Probably a repost, but this excellent video talks about the problems with outsourcing everything (i.e. the L J Hart-Smith report) https://youtu.be/PQccNdwm8Tw?t=566 - the report itself is fairly accessible and an eye-opener on what happens when you outsource all of your core competency.
The only remaining thing is a weak 'systems integrator'. And the best part is the suppliers have more leverage and less compliance/liability than you do! Because nobody even knows their name.
Thanks for sharing! I’ll have to take a look. I wanted to add that a great counter example in support of your point is SpaceX, who is highly integrated out of a desire for success and has clearly demonstrated engineering excellence, in some cases in direct competition with Boeing with impressive results.
... and Boeing used to be the shining example in the field until they were reverse-acquired by McDonnell Douglas, 81 years after their inception. It will be interesting to see where SpaceX is in another 100 years from now and how many mistakes they repeat. IMHO, it's already being run by someone who cares more about profit than technical excellence or safety.
I think SpaceX has done more to spur interest in lean/mean private companies that have collectively got 'bored, working on ads' people out doing quite spectacular work.
I think there are a lot of hungry people looking for some purpose - SpaceX seems to provide a sense of purpose. This might inspire more companies over time even if SpaceX eventually fades away.
It's a shining example of a proper American company that Boeing's now ship-of-theseus once was.
Oh absolutely. Boeing is their own counter example, but the direct competition between Boeing and SpaceX at the same time and place on the same government contracts provides a very nice case study in distributed versus integrated engineering and manufacturing development.
And yes, concerns with Musk abound, but certainly SpaceX is his baby and he has been pretty focused with that one, unlike other companies like Tesla and X.
I don't understand the justification for this. I am familiar with the NTSB's practices (thanks in on small part to Admiral Cloudberg) but I do not see how Boeing put a foot wrong on this issue. Won't the NTSB report say what it will say regardless what Boeing says or does??
At bottom it's about public opinion, not paper documents.
Boeing has tried to saturate the public's interest in the topic with a self-serving line of spin, front-running the public authorities. That way, when the NTSB report finally comes out, any negative info would struggle to overturn already set opinions.
They aren't having a whole lot of success then because they come across like a bunch of franchise fast food managers who accidentally parachuted into an engineering and manufacturing corp and haven't managed to find the bathrooms yet.
No argument there. Of the many baffling things about the ongoing Boeing saga, why the executive wing of the company isn't hiding in a bunker in New Zealand while their lawyers try to fend off a zombie apocalypse of minority investor lawsuits is definitely a head-scratcher for me. There's also the quant notion of the government applying career-altering fines when corporations step out of line but it's been so long now that this is just a bitter memory for cranky olds.
But Boeing has the same right that anyone has to do PR, right? The NTSB is not entitled to public opinion going their way. It's completely beyond the scope of their regulatory power.
Until the investigation is complete you want to minimize events that interfere with it. For Boeing's part they get to continue to operate until the investigation is completed and decisions made. This is the trade, otherwise, we could just shut down your entire company indefinitely until we determine if it should be reopened or not.
This is a highly regulated industry and it is so for the benefit of all citizens that use these services. Boeing is a for profit company that is speaking for the benefit of their own bottom line. It's not their decision to make.
Because they signed an agreement with the NTSB not to "[provide] investigative information [or give] an analysis of factual information previously released", and then did it anyways.
Agreed. They're being "sanctioned" for answering the media's questions about their own company, probably because the NTSB wants to control the narrative. The "sanction" seems to amount to nothing, though. No fine. No change to the investigation. Just bureaucratic finger-wagging and empty threats.
Boeing certainly deserves to be investigated and prosecuted, if the evidence supports it, but arbitrarily refusing to let them talk to the media is wrong.
"The NTSB said that during a media briefing on Tuesday, a Boeing executive provided non-public investigative information to journalists about the Alaska Airlines incident that the agency had not verified or authorized for release."
> provided non-public investigative information to journalists about the Alaska Airlines incident that the agency had not verified or authorized for release
>They're being "sanctioned" for answering the media's questions about their own company
It is customary for someone to answer "I/We will withhold any comments pending an ongoing investigation." against such questions. If you violate that, at best you're a flaming idiot and at worst you're trying to derail the investigation.
All that to say: If you're under investigation, kindly STFU until the dust has settled and everything is finished.
It is good advice to not talk about an ongoing investigation, but the government should not be able to force you not to. Talking about an investigation is not "derailing" it.
The "bureacratic finger-wagging" in this particular context is a lesser evil than the alternative, allowing a corporation to pre-manufacture public opinion by contaminating the neutrality of the investigation and prosecution. It's just a lesser evil given the status quo of the opposing systems of regulation and capitalism.
How on earth is speaking to the media about their own analysis of what happened going to "contaminate the neutrality of the investigation and prosecution"?
