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

&quot;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.&quot;<p>It don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s possible to overstate how bad, and sad, of a state of affairs that is. I&#x27;ve never seen a group at any organization that was composed predominantly of early career engineers that did not have issues (in the aerospace&#x2F;defense industry). Those mid &#x2F; late career engineers are irreplaceable and yet they were actively trying to get rid of them... There are no words.

FWIW, &quot;Prince Jim&quot; McNerney, who most of the article&#x27;s ire is understandably directed towards, is no longer the CEO. He directed the 737 MAX&#x27;s development, but retired before the scandals; his successor, Dennis Muilenburg (a 30+ year Boeing employee who started out in engineering), was fired for the poor quality of the 737 MAX despite it being developed under Prince Jim.<p>That being said, the current CEO — Dave Calhoun — is an old exec from from GE, where McNerney started out; I hope he&#x27;s different from Jim, but I wouldn&#x27;t bank on it. Unlike Muilenberg and pre-merger Boeing CEOs, he doesn&#x27;t have a direct background in aviation. He&#x27;s retiring at the end of the year, and I hope his replacement is more like the pre-merger CEOs than the accounting-focused recent ones.

&gt;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.<p>So they devalued Wisdom, and Elders... and things fell apart. This seems to be a pattern repeated all over the modern world.

&gt; The day after Broken Dreams premiered, Swampy got an email informing him that he’d been put on a 60-day corrective action plan four weeks earlier. His alleged offense constituted using email to communicate about process violations<p>That is pretty shady. They didn&#x27;t want to discuss violations in emails so it doesn&#x27;t end up in a court case or found by the FAA during an investigation.<p>&gt; the longtime former Boeing executive told me, “I don’t think one can be cynical enough when it comes to these guys.” Did that mean he thought Boeing assassinated Swampy? “It’s a top-secret military contractor, remember; there are spies everywhere,” he replied.<p>I am kind of surprised various executives don&#x27;t order hits on each other more often. Or maybe they do but the assassinations are too subtle and they look like heart attacks and accidents? With billions on the line, what&#x27;s a few millions in crypto found in a usb stick somewhere in the bushes for a &quot;job well done&quot;. There is also the idea that sometimes it should look more an assassination to send a clear message to others: &quot;you don&#x27;t want to fall on the knife backwards, three times in as row, like so and so, now do you?&quot;

I know that this is about Boeing, but it is just such a perfect epitaph for the end of the current decaying Valley elite. What took Boeing 20 years FAANG did in one:<p>“CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had ‘overvalued experience and undervalued leadership’ before he purged the veterans into early retirement.”

<i>&gt; Swampy knew he was caught in a prisoner’s dilemma. If he went along, he was breaking the law; if he didn’t, whistleblowers who complained about unsafe practices were routinely terminated on grounds of violating the same safety protocols they had opposed violating.</i><p>How is it a prisoner&#x27;s dilemma? Is it about cooperating with whisleblowers or defecting them?<p>It seems to me to be a mere dilemma, two choices, both bad. There was no interplay of cooperate&#x2F;defect strategies.

If you read this article looking for new or surprising insight, you won&#x27;t find it. It is not new information that Boeing started a rapid decline shortly after the McDonnell Douglas merger, and it will be unsurprising to you to hear that shortly afterwards, Boeing began abusing its most senior employees into leaving.<p>What this article offers is new detail into exactly <i>how</i> Boeing has gone about cannibalizing itself. The specific things done to specific employees, the specific quality incidents that were swept under the rug, the lengths to which they went to ensure all prior institutional knowledge regarding how to properly build a plane was systematically destroyed.<p>It&#x27;s worth reading, perhaps unless you&#x27;re going to be flying on a Boeing plane anytime soon.

&gt; Swampy believed relying on mechanics to self-inspect their work was not only insane but illegal<p>This sounds like the changes that have taken place in the software industry in the past 10-20 years. Engineers are meant to do much more than engineering, including testing their own software, managing project timelines, etc., however with software nobody dies, you just get crappy software that constantly breaks and needs an update every other day. There&#x27;s an overall theme here of underestimating how hard engineering is, and as a result expecting a lot more from engineers which then of course causes bad engineering. Not surprisingly this is caused by non-technical people with power. Perhaps the fix is a cultural shift and a renewed respect for people who want to spend all their time specializing in technical skills.

U.S. companies have a management problem. I specifically mean that the terminal career path for most professions is &quot;management&quot;. Depending where you work, management can mean:<p>- giving orders<p>- delegating work (usually this is work the manager specifically doesn&#x27;t want to do themselves)<p>- clearing blockers in front of your employees<p>That the third one is the rarest is a problem.<p>American corporate culture has devolved into: get promoted into management and coast.<p>There are obviously exceptions. But a lot of people will agree they&#x27;ve had their fair share of terrible managers. I dare say that&#x27;s the norm.<p>Boeing is just the most current example of what happens when a company fetishizes management. That is, there comes a time when the leeches have sucked the body dry.

