If you read this article looking for new or surprising insight, you won'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.
What this article offers is new detail into exactly how 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.
It's worth reading, perhaps unless you're going to be flying on a Boeing plane anytime soon.
"the lengths to which they went to ensure all prior institutional knowledge regarding how to properly build a plane was systematically destroyed."
why do this intentionally?
Stock price gains.
Fire all the longest-tenured, highest-salaried employees. Now you have a company that appears to look similar but with millions of dollars fewer per year in headcount expenses.
Boeing's stock price went up 10x in the time frame covered by the article. The people responsible for gutting the company have cashed out.
>Boeing's stock price went up 10x in the time frame covered by the article. The people responsible for gutting the company have cashed out.
Why does the stock market reward idiot shit like this?
I've seen the same whit a a large US semiconductor company. In the 2008 crunch, the fired the most tenured employees and offshored the work abroad. Granted, the company didn't fail, their stock went up and now it's 5-7x that amount.
Well at a first order, the answer is that the stock market as a system for promoting value creation is an imperfect approximation of an ideal value creator, and more and more we are beginning to see the myriad of ways this concept produces antisocial results. (See for example the state of hospitals and schools, and the rising rate of individuals with crippling medical and college debt.)
More directly there has been some criticism of the stock market for rewarding short term gain over long term value, which among other things has led to the creation of the Long Term Stock Exchange:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Stock_Exchange
I should add that our short term market-based approach to economic activity fails to produce appropriate housing outcomes, and that the approaches in Vienna or Singapore could end our homelessness crisis and make everyone happier. I recently read a doctor’s account of the homeless people who use the ER as a community space by complaining of minor illnesses, and it seems so clear to me it would be cheaper to give them small private subsidized housing (not the awful and alienating “shelters” that offer no privacy or storage and have strict rules, making the street more appealing). Fixing housing could be cheaper than them using the ER or paying for their prison space, and it would also make the streets of San Francisco smell a LOOOT better (and BART), but our short term market based system just chops up everything good, sells it for parts, and speculates on all the land and buildings.
https://www.shareable.net/public-housing-works-lessons-from-...
What happened to all the public toilets in US/UK? I remember there being many more, am I hallucinating this?
Many 2nd world countries still have them, for good reason!
People defile them, use them for shelters, or drug ingestion stations. There's no innovative way to solve homelessness. It's an insidious problem that defies any method to redress. Any angle you try to approach it from will be abused or defeated in some way.
I am sorry but I don’t think you realise how ridiculous this sounds to someone not from the west.
See, while India is building public toilets and becoming more civilised, we, with this attitude, are moving in the opposite direction.
If we can manage to maintain a toilet in Russia and India, 1st world countries somehow cannot - that’s just a statement of social distinction.
I mean yes, dealing with that is the basic responsibility of running a toilet
Well, you can either have human rights (non-authoritarian states who won't use the police to crack down on this behaviour) or clean public toilets. Of course Singapore for instance has the cleanest public toilets, but you can also pay a 2k fine for chewing gum.
You don’t need authoritarianism to have clean public facilities. Americans truly have a learned helplessness about what is achievable in this world.
I'm European mate. I haven't been to a single country over here that consistently (let's say 50%+ chance) had clean public bathrooms.
Singapore on the other hand was close to 100%.
Excuse me, I am a European and Czechia consistently has clean public bathrooms and baby changing rooms!
And we have human rights, and so does India
Why do you need to come up with wild excuses?
western-est west has decided they can’t be bothered to deal with some issues, like hygene, or, in case of UK, human waste in rivers
Comparing Indian culture to US is like comparing auto parts to aircraft parts, there's no point in continuing the discussion.
>and that the approaches in Vienna
Vienna's approach worked because it happened after WW2 when the country was bombed and broken, land, construction materials and labor were dirt cheap, so the state built over half the city's homes and turned them into public housing cheaply no problem.
But fast forward to today where most of the land and buildings in a city are privately owned, how to you expect a city, any city, to buy up over half the buildings in the city at today's market and turn them into public housing?
The city would probably have to go broke or into huge amounts of debt and everyone would be screaming communism.
Even in the rest of Austria, this approach today would not be feasible due to how insane the cost of urban housing ahs reached no city could afford to buy up over half of it.
The monetary appreciation of housing prices and and turning it into an speculative asset is the west's biggest policy failure. You'd have to undo this first before you can think of implementing Vienna's policies.
It didn't though, they already started in the 1920ies! The most famous builing, Karl-Marx-Hof, started construction in 1927.
And they are building new public housing to this day, making use of inner city land that comes available from old factories, storage facilities, rail yards or alongside private construction projects etc. Other austrian cities do this too.
Agreed on the policy failure though.
>And they are building new public housing to this day,
Sure, a bit yes, but the bulk was acquired/made back when property was dirt cheap, not at today's prices. Vienna couldn't replicate the same move from scratch today.
You cannot start to do today in any city what Vienna started 100 years ago. It's too late now. The fiscal policies of the last decades have made that unfeasible.
>Other austrian cities do this too.
Not even remotely as much as Viena. Graz has next to no public housing, it's mostly private.
Right so you’re saying Vienna’s approached worked but we would have to change things to make it work for us. That is exactly what I am saying too.
I’m also saying that it could be worth considerable effort to try to make those changes, because the reward is a much better system.
For example we might introduce bills now that help stabilize (reduce) housing prices by limiting large scale corporate speculation on housing, such as these two bills [below] introduced into congress. With cheaper housing available, the need for social housing goes down and so does the cost to build it, dramatically lowering the total cost to implement.
https://projects.propublica.org/represent/bills/117/hr9246
https://projects.propublica.org/represent/bills/117/s5151
Yes and part of what I’m saying is that we might want to stop doing that and think about what is actually going to fix our problems, even if gasp the government is involved. Nobody can afford housing and our planes are falling out of the sky and we’re having a cold-war political debate while every other major country offers cheaper medical care and education.
That would require actually listening to each other and experts, and not using demagoguery to villainize people who disagree with us on minor culture issues. Again, the financial incentives align for the anti-social aspect, since yelling at each other draws in more engagement and viewers and sells more ad-space.
