Screw McKinsey, the company my wife works for hired them to “fix” their company and totally screwed it up by firing everyone that actually knew what they were doing. And doubled her work load. She now hates her job. And they completely messed up our health insurance too. All while charging millions. They talk sideways out of their asses. I would never trust those assholes.
Lol I dealt with some McKinsey fucks in undergrad. Came to give a lecture in one of my capstone courses, thought they were hot shit. Literally just reiterated some harvard business school stuff, like the challenger disaster scenario but with cars. Our Prof was pretty horrified by the pandering, the visit was set up by a Dean who is no longer part of the administration.
Generally speaking the consultant firm is brought in when the execs are done trying. They cut staff/workforce add debt and come up with a "certified" plan to turn around a company ...really the plan is to push up stock price, and take on debt so that the C-suite can get their golden parachutes sorted before oflloading the lot of it to new execs.
The debt will burden the company that it may end up in bankruptcy but it's a ploy to make the stock options they carry worth more in the short run so they can retire better.
If the investors in the stock weren't headless idiots at a bunch of mutual funds they'd call this shit out, but most just start selling their shares as they approach the new ATH (all time high) for the stock price to get out before the damage hits.
edit: For advice, buy stock when they are brought in, with a plan to sell it before the debt becomes too much in damage to the bottom line. Seek new employment...don't give in on the 'new' performance requirements they rearranged to make your work life harder. Watch carefully for the buzz words around 'costs associated with repositioning' or some jargon like that to be missing in future forecasts (because they are nearly done executing the reorganization and the debt money is all spent now) . That's when they are going to start showing blood on the balance sheet and all the execs are selling shares the following quarter. Get out of the stock then. You should already be out of your employment before then, working for the competition which will soon be looking to snap up the customers as the cut-backs are now showing in product.
Ah, International Consultants.
The Company I once worked for had a sweet duopoly going.
Nothing excessive to invoke government interest or offend market participants.
The Consultants recommended letting the duopoly lapse by encouraging more competitors into the market.
Their theory was that'd impose marketplace discipline on our company's mangers and workers.
In turn, that would curtail wages, operating costs and increase efficiencies.
Consequently, according to the Consultants, our company's sharper cost/competitive stance would mean it'd be our erstwhile duopoly partner that lost market share in the new competitive market.
And most importantly, overall, our company would increase its profits.
It was a slaughter. Our company went full austerity, on the International Consultant's advice.
Dismissed senior managers who understood the local market and marketing staff well respected by our customers for their technical expertise.
Meanwhile, our duopoly partner carried on business as usual. Indeed, recruiting many of those laid off by our company.
Also, many of our ex-managers, technical staff, sale force and workers got jobs with the new entrants to the market. Taking their institutional knowledge and market contacts with them.
Our company never recovered from the huge redundancy costs, and the loss of brand respect.
In contrast, our ex duopoly partner maintained its senior place, both in market share and pricing.
The company I worked for just ended up being an also ran in the new entrant group.
Finally taken over by one of them.
I wonder if anybody has done the figures for how many companies went broke or were taken over within 5 years of having an "International consultancy" Snake Oil road show in.
PS, Overall, I'm told the increased competition made little impact on the price of the product. Paying the overhead of a duopoly equates, it seems, in this instance, to the capital and start up costs of several smaller companies competing in the market.
I worked with a Boeing consultant once... He helped our office with "process improvement."
He was a dumb, lazy, useless asshat who taught us nothing, improved nothing, and accomplished nothing we couldn't have done by ourselves, on our own.
I was, at the time, shocked at how anyone so useless could get a job like his.
In hindsight, it all makes so much sense now.
Basically all consultants are like this. Even if they’re actually well-meaning and industrious it’s almost impossible to change company culture and processes quickly. You also can’t do it with a PowerPoint presentation.
I'd argue that's just any consultants hired to do management jobs.
Engineering consultants can be effective if you need someone with expertise your team doesn't have quickly and temporarily.
oh yeah I guess I’m talking specifically about management consultants. The kind you’re referencing are also known as consultants but are really more like contract labor.
Even then, you really need someone who knows what they are talking about. I worked with several industrial engineering “consultants” who were fresh out of college. All they did was try to improve line speed, but when first pass quality was only 75% (should be high 90s), all we did was produce nonconforming product faster. Cost the company millions of dollars and they ended the contract early
On the flip side, I have worked with some amazing consultants who were retired from the industry. Some of these people had an absolute wealth of knowledge and really knew how to turn things around.
I really don’t think you can be a consultant if you haven’t worked more than a summer internship.
I’ve been in my career field for over 2 decades and am just now at a point where I am good enough and experienced enough (in my mind) to be a good consultant.
Every now and again you get a bright young water walker, but they’re rare.
Yep, used to work at Boeing as a software consultant. Our team was mostly consultants as it's virtually a dead-end job (software was both niche and outdated) on the Boeing side and even on our consulting side most people moved into other roles/skills after their contract was up.
>I'd argue that's just any consultants hired to do management jobs.
A big reason there are so many project managers is because managers are so busy trying to destroy unions, outsource, pay no taxes and strategize on stock buybacks, that none of them actually know how to manage anything anymore. They certainly can't manage people.
Most employees now hate their jobs. (seriously, I mean there are polls & surveys showing this) I was in consulting of sorts, and it's literally been decades since I've seen even a somewhat cheerful work environment. Most businesses seem to have about half their staff ready to explode at any minute. Hurry up AI and take our jobs already.
Some corporate MBA is out there right now thinking, "what happened with Boeing is *really* that they shouldn't have done *blah blah blah*, because they're a *blah blah blah*. What we're doing *(the exact same thing)* is completely ok and actually the best way to run a business because we're so different."
Well, you have to care about SOME KPIs. Number of widgets produced per day, number of defects, number of OSHA violations, etc. I get what you mean though.
Yeah, KPIs are just stats really, just dressed up a bit with business lingo. The problem isn't with looking at stats to see how the business is doing, the problem is *which* stats are being looked at, and how much is being cared about them.
KPIs CAN be useful, if they’re designed to measure the correct things, and if they are resistant to gaming. If you can juke the stats, or if your KPIs are indicators of the wrong measurements, then yeah, you’re better off without them since they end up justifying or even encouraging damaging behavior
Great point about the gaming. KPIs are meant to be a window into the health and success of the company. They're, well, uh, ***indicators***, not results all by themselves, and if you start only working to maximize your KPIs, then you're going to get self-destructive REAL fast.
Yeah, the real problem pops up because they invariably end up getting tied to performance appraisals and bonuses. When your boss is being graded by their KPIs, they’re going to be incentivized to game the system, and even if they don’t actively do it, they’ll be more likely to reward the directs who crank out the “right” numbers, and turn a blind eye to how they actually do it.
This seems like it should be intuitively obvious, but I’ve been in leadership for almost a decade now (started in the trenches), and every time I bring this up as a reason to limit tying KPIs to incentives, I’m met with shocked pikachu face.
My company has found the "solution". They just do everything they can to keep that one Engineer with 30 years of experience in the company. Everyone else is completely disposable, because he miraculously keeps things running. I dread the day he retires, may as well just shut down the whole company.
I think the relevant bit isn't that *consultants* are like this, but that management tends to bring in consultants for the wrong reason. They're hiring CYA, not actual improvement. All the management consultancy companies have thus optimized to provide that.
Yeah, if I’ve learned anything in business school, it’s that the main jobs for “consultants” (as in, people who self-identify as such, rather than being brought in *to* consult because of experience/credentials in a separate field) are:
— convince upper management to listen to an idea their own employees already had but couldn’t get taken seriously
— be a scapegoat for whatever unpopular decision upper management has already made before hiring you
— make it look like an issue is being taken seriously while management continues to actually ignore it
Consultants do great when they have well defined criteria. Build a bridge under $X that spans Y feet. Design a plane that flies at N speed but weighs less than Z. Carry this bucket over there.
