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Boeing fired midlevel executive following embarrassing emails

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Re: Boeing fired midlevel executive following embarrassing emails

#91

Post by mark-r »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #86
mark-r wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just pointing out that there were reasons it wasn't successful beyond just not being a viable approach.

Eastman, which was spun out of Kodak in 1994, is doing quite well. Demand for resins, plastic sheets and intermediates to make plastics products hasn't dropped. Kodak had no idea what their core product was going to be, and bulk chemicals would have been a good bet.

Interestingly, Fuji managed to pivot into polarized films for LCD panels when faced with the same problem. https://petapixel.com/2018/10/19/why-kodak-died-and-fujifilm...

Re: Boeing fired midlevel executive following embarrassing emails

#92

Post by redis_mlc »

Spivak wrote: post #61
redis_mlc wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> You're arguing from two different perspectives.

Your comment doesn't make any sense in the English language.

Nobody ordered a sensor system that was unreliable, so no idea what you're talking about.

Re: Boeing fired midlevel executive following embarrassing emails

#93

Post by ehvatum »

chaostheory wrote: post #70
at-fates-hands wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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

That’s changed. The corporate board, boarding school roommate pay-pal set (so called because they sit on each other’s corporate boards and vote to raise each other’s pay) now delete everything they are aware of. Think, “dvd burners glued shut and SVN repo is fucking gone, what?” mentality.

Re: Boeing fired midlevel executive following embarrassing emails

#94

Post by irrational »

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)

You forgot Senior VP.

But, it's more like President > C?O > some other C?O position > Senior VP > VP > etc.

Re: Boeing fired midlevel executive following embarrassing emails

#95

Post by yazan94 »

objclxt wrote: post #19
mrbonner wrote: post #8

He was a VP. I’m not aware VP is a mid level management job. I always thought director level and below would be the case.

> 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.

+1. In Morgan Stanley, the title/promotion hierarchy is associate -> vice president -> executive director -> managing director. You can get VP within 5 years or so.

Re: Boeing fired midlevel executive following embarrassing emails

#96

Post by heartbeats »

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…

What about using PGP or something? They could require as a matter of corporate policy that internal e-mails be sent using PGP, and that storage be encrypted. More sensitive stuff they could use OTR for.

I suppose it's not a good look if you're looking at an archived conversation and they switch over to PGP, but it's better than this.

Re: Boeing fired midlevel executive following embarrassing emails

#97

Post by Phrenzy »

Mirioron wrote: post #9
ihumanable wrote: post #6

From the article: Mr. Cooper didn’t send or receive the messages, the latest batch of which Boeing disclosed to lawmakers and the news media in January, this person said. Those messages show Boeing employees mocking airline officials, aviation regulators and even their own colleagues. In one, an employee said the 737 MAX had been “designed by clowns, who in turn are supervised by monkeys.” Boeing Chief Executive Davi…

This kind of an article sounds incredibly damning to me. It indicates that Boeing is essentially rotten on the inside and that anybody doing business with them should be wary.

I was working as a contractor at Boeing for 2 years. None of this surprises me.

Re: Boeing fired midlevel executive following embarrassing emails

#98

Post by manicdee »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #90
manicdee wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a clear disparity in the understanding of the phrase “good enough.” The “good enough” from an engineering perspective is, “meets the customer’s specifications and is the best we can do given the constraints of time and money.” It’s about the quality of the product. The “good enough” in this essay relates to the expenditure of emotional effort in getting your work done to a known standard while management are…

No, the "good enough" in Milkshake's essay means not conforming to accepted standards, it's good enough only for management, who consciously or unconsciously intend to deceive a client downstream and sell up before someone else notices. Elsewhere, Milkshake has a story about a biological chemist on a project to develop a delivery vehicle for cancer drugs. This fellow found his results unconvincing, continued working…

Would you say this researchers efforts were counterproductive to his career goals?

Re: Boeing fired midlevel executive following embarrassing emails

#99

Post by lutorm »

nate_meurer wrote: post #50
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…

> "good enough" is the gold standard in engineering. This doesn't really make sense given any common meaning of good enough . A well engineered system or product is optimized . If you want to say that good enough means solving the inherent tradeoffs between safety margins and cost with careful design and precise specs, then you're not talking about the same thing as that blog post, nor would that accurately describe…

Isn't the common meaning of "good enough" "sufficiently good to meet my requirements, even though I can imagine it being even better"?

But you're right, I'm clearly not talking about the same thing as that blog post. What I'm arguing is that there's this appropriation of language where people use "good enough" to mean exactly "not good enough", and I don't think that's helpful.

Re: Boeing fired midlevel executive following embarrassing emails

#100

Post by lutorm »

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.

Exactly. It was obviously not "good enough", so they failed to meet that standard. That's my point.
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