It's extremely unfair to blame "market based solutions" for failing to fix SF housing problems when it's pretty clear the largest hurdle is NIMBYism politically blocking new housing developments.
For example here: https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/s-f-housing-clash-yim...
The locals won't even LET other people build new housing. They definitely aren't going to start footing the bill and building the housing themselves
yet
Ummmm. State hospitals and schools are not traded on our stock exchanges. If there's a failure here, it's not with equities markets.
There's an obvious common denominator between the examples you give, and that these are the most highly-regulated industries in America. My first guess as to where to lay blame would be on those regulations - although we'd really need to dig into whatever the specific failures you're thinking of, if we want to be sure.
Because state hospitals aren’t publicly listened they aren’t broken by this?
Yes I forgot every aspect of state run hospitals are the same…
But except wait.. almost every aspect of what makes that hospital is on the stock market.
“See the state of hospitals” meaning the situation with hospitals, many of which it seems are private. Our schools are a mixture of state and publicly owned (I’m including college) but even state funded schools suffer due to their reliance on stock market driven suppliers such as textbook companies and the housing the teachers live in.
Considering medical and educational costs (total system costs including government expense) are much higher here than they are for example in Germany which has State run institutions for both, I would see this as a poor assumption.
However I’m not actually advocating for State-run institutions, as I would rather see locally owned cooperatives for housing and schools, and larger federations of cooperatives for medical research. My point is that short term market-based winner-take-all approaches are hurting us.
I should add that the broad topic of discussion here is Boeing, which degraded in critical safety metrics after moving to a relaxed regulation environment and focusing on market based short term optimization.
Hospitals and schools don’t support this thesis: in the USA, the bulk of the operators in both segments are either governments or non-profits.
Because the market is barely better than a ponzi scheme.
There's ___just___ enough laws around it to keep people somewhat okay with it.
That’s nonsense.
Markets are the best way we’ve come up with to allocate capital. Committees and commissars do not do a better job.
The potential for benevolence of a market is lesser than an enlightened individual.
Yes, but the likelihood of an individual being enlightened is less than either.
Then why is internal governance and resource allocation inside companies done by committees and commissars and dictators, instead of by an unplanned free market?
That’s actually a really good question. I would direct you to Ronald Coase and other writing on the theory of the firm.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm
Properly regulated, competitive markets. Aerospace regulation is based on a lot of trust, which Boeing seems to have exploited, causing this problem. The market is not competitive; there are only two players and the output of only one of them cannot meet demand.
Dichotomies are good for making punctual arguments online, but you do yourself a huge disservice by using them to frame the options in your own mind. Do you honestly think that the options are 1. Antisocial free market allowed to do whatever it wants for capital gain, or 2. Despotic communism? You are smarter than that.
I could have been clearer, but I honestly meant my point to be limited to the stock market as a means for allocating capital.
I do favor markets in general and I understand their limitations.
And with respect to allocating capital, stock markets have proven to be better than the varying degrees of state economies.
True. :-)
Because, depressingly, the stock market is correct.
Boeing is one of two manufacturers for planes of this size. The other is totally backlogged with orders. The stock market has assessed, correctly, that Boeing can withstand this loss of knowledge and keep generating profit. Does it result in shit equipment that literally kills people? Sure. But how many people are going to stop flying because of it? Not many. Throw in the lucrative military connections and you’ve got yourself a sure bet.
I'm not getting on a Boeing plane again. More on principle than fear of my life. And yeah, I'm probably in a group that is not statistically important.
I flew this week. There were two 737 flights at about 130€ then one with an A320 at 220€. I took the Airbus. Same reason as you.
I think that many of the managers honestly didn’t understand where the quality and safety came from. They probably thought that they could just coast and the quality would continue.
As a counterpoint, I work at very large financial firm in technology and in general, the 20+ year veterans who’ve been here forever are terrible. They are hidebound in their actions, years behind in industry best practices and they maintain little fiefdoms simply because of their intimate knowledge of the banks arcane and idiosyncratic policies. The place would be better of without the bulk of them.
That is to say we are the complete opposite of what Boeing was. But the most charitable interpretation you could offer the Boeing management is that they thought they were in the situation of my company rather than the situation they actually had.
You're being too generous. Boeing actively retaliated against people raising safety concerns. That's not the action of people who didn't know any better.
People won't stop flying until they do - or at least stop flying on Boeing aircraft. And if airlines can't make a profit on a Boeing aircraft flight, there won't be any more Boeing aircraft flights.
I don't know whether the point where the market for Boeing aircraft travel is one disaster away or ten disasters away, but it is out there. When it comes, people won't stop flying, but they will fly less, and it will cost more. It can happen.
I blame index funds. Pump the % gain, index funds buy it up because it looks like a better ROI. Abuse that by doing short term shit and ride the wave of self fulfilling prophecy by the index funds buying into it (amplifying noise into a signal) and leave retail/workers holding the bags.
I get that statistically DIY'ing your portfolio will almost always lead to worse returns but I really do wish I could exclude certain stocks from my index funds.
I don't think the timing adds up for this explanation. Friedman introduced the shareholder value doctrine in 1970, and Jack Welch's Pierre Hotel speech that kicked off the era of slash-and-burn management was in 1981. Meanwhile, index funds were a tiny fraction of assets under management until well into the 2000s.
I am starting to believe more and more that the shareholder value movement has done enormous damage to the social fabric. It basically declares that the only stakeholders of an economy are owners. Anybody else doesn’t count. If this doesn’t change, then progress in AI and robotics will lead to a very dystopian society with a few haves and many have nots.
1) That's not how index funds work: they attempt to track a target market index. At most, it happens indirectly: get your company into the major indices by a short-sighted depletion of capital, and you can get some level of lift from index funds blindly purchasing your stock (though IIRC it's not a huge effect).
2) You can effectively remove certain companies from an index using derivatives in addition to the index fund. Alternatively, look into direct indexing, where you attempt to track an index by directly owning an appropriately weighted basket of stocks, though it tends to be more complicated, have greater tracking errors, and have higher fees.
Index funds do not buy shares because shares “look like a better ROI”. Index funds buy because non index funds buy (and same with selling).
Because if you look at it by the numbers, expenses went down whilst output remained. If you’re an investor that investigates annual reports on finances, this would pique your interest. There is no way to price the talent and knowledge of your workforce until after they have left.