The Onion was joking about this eventuality in 2010:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theonion.com&#x2F;boeing-lays-off-only-guy-who-knows-how-to-keep-wings-on-1819571668" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theonion.com&#x2F;boeing-lays-off-only-guy-who-knows-...</a>

Related:<p><i>Boeing&#x27;s Dead Whistleblower Spoke the Truth</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thefp.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;boeings-dead-whistleblower-spoke-the-truth" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thefp.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;boeings-dead-whistleblower-spoke-the...</a> (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39838580">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39838580</a>)

It makes me so angry reading this about managers criticizing employees for being &#x27;too knowledgeable&#x27;.<p>There are so many narratives nowadays which claim that performance is at odds with talent. People are embracing mediocrity and patting each other on the back for it... The idiots who got lucky, since they cannot pretend to be knowledgeable, reframe the narrative to portray themselves as geniuses who understood the value of idiocy and revel in their mediocrity.

<p><pre><code> &gt; “Prince Jim”—as some long-timers used to call him—repeatedly invoked a slur for longtime engineers and skilled machinists in the obligatory vanity “leadership” book he co-wrote. Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were “phenomenally talented assholes,” </code></pre> Decline in attention to quality at Boeing is a known thing. But this attitude towards engineering and specially to machinist is just utterly f*king stupid. Especially to machinists, because experienced one are hard to find, not even talking about toolmakers. It seems that the starting salary for machinists isn&#x27;t that great and many shops lost to outsource. And experienced folks retire leaving a wide gap behind. Of course, this does not excuse such an attitude toward engineers either.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;Oub0v" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;Oub0v</a>

It 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.

This situation highlights why startups can outperform established companies. It&#x27;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.

&gt; The bosses hit Swampy with a new initiative called “Multi-Function Process Performer,”<p>Performance metrics are how bad employees level the playing field with good ones. Everyone wants to _quantifiably_ know why Swampy got a 9% raise when they got an 8%, &quot;because his expertise saved the company a $1bn fine last quarter that you nearly caused.&quot; Not once, anywhere I&#x27;ve worked, has that kind of metric been tracked.

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.

The problem here is that large corporations trusted with public safety - be it flight safety in the case of Boeing; electical generation and transmission safety in the case of PG&amp;E here in California - is that companies cater to Wall Street and bean counters rather than anything else. This is where the CPUC has failed in the case of PG&amp;E and the FAA failed in the case of Boeing.<p>There should be oversight and public safety should play into private corporate governance for such things.

I am more convinced that Boeing has exceeded their and human ability to cooperate and explain everything that goes into a modern plane - more than I am willing to say Boeing just sucks now.<p>It’s not just them. It’s everyone and everything.<p>We are in a complexity crisis and no one sees it happening.

<i>Boeing had quietly assumed many of the roles traditionally played by its primary regulator, an arrangement that was ethically absurd.</i><p>This is simply &quot;vertical integration&quot; applied to &quot;regulatory capture.&quot;

I have a serious question that might sound not serious. The articles I read about boeing seem to focus on assembly line issues. As someone who flies a lot, assembly problems scare me, but so far assembly qv hasn’t been catastrophic (right?). It seems the real issue is a design flaw in the 737max pilot interface. Aside from some articles that feel vague (like competition with airbus led to some poor decision making); the chain of decisions that led to the design flaw aren’t really reported on (right?). Do you all have the same read?

The &quot;funny&quot; thing to me is that I&#x27;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.

My paternal grandfather worked for Boeing as an airfoil modeling engineer (figuring out the right shape for wings and creating computer models) from 1960s-2000s. As a nerdy kid he had some of most entertaining engineering stories. One of my favorites was when a coworker brought a boomerang to work and due to some union&#x2F;budget shenanigans at the time, all the engineers were at work with nothing to do. So they designed and machined a 3 foot boomerang out of clear acrylic. They went out to the field and gave their heavy new toy a good throw, only to have it promptly vanish out of sight on a sunny day. After a moment to process what just happened, they all hit the dirt as they heard it whoosh overhead.

Sounds like Boeing has had a lot of what is often taught in business schools as <i>goal subordination</i> in <i>organizational behavior</i>.<p>Yup, these topics explain that some managers can feel threatened by especially competent subordinates.

Larry Culp may not be an engineer, but if you want someone who can take a storied American manufacturer that got infected with MBA bs and brought it back to its roots … I mean he’s the only one whose done it, right?

