> However, a person familiar with the decision and who asked not to be identified commenting on sensitive personnel decisions, confirmed that Clark’s leaving was not voluntary.
> Clark is an engineer. His successor Ringgold has business degrees. However she began her aviation career performing avionics systems maintenance and troubleshooting on C-130 aircraft in the United States Air Force.
(I'm not optimistic about Boeing here, but hey.)
Quite rare.
So true ... Jack Welch was an engineer.
That's a funny way of spelling "Self-entitled jackass, who would spit on his own mother for a nickel", but I'll accept it.
Edit: I guess the DVs are just ignorant idiots. here is just one example of how stellar of a guy ole Jack was:
Under Welch's leadership, GE waged a twenty-year battle with the Environmental Protection Agency and New York State over polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) that the company dumped into the Hudson River at its capacitor products division plant in Hudson Falls, New York.
Inflammatory? What else do you call a clown that would spit on his own mother for a nickel?
Point taken, but FFS. The man was a grand mal asshole and that should be mentioned every time his name appears.
Talking about this is doing a serious service.
This is free, and the simple fact of Jack being a grand mal jackass is relevant.
Every single time assholes are mentioned, their assholery should be mentioned too. Let's not rewrite history for those unaware of how these "people" acted.
By your logic, the only thing that should be mentioned about Pol Pot is that he was a leader of Cambodia at one point.
Sometimes, it’s about PR.
And culture, they haven’t changed. Boeing is still firing engineers, appointing MBAs, getting paid by politicians, and hiring on the revolving doors of local prisons. I wouldn’t even trust a burger flipped by this bunch. Boeing factories also need to move to other states before we trust them again.
I’m not for one second saying that Boeing hasn’t been seriously mismanaged. The whole debacle has just inexplicably been some sort of lightning rod for people that want to flex their self-identified nerd cred by saying “ENGINEER GOOD BUSINESS BAD!”
Interesting that she spent a few years in Belize after getting out of the Air Force. This is the description of her MOS: http://www.mosdb.com/air-force/2A133/mos/1559/
I don't think you're being all that fair here. I have no idea whether she's going to do a good job or not, but there's more to a person than the degree they got. Former military getting business degrees is pretty common and often the only reason is they were the most likely program to offer distance learning and night class options back in 2001. I'll say, as an engineer with a CS degree who is also a former commissioned officer, former military can be hit and miss, but in many ways I'd be more confident going with prior enlisted who got a degree via the GI Bill than other commissioned officers. There can be a tendency with the way we get trained in the military to become serious yes men. You never say no to a commander and you always attempt to accomplish any mission without question, no matter how ludicrous or impossible it is. That makes sense in wartime but not in business and many do not understand that or know how to turn off that attitude.
Prior enlisted, however, are usually not that fanatical about pleasing superiors. Their rating and promotion process is a lot saner and they tend to be more aligned and care more about the career field they were in. In her case, you can see this involved ensuring and maintaining the quality of aircraft comms and nav systems. That's probably not a bad place to come from. I was a tank commander back in the day myself, and I can say there was nobody who cared more that the tanks were reliable and safe than the career enlisted tank crewmen and tank mechanics. I would trust them with my life way before I would trust a career engineer who had never served on or with a crew.
As usual, it IS a system’s issue. It’s an incentive issue. If the people that made decisions were incentivised to prioritise long-term stability and performance, they would. They aren’t, and the reason they aren’t isn’t solved with a swift “get rid of them all”. You think that these big scary business people you demonise don’t themselves have KPIs? The pressure of corporate America, of short-term returns, is still going to be there. Have you seen how drastically the average shareholding lifespan has dropped over the last 10 years? Businesses are just operating in more of an environment where long-term stability and even growth don’t matter.
