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A comment on Boeing to lay off hundreds more engineers. Parent comment

Re:Boeing to lay off hundreds more engineers by kcorbitt on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @06:41PM (#14143679)
I don't know... I work for a (non-unionized) company about half the size of Boeing, and we don't have anywhere near that level of bureaucracy, so I have a hard time accepting the premise that "that's just how things have to be." I'm sure there are a lot of contributing factors, but I don't have a hard time imagining unions contributing to process creep by mandating the allocation of tasks in a non-optimal way.

I'm no hardcore anti-unionist, but this particular situation seems like a very plausible late-stage union failure mode.

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Re:Boeing to lay off hundreds more engineers by drewrv on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @07:29PM (#14144032)
But your company is smaller. I work for a company smaller still and the amount of dumb bureaucracy is even less than yours probably.

Also, culturally the aerospace industry is very rule and procedure heavy, for good reason.

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Re:Boeing to lay off hundreds more engineers by flukus on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @08:24PM (#14144375)
I've seen it in big and small (10 people companies), it just depends on having someone in HR that cares about shit like this and the authority to do something about it.

Sometimes you can't change a light bulb at a small company, sometimes at a big one you're first job is to assembly you're own desk.

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Re:Boeing to lay off hundreds more engineers by pilsetnieks on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @08:25PM (#14144378)
I could easily imagine an incident where someone plugged something in the wrong socket, something got destroyed, and it was codified in policy that only the people who certifiably know what they're doing are allowed to plug stuff into sockets. It takes just one to ruin it for everyone.
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Re:Boeing to lay off hundreds more engineers by nitrogen on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @10:16PM (#14144944)
Like plugging a vacuum cleaner into a UPS.
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Re:Boeing to lay off hundreds more engineers by walshemj on Wednesday April 19, 2017 @07:15AM (#14146925)
Which actually happened at a subsidiary of British telecom I worked at - the cleaners unplugged the accounts receivable unix system.

It was a POS system the finance director brought and caused no end of problems at one point we were unable to cut a BACS tape for over 6 months

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