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So let’s get this straight, after years of being relentlessly threatened, harassed, and retaliated against for attempting to hold up what little safety standards and quality assurance remained in their department, this Swampy guy finally gets a chance to deposition against Boeing, his moment to finally have Boeing see consequences for what they put him through, and he suddenly turns suicidal and shoots himself in the head?
Tell you what, if Boeing were expecting literally anyone to believe no foul play is involved here, then their heads must be put together as well as their planes are nowadays
The fact alone that leadership came in, declared that experienced staff were “phenomenally talented assholes”, forced them all out, and pushed LITERAL DEFECTIVE PLANES into the sky should be the goddamn electric chair.
And anyone who owns Boeing stock should have to pay any profit they’ve made back into a public fund to go to public education in America.
The rich are done with this place and they’re squeezing it dry before they let it rot. Happening everywhere.
Before the 80s the top marginal tax rate was obscene, so as a CEO or exec the way you’d extract value from your company was to make sure it’d last a hundred years and keep paying you the whole time. Reputation was of the utmost importance.
Now it makes more sense to just cash out whenever you can. We’ve changed the incentive structure. Who the duck cares if the planes stay in the sky six years from now, you’ll be out by then and it’ll be someone else’s problem. There’s so much money to be made by taking existing reputation and cashing it in.
The best part is that in many industries, especially in software, you can fire people now and won’t really feel the effects for years. You can take the money now, and maybe try to deal with the problems caused when they come up.
As someone who has worked in safety-critical aerospace in the past, and who works in biotech nowadays on projects that fall under FDA purview: the flagrant and willful violation of safety regulations that is abundantly apparent here - let alone the gross engineering ethics violations - simply beggars belief.
Fucking beancounters are killing everything. I just want to build cool shit that works good, helps people, and (I thought this part went without saying) doesn’t accidentally kill people. Please let me just do that.
I’m not sure they expected no one to think it was foul play, but I’ll bet they expected not to see any consequences, which historically has been a very safe bet for them to make.
Pretty decent article, thanks for posting it
Looks like optimizing value for shareholders is not compatible with quality, safety, or decent working conditions. There is too much control from these useless bloodsuckers in wall street.
They optimize value over safety and wind up loosing both.
Enshittification of the skies. Unfortunately, it kills people.
Yep. Boeing and other big companies that place money over everything need to start facing material consequences for their failures. The courts need to stop babying the rich and powerful. The fact that these issues are cropping up is being over decades Boeing has rejected quality over doing the bare minimum, this is the result and people are going to start feeling very unsafe in planes if they don’t start relearning their old ways.
I don’t understand the faith people place in the courts. No judge is going destroy their career and social status by actually handing out meaningful punishments.
So we should start with the judges. Got it.
Just one of the many, many examples of what you get when you build an entire society around the idea that making a profit is more important than anything else.