I really like that last sentence. 'There is no way to price the talent and knowledge of your workforce until after they have left.' I think that captures so much in such a simple to understand way.
Because as someone buying stock, I have no idea whether these kinds of things are right and necessary to reduce bloat and redundancies in the firm, or idiotic and self-destructive.
All I know is that I probably want to be buying stock in firms that are more profitable, as opposed to less profitable. Or, at least, firms that other people think are going to be more profitable.
Because the entire rewards system is built around short-medium term financial gains.
It is a very old story. People build a company with deep knowledge and caring about what actually makes great products. Financial managers get involved to manage the money aspects of the business. Financial types want a lot more control to make the company more profitable.
The financial management has no actual clue what makes the company valuable. They only know what makes more or less cash flow in this or that direction. But, credit where due, they DO know how to make that work.
They start financially 'engineering' the company for near-term profits and higher stock prices. This works. This works fantastically well. Everything looks leaner, teams of younger workers are sometimes orders of magnitude cheaper than the highly experienced teams, and no one can tell the difference from outside. Profits are higher, stock prices hit record high after record high. Cash is spent on stock buybacks and not R&D or retaining institutional knowledge. Warning flags start showing up in product and service quality indicators, but are ignored and even suppressed. The problems start multiplying at increasing rates, then exponentially increasing rates.
Eventually, it starts to get serious. But by then, the "financial geniuses" have long since cashed out and the core of the company's workforce, ethos, and institutional knowledge has been so gutted that there is no recovery. The death spiral starts in earnest.
The only questions are whether for Boeing, being a critical keystone in the US aerospace and defense industry can or will be allowed to fail, and, if not, if there will be an actual engineering-based turnaround, or if it will be a Soviet-like zombie company for how many years?
Forkin' MBAs, they'll kill it every time.
Because the MBAs and financiers have taken everything over and are working their way through our government now.
Goodhart’s law, unfortunately. Whatever metric the stock market rewards gets gamed like there is no tomorrow (or next quarter, here.)
Because Boeing boosted revenue from $60 to 101 billion during the time frame. And had just a single competitor.
The current stock price is less than half of its 2019 peak.
Wall St geniuses are not engineers.
That said, I bought Boeing stock and held over that time frame. I did so because I could see that humans were going to need more planes over the long term, and there are only two vendors. Also I visited the Everett plant with my family on vacation. It didn't occur to me that it would be worthwhile introducing KPI BS and McDonald's management style when constructing things worth 100 million and safety-critical.
Because Boeing is in an absolutely unique position where they are part of a duopoly in a market where demand for airplanes massively outstrips supply. Boeing's customers have no alternative and Boeing will be selling them planes and the market knows that.
Additionally the stock market can only look a tangible results. There is no measure of "engineering competency" which you could track year over year, which makes these mistakes hard to realize unless you are inside the system.
For the same reason that Ponzi schemes are so successful.
Few stock market investors bother to look beneath top line numbers like profits, revenue growth, etc. Number go up, so stock goes up.
They're exploiting the uninformed, which in this case are retail investors.
I don’t think the market rewards it, at least not by itself.
The problem is that the real money isn’t in the market, the institutional investors make most of their money on commissions. So while short term gains are a nice bonus, it’s only secondary to driving volatility and with it trade volume. So the incentive is to just stir shit up, because that’s what makes them money, both as stock prices go up and down.
Also institutional investors have disproportionate voting power that lets them put their own shit stirrers on the board and subsequently in the C-suite.
Quite simply because investors are often chasing after money only (ie profitability), not necessarily a company's productivity or product quality. And the quicker the profits the better (meaning short term is valued over long term).
Additionally, not all investors are savvy on what's going on with companies, so they decide to invest in ETFs (which mind you, is now the lion's share of investment activity). Now not all ETFs are the same basket of stocks. Some may have 15 stocks, whereas others may consist of 50. This is done so people can "choose their risk tolerance", which is calculated based on various things such as how diversified the fund is (50 stocks is more diversified than 15), what the market caps of the companies are, etc. Anyhow, the point is, choosing to invest in said investment vehicles, has little to do with investing based upon fundamentals, or rewarding productive companies, and more to do with managing a person's personal investment risk. The result? Companies are detached from fundamentals because, quite literally, the majority of investors are not investing based on fundamentals, but based on risk.
The stock market is all about near-term gains, and as a result it is often irrational and rewards destructive behavior.
It seems like this is the same pattern that we've seen happen more broadly in the tech industry over the past year--the big tech companies think they can juice the bottom line by reducing headcount, and the increased profitability will outweigh any negative impact on their engineering performance. It's a perverse incentive that seems very difficult to turn around once it starts happening.
The only thing that seems to work nowadays is name-and-shame (unless you run for president, apparently).
Who are these folks that deserve to be outted for gutting an American institution? I'm sure they're still around, practicing their strain of vulture capitalism.
UPDATE:
Looks like the article points out the following main culprits: * Jim McNerney * Dave Calhoun
This is what Google is actively doing. The layoffs continue and they are culling the most senior employees.
How about eliminate your employees to pump up the stock selling price or whatever and instead of removing the best subordinates, keep them, give them automation capabilities, and remove the unintelligent dross?
That's much better than basically destroying your own company because you don't know how to progress forward and upward. This privilege is reserved for the few who can I guess.
I don't know how much they saved by forcing out highly-paid employees, but it was a tiny amount compared to the 40 billion in additional revenue earned between 2008 and 2018 (60 to 101 billion). The stock market rewarded the company primarily because of the revenue gains.
The intention wasn't to destroy institutional knowledge. The intention was to cut costs in the short term, largely through outsourcing and turnover. Why pay a senior engineer a huge salary when you could replace them with a consultant in their twenties? They just didn't think or care about the consequences.
They adopted a philosophy of management that explicitly assigned no value to institutional knowledge, and thus eliminated anyone who had it as they were not considered worth their salary. From the article:
This is true, they also cut costs by 'finding' less defects in QA, deferring them to production deployment several quarters out.
This is the irony of good QA.
1) Company starts to notice a lot of quality problems.
2) Company institutes a good QA program.
