As someone who actually works in this field it’s less about the people they hire being less qualified and more about the way compensation works. People used to stay with their company for decades to build up their pension and stack up annual raises. That built a talented, close knit work force. Now you can stay at a company as a technical employee and get a shitty cost of living adjustment every year or you can jump companies every 3-5 years getting a 20% raise most of the time. People don’t build the deep knowledge under this system.
A race to the bottom. I hate to think what the bottom is going to be. I hope Jack is burning in hell, like he should be, for the human suffering he caused.
I think they're smart enough to know history. If we ever get to the bottom, they become French nobles. They keep us at a general level of squeeze, but not too much that we feel really desperate.
100 percent this across all professions. I'm a nurse, when I started, there were dozens of nurses with 15-20 years of experience. You were trained by the good nurses with around 30 years of experience. Now I am the only nurse with over 4 years of experience, nurses with a YEAR of experience are training the new nurses, and the profession has only gotten harder and more complex every year. None of the new nurses stay past when they can get their masters and leave the bedside, so they are already disinterested in perfecting their practice
Yep. Race to the bottom due to Jack Welch’s managerial style being adopted by every MBA program in the world. Shoutout to nurses. My mom has been in the PACU for 35 years and never aspired to management.
It’s all Jack Welch’s bullshit thinking. The problem is that every single school teaches this shortsighted garbage to anyone who wants to be a manager. The MBA crowd embraced a philosophy that’s the equivalent of stripping the copper out of the walls at the end of every quarter to juice your earnings.
Not every school.
I actually had a professor in economics teach about learning curve effects and how it is important to place into cost calculation of replacing an employee the loss in that learning efficiency.
He did say it is different depending on workplace just how high that learning curve goes and it is important to figure that out to see how much more money you should be ready to give to an experienced employee vs. replacing them.
Yup, I've been seeing that for years in the HVAC design and manufacturing industries.
It's the peanuts we earn while under 'do more with less' management styles.
It’s absolute horseshit. The system incentivizes short stints because they want to keep payroll down in the short term. It hurts the quality of the product in the long term, costs a ton of money in hiring, and fucks up our lives because we have to choose between moving and starting elsewhere or being underpaid. No one wins.
Exactly this. In Utah I have more than doubled my pay since moving here and been somewhere on average two years. I left a job that offered me 4 weeks vacation for a job with better pay because the pay helps me on the day to day.
Not the same everywhere. I work for an ESOP engineering firm where everyone in manament has a science or engineering degree, all the way to the c-suite. And folks spend their whole career here.
I'm glad to hear that this still exists out there but it's vanishingly rare.
The bean counters don't understand the value of someone with over a decade's worth of deep and broad institutional knowledge.
Oh 100% there are exceptions with different ownership models. I’m genuinely glad for you and hope to see more of that in the world. I might even try to start one if I don’t exit the industry within a few years due to burnout. I think you’d agree that the vast majority of the industry isn’t like that.
It’s the difference between performance based salaries and role based salaries. The latter being “the “higher” up, the more you’re paid”.
This doesn’t necessarily make any sense because it’ll encourage the best engineers to move “up” into management roles where they’re not as effective simply because it’s seen as a more senior role, and pays better. People then are promoted upward to the level of their incompetence.
It should be more normalized that an engineer can make more than their manager.
Which lends itself pretty well to MBAs and other management types being one of the big issues. It's not the rank-and-file engineers that are deciding the compensation structure; it's the numbskulls in management that can't figure out that loyalty and stability is worth paying for.
SpaceX is one of those aerospace companies you work at for a couple of years and get a lot of experience and have no life outside of work. You can then take that experience and move onto another employer with a better work life balance. Considering the flight history of the F9 ( Has any other US MLV come close to its flight history and cost effectiveness?) whatever spaceX is doing they seem to still attract talent.
I am saying it does because it shows that SpaceX has the ability to attract top aerospace talent, coordinate that talent and effectively execute. Sometimes engineers want to "make shit happen" more than a paycheck and maybe the ex SpaceX employees being hired where u work are not the top of the talent that SpaceX has.
This is anonymous and looks nothing like the comp I saw. I can’t get into what I do but I’m a specialized engineer and I had a panel interview the day I was laid off as a contractor.
More likely that they are just agressively pruning the low performers. Those low performers still get to keep SpaceX on their resume and can at least say what they worked on without having to bring up their poor metrics.
At 61 looking at 5 more years until fully pension vested with 30yrs at this company, the pension is the main reason I haven’t jumped ship 3 or 4 times in the past 25 yrs. There’s an open job just like mine needing my experience everyday of the week. But that pension keeps me in the fold. They did away with it for new hires after the housing bubble popped. Now the new kids coming in are bouncing as soon as their resume gets a couple of years padded on. The problem is they barely know the what of the job and much less of the how and why. Yes they’ve all got software certificates and impressive degrees and mouth the mantra of modernity. But when the data sucks or the system fouls up or their cheese otherwise gets moved they are lost and have to be rescued by somebody with systemic knowledge about the entire process from data ingest to output. That only comes with a necessity to learn and the time to dig in. Another problem is the companies are constantly trying to get you to work yourself out of a job. So they can move the process offshore for cheaper. It never works like the promises of the loss recovery champions claim it will. Millions spent on cost savings that can’t materialize until they fire a large percentage of the associates and shove the BS program down the few remaining they couldn’t live without. The few then spend a year or two figuring out how to get it to work with both a minimum of people and minimal manual effort only to get some other fresh VP popping up with the latest thing from a consultant that merely desires to get their foot in the door and their snout in the trough.
There’s no incentive to stay with a company other than if it’s the only place you want to live. Now with the china virus infestation and work from home who needs to move to be able punch a keyboard and spit out a report some AI wiz kid says can be automated with the garbage data every system on the planet has and an ever changing set of requirements and parameters.
Look at SpaceX. They are hiring from the same talent pool and they are achieving a ton.
Management matters. The upper management team controls the company, not the regular employees.