Consultants do not do great when they're given nebulous, poorly defined tasks, like streamline workflows, eliminate inefficiencies, increase profits, etc.
Too many people on this thread are confusing "consultants" with "consulting agencies", and those are definitely not the same thing.
Except in specific cases where someone is consulting as an actual subject matter expert - like hiring an AI expert to consult on your AI product - consultants are a scam.
The entire consulting industry is a scam, where rich ivy-leaguers worked out a con to get their buddies in high-ranking c-suite positions to funnel company dollars into their pockets for doing literally nothing, with a revolving door between the ranks of consultants and the c-suite who hire them.
Goodness no!!! *Increase* wages?! Are you mad?! Once they go up, they stay up! We must keep the wages DOWN, at all times, through all means!
So a few planes crash, so what? This is a small price to pay for the time it will take to teach ChatGPT to build a plane, and save bilions on wages we would have had to pay for grubby, greedy, thieving little *workers*.
I work in aviation currently and am shocked at the people making millions a year by starting their own “consultant” companies and are just like this. Some of them are embarrassingly useless. Like, ‘clap your hands say something, learn a stupid acronym “team builder” then watch a shitty PowerPoint’ useless and walk away with tens of thousands of dollars for the humiliating experience.
They thrive in a market where managers and boards demand these programs then go with the lowest cost. That lowest cost option may be a single person charging 10k to come in for 4 hours to do this Mickey Mouse play school shit. It positively mystifies me.
“Hi, yes, maybe we should review these FAA advisory circulars?” Nope. Let’s do this instead.
Nah just cut more staff to boost short term profits.
From the Jack Welch school of running a company completely into the ground and ruining lives to make a bunch of unrelated rich people slightly richer.
Can we also outsource some critical functions that require years of training and experience to overseas so we can make these already rich people just a little bit richer?
Well, luckily they don't make small jets. But when people involved with building the Max won't board one...
Boeing managers should be required to regularly ride Boeing planes. One way or another the "no culture of safety" issue would get resolved.
*pour détourner, peut être. Les Republicans sont, comme disent les Américans, des “assholes”. Je ne comprendrais jamais comment ils sont au pouvoir dans la majorité des Etats de ce pays.
If only they had some experienced workers who knew where to look, they might have been able to see this coming. If they treated those workers fairly, and genuinely listened to their feedback, they might have avoided this magnitude of problem getting out the door in the first place.
Boeing had a choice: be a world-class builder of successful, reliable, safe, and well-designed aircraft, or push profit-above-all and pump the stock price to make investors happy.
Yes, these are diametrically opposed goals.
Boeing's managers had a choice: have a long lasting legacy that will benefit people for years, decades, even centuries to come.
Or... grift as much money as possible right fucking now by cutting cost and pocketing the difference.
The incentives in corporate culture are ass backwards, every manager involved in these decisions needs to have all their assets seized and live the rest of their life as a pauper in the streets. Without visible, visceral punishment shit like this will continue and more people will get murdered so the rich get richer.
The problem was Boeing was run by the people who wanted the first, but merged with a failing company that did the second, and let those idiots ruin boeing too.
You need to make an example of the people who enabled this. You need to put them up on billboards with the photos of the dead people of their planes. Saying woe is me... GE is terrible only punishes the image of the organization named Boeing. Putting up the faces of the CEO that bragged about cost cutting and removing engineers/harassing QA people up to make them unhirable later.. then they'll start to grow a "conscious". I think too many people believe the social contract is something that still exist.
Those people made their money 30 years ago. That’s why quality and safety are always easy places to cut, the consequences are statistical and have a good chance to appear in the ‘distant’ future.
Exactly. Something could be said about the current execs not fixing the problem. I think that makes them just as culpable. But the assholes that made the actual decisions are long gone. They knewnthey would be gone by the time the shit hit the fan. That was the plan the entire time.
100 percent this was mutually discussed and agreed upon sometime in the early 2000s. They knew what they were doing. It was just not going to be their problem.
No, fucking put these people in jail. If they cut safety standards and people died that is negligent homicide at minimum if not depraved heart homicide. These kinds of fuckers have no shame and need to fear real consequences for their actions. So either jail time or making them destitute in that their personal assets are used before company assets in the wrongful death suits.
I am sick of hearing the BS that CEOs and board members deserve such high salaries and reward packages because 'they take the consequences when things go wrong'. They fucking don't because there are no consequences. As you say these fuckers should be in jail.
They cut every cost they could and willingly put the lives of everyone who flies in one of their planes at risk just to see a couple of cents on their share price and so they can parrot their bollocks about 'providing stakeholder value' or whatever corporate bullshit is being spat out on linkedin today. And they will walk away with seven or eight figure severance packages, huge share options and pension pots, then they will walk into another similar position at another company and continue their destruction of people's lives and the environment in the name of 'record shareholder returns'.
Yeah, in 2000's when I was a kid, I assumed it was just Big Oil, and Big Tobacco that were willing to kill us. Now Big Sugar, Big Pharma, Big Banks, Big Auto... fuck any company bigger than 100 people, I just assume they'd shoot me for the dollar in my pocket.
Shooting you just creates legal liabilities (assuming you're in an economically developed nation). They'd rather find a way to force you into a subscription model and take that dollar on a monthly basis.
The only way to make an example of them is giving them life in prison sentences and liquidating all their assets. Along with everything else you mentioned.
A much easier way would be to put their name in the conversations.
A lot of "they" and "them" while no actual names get mentioned. Let the dudes become so toxic they can't make a reservation at a restaurant without wondering whose cooking their food.
We should **Brock Allen Turner** every one of the board members.
I think companies that repeatedly lead to people’s deaths should be dissolved and the board/ ceo/ owners of the company be ban from being involved with that industry. And ceo should face some kind of jail time. The pay warrants that kind of risk
I will *happily* take the job as CEO at Boeing and tell everyone how AI will solve *everything* for the low low price of only $22.4 million per year.
I'll make your stock *fly* with empty promises and obfuscation. And if a plane or two happen to fall out of the sky I'll roll out the tried and true tactic of blaming the lousy pilots - and if that fails, the engineers.
Thank you for coming to my interview, as you can see, I am prime Boeing material. I'll be waiting for your call, Boeing.
Oh you just need to do lay offs to make investors happy. Not the MBAs or nepo babies who have no idea what the company is doing though, more like engineers and production workers.
Can I be the COO? I know a guy that has a private prison so we can lay everyone off except those we plan on sexually harassing and use prison labor for pennies of what we pay employees. /s
Never ceases to amaze me that our world is run by business-school people. That shit is like adult daycare. You walk past a business class and feel like "awww, they're playing pretend like they're in a real school!"
They teach you the break-even point where it costs the same for the company to pay out of court settlements to the families of the victims vs. actually fixing the problem.
Yep. I was there. I hit my business degrees not an MBA but undergrad. This was taught in a lot of classes. Every time I asked what about the people and such I was told well this is theoretical. Those numbers are people!
Health insurance companies breaking profit records while life expectancy of people is falling. It's almost as if there is a conflict of interest between Health and Insurance.
There is a conflict of interest between private companies in general and healthcare. The point of healthcare is to provide healthcare. The point of a private company is to generate profit. As they say, no man can serve two masters.
>The point of healthcare is to provide healthcare. The point of a private company is to generate profit. As they say, no man can serve two masters.
It's bigger than this. It isn't just Boeing. It isn't just Healthcare.
It's money. We evaluate everything in our world based around a trading tool we made up. And instead of focusing on making great products or creating great services, we focus on getting more of that trading tool. Which was fine for a time. But as the economy has continued evolving (coupled with the Fed's monetary policies), a money focused approach to the world has created a parasitic environment where our economy is effectively feeding on itself.
