About the article itself:
Like most neoliberal institutions, Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs.
We-ell, ideologically what people usually call “neoliberal” doesn’t discard the latter. Just the former is considered assets and the latter human resources. Here’s where the problems arise, cause human resources here means both domain area knowledge\expertise and various kinds of sales\politics.
The kind of bosses they have simply think that their social\political\criminal skills are the core, fundamentally needed human resource, and the rest is not.
It’s a bit like all those normies dreaming of replacing engineers with chatbots, and becoming excited (almost to the degree of yelling out loud with triumph “finally we are going to get rid of them”). Their worldview puts human ingenuity in themselves and their social existence, and what engineers do is in their opinion like tooling, a less high-level job, something that machines can do.
The customers sales and engineers can’t even figure out what they want after talking with a human engineer for hours. It we lets sales talk to chatgpt about projects, you can kiss the entire power grid goodbye in a year.
The early studies of chat bot code indicate too that using them results in more c&p style crap code with worse fundamentals which makes 100% of the sense when you think about it for a minute.
We’ve all worked with that guy who thought that loops were too heady, that it was a great idea to put everything into one method, or that it was better to have a giant hashmap of garbage in your code and maintain it manually rather than adding better infrastructure.
Welp, ChatGPT is their equivalent of a machine gun. Enjoy!
Well, historically in the course of industrialization something a bit similar worked. Skilled artisans could make better things with their hands, but workers with machines would win with sheer amount.
The nuance which should be clear (but isn’t) to every MBA, salesman and the kind is that the things engineers do make commercial sense only because of some baseline of quality, and also that the sheer amount doesn’t matter that much there. A bit like with a leader making decisions, the role is one they surely often think about, - fewer good decisions are better than lots of bad decisions.
