Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by the_real_cher | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

the_real_cher

How is Boeing so consistently terrible nowadays?

Theyre going to kill people at some point.

View on HN

They put business people in charge with the last merger, instead of people with technical backgrounds.

As for killing people, they have already done that with the 737 Max.

Insane. MBAs are a menace

A professional management class is a menace. Managers with experience in the domain they’re managing are key. Engineers-evolved-into-managers should lead engineering firms, etc. If you don’t understand what your underlying business is, you’re doomed to fail. Likewise, businesses should be predicated on selling products, not on boosting stock prices. There are at least two very wrong things: the Jack Welch-ification of companies, and professional MBAs.

case in point, Jensen Huang and Lisa Su. Both I think are excellent run engineering tech firms that would be ruined by an MBA. See Intel as an example..

They didn't have a choice. When Airbus developed into feasible competition Boeing suddenly had to start making money.

The aviation industry wants cheap, fuel economic and reliable "air busses". A brilliant name indeed.

> The aviation industry wants cheap, fuel economic and reliable "air busses". A brilliant name indeed.

Ah, so that's what went wrong with the Bombardier CSeries.

They could have put business people with technical backgrounds in charge, instead of business people with no technical skills whatsoever.

>> They already did with the 2 737 Max crashes.

Bean counters are notoriously poor engineers...

But they're great at financially justifying and ordering hits on whistleblowers.

Boeing merged with Lockheed/Martin when L/M was in serious trouble and rumors say it was pushed by the DOD because of all the L/M defense contracts involved. This then lead to the worst parts of L/M (management over engineering) gaining a foothold at Boeing (Engineering over Management).

The rest is a long, slow, decline into Boeing being what L/M was when they needed to be rescued.

I thought the real damage of management over engineering was done when they merged with McDonnell Douglas, and it was the MDD managers who got put into all the cushy higher level jobs?

Or did that happen twice?

I think his post is correct, except that he unfortunately got M-D confused with L-M and is probably outside the edit window now.

I'm pretty sure Boeing did not merge with Lockheed Martin. In this alternate history was it because of the F-35 contract?

ULA (Boeing and Lockheed's spaceflight division) is a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed. Maybe they're referring to that?

I think they're confusing Lockheed Martin with McDonnell Douglas.

At some stage capitalism/free market needs to happen to those companies. If they can't perform they should die and the military contracts moved on.

rather comically, the military is not taking boeing's word for it. they strip down and inspect the entire aircraft before acceptance.

I think the key is to have leaders that have passion for the product and aren’t just interested in making profits and increasing stock price.

When you look at people like Gates, Jobs, Musk, Huang, they are cutthroat businessmen but they also have passion for their products. When I listen to interviews with a lot of US car CEOs, they seem to be interested only tangentially interested in cars, it’s just all numbers.

Aren't there a couple of unalive whistleblowers?

afaik 2 so far as we know, John Barnett from "suicide" and Joshua Dean from "illness".

> Theyre going to kill people at some point.

developed by Boeing that became notorious for its role in two fatal accidents of the 737 MAX in 2018 and 2019, which killed all 346 passengers and crew among both flights.

"How is Boeing so consistently terrible nowadays?"

They are a publicly traded corporation. The enshittification is inevitable.

They already killed a few hundred people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com