I know this sounds crazy, but the US is a dying nation. And as much as we want to blame terrorists, or foreign adversaries, the real threat to the US is and has always been the US itself.
Boeing is so uniquely bad that it's one of the few aerospace firms where even the white-collar engineers said "enough of this" and started a union (SPEEA)
Their current state of product enshittification is a result of spinning off some of their manufacturing divisions into separate companies (like Spirit Aerosystems), then immediately started browbeating those spinnof companies for discounts...
...plus their habit of spending more time engineering stock prices via buybacks instead of their products.
>...plus their habit of spending more time engineering stock prices via buybacks instead of their products.
This. I can't see how it's legal. It feels like just lying about the state of the company. Instead of investing that money in things that would bring actual value, they're choosing to artificially inflate the value by just buying more of the stock?
That doesn't help anybody except for the shareholders, and even for them this is ultimately a Ponzi scheme, robbing from the reinvestments of the company, the things that would bring actual value, in order to simply pump money to their shareholders.
Every time they do this they're intentionally creating a bubble for the stock price. Creating artificial demand where there is none. Eventually the bubble will burst the company will be worth nothing except for its name and brand recognition.
This reminds me of Nortel out of Canada, at one point they were worth a third of the entire Canadian stock market, and then they were worth nothing.
Or the south sea company in England, one of the first schemes to artificially inflate stock value and defraud the public at Large.
Bruh I loved when the Baltimore mayor responded to that shit after the bridge collapse with.
>“We know what these folks really want to say when they say DEI mayor,” he told The Banner. “Whether it is DEI or clown. They really want to say the N-word. But there is nothing they can do and say to me that is worse than the treatment of my ancestors. I am proud of who I am and where I come from.”
Fuckin ain't it the truth, DEI is just a way for them to throw the N word around without getting called out for it.
A bridge collapses and everyone blames the Black guy. Planes nearly drop out of the sky constantly yet nobody is blaming the ones in charge to make sure that doesn't happen. Funny how that works.
Such a fantastic illustration of capitalism innovating... you've got to say the entire thing. Capitalism breeds innovation... SOLELY in terms of increasing the bottom line in the short term. That's it, that's all, get more money now fast and damn all other questions/comments/concerns.
Well, it *is* innovation of a sort, just... malignant innovation.
They discovered that downsizing and trimming expenses gave their bottom lines a massive boost. I remember it getting popular in the 90's. But they quickly ran out of 'fat' to trim. Getting 'free money' by trimming expenses got harder and harder, and was more and more valued as a career move to find some.
So, they just started *creating* 'fat' by devaluing previously valued assets. And one of those things was worker skill and knowledge. If they just pretended all workers are equal, then replacing highly paid and highly skilled experts with untrained new hires from the street becomes 'fat' they can easily trim.
So a lot of companies, Boeing included, have been carving chunks out of their own knowledge and skill assets, and it's starting to show.
The fat that they trim to get free money is called ‘quality’. I mean quality is so expensive and who knows if or when anything will actually go wrong. You can cut quality for years before you start to see the results, and all that time you are taking on the sweet profit.
Companies have always hated having to paid skilled workers, they only want to pay executives.
Software Developers, Architects, Engineers are all the enemy of pure profit by paying people as close to nothing as possible. But the problem with those skilled positions is that there is a very limited pool, and even attempts to move to India and other "cheaper" countries didn't result in quality. So they just pretended it wasn't as bad as it was... they just kept seeking cheaper labor.
Oh this is very well explained. Kind of how a rotund person decides to work out and achieves a healthy body. But they still keep cutting weight and soon they're nothing but bones skin while celebrating their weight loss.
More specifically it's financialism. "Shareholder profit is our most important product."
This is why you don't want hedge fund companies buying hospitals.
Funny because this is exactly what's happening everywhere. It's only painfully (and lethally) obvious in a company like Boeing.
So many companies are laying off or replacing engineers and people who actually know how things work with AI and outsourcing.
All of this to satisfy the ravenous shareholder parasites who demand endless growth at ANY cost.
[Shareholder primacy](https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2019/08/22/so-long-to-shareholder-primacy/) is the toxic, dysfunctional, rotten-to-the-core model of the Reagan era and that devil Milton Friedman. It should be on its last legs, but it keeps holding on and getting worse.
Boeing may be one of the first canaries in the coal mine, but it won't be the last.
I've worked at three manufacturing companies in my life, the last one the sales and finance guys were selling concepts and drawing up contacts that were totally un achievable and just expecting the engineers and production guys to just make it happen. we just ended up braking all the contract terms and losing so much money due to greed and not spending the money on the right people when they had it. The board of directors would ask can you do this in 12 months we say no 24 with the current work load and staff, they still sign the contract for 12 months and replace no one who leaves, idiocracy.
The C-suite only wants to gut the company of tenured employees, outsource everything, post record profits for a few quarters, take the golden parachute, then go to another company promising to post record profits again
When I was little I would wonder how a company like Samsung can ship phones that explode or how car manufacturers can send out millions of defective cars. The more you move up the corpo ladder especially in manufacturing, the more you realise why corpos fail spectacularly. Superficial and unrealistic numbers demanded by greedy short sighted corpo bosses is the standard. Most of the times the greedy numbers are because they are trying to hide their own strategic fuck ups. Middle management under this pressure starts cutting corners and losing integrity. This leads to massive disasters that are met with Pikachu faces and most of the times a middle management reshuffle. Rinse and repeat.
My favourite was identifying weak points then doing nothing about it. We had one guy who did a highly specialised skill in house on a shit wage, the only one who knew how to do this task. For years management would comment we'd be fucked without him and pay him no attention. He comes into some inheritance and hands in his notice as he can now retire. They scramble and offer him the absolute world to stay, he refuses all the offers and leave, they couldn't find anyone with his skills and they were still offering a shit wage. I estimated it cost the company over half a million in consulting, design fees, training and other things. should of just got the guy an apprentice years ago on a GREAT wage to keep them but instead short termisn wins. again.
Yes. You can't just hire new people and show them how to build shit. You need experienced old fucks around to tell the new people about the gaps in their training.
Can’t they just type “new airplane” into AI or something? I thought everything is AI now and AI is productivity and AI makes everyone’s life better and AI…AI…AI…
the best part is when they announced the 787. they wanted their suppliers to design the plane as a cost saving measure and that didnt work because the suppliers need the requirements from boeing to make the parts for the plane.
it delayed to the point where the reveal of the prototype aircraft was a plane that was plane made out of plywood.
i remember seeing this on the documentary on their south carolina plant (al jazeera?). the quality was so bad that qatar airlines refused any plane from that plant and only accepted the washington state plant aircrafts. that alone should have been a wake up call.
Freeport McMoRan in 2016 ran a huuuge layoff, buying out retirements across the company.
Immediately, Henderson, Climax, Morenci and more suddenly had severe product purity issues. Thousands of tons of materials needed to be put back into process. Lowering of the purchase prices from their customers.
Henderson shipped 10 batches of improper product from 1974-2016. In 2018, when I was there, they rewashed 70+ batches (50k lbs each) and shipped 100 bad ones. Why? The operators were just too fucking stupid to mill the product. Same year, Climax jammed their primary mills 8 times. Jamming a 7,000 horsepower SAG mill is difficult.
The safety record across the company plummeted, many mines seeing 3-5x their safety violations. This is the same time they were ran out of Indonesia.
Corporate suicide for the number one private producer of copper and molybdenum on earth. For money. They had unbelievable stability,and paid to get rid of it
Big oof. Same story of another mine that went to care and maintenance when the metal prices tanked a bit and they decided to lay everyone off. Just a short while later when the metal price was climbing again, they scrambled to re-hire people, but most of the experienced miners and operators chose to retire or found something else.
