Employee Turnover Fueled Boeing's Quality Control Nightmare
forbes.com
forbes.com
Technical people are expenses to be squeezed, restrained and controlled.
Management and sales people are productive assets to be lavishly rewarded.
It's a class oriented "country club" mentality with insiders and outsiders. Insiders would rather destroy their club than surrender too much to the outsiders who are essential to it's function.
World War II.
The production capacity of most industrialized nations was severely impacted by the war. The USA was one of the few that wasn't.
Without too much real competition, US industry (Boeing for example) prospered for decades and built a middle class that was the envy of the world. But as the competition slowly recovered, the USA has ceded much of this to greed, income inequity and mismanagement.
The vast majority of new income from increased productivity now goes to the top echelon at US corporations. In 2022, the CEO of Boeing made $23 million as the company lost $12 billion. The CEO of AirBus only made about $4 million as revenue increased 16%.
The USA now has some of the highest paid and arguably least effective managers in the world --- Boeing is just one example. Working hard in the USA mainly just creates bigger bonuses for those at the top.
American management and leadership style is fundamentally flawed and most of the available evidence shows that it is only getting worse over time, not better.
If your Quality Department has excessive turnover, there is one, and only one reason. Despair.
That despair comes about as a consequence of being made responsible for ensuring Quality, but having their attempts to ensure it overridden time and time again by higher ups. When the CEO/CTO/CFO/COO are essentially escape hatches to escape the Quality process, it does not take long for anyone intelligent enough to do the job effectively to understand that their toils are largely pointless in the grand scheme of things.
The central issue of Quality Management is fixing Companies; not products.
Create an environment where your Quality Team can't get purchase to get everything they need done, then look to the top for what's more important than Quality. The answer usually isn't hard or long in terms of being found.
This sounds more like a failure of QA to recognize their role in a larger picture.
It's a general problem, not specific to QA. I work on reliability engineering and have certainly been guilty of it.
The company's bar for "enough quality/reliability" is likely lower than yours and mine. The company's is pragmatic and ours is likely ideological.
I probably don't even care about quality control as much as you, and you likely don't care as much about reliability as me. We each over value our own niche because it's what we're trained to inspect, and we know how easy it is to fix some of those things.
My tools for dealing with it mostly involve realigning my work with what the business wants, rather than what I'd ideologically prefer, and working to see why the business wants that. It's probably not to improve reliability, but it cuts costs somewhere or something I can get behind.
Your experience as an SRE doesn't even necessarily encompass the integrations that have to happen with other operational departments; or even extra-organizational interfaces; another aspect of organizational Quality that is often an issue except maybe in as much as there may be a token word thrown in edgewise or a backlog item from time to time to shore up tools needed by other departments. Quality assurance is often a level higher in that we're analyzing "is there a missing signal that needs to be propagated here.
When the org makes it abundantly clear "Quality" is no longer a first order objective. "Pragmatism" is orthogonal to Quality, one can make a pragmatic decision without detrimentally effecting overall Quality as long as one is addressing all the points and dependencies one needs to in making the decision. That need is not used in the rhetorical, but mechanical sense.
Once your management looks at you when you have a high quality culture, and then goes "Good, now find things to throw out to make it cheaper. We don't care what it takes. Or starts tacitly encouraging people to short circuit your Quality group, you have a cancerous growth that a Quality group is hierarchically unable to do anything about.
If you wonder what it takes for a person to come in and spend day-in, and day-out, looking over every minute detail, pointing out faults, braving the risk of social stigma to keep orgs honest, and to do well at it; it's largely compassion, pride in a job well done, and a concern about who suffers down the road.
The end result is the person being faced with a question:
Am I okay with being responsible for this? Is this a cause I'm okay with perpetuating?
Presto. Instant excessive turn-over. And short of being a player at the C-table or Board layer, there is nothing to be done about it.
Quality cannot prevail without being an existential concern. Period.
I promise you it does; these are often the hardest part of my job. I interface with a half-dozen other operational departments, though no external teams at the moment.
> Once your management looks at you when you have a high quality culture, and then goes "Good, now find things to throw out to make it cheaper. We don't care what it takes. Or starts tacitly encouraging people to short circuit your Quality group, you have a cancerous growth that a Quality group is hierarchically unable to do anything about.
Right, and this is what I'm saying is a fundamental misunderstanding about QA's role (and mine, and virtually every role).
Your role is not to provide the best QA possible at any price. Your role, in the company, is to provide acceptable quality at the lowest price possible. Mine is to provide acceptable reliability at the lowest price possible.
If managers are trying to get you to cut corners, what they're saying is that you're spending money on guaranteeing quality that clients (not the business) don't value enough. Clients are not willing to pay the premium for higher quality. They'd rather get the product for 10% cheaper and accept occasional bugs.
> Am I okay with being responsible for this? Is this a cause I'm okay with perpetuating?