3) Company notices less quality problems.
4) Company cuts QA program because there seems to be less need for it.
Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
(The same can be said for safety when dealing with low probability events).
This doesn't explain Microsoft though, as that's probably a special case. They simply eliminated the Windows QA department, and instead let users do the QA. Why not? It's not like their users are going to switch OSes.
I don’t know about that specifically, but I’ve seen that as a common occurrence as a cost cutting measure in low risk situations. In that case, the risk is low because 1) it’s not safety critical and 2) the switching moat is large enough to ensure they don’t lose customers
Yes.
It is raining.
I use an Umbrella.
Still raining, but I am no longer getting wet.
I must not need the umbrella.
Close the Umbrella
Get wet again.
In that case, the causality is easy to determine. But that’s not the case with more complex systems, so it’s easier to rationalize a bias (I don’t need this expensive QA)
This has been done so many times at this point, shouldn't MBAs have case studies covering the "how companies have rotted from shit decisions made by bean counters" 101 course?
Does it matter to the MBAs? The effect is on long enough terms that they'll be gone by the time everything falls over. They're not there to maximize long-term value, just to get good enough to get promoted and then maybe switch companies.
In my experience, the term "tribal knowledge" is a pejorative, and has been disparaged by many authors (some, that I respect).
Also, in my experience, "tribal knowledge" is an essential ingredient in classical Maximum Quality engineering. I'm not saying that it's the only way, but I have seen many, many other ways fail.
It's something that -no exaggeration- humans have been doing for thousands of years.
It's just that we have a crew at the top that sincerely believe they know better. Every now and then, one hits it out of the park.
The rest ... not so much.
Rather: Money > consequences. And so far, they've been right. How likely will old managers that have long left, but fully participated, be held accountable?
You may be right.. your comment reminded me of the formula from Fight Club. Maybe the airlines made that calculus, reasoning that, after all this time their planes were safe enough, and the chance of an accident were low. Even still, it was cheaper to settle lawsuits.
"A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
The airlines brought a high-quality aircraft. Up to the first failures of the Max, there was no reason at all to expect Boeings to be badly done.
The Ford Pinto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Cost%E2%80%93benefi...
Y'all're gonna hate this, but financialization and the relentless pursuit of profits. Every time this stuff happens, people ask why, and it's because of greed. When you focus on making money above all else, this is what happens. It's not a mystery.
This is where regulation steps in. A regulatory body should make the cost of certain failure scenarios so painful that companies are incentivized to make better choices. We probably don't need regulations about the color choices of t-shirts, but safety & testing for mass-transit vehicles might be warranted.
That's the future guy's problem. So long as it is possible to cash out before the consequences happen that sort of regulation won't move the needle much.
Making it illegal to be a bad CEO is one of those things that sounds intriguing on paper, but would be a nightmare to implement in real life.
Prosecutor: "You inflated investor returns by sabotaging the future survival of the company and made shoddy products that killed people."
Former CEO: "So what?"
The worst part is that this is a real problem. So many formerly strong companies have been brought down by this behavior that it is becoming notable when it doesn't happen. We are allowing these guys to destroy the American economy slowly just because it makes them and their close buddies ridiculous money. And of course the government is largely captured by these same people, so Washington isn't going to help. Just so frustrating.
This phenomenon also explains some others that may or may not be surprising:
1. Founder led companies have higher returns. And it's by A LOT. Hard to quantify exactly but, I've seen quoted numbers as high as 20% outperformance for founder led companies.
2. The biggest corporations never remain the biggest. Where is the Dutch East India company today? More recent examples: IBM was overtaken by Nippon Telephone, was overtaken by Exxon Mobil, was overtaken by GE, was overtaken by Microsoft etc.
3. It's not very common that a company stays in the S&P 500 for more than 30 years. The average lifespan is 21 years.
The common thread is that as soon as the sociopath MBA's take over, they Boeing the whole business.
And where is GE these days? They even sold off their consumer appliance division to the Chinese company Haier. They still make jet engines and some other big industrial stuff, but they're not as huge as they used to be.
It's almost as if an economic system based on maximizing greed instead of reigning it in was not sustainable or desirable.
*for some domains.
No. Under nearly any other circumstance a company like Boeing would simply go under.
If a car manufacturer pulled something like this they either have to fix it really fast or have to face severe financial consequences.
You have to realize that Boeing's customers have no alternative. They will be buying planes from Boeing.
Unless the DoJ splits up Boeing, which is what they should do. If Apple's iPhone is a monopoly with dozens of Android alternatives, what does that say about Boeing?
It’s this, absolutely. Professional managers trained in finance who either don’t know or don’t care about the actual business they’re managing. Work = moving money around a spreadsheet and all else is incidental at best and something to be avoided at worst, doubly so if it can’t be captured in a spreadsheet with a dollar value attached.
a lot of people say things like 'stock price', but that's missing the point. the lesson is in the nuance.
its many factors, effecting all aspects of our lives now honestly.
- young people's disregard for the knowledge of people older than them. This can be an essay in itself, but there's the idea that the reasons why people are doing things the way they are is because they are stupid, something like: "you are young and you knows how to do everything right if only these dumb old people would get out of my way." I had a friend do a start up to make bourbon in 3 months. He thought all those alcohol producers that take 5-30 years making them were doing it wrong. I am like, definitely give it a go but understand that "I am sure they thought about this'.
- management focuses on nonsensical metrics. In recent history, you have to be data driven, focus on metrics, ignore everything else, its the new religion. An example is how technical support teams focus on having 0 tickets open, so support engineers just close tickets even if the customer isn't helped. but hey, that red line is pointing down and to the left right? win! And as with boeing, they made their metrics look really good, look, no more defects! all you have to do is stop reporting them.
- companies willing to outsource critical components of their business. I never understood this one, I don't care how 'cheap' it is, you don't outsource critical parts of your business. at best, they don't have the same stakes as you do on the matter, at worst they steal your IP and/or become your competitors.
Don't blame this on young people, it's probably mostly post-40 dudes who run the board of these large companies
young dudes of the time, that are now hitting their 40s. Dont get me wrong, the new young are doubling down on that world view.