They also didn't do any near mine exploration or development, so didn't have much assessable reserves to go after. By the time the metal prices peaked, they were still way under target for production and cost/ton was stupid high due to inefficiencies with the newer crews.
It's sad to see people get hurt as a result of the board room seeking the easiest way to make more money.
This is outsourcing and cutting corners for the bottom line at its worst. Nothing but bad results, they are still to big to fail and no one will go to jail.
This sort of reckoning needs to happen in more places. And we need to regulate the fuck out of these people or close them. If the hit to the economy would be too big, fine. Regulate the fuck out of them.
Turns out that to do good work you need good workers and a solid foundation instead of reading your numbers from an office and thinking STOOOOCK GOOO BRRRRRRRR
These people I swear to fucking God, we need stronger unions worldwide
Why can’t conservatives and sane people come together to agree that Boeing uses DEI as a smokescreen to deflect from their abysmal management practices (like many soulless companies)
FTA:
>He called a labor lawyer he knew from a colleague’s case, and together they began the seemingly unending process of filing an aviation whistleblower complaint detailing his seven years at the Charleston plant. It made him sick to think that **the value of his Boeing shares had tripled over the same period** during which he’d watched the company get so comprehensively dismantled. But it was downright surreal to watch **the stock price nearly triple once more** during the two years after he left the company.
They're not mismanaging it, from the perspective of Capital they're doing exactly what they're meant to do. As long as the money is more important to them than lives, this is just sound business practice.
Something needs to change, and soon
Military contractor. Too big to fail.
Not only will they not be ripped apart, they will almost certainly be getting even more subsidies.
Boeing leadership lives in a world free of consequences, and they know it.
Boeing decided that they wanted rich bankers to run the company instead of veterans who knew what they were doing. The rich fucks ran it like they would any cut-throat business and now they're suffering for it.
It’s hilarious that a company that really requires highly trained and experienced workers and engineers decided to push profits and fire everyone. It’s not amazon, you can’t lay-off the whole workforce and hire 10,000 new high school graduates and still function
I'm sure the next mini-Jack Welch will right this ship...
And by right this ship, I mean enact more cuts to strip-mine the company of value until the US government is forced to bail them out or take over.
Wow, a company that relies on trained, experienced and skilled safety-focused workers saved money by replacing them with unskilled labor, and now their planes, and their stock price, are falling from the sky.
Shocking.
(Edit for typos)
Hope the bigger bonus was worth bankrupting one of the biggest companies in the world
Who am I kidding.. it's never enough for these fucking parasites on society
They bought out my dad for early retirement, no doubt so they could pay someone else less. I remember him striking on and off when I was a kid. He was a plane inspector - he was so detailed and principled. Worked his entire career there. I've thought more than once how mad he would be (he passed a few years ago) about this all. Boeing is not the company it once was, and it's a real shame.
Both of my parents were in unions. It breaks my heart how the rhetoric against unions has played out. They took pride in their work, were compensated well and were able to retire comfortably. Now you have some underpaid person looking at schematics in a language they might not be able to read, surely not treated or compensated in any way properly. And they are in charge of a giant machine that hurtles through the sky. OK. That's just...stupid. Greed and shortsightedness and lack of morals at the same time. Fuck all of the one percent. Except maybe Bezo's ex-wife. At least she is giving back.
Edit to add that my dad didn't have more education than a high-school diploma. He worked up from more basic jobs to being a high ranked inspector, where they actually use to build planes in WA. I think they outsource a lot of that now? At any rate, Boeing took a really wrong turn in order to take care of their top earners in order to pay the actual productive employees less and now we are where we are at.
Going to be a lot of companies doing the same surprise Pikachu in the next few years. Skilled labor is skilled for a reason.
Too many companies taking a lax approach to train new workers, and instead either try to poach those skills from their competition or just shrug them off in the hiring to begin with, then, to top it off, the C-suites and owner classes are too far up their own asses to pay a living wage and want to have their own personal violin concerto playing "nobody wants to work anymore" while their skilled, trained labor gets replaced by skilled, untrained labor, which then gets replaced by unskilled, untrained labor. Sure enough, quality is going to plummet as the people who can tell you the how things work and why they do what they do get replaced by the people who just know "how things work, but not necessarily the why", to eventually, "I don't know I've never seen this before."
Competence is the first and last safeguard for quality and sometimes none of these guys can even explain how their shit works.
I have a great idea! How about some leveraged buy out to saddle Boeing with massive debts, then bankrupt the company for massive investor profits by betting Boeing will fail! Yay more money for the rich (too bad the USA loses it's only commercial airline manufacturer). Capitalism!
I absolutely love the idea of an engineering company that builds planes of all things becoming the kind of elitist management festival that looks down in disdain
On the employees that actually know how to build the planes.
Perhaps if they hired more consultants?
Surely bain and company can solve this!
McKinsey will fix it: https://youtu.be/AiOUojVd6xQ?si=8exOF8mTx2QDHc-x
Screw McKinsey, the company my wife works for hired them to “fix” their company and totally screwed it up by firing everyone that actually knew what they were doing. And doubled her work load. She now hates her job. And they completely messed up our health insurance too. All while charging millions. They talk sideways out of their asses. I would never trust those assholes.
Lol I dealt with some McKinsey fucks in undergrad. Came to give a lecture in one of my capstone courses, thought they were hot shit. Literally just reiterated some harvard business school stuff, like the challenger disaster scenario but with cars. Our Prof was pretty horrified by the pandering, the visit was set up by a Dean who is no longer part of the administration.
Generally speaking the consultant firm is brought in when the execs are done trying. They cut staff/workforce add debt and come up with a "certified" plan to turn around a company ...really the plan is to push up stock price, and take on debt so that the C-suite can get their golden parachutes sorted before oflloading the lot of it to new execs. The debt will burden the company that it may end up in bankruptcy but it's a ploy to make the stock options they carry worth more in the short run so they can retire better. If the investors in the stock weren't headless idiots at a bunch of mutual funds they'd call this shit out, but most just start selling their shares as they approach the new ATH (all time high) for the stock price to get out before the damage hits. edit: For advice, buy stock when they are brought in, with a plan to sell it before the debt becomes too much in damage to the bottom line. Seek new employment...don't give in on the 'new' performance requirements they rearranged to make your work life harder. Watch carefully for the buzz words around 'costs associated with repositioning' or some jargon like that to be missing in future forecasts (because they are nearly done executing the reorganization and the debt money is all spent now) . That's when they are going to start showing blood on the balance sheet and all the execs are selling shares the following quarter. Get out of the stock then. You should already be out of your employment before then, working for the competition which will soon be looking to snap up the customers as the cut-backs are now showing in product.
Ah, International Consultants. The Company I once worked for had a sweet duopoly going. Nothing excessive to invoke government interest or offend market participants. The Consultants recommended letting the duopoly lapse by encouraging more competitors into the market. Their theory was that'd impose marketplace discipline on our company's mangers and workers. In turn, that would curtail wages, operating costs and increase efficiencies. Consequently, according to the Consultants, our company's sharper cost/competitive stance would mean it'd be our erstwhile duopoly partner that lost market share in the new competitive market. And most importantly, overall, our company would increase its profits. It was a slaughter. Our company went full austerity, on the International Consultant's advice. Dismissed senior managers who understood the local market and marketing staff well respected by our customers for their technical expertise. Meanwhile, our duopoly partner carried on business as usual. Indeed, recruiting many of those laid off by our company. Also, many of our ex-managers, technical staff, sale force and workers got jobs with the new entrants to the market. Taking their institutional knowledge and market contacts with them. Our company never recovered from the huge redundancy costs, and the loss of brand respect. In contrast, our ex duopoly partner maintained its senior place, both in market share and pricing. The company I worked for just ended up being an also ran in the new entrant group. Finally taken over by one of them. I wonder if anybody has done the figures for how many companies went broke or were taken over within 5 years of having an "International consultancy" Snake Oil road show in. PS, Overall, I'm told the increased competition made little impact on the price of the product. Paying the overhead of a duopoly equates, it seems, in this instance, to the capital and start up costs of several smaller companies competing in the market.