Are the NTSB and DOJ so easily swayed that Boeing's words will negate their ability to tell fact from fiction? And if so, why should we listen to them at all?
Protecting a government narrative is NOT a valid reason to suppress speech. That is the path to despotism.
> How on earth is speaking to the media about their own analysis of what happened going to "contaminate the neutrality of the investigation and prosecution"?
Something along the lines of "if the findings are negative then the system is rigged against us."
This is the United States and you have every right to claim the system is rigged against you even if it isn't. You even have the right to sue if you believe it. This does not impede the investigation in any way.
I can't help but think of the old use of Saddam Hussein as a caricature in South Part when I keep seeing what Boeing is up to lately... I think we need more visibility with similar for Boeing executives.
What a fall from grace. An unstoppable company with a jaw dropping lineup of products, pride of the nation, destroyed by bean counters and MBAs within just 15 years or so. One would hope lessons would be learned, but one would then also be naive.
Bean counting and MBA'ing can be very valuable activities in the right hands.
I think the problem is that business management is now seen as an abstract thing that you can study on its own and then step into any industry and start working the levers of leadership.
But if a manager starts at the bottom, learns the trade inside and out, and then does an MBA-like analysis of their business, I think that can help optimize a business without ripping its foundation out.
Without naming names, I'm pretty concerned this is happening at practically every large tech company as we speak. It does not make me hopeful for the future of our critical digital infrastructure
Yes. Nowadays I am glad if the 'rip here' on a plastic food container works.
It seems like every engineering discipline is degrading to different extents.
And non-functional food wrapping is my major annoyance. Every other bag of bbq coal have the threads sewed in the wrong way. Pasta bags that needs scissors to open or you'll have pasta everywhere. I can go on and on and on...
I think engineering attrition is too high nowadays to keep institutional knowledge. Also about how to pack cookies...
I've noticed after the last several years that we're starting to turn from a high-trust society into a low-trust one.
Without spending too much time digressing on politics, it's my observation that Trump + covid are the main correlations. It started in 2015 when Trump declared his candidacy, picked up speed when he took office in 2017, and then hit full throttle when covid came to the US in 2020.
And I'm afraid we've hit several points of no return, and there's no going back for decades.
> And I'm afraid we've hit several points of no return, and there's no going back for decades.
Concur, sadly.-
I am afraid, that, much in the same way some posit that - given some "systemic" energy peak in the 70s (peak oil?) and reached the moon, we have ... somehow hit some civilizational "peak" cua values, norms, culture, character, and other goodwill intangibles essential for civilization itself to exist (though they might not look like it) ...
Yeah, I think Brexit at least is part of that same phenomenon. It can all be summarized as British voters saying "Screw all these other people, we're looking out for ourselves!" and then crashing their own economy out of sheer spite.
So this is more political than I usually care to get here, and I'm only talking about this because I think I can get something intellectually interesting about it (and dang, if you're listening, let me know if I should dial it down and I'll drop it right away), but I do have some observations on American politics before and since 9/11:
- There was a lot of horrible, awful stuff in the '90s that kinda got memory holed because people focus now on modern issues like 9/11, the financial crisis, the rise of the alt-right, covid, etc. But in the '90s you still had the hate crimes against Rodney King and and Matthew Shepard, the LA riots, David Duke becoming a GOP gubernatorial candidate, Pat Buchanan's speech at the 1992 RNC, the back half of one of the worst crime waves in our history (which petered out in the mid '90s, largely thanks to the end of leaded gasoline in cars), deeply rooted homophobia that pervaded every aspect of culture, etc. Post-9/11 America had its problems, with hate crimes against Sikhs because they were mistaken for Muslims (plus hate crimes against actual Muslims) and a general attitude of "you're either with us or you're against us", but it's not like the '90s was free of any of that ugliness either.
- Politically, post-9/11 America almost felt like a breather because it was the one and only time neocons had total control of the GOP and shut the paleocons out of the levers of power, and it's my observation that neocons are far more amenable to modern American ways of life than paleocons. The Bush era was the only time in my life I thought about Republicans, "they're trying to do what they think is best for the country, it's just that I think they're completely wrong about what actually is best". And with the modern GOP... you can see with Trump and his supporters doing anti-American things like threatening to pull out of NATO and withholding medical aid to blue states just because they didn't vote for him that he and his closest followers have a fundamental sense of contempt for the American way of life and America's role in the world, which isn't something I could ever say about the Bush-era GOP. In fact, neocon foreign policy was basically "the American way of life is so good, we should export it to the rest of the world by force". That's not the modern GOP.
- After the 2008 financial crisis, neocons were thoroughly discredited, and paleocons had a resurgence, taking back the GOP by creating first the Tea Party and the then Trump movement. The biggest difference between the Tea Party and Trump is that the Tea Party's behavior was purely confined to the sphere of politics.
