Posted on 06/29/2019 3:48:32 AM PDT by C19fan
“Where is the loudmouth “If it ain’t Boeing, I ain’t going” crowd?”
Well, that used to be the mantra, even with professional pilots. Boeing used to have a stellar reputation, at least until McDonnell Douglas no longer existed as competition due to the merger in ‘97.
Obviously things at BA have changed dramatically.
Boeing outsources to India primarily. Many of Boeing’s executives are Indians these days and they always have an yearning to send work to India. Indians denounce Americans doing the job as poor quality or slow then claim the solution is to outsource to India.
“Heads Up - almost all of Boeing’s engineers in the Seattle metro area are unionized.”
Not exactly. Many are contractors and software is also written in Denver, Dallas, Vancouver, Poland, and a few other countries.
I have a personal experience with GM on just that.
The accountants countermanded the engineers to put in the minimum possible strength part, instead of what the engineers had finalized. This was done to save a penny or less a part, sometimes.
And in the meantime, Airbus has overcome their own flight control software issues from decades past is delivering excellent products lately - especially the 787’s newest competitor the A350-900.
“The level of engineering training in India is very high.”
No, it isn’t. As someone who has worked with Indians and has taught them in college, I found their level of knowledge to be very poor. In fact, plagiarism is rampant in India and they practice it in the US.
“Things that used to get fixed in weeks now take many, many months...and even then they’re not right.”
Amazing. We just finished six years of an LCE “Reliability Excellence Initiative” and the same thing happened. But we can track KPIs now! On nice colorfull charts, so many numbers to game!
Accountants should never be put in charge of any company that is not an accounting firm.
Breathes their an MBA with a soul so dead, as to think they could not squeeze 5 more basis points out of anything, including their kid’s lemonade stand.
I work in National Security and have a standard Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) chart where the customer wrote the first bullet under “Threats,” in red, bold font, and three points larger than the font of the rest of the bullets. It reads:
“An MBA in Finance”
“What a way to wreck a reputation for quality.”
Quality left Boeing in the 1990’s. Prior to that Boeing was a quality shop. Now, the bean counters and not the engineers run the place. Managers with zero aviation or engineering experience are in charge.
Boeing treats ‘manager’ as a career field, as in, “We’re looking for a manager. You have zero aviation, Boeing, or engineering experience but you are a manager? Great, you’e hired.”
Another metric of how Boeing is poorly managed: There are only 30 employees per Vice President. That doesn’t include the managers, Senior Managers, Directors, and Senior Directors. That tallies to 1 manager for every 5 employees.
Boeing is having an accountability and ownership issue. Any idea must get through dozens of managers to see the light of day. The Lowest Common Denominator is at play here: The high level of politics means low productivity and low quality.
“None of us is as dumb as all of us.”
Regardless of the cause the point rings true about a number of companies I’ve worked with an observed.
I started in the computer business in 1981, long before Google, Facebook, and Amazon existed.
Back then Hewlett Packard was started by Engineers, run by Engineers who made products for Engineers and other scientific and technological professions....
Everything from calculators to printers and other medical technology devices....they even made a line of mini-computers aka small mainframes....
Overtime as the Computer Industry went thru dramatic changes, they brought in non-Engineers to run the company, people like Carly Fiorina, Mark Hurd, and Meg Whitman, none of which were fit to run a company like HP.....
They managed numbers instead of people and products...
HP will be around for a long time, but they have passed the point of no return, they will never be the innovative cutting edge technology company they once were.....
The next company is Apple, originally run by Steve Jobs, when Apple initially became successful, the Board of Directors brought in John Scully from Pepsico I believe to run Apple and ran off Steve Jobs....Scully had NO business running Apple and nearly killed the company only to be saved by bring Steve Jobs back, who lead a miracle turn around....
After Steve Jobs died, Apple has pretty much done nothing new and dramatic, the new Iphones are essentially the same as the generation before, with faster CPUs, better cameras and cost a fortune.....
I read recently that Jony Ive one of Apple’s longtime legendary designers is leaving to form his own company as Apple issued a statement that their focus now would be on services instead of design.....
HUGE mistake IMO, yes they are and will continue to be hugely profitable for a long time but they have begun that long slow road to irrelevance that hits almost all IT companies at one time or another....
“Those planes did not crash because of defective code.”
Depends on the definition of ‘defective’. The code did what it was designed to do, but, as others have written in this thread, there was no anticipation in the design to deal with different situations and variables that might arise - like a faulty sensor, or disparate instrument readings.
When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail. The only thing accountants understand about making more money is cutting more costs. The only thing MBAs seem to understand is mergers, breakups, divestitures and clever financing.
Growing a company with improved products, expanded markets, innovation, streamlined manufacturing and such is the province of engineers and marketers. Others may be able to do it but it is not their first instinct. They are more interested n much faster gratification and payoffs.
When you put investors and number-pushers in charge of an aviation company.....planes crash.
OK, then how do explain in software engineering that the Indians are so active as outsourcing shops? Why do all these big U.S. corporations give them work?
Is it because they are given the easy tasks? Perhaps. Is it because their level of quality is merely satisfactory but they offer very low prices?
My opinion: wherever I go, looking at the telecom market, either Indian Americans or people from India have a strong presence as technical leaders or are the executives managing the build of next generation systems.
I can’t speak to other engineering fields like aerospace, etc.
I think the $10 an Hour folks are much more qualified.
Throughout my career it seems they tried to use the Big Bang theory if integration. Build all the pieces,then throw them together and hope that somehow it will magically work as desired. Not as designed, but as desired.
* * *
That practice is scary in the airplane business.
Next thing will be AI robots replacing humans and they think that will fix everything. For some reason, I think it will backfire on them. I don’t know how. Just a feeling. Something that bots lack.
* * *
I too have my doubts about AI. I think it will eventually work, but we’ll have severe growing pains.
You cannot use AI to build AI systems. Human setup and monitoring is absolutely essential. A big problem with AI is it’s a bit harder to trace what actually went wrong.
But theoretically, it makes perfect sense. Humans make tons of errors and extrapolate their “rules” from insufficient experience. Using machines will enforce greater statistical discipline when it comes to make decisions.
But I'm sure they followed all the worse-than-meaningless, CYA standards written by people who don't know a microsecond from a microphone.
ML/NJ
“The code did what it was designed to do,”
That is the meaning of not defective.. What definition of defective could you conjure that would apply to this code?
It did what it was designed to do. That said, it was defective because it wasn't designed to do what it should do. The point of the new software was to make the plane safer. The software did the opposite, and therefore was defective.
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