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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

The tone of this statement is interesting to me.

Normally official statements are far less direct, more vague, and more technical.

Probably because they know Boeing is a problem and they want the public and politicians to clearly know they are a problem to get momentum on legislation to force them to behave.

At this point I'm starting to agree we should severely limit or outright ban stock-based or near-term performance based compensation.

"Sorry kids, this is why we can't have nice things!"

> At this point I'm starting to agree we should severely limit or outright ban stock-based or near-term performance based compensation.

If Boeing employee compensation takes a hit, they will lose good engineers to Meta, Google, and TikTok which already probably pay 3X. You want safer planes? Help bid their stock up so that it attracts good engineers.

This is the problem with public companies. Boeing stock value should be determined by safety, by FAA, and by actual passengers, not by some armchair investors who don't even fly on their planes.

Uh, what?

Did you just list two companies which had some of the most comprehensive layoffs this year and a third Chinese private firm for clearance-based US engineers (generally stereotyped as uptight and/or establishment types) to move to?

You seem to be stuck in a weird news bubble / or some kind of layoff echo chamber. Google had a 6-7% layoff 12 months ago, and has been hiring steadily, almost aggressively since then.

They’re just better informed that you:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/11/technology/google-layoffs...

All of the big tech companies are going to have a risk of layoffs for a while: the Wall Street activist crowd is looking to cash out and those companies which have guaranteed income like ads will look great in the short term with lower costs on the same income stream. It’ll take time for the drawbacks to manifest, and often that stage will lead to more layoffs when they decide to get out of a particular business they’ve let themselves fall behind in.

Is a 0.5% layoff important?

The story is about a company with 180,000+ employees laying off hundreds, less than one one-thousandth. What does that mean? It would be like a company with an $1.8 billion budget losing < $1.8 million on something.

It means anyone considering working there has to think about how directly their work connects to one of the big strategic goals and assess the odds that they’ll be next. That certainly doesn’t mean nobody should take a job there but it adds to the absurdity of someone suggesting Google and Boeing are in a hiring competition given how different those jobs are.

The odds are less than one in a thousand that they'll be next. They only have to be above the 0.1th percentile of Google employees.

That’s only true if everything is determined at random. In real life, new hires are usually more at risk than people who’ve been around long enough to have a track record and allies. More importantly, layoffs also tend to involve shifts in business priorities which is why I mentioned needing to think about goals – it might be that 0.1% of the total staff are being laid off, but that doesn’t help you if it’s your entire project.

And your odds might be better, depending on the project, etc. The average is less than 0.1% - some better, some worse. If > 999 out of 1,000 aren't good enough odds for you, where will you work?

Lots of people dream of that kind of job security.

These things are often not uniformly distributed. Most of the recent layoffs affected teams within Google Assistant, many of which lost more than half of their headcount.

So if you were in Google Assistant, your chance of being laid off was much higher.

Of course, you could counter with, "just don't join Google Assistant lmao", but it's not clear to an outsider what the fortunes of various teams will be. Heck, it's often not even clear to the VPs running those very teams, to say nothing of the rank and file engineers there.

So a bit more compassion please, thank you.

> These things are often not uniformly distributed.

Right, so in ~ as many situations where your odds are worse, there will be situations where your odds are even better than < 1/1,000.

> you could counter with, "just don't join Google Assistant lmao"

> So a bit more compassion please, thank you.

You said that, not me!

Many many many companies have had layoffs in 2023, and more are already on the chopping block for 2024. A lot of people i talk to regularly, including myself, have been laid off in the last 6-7 months.

Google is not the only company in the world. You can even search here on HN for layoff discussions, which have spiked in the past year.

The engineers FAANG needs are usually not of the aerospace variety, are they?

And no, please don't use more start-up or software dev thinking during the development of safety critical hard- and software.

From FAA to FAANG

Actually there's more crossover than you might think, but at an earlier point in the education process.

One of my coworkers at the first startup I worked at out of college was an MIT-trained aeronautical engineer. He was re-training as a software engineer for quant hedge funds (at a salary lower than what I got), because aeronautical engineering didn't pay enough to support a family in the Boston area. Jumped ship for an actual quant hedge fund during my tenure there, for 3x the pay. Then the financial crisis hit and I have no idea what became of him.

I think this is a pretty common story for the personality type that goes on to become software engineers. If it were the 70s/80s, when both defense and commercial aviation were hot, they would've gone into aviation. Many actually do go into aviation as their second career, eg. John Carmack, Phil Greenspun, or Sebastian Thrun. But the money has been in software from 2000-2020, and so that is where the smart engineers go.

I got a MSc in Controls Systems, spent over a decade getting crap pay for highly technical and extremely stressful work, then made a conscious decision to go to the bottom of the software Eng ladder and climb my way up.

Ended up getting 3-4x the pay for 3-4x less stress.

The engineers at Boeing are not going to trade planes for web apps.

I personally know several that have, because Boeing pays shit for the level of work and the culture sucks.

It's like the games industry. They underpay because people dream of working in the industry because they think it's cool.

“The government should set the stock price”

Please don’t spread this dangerous line of thinking

Government continues to fail. Let’s stop waiting for it to fix our problems

The government continues to fail because a certain segment of Congress consistently works to hamstring and defund important regulatory arms of government. They then point to the failure of government (which they caused) as evidence that more funding should be cut.

It is the government's job to ensure that private companies don't sacrifice safety in the pursuit of short-term gains. Humans are extremely shortsighted by nature and the free market will always choose the short term over the long term without intervention.