- I think the first big low-trust moment in politics was Joe Wilson shouting "You lie!" at Obama on the floor of Congress in 2009. Say what you will about Obama's politics, but not only is Wilson's line disgustingly crass, but it's a kind of crassness that none of us had previously seen on the floor of Congress in our lifetimes. I think the last time we saw that kind of boorish behavior in Congress was the 19th century. Similarly, we had the GOP's accelerated use of the filibuster. Before the Obama Administration, the filibuster was primarily a "break glass in case of emergency" button, but GOP senators during the Obama Administration used it in place of a no vote, effectively forcing the Senate to have a 60% supermajority to pass anything. You can find a number of graphs and charts showing how sudden and drastic this rise in the use of the filibuster was [0] [1] [2] [3] (I found most of these by doing a Google Image Search for use of the filibuster in congress over time btw). This is indeed not normal behavior. Similarly, GOP senators refusing to confirm Merrick Garland for SCOTUS just because it was an election year and they hoped Trump could appoint Scalia's successor is also low-trust behavior. Nothing about this is doing anything to help America or Americans, it's purely so they can wield even more power for themselves and lock their enemies out of power. In the past, you would only see a political party moving in lockstep to block a major nominee if the nominee had political stances that were just plain beyond the pale or if they were found to have had a criminal background, not as a matter of course just because they want their own party to fill the position instead. Merrick Garland is no left-wing ideologue, he's a milquetoast centrist who, as attorney general, hasn't prosecuted Trump and the like nearly as hard as he should have.
- But everything in that above bullet point was something you would only see if you paid any attention to politics. Outside the sphere of politics, things were still normal until 2015.
- When Trump came along, his behavior intersected with the concepts of guilt and shame in a way that proved incredibly destructive to society. The words are not synonyms: guilt is what you feel when you violate your own standards, and shame is what you feel when you violate society's. A bad actor can absolve the public of shame by behaving shamelessly and not facing any consequences for it. Tale as old as time, to see people behaving badly in public, getting away with it, and spawning more people doing the same. But Trump went farther, and he absolved the public of guilt, too. He didn't just perform bad acts in public, he presented them as a virtue. He told them that any hatred they hold in their hearts is A-OK, that there's nothing wrong with resenting other people. When Hillary Clinton confronted him in the 2016 debates about potentially cheating on his taxes, he said "That's because I'm smart." And time and time again, when Trump would do something awful, he would extol the virtues of his own behavior. His behavior was to enrich himself, destroy his enemies, act with fear and hatred towards minority groups, and turn against his closest allies the moment they stopped being useful to him. And he told the public that this is morally correct, that everything he has done is the right thing to do. And that eventually wore away society's guilt and created a legion of people whose entire moral code consists of "enrich yourself, destroy your enemies, fear and hate minorities, and throw your loved ones away once you no longer have use for them". And any society whose moral code is that is by definition a low-trust society.
- In a society with a healthy level of guilt, it wouldn't be unheard of for somebody to have a bigoted thought only for them to feel guilty, chastise themselves over it, and never act on it. Like maybe someone reads a news article about somebody being killed by a member of a minority group, they may think "those people are all murderers, they don't belong here" and immediately the guilt kicks in and they realize this knee-jerk thought is wrong, that you can't hold an entire ethnicity or race responsible for one individual doing something evil, and they move on and get the racism out of their head. But in a world where Trump has worn away society's guilt, that doesn't happen. No, the leading candidate for a major party's presidential nomination instead says that Mexico is sending murderers and rapists across our border and we need to stop them by any means necessary, and then when that very same man wins not only the GOP nomination but also the presidency, the next time they have a knee-jerk reaction to reading a piece of news about a murder that happened to be committed by someone of Mexican descent, they're going to think "The president was right, they really are all murderers and rapists!" and not feel an ounce of guilt and never examine their behavior or change their ways.
- And then you have covid, when certain elements of the GOP turned stopping a deadly disease into a partisan, political issue. The GOP told them there was nothing wrong with refusing to do anything to help curb the spread of a highly contagious disease with a 1-2% IFR and even that there was nothing wrong with refusing to get vaccinated after vaccines become available and actually make it possible to go back to a pre-2020 way of life. That the base of an entire major political party decided they were A-OK with covid running out of control had impacts outside the political sphere. Because if they're willing to kill their fellow Americans with a plague, they're also going to be plenty willing to take any number of other hostile actions against their fellow Americans. And those who aren't Trumpers are going to respond in kind: i.e., if the GOP is willing to straight-up kill us in droves, we need to treat any whiff of Trumpiness in somebody's behavior as a personal, existential threat to our lives and take steps to protect ourselves.
