Quote:
Originally Posted by astrochex
Thank Harry Stonecipher.
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I was friends with the older crowd right up until they died. Such amazing elegant people. Great minds and sharp right up until the end. Structured thinking made for amazing stories. They were really upset by the md merger. Really didn't like the new executives who they said really changed the culture to be more focused on shareholders. Felt like a lot of what they'd worked to achieve was being ignored and that it was going to end badly. They were intensly focused on quality, was amazing to hear them describe the issues with managing complexity because of course its the main problem with software. Was weird where I count functions and lines of code, they're counting screws and tons of metal and yet there were a lot of similarities.
The move to chicago was the end as far as they were concerned. Story I heard (from two very very senior people) was that some cadre of execs wanted better clubs to belong to. I told them I thought they were joking but nope... Folks I knew thought it was important to be connected to the factory and talk to the workers directly.
I took a class sponsored by boeing and was incredibly depressing to visit their software teams. At the end of the class nobody applied to work there.
What really turned me off was the worshipful attitude everyone had for the execs - looked to me like a serious organizational sickness if execs want to be brown nosed. Job like that you should have nowhere to hide.
Edit: forgot: also spent a few evenings with a recent boeing president. What a complete and utter douche. Could be all that brownnosing caused his compass to become unstuck - he seemed to think he was the sun king. He did not like to have his opinions questioned, was like I'd pooped in his wine glass.