• 5C5C5C@programming.devEnglish
      102·
      9 months ago

      By all credible accounts the systemic issues at Boeing predate this CEO by probably 2 decades. Dave Calhoun seems to specialize in “troubled companies”, i.e. he has never been anything more than a professional scape goat.

      Edit: I didn’t do enough research, he hasn’t really been CEO at many places, just upper positions like director and board member. Still, the companies he specializes in seem to be the ones with reputations to cannibalize for money by cutting quality and screwing consumers, like GE.

      • db2@lemmy.worldEnglish
        60·
        9 months ago

        If it comes with golden parachutes it’s all but guaranteed he doesn’t care.

        • Zron@lemmy.worldEnglish
          38·
          9 months ago

          If I got millions of dollars every time a company went down in flames around me, I’d carry around a can of gas and matches.

          He was CEO, he could have implemented policies to alleviate these issues. Instead he kept the status quo.

          He belongs in jail, not another board room.

      • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.worldEnglish
        27·
        9 months ago

        He was responsible for the figurative nosedive my boss’ previous company did. Now he’s responsible for the literal nosedive of Boeing.

        This man is a professional company ruiner, not just a scape goat.

        • 5C5C5C@programming.devEnglish
          7·
          9 months ago

          You’re right, he was there since 2009, so he has probably been helping to design the cannibalization, but it certainly didn’t begin with him.

    • bionicjoey@lemmy.caEnglish
      43·
      9 months ago

      It doesn’t matter if the CEO was an engineer or not in a previous life. The job of a CEO doesn’t change and he did exactly what he was supposed to do: made shortsighted decisions that maximised profit and took the fall for it when the short-sightedness of those decisions blew up in their faces.

  • Jesus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    88·
    9 months ago

    So what about his seat on the board and what about the Director of the board, Bradway?

    At the end of the day, it’s the board that’s signing off on the high level strategy. They need to be held accountable too. The CEO isn’t the top of the pyramid. The board is.

    • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      33·
      9 months ago

      Thank you! Folks around here are always baggin’ on CEOs like they’re the top dogs. Nope. The Board often orders them to do stupid shit, and sometimes they’re brought on to do stupid shit. Hence the golden parachute thing. Damn straight I want paid if you fire me for doing what I was told.

  • PrincessLeiasCat@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    69·
    9 months ago

    Highly recommend the book ‘Flying Blind’ by Peter Robison on Boeing and the decline of its safety culture after the merger with McDonnell Douglas. That’s when the “business” types who ran the former company into the ground took over both and we see the same results here.

    Before the merger, the engineers were in charge and safety was taken seriously. Now, it’s more about stock, etc.

    • applebusch@lemmy.worldEnglish
      32·
      9 months ago

      Long ago the four nations lived in harmony. But everything changed when the business nation attacked. Only the regulations could stop them, but when the world needed them most, they vanished.

    • SkyeStarfallEnglish
      17·
      9 months ago

      I feel like I hear this story repeated over and over and over and over and over… everywhere.

      At what point will we stop letting the business types degrade our human civilization for their egoistic short-term gains?

      • Blank@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        9 months ago

        When capitalism is no longer propped up by the government, masquerading as democracy, so that they, too, can greedily profiteer on the short term gains of a quality product that has been ran into the ground for the sake of a bigger personal estate.

      • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        9 months ago

        Maybe just learning to live with it would be better. It’s cliche at this point. Company thinks big, takes big risks, makes shitton of money and shitton of mistakes. Wall Street takes over and the company circles the drain. We all know it’s going to happen. That uniqueness will converge, or made to converge to the mean, and given enough time every company will be an also-ran.

        I got into Soylent when it first came out. It said proudly made with GMOs on the label. The recipe was open source and a revision number on it. The inventor was conducting medical tests on himself as a test subject and tweaking the nutrition balance and it was all made by one facility. Now, the proudly made with GMOs is gone, it is closed source, the recipe seems to never change, the supply of bottled comes from a different facility each time I order it. What happened? The company was sold to an established player and they made it just yet another meal replacement drink.

