booties in boeing fuel tanks

[Electro Detective]

I hit on Youtube Booty Zone to see what a Booty Twerk is    and this is what I got

"Content Warning,
This video may be inappropriate for some users."


Maybe better luck with booty planking?   

[coppercone2]

its when a fat ass shakes so it decouples from the bone and each butt cheek has its own axis or rotation

think pronounced two joint pendulum system

[tooki]

Subordinate by definition must be less competent than a superior.
 

Where on earth did you get that idea?!? Google the Peter principle.

[tooki]

D'oh! I think you're right, my sarcasm detector must have been on the fritz! 

[donotdespisethesnake]

The trend I see is described by Putt's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putt%27s_Law_and_the_Successful_Technocrat

Technology is dominated by two types of people, those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand.

Back in the old days, senior managers in an engineering company were former engineers, and often very good ones. If needed, they could go to the lab and actually do real work and teach younger staff. The problem with those guys is that they were not trained business managers, and often had little idea of finance. At one company, they had these engineering trained managers, but they literally didn't know the cost of the products they were making. That was something for finance to "sort out". To stay in business you gotta know margins, ROI and all that other stuff. That is before "optimising shareholder returns".

So what happened is that senior managers were recruited from business trained managers, who were on top of the finance from day 1. Unfortunately, these guys and gals know f*** all about engineering. As the old engineer-turned-managers retire, that leaves the engineers with no one to guide them, and no one to back up their decisions (aka "top cover"). Almost no one above had an engineering background, all the way up to the CEO.

As we know, engineering is about details, but all the managers want to do now is reduce time and cost, regardless. They are completely unable to offer any advice about what a good solution should be, nor how to achieve it. They will always pick what has the lowest immediate time/cost. They reject anything that exceeds time/cost, until you propose a solution that cuts all the corners and has a high risk.

Old IP is milked for far longer than it should, and the current generation of engineers struggles to maintain it, let alone generate a new design. All the knowledge has been lost as engineers are moved around and/or retire.

I've also found that management are quite unable to diagnose poor management structure, or improve it. All they can think of is moving a project manager sideways, and pulling in someone new. You end up with a revolving door of managers, multiple managers fighting over the same people, new managers who know less about the project than the last one.

Once the spiral of decline sets in, it seems unstoppable. Profitability continues to reduce until the business collapses or is sold off.

The pattern at Boeing is exactly the same I've seen at other large engineering companies which trade on reputation and some good legacy products. It might take a decade or two, but you end up with Putts Laws. The engineers who know their stuff are routinely overruled by management, even though the managers don't have the knowledge to make a proper decision.

[Nominal Animal]

D'oh! I think you're right, my sarcasm detector must have been on the fritz! 

Me fail English often, here too... 

[Kjelt]

And sometime you miss the person that can oversee the entire (bigger) picture instead of the details.
True story: a glass product was sold at the millions but the management wanted to reduce the cost. The question was put to the manufacturer who could reduce 25% of the glass volume by re-engineering the design without changing the look, in laymens terms: change the thickness of the glass on places where the mechanical strength can be lowered.
Perfect and 1000 prototypes where flown in in flycrates packed in foam to the testlab, where they were tested rigourously for weeks and found to be OK.

So the company ordered start of the production and the millions of products were being manufactured, packed and shipped to the customers, and >80% arrived broken. 
To cut the story short: They forgot to change the carton boxing packing material to compensate for the changed product.

[Alti]

Back in the old days, senior managers in an engineering company were former engineers, (..)

Thank you for the story, that still does not explain your attitude:

I have spent many days in meetings battling with managers to persuade them their latest brilliant idea (..)

Did you battle with incompetent managers as an engineer or as a stock owner?
I assumed that the former.

It does not make sense for a subordinate engineer to battle with manager or playing game of persuasion. This is not a marriage. A superior assigns you to a project and you follow the assignment the best you can. Whether this is a brilliant idea or not is not a subordinate engineer's concern.

Subordinate by definition must be less competent than a superior.

As for superior being more competent than subordinate - of course in the above case this is limited to managing, not engineering. Manager does not have to know or understand engineering to be better in managing than a subordinate engineer is in managing.

However, just to be clear, if a manager makes engineering decisions without understanding the consequences of theese decisions, well, then again this is not a subordinate engineer's concern. I am sure the pesky manager has his own well paid boss and it is the boss that is the only person qualified to deal with it.