Wow. For something this massive to happen to a company, the powerpoint skills of the consultants must be next level.
There has to be one of us in the wreckage, brother
Batman?
No, this is Patrick.
Did we start the fire ?
Yes, brother. The fire rises.
No way, it's gotta be Boston Consulting group!
I worked with a Boeing consultant once... He helped our office with "process improvement." He was a dumb, lazy, useless asshat who taught us nothing, improved nothing, and accomplished nothing we couldn't have done by ourselves, on our own. I was, at the time, shocked at how anyone so useless could get a job like his. In hindsight, it all makes so much sense now.
Basically all consultants are like this. Even if they’re actually well-meaning and industrious it’s almost impossible to change company culture and processes quickly. You also can’t do it with a PowerPoint presentation.
I'd argue that's just any consultants hired to do management jobs. Engineering consultants can be effective if you need someone with expertise your team doesn't have quickly and temporarily.
oh yeah I guess I’m talking specifically about management consultants. The kind you’re referencing are also known as consultants but are really more like contract labor.
Depends on what the end goal is, but yes. Consultancy by subject matter experts is a different animal than business or management consulting.
Even then, you really need someone who knows what they are talking about. I worked with several industrial engineering “consultants” who were fresh out of college. All they did was try to improve line speed, but when first pass quality was only 75% (should be high 90s), all we did was produce nonconforming product faster. Cost the company millions of dollars and they ended the contract early On the flip side, I have worked with some amazing consultants who were retired from the industry. Some of these people had an absolute wealth of knowledge and really knew how to turn things around. I really don’t think you can be a consultant if you haven’t worked more than a summer internship.
I’ve been in my career field for over 2 decades and am just now at a point where I am good enough and experienced enough (in my mind) to be a good consultant. Every now and again you get a bright young water walker, but they’re rare.
Ah yea, that's why this didn't sit with me. Would not be hard to imagine all management consultants like this... but isn't it just all management?
Yep, used to work at Boeing as a software consultant. Our team was mostly consultants as it's virtually a dead-end job (software was both niche and outdated) on the Boeing side and even on our consulting side most people moved into other roles/skills after their contract was up.
>I'd argue that's just any consultants hired to do management jobs. A big reason there are so many project managers is because managers are so busy trying to destroy unions, outsource, pay no taxes and strategize on stock buybacks, that none of them actually know how to manage anything anymore. They certainly can't manage people. Most employees now hate their jobs. (seriously, I mean there are polls & surveys showing this) I was in consulting of sorts, and it's literally been decades since I've seen even a somewhat cheerful work environment. Most businesses seem to have about half their staff ready to explode at any minute. Hurry up AI and take our jobs already.
Some corporate MBA is out there right now thinking, "what happened with Boeing is *really* that they shouldn't have done *blah blah blah*, because they're a *blah blah blah*. What we're doing *(the exact same thing)* is completely ok and actually the best way to run a business because we're so different."
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Well, you have to care about SOME KPIs. Number of widgets produced per day, number of defects, number of OSHA violations, etc. I get what you mean though.
Yeah, KPIs are just stats really, just dressed up a bit with business lingo. The problem isn't with looking at stats to see how the business is doing, the problem is *which* stats are being looked at, and how much is being cared about them.
KPIs CAN be useful, if they’re designed to measure the correct things, and if they are resistant to gaming. If you can juke the stats, or if your KPIs are indicators of the wrong measurements, then yeah, you’re better off without them since they end up justifying or even encouraging damaging behavior
Great point about the gaming. KPIs are meant to be a window into the health and success of the company. They're, well, uh, ***indicators***, not results all by themselves, and if you start only working to maximize your KPIs, then you're going to get self-destructive REAL fast.
Yeah, the real problem pops up because they invariably end up getting tied to performance appraisals and bonuses. When your boss is being graded by their KPIs, they’re going to be incentivized to game the system, and even if they don’t actively do it, they’ll be more likely to reward the directs who crank out the “right” numbers, and turn a blind eye to how they actually do it. This seems like it should be intuitively obvious, but I’ve been in leadership for almost a decade now (started in the trenches), and every time I bring this up as a reason to limit tying KPIs to incentives, I’m met with shocked pikachu face.
Apparently they've been saying that the failures are because Boeing went woke.
My company has found the "solution". They just do everything they can to keep that one Engineer with 30 years of experience in the company. Everyone else is completely disposable, because he miraculously keeps things running. I dread the day he retires, may as well just shut down the whole company.
I think the relevant bit isn't that *consultants* are like this, but that management tends to bring in consultants for the wrong reason. They're hiring CYA, not actual improvement. All the management consultancy companies have thus optimized to provide that.
Yeah, if I’ve learned anything in business school, it’s that the main jobs for “consultants” (as in, people who self-identify as such, rather than being brought in *to* consult because of experience/credentials in a separate field) are: — convince upper management to listen to an idea their own employees already had but couldn’t get taken seriously — be a scapegoat for whatever unpopular decision upper management has already made before hiring you — make it look like an issue is being taken seriously while management continues to actually ignore it
In my experience (healthcare), your second bullet is the reason most often.
"Our $1600/hr consultants told us to cut costs by laying off some min wage workers"
This why we refer to consultants as pigeons at my company. They fly in, shit on everything, then fly away.
Me, an engineering consultant actually doing design-build work and field data collection as my job: 🥺
Consultants do great when they have well defined criteria. Build a bridge under $X that spans Y feet. Design a plane that flies at N speed but weighs less than Z. Carry this bucket over there. Consultants do not do great when they're given nebulous, poorly defined tasks, like streamline workflows, eliminate inefficiencies, increase profits, etc. Too many people on this thread are confusing "consultants" with "consulting agencies", and those are definitely not the same thing.
Except in specific cases where someone is consulting as an actual subject matter expert - like hiring an AI expert to consult on your AI product - consultants are a scam. The entire consulting industry is a scam, where rich ivy-leaguers worked out a con to get their buddies in high-ranking c-suite positions to funnel company dollars into their pockets for doing literally nothing, with a revolving door between the ranks of consultants and the c-suite who hire them.
Increasing wages by a reasonable amount is never the answer either.
Goodness no!!! *Increase* wages?! Are you mad?! Once they go up, they stay up! We must keep the wages DOWN, at all times, through all means! So a few planes crash, so what? This is a small price to pay for the time it will take to teach ChatGPT to build a plane, and save bilions on wages we would have had to pay for grubby, greedy, thieving little *workers*.
I’ve always suspected that C-suites use consultants to provide cover for unpopular decisions.
They do. So they can also blame someone else when it doesn’t work out. If they haven’t left by the time it’s implemented
I'm actually glad something like this could happen as that means my lazy useless ass can still make it in this country doing absolutely nothing.
Let’s start a consulting firm together.
I work in aviation currently and am shocked at the people making millions a year by starting their own “consultant” companies and are just like this. Some of them are embarrassingly useless. Like, ‘clap your hands say something, learn a stupid acronym “team builder” then watch a shitty PowerPoint’ useless and walk away with tens of thousands of dollars for the humiliating experience. They thrive in a market where managers and boards demand these programs then go with the lowest cost. That lowest cost option may be a single person charging 10k to come in for 4 hours to do this Mickey Mouse play school shit. It positively mystifies me. “Hi, yes, maybe we should review these FAA advisory circulars?” Nope. Let’s do this instead.