&gt; He mocked him in weekly meetings whenever he dared contribute a thought, assigned a fellow manager to spy on him and spread rumors that he did not play nicely with others, and disciplined him for things like “using email to communicate” and pushing for flaws he found on planes to be fixed.<p>Sounds like a regular middle manager in any tech company. Sad unfortunate effect of the power asymmetries in corporate structure: managers have all the power but very few checks to keep them accountable. I’ve seen the same thing happen again and again in different companies (including to me), thankfully none of them building planes.

Tremendously detailed for how short it is. I struggle to understand how outsourcing the engineer was sold as good for shareholders. Anyone watching someone write a longer book on this publicly?

Nothing new here, but it&#x27;s certainly a well-articulated redux.<p>Reading about this Boeing debacle is gut-wrenching because it totally contradicts what I believe in. Nihilism isn&#x27;t supposed to win. Not like this, at least. I&#x27;m an engineer. I&#x27;m proud of what I do, and I care deeply about what I make. I&#x27;ll admit it, I&#x27;m even proud of my country and I believe in the notion that I&#x27;m not the only person around here who gives a damn. Apparently there aren&#x27;t enough people who do.

Funny how everyone keeps blaming management and even the merger as the root cause, but fail to realize that the merger was effectively forced on Boeing by the US government.

I wonder if I could get a job at Boeing and ask for put options. My thoughts are that it&#x27;s going to take a while to fix the company, during which time it will be focused on rebuilding instead of financial games and quality shenanigans. So the stock going down <i>may</i> be a sign of increased long term value. So give me 4 years of put options and then another 4 years of call options.

One of the fundamental problems with organizations, no matter what economic system you live under[0], is that <i>you cannot give your boss a problem</i> that they don&#x27;t want to deal with. So if your job is to find problems, and your boss does not want to deal with problems, then your job will suuuuuuuuuuuuck.<p>0. I acknowledge that capitalism has caused a lot of problems, including Boeing problems.

&gt; What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane<p>That&#x27;s not fair. They didn&#x27;t murder <i>all</i> of them, at least not yet.

Is anyone here who still has the courage to board a Boeing plane after reading this?<p>Parts flying off the planes, a non-existent QC culture... it sounds like the next bad accident is about to happen.<p>If Boeing -somehow- survives this though, it&#x27;s planes might be the safest most thoroughly inspect that exist :)

Boeing’s crappy planes killed hundreds of people, true. But that was years ago!<p>So a door blew off a plane. Did it crash? No.<p>So a tire fell off a plane. Did it crash? No.<p>It goes to show that even after a quarter century of decline, there’s enough engineering savvy to at least make some things fail to a known condition.

I wonder if Boeing’s institutional investors have had the foresight to get controlling stakes in business jet manufacturers to prevent them from going down the same path, just so that they can still get places by plane in reasonable safety.

I was reading the part about making employees sign a declaration about taking responsibility for their work and thought that was pure genius. Sounds like managers should also sign something like that.

From the article: &gt;Discussing Swampy’s death and the whistleblower lawsuit he left behind, the longtime former Boeing executive told me, “I don’t think one can be cynical enough when it comes to these guys.” Did that mean he thought Boeing assassinated Swampy? “It’s a top-secret military contractor, remember; there are spies everywhere,” he replied.<p>Me: Aaaaand no way I&#x27;m ever applying to work at an MIC defense contractor conglomerate ever again.

Corporate greed. Simple and truthful answer…it’s also applicable for many many other companies who have abandoned their ways and have fallen victim of the dark side profit, dividend, share price and all the other similar capitalistic ideas :-(

&gt; noncompliance (and nonconformance, which is similar but not identical)<p>Anyone who can explain the difference?

There are real problems at Boeing and those are real issues, but let&#x27;s beware of the BS that comes with the kind of widespread pile-on that&#x27;s happening now.<p>This article reads like an Internet rant to me, with the sarcasm, hyperbole, and ridicule. Those things aren&#x27;t awful in themselves (though they&#x27;ve become very overused and tiresome to me), but they crowd out actual facts, details, nuance, complexities. If you write &#x27;it&#x27;s the worst thing <i>ever</i>&#x27;, you omit where and how it&#x27;s bad, where it&#x27;s not, the consequences, the trade-offs, etc. I don&#x27;t learn what happened, how, or why, just that you are really, really, <i>really</i> pissed off.<p>Examples:<p>* <i>pieces are flying off the Boeing planes actually in use at an alarming rate</i><p>* <i>to train the workforce to properly put together a plane.</i><p>* <i>obligatory vanity “leadership” book</i> - note the ridicule and scare quotes.<p>* <i>suppliers, many of which</i> lacked engineering departments* -- now using fonts for emphasis<p>* <i>in a perpetual state of unlearning all the lessons it had absorbed over a 90-year ascent to the pinnacle of global manufacturing</i><p>* <i>Qatar Airways had become so disgusted ...</i>, coincidentally matching the author&#x27;s emotion<p>* <i>one of the most pathetic plea bargains in the history of American justice</i><p>It&#x27;s like series of Reddit comments, and the world certainly doesn&#x27;t need more of that. The author&#x27;s and American Prospect&#x27;s quality is no better than Boeing&#x27;s.

