Pay attention to the language - ‘Boeing needed cash to assuage it’s shareholders and executives’
What does it mean? It presents Boeing as a ‘separate’ entity that has to throw a bone to shareholders and executives. But they are Boeing, they own it and run it. There is no separation.
A more accurate way to describe it would be to say that the owners of Boeing decided to pillage the company and put money into their own pocket - sell factories and do share buybacks. Get rid of talent, etc. The exact same thing is happening across the board, in every company in the west, American railways, water companies in UK, and now it has come for us, it’s happening in google and Microsoft.
They are run by executives who know nothing about airplanes / engineering and don’t give a shit.
We are catering to financialisation and killing the real economy. The idea that when financial institutions make money that’s the main thing in the economy will spell our doom.
I recently saw a report from a financial institution that predicts that if climate change causes water shortages and farming losses, the impact on economy will be 5%. because the share of farming in the economy is about that much. They have little appreciation for knock on effects.
The finance industry is not run by people who are smarter than the rest of us, it is run by people detached from reality who never pay the price of their mistakes, as happened in 2008
This is super important. It reminds me of the line from "Succession," when Brian Cox says, "The Ford Motor company is barely real. It's a shorthand for a set of financial interests."
We use the word "Boeing" as if it is a real thing. In fact it is a set (as well as many subsets) of individuals pursuing a variety of goals.
When we say "Boeing" quote "lost its way," maybe that is reasonable language for the entirety of the Boeing corporation. But you can just as easily say, "How Boeing willfully endangered the lives of its passengers by cutting corners" if you're referring to the subset of individuals who command Boeing and created this set of incentives.
> run by executives who know nothing about airplanes / engineering
Dennis Mullenberg and Jack Welch were pillaging executives and engineers. The myth of engineering management being inherently incorruptible is empirically misplaced.
> Why does everyone rip on Jack Welch here? Was he ever a Boeing exec?
He was an engineer and an exercise. There is this myth in Silicon Valley about how MBAs and engineers behave in the C suite. It’s empirically unsupported, albeit a satisfying story to tell.
OK, but why does Welch come up so often in Boeing articles? It's like there's this meme that "What happened to Boeing is all Jack Welch's fault!" It comes up over and over and over, and from multiple authors. Why?
James McNerney, the CEO of Boeing who oversaw the development of the 737 MAX, was one of Jack Welch's underlings (along with eventual Home Depot CEO Robert Nardelli and Welch's successor as CEO of GE, Jeff Immelt). [1][2]
The exec brought from McDonnell-Douglas, who was also an adviser to Phil Condit when certain changes (the 7E7 aka 787 program goals and planning, outsourcing strategy, HQ change) were done, and who later replaced Condit as CEO, was well known for being Jack Welch acolyte.
In fact, you can find Jack Welch "acolytes" all over 1990s execs and management and even later, because he was that influential.
It describes how it used providers instead of internalization to push down on the prices.
However, to anyone who might expect it, it doesn’t tell that Boeing has fired 900 QAs out of 3000 back in 2021.
This documentary is not as damning as Al Jezeera’s documentary on the 2013 airframe mishaps: https://youtu.be/rvkEpstd9os
Maybe it’s a European bias, but I’d like to see more shame (and jail time) upon the Boeing management, down to the guy at the bottom who signed off the bolt work without even looking at the plane, which is criminal. But I’m fair, I’d also enjoy the management of Volkswagen going to jail, like that manager who went to holidays through a USA connection and was intercepted by the US border and is still rotting in jail.
> the guy at the bottom who signed off the bolt work without even looking at the plane, which is criminal
Rumour is [1] bolt removal was entered in the tracking system as 'opening' the door rather than 'removing' the door and hence it didn't attract a re-inspection.
Boeing is one of the crown jewel flag carrying brands of US superiority, a major jobs provider across several states, and a huge defense supplier, nobody from Boeing is ever going to jail.
Deals will be done behind closed doors on how to sort things out quietly and the show will go on.
> Boeing is one of the crown jewel brands of US superiority, and a huge defense supplier
It is precisely for that reason that people should be going to prison for fucking with it. Sending Boeing people to prison for fraud would protect the strategic value of Boeing, not threaten it. When a metallurgist was found to have fraudulently signed off on steel for US nuclear submarines, she was sent to prison for it. That's the way it should work at Boeing too, but unfortunately the short-term financial concerns are drowning out the long term strategic concerns.
> Boeing is one of the crown jewel brands of US superiority
was.
That is definitely - at least for now - a thing of the past. I'm pretty sure they could regain that position if they really went for it but at the moment they are as much an asset as they are a liability. If they weren't also that 'huge defense supplier' they would have been in far more trouble than they are and by rights they should be.
One of the ways the “West” begins/is losing its way: don’t prioritize the truth and don’t focus on the truly important things. Think short term. It took them long to get to this point.
It's not the West as a whole, it's a specific group of MBA-types which hijacked many institutions. We know where the problem is coming from. We have enough people who want to do stuff like building planes properly. The next step is to make domain knowledge mandatory for leadership roles.
