MBAs ruin everything
The paradigm shift from an MBA becoming a degree for showing you are a connected, yet glorified project manager, to a Jack Welch disciple is astounding.
Why anyone would ever hire a pure MBA graduate is beyond me. Yes, please make my business a complete failure while extracting all the wealth for short term gains. This is amazing.
Oh I completely understand the why. Get a golden parachute in your contract, hire MBAs to cannibalise the company for short-term gains, then leave the company obscenely rich before the dumpster fire you created bites anyone in the ass. Rinse and repeat until you have all the money.
For Boeing’s execs, they just got caught before they could cut and run.
That was the missing piece of the puzzle. I hate these people.
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.
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I’ve never seen one of those full screen obnoxious windows actually going out of its way to declare itself as not being a paywall before. Interesting.
uBlock Origin has a nifty Zap feature that works well on idiot web developer fads.
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?
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.
Ok doomer.
I say the above not as an insult, but because I want to make a point.
Look up doomism. It’s a tool of climate change deniers. We are not dead yet. Nothing going on now is truly impossible to fix. It’s certainly not easy. It’s hard af. But just because it’s hard, doesn’t mean we should let ourselves give up. We shouldn’t let ourselves fall into a doomer mindset. Because the very moment we do, the moment we accept the doom, then the doom becomes our fate.
Don’t give up. Don’t encourage other people to give up. Don’t say it’s over when we’re still fighting. It’s only over when it’s over.
I bet World War II must have been psychologically devastating to witness. It must have felt like the whole world was falling apart. Like it would never bring itself back together. Can you imagine? Watching Hitler take over country after country. Watching the bombs fall in London. And the Cold War. Where people were so sure it was the end of humanity, because we were going to kill ourselves dropping nukes on each other.
There are so many moments it was horrible. So horrible that we couldn’t even imagine there would be a way out. A good future.
But there was. Things got better. Countries rebuilt. The Cold War ended. No one dropped any nukes.
See, climate change, and companies taking our data, and AI, and the rich getting richer… all that? That’s our WWII. That’s our thing causing hopelessness and devastation and fear in everyone.
The doomism is a plague we’ve been dealing with since probably the dawn of humanity.
We can get through this. Maybe we won’t. But the chance we will isn’t even that small. As long as there’s a chance: fight for it.
Please step away from screens for a bit. There are bad things/people in the world. Always have been, always will be. Your comment history has me worried for your sake.
Linux is a lifestyle
Yeah this guy has issues
— a fellow Linux user
I actually don’t find that objectionable — a fellow Linux user and conscientious meatist
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.
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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.
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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.
