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.
Yes, a very interesting article. And awful to think annout all those top management people that caused this will probably not see any punishment at all. They have actual people’s lives on their conscience after those crashes, but I doubt they care.
It’s frustrating because instead of consequences, all they see are benefits. They got or are getting their paydays so it really worked out for the villains.
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.”"
Hadn't the case been going around for years before that? It started in 2017.
It seems odd that it would happen now, when there is a bunch of press around it. Especially when someone conveniently dying would just make people assume foul play.
It was the right time to ensure the right stock price at the right time.
An enormous company like Boeing always has myriad legal things going on. There's always a little litigious jitter in their stock price.
Everything Swampy knew, the big cheeses did too and more. Statements entering the courts' records makes them more difficult to casually dismiss. Evidence of top echelon mismanagement becomes a problem, a stock price problem.
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.
Gotta say, I'm a blue collar who also builds sensitive machinery, have been doing so for six years now.
There is a VERY sharp divide in how well I consider myself to have mastered certain aspects of the job.
Someone fucking kill me: I'm doing this job for the first time and I'm having to spend ages sifting through our processes that may not be documented in enough detail to do the job perfectly. The job is legally safe because I'm following the rules but god I don't like it. Takes about three times as long as a 'normal' task.
This is fine: I've done the job enough to know how everything goes together, what torque to use where, and if there's anything I should really be doing that isn't in the instructions, or if there's an instruction mismatch.
Mastery: I can not only do the job, I actually understand the explicit purpose and function of everything I'm putting together on an intimate level, and can use my knowledge of that purpose and function to make god damn sure that what I'm putting out is top quality. As probably the least sensitive example of this, this is stuff like knowing that the particular brand of no-mixing-needed paint we use can sometimes develop a sediment layer of its' pigments on the bottom that requires you to mix it with a stick for the paint to perform properly, and that you can tell when the paint is experiencing this issue because it'll be off-colour due to the lack of pigment; and if you don't resolve this issue the paint won't adhere to surfaces correctly and is liable to flake off.
I've been doing this for six years and there are only a handful of aspects of my job I consider myself to have complete mastery over. I don't think I'm the best worker out there, not by a long shot, but to me the idea that you can just lose and replace your workforce when dealing with complicated machinery is about as stupid as the notion that AI can replicate the human mind (It can't unless you abandon the von-neumann computer design).
What I do is similar, and our customers are in house so we have some latitude. We've got fairly loose standards about how we build most things, and usually more than one option - but the finished product has rigid requirements. We get to "equivalent or better" some things, but even knowing that is kind of fucky. Grade 8 hardware is better than grade 5, right? Except for safety critical shit. Then you need stress disposition to go to grade 8.
We've lost a lot of old peeps to golden handshakes and being mad at the company/union. In a few years my org lost an absurd number of years of experience. Think thousands.
MBAs ruin everything
The paradigm shift from an MBA becoming a degree for showing you are a connected, yet glorified project manager, to a Jack Welch disciple is astounding.
Why anyone would ever hire a pure MBA graduate is beyond me. Yes, please make my business a complete failure while extracting all the wealth for short term gains. This is amazing.
Oh I completely understand the why. Get a golden parachute in your contract, hire MBAs to cannibalise the company for short-term gains, then leave the company obscenely rich before the dumpster fire you created bites anyone in the ass. Rinse and repeat until you have all the money.
For Boeing's execs, they just got caught before they could cut and run.
As an engineer I too hate MBAs
This is not a paywall Please register or sign in
I've never seen one of those full screen obnoxious windows actually going out of its way to declare itself as not being a paywall before. Interesting.
uBlock Origin has a nifty Zap feature that works well on idiot web developer fads.
they have been subjected to groundbreaking management strategies
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.
I didn't read this, but did you guys know that Zerglings from the game StarCraft: Brood War have a unique upgrade called Adrenal Glands. After applying the upgrade they are colloquially referred to as "Cracklings" because they attack so quickly. This upgrade, only available after evolving a Hive, makes Zerglings extremely effective in the late game, and allows them to swarm enemy units and bases much more effectively. Despite their small size and low health, with this upgrade, Zerglings can become a critical component of the Zerg army, showcasing the game's strategic depth and the importance of upgrades.
I did read this.
I didn't read this, but did you know that the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV has a free trial, and includes the entirety of A Realm Reborn AND the award-winning Heavensward expansion up to level 60 with no restrictions on playtime?
