> No, this is how Boeing has always operated.

While I have no doubt Boeings business has been cyclical, many of the problems they face today can also be attributed to bad management.

These problems can be linked back to when Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas, resulting in it's loss of engineering focus:

https://www.msn.com/en-za/money/news/how-the-mcdonnell-dougl...

If you read the wiki page for McDonnell Douglas it reads a lot like the modern day Boeing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas

This gives a hint as to how that merger help to infect Boeing (no pun intended) with it's current bad management culture.

> Boeing, which has been struggling for the past year with the safety of its 737 Max jet, has spent over $43 billion buying back stock over the past decade.

https://www.newsweek.com/boeing-airlines-under-fire-90-billi...

Step 1: Give billions in stock buy backs and ask for billions in tax cuts

Step 2: Demand that taxpayers to bail you out in a recession

Step 3: Repeat

It's like a heat pump, but for moneys. It's a MONEY pump!

Boeing's decay previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20353342

Off topic but it's killing me: what is the pun there? I just don't see it.

COVID-19

Edit: To clarify one could argue Boeing's problems are due to COVID-19 infections not due to a MD infection.

"infect" Boeing

Am I crazy? I still don't see any word play. Is there a homonym, or specific phonetic reading I'm missing? Tried:

- Infect-being

- In fact being

- Etc.

Thanks for the help.

Covid infected humans. McDonnell 'infected' Boeing.

It's not a pun. Just a joke. Lots of people just say pun to refer to any wordplay. Wait till you find out "meme" is now starting to mean "joke" too.

I mean, that kind of makes sense. But instead, why not hire 5,000 when times are good, stash away the rest of the cash, and then just keep all the great people you have when business is down?

It seems like retaining people instead of hiring up a bunch of new people and possibly losing some of your best people would be a better approach.

Sure, the other guys might get ahead of you a bit during the boom times, but you'll get a good jump during the bust and be much better positioned to take advantage of the next boom.

> get ahead of you

You hit the nail in the head. When it rains, the moneyfolk want to hoard as much cash as they can (shareholders gotta buy that new Porsche).

It's like temporary employment in hotels and restaurants during summer in touristic places.

Only the cycle is 8y/2y (up/down) in the decade) of 4mo/8mo (up/down) in the year.

> No, this is how Boeing has always operated. It's a cyclic industry.

Do the cyclic layoffs generally occur right when they're supposed to be building hundreds of planes? I think what's unusual about this round of layoffs is that it was caused by all their orders being cancelled.

If Boeing isn't alarmed by this situation -- if they chalk it up to an historic pattern -- I think that in itself is a sign of bad management.

No this is not how Boeing has always operated. Boeing had a great engineering culture for most of its' history. A fundamental shift happened around the time that the company merged with McDonnell Douglas, a merger that was shepherded largely by the Department of Defense. Around this time began the "Financialization" of Boeing. The following is a good read on the shift within the company and how that new culture enabled the Dreamliner and the 737 Max debacles.

https://newrepublic.com/article/154944/boeing-737-max-invest...

Matt Stoller also talked about this cultural shift that enabled Boeings problems in an article a year ago.

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-coming-boeing-bailout

Has anyone written about how exactly the acquired company (McDonnel Douglas) was able to take over the acquiring company? Sounds like it would be an interesting story.

I also wonder if there are similar accounts of the same happening in other companies.

When a company seeks to acquire another company, the executives of the target company are sometimes promised and given a disproportionate share of management roles in the reorganized entity as enticement to grease the acquisition. The alternative is more expensive payouts. And of course, no matter which approach is taken, cash will be tight post merger so there'll naturally be an emphasis on cost cutting and "synergizing", which McDonnell Douglas executives were well practiced in, likely drawing favor from the board, despite that it was still 2/3rds Boeing post merger.

Also, despite the narrative, it may very well have already been the case that Boeing's culture was going down the gutter, its acquisition of McDonnell Douglas a reflection of that rather than the root cause.

EDIT: Here's a 2002 article that suggests it was all of these phenomena--disproportionate leadership roles, a claim to cost control expertise, a skittish board, and evolving business strategies. https://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/Hard-nosed-Stonec... Some former McDonnell Douglas executives, like Boeing President and COO Harry Stonecipher, were well placed to take control when the inevitable cash crunch happened. Stonecipher replaced the Boeing CFO with a GM executive. See also this contemporaneous 1998 article describing the same event: https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19980715&slug... That article says it was Stonecipher and the board chairman, Phil Condit, who forced the CFO out for his overly conservative accounting. Condit, AFAIU, was also CEO at the time and had been CEO of Boeing prior to the McDonnell Douglas merger. In fact, Condit led multiple acquisitions before MD, which suggests to me he and Boeing were already following the "acquire rather than innovate" playbook.

Yes. There's was a good article on this recently. I've provided the original URL and outline URL to get around the login wall:

>In the eyes of many Boeing employees, McDonnell Douglas executives seemed to do disproportionately well out of the merger: Many were given senior positions following the acquisition, with the company’s head, Harry Stonecipher initially appointed chief operating officer and holding more than twice the number of shares in the company as Condit, who remained CEO. Stonecipher and John McDonnell, formerly the chair of McDonnell Douglas’ board, were now the two largest individual shareholders of the merged companies."

In a 2007 interview, Ron Woodard, the former president of Boeing’s Commercial Airplane Group, bemoaned the changes the merger brought with it. “We thought that we’d kill McDonnell Douglas and we had it on the ropes,” he said. “I still believe that Harry outsmarted Phil and his gang bought Boeing with Boeing’s money."[1][2]

[1] https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merg...

[2] https://outline.com/gDseXY

Embraer is cutting 4000 jobs too :(

Airbus cut 2,500 jobs in February.. I don't know how many more they cut since then. The reality is that the commercial airline industry is in a freefall and it's nobody's fault.

It's just the virus.