: they attempt to track a target market index. At most, it happens indirectly: get your company into the major indices by a short-sighted depletion of capital, and you can get some level of lift from index funds blindly purchasing your stock (though IIRC it's not a huge effect). 2) You can effectively remove certain companies from an index using derivatives in addition to the index f…

>At most, it happens indirectly

Oh this is exactly what I was trying to claim. I don't have any source for it though, just general distrust of our financial system and awareness that there's many incredibly smart people trying to find every loop hole and turn every random fluctuation to their advantage.

Thanks for the info on how to effectively remove certain companies from an index though, I'll put that to use

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

#556

Post by hnaccountme »

This isn't unique to Boeing. All large companies will eventually get to this state. People who usually makes it to management positions have no clue about what they are managing. Then they will always shit on the actual worked so they can keep their job.

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

#557

Post by ForHackernews »

taylodl wrote: post #547
ForHackernews wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing software is nothing like building airplanes. 99% of the time it doesn't matter because most software is worthless or trivial. A sibling thread highlights the decline of Google: What a horror if someone were to receive subpar search results or view an advert that hadn't been auctioned at the most profitable rate.

Yeah, that's what the MCAS team thought. Oops! There is a lot of software used in finance, medicine, transportation, logistics, aerospace, manufacturing, and robotics where a simple whoopsies isn't going to undo the loss of money and the loss of life.

You're not disagreeing with me.

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

#558

Post by everforward »

tcmart14 wrote: post #521
polygamous_bat wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why does the stock market reward idiot shit like this? Goodhart’s law, unfortunately. Whatever metric the stock market rewards gets gamed like there is no tomorrow (or next quarter, here.)

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 unprofitable to do more to fight spam. They already have the vast majority of the market, making search 40% better isn't going to get them 40% more money.

I think it's just a calculated decision to keep search "good enough" to not lose too much market share, while not having to spend too much on engineer salaries.

I also kind of suspect the markets left to try to capture are either less profitable or more difficult to serve (specializing in niche content).

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

#559

Post by wpietri »

WalterBright wrote: post #538
wpietri wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think others would for the reason described in sentence directly before it. Which, as "so" indicates, is the logical predecessor. I used to write code for financial traders. I promise you that there are a lot of people who do not give half a shit what a company's up to as long as they can buy it for $100 and sell it later for $101. And based on infinite news reports, we can all see there are plenty of CEOs who will…

> I promise you that there are a lot of people who do not give half a shit what a company's up to as long as they can buy it for $100 and sell it later for $101. I'm sure there are. But you gotta fool the investors to make this work. The presumption that investors are stupid doesn't sound that plausible.

Depends on which proposition. Remember that that once they've sold it, they have no further exposure. So if what's happening is looting a company, then as long as they get out before the rot becomes obvious, they don't care.

And no investor has to be stupid for this to work. You just need some investors who are smarter, better informed, better prepared, or more experienced than others. And that's no presumption at all. If you talk to experienced people in the industry, they know that their living comes out of the pockets of other people's pockets. Literal billions of dollars are invested every year in being the winner in zero-sum games in finance.

That said, plenty of investors are stupid and/or naive enough. Boeing's a fine example here. As it WeWork. Or DJT. Or literally any pump and dump or Ponzi scheme. Or nearly all of crypto.

If you're really struggling to understand this, I suggest Dan Davies' "Lying for Money". Because parasitical actors assuming that investors are stupid enough is a huge, multi-century activity.

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

#560

Post by taylodl »

ForHackernews wrote: post #557
taylodl wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's what the MCAS team thought. Oops! There is a lot of software used in finance, medicine, transportation, logistics, aerospace, manufacturing, and robotics where a simple whoopsies isn't going to undo the loss of money and the loss of life.

You're not disagreeing with me.

I think I am. I'm disagreeing with you on the volume of software that's critical and relevant. I think you're understating the amount.

I've been in this business for 40 years and I've worked in several verticals. You'd be amazed at how much software is critical to the continued operations of modern civilization. Software has increased the carrying capacity of the planet, and without it, literally billions of people would die.

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