Jury finds Boeing stole technology from electric airplane startup Zunum

Did you forget a /s tag? I feel like the penalties are so small for the big companies that they just become small expense lines that need to be passed on to the consumers (airlines in this case).

And they did it a year late and over budget (thankfully they had to absorb the loss), despite submitting a much higher bid than their competitor. So it may not be a total failure since they did eventually launch, but I would hardly call this a success.

> I mean, they just put astronauts into orbit a minute ago. What’d you do today?

Well, I'm currently unemployed, and my new job doesn't start for a few more weeks.

So my accomplishments for today include:

* I hung out with my kid before he went out to the school bus

* I made the guacamole for tonight's dinner, because it benefits from sitting in the fridge for a few hours.

* I partially caught up on today's new Crunchyroll episodes. But Konosuba season 3 just isn't amusing me the way the first two seasons did.

* Played "Endless Space 2" and "Age of Darkness: Final Stand" for a while, because I'm short on sleep today and my brain wasn't good for much else.

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So, I didn't put anyone in orbit today, but I think I'm doing pretty okay, thank you :)

Getting to orbit is the easy bit. Coming back is the hard part.

There is a link, however, because after the merger, most of the Boeing execs peaced out, letting the students of Jack Welch gut the company.

You go in, fire replace or sideline anyone who isn't 100% profit motivated then the culture is gone, no? Time is then only going to make that worse

If those few people are in management and making hiring/firing decisions then yes, they can completely wipe out a culture.

But also, wiping out a culture does take some time. You wouldn't expect it to completely change overnight.

The 787 Dreamliner was completed in 2003, it was the last plane developed with the old Boeing culture. The 737 max was the first plane developed post merger 13 years later.

I was at a recruiting tech conference where a HR person from Boeing was talking about their impending age-out problem. Their average employee age was close to retirement.

You're right, it really wasn't that strong to begin with. Everyone talks about Boeing's engineering culture but this all took place in the context of the 1990s after the DoD started to unwind its anti-Soviet doctrine and retooling the armed forces for other enemies. There was less money to go around in the defense industry and everyone was downsizing so the engineering culture at Boeing was at risk if not already undermined by layoffs. The 1990s also brought a global slump in aircraft sales which hit their commercial aviation divisions really hard and Boeing tried to age-out the most expensive workers that would have been the backbone of the culture.

Lockheed had just merged with Martin Marietta to become Lockheed Martin and that goaded Boeing's leadership to blunder into a FOMO merger with McDonnell-Douglas. On top of that, the US government itself actually paid bonuses to the executives who got the LM deal done so the incentives were rotten from the start.

I've also heard rumors that Boeing execs received pressure from the DoD to acquire McDonnell-Douglas to prevent it from going bankrupt so they might not have been entirely willing from the start. The latter had just lost some pretty large contracts to competitors and was at risk of going bust entirely which was an unacceptable vendor risk to the DoD. The DoD didn't have the money to prop it up directly so instead might have used a third party.

If Boeing’s product was something less necessary, and held in lower esteem, like military aircraft, a lot of these QA issues (and clear lack of ethics) would fall by the wayside in terms of press coverage. Boeing is not the only company that has wrung itself dry with goals of growth-over-growth in terms of stock dividends.

Planes require so much validation and Boeing aircraft were held in very high esteem, but these attributes are just cows to milk in the eyes of the “smartest” investor. Boeing is the canary, the first to erode, because they set high standards for themselves and have to meet stringent regulatory standards. I won’t be at all surprised when other companies with less important products begin to display fraying edges.

This isn't a few random people, it's the executives at the top...

Yes, change of few decision makers on top in charge of hiring or money or anything similar will change the culture no matter how robust it was.

Culture is not magic, it is determined from top.

Incorrect conflation between hierarchal politics and amorphous culture. The management of Boeing was essentially replaced during the merger. It's not the "strength" of Boeing's culture that matters, but the quality of its work.

That story started out all too familiar from business, but this time it had a happy ending.