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Boeing fired midlevel executive following embarrassing emails

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Re: Boeing fired midlevel executive following embarrassing emails

#61

Post by Spivak »

redis_mlc wrote: post #52
lutorm wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an engineer, I sort of disagree with this. Doing a shoddy job and trying to get away with it is inexcusable, but "good enough" is the gold standard in engineering. No one is helped by spending development time and money by making things better than they have to be. Sometimes you have to go with a less capable result because the alternative will take too long or cost too much to develop, or (since we're talking aer…

> but "good enough" is the gold standard in engineering Your post does a dis-service to the 350+ who died. Nobody agrees that using one external sensor on the 737 MAX that is subject to weather, bird strikes and ground handling damage was nearly good enough.

You're arguing from two different perspectives. Engineering is about producing an deliverables that just meet spec. If someone orders a temperature sensor that they ask to be 1° accurate then you are wasting your time designing something better^.

However the engineers in question at Boeing clearly failed to produce a design that performed to spec in normal operating conditions.

^ Yes, there are scaling factors where it might be cheaper to design a 0.1° accurate sensor and sell it to everyone because it would be more effort having two production lines but that's an optimization.

Re: Boeing fired midlevel executive following embarrassing emails

#62

Post by ferzul »

kjs3 wrote: post #51
objclxt wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m not aware VP is a mid level management job A lot of companies ( especially finance) suffer from title inflation, and also flip Director and VP (i.e, Director is a higher rank than VP). For example, at Goldman Sachs 30% of all employees are Vice Presidents.

Yeah, I work at a bank. The VP track is often on an 'Officer of the Company' track (Officer, Associate VP, VP, Senior VP, etc). Then there's the 'Job Title' track (Manager, Senior Manager, Director, Senior Director, Executive Director, etc). Usually, you have to be a minimum job title for certain officer title, but less the other way. So you can have a Manager who is a VP and a Director that's a AVP, but not a Manage…

i didn't understand that at all. i thought a director is a person elected by shareholders onto the board of directors. but i normally work for small companies!

Re: Boeing fired midlevel executive following embarrassing emails

#64

Post by frozenlettuce »

riazrizvi wrote: post #29

Boeing CEO David Calhoun vows to stamp out 'such behavior' and hold managers accountable. What behavior? Well he reassigns the Boeing pilot who lied to regulators, and fires the Boeing manager overseeing external pilots, who called out the bad design and incompetence within. Got it.

Looks like that for them building defective planes is not as bad as sending "embarrassing" emails

Re: Boeing fired midlevel executive following embarrassing emails

#65

Post by kjs3 »

ferzul wrote: post #62
kjs3 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I work at a bank. The VP track is often on an 'Officer of the Company' track (Officer, Associate VP, VP, Senior VP, etc). Then there's the 'Job Title' track (Manager, Senior Manager, Director, Senior Director, Executive Director, etc). Usually, you have to be a minimum job title for certain officer title, but less the other way. So you can have a Manager who is a VP and a Director that's a AVP, but not a Manage…

i didn't understand that at all. i thought a director is a person elected by shareholders onto the board of directors. but i normally work for small companies!

It is that, too. Welcome to the totally non-standard world of job titles.

Re: Boeing fired midlevel executive following embarrassing emails

#66

Post by kevstev »

dylan604 wrote: post #60
irrational wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for a Fortune 150 company where VP is definitely a mid-level management job. It's insane how many VP we have. Just my small part of the company has 5 VPs and they are all at least 4 levels below the President of the company.

How does that even look on an org chart? Normal: President -> Vice-President Common: President -> Executive VP -> VP Guessing: President -> Platinum VP -> Exec VP -> VP (It is related to airlines, so just borrowing their classes)

At a typical investment bank: President/CEO --> CTO (may also hold corp title of Managing Director, maybe "Senior Managing Director") --> Managing Director --> Director --> VP --> (possibly) AVP --> Peon.

When I last left the IB world, there were many VPs and a decent number of Directors that were individual contributors.

Re: Boeing fired midlevel executive following embarrassing emails

#67

Post by mark-r »

jessaustin wrote: post #53
onceUponADime wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some companys who manage it though, by basically getting bi-furicated intwo two seperat internal divisions competing against one another. Basically if you have a safe seat- or monopoly, you must learn to play catch against yourself or else.. boing, and important parts go flying.

This is a great idea. Can we think of any examples where this has worked? Famously, it didn't work at Kodak when they invented digital photography.

Kodak gets picked on unfairly I think. When you look at the revenue streams before digital photography took off, you can see that Kodak had their fingers in every part of it - cameras, film, processing, printing. They made money every time you took a picture. There's simply no revenue stream in digital that's big enough to replace that. It's impossible to shrink a company by 90% gracefully.

Re: Boeing fired midlevel executive following embarrassing emails

#68

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

bilbo0s wrote: post #37
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like there are two possible takeaways. One is the one you called out. The other is to escalate issues your reports raise to you. "My pilots think this plane is trash. I better tell my boss." He could have taken either route and been safe at least from being canned. Boeing seems to be publicly expecting everyone to take the second approach.

> He could have taken either route and been safe at least from being canned. I don't know? Unless I'm misunderstanding the story, I'm not sure the guy they fired could have escalated issues he was not informed of? I suppose we could assume that he was informed of the issues, just not via any documented method? But based only on the information given in the article, I'm just not sure how someone not even in the loop o…

No, you've got it right. I missed the negation on him receiving the messages. In that case, his firing is incomprehensible, at least if this is the sole cause.

Re: Boeing fired midlevel executive following embarrassing emails

#69

Post by magduf »

dylan604 wrote: post #60
irrational wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for a Fortune 150 company where VP is definitely a mid-level management job. It's insane how many VP we have. Just my small part of the company has 5 VPs and they are all at least 4 levels below the President of the company.

How does that even look on an org chart? Normal: President -> Vice-President Common: President -> Executive VP -> VP Guessing: President -> Platinum VP -> Exec VP -> VP (It is related to airlines, so just borrowing their classes)

Future: President -> Titanium VP -> Platinum VP -> etc.

It's funny how "titanium" is somehow such a big thing with marketing names these days, such as with car trim models. It's a pretty neat metal but it isn't particularly valuable. Steel and aluminum are pretty neat metals too, in different ways, but no one uses those in marketing this way.

Re: Boeing fired midlevel executive following embarrassing emails

#70

Post by chaostheory »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #42
uxp100 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. As the company, you don't want emails like that coming out, but getting rid of messages like that damages the so called safety culture. I think a good answer as a CEO would be to tell managers to be more careful in emails, but no real punishment. However, the criticism in the emails was pretty low content, it's not like this was a message that said, man those monkeys really screwed up the MCAS or something. I t…

>> Yeah. As the company, you don't want emails like that coming out Which, honestly shocked me they were sending emails like that in the first place. Talk among yourselves at the lunch table, complain in private and try to talk to someone in management who will listen. It was 2018 for god's sake. Do these engineers still not know how stupid it is to be sending emails like that around the company? Maybe it just highli…

People who aren’t in either IT, HR, or legal tend to not know or forget that all corporate emails are archived for years
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