Boeing's problems have very little to do with DEI. The primary problems came from when Boeing merged with the then struggling McDonnel Douglas and somehow the MD management ended up almost completely in charge. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/boeing-737-max-corporate-culture/677120/. They even moved the corporate headquarters to be deliberately further away from the factories and engineers. So what was once one of the most engineering focused of businesses became completely business focused.
Oh not this again.
From the article:
But in 1997, Boeing bought another aircraft manufacturer, McDonnell Douglas, in what turned out to be a kind of reverse acquisition—executives from McDonnell Douglas ended up dominating and remaking Boeing. They turned it from a company that was relentlessly focused on product to one more focused on profit.
As if Boeing wasn't ruthlessly focused on profit before the merger, like all large companies.
Most of this whining comes from legacy Boeing employees that lost out come promotion time to MD employees in the merger. The legacy Boeing people have been the source for many of these articles, like your source in the Atlantic, and they've been out of the company a long time. Most of them have no idea what's going on inside today.
Boeing's problem, like all other large corporations, is the culture of outsourcing. This is not unique to Boeing in any way. Witness the horrific problems Lockheed Martin has in producing the F-35, where an audit found that some aircraft had parts installed backwards. Lockheed spread production out across most of the Continental US, helping to ensure political survival of the project, but raising the cost and spreading production out among an unmanageable web of subcontractors.
Every large corporation in the world has these problems because every large corporation in the world is now essentially just a logo slapped on a product assembled by a third party in a low cost country or area. Apple's reputation for quality is due to their zeal in controlling every step in production, and even they are slipping here.
Ask any appliance repairman how much you should spend on a new refrigerator, washing machine, etc. He'll tell you to buy cheap, because none of it lasts anymore anyway. We all have that grandpa or uncle with a refrigerator in his garage that's been running for 50 years. And yet I can't get one to last more than 6 or 7 these days. The issue of quality is worldwide, and Airbus has them too, they're just not in the news as much. Airbus just settled a lawsuit last year over fuselage quality issues.
