> Not a good example because Boeing didn’t outsource.
No, that's precisely my point actually. Boeing is one of the very few companies that maintained its local manufacturing capacity. (to say that they "didn't outsource" is not remotely accurate)
Despite everything that was pointing in Boeing's favor -- culture, financials, market, reputation; it was taken over by the MBAs that put McDonnell-Douglas into a nosedive and now all of that is gone.
So now, let's assume that Boeing sees the light and wants to rebuild their manufacturing chops. Who do they hire? Who can they hire, who has the manufacturing expertise? When I worked at Boeing 25 years ago, the old-timers were invaluable. Most of those folks are dead and gone; my generation should be graduating into old-timer-hood in the next couple of decades but Boeing hasn't invested in us. Wages have been stagnant, software is easier, tiktok is more exciting, and the young generation is used to being bossed around by MBAs who don't understand the work.
If not Boeing, the once-shining-example of American manufacturing what didn't outsource, who can bootstrap our manufacturing renaissance?
It does not take long to build excellence in the grand scale of things. A culture with positive feedback that encourages good engineering with leadership recognition and monetary/equity rewards can produce a great company in less than a decade.
> who can bootstrap our manufacturing renaissance?
Look at SpaceX. You don’t need a great wizard of yore to teach you how to do things if you iterate and learn. They went from a joke 10 years ago to completely dominating and transforming the launch and LEO space industry.
Or, look at Boeing 70 years ago. They didn’t have a magic culture of excellence then either and it wasn’t bestowed on them by elders. They built it then and it can definitely be built again.
> They didn’t have a magic culture of excellence then either and it wasn’t bestowed on them by elders.
It was, actually. The machinists at Boeing 70 years ago were taught their craft. They didn't just figure it all out from scratch; some aspects of aeronautics were novel but shipbuilders were making propellers before William Boeing was even born.
> They built it then and it can definitely be built again.
I can't see why I should trust this line of reasoning. I baked a cake yesterday, so I should definitely be able to bake a cake today, right? But I ran out of flour and stores are closed.
Not to say that it can't be done, but in today's economy, with today's culture, it just isn't a sure thing.
> It was, actually. The machinists at Boeing 70 years ago were taught their craft. They didn't just figure it all out from scratch; some aspects of aeronautics were novel but shipbuilders were making propellers before William Boeing was even born.
This is absolutely incorrect. Most of the materials machining advancements to make light aircraft parts had to be done specifically for aircraft. Ship building is completely different and largely irrelevant.
> I can't see why I should trust this line of reasoning.
Because this wasn’t some long line of training from centuries of wizardry. Materials science was a joke 100 years ago. We can do what they did then to learn manufacturing but we can do it significantly faster because we have simulations and chemistry knowledge that wasn’t lost.
Aah the McDonald excuse again. The favorite pivot of every boing apologist and conspiracy theorist. If only Mac, a completely successful defense contractor, hadn't somehow engineered a completely galaxy brained backdoor purchase of their largest competitor Boeing like a tapewirm because they needed cash after the f112 cancellation they never would have lost that engineering led spirit.
Get over it. Boeing wasn't doing great and has always had struggles. They wanted to get further into defense and kill off a competitor.
Also Wharton came for everyone in the 90s and 00s. If Boeing stayed seperate from the evil Mac they still would have been inmundated by best practice short term bean counters from every MBA school in the country.
Also if you ask a machinist in Seattle or STL if Boeing outsources, they sure do, to those non-union untrained unqualified folks in the south. Nevermind all the moisture that gets into the plane when you wheel a 747 from an air-conditioned warehouse to the southeast sauna. Boeing has always fought with it's union so that wasn't the fault of the Boogeyman either.
I was there at the time, so was my mom; quite a few of my friends. The McDonnell merger was the death knell. I'm not saying that everything was rosy and without challenge, but moving corporate to Chicago triggered massive changes throughout the hierarchy. And those changes are now visible as rot and corruption.
take something metal, get it really cold, wheel it out into a steam room or a sauna where someone just poured a bucket of water on the rocks... tons of moisture is gong to condense on the metal, and in all the gaps and tracks inside
No, that's precisely my point actually. Boeing is one of the very few companies that maintained its local manufacturing capacity. (to say that they "didn't outsource" is not remotely accurate)
Despite everything that was pointing in Boeing's favor -- culture, financials, market, reputation; it was taken over by the MBAs that put McDonnell-Douglas into a nosedive and now all of that is gone.
So now, let's assume that Boeing sees the light and wants to rebuild their manufacturing chops. Who do they hire? Who can they hire, who has the manufacturing expertise? When I worked at Boeing 25 years ago, the old-timers were invaluable. Most of those folks are dead and gone; my generation should be graduating into old-timer-hood in the next couple of decades but Boeing hasn't invested in us. Wages have been stagnant, software is easier, tiktok is more exciting, and the young generation is used to being bossed around by MBAs who don't understand the work.
If not Boeing, the once-shining-example of American manufacturing what didn't outsource, who can bootstrap our manufacturing renaissance?