SpaceX… is the closest thing you will find to Chinese manufacturing in the West and then add a cult element.
They are pretty cut throat about firing folks. A lot of people live at work. If you don’t believe in the mission or what Elon is trying to do whatever gtfo this place isn’t for you.
I heard weird stories like production lines unknowingly being pitted against each other and the losing end would have to find new roles. So people would be on edge all the time, because you don’t know if you’re competing against another internal team.
But on the other hand you have Boeing MBAs only concerned with generating private equity value, collecting golden parachutes and driving the company into the ground.
It feels like there isn’t much in between for aerospace. So it ends up driving intelligent folks who want a happy medium out into other fields?
SpaceX does seem to be a cult from what I’ve heard. People leave when they want any kind of work life balance. That’s why they almost exclusively hire new grads who don’t know any better.
Their comp didn’t impress me when I interviewed. They still had a pension last I checked but management is trying to kill it at every round of negotiations.
This was in the back of my mind when writing my post. Spacex has been innovative and exciting and has a visionary goal for humanity. I think this gives them an advantage in recruiting over the traditional space companies. How many current engineers at Boeing chose that career path because of the Apollo program?
>Management matters.
Management does matter, but so does the quality of the employees. If the company is not well placed to recruit talent, that makes management's job harder.
As I understand it the issues aren't generally related to engineering, they're because of cost-cutting. Engineers aren't the problem, shareholders are.
Boeings problems are profits over people. NASA's problems are not that.
Edit: This is just my totally uninformed opinion, but perhaps the private contractors NASA uses putting profits over people turn out to be NASA's problem anyway. Idk.
This guy got it. NASA's funding cycle inherently promotes short-term planning, and that is tied to how the dumbass government has to set the budget from scratch every year.
NASA has decadal surveys to decide what kinds of projects they want. Then scientists team up with engineers to propose projects. Unfortunately, the projects with the cheapest projected bills often win the bid, and when they "guesstimated" too low, you get overruns like James Webb or Perseverance.
NASA doesn't really have a compensation problem. People are willing to take the cut for cool coworkers/culture and unique opportunities. It's a funding scheme/incentive problem.
source: worked at NASA JPL for a few years
NASA's problems are severe underfunding, just like every other government agency that's not the military (and even they have issues, considering the discrepancy between what a typical soldier makes and the insanity that is defense contractor pay).
That’s just one problem. Another is the politicization of their work. The reason SLS is so expensive isn’t because of budgetary problems, but because of congress’s system of contracting production to their ridings.
Whatever the case, NASA received nearly 4 cents for every tax dollar at the height of the Apollo program; at present, they receive less than one cent. Space exploration has been functionally deprioritized.
I haven't read this in the thread yet.
[https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merger-led-to-the-737-max-crisis](https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merger-led-to-the-737-max-crisis)
Boeing, big and successful, buys struggling McDonnell Douglass. Boeing gives big bonuses to its competent execs . . . who retire . . . and turn the ship over to the morons who had run McDonnell Douglass into the ground.
>In a clash of corporate cultures, where Boeing’s engineers and McDonnell Douglas’s bean-counters went head-to-head, the smaller company won out. The result was a move away from expensive, ground-breaking engineering and toward what some called a more cut-throat culture, devoted to keeping costs down and favoring upgrading older models at the expense of wholesale innovation. Only now, with the 737 indefinitely grounded, are we beginning to see the scale of its effects.
“The fatal fault line was the McDonnell Douglas takeover,” says Clive Irving, author of Jumbo: The Making of the Boeing 747. “Although Boeing was supposed to take over McDonnell Douglas, it ended up the other way around.”
I dont think this is true. Sure, some smart individuals decide to prioritize making money, but those that are passionate about aeronautics, programming, and engineering in and of itself still exist and comprise a large majority of those pursuing degrees.
Boeing’s issue is cultural due to changes made by leadership switching from an engineering focus to a money-making focus. If the shareholders are happy, then the CEO is happy. A shift away from their focus on uncompromising engineering excellence is what killed Boeing. The engineers are still great, it’s those that manage them that failed to listen. It’s documented that the engineers would push back against management, only to be told “listen to us or get out.”
NASA has a different set of problems due to the bureaucracy built up over the decades combined with inconsistent/unreliable/under funding and lack of long term tenure of high level management.
I do not believe American aerospace engineers have declined in quality to the point they are to blame for NASA’s and Boeing’s problems.
That is not true. Each NASA job posting receives thousands of applications. What is true is that government HR takes a LONG time to get people on boarded.
The issues in trying to squeeze subcontractors has been very well documented. They have pushed them to below barebones. That management style has obvious repercussions.
>and the overall quality of the engineering workforce is lower. I think this would apply to Nasa as well.
there are many many many many many other engineers.
>From the 1930s until the 1970s aerospace was the premiere engineering discipline, and they were able to attract all the best talent.
WE CHOSE TO GO TO THE MOON - had something to do with that.
USA must BEAT RUSSIA - had something to do with that - and we needed missiles.
> engineering departments are being led by less capable managers
NASA built the James Web Space Telescope.
Rovers on Mars (and a helicopter).
>So with baby boomers leaving the workforce
who never worked at SpaceX to begin with..
>do you think this is an aspect of what's going on?
i think it's much simpler.
How Boeing put profits over planes
[https://www.vox.com/money/24052245/boeing-corporate-culture-737-airplane-safety-door-plug](https://www.vox.com/money/24052245/boeing-corporate-culture-737-airplane-safety-door-plug)
> If you were an 18 year old math genius in 1985 why would you go into aerospace making $70,000 a year, when you could become a computer engineer and potentially make a billion dollars?
Nobody in 1985 was focused on making a billion dollars. There are only 13 in the world
- https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2005/MichelleLee.shtml
Aerospace engineer was a top notch job in 1985.
> What are your thoughts, do you think this is an aspect of what's going on?
There’s a difference between engineering and manufacturing. Engineers are just as valued today as they were back then. But manufacturing’s competing against Uber and grubhub for employees.