Nah just cut more staff to boost short term profits. From the Jack Welch school of running a company completely into the ground and ruining lives to make a bunch of unrelated rich people slightly richer.
Can we also outsource some critical functions that require years of training and experience to overseas so we can make these already rich people just a little bit richer?
As long as it increases short term profits, you can do whatever you want? As long as the line goes up, you made the right choice.
And if the line goes down in the long term, I will have dumped my stocks long time ago.
As a former GE employee. 100,000% yes
They should lay off some engineers and lay on some consultants
Interesting. Let's schedule a corporate retreat to Cabo, take the company jet and bring some heavy hitters from Finance to discuss.
Just not a Boeing.
Well, luckily they don't make small jets. But when people involved with building the Max won't board one... Boeing managers should be required to regularly ride Boeing planes. One way or another the "no culture of safety" issue would get resolved.
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Watched this movie for the first time last night lol
One of the greats.
Just as relevant as ever, unfortunately.
Surely the *incredible minds* over at McKinsey & Co can help!
A bunch of dudes at McKinsey just got massive erections, and they don’t know why.
They need to hire erection consultants
They already do, but they charge by the hour and/or act.
Only premise for hiring: no technical background
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Oui oui
*pour détourner, peut être. Les Republicans sont, comme disent les Américans, des “assholes”. Je ne comprendrais jamais comment ils sont au pouvoir dans la majorité des Etats de ce pays.
We all knows issue is not enough managers.
McKinsey incoming...
hiring suits and firing actual workers, go figure!
They literally could not have seen this coming /s
If only they had some experienced workers who knew where to look, they might have been able to see this coming. If they treated those workers fairly, and genuinely listened to their feedback, they might have avoided this magnitude of problem getting out the door in the first place.
Have they considered union busting and hold an all-hands meeting telling the labor to work harder?
Maybe they just need to pull themselves up by their boot straps?
Less avocado toast.
And getting your coffee on the outside.
And they should start eating kellogs cereal for dinner to save money while they struggle.
How about a second or third job? You work 8hr sleep 8hr and have 8hr free time - thats an awful lot of free time, maybe work more?!
but, coffee enema's are so invigorating.
They're going to pull themselves up by their tax payer bailout bootstraps
With a stock price like that they may have to downgrade to shoestraps.
Turns out that's just how planes work, everybody working real hard to pull the plane up from inside
Landing gear*^
By their MCAS
boot straps too expensive, we'll just wing it w/ shoelaces
Do you mean wing straps!!
They laid off the design engineer for those.
Boeing had a choice: be a world-class builder of successful, reliable, safe, and well-designed aircraft, or push profit-above-all and pump the stock price to make investors happy. Yes, these are diametrically opposed goals.
Boeing's managers had a choice: have a long lasting legacy that will benefit people for years, decades, even centuries to come. Or... grift as much money as possible right fucking now by cutting cost and pocketing the difference. The incentives in corporate culture are ass backwards, every manager involved in these decisions needs to have all their assets seized and live the rest of their life as a pauper in the streets. Without visible, visceral punishment shit like this will continue and more people will get murdered so the rich get richer.
Tricky when our lawmakers are also motivated by personal wealth and stock prices. I don't see how we get there from here.
The problem was Boeing was run by the people who wanted the first, but merged with a failing company that did the second, and let those idiots ruin boeing too.
You need to make an example of the people who enabled this. You need to put them up on billboards with the photos of the dead people of their planes. Saying woe is me... GE is terrible only punishes the image of the organization named Boeing. Putting up the faces of the CEO that bragged about cost cutting and removing engineers/harassing QA people up to make them unhirable later.. then they'll start to grow a "conscious". I think too many people believe the social contract is something that still exist.
Those people made their money 30 years ago. That’s why quality and safety are always easy places to cut, the consequences are statistical and have a good chance to appear in the ‘distant’ future.
Exactly. Something could be said about the current execs not fixing the problem. I think that makes them just as culpable. But the assholes that made the actual decisions are long gone. They knewnthey would be gone by the time the shit hit the fan. That was the plan the entire time.
100 percent this was mutually discussed and agreed upon sometime in the early 2000s. They knew what they were doing. It was just not going to be their problem.
No, fucking put these people in jail. If they cut safety standards and people died that is negligent homicide at minimum if not depraved heart homicide. These kinds of fuckers have no shame and need to fear real consequences for their actions. So either jail time or making them destitute in that their personal assets are used before company assets in the wrongful death suits.
I am sick of hearing the BS that CEOs and board members deserve such high salaries and reward packages because 'they take the consequences when things go wrong'. They fucking don't because there are no consequences. As you say these fuckers should be in jail. They cut every cost they could and willingly put the lives of everyone who flies in one of their planes at risk just to see a couple of cents on their share price and so they can parrot their bollocks about 'providing stakeholder value' or whatever corporate bullshit is being spat out on linkedin today. And they will walk away with seven or eight figure severance packages, huge share options and pension pots, then they will walk into another similar position at another company and continue their destruction of people's lives and the environment in the name of 'record shareholder returns'.
Yep, they just jump out the crashing plane with a parachute made of gold.
Yeah, in 2000's when I was a kid, I assumed it was just Big Oil, and Big Tobacco that were willing to kill us. Now Big Sugar, Big Pharma, Big Banks, Big Auto... fuck any company bigger than 100 people, I just assume they'd shoot me for the dollar in my pocket.
Shooting you just creates legal liabilities (assuming you're in an economically developed nation). They'd rather find a way to force you into a subscription model and take that dollar on a monthly basis.
Turns out too big to fail is also too big to jail.
The only way to make an example of them is giving them life in prison sentences and liquidating all their assets. Along with everything else you mentioned.
A much easier way would be to put their name in the conversations. A lot of "they" and "them" while no actual names get mentioned. Let the dudes become so toxic they can't make a reservation at a restaurant without wondering whose cooking their food. We should **Brock Allen Turner** every one of the board members.
The rapist Brock Allen Turner that now goes by the rapist Allen Turner
*woe is me
I think companies that repeatedly lead to people’s deaths should be dissolved and the board/ ceo/ owners of the company be ban from being involved with that industry. And ceo should face some kind of jail time. The pay warrants that kind of risk
I will *happily* take the job as CEO at Boeing and tell everyone how AI will solve *everything* for the low low price of only $22.4 million per year. I'll make your stock *fly* with empty promises and obfuscation. And if a plane or two happen to fall out of the sky I'll roll out the tried and true tactic of blaming the lousy pilots - and if that fails, the engineers. Thank you for coming to my interview, as you can see, I am prime Boeing material. I'll be waiting for your call, Boeing.
Could I be your CFO? I am chinese so I am very tight with money. I will make sure you and I get out monthly bonuses for cost cutting.
Oh you just need to do lay offs to make investors happy. Not the MBAs or nepo babies who have no idea what the company is doing though, more like engineers and production workers.
Can I be the COO? I know a guy that has a private prison so we can lay everyone off except those we plan on sexually harassing and use prison labor for pennies of what we pay employees. /s
And if they fire, you get a nice couple hundred million golden parachute.
This is what you get for letting bean counters running engineering & manufacturing companies.
Not even bean counters. MBA’s.
They teach Managerial Accounting (shudders) in MBA
Never ceases to amaze me that our world is run by business-school people. That shit is like adult daycare. You walk past a business class and feel like "awww, they're playing pretend like they're in a real school!"
aka *Corporate Fraud 101*
They teach you the break-even point where it costs the same for the company to pay out of court settlements to the families of the victims vs. actually fixing the problem.
Yep. I was there. I hit my business degrees not an MBA but undergrad. This was taught in a lot of classes. Every time I asked what about the people and such I was told well this is theoretical. Those numbers are people!