I realize this is focusing on the example, but no, established bourbon distillers aren't going to stop barrel aging. It's part of the brand, it's part of what people pay for, and they have no reason to.
Your friend might have been overconfident, I don't know, but macerating oak chips at high temperature, getting the process right, adding flavorants: if he succeeds in making a high-quality product, great! Am I skeptical? Yes. But again, the established distillers didn't consider and reject the idea of making liquor this way because it's a bad idea, they wouldn't do it because that's not bourbon.
If he's successful, they still won't do it, because it's not bourbon. He can sell to people who don't care, though. If it's good, I'd get a bottle.
I was going to make a comment along these lines. I don't know much about bourbon, but as an alcoholic drink, basically it's relying on chemical reactions to create the final product. The current way of making it, which takes a lot of time, has been designed by trial-and-error over many, many generations, as with most alcoholic drinks, and this was mostly done in times before we understood the science of chemistry.
It should be certainly possible (I'm not sure how) to replicate this process in a speedier way.
However, I think the thing being missed by the start-up guy is that, like Louis Vitton crap and genuine De Beers diamonds, most people aren't looking for something that replicates the "genuine" product, they want "the real thing" because there's some kind of emotional factor in owning some massively overpriced shirt made by sweatshop workers and sold in a fancy store by appointment, or a rock that was really dug out of the ground by an enslaved child in Africa. I suspect barrel-aged bourbon is similar.
Perhaps because the senior people were at a higher pay grade? If you bump off the expensive employees, your overhead goes down. Better numbers next quarter so you get a bonus.
Senior people also cost more because their health care costs more. Of course discriminating against older people is illegal, so they cut down on senior staff which just happens to have the same cost reduction. Funny that.
It's in the article.
Not just senior = higher pay. Senior = more likely to stick to existing (known good) safety/QC processes. Boeing didn't want QC at all - they wanted the guys assembling the planes to do their own QC (which is likely illegal per FAA regulations).
Toss in a side of union busting. And a dessert serving of outsourcing to the lowest bidder, regardless of that bidders history in the space.
Those old engineers cost too much! And we already know how to build planes. So, we can ditch them, my quarterly KPIs look good and with the money freed up from pushing them out it can land in my bonus check!
Or 20 billion in stock buy-backs, juicing the price.
they did not. this article and many people are sensationalizing it to get attention and push whatever their angle is. it was short-sighted, stupid, greedy, and wrong, but not intentionally suicidal (let alone homicidal!).
Myopia + greed is a hell of a drug.
Some people in organizations can't take no for an answer. They want to see their orders followed, and if they see you as a roadblock, you will be marginalized, sometimes with harm.
That's not always bad, sometimes employees drag their feet when they shouldn't. But in some situations (for instance, one arm of the company gaining the upper hand), the people in power are so convinced that their own perspective and goals are right, that they think they don't need to listen or understand the big picture.
Ad to this that sometimes an exec has sociopathic tendencies, and you have an explosive cocktail of harassment and destruction of valuable knowledge. The more resilient the company, the more entrenched this behaviour can get, and the more irreversible it will become.
It's a side effect of reducing the power of those awkward people who want to spend money on well designed aeroplanes.
It's a lot easier to make your outsourcing strategy stick, if you no longer have an alternative.
That's the million dollar question. Why talented people are forced out? Like managers/other key members have a mission and if you somehow not fit in their "world view", you get hell.
Are any of the executives who did this in jail? No? Well, carry on, then.
None of the executives responsible for this have paid any price. None of the investors or board members who allowed this paid any price.
And the worst part: it's not clear you can fix it, now. Even if you completely busted out every executive and wiped out the investors, there is no path forward since those executives pushed out all the engineering knowledge.
"intentionally" is too strong a word here.
More -> intentionally cut cost by eliminating experienced people.
Not -> intentionally getting rid of knowledge. even the worst managers wouldn't admit to wanting to loose knowledge.
Most of the article is spent describing exactly why.
I learned some things reading this article from 2 days ago:
Boeing’s Dead Whistleblower Spoke the Truth
https://www.thefp.com/p/boeings-dead-whistleblower-spoke-the...
The Free Press
The entire first half of this (tfp directly above this comment) article blindly supports the spin that there is some conspiracy where someone killed him. HIs own family goes into great detail all over the press about how he had anxiety and ptsd. That he quit his job on DR orders or the stress was going to give him a heart attack.
The shit Boeing did to him was awful (stress, anxiety and ptsd) and Boeing should be blamed for that. They should be held accountable for that. Making his sucicide "Fishy" discredits the pressure he was under and its cause. Playing at the edges of conspiracy theory also serves to discredit the author of the article and the validity of everything else they are saying.
The man killed himself. The actions of Boeing played a part in that.
There's more than enough circumstantial evidence to support the allegations of foul play here. When people kill themselves, they usually do it somewhere private and personal to them, like inside their home, or their car. Not in the parking lot outside a courthouse.
NO: Barnett's body was found in a vehicle in a Holiday Inn parking lot in Charleston on Saturday, police said.
Or you know this
The family says Barnett's health declined because of the stresses of taking a stand against his longtime employer.
"He was suffering from PTSD and anxiety attacks as a result of being subjected to the hostile work environment at Boeing," they said, "which we believe led to his death."
FROM: https://www.npr.org/2024/03/12/1238033573/boeing-whistleblow...
The man was found dead, with a sucide note (hand written) and his own gun in his hand.
You know what happens when gun owners get the urge to kill themselves. They kill themselves. Guns make suicide less of a cry for help and more or less "effective".
Any article that doesn't mention what his family had to say about the matter is not only creating a narrative, but they are openly disrespecting the family of a dead man to grab attention and headlines.
How about todays interview with his OWN FAMILY:
FROM HIS MOTHER: If this hadn't gone on so long, I'd still have my son, and my sons would have their brother and we wouldn't be sitting here. So in that respect, I do," Vicky Stokes said when asked if she places some of the blame for her son's death on Boeing.
OR THIS: Stokes and her son Rodney Barnett said they do not want to comment on whether they believe he died by suicide until the investigation by the Charleston police department concludes.
source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/john-barnett-boeing-whistleblow...
