What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane
What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane
Interesting article.
“For every new plane you put up into the sky there are about 20,000 problems you need to solve, and for a long time we used to say Boeing’s core competency was piling people and money on top of a problem until they crushed it,” says Stan Sorscher, a longtime Boeing physicist and former officer of the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA), the labor union representing Boeing engineers. But those people are gone.
FTA:
"By now you know what became of Swampy: He was found dead a few weeks ago with a gunshot wound to his right temple, “apparently” self-inflicted, on what was meant to be the third day of a three-day deposition in his whistleblower case against his former employer; his amended complaint, which his lawyer released last week, is the basis for much of this story.
It is worth noting here that Swampy’s former co-workers universally refuse to believe that their old colleague killed himself. One former co-worker who was terrified of speaking publicly went out of their way to tell me that they weren’t suicidal. “If I show up dead anytime soon, even if it’s a car accident or something, I’m a safe driver, please be on the lookout for foul play.”"
About the article itself:
Like most neoliberal institutions, 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.
We-ell, ideologically what people usually call "neoliberal" doesn't discard the latter. Just the former is considered assets and the latter human resources. Here's where the problems arise, cause human resources here means both domain area knowledge\expertise and various kinds of sales\politics.
The kind of bosses they have simply think that their social\political\criminal skills are the core, fundamentally needed human resource, and the rest is not.
It's a bit like all those normies dreaming of replacing engineers with chatbots, and becoming excited (almost to the degree of yelling out loud with triumph "finally we are going to get rid of them"). Their worldview puts human ingenuity in themselves and their social existence, and what engineers do is in their opinion like tooling, a less high-level job, something that machines can do.
I'm not sure if Boeing is going the same route we are, but blue collar people - the ones building and assembling airplanes - are treated like replaceable cogs. They aren't taught the actual meaning or point of quality/quality management systems. It's mostly warm bodies. When I ask people if they've read the specs that cover the processes they're doing, they stare at me. It's maddening. You're performing a complex process solely on OJT? Fucking lunacy.
they have been subjected to groundbreaking management strategies
It's actually a process between design engineers, manufacturing engineers and their interaction with the builders. Somehow the right instructions evolve from that. And somehow the skills are gained and up kept by making parts. There's no easy way around it or short cut. It will take a long time to fix.
Great read
This story, like most corporate stories these days, frustrates me.
This is a tale as old as time...the time when American corporations went to shit as our elected officials ensured there was no liability and realistic legal consequences to executes or MBA decision making.
I'm not a business scholar obviously. I've always been led to believe that in order for the world to turn and air to be breathable, corporations and businesses need liability protection for those who run it. Why?
If I kill someone with my car, even if it was completely an accident, I'm still liable right? Should I account for the death of that person, child, etc?
How would things not be better if, instead of the bottom line and stock price being the ultimate concern of CEOs, it was them not going to court to face charges because they allowed their company to kill people with its negligence? I know there's some nuance here, but ultimately, I feel like everything sucks because there's no incentive to care about anything but investors and greed.
If industry, aerospace or other, was run by people who cared about not killing people and going to jail, would they in turn ensure their design and production met the quality and ambition of the type of people here, discussing their accounts of cutting corners or experienced personnel just to save money?
Either use a paywall or a cookie wall. That thing is just crappy
They retired. Boeing hasn't built a new plane in a very long time. Part of it is management, and part is regulatory issues. Yes management has consistently forced out people with knowledge, and replaced them with less experienced people. That happens in every industry, it's not always catastrophic.
The real problem is due to the regulatory environment. Yes those rules are important, but they've also effectively banned new aircraft from being built. There are now generations of engineers that are experienced in making a new aircraft look like a small tweak to an existing one. The perverse incentives created by the regulations changed Boeing from a company that built aircraft, to a company that just games regulation. A similar thing happened to the auto industry to a lesser extent.
I didn't read this.
But life isn't what people think it is. Not many people are actually really living. And there's a lot more evil in everyone's daily lives than they could imagine. Right under their noses. It's closer to a "worse case scenario" than it's is freedom or living. Hell is real and we live there.
...sorry for sounding so angsty and poetic? But it's true. And we can't even fix or change this it's all so far gone, built by generations of greed and "evil". There are no sides... Just you, just me all individually stuck in hell. Killing ourselves fighting limitless devil's our naiveness of generations helped build and thrive.