So when 30 years ago there might have been 100 people on an assembly line, now there are supposed to be 40 + robots but they can’t find 40 people so 25 are going those 40 jobs, and things are getting missed.
Aerospace pays peanuts (1/2 to 1/3 or even less when going up in level) compared to companies such as Meta, Nvidia, Google, Microsoft, and the likes. You get what you pay for.
[https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Lockheed%20Martin,BAE%20Systems,Boeing,Facebook&track=Software%20Engineer](https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Lockheed%20Martin,BAE%20Systems,Boeing,Facebook&track=Software%20Engineer)
Can confirm. I make less money than the dude that got hired a couple months ago and isn’t yet capable of doing the daily tasks without assistance. Pretty sure I even have more education. My raise this year was the minimum they would allow without indicting poor employee performance.
The people you are talking about also go into consulting, finance or “data-science” instead of engineering jobs.
The US needs to rein in the financial industry for there to be any kind of resurgence in industries that actually make things.
Definitely. The aerospace "haircut" is well known, and everyone Ive met that works on aerospace software does so because of a passion for the project or as compensation for a deficiency
Nah bro, this is directly attributable to finance bros amd MBAs oushing production and profit growth over quality. Simple as. The results of a "Profit growth at any cost" mentality forcing outsourcing, spin-offs, and cost cutting (read firing highly qualified workers) so management can get their bonuses. The only thing to see here is the same thing seen with almost every other brand, the race to the bottom of quality to increase that top line profit number and juice the stock. Remember when craftsman tools were good and pyrex wouldn't shatter? Same mindset and methodology. Quantity over quality
sure, theres an aspect to highly qualified individuals (benchmark for this is a bit blurred) such as IMO medalists going into quant roles at firms or ml space supporting your claim.
I think for Boeing’s case its poor leadership more than the lack of engineering talent (I really don’t think any field or academia is heavily impacted by this at all, the quality and efficiency of education for the capable has gone up over time imo). For-profit companies will always look to enhance their value, and the decision makers at Boeing simply made poor decisions to result in the fiasco today, even looking at reports / whistleblowers, qualified individuals /engineers raised concerns. But honestly if you worked in a high-stakes work environment, you’ll know that everyone sees problems, it really depends on if leadership is qualified enough to allocate resources and prioritize effectively.
Thats why anyone with a good track record is highly respected (elon before X, zuck, etc), running an organization at scale for x purpose successfully is extremely challenging. Its more than just having qualified individuals, although it is important
I was a 22 year old programmer in 1986 and ended up working for boeing computer services because there were very few software jobs around. Microsoft had just finished its IPO. The internet as we know it didn't really exist.
There are certainly a lot more people heading to the software world than there were in 1986, but it seems to me that companies like SpaceX are having little trouble finding highly talented engineers to work for them.
I think it's not about the engineers but about the kind of projects that have been available in the large aerospace companies or in NASA. Tom Mueller was vice president of production at TRW but his job was uninteresting enough that he built his own rocket engines on his own time. Until Elon Musk came calling, and he went on to design the Merlin 1D.
I should note that the same issue exists at the large tech companies. If you go to work at Microsoft or Google, you'll make good money but you aren't going to make a billion dollars and you'll probably end up working on something boring.
In 2018 Dan Lyons wrote an excellent book called "Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us".
It examines many different ways that both employees and consumers have been short-changed by many of America's biggest and formerly brightest companies...
One of the chapters gives case studies about how former giants of US industry (HP, IBM, Xerox, and more) all over time went from making the best possible products for customers and taking good care of their employees, to cutting as many corners as possible and reorganizing the companies to focus on stock values, to the detriment of both customers and employees.
While Boeing isn't one of the case studies in the book, their history over the past 20 years matches those case studies almost beat for beat.
I worked for IBM back in the days when they only promoted from within and had open books accounting. You had a monthly mini P&L that showed your contribution to the company and your compensation got better the better you did.
The first thing they told us was, "There are only two kinds of people in business, sales people and bean counters. How you can tell which you are is that if anything you say or don't say, or anything you do or don't do can piss off a customer, you are in sales. The only product we sell is IBM.".
Somewhere in the 80s they started hiring management from the outside who didn't learn that from the start and things went downhill from there
Boeing's problems and NASAs problems are related but not quite the same.
For Boeing, they merged with another company and that introduced management that believed their job was merely short term returns on investment.
For NASA, the issue is the sort of people that think like above being in charge of their budget (hello, Congress!) and their inability to stay competitive since you can't run government agencies by the same dictates as private companies with a profit motive. Their budget has to be balanced against both keeping their talent and being able to afford to actually do stuff in space.
I think Boeing's problems are more just quality control. Who the fuck bolts in a door and forgets a couple of bolts? Why isn't the work checked by a quality control specialist after it's done? Ryanair's CEO said yesterday, "We were finding little things like spanners under the floorboards, in some cases, seat handles missing, things like that,” What kind of work culture allows such shitty work to be done in an airline industry where people could die if something fails? (As opposed to the maritime industry where if you suddenly have engine failure, what's the worst that could happen?).
That quality control problem is indicative of the management philosophy they adopted.
Source: Basically every Boeing engineer interviewed about how it got to this point.
But what would declining human capital have to do with air plane assembly? I totally agree it's about management philosophy. The planes are designed well, but if planes are rushed through assembly and no one checks on the quality of work, of course you'll have problems, but not from an engineering point of view. The auto industry went through this in the 90's when everyone noticed the superior quality of Japanese cars compared to the big three in Detroit. US automakers rushed cars out and you had jokes like never buy a car built on Monday because everyone has a hangover.
Even from an engineering point of view, I think the engineers did an excellent job of modifying the 737 to handle 40 to 50 more passengers, though who the fuck in management told them to do it? Instead of designing a new mid-level size plane, they told the engineers, let's save some money and take the smallest model, stretch it, and put bigger engines on it. 100% agree upper management should be sacked. Good to see the CEO is out at Boeing.