It's not like we know or will ever know the details of and the extend of the investigation, the note was actually reported as a "white piece of paper that closely resembled a note,", what was on the note? Were his fingerprints on the note? Was handwriting analysis done? Did the gun belong to him? That wasn't reported either. Was it registered to him/ when/where did he buy it? Was there gunpowder residue on his hand? Does the trajectory and blood splatter analysis all match? Was there surveillance footage of the car? What was his last cellphone usage?
Part of the reason why people jump to conclusions is because of a distinct lack of rationalist reporting by police and media. They don't tell us the empirical evidence because we are supposed to just believe them, and trust in their competent investigation, but that doesn't really work, at least not everyone is going to be satisfied by that demand.
That's not to say it wasn't a suicide, it just means we don't know either way and will likely never know. But it crucially also doesn't mean sufficient evidence couldn't be presented to convince a reasonable observer.
Sure:
What we do know: this was an AR21 case. It was him suing boeing for forcing him to retire early and not promoting him because he was "whistle blowing". This is a case that had already been dismissed once.
On the matter of that, the FAA already got his reports and agreed with him. The harm to Boeing from his wistle blowing was finished. They were probably paying more for lawyers to fight this than it was going to cost to settle. So this wasnt about Boeing loosing anything other than cash at this point. If we're going to speculate we should be asking if Boeing was fighting this out of spite rather than making a good business decision.
The family themselves have spoken up: that he was troubled, and they firmly blame Boeing for his death. The way they are going about it says "we know he killed himself" ... they just think Boeing drove him to do it. They are coy with the conspiracy theory angle cause it just make boeing look bad...
There is a really interesting narrative here about stress, mental heath, and suicide for gun owners. Topics that the press wants to touch less than the ones your suggesting they ignore....
I care infinitely more about the questions I asked than whatever the family had to say. Because questions about fingerprints and gunpowder residue are concerning the physical evidence that could prove suicide to a reasonable degree.
I don't really care about talking about circumstantial evidence when the physical is right there.
The reason why people aren't convinced by the “this wasn't even about his whistleblowing, he already disclosed everything, so Boeing has no motive“ argument is because it isn't just about stopping whistleblowers, it's about the chilling effect for other potential, current employees.
We can brush it all aside as crazy conspiracy theories, but I think that's actually very harmful to society. Conspiracy thinking is very damaging, our response shouldn't be “shut up and trust authority“ when somebody asks about forensic evidence.
We agree on this 1000%
"If this hadn't gone on so long, I'd still have my son, and my sons would have their brother and we wouldn't be sitting here. So in that respect, I do," Vicky Stokes said when asked if she places some of the blame for her son's death on Boeing.
FROM: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/john-barnett-boeing-whistleblow...
Let me restate that: THE MANS OWN MOTHER SAYS BOEING DROVE HIM TO KILL HIMSELF
They didn't need to hold a gun to his head and pull the trigger. The just needed to fuck him over badly enough for long enough for this to be the inevitable outcome.
Blow the whistle all you want kids, Pappa Boeing gonna take your job and fuck you over and there aint nothing you can do about it... Thats the chilling narrative if there ever was one.
She should sue Boeing for wrongful death. If they really continued this behavior, and she doesn't sue, they got exactly what they wanted.
Handwriting analysis and blood spatter is mostly garbage. If he was shot with a gun inside the car from a reasonable angle its not going to be immediately obvious whether he did it or not unless they left bloody fingerprints on the door handle after shooting him twice.
First I've heard of a handwritten note. Any details?
And they generally don’t tell a friend “if anything happens to me, it's not suicide”.
From TFA, it seems that it was someone else (still alive) who said that.
From "the f..ing article"?
See https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=39488667 .
It’s commonly used on HN.
That was a widely reported quote from that Barnett said to one of his friends.
https://abcnews4.com/news/local/if-anything-happens-its-not-...
Unless its one last troll against boeing on the way out. Why go quietly if you are going to go when you have a shot to majorly embarrass the company one last time?
The article above and every other article I've read says, "he was found in his truck". That's a personal vehicle, and assuming it was locked, enough to suggest that it was self-inflicted.
Prime Boeing juror material
I can close a locked door after shooting someone in the head. I'm not sure how this follows that "it's enough". After years of criticizing Boeing, he kills himself during his deposition? I don't think so.
On the other hand, he might have wanted to go out leaving exactly this sort of mess of optics for boeing PR to deal with. Most people who commit suicide probably aren’t in the national spotlight against the very thing that brought them this point beforehand.
That's where he killed himself. Inside his truck, in the parking lot.
This is clearly false. "He did it in the parking lot" is nothing like enough evidence to convict anyone. It isn't remotely enough even on the balance of probabilities. I have seen zero evidence for the conspiracy theory, and strong evidence against it, including the fact that his own family think his death was suicide.
Please do not casually spread conspiracy theories. They poison democratic debate, make us all stupider, and distract attention from important, evidenced realities, like the others mentioned in the article.
You say it like "anxiety" and "stress" are synonymous to suicidal. I am a pretty anxious person, and sometimes have a lot of stress at work, and experienced burnout in the past too. That doesn't mean I am about to shoot myself in a motel parking lot - or anywhere else, for that matter. This binary view of mental health - either a person is "healthy" which means 100% perfect, or he's not - and then anything can be expected, including a suicide at any arbitrary time - is nonsense. It's completely legit to ask how comes the person who wasn't suicidal, and actually told people that he's not - suddenly turns to commit suicide in the middle of court testimony, without any warning signs or explanation. Saying "oh, he was anxious and stressed about work" is not a good explanation to this. Maybe there was an explanation, maybe there wasn't, but pretending "anxiety" explains it is nonsense.
Stress and anxiety make you more vulnerable to bad decisions like suicide. Stop trying to turn stress and anxiety into an aesthetic personality trait and fashionable dress. Mental illness is not a dress that you can wear. It's toxic stuff to get rid of or at least mitigate.
Stress and anxiety are foundational to high performance. Imagining that stressed anxious people are mentally ill is ridiculous.
Then maybe stressed anxious people who are both high performing and mentally ill isn't ridiculous? Which makes sense because mediocre people have no stress, anxiety, or mental illness. They're "sane and healthy" instead.
Not every bay is a harbor, but every harbor is a bay.