As I was reading this it reminded me 100% of GE. Another manufacturing giant that put profit above all else and many people suffered for it as the company collapsed under the weight of its own incompetence... though many also became staggeringly wealthy.<p>GE is absolutely a place where leadership is the only “skill” that matters. Leaders are all that’s needed and everyone else is a commodity. Leader worship and success theater killed GE.<p>I could only shake my head when I got to the part where a former GE leader is in the running to be the new CEO.<p>Make sure your affairs are in order before boarding a Boeing aircraft.

This isn&#x27;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.

&gt; Like most neoliberal institutions<p>I stopped reading here. I thought it was an article not a political flame presenting opinions as facts

Anecdotal story: A few years ago I worked with ex-Boeing employees from Altus AFB. They were disgusted by the quality control of the delivered C-17 Globemasters. Construction garbage in the wall panels, etc. Like the article, their complaints only succeeded in labeling them as &quot;troublemakers&quot; within the company.

But racist white supremacists like Elon Musk blamed it on &quot;DEI&quot; (which is their new dog whistle for the n-word). Same thing they say caused a container ship to hit the Francis Scott Key Bridge.<p>‘A Black guy’ didn’t cause Boeing’s midair blowout. Capitalism did:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inquirer.com&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;boeing-airplane-safety-dei-capitalism-20240118.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inquirer.com&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;boeing-airplane-safety-dei-...</a><p>Baltimore mayor claims &#x27;racist&#x27; critics use &#x27;DEI&#x27; instead of N-word to attack him:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mynbc15.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;nation-world&#x2F;baltimore-mayor-claims-racists-use-dei-instead-of-n-word-dont-have-the-courage-msnbc-joy-reid-diversity-equity-inclusion-brandon-scott-maryland-francis-scott-key-bridge-collapse-cable-news-woke-city" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mynbc15.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;nation-world&#x2F;baltimore-mayor-claims...</a><p>&gt;&quot;Listen, I know and we all know and you know very well that Black men and young Black men in particular have been the boogeyman for those who are racist and think that only straight wealthy white men should have a say in anything,&quot; Scott said. &quot;What they mean by DEI, in my opinion, is duly elected incumbent. We know what they want to say but they don’t have the courage to say the N-word.&quot;<p>&gt;Scott was elected in 2020 with 70% of the popular vote. He is one among five mayors of color to have led the city since 2007. Over 60% of Baltimore residents are Black, according to Census data.<p>Lyman blames DEI for Baltimore bridge collapse, but admits he didn’t write social media post:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;utahnewsdispatch.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;03&#x2F;27&#x2F;utah-governor-candidate-phil-lyman-blames-dei-for-baltimore-bridge-collapse&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;utahnewsdispatch.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;03&#x2F;27&#x2F;utah-governor-candid...</a><p>&gt;Utah Republican Phil Lyman, an outgoing state representative and current gubernatorial candidate, suggested diversity, equity and inclusion programs were to blame, at least in part, for the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore on Tuesday.

<i>&quot;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 conception of a good product versus a bad product.<p>They have no conception of the craftsmanship that&#x27;s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers.&quot;</i><p>Steve Jobs (1995) - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Steve_Jobs:_The_Lost_Interview" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Steve_Jobs:_The_Lost_Interview</a>

Since we live in a capitalist society, maybe the past golden times of Boeing are the exception, not the rule. Boeing is just another for-profit company now.

I am not exaggerating to say that Jim McNerney should be dragged in front of Congress and be forced to explain what he did to an incredibly important American company. It&#x27;s important to push back against the shareholder value theory where appropriate and humiliation is an underrated component of that.

tl;dr: Pournelle&#x27;s Iron Law.

An intrusive popup took over my screen at that link.

How should a company promote diversity without jeopardizing safety?

When journalists write about unions, like this:<p>&gt;The plan would save money while busting unions, a win-win, he promised investors. Instead, McNerney’s plan burned some $50 billion in excess of its budget and went three and a half years behind schedule.<p>They have a moral obligation to disclose their conflicts of interest in being unionized themselves.<p>The staff at The American Prospect are all part of a News Guild, with their employer mandated into exclusive collective bargaining with their bargaining unit:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wbng.org&#x2F;unit&#x2F;the-american-prospect&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wbng.org&#x2F;unit&#x2F;the-american-prospect&#x2F;</a><p>They thereby benefit from laws that enshrine union control at the expense of contract liberty.