What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane.
“John is very knowledgeable almost to a fault, as it gets in the way at times when issues arise,” the boss wrote in one of his withering performance reviews, downgrading Barnett’s rating from a 40 all the way to a 15 in an assessment that cast the 26-year quality manager, who was known as “Swampy” for his easy Louisiana drawl, as an anal-retentive prick whose pedantry was antagonizing his colleagues. The truth, by contrast, was self-evident to anyone who spent five minutes in his presence: John Barnett, who raced cars in his spare time and seemed “high on life” according to one former colleague, was a “great, fun boss that loved Boeing and was willing to share his knowledge with everyone,” as one of his former quality technicians would later recall.
But Swampy was mired in an institution that was in a perpetual state of unlearning all the lessons it had absorbed over a 90-year ascent to the pinnacle of global manufacturing. 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. CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had “overvalued experience and undervalued leadership” before he purged the veterans into early retirement.
jeezuz murphy talk about rock and a hard place.
Barnett’s outlook mirrors my own. short version, l have high functioning autism, analytical to a fault. except in IT you have to be 100% thorough.
l could see problems no other could and sadly being on the bottom rung was perpetually ignored. or if they did ‘watch and listen’ they defaulted to ‘go along to get along’.
but l wasnt building aircraft that in total carried millions of individual passengers.
l was operating fragile mainframes in the 70s so when it went ‘splat’ just chalk it up to the overwhelming demands put on the thing and hit reset/restart.
this article which l could not even finish suffices for me to never fly on a boeing machine ever again. l either find another carrier or dont go or go by rail/car etc.
scaaREEWWWW boeing.
Watch and Listen – Re: “this article which l could not even finish”. You should finish it. It has a surprise ending. Things did not go well for Swampy.
l was operating fragile mainframes in the 70s so when it went ‘splat’ just chalk it up to the overwhelming demands put on the thing and hit reset/restart
This is the number one problem in software engineering to this day. There are no physical consequences for failure; you can always just reboot or git reset –hard. Sure, there are financial consequences to downtime, security breaches, or just using Node.js, but it’s impossible to get software developers to psychologically connect the failure of their code to the economic consequences.
It was a long time ago, but when I was teaching Computer Science, at some point in my tutorial sessions with every year, I would pose a question, after telling them I didn’t want an answer, I just wanted them to think about their answer.
Simple question: You are going to write the code for a life support system that has to take over pretty much every critical function of the human body for a while. When you have finished. We are going to put you on it for a few days. Are you happy?
Happy Vanishing Comment Day.
Too true! I’ve noticed several complaints about this recently.
yup.
and my hack to get a ‘toehold’ message and then ‘edit’ in the time allowed with the real message . . . . . . . ummm doesnt work anymore. it erases the toehold message.
kudos and shame on kate’s people
meh.
I’m trying hella hard to keep an open mind about Barnett’s death(PTSD, wife’s death)but there’s too much weirdness. Finger still inside the trigger guard and on the trigger to name just one. Might work on an episode of Columbo but I don’t think it happens that way.
“…a brand-new 737 MAX dove into the ground near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, at nearly 800 miles per hour, killing 157 people on board, thanks to a shockingly dumb software program…”
Good Grief!!! What a way to check out.
Worse of all. The soon to be new CEO is a DEI pick and has no education in aircraft!
Bad pick Boeing
I think civilization is like a big, tall ladder- it takes a long time and lots of hard work to get to the top…but it just takes seconds to fall back down to the bottom. We may have to start that long climb again.
How did Boeing fill the skies of Europe with aluminum overcast without experienced workers in 1942?
When you’re building tens of thousands of aircraft you can train people to do very small steps, so each individual worker doesn’t need to know all that much. When you’re only building a few aircraft each worker is responsible for a lot more. We were also a different people back then. The mothers working the line weren’t going to cut corners knowing their sons, nephews,, husbands and neighbors were going to be flying in them.