Man I really hate these you need effective crowd control at all times of against Zerg but as Protoss I'm always too slow to tech into robotics.
Interestingly Protos makes the best rusher. You can get 1 protos zealot out before anyone has effective defense. The 1 zealot can kill several drones before dying. As long as you kill more drones than the cost of the zealot, you'll eventually win by attrition. By the time the zerg has defense to stop the harassment, the Protos is ahead in its economy.
I didn't read this.
I didn't read this.
Then why are you commenting on it?
You post first, then RTFA after, as always 😉
Please step away from screens for a bit. There are bad things/people in the world. Always have been, always will be. Your comment history has me worried for your sake.
Linux is a lifestyle
Yeah this guy has issues
— a fellow Linux user
I got into Linux because it had cool 3d cube effects. Now I use Linux because people pay me to... And because it has cool stuff like 3d cube effects.
Ok doomer.
I say the above not as an insult, but because I want to make a point.
Look up doomism. It’s a tool of climate change deniers. We are not dead yet. Nothing going on now is truly impossible to fix. It’s certainly not easy. It’s hard af. But just because it’s hard, doesn’t mean we should let ourselves give up. We shouldn’t let ourselves fall into a doomer mindset. Because the very moment we do, the moment we accept the doom, then the doom becomes our fate.
Don’t give up. Don’t encourage other people to give up. Don’t say it’s over when we’re still fighting. It’s only over when it’s over.
I bet World War II must have been psychologically devastating to witness. It must have felt like the whole world was falling apart. Like it would never bring itself back together. Can you imagine? Watching Hitler take over country after country. Watching the bombs fall in London. And the Cold War. Where people were so sure it was the end of humanity, because we were going to kill ourselves dropping nukes on each other.
There are so many moments it was horrible. So horrible that we couldn’t even imagine there would be a way out. A good future.
But there was. Things got better. Countries rebuilt. The Cold War ended. No one dropped any nukes.
See, climate change, and companies taking our data, and AI, and the rich getting richer… all that? That’s our WWII. That’s our thing causing hopelessness and devastation and fear in everyone.
The doomism is a plague we’ve been dealing with since probably the dawn of humanity.
We can get through this. Maybe we won’t. But the chance we will isn’t even that small. As long as there’s a chance: fight for it.
There are people in the world right now who really do wake up every day to hell on earth, like you or I can't imagine
And people who have no ability at all (at least right now) to change things
I'm not saying things are easy for you or sit in judgement or anything like that. I hope things get better and I really do. But at the same time if you're on Lemmy, you are not either one of those.
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.
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 assume this is all some elaborate joke based on an alternate universe, since in our reality, the golden age of safe aviation and good engineering on the planes corresponded to strong safety regulations, and deregulation is exactly what cleared the way for Boeing management to cut corners in the exact negligent-homicidal way they are doing and have done. I can’t find the punch line though, can you help me?
Ah yes. Blame the regulations for busting up the union, moving production to South Carolina, then firing all the expensive workers that care about quality control.
Right, those pesky regulations that require things like bolts on door panels. DAMN THEM. DAMN THEM ALL.
It’s those damn lazy bolts, I set up a perfect environment for them and none of them stepped up and held the door closed, no one wants to work anymore, see this is why I hate immigrants and young people
Boeing hasn’t built a new plane in a very long time.
Wait, what? They have created the 787 in the 2000s and the 777X and 737 MAX in the 2010s.
The issues are not because they didn't have projects, but because those projects were done primarily thinking about costs, time and profits. Do it fast and do it cheap always means do it bad, and this applies to any industry
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.
Should we laugh at this? Lolz? If anything regulations should encourage better safety innovations! Government wants safety and efficacy from corporations that directly affect people's lives. Just look at Volvo and tell me their reputation isn't known for safety.
Regulations are pain in the hole, I get it, but without it we are back to the days of selling snake oils and monopolies of the Gilded Age. As they say in my field: "Do you think compliance is expensive? Think non-compliance." The only people discouraging regulations are the ones who stand to benefit from ridding it in the name of short term profit. STOCKS ARE UP!
The 787 entered service in 2011. I would not call that a very long time.
They absolutely should have produced a clean sheet 737 replacement. But cost overruns from the 787 program, competition from the much faster to develop A320neo, and worries about existing operators going A320 if they developed a new type rating stupidity scared them off.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
