Boeing push to make training profitable may have left 737 Max pilots unprepared

Re:Boeing push to make training profitable may have left 737... by baddox on Saturday December 21, 2019 @08:25PM (#21854504)

How do you even define “optimize for maximizing the next quarters results at the expense of everything else”? Obviously big companies don’t literally do this. I’m pretty sure every big public tech company is currently spending money on products that will not be released before the end of the next quarter.

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Re:Boeing push to make training profitable may have left 737... by codys on Saturday December 21, 2019 @09:27PM (#21854747)

Big companies make decisions all the time that harm long term prospects (sometimes in ways that are difficult to measure) in favor of obvious short term gains.

As an example, when I worked for IBM, they furloughed the entire Systems technology group (essentially the folks working on things that aren't pure software or contracting) for a week.

This was done purely to reduce the payroll for the STG so that it's income would look better on the quarterly earnings.

Neither the inability to get anything done for 2 weeks (furlough was staggered so only approx half of folks were out each week) nor any of the follow on effects on project or work force was not enough to impede this type of roughshod pursuit of quarterly accounting numbers.

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Re:Boeing push to make training profitable may have left 737... by baddox on Saturday December 21, 2019 @10:00PM (#21854878)

Sure, but now the claim is simply that companies focus on varying time scales, and sometimes those time scales are shorter than what some people would like to see. That’s fairly clearly true, but it’s a very different claim than that big public companies optimize for the next quarter over everything else.

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Re:Boeing push to make training profitable may have left 737... by perl4ever on Saturday December 21, 2019 @10:38PM (#21855020)

Note that this is unrelated to my (original) comments and I wasn't expressing an opinion on whether companies "optimize for the next quarter".

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Re:Boeing push to make training profitable may have left 737... by perl4ever on Saturday December 21, 2019 @11:10PM (#21855127)

Sure they do, but people can and do get just as angry when companies ignore short term harm with the promise of long term gains. So the issue isn't short term vs. long term, but rather being right vs. wrong and honest vs. dishonest. It's really hard to always be right.

I mean, if you want "long term thinking", does that mean that WeWork is a better model than Boeing? Because people seem to hold it up as a failure of capitalism just as much.

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