- And that's where we are now. I can personally say that since Trump took the national stage and especially since covid, I have hard cut multiple people out of my life including some who used to be good friends just because they made it explicit that they were A-OK with Trump, and I can no longer see their politics and their attitude to society as anything other than a personal threat to me, when before 2016 I had a very large circle of friends of all different political viewpoints and never cut anyone out of my life over it. Simply put, if they're going to act like low-trust people, I'm not going to trust them with any part of my life.
[3] https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/2021/03... (This one is interesting because you can see how Democrats responded by also increasing their use of the filibuster to match, once they lost the Senate in 2014. You can see how polarization from one side begets polarization from the other.)
(Again, dang, let me know if this is too political for this site, and I won't pursue this subject any further. I figured there was value in intellectually exploring how political events have knock-on effects that reshape our culture in fundamental ways and providing elaboration and explanation on my thesis that the last 9 years have seen the US transform from a high-trust to a low-trust society.)
(I just wanted to really appreciate your comment. I found it informative an thoughtful. Great context. Many thanks. It really did lead down a thoughtful and provoking route.-)
> We have just stopped enforcing standards as a society.
Do we (rethorical) realize how incredibly dangerous that is?
PS. Incidentally: Tech, science and engineering might (might) just very well be the last "strongholds" of such (any?) standards, for, in lack of those, bridges - for example - just break down. Experiments fail. Systems break.-
It's happening to a lot of large companies in general. Being gutted for short term profits, less care on providing good products/services and more on acquiring competition to foster growth while looking for "inefficiencies".
Corporate consolidation, and a massive focus on finance create these abnormalities. Another pretty good example of that phenomenon on a different industry is Disney.
As an ex-googler, can confirm. McKinsey guy (Pichai) is running the company straight into the ground. This is masked by the kpis and the stock price (same as with Boeing, up to a point), but don’t yall be surprised when wheels start falling off Google stuff too.
Following bad directions can of course potentially get you killed (which is why you shouldn't blindly follow them). However, there are other navigation software providers out there, so if Google suddenly disappeared, people would be able to switch to those. If those alternatives give bad directions and get people killed, that's not Google's fault.
(And, death aside - if I could - I just want to bring up that it does not necesarily have to get to life and death to be dysfunctional or dangerous or inaceptable ...)
No lesson has been learned. These companies are all getting filled with people who look at words like "grace" and "pride" and "jaw dropping" and all they see is not-yet-captured margin for shareholders. They think, if we can just throw all these intangible things under the bus, we might be able to squeeze out another $0.06 per share for shareholders. "Pride of the nation?" That means we can cut costs by $3 million, and simply not be proud.
Which is a mindset that is only possible if you have no competition and if you have captured regulations to the point that new competition is highly unlikely to form.
It's not unknown for companies to put "Goodwill" as a line item on their quarterly reports.
Competition makes it worse. It causes this race to the bottom, and forces companies to sacrifice everything they can at the altar of Shareholder Returns. Shareholders will sell companies who don't race to the bottom and buy companies who do.
You don't have to be an engineer to appreciate the value of engineering. Also, a lawyer is more likely to think about risk and liability first and "shareholder value" later.
I agree. But thought it was worth mentioning because I'm not so sure everyone repeating the engineering company line understands that.
Similarly, Boeing's decline is attributed quite frequently to the managerial descendants of Jack Welch. And Welch? Well he was... an engineer. A PhD in chemical engineering no less.
Sometimes (often times) comments here over simplify the reality that underlies the real issues that need to be addressed. I think it's worth while to break the stereotypes and charactures that often time get used in arguments to either iconize or demonize various groups, depending on the viewpoint of the speaker. That tendency is the real problem with modern discourse.
“ The Man Who Broke Capitalism” by David Gelles offers great insight into the man and his actions. It actually offers some solutions to the problems Welch caused.
From the Pride of the nation to the nation of Pride. This is not just a 'dumb' jab at identity politics (on which 'Pride' and similar phenomenons are built) but a factual description of how companies (this does not just touch Boeing) shifted their messaging from engineering prowess to how they champion 'diversity' and 'inclusion'. As to why they started doing that the answer is most likely multifold ranging from 'pressure from outside to raise the ESG rating [1]' via an internal push by more recent activist hires to - and this is probably one of the biggest factors - the realisation by those same bean counters and MBAs that it is a lot cheaper in the short run to gain the public eye by pandering to a few loud activist groups [2] than it is to do so through innovation, especially for companies which have a de-facto monopoly in their market segment, doubly so for companies which seem to have cemented that position by making themselves 'essential' to the national defence and triply so when executive bonuses are tied to hitting 'DEI' and 'climate' targets [3]. In the long run it will bring the company down but by that time the bonuses have been harvested and the executives have fled to new and richer pastures.
The only remaining thing is a weak 'systems integrator'. And the best part is the suppliers have more leverage and less compliance/liability than you do! Because nobody even knows their name.
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