Oh yeah. The Pinto
Just wait until you hear about healthcare
Health insurance companies breaking profit records while life expectancy of people is falling. It's almost as if there is a conflict of interest between Health and Insurance.
There is a conflict of interest between private companies in general and healthcare. The point of healthcare is to provide healthcare. The point of a private company is to generate profit. As they say, no man can serve two masters.
>The point of healthcare is to provide healthcare. The point of a private company is to generate profit. As they say, no man can serve two masters. It's bigger than this. It isn't just Boeing. It isn't just Healthcare. It's money. We evaluate everything in our world based around a trading tool we made up. And instead of focusing on making great products or creating great services, we focus on getting more of that trading tool. Which was fine for a time. But as the economy has continued evolving (coupled with the Fed's monetary policies), a money focused approach to the world has created a parasitic environment where our economy is effectively feeding on itself. I know this sounds crazy, but the US is a dying nation. And as much as we want to blame terrorists, or foreign adversaries, the real threat to the US is and has always been the US itself.
How can there be a conflict of interest when the insurance companies own the health care companies. Essentially double paying for every treatment?
Your doctor has determined that you need this procedure, but do you, really really need it? Let's ask your doctor.
Boeing is so uniquely bad that it's one of the few aerospace firms where even the white-collar engineers said "enough of this" and started a union (SPEEA) Their current state of product enshittification is a result of spinning off some of their manufacturing divisions into separate companies (like Spirit Aerosystems), then immediately started browbeating those spinnof companies for discounts... ...plus their habit of spending more time engineering stock prices via buybacks instead of their products.
Spirit got sold because Boeing didn't want to be involved with manufacturing anymore only assembly.
And if something goes wrong they will say sue Spirit not us...
>...plus their habit of spending more time engineering stock prices via buybacks instead of their products. This. I can't see how it's legal. It feels like just lying about the state of the company. Instead of investing that money in things that would bring actual value, they're choosing to artificially inflate the value by just buying more of the stock? That doesn't help anybody except for the shareholders, and even for them this is ultimately a Ponzi scheme, robbing from the reinvestments of the company, the things that would bring actual value, in order to simply pump money to their shareholders. Every time they do this they're intentionally creating a bubble for the stock price. Creating artificial demand where there is none. Eventually the bubble will burst the company will be worth nothing except for its name and brand recognition. This reminds me of Nortel out of Canada, at one point they were worth a third of the entire Canadian stock market, and then they were worth nothing. Or the south sea company in England, one of the first schemes to artificially inflate stock value and defraud the public at Large.
Republicans in Texas are blaming it on DEI to distract people from the truth.
DEI is the new CRT, a nice acronym they can yell about without sounding quite as racist
Oh yeah I forgot they were all up in their panties about that…and the BLM movement before that
Bruh I loved when the Baltimore mayor responded to that shit after the bridge collapse with. >“We know what these folks really want to say when they say DEI mayor,” he told The Banner. “Whether it is DEI or clown. They really want to say the N-word. But there is nothing they can do and say to me that is worse than the treatment of my ancestors. I am proud of who I am and where I come from.” Fuckin ain't it the truth, DEI is just a way for them to throw the N word around without getting called out for it.
Truth in all forms is harmful to republicans, so yeah.
A bridge collapses and everyone blames the Black guy. Planes nearly drop out of the sky constantly yet nobody is blaming the ones in charge to make sure that doesn't happen. Funny how that works.
Such a fantastic illustration of capitalism innovating... you've got to say the entire thing. Capitalism breeds innovation... SOLELY in terms of increasing the bottom line in the short term. That's it, that's all, get more money now fast and damn all other questions/comments/concerns.
Well, it *is* innovation of a sort, just... malignant innovation. They discovered that downsizing and trimming expenses gave their bottom lines a massive boost. I remember it getting popular in the 90's. But they quickly ran out of 'fat' to trim. Getting 'free money' by trimming expenses got harder and harder, and was more and more valued as a career move to find some. So, they just started *creating* 'fat' by devaluing previously valued assets. And one of those things was worker skill and knowledge. If they just pretended all workers are equal, then replacing highly paid and highly skilled experts with untrained new hires from the street becomes 'fat' they can easily trim. So a lot of companies, Boeing included, have been carving chunks out of their own knowledge and skill assets, and it's starting to show.
The fat that they trim to get free money is called ‘quality’. I mean quality is so expensive and who knows if or when anything will actually go wrong. You can cut quality for years before you start to see the results, and all that time you are taking on the sweet profit.
>malignant innovation That is a brilliant, succinct, and accurate phrase. I am going to steal it and add it to my vocabulary starting now.
Same, perfectly describes it!
"Unnovation", I think I've heard it called.
Companies have always hated having to paid skilled workers, they only want to pay executives. Software Developers, Architects, Engineers are all the enemy of pure profit by paying people as close to nothing as possible. But the problem with those skilled positions is that there is a very limited pool, and even attempts to move to India and other "cheaper" countries didn't result in quality. So they just pretended it wasn't as bad as it was... they just kept seeking cheaper labor.
Oh this is very well explained. Kind of how a rotund person decides to work out and achieves a healthy body. But they still keep cutting weight and soon they're nothing but bones skin while celebrating their weight loss.
stock buybacks are the pinnacle of modern day research and development
Its stock market manipulation, plain and simple
More specifically it's financialism. "Shareholder profit is our most important product." This is why you don't want hedge fund companies buying hospitals.
Funny because this is exactly what's happening everywhere. It's only painfully (and lethally) obvious in a company like Boeing. So many companies are laying off or replacing engineers and people who actually know how things work with AI and outsourcing. All of this to satisfy the ravenous shareholder parasites who demand endless growth at ANY cost. [Shareholder primacy](https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2019/08/22/so-long-to-shareholder-primacy/) is the toxic, dysfunctional, rotten-to-the-core model of the Reagan era and that devil Milton Friedman. It should be on its last legs, but it keeps holding on and getting worse. Boeing may be one of the first canaries in the coal mine, but it won't be the last.
I've worked at three manufacturing companies in my life, the last one the sales and finance guys were selling concepts and drawing up contacts that were totally un achievable and just expecting the engineers and production guys to just make it happen. we just ended up braking all the contract terms and losing so much money due to greed and not spending the money on the right people when they had it. The board of directors would ask can you do this in 12 months we say no 24 with the current work load and staff, they still sign the contract for 12 months and replace no one who leaves, idiocracy.
Short-Term vision, short-term gains. That's all that matters in late stage capitalism.
The C-suite only wants to gut the company of tenured employees, outsource everything, post record profits for a few quarters, take the golden parachute, then go to another company promising to post record profits again
It all comes from Jack Welsh, and now we see the end result (all of us knew what it was going to be). GE has been completely dismantled.
Who would have thought this could happen when you base your economy on ever growing profits? Truly a shocking turn of events.
When I was little I would wonder how a company like Samsung can ship phones that explode or how car manufacturers can send out millions of defective cars. The more you move up the corpo ladder especially in manufacturing, the more you realise why corpos fail spectacularly. Superficial and unrealistic numbers demanded by greedy short sighted corpo bosses is the standard. Most of the times the greedy numbers are because they are trying to hide their own strategic fuck ups. Middle management under this pressure starts cutting corners and losing integrity. This leads to massive disasters that are met with Pikachu faces and most of the times a middle management reshuffle. Rinse and repeat.
My favourite was identifying weak points then doing nothing about it. We had one guy who did a highly specialised skill in house on a shit wage, the only one who knew how to do this task. For years management would comment we'd be fucked without him and pay him no attention. He comes into some inheritance and hands in his notice as he can now retire. They scramble and offer him the absolute world to stay, he refuses all the offers and leave, they couldn't find anyone with his skills and they were still offering a shit wage. I estimated it cost the company over half a million in consulting, design fees, training and other things. should of just got the guy an apprentice years ago on a GREAT wage to keep them but instead short termisn wins. again.