We also have the same issue in politics and journalism: People with lightweight backgrounds making big decisions/observations/conclusions that actually require domain expertise.
No those MBAs are just servants. It is the shareholders. And it is not only Boeing that has this problem. Investors want the line to go up and everything else be damned. And humans are exceptionally bad at long term planning.
In my work as a senior software engineer, half of my work is to write some “popular science” versions of documents to educate the leadership. I have to over simplify the system to fit into their needs. It seems to me they don’t have the patience to understand some real complexity of the system, or even don’t have the curiosity to.
They looks more like business man too me, instead of their title as software engineer director.
The cultures that focus on performance. Just like the West did in the past. Now, with DEI/woke agendas, the focus is definitely on something else, especially in academia.
DEI does to society what the penny pushers at Boeing did to their business: chasing the wrong objectives in search of some theoretical goal leads both to ruin. If any DEI implementation is not 'stoopid' that is only by happenstance, not due to some kernel of truth lurking behind the discriminatory revolutionary synthetic-society ideological hodgepodge that DEI is. There is no truth to be had there, only ideology.
The Ideology is common people having baked in prejeduces, not becoming aware of them, and I'm continuously baffled how so many people on HN can't see beyond their own default view.
The other Ideology is DEI usually being a pet project in corporate, more there to use for PR than to enact real change. HR will always reserve the right to fuck you over with all means available, and if that includes your race, gender or religion, they'll happily use that. This is a good extreme example: https://fandomwire.com/transgender-former-bethesda-employee-...
The fundamental observation that many kinds of prejudices that continue for generations create lasting harm for those that have been prejudiced against and their descendants is kind of self-evident.
The “woke” or DEI mindset is as far as I can tell, in origin basically about acknowledging that.
Then all sorts of things, including social media pressures, combined with grievance and resentment have led people really far astray in their attempts to “make things right”.
So I understand the visceral reaction the words can cause for some people, and partly agree.
However, the underlying observation is true, and if one for example were looking for a candidate and would, inspired by this observation, spend extra effort to advertise to certain groups, then that would be a pretty sensible DEI implementation.
Any sort of relaxed standards or claims that math is racist or something is bad however.
Racial or gender quotas are also dangerous, if they’re used it needs to be very careful and temporary.
I do feel that while this sort of stupid stuff obviously happens, is discriminatory and very bad, and should be stopped, it is probably being blown out of proportion as part of a bigger political fight.
No, the notion that the culture shift at Boeing is an indication of general "western decline" and that such things didn't happen 20-50 years ago, and that we just need to rid ourselves of bad influences (like the person above me getting upset about DEI, despite no link to current issues as Boeing) to become great again.
Incidentally, this is a popular narrative in fascist regimes.
I think what people don't fully appreciate is that the US will never allow Boeing to go bankrupt. A ecosystem around it is too important for the military industry.
Worst case scenario they'll order 200 of the worst assembled 737s as troop carriers. Hopefully they'll then just have them sit in an Arizona desert.
Is it possible for a hundred billion dollar company to hold constant stream of innovation that is not in big tech?
From what I understand MBA-fication of innovation is inevitable. Innovation is funded by revenue and revenue is backed by sales. Sales is driven by "who you know" aka networking.
Technical prowess will convince someone to buy your product, but networking gets you through the doors in the first. Inevitably you need MBAs to generate revenue. After a certain points MBA-fication creeps in to engineering decisions and innovation.
From what I understand, innovation is largely fueled by chaos and risk. MBA fundamentally is about risk minimization and certainty. So, I can't blame Boeing, like I can't blame Intel, IBM, Ford, GM, General Electric, Phillips etc.
Normally I’ll deep into the apologia and explain stuff like “why VHS is actually better than Beta”, which, yes, is something I believe. But I only have a limited stockpile of apologia for why the market chose correctly and gave us the better product. There is an unlimited supply of counterexamples, where an inferior product won out, even when you consider things like manufacturing cost.
Sales are driven by convincing the most people (or the deepest pockets) to buy your product. It doesn't have to be the best, it has to be the best marketed.
The most mendacious and destructive idea to have ever been been conceived. Customers, employees and governments can screw themselves, only the wealthy matter. Propped up by the concept of a corporation as a legal entity with the same rights as a person, who happens to be a sociopath.
If the board is solely elected by shareholders, whose interests do you expect them to prioritise?
In some EU countries, they put union/employee reps on corporate boards. Generally done by having two boards - a supervisory board containing union/employee reps, which in turn appoints a management board without them. The CEO reports to the management board which in turn reports to the supervisory board
But it doesn’t necessarily stop scandals/mismanagement/corruption - Volkswagen has a supervisory board with employer/union reps, but that didn’t stop Dieselgate. Would employee/union reps on Boeing’s board have stopped the 737 MAX debacle? Hard to know
Boeing has to redesign how they design planes (for example without outsourcing not just the manufacturing but also the design of various pieces as they are currently doing), then design a new plane that's safer and cheaper. They don't have the money to do that. A government bailout may be the only solution, because otherwise we'll be looking at an Airbus monopoly.