People in my family have chronic anxiety across generation and I haven't heard of any of them killing themselves.
Nobody's saying it's an "aesthetic personality trait", just that it doesn't make you suicidal.
His whole lawsuit was about being forced to retire 10 years early because Boeing forced him out for whistleblowing.
Thats whistleblowing as in past tense. He complained to the FAA and the FAA said 'yes John you're right'.
Not to diminish your mental heath but the whole argument here is that what Boeing around "stress", "pressure" and "anxiety" was far worse.
Its not like is anti whistleblower retaliation case (AIR21) was going to be some massive blemish for Boeing. It's not like it was going to be a 100 million dollar write down. It is basically "wrongful termination" that they are fighting. And it would be round 2 on this case (the first was "dismissed").
https://archive.is/iUzxR#selection-995.134-995.139 does a bit better job of surfacing more of the details. Ones that paint boeing in a far worse light without the sensationalism of a tv script murder plot.
Being forced as whistle-blower and being suicidal are again very different things. Especially when he was in the middle of proving he's right. And right in the middle of the fight, between the testimonies, after he spent so much effort to prove he's right, he decides "fuck it all" and quits abruptly? Doesn't add up. Maybe something else happened but I just am astonished how easily people dismiss it. Ah, he was anxious and stressed? We'll, it's only natural then. No it's not.
Seems pretty convenient to the people in power that he had the courtesy to off himself before he could hurt them in court.
It. was. a. defamation. lawsuit.
The second of two, because he lost the first one.
People act like this was a criminal proceeding. It was not. He'd already been testifying and speaking publicly about Boeing for more than 5 years. He sued them because of Boeing's attempts to defame his character to downplay the allegations which have been public for a long time.
I am not saying your wrong but who were the faulty suppliers for all these claims? Is it possible things would start unraveling for something much bigger than it already has? The other motive would also be to send a message which it definitely did. I find it weird that he would ruin the chance of future whistle blowers coming forward by doing this the day after the court appearance, its strange.
Right... defamation is a good analog for this. Its under AIR21...
This case was him suing Boeing for money. The claim was that his whistleblowing was the reason he didn't get promoted and was forced to retire early. Thats whistleblowing past tense, the FAA already said the things he was whistleblowing on were in fact true, and Boeing was at fault.
He had lost this case once, but his lawyers felt that he could win this 2nd time around as there was a preponderance of evidence. The table stakes for this were in the 10's of millions at best, a trivial sum of money.
It was all, already, long ago, unraveled:
https://archive.is/iUzxR#selection-1111.393-1111.775
Its not opening but I appreciate you adding other info to the conversation. Do you think as the trial proceeds we will gain new information?
What was his testimony in a civil (not criminal) lawsuit which had already been given many times before both in public and in other lawsuits going to unravel? Especially given the number of additional investigations going on?
Why would I just assume that it exists?
And why would it ruin the chance of future whistle blowers coming forwards? Was he supposed to imagine that everyone was going to start believing conspiracy theories about his death?
I mean, do you really think this will not deter future whistle blowers lol? "conspiracy theories about his death" You mean like that 30 year coordinated Epstein situation?
On a previous HN discussion, plenty of people here believed it was fully possible that someone at Boeing essentially pulled the trigger and gave plenty of examples, even from a huge successful Silicon Valley company, of corporate folks doing stranger nefarious things than would be believable in film. As someone who has known multiple people who committed suicide, I'm not sure I can feel as certain as you that this was a suicide without more evidence.
After reading the story of ebay execs harassing a random completely unimportant couple, to the point of repeatedly mailing them threatening or disgusting packages, I can't discredit killing a witness for a real tangible reason.
Oh yeah, I remember that one [1]. One of the bastards got five years in prison - one of the very very few exceptions to my general line of calling for prison abolishment.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/sep/29/ebay-exec...
Prefaced with, while horrifying, that may also have been one of the funnier corporate stories I've read in the last several years. Note, horrifying from the Steiner's perspective. People with private jets who can fly across America to leave bloody masks on your porch.
Yet, it's cartooonishly preposterous. Seven people charged, seven guilty pleas, and the heads of Security and "Resiliency"? They flew across the country to do the equivalent of college harassment and B&E ... in a residential garage? Baugh worked for the CIA? His wife works for the CIA? Running Charlie's Angels as the security team (sorry, Jim's Angels)? Mandatory pop culture videos? What did I just read?
Unfortunately, it always has a Nelson response, no matter how funny. "Aww, those are the people who run corporate America..." They run my economy.
NYT Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20201213125301/https://www.nytim...
WP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal
Monsanto also did some pretty awful persecution to scientists… there are plenty of examples in American contemporary businesses
I don't really even get the conspiracy theory that he was murdered, if Boeing etc are all so knowing and powerful why didn't they kill him years ago, well before he could tell his tale? Now they kill him because he already spoke out and they want to put the spotlight on themselves? The whole thing doesn't really make a lot of logical sense.
"Boeing etc are all so knowing and powerful" Wait Boeing makes most of its money through military contracts, downplaying its "power" and importance is slightly disingenuous .
You completely missed the point that...if Boeing knew he was going to blow the whistle, and they are so powerful...they'd have killed him beforehand. Not very smart of them to kill someone AFTER they blew the whistle and then make everyone think you did it. That just puts you even more into the spotlight and his testimony is already publicly available. Doesn't sound like a great conspiracy, much less a theory.
It sounds like you have some unrealistic overestimate of your safety against a determined criminal. This just an older gentleman, far away from home, alone, with no security.
One method is to hire a junky, or a homeless person, or some other desperate person to commit a crime. Affordable to the middle class! And even if they are caught, they would not know your identity.
Kadyrov regularly assassinates his critics in EU for example, and that's not even his 'territory' so to speak, https://warsawinstitute.org/kadyrovs-hitmen/
A billion dollars here, a billion dollars there, pretty soon someone needs to be taken out of the picture.
What billions of dollars.
The man had already been on film. He already has written statements everywhere. The FAA already agreed that what he said had happened.
He was in court for AIR21 case... to get money out of boeing for himself, for 10 years of early retirement. Candidly Boeing was probably paying more for the lawyers they were using to fight him than they would have paid just settling.
There weren't billons on the line with this.
