If your answer is that not just Boeing, but our whole system is in fact that corrupt...well, that's not a very comforting answer, is it?
There's way less pride from work: most people don't judge themselves too much on coworkers opinions since jobs are more changing, and it's unlikely for you to develop lifetime friendships with people who remain on your team.
Large corporations have too many regulations and HR policies to meaningfully pay based on performance, so there's little monetary incentive to be a strong performer.
You rarely get to see the product you've built get used in a meaningful way where someone would say something about it. It's likely that only one or two disinterested people quality check your work, and in this case you're either within spec (expected), "close enough to pass" (which wasn't getting reported), or failing miserably. The QA people hate getting the last one, but there's so much apathy these days from what I've seen because everyone just wants to be somewhere else doing something else.
So basically they've evolved to take away any dopamine one can get from pushing for quality from anyone but the most intrinsically motivated workers. They got rid of those people systemically and purposefully, and made a lot of money doing it.
Current brokenthink of the management class is that their job is to wage war on their own workforce and labour rights. In the process destroying human capital. This isn't just my conclusion based on the fact that FANG was fined for having anti-poaching agreement - country-wide, corporate spending on workforce training and upskilling has been falling for the past 20 years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust...
When it's not you, it's just training data on the "wrong thing to do", and it's usually described as "being disagreeable" which accelerates the collapse - this seems perfectly reasonable at the time, they were overly difficult and an outlier.
Without explicit intent or some sudden accident, there's nothing to point at, especially in such a simplistic "what corrupt corporate or government official ignored this? Obviously someone reported it" way
I disagree. As the article shows, there were plenty of technically competent people who did point at specific things. But management did not listen to them, and indeed actively suppressed them and drove them out. And since the FAA had outsourced all of its "independent" inspection responsibility to Boeing, there was no effective third party that the technically competent people could go to to raise a red flag.
So you don’t need a Boeing sized company to check up on Boeing.
The problem isn't that the system is corrupt, it's that you're expecting a third party to both be close enough to be intimately familiar with all the details of the airplanes and spacecraft and yet separated enough from the company they're monitoring to not have conflicts of interest.
Whenever anyone points this out, they get labeled as cynics who hate capitalism and industry, and their complaints are swept under the rug -- after all, the company hasn't collapsed yet, so the worries must be unfounded!
This is exactly why strong government regulations and oversight is necessary. Strictly profit driven companies don't care about externalities like pollution or human lives. Literally, they only care about making one number go up, everything else (including the long term value of the number) means nothing at all.
Engineers can sometimes be indispensable enough to finagle power from alliances with capital. We don’t win popularity contests.
Then why do companies' value go up long term? I own many stocks that have increased 10-fold in value over the last 10 years.