Boeing was building Pan-Am’s flying boats in the ’30s and the B17 first flew in the mid ’30s. That core group of experienced master craftsmen could perform every task to turn sheets of aluminum into airplanes. During wartime thousands of newbies, many of them women, were brought in and were quickly taught to perform only one or two tasks, ie Betty would mark the holes, Pam would drill them and Sue and Rosie would buck and drive the rivets.
Rolls-Royce did the same thing in order to increase their aircraft engine production to 100 times their prewar output. Thousands of new machinists learned how to perform only one or two of the 100s of machining operations needed to make the 14,000 parts in a Merlin.
I worked a total of 39 years in aviation maintenance. Management doesn’t like QA because they slow down production and increase costs. Everyone with a toolbox hates QA, no one likes to be asked “are you sure you’re doing that right?” but their insistence that you prove that you’re doing it correctly by following the latest manuals and repair drawings using tools that are still in calibration keeps flying safe. Safety costs but accidents cost more.
This is happening in every industry. Very knowledgeable people are being let go in engineering and technical fields in favor of cheap labor. I see it in the patch a lot. Particularly with bigger companies, not so much with the smaller private companies. CEOs etc want to post big numbers and are no longer interested in quality. A lot of workers get into the patch for the same reason, they just want the big pay cheque and have no pride in their work, nor are they incentivized to do quality work. Accountants are ruling the world it seems.
Gave them pensions, I suspect. The new guys on the block do not know as much, as they had crappy courses.
Anyone who thinks you define a successful company by its profit rather than by its product is a moron.
I would multiply this by 10 or 10X10 for a company that makes flying buses for the masses.
CEO Jim McNerney should have his skin flayed off before he gets tortured to death.
Quality Control Matters. You have to be tough to stand up to the pressure from above.
Whatever happened to ISO, Initially, it had meaning and purpose, focusing on quality and efficiency.
Initially it was so Rolls-Royce didn’t blow up their bomb factories in World War 2. It worked, and turned out to improve manufacturing quality in all sorts of businesses. ISO should be taking a real close look at Boeing and probably yanking their certification.
The trouble with ISO is that your procedures can be crap so long as they are documented and you can prove that you follow them.
I can’t seem to get the link to load. Is it a problem at my end?
Well, all I can say is that I’m happy this kind of disfunction and DEI toxicity is absent from our public institutions!
It’s not just Boeing. This is happening everywhere, every industry.
Same thing happened to the large oil company I worked for in Fort Mc Murray. They started losing the plot in 2008 when the accountants and HR took over. Board of directors were morons.
They still haven’t recovered.
Dispassionate, uncaring incompetence earns promotion.
I’ve seen it go on for decades.
If you care enough about your product to fight for it, and to fight for careful, precise manufacturing; THAT will get you fired.
As a veteran of the “crude oil wars” aka a refinery unit operator, maybe you should consider who runs the safety department in most major oil companies. There are not as many safety degreed people as you might expect. Here’s the big shocker. Not really, if you have been attention, you know what’s next. Yes, that ugly whore, dei is running rampant in the oil industry. That, along with getting rid of the experienced operators (they cost too much in vacation time and benefits) has made an unseen crisis. Think of a medium sized oil refinery with a DAILY processing rate of 200,000 barrels of crude oil a day, all of it flammable. Do you want someone running a unit with less than 3 years experience? I retired, cashed in my stock and moved far, far away.
Good point sortawhite! I agree completely. Main reason I retired.
It isn’t just Boeing. Many technical industries and companies are no longer being run by the people who understand them. Technical organizations all start to fail as soon as the technical (engineering, geology, software developers) people in leadership, who made the company great, are replaced by people who came from finance, HR, legal or sales. Steve Jobs had a great quote about this. Boeing is going down this road. So is much of the energy and chemicals and mining industries, including engineering companies and equipment manufacturers.
