Nothing but a scapegoat if they replace him with another accountant instead of an engineer.
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.
If it comes with golden parachutes it's all but guaranteed he doesn't care.
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.
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.
Calhoun's MCAS might have been set incorrectly 👀
Didn't he hold senior positions in Boeing much longer than he has been CEO?
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.
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.
Until the merger, Boeing was engineer-driven. They were well known for safety first and design over cost.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/30/business/boeing-history-of-problems/index.html
There are hundreds of articles on this topic and you rant without knowing the topic.
They need to get back to the engineering mindset. This is why I think CEO bonuses on things like EPS are BS. It should be tied to things like engineering, safety, etc.
It should be something that must be returned if there's a severe fuckup within five years or something. Also they shouldn't be getting bonuses, they are already massively overpaid.
I think they're more in a "hire a hit man to kill whistleblowers" mindset. Not the sort to suddenly turn about and become engineering do-gooders.
Don’t let the door hit you on the—oh shit, the door!
In ~~Soviet Russia~~ America, the door hits you on it’s way out.
Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
No, not that door- the one from your shitty plane flying overhead.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Are we all forgetting that Boeing most likely had a witness testifying them executed in a parking lot a few weeks ago?
John Barnett didn't kill himself and they're doing a damn good job of sweeping it under the rug. It barely got mentioned in by any mainstream news outlets. Even Epstien got more media coverage than this.
You a word, there.
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.
Just wanted to say your edit is awesome ✊
I wonder what his golden handshake (parachute? What's the difference?) is, for screwing things up so badly?
Golden handshake is coming in, golden handcuffs to keep you there, and golden parachute for your exit.
One golden anything please
Best I can do is a golden shower
Jeez, I just can't win in this timeline
He’s gonna need a parachute if he flies home on one of his planes.
Cool. Now arrest him for criminal negligence.
How many millions fat will his golden parachute be for sending hundreds of passengers to death?
15 million in stocks that vest in 3 years plus his 1.4 million in base salary plus plus his 22 million in stock, which has admittedly taken a beating as of late.
Nice payout for a complete failure on the job.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Probably stepping down to sit on the board instead.
He should required to be up there to answer questions from congress and the Feds.
"I'm gonna step down because I failed this clown car of a company...btw i'm keeping my golden parachute"
I’m just flabbergasted it took this long. It’s COMICALLY obvious that this is the result of a decades-long legacy of technical leadership failures and safety-incompatible profit fixation.
Technology
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed