[tr_user]

Steps in the right direction, let's get rid of more engineers and replace them with more MBAs.

> However, a person familiar with the decision and who asked not to be identified commenting on sensitive personnel decisions, confirmed that Clark’s leaving was not voluntary.

> Clark is an engineer. His successor Ringgold has business degrees. However she began her aviation career performing avionics systems maintenance and troubleshooting on C-130 aircraft in the United States Air Force.

[ics]

While many here won't disagree in general, be wary of holding this sentiment as dogma. There can be bad apples in engineering, and MBAs who can see that whether or not they have the knowledge or experience to make it better themselves. Whether or not they can (or want to) make the next step of hiring better or more honest engineers is what matters then.

(I'm not optimistic about Boeing here, but hey.)

[bombcar]

Sometimes (as rare as you expect, likely) an MBA has the tooling to fight back against the standard business pressures to cut costs, whereas an engineer is basically defenseless.

Quite rare.

[pg_1234]

> There can be bad apples in engineering,

So true ... Jack Welch was an engineer.

[Log_out_]

Any of the two intertwined organizations will eject bad apples towards the other?

[eastbound]

Yes but Boeing needs to send a message. A message that they understood how they failed, a message that they apologize, a message that they can be redeemed.

Sometimes, it’s about PR.

And culture, they haven’t changed. Boeing is still firing engineers, appointing MBAs, getting paid by politicians, and hiring on the revolving doors of local prisons. I wouldn’t even trust a burger flipped by this bunch. Boeing factories also need to move to other states before we trust them again.

[passwordoops]

I've mentioned it somewhere else, and maybe I've just been really unlucky with my experiences in industry but I'm at the point where I feel like someone with an MBA or finance background should start any new company (regardless of previous experience) by sitting in the janitor's closet for a month. If the janitor says they're ok, the MBA can start following the janitor around at a distance of 10 feet. If they don't screw anything up, they're allowed to ask one question a day of said janitor. So on and so forth. I estimate 10-15 years of persistence before the MBA/finance can be in a position to make minor decisions

[cqqxo4zV46cp]

This is the completely and utterly insufferable mindset that one gets when they spend too much time around other engineers and actually begins to buy into the completely fabricated self-important narrative that they are God’s gift to the world. It s a profession! Pull your head in. I’m not sure what sort of highschool bully trauma you’re trying to make up for, but being a bully yourself isn’t the answer. Interest rate rises couldn’t come soon enough, because there’s obviously at least one generation of techies that have been tricked into thinking that ‘finance’ starts and ends with “take a bunch of dumb VC money, build a completely unsustainable business, and change jobs every 18 months”.

I’m not for one second saying that Boeing hasn’t been seriously mismanaged. The whole debacle has just inexplicably been some sort of lightning rod for people that want to flex their self-identified nerd cred by saying “ENGINEER GOOD BUSINESS BAD!”

[nonameiguess]

Here's her LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katherine-ringgold-88484140/deta...

Interesting that she spent a few years in Belize after getting out of the Air Force. This is the description of her MOS: http://www.mosdb.com/air-force/2A133/mos/1559/

I don't think you're being all that fair here. I have no idea whether she's going to do a good job or not, but there's more to a person than the degree they got. Former military getting business degrees is pretty common and often the only reason is they were the most likely program to offer distance learning and night class options back in 2001. I'll say, as an engineer with a CS degree who is also a former commissioned officer, former military can be hit and miss, but in many ways I'd be more confident going with prior enlisted who got a degree via the GI Bill than other commissioned officers. There can be a tendency with the way we get trained in the military to become serious yes men. You never say no to a commander and you always attempt to accomplish any mission without question, no matter how ludicrous or impossible it is. That makes sense in wartime but not in business and many do not understand that or know how to turn off that attitude.