The reason you don’t settle is to discourage others from doing the same thing. It would also be the reason to ‘suicide’ someone even if they were not costing you much money.
Exactly, they weren't stopping him, they were stopping every other future whistleblower. Imagine if even 3 more people stepped forward.
It appeals to the "free thinkers"/"heterodox" (empty-headed contrarian) crowd that TFP caters to and that infests every tech website on the net.
In what way, exactly? Because from where I am sitting, it appears Boeing would enjoy unconditional support of US government no matter what they do.
On the other hand... I can imagine after testifying, the feeling that one had done all one could do. That it was finished and it was his time.
But he wasn't finished testifying. He was found dead on the morning of what was supposed to be his final day of deposition.
This is all bad for Boeing, but at the end of the day, nobody has died on an American carrier in a Boeing plane in a very long time.
Aircraft safety is layers on layers on layers. Let's not FUD people into thinking that flying on the worst plane Boeing has ever put out is anywhere comparable to the daily risks of driving.
This is coincidental. When the plug ripped out of the plane over Portland, it was pure luck that no one was sitting in that row. The seats were shredded. If someone had been sitting there, they also would have been shredded.
Boeing and their deteriorated quality culture is directly at fault for that one, and the only thing that prevented a fatality is a coincidence of seating arrangement.
As far as I'm concerned, that resets their safety clock.
If a new 737 were to literally disintegrate in midair, but by pure happenstance it was entirely staffed and occupied by skydivers wearing parachutes and as a result no one dies, that also shouldn't be handwaved off as "oh nobody has died in a long time" just because luck prevented an otherwise sure death in that specific scenario.
Even if, worst case, 3 people had been sitting there and died (and people are tougher than seats), it would only move needle trivially vs cars.
and while the fact related to the risk of flying vs. driving are probably true, they are off-topic and irrelevant.
the reason that large airline safety in the US is so overwhelmingly good is the preceding 20, 30, 40, 50? years of continuous improvements. until the last 5-10 years that is. we haven't even seen the tip of the iceberg yet. when these 2010's and 2020 planes are 15-30 years old, it's going to be a shit-show.
so if you believe that the airlines are too safe, that there is too much margin, they are over-engineered, over-regulated, etc. then that wouldn't be at all irrational. you could trade some gold-plated engineering for profit. you could trade bureaucracy for faster production, maintenance, etc. you could reduce the cost of travel (by how much? it's already cheap). this would be an interesting argument to make. but these decisions should be made in the light of day by the NTSB/FAA, congress, the public, and the shareholders, etc. even then, it's likely that theory would have negative consequences (remember the better-faster-cheaper NASA theory of operation).
the problem is that, instead of an honest choice made in public by the appropriate stakeholders and the flying public, these choices and short-cuts were made in secret, illegally, with extreme dishonestly, repeatedly, for at least a decade, for extremely selfish gains, by FAA and boeing executives.
that's what's not ok. we're told and we expect the nearly perfect safety to continue. what we got was back to the 1950's-1970's era shit-show.
I’m sorry, why does it matter that no one has died on an American carrier for a while? Not so long ago, Boeing sent over 300 people to their deaths with their shoddy MCAS scheme. It’s pure chance that this didn’t happen in the USA so I’m not sure I understand the relevance of the nationalities of the deceased.
It's not pure chance. It was a plane error, but trained pilots following procedure would have responded appropriately and avoided a crash. In response to a plane malfunction, the pilots panicked, did the wrong thing, and everyone died.
This does not excuse Boeing, but it's just the way it is. Training standards are higher in the US than, for example, Ethiopian airlines.
Thanks
This is true, but disasters occur because those layers and layers get eroded until there is only one layer left which then fails.
The problem is that Boeing has eroded layers and layers and layers of that safety. The question is "How many of those layers are left?"
What do you mean by "down hill"? Boeing has developed incredible technologies since the MD merger. They have been profitable w/ these technologies. You make a claim they were going down hill, what do you mean?
I have a number of family members that work for Boeing, that have been in executive management, engineering and research. None of them ever mentioned MD as being the beginning of a decline.
All of them tell a different story. The problems began with James McNerney. Harry Stonecipher came from MD, and was one of the best CEO's to ever touch that company. The 787 wouldn't have been a thing if it were not for McNerney.
If you make a claim, back it up.
This is a discussion of an article. You'll find a link to it at the top of the page. If you read the article, I am sure someone as intelligent as yourself will be able to use context clues to figure out what I mean by "down hill". That article is what I am backing up my claim with.
Ha. That’s not the story I have heard from greybeard engineers there before and after the merger.
I got the story that Stonecipher wrecked the engineering culture and valued/promoted management at the expense of engineering. Management becoming the only path to promotion and career advancement leaving important engineering groups hollowed out.
It's really hard to recover from a downgrade in culture. I hear the same kinds of things about IBM. I'm pretty sure there are other examples.
The tough part is - it is sad.
Read about boeing and Tex Johnston:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_M._Johnston#Boeing_Compa...
and IBM invented the PC:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer
Other examples include Xerox and Kodak.
I also wonder if it has happened in the past, with a subsequent recovery, to some American car companies? GM pre-2008 perhaps?
I am silently grateful to JetBlue for ordering Airbuses from the get go...
Airbus has a limited production capacity, and they are maxed out with this scandal.
So Boing is still getting orders, because the world need planes.
it will be unsurprising to you to hear that shortly afterwards, Boeing began abusing its most senior employees into leaving.
Sounds a bit like what happened in newsrooms and at newspapers in the past decade and a half. (Except in that case, it was bottom-up, not top-down.)
I'll be on two 737 MAX planes going back and forth to Vegas in a couple weeks. Yay!
Just returned from Miami yesterday aboard a B757-200. I was intrigued because it has been so long since I've flown on one. The trip down was a 737-Max8 (or 9 I'm not sure). So I wondered if this was a plane that they had dragged out of retirement. Not like Newark-Miami is a backwater route.
Norminalization of Deviance: https://youtu.be/GN80sx3s4LA?si=de_4xxo1YhFVy0lD
Hm, i smell a google here. What a shame tbh.
IMO the FAA’s approach and handling was the most shocking aspect. Not sure what purpose the FAA serves anymore.