Boeing is such an easy target. It’s very easy to just lazily say “Boeing is rotten!” and leave it at that, because then you get to pretend that the solution is easier than it is. Whilst there are definitely Boeing-specific circumstances that heavily heavily contribute, the reality is that Boeing has had few chances to ‘innovate’ in recent memory, especially with its new makeup. This is just what it looks like when they do. The reality is that this is merely a reflection of how the wider world works. And that’s the thing with systems problems. It’s intellectually dishonest to just sit back and “blame MBAs”. These sorts of problems fester in the wiring and the mechanics, with unpredictable consequences that are almost impossible to reverse by the time they’re realised.
The wheels were set in motion before the Boeing merger. It wasn’t a trigger, it was a consequence. Similarly, some “MBAs” making decisions, either with Boeing or investors, were themselves not the trigger. Fate had already been decided several layers up the stack when personal and organisational incentives were set as they are in the first place.
>The MO of ‘business people’ isn’t inherently ‘quick wins, bleed the company dry’.
It absolutely is the model, because humans gotta human.
I assure you that Engineers with knowledge of the products are rarely included in steering meetings, and when they are, they are window dressing.
I know this because I'm an expert in my field and over 3+ decades, this is pretty much exactly how technical people get handled when it comes to meetings and decisions.
Guess who occupies most of the C-suite. Do you think it's engineers? No, its MBAs.
MBAs are NOT the source of all things bad, but lets not break our arms jerking them off over the "great work" they've done.
smh.
1. Engineering incompetence.
2. Mgmt pressure.
3. Engineering failure. As in legitimately attempted, but missed the mark.
Considering how this company has operated, for decades, it's fairly simple to point to Option 2 as the most likely culprit. Option 1 is possible, but unlikely, since there are a number of engineers involved. Option 3 is also possible and could still be the issue, but if we were betting, it would be option 2, because they've already proven, that's who they are.
Why did this action take _this_ long for this to happen? To me it says they were burying their heads in the sand hoping things would blow over.
I'll believe Boeing if they turn a new leaf and prioritize engineering over marketing and being number one in aircraft deliveries in the short-term at the cost of long-term viability.
Mmmmm, there was a delicious "Under-Bus-Throw Contest" in the wake of the MCAS fiasco, centered around their chief technical test pilot, Mark Forkner.
Keep in mind that half of this is anecdotal, but the sequence of events was something like this. Crap goes down, Forkner gets canned. He leaks documents, and wow, that was super bad. Now something curious happens, more docs get leaked - from <s>who knows where</s> - showing that Forkner was a bit of a burnt out cynical a-hole[1]. Now, imagine those chats going to the media - it would make that person seem like the real villain, yes? The DOJ thought so too, so the leak brought criminal fraud charges on Forkner. After that, even worse documents were leaked - probably from Forkner or his attorney's people - and the charges get walked back, because it's insanely obvious that whatever fraud he might have been committing was done at the behest of his masters. A colossal cock up, part of the bigger cock up that was the PR blitz following the MCAS crashes, which was itself a subset of the Ubersturmbanfuhrer Cockup of the MCAS fiasco. It's cockups all the way up.
In this tit for tat, the only one with the bomb craters showing was Boeing's rep, because, let's be honest here, at the end of the day even if Forkner was a horrible asshole he was still Boeing's representative to the goddamn flying world.
Terribly calculated, terribly executed, terrible results. A masterclass in how not to do public relations and, failing that, dirty tricks campaigns.
[1] You know the type. The guy who always ends each IM with some quip about what crap your company is making and how he feels like a con artist. His soul, hollow and shrivelled from all the sucking sounds, tends to kick cats and hiss at dogs. Leak that to the media, see who the villain is now.
Why this happened? Massive cost cuts ordered by management, which led to cut corners, or cut trainings, or both. If ing. Or MBA is irrelevant. If I have to guess, I would point to an MBA
As the saying goes, “you can’t test quality into a product.”
But that also seems like splitting hairs. The problem is not one of engineering design, to OP's post.
If cars are leaving the factory without brakes on, you shouldn't start firing engineers for designing a car that's possible to build without brakes.
Shareholders are more than willing to reward the relevant executives for cutting spending, but they rarely hold the same people who made those cuts for issues stemming as a consequence of the aforementioned cuts.