        I guess what I am saying is it is probably just easier to accept that this is going to happen. The craftsman of your grandfather is the cheap junk of today.

  • Jode@midwest.socialEnglish
    61·
    9 months ago

    Are we all forgetting that Boeing most likely had a witness testifying them executed in a parking lot a few weeks ago?

  • Binthinkin@kbin.social
    44·
    9 months ago

    That’s not enough. We want investigations that bring consequences.

    Edit: the people who are commenting below about how “we have no control” etc etc, I just want to say, “Shut the fuck up.” Nobody wants you around anymore. Just because YOU have been a weak POS your entire life spouting off weak, sad bullshit trying to divert REAL change doesn’t mean that the rest of the country is like you. Go back to your holes because I promise if you don’t and you keep acting up, we will put you there in finality. The public isn’t stupid, and they aren’t weak. It’s scumbags within the wealth class that are protected by losers like you all naysayers and class traitors who try to make it seem that way. Trump and Biden is a symptom of class traitors turning on the public, not a show of force by the elites. Best recognize.

    • Nudding@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16·
      9 months ago

      What we want, and what happens in reality, have absolutely no connection. Money is what makes the world go around. Money is the only thing that matters to our society.

      • some_designer_dude@lemmy.worldEnglish
        12·
        9 months ago

        No, it’s the only thing that matters to our current leadership. That can be changed. Either by changing their minds, or by removing and replacing them.

      • in4aPenny@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        9 months ago

        When are we going to change that? It’s been a while, like 600BC, but we managed just fine for tens of thousands of years before minted coin.

  • YurkshireLad@lemmy.caEnglish
    41·
    9 months ago

    I wonder what his golden handshake (parachute? What’s the difference?) is, for screwing things up so badly?

  • Treczoks@lemmy.worldEnglish
    28·
    9 months ago

    How many millions fat will his golden parachute be for sending hundreds of passengers to death?

  • notannpc@lemmy.worldEnglish
    24·
    9 months ago

    The shareholders get their fall guy, cool, but what about the entire leaderships criminal negligence? Because you can’t convince me that the CEO was single-handedly making the call to cut corners.

  • BeautifulMind ♾️@lemmy.worldEnglish
    20·
    8 months ago

    When you have financial engineers overriding the decisions of mechanical engineers, you get crashy airplanes and eventually, caught up murdering people that might talk to investigators in order to defend those juicy profits

    …sort of like how when administrators and insurance folk and lawyers and judges override the decisions of doctors and nurses, you end up with highly profitable hospitals and people dying for it

    …all a bit like when the bean counters run your software company, layoffs designed to boost stock price by showing investors ‘fiscal discipline’ leaves your engineering teams shorthanded and forces them to de-prioritize bug fixes and dealing with technical debt and rigorous testing and you end up shipping lots of bugs when you release your product

    • KevonLooney@lemm.eeEnglish
      9·
      9 months ago

      Don’t blame accountants. They don’t make any decisions, and they don’t have the technical expertise to know what is dangerous.

      The CEO is a good start. I bet the COO and head of engineering are also at fault. People signed off on these planes without doing the required installation of the door. If it’s a systemic issue, the quality control team is to blame.

      Aviation is a regulated industry, right? I expect the FAA to get to the bottom, if not lawsuits.

  • Fedizen@lemmy.worldEnglish
    20·
    9 months ago

    Just going to state the obvious here: Boards of directors of large public company should have a % of the board elected by company workers and another % appointed by elected politicians. The problem here is corporate boards entirely run by investors.

  • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.todayEnglish
    19·
    9 months ago

    Not good enough, I want more than just a change of leadership. I want federal oversight at every Boeing Facility. I want the FAA to have a new office funded by Washington to scrutinize this company. I want Boeing Employees purged from the FAA.

  • KNova@infosec.pubEnglish
    14·
    9 months ago

    Culture change takes a while; I feel like even if they replaced everyone at the top with safety minded engineers to run the company, it would be some time before they dig themselves out of the hole they created for themselves.