I worked for Boeing from 1974 to 1976. In my opinion, the company was great up until that point. That was the years when they were tasked with putting wet wings on the B-52's. Back then, computers were just coming into use at the manufacturing floor level. The company depended on a very skilled work force with lots of practical experience.
Back then, the typical cycle of aerospace hire - layoff - hire - layoff as contracts came and went did not affect the product much because they would hire back the same people they laid off a few months back. That pattern was broken in the 1970's. While the roster of hires had all of the same surnames from the last layoff, the people being hired were the children of their experienced parents. The B-52 wet wing project was especially hard hit because a lot of the product knowledge was not on paper but in the minds of the people who originally built them. The new hires ran into all types of undocumented engineering changes that brought the project to a crawl.
Management did not learn from this mistake in the quest for profit over perfection. Subbing out major sections to companies became the norm further distancing the engineers from the production floor. I had moved on to a software company making manufacturing control software. We did a sales call at Menasco who had just obtained a contract to manufacture Boeing landing gear assemblies. Menasco's claim to fame was the aircraft engines. After the war, they went to manufacturing landing gear for all the major companies.
During the tour, I pointed out to my management that we should not bid on the project because our software was not equipped to handle Boeing's Omnibus Effectivity Bill of Material (simply put, negative bills aimed at customization by individual tail number) requirements of which I was intimately familiar. Our software only handled date effectivity. My management's solution was to take me off of the sales effort replacing me with an analyst who had no knowledge of aerospace requirements. The sale was made and a year later, my company was being sued.
In my opinion, the company over time, had given up control from the engineers and experienced work force to the politically connected. In a bit of irony, my company's visionary and founder decided to retire shortly before the above incident. He turned the company over to a bunch of wall street bean counters who proceeded to drive the company into the ground. My company was sold to a bottom feeder software company. On the second day of ownership, the bottom feeder laid off all of the developers and customer support staff (including me with revenue generating bookings for over a year in the future) and informed the customers that they would no longer offer customer support.
It is sad to see such a great company fall out of grace.
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