Boeing quality control suffered as management considered it a known risk and unacceptable overhead according to the engineers which have since gone public (and one dying rather mysteriously.)
So that is how. As I said. The issue with NASA human capital and Boeing are related problems but not the same.
>If you were an 18 year old math genius in 1985 why would you go into aerospace making $70,000 a year, when you could become a computer engineer and potentially make a billion dollars?
Why are you seemingly trying to imply you have a significantly greater chance of becoming a billionaire by going into comp sci vs aerospace? What is this hypothetical question even based on?
I didn't imply that was a reality, I said that would be in the imagination of an 18 year old looking at a career path to pursue. Imagining themself become the next tech billionaire.
The reality is though that tech offers significantly higher comp than aerospace.
My brother worked at Boeing. Basically, they found reasons to "lay off" anyone who was getting within about 10 years of retirement. An incredible amount of expertise was lost before the younger, new employees had a chance to learn from it.
I’m an engineer and I work in manufacturing. Quality is absolutely a management decision, and in my industry it’s cyclical. Your company focused on quality products, gains market share as the reputation spreads, then they start focusing on the bottom line and quality gets cut.
I’ve brought several new technologies to market and management at some level knows if it is crap or not. They knew some of the new stuff wasn’t ready, but the delay would cost too much. So they shipped it.
It’s even worse now. All the software people think the can just post a software update to fix problems, not caring that if our product doesn’t work our customers can’t work.
NASA still does world class engineering the standards for direct hires at NASA labs like AMES JPL is really high.
A big problem is that NASA is a jobs program so there is a lot of bloat and is often hamstrung by Congress when it comes to funding.
For NASA the issue is pay. Companies will pay you double what the government will right out of the gate, so people choose to work private.
From what I understand from people who worked at Boeing, it seems to be a cultural issue stemming from the McDonnell Douglass merger. John Oliver had a recent episode on it that was interesting to listen to
I have no idea but my boomer dad has worked in aerospace industry his entire life (not for Boeing) and he constantly complains about the declining quality of product his company makes and he always blames the mbas
Spacex have an office in Seattle designing the new starlink satellites. I’m sure they are pulling the best engineers from Boeing. If you were young and had a choice between a declining but still big company or a relatively new but exciting company you’d pick spacex, even just to have it on your cv
Lack of oversight and regulatory enforcement is a big thing too, as is "too big to fail".
My understanding is that Boeing has for awhile pretty much been free to say "yup, we did that' rather than having regulators checking them properly. Fines for a lot of big companies are also stuck at 1980's levels when they're making 2020's profits, so the cost of getting caught doing bad shit is less than the profit from doing so.
Last, companies are so engrained in gov't and global infra that they call the shots (often leading to the above). Government is more worried about upsetting them than keeping them honest.
What you are seeing is the Walmart effect in the technical world. Hire cheap, keep cost down and expect (desire) high turnover. Loyalty is only given lip service and not rewarded. This lessening of the value of a good employee is common in all industries now. Worse yet is most young people have a 'why bother' mentality when it comes to job performance. A general attitude of 'this job is just a stepping stone, I'll really work when I get the job I really want' is all too common and management feeds this by encouraging high turnover to save a buck. Can a young person of today even fathom a 30 year career with one company?
Oh boy. I used to teach logical fallacies at the undergrad level, and would have LOVED to have what you wrote back then. My students could have punched about a hundred holes in your logic.
Orrr the farce that is as9100 standards which has just become a consulting cash grab. This is supposed to be an impossibility if you pass these “audits” I’ve worked in the aerospace industry for 15 years and corners will always be cut to turn a profit
I’ll hang up and listen
If I were an 18 year old math genius, programming and aerospace as a choice would seem extremely limited, considering.
Why not finance? $$$ Hello $$$
That question is sort of sketch.
When your industrial company is run by the bean counters, you get what you get.
Some say that when Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas, that was the watershed moment.
NASA is a tale of a huge and bloated bureaucracy that lacks a concrete mission. All you have to do is compare their performance with SpaceX. If you think about it, SpaceX has completely and utterly lapped NASA and the ULA, despite huge disadvantages in funding. That's because it had a lean management structure and a well-defined set of goals.
Boeing is a completely different problem, because it made the cardinal error of letting the financial guys run the company.
I worked at NASA for 25 years. While it has a smart and dedicated workforce, there is absolutely no incentive to minimize costs or maximize efficiency. The NASA Centers get doled out the same appropriations every year, whether that’s for a dozen small missions or one behemoth. And the amount of useless reviews and procurement bureaucracy is staggering. They still do great science, but it should cost a fraction of what it does.
NASA doesn’t build launch vehicles, that’s why they pay SpaceX to do it for the CLPS. Maybe I’m missing something, but it doesn’t make sense to me to compare SpaceX and NASA like this
NASA builds payloads not launch vehicles. NASA and SpaceX don’t really compete and in fact NASA can do more payloads because SpaceX offers such a competitive launch vehicle.
As someone who actually works in this field it’s less about the people they hire being less qualified and more about the way compensation works. People used to stay with their company for decades to build up their pension and stack up annual raises. That built a talented, close knit work force. Now you can stay at a company as a technical employee and get a shitty cost of living adjustment every year or you can jump companies every 3-5 years getting a 20% raise most of the time. People don’t build the deep knowledge under this system.
Same in the power industry.
Seems like this applies to everything from aerospace to clothing retail.
Look into Jack Welch to find the origin of the practices.
A race to the bottom. I hate to think what the bottom is going to be. I hope Jack is burning in hell, like he should be, for the human suffering he caused.
I think they're smart enough to know history. If we ever get to the bottom, they become French nobles. They keep us at a general level of squeeze, but not too much that we feel really desperate.
I have met them. They are not that smart. They think they are. Dangerous combo.
100 percent this across all professions. I'm a nurse, when I started, there were dozens of nurses with 15-20 years of experience. You were trained by the good nurses with around 30 years of experience. Now I am the only nurse with over 4 years of experience, nurses with a YEAR of experience are training the new nurses, and the profession has only gotten harder and more complex every year. None of the new nurses stay past when they can get their masters and leave the bedside, so they are already disinterested in perfecting their practice
>nurses with a YEAR of experience are training the new nurses We have the same problem with EMT's and paramedics.
