Interesting article.
“For every new plane you put up into the sky there are about 20,000 problems you need to solve, and for a long time we used to say Boeing’s core competency was piling people and money on top of a problem until they crushed it,” says Stan Sorscher, a longtime Boeing physicist and former officer of the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA), the labor union representing Boeing engineers. But those people are gone.
Yes, a very interesting article. And awful to think annout all those top management people that caused this will probably not see any punishment at all. They have actual people’s lives on their conscience after those crashes, but I doubt they care.
I’d say it’s on the conscience of people with actual conscience who decided that others have it too, and thus allowed such cockroaches to ruin wonderful systems.
FTA:
"By now you know what became of Swampy: He was found dead a few weeks ago with a gunshot wound to his right temple, “apparently” self-inflicted, on what was meant to be the third day of a three-day deposition in his whistleblower case against his former employer; his amended complaint, which his lawyer released last week, is the basis for much of this story.
It is worth noting here that Swampy’s former co-workers universally refuse to believe that their old colleague killed himself. One former co-worker who was terrified of speaking publicly went out of their way to tell me that they weren’t suicidal. “If I show up dead anytime soon, even if it’s a car accident or something, I’m a safe driver, please be on the lookout for foul play.”"
Hadn’t the case been going around for years before that? It started in 2017.
It seems odd that it would happen now, when there is a bunch of press around it. Especially when someone conveniently dying would just make people assume foul play.
It was the right time to ensure the right stock price at the right time.
An enormous company like Boeing always has myriad legal things going on. There’s always a little litigious jitter in their stock price.
Everything Swampy knew, the big cheeses did too and more. Statements entering the courts’ records makes them more difficult to casually dismiss. Evidence of top echelon mismanagement becomes a problem, a stock price problem.
Agreed. His family attributed it to the stress of dealing with the court case and the idea that people could die in one of the planes he oversaw being built. That tells me there was an underlying mental health issue that could explain this as suicide.
That said, the mental health decline came directly from the disregarding of his safety reports, so Boeing is at least partially responsible here. I don’t think he was necessarily murdered in-person, but I do think he was essentially murdered by working in such a toxic workplace.
At least that’s my take by straining at the few details I have access to.
I’m not sure if Boeing is going the same route we are, but blue collar people - the ones building and assembling airplanes - are treated like replaceable cogs. They aren’t taught the actual meaning or point of quality/quality management systems. It’s mostly warm bodies. When I ask people if they’ve read the specs that cover the processes they’re doing, they stare at me. It’s maddening. You’re performing a complex process solely on OJT? Fucking lunacy.
Gotta say, I’m a blue collar who also builds sensitive machinery, have been doing so for six years now.
There is a VERY sharp divide in how well I consider myself to have mastered certain aspects of the job.
Someone fucking kill me: I’m doing this job for the first time and I’m having to spend ages sifting through our processes that may not be documented in enough detail to do the job perfectly. The job is legally safe because I’m following the rules but god I don’t like it. Takes about three times as long as a ‘normal’ task.
This is fine: I’ve done the job enough to know how everything goes together, what torque to use where, and if there’s anything I should really be doing that isn’t in the instructions, or if there’s an instruction mismatch.
Mastery: I can not only do the job, I actually understand the explicit purpose and function of everything I’m putting together on an intimate level, and can use my knowledge of that purpose and function to make god damn sure that what I’m putting out is top quality. As probably the least sensitive example of this, this is stuff like knowing that the particular brand of no-mixing-needed paint we use can sometimes develop a sediment layer of its’ pigments on the bottom that requires you to mix it with a stick for the paint to perform properly, and that you can tell when the paint is experiencing this issue because it’ll be off-colour due to the lack of pigment; and if you don’t resolve this issue the paint won’t adhere to surfaces correctly and is liable to flake off.
I’ve been doing this for six years and there are only a handful of aspects of my job I consider myself to have complete mastery over. I don’t think I’m the best worker out there, not by a long shot, but to me the idea that you can just lose and replace your workforce when dealing with complicated machinery is about as stupid as the notion that AI can replicate the human mind (It can’t unless you abandon the von-neumann computer design).
What I do is similar, and our customers are in house so we have some latitude. We’ve got fairly loose standards about how we build most things, and usually more than one option - but the finished product has rigid requirements. We get to “equivalent or better” some things, but even knowing that is kind of fucky. Grade 8 hardware is better than grade 5, right? Except for safety critical shit. Then you need stress disposition to go to grade 8.
We’ve lost a lot of old peeps to golden handshakes and being mad at the company/union. In a few years my org lost an absurd number of years of experience. Think thousands.
I will say that the union at the St. Louis side was pretty decent from what I could tell when I was there, granted I was an engineer on the outside looking in. Still, agree with you that just replacing these couple of leaders isn’t going to change anything overall, the entire executive leadership are full of MBA’s that only care about EVM and I had a few arguments about doing the right thing vs the cheap thing.
CEOs have cliques now. When we replace one a new fleet of fucking VPs come with them. They don’t fire all of the old ones, either.
It’s maddening. You still in aerospace?
I mean I’m a union member and it isn’t much better. There’s a lot of talk but nobody seems to actually care.
You have to explicitly pay people to care. And incentivise(not work them to death ie) them not to get complacent
Edit. This is meant as commentary not a disagreement or an argument
Well, there’s another side to this, of industrial ergonomics. The system assembled\built is supposed to be easily divisible with clear documents into simple non-ambiguous tasks which can be given to those blue-collar people. If the engineers designing it failed at that stage, you can’t blame blue-collar people for not being able to grasp something above their pay grade. They should be shown a few pages with “screw that with this, grease with such amount of that” and that should be enough.
