A new report finds Boeing's rockets are built with an unqualified work force | Hacker News Reader

A new report finds Boeing's rockets are built with an unqualified work force

arstechnica.com

36 pointsnosianu14 comments

It's fashionable to hate Boeing, and they totally deserve it, but I'm in the industry (satellite payload side mostly) and I've been getting hints that this is becoming the case everywhere. Spacex in particular seems to be trying to move as much of the assembly labor as possible to lower qualification workers as a cost cutting measure.

Now, that's kinda how manufacturing works. You start with a product that is hand assembled by your $200/hr engineers and try to get it to the point where it's being mass produced by $20/hr techs and/or automated machinery. The issue is, how skilled are you at training those techs and setting up automation? If your management culture is dogshit at organizing literally anything, you're gonna have a bad time. You can take random people off the street and teach them to assemble spacecraft faster than you'd expect, but you need to be deliberate about it. Basically, this isn't an issue of using unwashed "non-areospace" workers, it's Boeing management and high level engineers continuing to be trash.

On the flip side, Spacex is relatively organized, but they'll have their moment when they run their course as a hot startup, failures and lessons lead to "process" and they can no longer get infinite new talent for the meat grinder. They almost make a point of not retaining, they want their workforce on edge at all times and you can only do that so long, all their talent is running off with their knowledge to other startups.

Edited to add: I don't think it's fashionable to hate Boeing. I argue it's your civic duty to be outraged by it.

There's a minimum cost at which things can be constructed. If Boeing wants 4 sigmas of a safety margin instead of 7 or 8 sigmas for profit reasons, great -- all I ask is that companies be up front about it when they sell, say, a reduced-safety 737-800Max (.e.g) to the market. It will be less safe, but some people may buy it (say Fedex, e.g.).

The other aspect is that I don't think the front line people and engineers are rewarded enough. People like money. Tying quality to bonuses is not a terrible idea. A lot of quality is known where people with less than 1 year of experience will make X% of mistakes. As they get more and more experienced they make Y% of mistakes.... encourage them get to Y% faster.

This is what leaves me annoyed about NASA choosing (so far) not to continue with the suggested financial penalties for Boeing. Boeing sought to save a dollar by using less-qualified, less expensive labour, in an area that they clearly shouldn't have. That should have a cost, dammit.

Some of those saved dollars got to political contributions. The return on investment on that is fantastic.

OIG report mentioned: https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/ig-24-015.pd... [pdf]

I thought the whole point of SLS was to keep critical skills from being lost by keeping people employed at Michoud, Stennis, Huntsville, etc. If that's not happening then it's really pure pork.

Any company doing stockbuy backs is suspect for doing the same thing.

Given the manuafacturing and quality issues with basic aircraft, is anyone surprised that the advanced stuff has problems too?

> largely caused by its workforce having insufficient aerospace production experience

How do new employees gain the experience if they can't get the job without experience?

You have to be willing to pay, train, and retain. Collins Aerospace pays $19/hour for third shift aerospace welding work, for example. It's financialization and enshittification from Boeing's board all the way down.

Edit: This is why unions are important (although they are not without their own problems). The alternative is C-level strip mining and dumping the liabilities on everyone else. Survival of an org depends on checks and balances between the people who do the work and management. The evidence is clear the incentives are insufficient for management to "do the right thing" and that a board will hold them accountable.

Plus spending $100B on stock buybacks, so this was not a cost saving measure driven by actual cost saving needs.

At some point it starts to look like busting out the company was intentional and the entire point and there was zero concern for long term viability.

So about $40k/year. Barely more than a Walmart associate. Yeesh!

And also willing to retain the experienced workers from which the freshers can learn... costs costs costs, while a rocket comes down anyway (CEO thinking here)

New employees by themselves aren't the problem, and can be trained and eventually get sufficient experience by working in an environment where the people around them know what they are doing.

But if you don't train them, and not enough people around them know what they are doing, they can never get the experience needed.

Boeing just cheaped out, didn't retain, didn't train.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com