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.
This story, like most corporate stories these days, frustrates me.
This is a tale as old as time…the time when American corporations went to shit as our elected officials ensured there was no liability and realistic legal consequences to executes or MBA decision making.
I’m not a business scholar obviously. I’ve always been led to believe that in order for the world to turn and air to be breathable, corporations and businesses need liability protection for those who run it. Why?
If I kill someone with my car, even if it was completely an accident, I’m still liable right? Should I account for the death of that person, child, etc?
How would things not be better if, instead of the bottom line and stock price being the ultimate concern of CEOs, it was them not going to court to face charges because they allowed their company to kill people with its negligence? I know there’s some nuance here, but ultimately, I feel like everything sucks because there’s no incentive to care about anything but investors and greed.
If industry, aerospace or other, was run by people who cared about not killing people and going to jail, would they in turn ensure their design and production met the quality and ambition of the type of people here, discussing their accounts of cutting corners or experienced personnel just to save money?
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.
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.
on their conscience
🤣
Thanks for the laugh, I needed that. 🙂
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.
There’s a wonderfully complex system of deferred responsibilities making sure that the people who actually caused this can have all the plausible deniability in the world, see themselves as having nothing to do with it, and enjoy a very relaxed life with riches we can only imagine.
In my opinion Hassan ibn Sabbah was the most perceptive libertarian in the history of this planet.
In other words, how good can be all the bodyguards these people can hire to protect themselves from retribution, in case the small part of logically connecting them to an event is fulfilled by peaceful means?
That’s the point of the plausible deniability. You can go after them with a personal conviction, but you can’t go after them with proof. There’s nothing left to “logically connect”.
Because they controlled the mechanisms that were designed to hold them accountable, and made sure not to be accounted for.
Kinda like how attackers who intrude on a system delete the logs and other traces of their presence.
But that is a logical connection.
In many countries politicians intentionally try to keep the environment such that nobody would be to blame, but bad things would still happen. In many social structures - influential people.
That fact is enough of a crime itself.
Try approaching this like you would approach electrical engineering.
It’s a problem, not a dead end.
It’s actually a process between design engineers, manufacturing engineers and their interaction with the builders. Somehow the right instructions evolve from that. And somehow the skills are gained and up kept by making parts. There’s no easy way around it or short cut. It will take a long time to fix.
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.
Boeing moved 787 assembly out of Everett to just their Charleston site to avoid unions. Yes, they treat their assemblers like interchangeable cogs, especially when there are no unions to counteract some of their bad abti-labor decisions. Don’t expect Boeing to get any better with the replacement of 3-4 leaders.
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.
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 didn’t read this.
But life isn’t what people think it is. Not many people are actually really living. And there’s a lot more evil in everyone’s daily lives than they could imagine. Right under their noses. It’s closer to a “worse case scenario” than it’s is freedom or living. Hell is real and we live there.
…sorry for sounding so angsty and poetic? But it’s true. And we can’t even fix or change this it’s all so far gone, built by generations of greed and “evil”. There are no sides… Just you, just me all individually stuck in hell. Killing ourselves fighting limitless devil’s our naiveness of generations helped build and thrive.
I didn’t read this, but did you guys know that Zerglings from the game StarCraft: Brood War have a unique upgrade called Adrenal Glands. After applying the upgrade they are colloquially referred to as “Cracklings” because they attack so quickly. This upgrade, only available after evolving a Hive, makes Zerglings extremely effective in the late game, and allows them to swarm enemy units and bases much more effectively. Despite their small size and low health, with this upgrade, Zerglings can become a critical component of the Zerg army, showcasing the game’s strategic depth and the importance of upgrades.
I didn’t read this.