Exactly.
It started when Boeing absorbed McDonnell Douglas. MD had gone down the tubs to the point of bankruptcy due to to the financialization of management. Unfortunately, it was the minnow that swallowed the whale and the MD management ended up taking over Boeing.
One of the greatest fears of technical people is that managers will be put in charge who do not understand what they do but who are thoroughly convinced of their own brilliance.
One of the first acts of one such individual was to demote me so that he could then declare that he would be making all the decisions henceforth, even though he hadn’t a clue what we did. Fortunately his performance was so bad that he was soon fired and I was returned to my position. The letter from my lawyer probably helped.
I just posted … had disappeared … edited … reposted … had disappeared … edited … reposted … had disappeared my 3-paragraph post on this subject. Edited out every “bad” word (one use of the word ‘shit’) including any “potentially inflammatory” common non-swear words.
Sorry. No longer worth my while.
we sympathize.
accutely me the autistic just
tell
me
what
the
rules
are. then l can cope but nowadays life is a series of 20 questions
gotta know life to know what questions.
as of last month or so in consultation with a skilled communications expert psychologist, l officially announced l am disengaging.
turn it all my words, into a new found Shakespearean play and watch to opening night live.
absolve myself totally and utterly ignored for decades.
a bachelors degree compuer science is no cake walk.
applicability to workplace separate related matter.
how can the grade 5 dummy do that?
my interactions with society and authority, a bad taste.
l do this hoping it will stick and forevermore attend to a very low number close friends, my doggies and whoever on a whim.
the rest is clatter and lve covered it all with white noise oh my provider doing an ace job in that. there are those on my side even if only for a price.
take care.
Watch & Listen
In the end, it still boils down to a simple theory: Companies that focus on meeting and exceeding the needs of the customer will ALWAYS eat the lunch of the competing companies that don’t. Airline passengers, and airlines, won’t really care about how many gay unborn whales were employed in the airframe assembly process, if every bump and jolt and shake in flight is an existential moment for the passengers and crew.
Swampy didn’t sod himself off.
Profits are a side effect of having an effective and efficient business. You must produce a desirable good or service of sufficient quality at a reasonable cost, and then offer that good or service at a competitive price to maximize consumer value. Improving manufacturing and distribution efficiencies creates more margin between prices and costs, increasing profitability.
Most accountants don’t understand this. They constantly demand cost reductions to lower prices ro make products more competitive. This generally leads to poor quality materials, poor craftsmanship, and compromised designs. The result is short term profits, followed by a drop in company reputation and long term losses.
Shouldn’t we just change “DEI” to “DIE” so the meaning is clear!
It’s news like this that makes me relieved that I’m too poor to fly anywhere these days. I feel much safer on the ground. Between the wonky planes and the jabbed pilots I think I’m better off driving anywhere I can afford to go, which isn’t anywhere very far.
Forty years of writing complex software; sometimes in situations where a serious error leads to environmental catastrophe or deaths and serious injuries. As I aged I contended with managers who came up thru the ranks of the “help desk” or the accounting side of the business. These folks had no appreciation of the effort and discipline required to develop resilient software that would gracefully degrade when faced with unanticipated real world issues.
In the end, I had a three day argument with a novice script kiddie who downloaded a solution to his problem and did not do the research to understand the importance of a commit or rollback when operating against a SQL database. Four hours of a locked up development database and then a wiped out table representing the month’s worth of tracked incidents. Because I called him on it, my help desk boss literally called me an a$$hole and demanded that I apologize. When I refused, he and my director went and apologized on my behalf.
About 12 hours later, I resigned effectively immediately. Before I left, I revoked all of the idiot’s access rights to the production system. My sudden departure left the company unable to complete a project (visible up to the CIO) because nobody else could figure out how to configure our software to provide an incident feed to the script kiddie’s vaporware toolkit. I have never been happier in my whole lifetime.