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NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

flyingmag.com

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Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#81
post #68

Boeing has been very slow at raising salaries and contract rates in the last 15 years or so. That lead to a lot of the best engineers, managers and technicians leaving.

It's a pervasive problem among all gov contractors. Most don't pay as well as private market, and you have the added downside of needing a clearance in a lot of positions, so they try to make it up with "job security". That means, when times are tough, instead of letting people go they freeze or cap raises, often below inflation. Good people wind up leaving.

If half your best people leave every few years when the gov hits its next debt ceiling, your company is gonna have a bad time.

Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#82
Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy claims another victim.

In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.

RIP Jerry. A Step Farther Out is one of my all time favorites.

Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#83
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that you can't run a large engineering department based on "Bob says Steve isn't that good". It just doesn't scale, that's the whole reason metrics get introduced.

Exactly. Who's to say Bob knows what he's talking about?

The plot twist is that Bob is rushing all of his welds and thinks Steve is wasting his time by making them "look good".

Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#84
post #60
post #27

The damage to Boeing is already done I am afraid. But moving forwards there needs to be accountability for management types that destroy companies in such a way. This is a massive destruction of capability for the USA and will continue to be extremely expensive in the future.

NNT wrote Skin in the Game, which discusses such types of managers who cause similar damages. He argues that there should be clawbacks to managers that harm a company to the degree Boeing’s current management has. He invokes The Code of Hammurabi to illustrate how ancient civilization used to deal with such class of professionals.

The Soviet Union would actually send managers to GULAG for "wrecking," or other labor crimes, and it didn't really help. In fact, "accountability" was the only thing the USSR did not have a short supply of. Extraordinary punishments don't help if the system for figuring out who's doing a good job, and who isn't, is not working in the first place.

Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but money can't pay for skill that doesn't exist anymore.

I really think it's worth it to go back and read the original Apollo program proposals, technical conference memos, and NASA administrative plans to see the history of the program and how something like this gets off the ground in the first place. The US was not a bastion of technical capability or well educated people in the 1950s. To say that the "skill doesn't exist anymore" suggests a misunderstanding of "where i…

Apollo really was a rare alignment of motivations, unbounded optimism meets existential fear, ie, "humanity can migrate into the stars" overlapping with "if we don't do this the commies win first strike capability", seems unlikely to re-occur.

Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#87
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Good luck fighting it. The basic human desire to stay out of the line of fire, combined with feudal loyalty trees, lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union despite the great intelligence and administrative ability of the people at the top. The only economic difference between the state monopoly of the USSR and the many companies of the US is that here, it's legal to start new organizations, where in the USSR that wou…

Private ownership isn't anti-monopoly, though. Big fuck-off monopolies are the best way to deliver rents to shareholders, which is capitalism's objective function, so ownership and management pursue the goal with a single mind and eventually they succeed. Eventually they find a combination of vertical/horizontal integration, economies of scale, network effects, platform effects, last mile dynamics, regulatory capture, and ownership rights that lock out competition. It's all they talk about, it's all they think about, and if you try to deliver a pitch to an investor without some kind of plan to build an anticompetitive moat god help you, lol.

I'll believe that capitalists believe in competition when they start passing policy that promotes it. Policy that tax disadvantages large corporations to encourage them to break up. Policy that winds down the "cheat codes" that business students and boardrooms salivate over. Policy that prevents political influence from becoming just another route to investment return. Policy that makes it easier to do incorporation/payroll/taxes/benefits for small businesses. Until these things happen, I see capitalism as just one more flavor of the same old empire-building dynamics that stretch back through time.

And not necessarily the winning one. Selling the industrial base of the United States economy to the Communist Party of China in order to pump the assets of wealthy Americans was a real six dimensional chess move. I suppose we'll see how it turns out.

Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#89

Does anyone actually seriously believe the U.S. will land a person on the moon in 2025? This is the country that takes decades to open a new subway station.

If they keep awarding contracts to SpaceX for getting the needed pieces done, then it's possible. :)

At least until SpaceX starts to feel a bit too comfortable... o_O

Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#90
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Good luck fighting it. The basic human desire to stay out of the line of fire, combined with feudal loyalty trees, lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union despite the great intelligence and administrative ability of the people at the top. The only economic difference between the state monopoly of the USSR and the many companies of the US is that here, it's legal to start new organizations, where in the USSR that wou…

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