[tr_user]

Steps in the right direction, let's get rid of more engineers and replace them with more MBAs.

> 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.

[ics]

While many here won't disagree in general, be wary of holding this sentiment as dogma. There can be bad apples in engineering, and MBAs who can see that whether or not they have the knowledge or experience to make it better themselves. Whether or not they can (or want to) make the next step of hiring better or more honest engineers is what matters then.

(I'm not optimistic about Boeing here, but hey.)

[bombcar]

Sometimes (as rare as you expect, likely) an MBA has the tooling to fight back against the standard business pressures to cut costs, whereas an engineer is basically defenseless.

Quite rare.

[pg_1234]

> There can be bad apples in engineering,

So true ... Jack Welch was an engineer.

[sonicanatidae]

>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.

[x3n0ph3n3]

The person you are quoting did not express approval of Jack Welch. You are being downvoted for being unnecessarily argumentative and inflamatory, not for being wrong.

[sonicanatidae]

Argumentative? I agreed that he was a jackass with a pithy comment about spelling.

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.

[cqqxo4zV46cp]

You aren’t contributing to the conversation by going on a tirade.

[Log_out_]

Any of the two intertwined organizations will eject bad apples towards the other?

[eastbound]

Yes but Boeing needs to send a message. A message that they understood how they failed, a message that they apologize, a message that they can be redeemed.

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.

[ics]

Sometimes. It's problematic if you're stuck in a loop of sending a message without actually making the hard or risky strategic decisions.

[passwordoops]

I've mentioned it somewhere else, and maybe I've just been really unlucky with my experiences in industry but I'm at the point where I feel like someone with an MBA or finance background should start any new company (regardless of previous experience) by sitting in the janitor's closet for a month. If the janitor says they're ok, the MBA can start following the janitor around at a distance of 10 feet. If they don't screw anything up, they're allowed to ask one question a day of said janitor. So on and so forth. I estimate 10-15 years of persistence before the MBA/finance can be in a position to make minor decisions

[cqqxo4zV46cp]

This is the completely and utterly insufferable mindset that one gets when they spend too much time around other engineers and actually begins to buy into the completely fabricated self-important narrative that they are God’s gift to the world. It s a profession! Pull your head in. I’m not sure what sort of highschool bully trauma you’re trying to make up for, but being a bully yourself isn’t the answer. Interest rate rises couldn’t come soon enough, because there’s obviously at least one generation of techies that have been tricked into thinking that ‘finance’ starts and ends with “take a bunch of dumb VC money, build a completely unsustainable business, and change jobs every 18 months”.

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!”

[nonameiguess]

Here's her LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katherine-ringgold-88484140/deta...

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.

[lgleason]

From personal experience, once engineers go the MBA route they tend to lose their technical edge and get sucked into the vortex of the MBA universe. It's like some strange indoctrination process.

[protastus]

It makes sense. Engineers who get MBAs (or any second degree) usually do it early in their careers, so it's not like they have deep experiences to anchor them after they switch career path.

[varjag]

There are bad engineers too.

[sonicanatidae]

Absolutely, but systemically, that's not been their problem. Too many MBAs are making decisions without Engineering involvement. I know because my industry works the exact same way le rage

[slt2021]

this is because shareholders (pension and investment fund managers) are all MBAs and they demand results a-la "quick wins" that forces management into short-term thinking, cutting corners and cutting costs

[Smoosh]

I suspect that it can also be likened to "when the only tool you have is a hammer...". An MBA will see a product with flagging sales and solve it by cutting people, products and costs to improve the numbers. An engineer will see that same problem as requiring changes to the product, or developing a new one.

[cqqxo4zV46cp]

The MO of ‘business people’ isn’t inherently ‘quick wins, bleed the company dry’. I have absolutely no idea why techies can be so precious about every problem in their profession actually being a ‘systems problem’ yet are so quick to personally blame each and every person in another profession based on some ‘YouTube video essay’-level understanding of the context.

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.

[sonicanatidae]

It was at this point, that I knew you had no idea what you were talking about.

>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.

[varjag]

Well in the 737 MAX case here it is. There are multiple engineering failures, and regardless the management pressures there are specific engineers who implemented them and who signed them off.

[sonicanatidae]

We can consider 3 common ways this could have happened.

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.

[pugworthy]

And good engineers that become bad managers

[lgleason]

It creates some good optics, meanwhile the execs can funnel more money out of the company and parachute out before the thing blows up.

[mc32]

Looks like MBAs doing a CYA and throwing the Engs under the bus.

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.

[MilStdJunkie]

I know that there was a Boeing sub with a doc repository whose internal address was "TheBlameThrower". It had the explicit purpose of nailing specific people for saying specific things. So throwing people under transmissions is something of a company sport, with points awarded for distance and style.

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.

[legitster]

To be fair, the problem this time was with QC - not with engineering.

[f1shy]

I see a lot of comments trying to pin point the problem with a name. People: if in an airplane some pieces are taken off, they have to be labeled. In fact anything entering or leaving the airplane has to be noted, juat like in an op-room, to avoid for example forgetting tools (or loose bolts) somewhere. That is basic ABC 101 of working in an airplane.

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

[gumby]

This was actually a QA problem — a set of design issues starting at the front of the process. All QC can do is identify problems after they have occurred.

As the saying goes, “you can’t test quality into a product.”

[legitster]

I guess I am a bit confused. Someone was supposed to be checking the bolts before the plane left the facility and they didn't. That seems to be a QC process issue more than a QA issue.

But that also seems like splitting hairs. The problem is not one of engineering design, to OP's post.

[itishappy]

I disagree somewhat. It should not be possible for a plane to leave the factory without completing all QC checks. People are fallible, so a robust process is critical, and designing/confirming a robust QC process is a QA responsibility.

[legitster]

Sure, but "did the plane leave with all of the bolts it was supposed to" does not seem like a question that needs to be answered by someone with mechanical engineering degree. Let alone the responsibility of someone sitting in a cubicle in Everett.

[itishappy]

Agreed, but "how do we design the process to ensure, structurally, we cannot kill our customers" starts to sound a bit more engineering-like, no?

[djmips]

And these QC design people are engineers.

[itishappy]

Right! It's engineers all the way down...

[djmips]

How do we know that it was just 'someone was supposed to be checking the bolts before the plane left the facility and they didn't'. Because I'm not sure it's actually been fully revealed where the problem was. And despite the production issues, I'm of the opinion that the door-plug design should have been fail safe like the other doors where just pressure prevents them from being opened during flight. And another thing, passing the buck to QA doesn't let engineering off the hook since QC in this setting is a part of the engineering!

[KerrAvon]

The person you're replying to was being sarcastic. But -- to be clear -- this was clearly a problem with the defect tracking process, not like individual QC contributors.

[tareqak]

My question is, "was the defect tracking process influenced negatively by spending cuts?"

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.

[pyrolistical]

I don’t think they were being sarcastic

[msie]

Can't tell if you are sarcastic or not.