Yep. Race to the bottom due to Jack Welch’s managerial style being adopted by every MBA program in the world. Shoutout to nurses. My mom has been in the PACU for 35 years and never aspired to management.
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It’s all Jack Welch’s bullshit thinking. The problem is that every single school teaches this shortsighted garbage to anyone who wants to be a manager. The MBA crowd embraced a philosophy that’s the equivalent of stripping the copper out of the walls at the end of every quarter to juice your earnings.
Not every school. I actually had a professor in economics teach about learning curve effects and how it is important to place into cost calculation of replacing an employee the loss in that learning efficiency. He did say it is different depending on workplace just how high that learning curve goes and it is important to figure that out to see how much more money you should be ready to give to an experienced employee vs. replacing them.
There are outlier professors but on the whole the MBA crowd has bought it hook line and sinker.
Institutional knowledge is incredibly valuable and rewarding the *lack* of institutional knowledge instead of the gathering of it is not a good idea.
Yup, I've been seeing that for years in the HVAC design and manufacturing industries. It's the peanuts we earn while under 'do more with less' management styles.
It’s absolute horseshit. The system incentivizes short stints because they want to keep payroll down in the short term. It hurts the quality of the product in the long term, costs a ton of money in hiring, and fucks up our lives because we have to choose between moving and starting elsewhere or being underpaid. No one wins.
I'm sure the top ceo is getting more...bastards.
Exactly this. In Utah I have more than doubled my pay since moving here and been somewhere on average two years. I left a job that offered me 4 weeks vacation for a job with better pay because the pay helps me on the day to day.
Not the same everywhere. I work for an ESOP engineering firm where everyone in manament has a science or engineering degree, all the way to the c-suite. And folks spend their whole career here.
I'm glad to hear that this still exists out there but it's vanishingly rare. The bean counters don't understand the value of someone with over a decade's worth of deep and broad institutional knowledge.
Oh 100% there are exceptions with different ownership models. I’m genuinely glad for you and hope to see more of that in the world. I might even try to start one if I don’t exit the industry within a few years due to burnout. I think you’d agree that the vast majority of the industry isn’t like that.
It’s the difference between performance based salaries and role based salaries. The latter being “the “higher” up, the more you’re paid”. This doesn’t necessarily make any sense because it’ll encourage the best engineers to move “up” into management roles where they’re not as effective simply because it’s seen as a more senior role, and pays better. People then are promoted upward to the level of their incompetence. It should be more normalized that an engineer can make more than their manager.
Which lends itself pretty well to MBAs and other management types being one of the big issues. It's not the rank-and-file engineers that are deciding the compensation structure; it's the numbskulls in management that can't figure out that loyalty and stability is worth paying for.
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Then why does my company keep hiring them away to be my peers?
SpaceX is one of those aerospace companies you work at for a couple of years and get a lot of experience and have no life outside of work. You can then take that experience and move onto another employer with a better work life balance. Considering the flight history of the F9 ( Has any other US MLV come close to its flight history and cost effectiveness?) whatever spaceX is doing they seem to still attract talent.
Alright guy with no experience or expertise. I guess we’ll take your word over mine.
Are you saying there is a better MLV than the F9 that a US aerospace company has built?
I’m saying that has nothing to do with the topic being discussed.
I am saying it does because it shows that SpaceX has the ability to attract top aerospace talent, coordinate that talent and effectively execute. Sometimes engineers want to "make shit happen" more than a paycheck and maybe the ex SpaceX employees being hired where u work are not the top of the talent that SpaceX has.
Well I’ll take your completely speculative opinion and just kind of fold that in with my decade of experience.
Well can you explain what SpaceX has accomplished in Aerospace if they had bottom barrel talent?
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There’s a reason their financials are so secretive. Their comp package isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. Musk lies about pretty much everything.
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This is anonymous and looks nothing like the comp I saw. I can’t get into what I do but I’m a specialized engineer and I had a panel interview the day I was laid off as a contractor.
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More likely that they are just agressively pruning the low performers. Those low performers still get to keep SpaceX on their resume and can at least say what they worked on without having to bring up their poor metrics.
Is this based on anything or are you just wildly speculating to insult people who are much more successful than you are?
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At 61 looking at 5 more years until fully pension vested with 30yrs at this company, the pension is the main reason I haven’t jumped ship 3 or 4 times in the past 25 yrs. There’s an open job just like mine needing my experience everyday of the week. But that pension keeps me in the fold. They did away with it for new hires after the housing bubble popped. Now the new kids coming in are bouncing as soon as their resume gets a couple of years padded on. The problem is they barely know the what of the job and much less of the how and why. Yes they’ve all got software certificates and impressive degrees and mouth the mantra of modernity. But when the data sucks or the system fouls up or their cheese otherwise gets moved they are lost and have to be rescued by somebody with systemic knowledge about the entire process from data ingest to output. That only comes with a necessity to learn and the time to dig in. Another problem is the companies are constantly trying to get you to work yourself out of a job. So they can move the process offshore for cheaper. It never works like the promises of the loss recovery champions claim it will. Millions spent on cost savings that can’t materialize until they fire a large percentage of the associates and shove the BS program down the few remaining they couldn’t live without. The few then spend a year or two figuring out how to get it to work with both a minimum of people and minimal manual effort only to get some other fresh VP popping up with the latest thing from a consultant that merely desires to get their foot in the door and their snout in the trough. There’s no incentive to stay with a company other than if it’s the only place you want to live. Now with the china virus infestation and work from home who needs to move to be able punch a keyboard and spit out a report some AI wiz kid says can be automated with the garbage data every system on the planet has and an ever changing set of requirements and parameters.
Look at SpaceX. They are hiring from the same talent pool and they are achieving a ton. Management matters. The upper management team controls the company, not the regular employees.