Prior enlisted, however, are usually not that fanatical about pleasing superiors. Their rating and promotion process is a lot saner and they tend to be more aligned and care more about the career field they were in. In her case, you can see this involved ensuring and maintaining the quality of aircraft comms and nav systems. That's probably not a bad place to come from. I was a tank commander back in the day myself, and I can say there was nobody who cared more that the tanks were reliable and safe than the career enlisted tank crewmen and tank mechanics. I would trust them with my life way before I would trust a career engineer who had never served on or with a crew.

[lgleason]

From personal experience, once engineers go the MBA route they tend to lose their technical edge and get sucked into the vortex of the MBA universe. It's like some strange indoctrination process.

[varjag]

There are bad engineers too.

[sonicanatidae]

Absolutely, but systemically, that's not been their problem. Too many MBAs are making decisions without Engineering involvement. I know because my industry works the exact same way le rage

[pugworthy]

And good engineers that become bad managers

[lgleason]

It creates some good optics, meanwhile the execs can funnel more money out of the company and parachute out before the thing blows up.

[mc32]

Looks like MBAs doing a CYA and throwing the Engs under the bus.

Why did this action take _this_ long for this to happen? To me it says they were burying their heads in the sand hoping things would blow over.

I'll believe Boeing if they turn a new leaf and prioritize engineering over marketing and being number one in aircraft deliveries in the short-term at the cost of long-term viability.

[MilStdJunkie]

I know that there was a Boeing sub with a doc repository whose internal address was "TheBlameThrower". It had the explicit purpose of nailing specific people for saying specific things. So throwing people under transmissions is something of a company sport, with points awarded for distance and style.

Mmmmm, there was a delicious "Under-Bus-Throw Contest" in the wake of the MCAS fiasco, centered around their chief technical test pilot, Mark Forkner.

Keep in mind that half of this is anecdotal, but the sequence of events was something like this. Crap goes down, Forkner gets canned. He leaks documents, and wow, that was super bad. Now something curious happens, more docs get leaked - from <s>who knows where</s> - showing that Forkner was a bit of a burnt out cynical a-hole[1]. Now, imagine those chats going to the media - it would make that person seem like the real villain, yes? The DOJ thought so too, so the leak brought criminal fraud charges on Forkner. After that, even worse documents were leaked - probably from Forkner or his attorney's people - and the charges get walked back, because it's insanely obvious that whatever fraud he might have been committing was done at the behest of his masters. A colossal cock up, part of the bigger cock up that was the PR blitz following the MCAS crashes, which was itself a subset of the Ubersturmbanfuhrer Cockup of the MCAS fiasco. It's cockups all the way up.

In this tit for tat, the only one with the bomb craters showing was Boeing's rep, because, let's be honest here, at the end of the day even if Forkner was a horrible asshole he was still Boeing's representative to the goddamn flying world.

Terribly calculated, terribly executed, terrible results. A masterclass in how not to do public relations and, failing that, dirty tricks campaigns.

[1] You know the type. The guy who always ends each IM with some quip about what crap your company is making and how he feels like a con artist. His soul, hollow and shrivelled from all the sucking sounds, tends to kick cats and hiss at dogs. Leak that to the media, see who the villain is now.

[legitster]

To be fair, the problem this time was with QC - not with engineering.

[f1shy]

I see a lot of comments trying to pin point the problem with a name. People: if in an airplane some pieces are taken off, they have to be labeled. In fact anything entering or leaving the airplane has to be noted, juat like in an op-room, to avoid for example forgetting tools (or loose bolts) somewhere. That is basic ABC 101 of working in an airplane.

Why this happened? Massive cost cuts ordered by management, which led to cut corners, or cut trainings, or both. If ing. Or MBA is irrelevant. If I have to guess, I would point to an MBA

[gumby]

This was actually a QA problem — a set of design issues starting at the front of the process. All QC can do is identify problems after they have occurred.

As the saying goes, “you can’t test quality into a product.”

[KerrAvon]

The person you're replying to was being sarcastic. But -- to be clear -- this was clearly a problem with the defect tracking process, not like individual QC contributors.

[msie]

Can't tell if you are sarcastic or not.