A while ago Boeing made a big deal about supporting women in STEM with Women Make Us Better.
First there was this news:
‘Absolutely unacceptable’: Boeing finds a new issue with Max, debris in fuel tanks
Today I read this:
Boeing finds more 787 quality defects, broadens fuselage inspections
Boeing has expanded its examination of 787 Dreamliners after finding more widespread instances of a defect initially thought confined to the aircraft’s aft fuselage plant in South Carolina, prompting inspections at 787 component plants around the globe.
I guess that backfired.
Another aircraft quality fuck-up for Boeing.
Now I want to make this clear, I do not believe that this happened because they hired women.
What I am saying is that focusing on hashtags and woke pandering instead of quality leads this sort of shit.
It’s possible to put together a diverse team of competent people when you focus on competence.
When you put the Diversity and Inclusion Coordinator in charge, you get a diverse team that fails to meet spec, and adhere to quality standards and best practices.
Go woke, go broke.
Our local clinic has an ad campaign for new employees that goes like:
“We are colorful!”*
Hell no – you’re a medical institution. I don’t care how diverse your staff is – I care how COMPETENT your staff is!
*)”Bunt” is the new buzzword against “braun”/braun which stands for Nazis. It’s just weapons grade cringe.
To be fair, I wonder exactly how much senior management actually really participated in all this woke nonsense- probably very little.
However, I have every bit of confidence that the money thrown to Intersectionality, Inc for certified indulgences probably came out of the QC budget.
Aahhhh to go back to the days when you hired people based solely on thier QUALIFICATIONS
Where I work we had to take a bunch of classes on harassment, gender identity, unconscious racism(yes really!). All this crap makes me not want to talk to anyone.
That’s one very common reaction.
The other is to actually increase racism, because it sends the message that some types of people are just not as fundamentally competent / smart / motivated / etc., so allowances need to be made.
In the final analysis, nobody likes being scolded. (Well, I suppose some do, but this is a family blog…)
It is a luxury of the wealthy to care about equality, diversity, or wokeness. However, when the wealthy put that before maintaining that wealth, they lose both.
Serves them right.
They will eventually lose both. And they will make a lot of the rest of us miserable along the way, unfortunately.
I’ve met some serious women in technology in my career, mostly at smaller companies. When I’ve worked at large corporations, they were all nearly useless. I worked for a huge, now defunct, telecom manufacturer. Towards the end, I was put on a carrier team that had their own diversity director. I honestly don’t know what this woman’s job was, other than to attend meetings and gurn like an imbecile.
Before that I was on a global sales engineering team. In our office was a diversity hire woman who as director of Sales Engineering on a major customer account. Her and my boss were up for the job. They picked her, Shirley from ‘what’s happenin'”
Astonishing, since he 1- worked for the customer prior to joining us, 2 – knew their network inside and out, and 3 – knew and was friends with most of the decision makers on their engineering staff. and 4 – was a double masters – EE and Civil engineering.
Every so often she’d come by my cube and ask really dumb questions. She literally had zero knowledge of anything other than buzzwords.
Well. Shit floats. And she floated back and forth on the tides of many layoff tsunamis. Last I heard, prior to being bought out, she was still there, one of the few left. I did hear that the new company cleaned house though. At least of the deadwood on my team.
For all I know, she’s still there sucking away profit and annoying customers.
This makes perfect sense. Boeing is populated by ex-senior military (mostly AF). The USAF wrote the playbook on “let’s concentrate on everything but the mission.” You can see this in their “0-a whole bunch” record since becoming a separate service.
Boeing is just getting the dross from people too old to stay in the Air Force.
And your proof of such scurilous, prejudiced remarks are what?
When I was in college, I didn’t spout off about how I was going change the world, or revolutionize the industry, or any of that other BS. Instead, I was going get a job, make tons of money, buy a 4×4 truck, find me a beautiful wife (cause now I’m making tons of money!!), get a Harley, go hunting and fishing every day off, etc. What I actually did at my engineering job was largely irrelevant to my dreams.
In over 30 years of working as an engineer and mentoring new engineers, I’ve found that the ones spouting the same type of drivel that’s in that ad (I’m going do this, or that) tended to be the worst at actual engineering. Forget the high school guidance counselor crap. Don’t set out to change the world, simply set out to do your job, the one you were hired for, as good as possible.
And the Go Woke, Go Broke? That sort of crap has been around since forever. I remember back in the 90’s there was a “protected class” of employees who simply couldn’t get fired, no matter how bad. I’ve seen members of that same class (lots of overlap with the victim class) get promoted up in order to remove them from key roles where they could cause problems. Can’t do your current job, we’ll promote you to something largely irrelevant so you don’t screw things up any worse. Meanwhile the good engineers get to continue picking up the slack. Fun times.
There is a good reason states require five years in the engineering field before you can take the PE exam, unfortunately teaching engineering at the collegiate level counts as engineering experience. One of my ongoing problems mentoring young, otherwise bright engineers, is getting them to understand that the real world doesn’t always work like a textbook problem, and not all variables are (or can be known). And yes, just because you put an arrow on the drawing, doesn’t mean the air is smart enough to know that’s the direction it’s supposed to go.