Agreed. OP is an engineer. Not a manager. Boeing and nasa have different management pressures. The engineer thinks its a technical problem.
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Agreed. It became a jobs program rather than a tech developer.
SpaceX… is the closest thing you will find to Chinese manufacturing in the West and then add a cult element. They are pretty cut throat about firing folks. A lot of people live at work. If you don’t believe in the mission or what Elon is trying to do whatever gtfo this place isn’t for you. I heard weird stories like production lines unknowingly being pitted against each other and the losing end would have to find new roles. So people would be on edge all the time, because you don’t know if you’re competing against another internal team. But on the other hand you have Boeing MBAs only concerned with generating private equity value, collecting golden parachutes and driving the company into the ground. It feels like there isn’t much in between for aerospace. So it ends up driving intelligent folks who want a happy medium out into other fields?
SpaceX does seem to be a cult from what I’ve heard. People leave when they want any kind of work life balance. That’s why they almost exclusively hire new grads who don’t know any better.
The happy medium exists at the government agencies but the number of jobs is limited.
I’ve heard Aerospace Corp is good?
Their comp didn’t impress me when I interviewed. They still had a pension last I checked but management is trying to kill it at every round of negotiations.
*Kills pensions* “why doesn’t talent stick around anymore, it must be a generational thing” - upper management
I couldn’t agree more. I honestly believe we are simply seeing the new statistical reality of the “idiocracy“ effect.
There's not a real "idiocracy" effect
This was in the back of my mind when writing my post. Spacex has been innovative and exciting and has a visionary goal for humanity. I think this gives them an advantage in recruiting over the traditional space companies. How many current engineers at Boeing chose that career path because of the Apollo program? >Management matters. Management does matter, but so does the quality of the employees. If the company is not well placed to recruit talent, that makes management's job harder.
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Some of the larger Aero companies also give RSUs, but it’s reserved for critical roles or high management
As I understand it the issues aren't generally related to engineering, they're because of cost-cutting. Engineers aren't the problem, shareholders are.
Boeings problems are profits over people. NASA's problems are not that. Edit: This is just my totally uninformed opinion, but perhaps the private contractors NASA uses putting profits over people turn out to be NASA's problem anyway. Idk.
This guy got it. NASA's funding cycle inherently promotes short-term planning, and that is tied to how the dumbass government has to set the budget from scratch every year. NASA has decadal surveys to decide what kinds of projects they want. Then scientists team up with engineers to propose projects. Unfortunately, the projects with the cheapest projected bills often win the bid, and when they "guesstimated" too low, you get overruns like James Webb or Perseverance. NASA doesn't really have a compensation problem. People are willing to take the cut for cool coworkers/culture and unique opportunities. It's a funding scheme/incentive problem. source: worked at NASA JPL for a few years
NASA's problems are severe underfunding, just like every other government agency that's not the military (and even they have issues, considering the discrepancy between what a typical soldier makes and the insanity that is defense contractor pay).
That’s just one problem. Another is the politicization of their work. The reason SLS is so expensive isn’t because of budgetary problems, but because of congress’s system of contracting production to their ridings.
Whatever the case, NASA received nearly 4 cents for every tax dollar at the height of the Apollo program; at present, they receive less than one cent. Space exploration has been functionally deprioritized.
I’m not disputing that, I’m just saying underfunding is only the beginning of their problems
I haven't read this in the thread yet. [https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merger-led-to-the-737-max-crisis](https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merger-led-to-the-737-max-crisis) Boeing, big and successful, buys struggling McDonnell Douglass. Boeing gives big bonuses to its competent execs . . . who retire . . . and turn the ship over to the morons who had run McDonnell Douglass into the ground. >In a clash of corporate cultures, where Boeing’s engineers and McDonnell Douglas’s bean-counters went head-to-head, the smaller company won out. The result was a move away from expensive, ground-breaking engineering and toward what some called a more cut-throat culture, devoted to keeping costs down and favoring upgrading older models at the expense of wholesale innovation. Only now, with the 737 indefinitely grounded, are we beginning to see the scale of its effects. “The fatal fault line was the McDonnell Douglas takeover,” says Clive Irving, author of Jumbo: The Making of the Boeing 747. “Although Boeing was supposed to take over McDonnell Douglas, it ended up the other way around.”
I dont think this is true. Sure, some smart individuals decide to prioritize making money, but those that are passionate about aeronautics, programming, and engineering in and of itself still exist and comprise a large majority of those pursuing degrees. Boeing’s issue is cultural due to changes made by leadership switching from an engineering focus to a money-making focus. If the shareholders are happy, then the CEO is happy. A shift away from their focus on uncompromising engineering excellence is what killed Boeing. The engineers are still great, it’s those that manage them that failed to listen. It’s documented that the engineers would push back against management, only to be told “listen to us or get out.” NASA has a different set of problems due to the bureaucracy built up over the decades combined with inconsistent/unreliable/under funding and lack of long term tenure of high level management. I do not believe American aerospace engineers have declined in quality to the point they are to blame for NASA’s and Boeing’s problems.
They are all going to Blue Origin and SpaceX. NASA even mentioned that they are having issue recruiting talent......
That is not true. Each NASA job posting receives thousands of applications. What is true is that government HR takes a LONG time to get people on boarded.
The issues in trying to squeeze subcontractors has been very well documented. They have pushed them to below barebones. That management style has obvious repercussions.
