Wow Boeing is desperate for "The Old Brain Trust" to come back
 

Been Retired ~15+ years from Boeing after doing my 25 years there as a EE automation and robotics Tooling Engineer.

Before me my Dad put in his 35 and worked on the Saturn V rocket.

Wife put in 32 years in Finance forecasting Billions of Dollars, and she was offered a golden parachute like many many others the last 5-10 years.

It is/was the Brain Drain of seniored experienced Engineers and Mechanics from the work pool.

MAJOR shortage of this type of Talent in the Seattle area. Now you see the 23 year old "mechanic" they just popped out of their 3 month training program where they learn the pointy end of the drill goes forward.


So to the point, out of the blue today I get a call from a sweet sounding optimistic gal trying to recruit "Old Talent"

I laughed and said No Way in Hell........in today climate there.


What was really said, is she said she keeps hearing over and over and over about how the Airline Manufacturer today is no where near the Family Company you were once proud to wear your badge and said you worked there.

I felt so sorry for the recruiter. hah.

Don't know why but I just felt like saying beware of DEI and I don't think you can handle having to go through that.

Sad that America has to come to this and its across the industry. If we look hard enough there are still some sharp young folks out there. Said thing is that there's no bull elephant to groom them into something great.

Elephants are matriarchal, so that is a poor analogy. Male elephants are educated by their mothers and aunts and then are kicked out when they are old enough to be by themselves and their peer males. Bull elephants tend to be loners, and not terribly socialable, let alone instructive.

I took a software class that interned with Boeing in the 90s. Wow was it depressing. At least the folks we interacted with were completely incompetent. Bonus points for how they all groveled over the vice president. End of project they had a strict deadline for applications… then they extended the deadline… nobody in the class would apply. Most depressing thing ever.

I knew a few excellent engineers that retired from Boeing while I was in high school. Guys that brought up the 747 program. Structured thinkers with an absolute focus on quality. They respected the complexity of the work and cut no corners and worked as many hours as they could. They had harsh words for the new Boeing and that was in the 90s even before it left seattle,

Worked with a good guy that was in Boeing software for a year straight out of school. Said there was a whole room of tenured people at desks in a row and boss came to him in secret if something needed doing. Said he was sort of threatened a few times by others because he was so productive. He left because he didn’t want to advance there - he wanted to do cool stuff and was so happy to be gone - not to mention the low pay.

It’s one of those things - I think they need to fire a huge swath of people that were successful in the new Boeing, but then they’d have no company. I’ll be surprised if it can be turned around. Perhaps more economical to start a new company.

DEI is not the main problem at Boeing.
It is MBA's chasing the god of shareholder value instead of Engineers running the company and making the best possible product.

The defense side of Boeing has a customer who insist on quality over cost.
The Hellfire Missile group was the only CMMI level 5 software group in the company.

Boeing Commercial Aircraft Group (BCAG) and the MacDac crowd would not adapt those software engineering systems & processes found to do the job by the defense side. Then along comes the MCAS software development & testing fiasco. The public whistleblowers connected the dots and the company conceded their errors. Thankfully the board of directors finally grew a spine.

When I was the government flight test lead at Sikorsky, they held their Shareholders meeting in the big hangar on a Friday, thousands of people.

The Head of Sikorsky at the time, then under United Technologies now Lockheed, was a really interesting guy and we became lunch buddies.

His message to the Shareholders, on the government side of contracts, was always very straightforward in terms of allowable profit, over and aboves, Forward Pricing Rate Agreements, etc. There is a lot of margin in G&A, but there was not going to be an Iphone/Ipad moment in helicopters on the defense side.

He was a master at simply bounding the profit curves without selling. I learned a lot.

Not just quality but sustainability...air vehicle and mission systems in DoD have the half life of the Earth.

Musk said companies should be engaged in the business of building products that are useful and desired. That is remarkably different from 'maximizing shareholder return'. I think that phrase/mantra has done more damage to American exceptionalism than most other influences.

this isnt a DEI problem.

its a management cost cutting banking on selling a hard earned corporate reputation for short term profits thing.

its happened everywhere. capitalism demands it. all the great american engineering firms have slowly been hollowed out, replaced with finance and software people to keep the books looking good, but the quality and innovation is long dead. we've been battling for 15 years at my fortune 100 US engineering company to keep R&D alive, but its been a losing battle here too. Boeing is just the canary in the coal mine.

until we redefine what businesses are for, there wont be a change. quarterly profit for shareholders is the only metric that matters, when in reality, businesses are about building valued solutions to real world problems. until we remember that, all the american greats are going to hollowed out, mortgaged, and sold out.

that would be great if musk was actually engaging in building useful products lol.

but can't say i disagree with the sentiment. maximizing shareholder return and the American MBA has killed more jobs, killed more American companies, than anything else.

Lol, Boeing can't be going to hell by shortchanging engineering, *and* desperately hiring retired engineers cause they know more than those youngins.

Please pic one. :)

can't pick one. one is a response to the other. after 30 years of cashing out value by hollowing out your engineering and manufacturing, you have to hire them back to fix it. you have to rebuild those departments.

I left Boeing after 19 years in 2007 largely because this ^^ was what I saw happening.

Back in the 1980s after the big oil bust, much of the brain trust of knowledgeable oil field workers retired or changed careers. Then came the next oil boom, and the companies were crying to find experienced workers.

That happens in many industries.

When I was there as a newbie you were mentored by your "Technical Fellow Mentor" assigned to you when you became part of the Technical Fellowship in the Engineering ranks. Leadership then knew which engineers to listen to on the program, that fellowship is gone to my knowledge.

Very insightful. I couldn't agree with you more. I saw both - the Boeing of 1980 that was a veritable "playground for engineers" whose only concern was pushing that envelope, to the Boeing of 2016 whose only concern was shareholder value.

Yup, once again, I couldn't agree more.

Exactly. The former has fed a desire to do the latter. Pretty short sighted of these companies, however, in that engineering (or whatever it is a particular company does) talent is not the problem. It's still there, in those companies, it's simply been repressed by the management structure. Bringing back older, experienced engineers that left because of that management structure won't fix the problem.

Exactly why I left in 2016. I loved my little corner of the company, and we were largely immune from much of what drove manufacturing, but it was starting to creep in to AOG as well.

What a sad tale. Not just at Boeing, but across corporate America.

I have been watching BA as a stock. I think to right the ship it needs to replace its management and put products first and profits second, which means its out-year earnings estimates probably need to go down more. It will probably require a bigger crisis to force that kind of change. It probably needs to successfully develop a new airplane in the next several years. During that period, the commercial aviation market will have a slump, the Chinese domestic market will go mostly to COMAC and some export markets as well. BA has $48BN debt, earnings are currently less than interest expense, and $13BN debt comes due in 2024-2026. That is my theory, anyway.

Dei and they try to honey pot you.



Yeah. Nothing has changed

To enhance shareholder value, some bean counter proposed building convertible planes. So that is why they installed six point harnesses.

immense stock buybacks are solid proof of chasing shareholder value ....... rather than investing.
it's happening everywhere - was once illegal, the buyback method of stock price manipulation.