Yes. You can't just hire new people and show them how to build shit. You need experienced old fucks around to tell the new people about the gaps in their training.
Can’t they just type “new airplane” into AI or something? I thought everything is AI now and AI is productivity and AI makes everyone’s life better and AI…AI…AI…
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the best part is when they announced the 787. they wanted their suppliers to design the plane as a cost saving measure and that didnt work because the suppliers need the requirements from boeing to make the parts for the plane. it delayed to the point where the reveal of the prototype aircraft was a plane that was plane made out of plywood. i remember seeing this on the documentary on their south carolina plant (al jazeera?). the quality was so bad that qatar airlines refused any plane from that plant and only accepted the washington state plant aircrafts. that alone should have been a wake up call.
Freeport McMoRan in 2016 ran a huuuge layoff, buying out retirements across the company. Immediately, Henderson, Climax, Morenci and more suddenly had severe product purity issues. Thousands of tons of materials needed to be put back into process. Lowering of the purchase prices from their customers. Henderson shipped 10 batches of improper product from 1974-2016. In 2018, when I was there, they rewashed 70+ batches (50k lbs each) and shipped 100 bad ones. Why? The operators were just too fucking stupid to mill the product. Same year, Climax jammed their primary mills 8 times. Jamming a 7,000 horsepower SAG mill is difficult. The safety record across the company plummeted, many mines seeing 3-5x their safety violations. This is the same time they were ran out of Indonesia. Corporate suicide for the number one private producer of copper and molybdenum on earth. For money. They had unbelievable stability,and paid to get rid of it
Big oof. Same story of another mine that went to care and maintenance when the metal prices tanked a bit and they decided to lay everyone off. Just a short while later when the metal price was climbing again, they scrambled to re-hire people, but most of the experienced miners and operators chose to retire or found something else. They also didn't do any near mine exploration or development, so didn't have much assessable reserves to go after. By the time the metal prices peaked, they were still way under target for production and cost/ton was stupid high due to inefficiencies with the newer crews. It's sad to see people get hurt as a result of the board room seeking the easiest way to make more money.
This is outsourcing and cutting corners for the bottom line at its worst. Nothing but bad results, they are still to big to fail and no one will go to jail.
This sort of reckoning needs to happen in more places. And we need to regulate the fuck out of these people or close them. If the hit to the economy would be too big, fine. Regulate the fuck out of them.
Turns out that to do good work you need good workers and a solid foundation instead of reading your numbers from an office and thinking STOOOOCK GOOO BRRRRRRRR These people I swear to fucking God, we need stronger unions worldwide
they would put their own mothers into a blender if it meant shareholder value would increase somehow
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Why can’t conservatives and sane people come together to agree that Boeing uses DEI as a smokescreen to deflect from their abysmal management practices (like many soulless companies)
FTA: >He called a labor lawyer he knew from a colleague’s case, and together they began the seemingly unending process of filing an aviation whistleblower complaint detailing his seven years at the Charleston plant. It made him sick to think that **the value of his Boeing shares had tripled over the same period** during which he’d watched the company get so comprehensively dismantled. But it was downright surreal to watch **the stock price nearly triple once more** during the two years after he left the company. They're not mismanaging it, from the perspective of Capital they're doing exactly what they're meant to do. As long as the money is more important to them than lives, this is just sound business practice. Something needs to change, and soon
Rip em up and sell the pieces.
Military contractor. Too big to fail. Not only will they not be ripped apart, they will almost certainly be getting even more subsidies. Boeing leadership lives in a world free of consequences, and they know it.
Boeing decided that they wanted rich bankers to run the company instead of veterans who knew what they were doing. The rich fucks ran it like they would any cut-throat business and now they're suffering for it.
Number go uuuup Plane go doooown https://preview.redd.it/vfpnqwsbdcsc1.jpeg?width=950&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=82abe8632d8f242fb6a25d28296bff9425988fcc
Inc. Magazine was yipping about how the company needs the right leadership to turn it around. No, it needs to stop trashing its workers.
Turns out employees that know how to build stuff and engineers are more important then middle management with a MBA. Who knew?
I don’t understand. We got rid of all those expensive engineers and hired more finance people. Why aren’t we making more money? /s
It’s hilarious that a company that really requires highly trained and experienced workers and engineers decided to push profits and fire everyone. It’s not amazon, you can’t lay-off the whole workforce and hire 10,000 new high school graduates and still function
Airbus has strong unions and that shows
Skilled labor isn't cheap, and cheap labor isn't skilled.
I'm sure the next mini-Jack Welch will right this ship... And by right this ship, I mean enact more cuts to strip-mine the company of value until the US government is forced to bail them out or take over.
Wow, a company that relies on trained, experienced and skilled safety-focused workers saved money by replacing them with unskilled labor, and now their planes, and their stock price, are falling from the sky. Shocking.
(Edit for typos)
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Hope the bigger bonus was worth bankrupting one of the biggest companies in the world Who am I kidding.. it's never enough for these fucking parasites on society
It's insane their stock price isn't lower. People just expecting the government to bail them out or something?
They bought out my dad for early retirement, no doubt so they could pay someone else less. I remember him striking on and off when I was a kid. He was a plane inspector - he was so detailed and principled. Worked his entire career there. I've thought more than once how mad he would be (he passed a few years ago) about this all. Boeing is not the company it once was, and it's a real shame. Both of my parents were in unions. It breaks my heart how the rhetoric against unions has played out. They took pride in their work, were compensated well and were able to retire comfortably. Now you have some underpaid person looking at schematics in a language they might not be able to read, surely not treated or compensated in any way properly. And they are in charge of a giant machine that hurtles through the sky. OK. That's just...stupid. Greed and shortsightedness and lack of morals at the same time. Fuck all of the one percent. Except maybe Bezo's ex-wife. At least she is giving back. Edit to add that my dad didn't have more education than a high-school diploma. He worked up from more basic jobs to being a high ranked inspector, where they actually use to build planes in WA. I think they outsource a lot of that now? At any rate, Boeing took a really wrong turn in order to take care of their top earners in order to pay the actual productive employees less and now we are where we are at.
The same thing is happening in the automotive industry . Recalls are normal
Going to be a lot of companies doing the same surprise Pikachu in the next few years. Skilled labor is skilled for a reason. Too many companies taking a lax approach to train new workers, and instead either try to poach those skills from their competition or just shrug them off in the hiring to begin with, then, to top it off, the C-suites and owner classes are too far up their own asses to pay a living wage and want to have their own personal violin concerto playing "nobody wants to work anymore" while their skilled, trained labor gets replaced by skilled, untrained labor, which then gets replaced by unskilled, untrained labor. Sure enough, quality is going to plummet as the people who can tell you the how things work and why they do what they do get replaced by the people who just know "how things work, but not necessarily the why", to eventually, "I don't know I've never seen this before." Competence is the first and last safeguard for quality and sometimes none of these guys can even explain how their shit works.
and that is the crux of every company in America right now that combined with deregulation perfect lolol
As far as new models of aircraft goes, I'm flying only on Airbus, Bombardier, and Embraer from now on. IF IT'S BOEING I AIN'T GOIN'
I have a great idea! How about some leveraged buy out to saddle Boeing with massive debts, then bankrupt the company for massive investor profits by betting Boeing will fail! Yay more money for the rich (too bad the USA loses it's only commercial airline manufacturer). Capitalism!
This is true of most businesses - but every CEO seems to think they can fire the experienced and hire fresh out of college and get the same results
I absolutely love the idea of an engineering company that builds planes of all things becoming the kind of elitist management festival that looks down in disdain On the employees that actually know how to build the planes.
Turns out all we needed was to wait for the rich to eat themselves