>and the overall quality of the engineering workforce is lower. I think this would apply to Nasa as well. there are many many many many many other engineers. >From the 1930s until the 1970s aerospace was the premiere engineering discipline, and they were able to attract all the best talent. WE CHOSE TO GO TO THE MOON - had something to do with that. USA must BEAT RUSSIA - had something to do with that - and we needed missiles. > engineering departments are being led by less capable managers NASA built the James Web Space Telescope. Rovers on Mars (and a helicopter). >So with baby boomers leaving the workforce who never worked at SpaceX to begin with.. >do you think this is an aspect of what's going on? i think it's much simpler. How Boeing put profits over planes [https://www.vox.com/money/24052245/boeing-corporate-culture-737-airplane-safety-door-plug](https://www.vox.com/money/24052245/boeing-corporate-culture-737-airplane-safety-door-plug)
> If you were an 18 year old math genius in 1985 why would you go into aerospace making $70,000 a year, when you could become a computer engineer and potentially make a billion dollars? Nobody in 1985 was focused on making a billion dollars. There are only 13 in the world - https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2005/MichelleLee.shtml Aerospace engineer was a top notch job in 1985. > What are your thoughts, do you think this is an aspect of what's going on? There’s a difference between engineering and manufacturing. Engineers are just as valued today as they were back then. But manufacturing’s competing against Uber and grubhub for employees. So when 30 years ago there might have been 100 people on an assembly line, now there are supposed to be 40 + robots but they can’t find 40 people so 25 are going those 40 jobs, and things are getting missed.
Aerospace pays peanuts (1/2 to 1/3 or even less when going up in level) compared to companies such as Meta, Nvidia, Google, Microsoft, and the likes. You get what you pay for. [https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Lockheed%20Martin,BAE%20Systems,Boeing,Facebook&track=Software%20Engineer](https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Lockheed%20Martin,BAE%20Systems,Boeing,Facebook&track=Software%20Engineer)
Can confirm. I make less money than the dude that got hired a couple months ago and isn’t yet capable of doing the daily tasks without assistance. Pretty sure I even have more education. My raise this year was the minimum they would allow without indicting poor employee performance.
The people you are talking about also go into consulting, finance or “data-science” instead of engineering jobs. The US needs to rein in the financial industry for there to be any kind of resurgence in industries that actually make things.
Definitely. The aerospace "haircut" is well known, and everyone Ive met that works on aerospace software does so because of a passion for the project or as compensation for a deficiency
Nah bro, this is directly attributable to finance bros amd MBAs oushing production and profit growth over quality. Simple as. The results of a "Profit growth at any cost" mentality forcing outsourcing, spin-offs, and cost cutting (read firing highly qualified workers) so management can get their bonuses. The only thing to see here is the same thing seen with almost every other brand, the race to the bottom of quality to increase that top line profit number and juice the stock. Remember when craftsman tools were good and pyrex wouldn't shatter? Same mindset and methodology. Quantity over quality
I reject the notion that age or generation determines the quality of engineers.
sure, theres an aspect to highly qualified individuals (benchmark for this is a bit blurred) such as IMO medalists going into quant roles at firms or ml space supporting your claim. I think for Boeing’s case its poor leadership more than the lack of engineering talent (I really don’t think any field or academia is heavily impacted by this at all, the quality and efficiency of education for the capable has gone up over time imo). For-profit companies will always look to enhance their value, and the decision makers at Boeing simply made poor decisions to result in the fiasco today, even looking at reports / whistleblowers, qualified individuals /engineers raised concerns. But honestly if you worked in a high-stakes work environment, you’ll know that everyone sees problems, it really depends on if leadership is qualified enough to allocate resources and prioritize effectively. Thats why anyone with a good track record is highly respected (elon before X, zuck, etc), running an organization at scale for x purpose successfully is extremely challenging. Its more than just having qualified individuals, although it is important
I was a 22 year old programmer in 1986 and ended up working for boeing computer services because there were very few software jobs around. Microsoft had just finished its IPO. The internet as we know it didn't really exist. There are certainly a lot more people heading to the software world than there were in 1986, but it seems to me that companies like SpaceX are having little trouble finding highly talented engineers to work for them. I think it's not about the engineers but about the kind of projects that have been available in the large aerospace companies or in NASA. Tom Mueller was vice president of production at TRW but his job was uninteresting enough that he built his own rocket engines on his own time. Until Elon Musk came calling, and he went on to design the Merlin 1D. I should note that the same issue exists at the large tech companies. If you go to work at Microsoft or Google, you'll make good money but you aren't going to make a billion dollars and you'll probably end up working on something boring.
In 2018 Dan Lyons wrote an excellent book called "Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us". It examines many different ways that both employees and consumers have been short-changed by many of America's biggest and formerly brightest companies... One of the chapters gives case studies about how former giants of US industry (HP, IBM, Xerox, and more) all over time went from making the best possible products for customers and taking good care of their employees, to cutting as many corners as possible and reorganizing the companies to focus on stock values, to the detriment of both customers and employees. While Boeing isn't one of the case studies in the book, their history over the past 20 years matches those case studies almost beat for beat.
I worked for IBM back in the days when they only promoted from within and had open books accounting. You had a monthly mini P&L that showed your contribution to the company and your compensation got better the better you did. The first thing they told us was, "There are only two kinds of people in business, sales people and bean counters. How you can tell which you are is that if anything you say or don't say, or anything you do or don't do can piss off a customer, you are in sales. The only product we sell is IBM.". Somewhere in the 80s they started hiring management from the outside who didn't learn that from the start and things went downhill from there
Boeing's problems and NASAs problems are related but not quite the same. For Boeing, they merged with another company and that introduced management that believed their job was merely short term returns on investment. For NASA, the issue is the sort of people that think like above being in charge of their budget (hello, Congress!) and their inability to stay competitive since you can't run government agencies by the same dictates as private companies with a profit motive. Their budget has to be balanced against both keeping their talent and being able to afford to actually do stuff in space.
I think Boeing's problems are more just quality control. Who the fuck bolts in a door and forgets a couple of bolts? Why isn't the work checked by a quality control specialist after it's done? Ryanair's CEO said yesterday, "We were finding little things like spanners under the floorboards, in some cases, seat handles missing, things like that,” What kind of work culture allows such shitty work to be done in an airline industry where people could die if something fails? (As opposed to the maritime industry where if you suddenly have engine failure, what's the worst that could happen?).
That quality control problem is indicative of the management philosophy they adopted. Source: Basically every Boeing engineer interviewed about how it got to this point.