> don't have the money to do that. A government bailout may be the only solution
On the condition of bankruptcy, sure. (This is how we did the auto bailouts.)
In reality, we probably need a break-up (and recombination of spun-out factories). Keep the military contractor a monolith. But reïnject competition into our civil aviation sector.
There is competition— they’re just not American companies. It’s an interesting conundrum. Will breaking up the civil part of Boeing help or hurt their ability to compete internationally?
My sense is that a proper rebuild would lose them significant market share for a long time. I’m not sure the government will permit that. They’re a significant part of the economy and nobody likes being in office when it contracts.
> Will breaking up the civil part of Boeing help or hurt their ability to compete internationally?
Almost certainly help. American capital markets give mid-sized companies scale. And they’re already decentralised their operations; they’re already paying the cost of competition. There are just no benefits yet.
Look back at the halcyon days of civil jet aviation; America dominated in large part due to its internal competition.
> But reinject competition into our civil aviation sector.
This is the same US government that gave Boeing the 300% foreign aircraft tariff in an attempt to kill the Bombardier CS100. Which they then sold to Airbus (who have a manufacturing presence in the US, so no tariff) so the jet could live.
These are explicitly not a design issue, but a manufacturing process issue.
And I'm not sure if you want current Boeing to do a clean-sheet 737 replacement with their current engineering culture. The reason it isn't more unsafe is that a lot of it was designed so long ago (some parts even as far back as the 707).
Then again, the Dreamliner seems to be doing okay-ish now.
> These are explicitly not a design issue, but a manufacturing process issue.
Not true. The reason MCAS was needed is because of a design issue. Also, if you watch the video, Boeing didn't just outsource manufacturing - they also outsourced the design.
The current issue with the plug door is. MCAS is the second sentence. And I'd still consider that a process failure, when engineers only ever tested the upgrade variant AOA indicator and didn't notice the non-upgraded glass cockpit advisory didn't work and nobody is specifically responsible for making sure the code is reviewed.
And oursourcing wasn't new. The here praised 737 NG had parts delivered by subcontractor Ducommun in the early 2000s that were allegedly so defective, they had to be rejected entirely. Except the Boeing of the early 2000s caught it, and late 2010s Boeing didn't.
The Boeing of 2000s was also hell-bent on switching to outsourcing, down to cutting off its own pieces like Boeing Wichita (which became Spirit Aerosystems)
It isn't necessarily capitalism. The plan economy didn't do well either.
It's that the overall mind set has turned to greed, and (almost) everybody thinks it's ok. So people grab what they can at any cost. You can see it on this forum as well.
This is a common excuse or conspiracy theory if you live near Mac or Boeing plants, it may or may not be true.
Boeing bought Mac in '97, over 25 years ago. That's a whole generation of employees. Coming from St. Louis I've been hearing Boeing folks blame Mac for their failures for years which is probably because few are left from Mac to disagree, and when Mac folks did complain it was when they were getting laid off around 99.
It's been 25 years, these problems now are all of Boeing's makings, there is no Mac and hasn't been for a long time. Mac didn't make the MAX nor did it not bolt doors to planes. All of this is easily explained by general growth and stagnation of a company but conspiracies are more fun. None of this fixes the current issues.
I can see the copium is strong with this group. Does it really matter who's to blame when the problems are at this level? It just needs a fix.
Boeing bought Mac, but Mac's management and priorities infected Boeing. Maybe Boeing's old-school managers would have succumbed to Jack Welch's financialization scheme, lured by fat stacks of cash, but Mac's people certainly accelerated that process.
You can convincingly argue that Mac did make the MAX and Mac did oversee a process where planes flew without doors bolted on, because Boeing no longer exists. It's just Mac wearing Boeing's branding and facilites like a skin suit.
Remember, the person who oversaw the start of the changes was a Boeing lifer - by the time Condit left due to corruption scandal caused by his subordinates and let an ex-McD-D executive in, he had already initiated outsourcing strategy and the idea that Boeing was to concentrate only on "final integration", changed the HQ, and set goals and rules for 7E7 (today's 787) project including ridiculous cost cuts (the project, which used completely new technologies for Boeing, was supposed to cost 1/4th of 777!)
What does it mean? It presents Boeing as a ‘separate’ entity that has to throw a bone to shareholders and executives. But they are Boeing, they own it and run it. There is no separation.
A more accurate way to describe it would be to say that the owners of Boeing decided to pillage the company and put money into their own pocket - sell factories and do share buybacks. Get rid of talent, etc. The exact same thing is happening across the board, in every company in the west, American railways, water companies in UK, and now it has come for us, it’s happening in google and Microsoft.
They are run by executives who know nothing about airplanes / engineering and don’t give a shit.
We are catering to financialisation and killing the real economy. The idea that when financial institutions make money that’s the main thing in the economy will spell our doom.
I recently saw a report from a financial institution that predicts that if climate change causes water shortages and farming losses, the impact on economy will be 5%. because the share of farming in the economy is about that much. They have little appreciation for knock on effects.
The finance industry is not run by people who are smarter than the rest of us, it is run by people detached from reality who never pay the price of their mistakes, as happened in 2008