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Comment by rkomorn | Hacker News Reader

Your note on politics is interesting because my anecdotal experience was quite different.

I worked at an Airbus offshoot in Silicon Valley and my visit to Toulouse for a bunch of meetings with the teams working on new tech and AI things were somewhat shocking.

The amount of sniping in meetings, and the amount of post-meeting behind the back sniping was somewhat shocking.

This was somewhat mirrored to a lesser extent even in our videoconf meetings and other collaborations.

It left me wondering how a group of people who seem to think so poorly of each other and work so dysfunctionally could actually come together to build some of the most amazing machines on earth (because modern airliners truly are such things).

The best take I could come up with was "Maybe all the adversity and mistrust means the end up building things that survive intense scrutiny."

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That level of sniping also means that groupthink can't happen, which is a major problem at Boeing: nobody wanted to speak up about obvious problems, and those that did saw their careers ended.

It’s fair to describe Boeing’s problems as being caused by Boeing now being actually McDonnell Douglas. It’s only called Boeing because MD had a terrible reputation.

Maybe the real reason is more related to Price’s law/Pareto’s principle, loosely meaning that 90% of the work is done by 10% of the people. In other words, in large companies most perons do not contribute much, at least not at the same time.

Maybe, yeah.

And it's also quite possible that my view (which was across a slice of new-technology stuff hosted by the "innovation" arm) was skewed, and things aren't the same elsewhere in the company.

I just remember being shocked by the negativity.

Was that country political politics or office politics politics?

Office politics, I guess, though it was kind of tinged since the offices were in different countries, but it still was Airbus-level, not nation-level, I guess.

While there is some amount of sniping and banter everywhere whenever Americans and French will have different ways of expressing " this is 90% great" or "this is only 10% usable"

Americans might praise a bad solution one moment (for politeness) and turn their back on you the other while French will say "this is ok" while they are deeply enjoying it

IDK, I'm French, and worked in the US and I can't say my perception of the US way of working generally matches yours.

I've never worked in France so I can't compare there.

If we talk about the same „innovation“ offshoot, it happened right after I left the company. I think the cultural change that the top leadership at that time wanted to push was just too much to not cause a backlash. A new CTO who was perceived as an outsider, a somewhat implied message that the Silicon Valley’s way of working was superior to the company‘s traditional approach, and the internal realization that Airbus started to lag behind leading to the typical defensive behaviors. Curious how the culture evolved since then

I left A^3 (or Acubed, groan) 5 years ago, to relocate overseas, so I don't know how it's been since. There was definitely a bit of a "Silicon Valley knows best" attitude that I didn't buy into (because the people I met at Airbus were pretty damn sharp ... while I felt very overpaid, but anyway).

There was always some talk of maneuvering around other groups who wanted our project or wanted to beat us to the punch or whatever, which felt a bit pointlessly unproductive to me, so I did my best to ignore it and try to just deliver.

I did get to meet some cool people, though, including Grazia Vittadini, so I can't complain.

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