Ergonomics seems to be having its own dark ages as an area these days. Both in consumer and in industrial stuff.
I don’t know about that, we have the same problem in civil engineering. At some point you just have to say that if someone can’t read a drawing and do what it says they are not doing their job properly. If that means you need an engineer on site to read and interpret the drawing for people who can’t or won’t read then so be it.
As an engineer who documents things compulsively and spends a large amount of time ensuring my documentation is clear, nothing pisses me off more than when people refuse to read documentation. I am hired to perform technical tasks, not to read documents I already wrote for others. It’s like people are illiterate or unwilling to spend any amount of time parsing data to find what is needed.
In aircraft, with unions, that always falls on the company. Management is too busy sucking the next level’s dick or too fucking stupid to do anything but shuffle problems. It’s special.
Think about it this way. Nobody starts off knowing or having mastery of a task. Military aviation works on this principle. That a person should get an MOS out of boot, go to school to learn some basic background about the job (ideally), or to a training command to learn the hands on about the job and then school later. Taking an 18 year old who’s never turned a wrench in their life and turning them into something of a subject matter expert in approximately 4 years.
But that’s still 4 years to train that person with no prior experience. And experience is what keeps things running. The aviation industry as a whole is just hemorrhaging people. Experienced people are retiring every day and there’s not enough new people coming in.
Back in the day my father used to do piece work machining for Eton and McDonnell Douglas. He’s in 74 now. The median age of most of the guys I work with? 55. I’m on the maintainer side of things so I don’t know about the manufacturing side. But what I do know is that even having an engineer on site doesn’t always trump having experienced people to teach the job, supervise it, and fill in the disconnect between engineers and maintenance or builders.
So while I wholeheartedly agree that it is possibly and even expected that instructions should be made so that a novice can follow them, that’s not the whole picture.
And there is a disconnect. Working from engineering drawings can be a nightmare. Some engineers have never walked the space they are making the drawings for. They don’t know the problems that can crop up when they want someone to install wiring through a solid bulkhead or a wet sealed area like a lavatory. They ignore the fact that this wiring can’t interfere with the hydraulic lines running from this bulkhead to this frame. These are problems I’ve run into and only experience has told me that hey, this isn’t right, we shouldn’t do that.
I’m blue collar and deal with that sort of thing. In the last ten years it’s actually gotten worse. It’s like we’re giving them tooling that’s more “they can make it work” than something with an obvious interface. Things I think are pretty basic (give mechanics star knobs, not bolts) are just fucking ignored. Tooling should get out of the way of your job as much as possible, not require even more tools to manage it.
This isn’t just putting shit together, though. Most assembly tasks aren’t tight tolerance, but they always involve multiple specs that each person is supposed to at least know about. I haven’t been through production training, but the production people I interact with scare me sometimes, and it’s not their fault if the importance of quality isn’t adequately explained.
But I made it clear I wasn’t blaming them in the first post, so I’m not even sure where that came from.
Unskilled labor is a myth but Boeing leadership bought into it. You can codify a lot but eventually with too much churn even the knowledge of the docs, and automation gets lost. Let alone the knowledge to improve or maintain that code. In software the idea “code rots” is true for a reason.
About the article itself:
Like most neoliberal institutions, Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs.
We-ell, ideologically what people usually call “neoliberal” doesn’t discard the latter. Just the former is considered assets and the latter human resources. Here’s where the problems arise, cause human resources here means both domain area knowledge\expertise and various kinds of sales\politics.
The kind of bosses they have simply think that their social\political\criminal skills are the core, fundamentally needed human resource, and the rest is not.
It’s a bit like all those normies dreaming of replacing engineers with chatbots, and becoming excited (almost to the degree of yelling out loud with triumph “finally we are going to get rid of them”). Their worldview puts human ingenuity in themselves and their social existence, and what engineers do is in their opinion like tooling, a less high-level job, something that machines can do.
The customers sales and engineers can’t even figure out what they want after talking with a human engineer for hours. It we lets sales talk to chatgpt about projects, you can kiss the entire power grid goodbye in a year.
The early studies of chat bot code indicate too that using them results in more c&p style crap code with worse fundamentals which makes 100% of the sense when you think about it for a minute.
We’ve all worked with that guy who thought that loops were too heady, that it was a great idea to put everything into one method, or that it was better to have a giant hashmap of garbage in your code and maintain it manually rather than adding better infrastructure.
Welp, ChatGPT is their equivalent of a machine gun. Enjoy!
Well, historically in the course of industrialization something a bit similar worked. Skilled artisans could make better things with their hands, but workers with machines would win with sheer amount.
The nuance which should be clear (but isn’t) to every MBA, salesman and the kind is that the things engineers do make commercial sense only because of some baseline of quality, and also that the sheer amount doesn’t matter that much there. A bit like with a leader making decisions, the role is one they surely often think about, - fewer good decisions are better than lots of bad decisions.
MBAs ruin everything
The paradigm shift from an MBA becoming a degree for showing you are a connected, yet glorified project manager, to a Jack Welch disciple is astounding.
Why anyone would ever hire a pure MBA graduate is beyond me. Yes, please make my business a complete failure while extracting all the wealth for short term gains. This is amazing.
Oh I completely understand the why. Get a golden parachute in your contract, hire MBAs to cannibalise the company for short-term gains, then leave the company obscenely rich before the dumpster fire you created bites anyone in the ass. Rinse and repeat until you have all the money.
For Boeing’s execs, they just got caught before they could cut and run.
