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Comment by deepspace | Hacker News Reader

A friend used to work as an engineer at the Seattle plant 15 or so years ago and he always told stories of how meticulous they were about avoiding FOD, how management completely supported the effort and how a FOD discovery, no matter how small the object, always led to a "five whys" style investigation.

I would guess the NC plant was commissioned without much, if any involvement from the Seattle people, if there culture was that radically different.

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The podcast I mentioned, the guy was actually from Seattle. He had been relocated there because the NC plant was new and needed people with experience. He basically said it was a company culture issue. Seattle culture was good. NC culture was bad. Management matters, it turns out.

The plant on the East Coast was because Boeing was busting the machinist union that runs the Seattle plants.

It’s also why Boeing has been cutting their key engineering staff in Seattle — they also unionized. In fact, rumor has it that the entire reason MCAS/737MAX debacle happened was outsourcing and contracting shenanigans to break the engineering union.

It turns out moving senior management away from the rest of the company and getting in an ugly fight with your talent before petulantly building a non-union plant elsewhere leads to low quality products and out of touch executives.

Who could have known?

Oh yeah, my friend’s uncle who flatly said when his generation of engineers retired, Boeing would lose the ability to make planes.

And everyone else.

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