In a very broad sense, just like large enterprises are "us", the government is also "us". These are different ways that we organize to achieve our aims.

As I see it, government continuing to fail can be seen as us continuing to fail. If I stop waiting for us to fix our problems, I'm giving up on us, which I'm fighting not to do.

> Government continues to fail. Let’s stop waiting for it to fix our problems

It continues to fail since your government adopted the policy of less government is better as an ideology, then a whole section of your political class completely embraced it and decided to hamstring government powers to sabotage it and let private companies take over.

There are other governments in the world which suffer much less from this, even though the USA successfully exported this ideology no other country went so deep into this stupidity.

Now you experience the side-effects of the Nixon/Reagan eras biting your asses, and since a large part of your society doesn't have much of a grasp of history and its consequences we end up with a large cohort believing that government = bad a priori.

Bad government is bad, but bad government happened by design, not because government is naturally bad. Government in democratic countries is what the people and society under it makes of it, your society decided to make it bad by voting believing in lies from the past 40 years.

So much assumption based upon so few words that I put into this website

Care to expand on the few words then? From what I gather you are from the USA so my comment does apply to the society you live in.

Don't forget Thatcher!

> > At this point I'm starting to agree we should severely limit or outright ban stock-based or near-term performance based compensation.

> If Boeing employee compensation takes a hit, they will lose good engineers to Meta, Google, and TikTok which already probably pay 3X. You want safer planes? Help bid their stock up so that it attracts good engineers.

First, those are entirely different industries and skills, and the companies you mentioned all are doing layoffs so a steady paycheck at Boeing might be looking pretty good. More fundamentally, however, nobody said compensation would go away without being replaced but rather that it’d be restructured to avoid the incentive to juice short-term share prices. This would have little effect on Boeing engineers who are not given enough stock for that to be a huge deal but it’d have a big impact on the managers who have been making so many bad calls: if getting paid in cash means the financial engineers don’t find working there appealing and they’re replaced by real engineers, that’d be a net win for the company and the flying public.

I was pretty against this way of thinking a decade ago, now I cannot deny this might be the solution for most problems on predatory capitalism.

I'm not sure that this by itself would help. The root issue is the double-edged sword of liquidity. If you have the ability to "take the money and run", it creates a strong incentive to do things which increase the amount of money you can take now, and then offload the consequences onto problems that will surface long after you have run. Cash is actually worse than stock, because you literally get the money now and have no incentive and no mechanism to see it increase in value later. Much of the reason for stock-based compensation is to align incentives between the executive and shareholders so that their time horizon at least encompasses their vesting period.

To really fix the problem, you need to destroy liquidity for decision-makers. Basically make it unprofitable to switch companies or retire, so that a.) they are forced to stay with the company and live with the consequences of their decisions and b.) they don't gain anything from short-term revenue bumps anyway. This was sorta the system that was in place in the 1950s & 1960s, where the top marginal tax rate was 90% so the government took all your money above a certain max anyway, and as a result companies invested in seniority-based perks like more vacation time, private jet use, employer-funded health insurance, etc. But this...destroys liquidity, which makes the companies and economic system less resilient to outside changes. This is what happened to U.S. industry in the 1970s, when they found they were uncompetitive with new Japanese firms, or to the housing market today, where we've built a system that offered great suburban living to Boomers but now can't adapt to the incoming Millennial population.

On one level these are both imposed rules (ie regulation), but this is an approach I haven’t heard before and I like it. It would also help a fleet of other problems, like underfunded public institutions and infrastructure.

That's a great analysis, maybe in the first suggestion, instead of force someone being at the same company, there could be a law that will be a crime doing this behaviour.

They were seen reacting way too late in the MCAS debacle, to the point other countries were pondering re-evaluating the trust-by-default position the FAA has.

The FAA must be seen to react decisively to keep their trust. This way, they keep carrying enough weight to declare the airplanes safe again later.

> "This incident should have never happened and it cannot happen again."

Indeed, you're right. Pretty opinionated and emotional for a regulator.

I can't blame them though, they have gotten a lot of flak for letting boeing police itself with MCAS, and now this...

Feels like this part was written by a consultant in a foreign country — the pdf letter is more formal

Not emotional, passionate. Don't forget, everyone in civil aviation spent their lives since decades worrying about safety. And then comes Boeing and fucks that all over twice.

Bad news for Boeing so, the FAA seems to be rather pissed. And rightly so.

And embarrassed.

Boeing: we can inspect ourselves

FAA: OK, but

Boeing: don’t worry!

FAA: Ok but do not fuck this up

Boeing: Relax, guy!

FAA: GOD DAMMI—

That's how you want the regulators holding your existence as company in their hands, right? Pissed off and embarassed by you.

Which "multiple disastrous human catastrophes" has Boeing caused in the US for the FAA have stopped?

Are they cheekily quoting the CEO who made a similar statement last week?

> The safety of the flying public, not speed, will determine the timeline for returning the Boeing 737-9 Max to service.

One reading-between-the-lines: "We believe we now have the upper hand, the public attention, to shake enough budget out of Congress that in future we can have a reasonable fraction of safety inspectors reporting to us rather than Boeing. At least until public interest moves on to its next big question, such as speculating on Taylor Swift's sexual orientation."

This statement gave me the exact same feeling that hearing my full name (including middle name) coming from my father gave me.

"Now look what you've done, Marjory Stewart-Baxter! You're grounded!"

They must be alluding to the previous MCAS disaster - I.e. strike two.

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