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Comment by pizlonator | Hacker News Reader

So I read somewhere than Muilenburg was the only engineer in the Boeing C suite. There were no pilots in the C suite. And this was part of the problem.

The new CEO has a degree in accounting. I bet he’ll do great.

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At some point we (society at large) are going to realize these fluffy c-level people are toxic and remove value from companies - then, ideally, we'll move back to a default of promoting internally.

There needs to be a broader cultural backlash against the cult of MBAs first.

As a programmer who got an MBA, I can tell you that in my cohort there were absolutely extremely smart super stars who put the time into everything they do and have the talent to make good decisions and have the empathy to be good managers. There were also people who tried their best but their judgement was clearly lacking.

My cohort has Civil Engineers, Materials engineers, Physicians, Finance, Accountants.. and also art students and communication students.

All this to say you can't generalize a whole degree.

The current hacker news meme is that bad management of any kind is due to MBAs, where in reality a bad manager is a bad manager and an MBA has nothing to do with it.

I don't agree - the current meme is that people who have MBAs wave them in the air as proof that their decisions are infallible... There are a lot of smart people with MBAs out there, but their intelligence and experience isn't solely owed to acquiring an MBA.

MBA culture introduced us to the meme of "management is a generic function" meaning accountants with an MBA degree could manage engineers, software developers, doctors or teachers using the same tools (e.g. performance metrics).

Yeah the degree never tries to cover the specifics of every industry and job. It doesn't even specialize in people management (MIM is that degree). MBA tries to help build the mindset to begin your learning off of (assuming you have an openness to learn). CS is similar (CS graduates are not advanced programmers). Of course it's nothing special, you could self teach that like most degrees.

MBA teaches bad management.

MBA is a set of methodologies that are hilariously unfit for purpose unless your business is about making widgets in large volume.

It’s not about being smart or not smart as a person. It’s whether earning the mba and then applying what you learned to a domain that you don’t understand is a good idea. I think folks are starting to realize that it’s a terrible idea and we should stop doing it.

And then you just end up with all old, conservative c levels. There is no easy answer except careful hiring and accountability.

What meaning of conservative are you using here? A conservative approach to the 737-MAX would have entailed a more thorough process and canning the design on the recommendation of the engineers, in my interpretation. Instead, we got a rushed process.

Yeah but that does nothing to leverage the talents of real thought leaders who think outside the box, can take it to the next level, and take deep dives into paradigm shifts. How do you expect any real game-changers to decruit and not boil the ocean? After all, bleeding-edge pushing of the envelope is not an ideation that promotes disruptive thinking in any organization.

In my company (similar size with Boeing, also manufacturing but in a different business sector) we mostly promote from within, but the CEO is always a marketing or sales guy and IT is reporting into the CFO, which has absolutely no knowledge about the area. Only the plant managers are former engineers promoted up, everyone above that level is former sales or marketing.

Skilled leaders make a big difference in organizations, and they have skills that engineers don't (always) have. A leader that discounts the advice of his engineers is doomed to failure, but an engineer promoted to leadership that doesn't know how to people manage and steer the ship will also fail.

It seems that some of these fluffy C-level people are actually good at their jobs, but we haven't found how to reliably distinguish them from the fluffy C-level people that slash and burn everything and juice the stock price with buybacks and financial engineering, then ride it out until a catastrophe happens.

There are absolutely some great leaders out there in executive positions, but there are also a lot of rich kids that step directly into C-level roles and really have no business being there.

One of my requirements when taking on a job (and I work in smaller companies) is having a sit down with the executive and making sure they know what they're doing - after googling them and making sure they aren't just the child of some famous person. Being in a c-level position and having a famous relative is a bad sign for the company.

Yeah. Domain specialists with leadership qualities are better at leading companies than ridiculously good looking (and very white and very male) accountants.

> ...then, ideally, we’ll move back to a default of promoting internally.

Muilenburg was promoted internally.

Perhaps the new chairman will do a great job... perhaps not. Time will tell. From optics perspective, it doesn't look very good to be putting current Blackstone private equity global head into Boeing CEO position.

https://www.blackstone.com/the-firm/our-people/person?person...

I believe there are at least three, but:

>The decision to launch the MAX was taken by James McNerney, the company’s first boss without a background in aviation, with a résumé that included Procter & Gamble, McKinsey, General Electric and 3M. At GE McNerney was schooled under the hard-nosed bottom-line philosophy of Jack Welch.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-boeing-bean-counters-court...

Four out of 15 of Boeing's Executive Council have engineering degrees. https://www.boeing.com/company/bios/

Interestingly, only one has a degree in CS, and there's no other computer-aligned degree represented in the board. They have plenty of lawyers though.

I bring this up because software is incredibly important for flying these planes, and the 737 MAX disaster was caused in part by bad software (MCAS). They were outsourcing its development to $9/hr contractors, which if they treated software as more of the core competency that it actually is for them, they would never have done.

Ok fine I’ll play.

Having an engineering degree and being an engineer aren’t exactly the same thing. Like, Colbert has an engineering degree to do with “information systems”. Deal’s resume is mostly about supply chains. Hyslop gets to call himself an engineer, so ok, that’s one. Uddanwadiker is an engineer, but IT.

So there is one actual aero engineer in the C suite. I exaggerated (it’s the internet so what fun it is to exaggerate) but not by much. Point is, these people aren’t the dream team I’d pick to design airplanes.

> The new CEO has a degree in accounting. I bet he’ll do great.

And, if Wikipedia is to be believed, once worked for GE!

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