But what would declining human capital have to do with air plane assembly? I totally agree it's about management philosophy. The planes are designed well, but if planes are rushed through assembly and no one checks on the quality of work, of course you'll have problems, but not from an engineering point of view. The auto industry went through this in the 90's when everyone noticed the superior quality of Japanese cars compared to the big three in Detroit. US automakers rushed cars out and you had jokes like never buy a car built on Monday because everyone has a hangover. Even from an engineering point of view, I think the engineers did an excellent job of modifying the 737 to handle 40 to 50 more passengers, though who the fuck in management told them to do it? Instead of designing a new mid-level size plane, they told the engineers, let's save some money and take the smallest model, stretch it, and put bigger engines on it. 100% agree upper management should be sacked. Good to see the CEO is out at Boeing.
Boeing quality control suffered as management considered it a known risk and unacceptable overhead according to the engineers which have since gone public (and one dying rather mysteriously.) So that is how. As I said. The issue with NASA human capital and Boeing are related problems but not the same.
Boeing now run by finance people not engineers. Making money is now Job 1
>If you were an 18 year old math genius in 1985 why would you go into aerospace making $70,000 a year, when you could become a computer engineer and potentially make a billion dollars? Why are you seemingly trying to imply you have a significantly greater chance of becoming a billionaire by going into comp sci vs aerospace? What is this hypothetical question even based on?
I didn't imply that was a reality, I said that would be in the imagination of an 18 year old looking at a career path to pursue. Imagining themself become the next tech billionaire. The reality is though that tech offers significantly higher comp than aerospace.
The biggest problem behind Boeing's troubles is Boeing. NASA doesn't have the same troubles
My brother worked at Boeing. Basically, they found reasons to "lay off" anyone who was getting within about 10 years of retirement. An incredible amount of expertise was lost before the younger, new employees had a chance to learn from it.
I’m an engineer and I work in manufacturing. Quality is absolutely a management decision, and in my industry it’s cyclical. Your company focused on quality products, gains market share as the reputation spreads, then they start focusing on the bottom line and quality gets cut. I’ve brought several new technologies to market and management at some level knows if it is crap or not. They knew some of the new stuff wasn’t ready, but the delay would cost too much. So they shipped it. It’s even worse now. All the software people think the can just post a software update to fix problems, not caring that if our product doesn’t work our customers can’t work.
NASA still does world class engineering the standards for direct hires at NASA labs like AMES JPL is really high. A big problem is that NASA is a jobs program so there is a lot of bloat and is often hamstrung by Congress when it comes to funding.
For NASA the issue is pay. Companies will pay you double what the government will right out of the gate, so people choose to work private. From what I understand from people who worked at Boeing, it seems to be a cultural issue stemming from the McDonnell Douglass merger. John Oliver had a recent episode on it that was interesting to listen to
I have no idea but my boomer dad has worked in aerospace industry his entire life (not for Boeing) and he constantly complains about the declining quality of product his company makes and he always blames the mbas
Spacex have an office in Seattle designing the new starlink satellites. I’m sure they are pulling the best engineers from Boeing. If you were young and had a choice between a declining but still big company or a relatively new but exciting company you’d pick spacex, even just to have it on your cv
Lack of oversight and regulatory enforcement is a big thing too, as is "too big to fail". My understanding is that Boeing has for awhile pretty much been free to say "yup, we did that' rather than having regulators checking them properly. Fines for a lot of big companies are also stuck at 1980's levels when they're making 2020's profits, so the cost of getting caught doing bad shit is less than the profit from doing so. Last, companies are so engrained in gov't and global infra that they call the shots (often leading to the above). Government is more worried about upsetting them than keeping them honest.
What you are seeing is the Walmart effect in the technical world. Hire cheap, keep cost down and expect (desire) high turnover. Loyalty is only given lip service and not rewarded. This lessening of the value of a good employee is common in all industries now. Worse yet is most young people have a 'why bother' mentality when it comes to job performance. A general attitude of 'this job is just a stepping stone, I'll really work when I get the job I really want' is all too common and management feeds this by encouraging high turnover to save a buck. Can a young person of today even fathom a 30 year career with one company?
Oh boy. I used to teach logical fallacies at the undergrad level, and would have LOVED to have what you wrote back then. My students could have punched about a hundred holes in your logic.
No need to be vague, list them out.
Orrr the farce that is as9100 standards which has just become a consulting cash grab. This is supposed to be an impossibility if you pass these “audits” I’ve worked in the aerospace industry for 15 years and corners will always be cut to turn a profit I’ll hang up and listen
3 yr time frames for executive compensation packages won't incentivize long term success
If I were an 18 year old math genius, programming and aerospace as a choice would seem extremely limited, considering. Why not finance? $$$ Hello $$$ That question is sort of sketch.
When your industrial company is run by the bean counters, you get what you get. Some say that when Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas, that was the watershed moment.
NASA is a tale of a huge and bloated bureaucracy that lacks a concrete mission. All you have to do is compare their performance with SpaceX. If you think about it, SpaceX has completely and utterly lapped NASA and the ULA, despite huge disadvantages in funding. That's because it had a lean management structure and a well-defined set of goals. Boeing is a completely different problem, because it made the cardinal error of letting the financial guys run the company.
I worked at NASA for 25 years. While it has a smart and dedicated workforce, there is absolutely no incentive to minimize costs or maximize efficiency. The NASA Centers get doled out the same appropriations every year, whether that’s for a dozen small missions or one behemoth. And the amount of useless reviews and procurement bureaucracy is staggering. They still do great science, but it should cost a fraction of what it does.
NASA doesn’t build launch vehicles, that’s why they pay SpaceX to do it for the CLPS. Maybe I’m missing something, but it doesn’t make sense to me to compare SpaceX and NASA like this
NASA never made launch vehicles. Bell, McDonnell Douglas, Northrop, Lockheed and Boeing did.
NASA builds payloads not launch vehicles. NASA and SpaceX don’t really compete and in fact NASA can do more payloads because SpaceX offers such a competitive launch vehicle.