I think we're on different ideological grounds here. For me, reliability and QA is a means to an end: providing value to the customer. QA and reliability don't have any intrinsic value; that is to say their value is defined by the customer.
I don't get warm and fuzzy feelings for building out reliability the customer doesn't want. It doesn't do me any good to build out a 99.999999999% availability cluster if no one is going to pay $12M/month to use it. If the customers want low reliability and low costs, that's fine, I'll give them as much reliability as I can for what they want to spend. I can be proud of the reliability I achieved on the budget customers gave me.
QA is the same way. QA only has value as far as customers decide it does. The pride comes from giving them as much quality as I can for what they're willing to spend on reliability.
Customers aren't sheep. If they wanted incredible QA and were willing to pay for it, they'd find someone who could provide it. But they don't, because they don't value the level of QA you want at the price it costs to achieve.
Look at Windows. The patches break stuff all the time, to the point that many orgs delay Windows updates for months.
And yet people keep buying Windows licenses. The market doesn't value Windows' QA process enough to demand a more bug free update channel and pay commensurately.
Shit, we basically are Windows' QA at this point on the non-business consumer side. People want Windows bad enough to basically volunteer to QA releases for businesses as part of their Windows licenses.
Broadly speaking, the market is willing to pay for enough QA to prevent bugs with permanent damage (data loss) and that's about it. Frequent bugs are tolerable as long as they don't cause data loss, or break integral workflows too often. Nobody really cares that your app has a 4th bug that causes window resizing to break, or some config option to not apply. I mean, it would be great if those bugs didn't exist, but I'm not paying 20% more to cover enough QA salaries to prevent those bugs.
> Quality cannot prevail without being an existential concern. Period.
A business cannot exist with quality being it's existential concern, because it's existence is denominated in dollars, not bugs. QA and most other facets of the business are only valued so long as they are positively correlated with profit.
You can't see this on a spreadsheet or a financial statement --- but once it happens, the effects are very real.
Boeing is now reaping the rewards of this sort of flip --- and management will blame anyone but themselves.
It is difficult to take pride in your work when the general contractor (bossman) tells you to "learn how to shut your fuckin'mouth" after you point out glaring errors in other sub-contractors' (often drug-addled) outputs.
When pressed, attempting to defend GC's reputation, you are told "just let insurance worry about [Deficiency#XYZ], that's why we pay for it."
This quickly leads to burnout, not giving AF (not one!), and eventually retiring all-together. Even on mansions, construction is typically sub-contracted to lowest-bidder; this contractor typically has higher turnover staff than most bids.
The insurance coverage has already been calculated, a lá Fight Club sugar packets, as the lesser expense.
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tl;dr: I worked both union and non-union shops, and eventually started (and ran for two decades) my own electric shop: Nobody can care in the "race to the bottom" environment of lowest-bidder acceptances.
The solution is so simple it is almost a joke: Pay technical skills more than layers and layers of management. Pay for retention. Pay for responsibility. Give them autonomy.
Sports teams have already figured this out where even the CEO of sports teams don't get paid as much as the players. It's simple. The players are the reason the business exists.
There’s nothing like SAG to help mere mortal engineers that struggle with ageism and have trouble breaking into more lucrative companies for whatever reasons either.
But unlike sports we can’t really distill down everything an engineer does these days into a line item sheet of statistics because so much of engineering isn’t execution-focused but design and project focus.
Also, I’ve realized that a ton of software companies - arguably the majority - basically exist to take existing proprietary business knowledge that engineers have little clue or concern about and put it online essentially. Technology in itself isn’t the competitive differentiator at all for these companies that is as opposed to more trade-like relationships, business know-how, etc. that basically acts as social mediation for a lot of incumbent wealthy people’s whims. These would be a lot of enterprise software companies where your sales team basically buys you access to certain accounts and unlocks markets.
So this to me is the difference between a company that makes money because of its technology advantages like most of Big Tech rather than existing business domain and market influence advantages (I think this is really close to the classic rent term and in the technology area all that raw data could be considered rent maybe).
Small nitpick that sports players are more like marketing, not sales. Sports teams have armies of sales everywhere. But your sentiment is right - each individual player is a symbol that markets the team. This is true in large leagues with famous players.
That said, even in leagues with little audience, management and execs still draw much lesser pay than players. It's because the punishment for mismanaged team is lower wins/positions in the league and thus, lower awards and sponsorships. Sponsors want to pay the winners, not the losers and the only way winners win is by paying the players who actually play.
An (not perfect) equivalent in ad tech industry would be - ad buyers buying ads in meta as opposed to Twitter, where all players were not retained.
- Some Boeing exec, whose biggest possible downside is having to move on and suck the life out of a different company.
The real problem is upstream, with short-term-profit-is-our-one-and-only-God capitalism. If you optimize ruthlessly enough for that - well, d'oh, obviously everything will end up enshittified. Any freshman bright enough to get an 'A' in Business Math 111 could have told you that.