Ignoring the ad hominem for the moment.. What happens when none of the charter schools in your district will accept your child as a student, because they have a learning disability, or are autistic, or they're a poor student? The first two consume more resources than the average student, the third will drag down whatever metrics are used to measure the performance of a school. Are those students just supposed to not get an education?
For-profit entities compete by doing two things: increasing revenue and/or lowering expenses. Increasing revenue is hard in a market where the customer base is finite; it's easier to cut corners. It's only a matter of time before those cut corners lower the quality of the education offered. For-profit schools are not in the business of providing quality education, they are in the business of making money. It's not if you can do it better than the other guy, it's if you can do it cheaper.
Also, this is interesting: Charter schools aren't the free market miracle cures you seem to think they are. tl;dr: Charter schools game the system to make it look like they perform better than public schools, by dropping or turning away poorly performing students. Separation of church and state is also just theory. No fiscal responsibility, either; they don't have to tell you what they're spending your tax money on.
Very few? The public schools? What the hell are you talking about? There seem to be hordes of children around when I drop off my kid at school.
If you want to talk about a service very few use, well, how many people have house fires? Or medical emergencies? Not many, and a shitload fewer than those who send their kids to school.
And as far as private schools go, it's not like they have to compete at the moment; their exclusivity puts them in a different class. But, if all the schools are private, for-profit entities, you can count on the race to the bottom happening eventually.
Well, you might not start out that way, you could have multiple vendors providing competing services. But the inevitable consolidation that would happen would leave you with one company owning all of them. Then you're pretty screwed, aren't you. Even if there were no consolidation, you can bet your ass that there would be a rapid race for the bottom in terms of who can provide the service the cheapest, quality be damned.
Oh, and your taxes are paying for things you don't personally use? Cry me a fucking river. I've never needed the fire department, should I be pissed that I'm paying for that?
When corporations do something bad, at least there is another organization above them to punish them.
How exactly, as a consumer, do you punish a corporation acting badly? Example: Car dealership rips you off. You go to the manufacturer, who says "Sorry, can't help, they're a private business." You complain to the dealership's parent organization, who hangs up on you. Short of filing a lawsuit (hey, look at that, government intervention), what do you do? You get fucked. Another example: BP. 1) Destroy an entire ecosystem that millions of people make their living from. 2) Wring your hands and look concerned. Pay a pittance (relatively speaking) in fines, while admitting no wrongdoing. 3).. 4) PROFIT. Still another: Bank of America and their contemporaries. Knowingly wrote thousands of shit-quality mortgages, but ultimately got to decide FOR THEMSELVES who was wronged by the practice.
Good luck changing ANYTHING in government, unless the change you want is more rules that nobody could possibly remember, let alone follow.
There's something we do every couple of years or so called "an election". You have far more say over who runs your local government than some faceless corporation hiding behind the corporate veil and a handful of shell companies.
I don't see how that's a benefit here. If we hand over education to the private sector, and the company running your school district goes bankrupt, yay free market, but where do your kids go to school while another company extorts massive tax breaks out of your town to take over the schools?
We have a similar problem in our town. The water company is privately owned. They run the company about as well as a bunch of howler monkeys on acid; when there was a boil order for a couple weeks in 2009, the company's response was to send a manager to the state regulator's chosen testing facility with samples so loaded with bleach that they couldn't measure the concentration, instead of actually fixing the problem. (That manager is facing criminal charges at the moment, and is likely going to jail.) But it's not like we can let them go bankrupt; a town needs a water supply. They've even had the balls to demand a near-doubling of our (already highest in the region) water rates, because they started building a new water treatment plant without securing financing first. Same principle applies; your children need an education. Once a company has a monopoly, they have no incentive to perform efficiently, or to even perform at all. Soon, your children would be instructed by telepresence from someone in Mumbai who they can pay one-tenth of what a newly hired, actually qualified teacher can make. Sure, the education is about as high-quality as offshore tech support, but hey! Free market!
If I decide that a solid religious education is important for my children, there is no reason why the money I pay in taxes should go towards the public school system in my school district. That money should be going to the private school where I send my kids, but I would be prepared to split that with the public school system for services that are shared between the public and private schools. (Example: the private school where I send my kids uses the same textbooks as the public school system, and uses a nurse that is employed by the public school system.) You don't get to complain me educating my kids in a private (religious) environment, unless you somehow think the 1st Amendment is magically invalid.
If you get to complain about your tax money supporting a public school system, I get to complain about my tax money supporting an institution that has no prohibition from discriminating on race, gender, religious affiliation, and so forth. You wave around the first amendment when it's convenient for you, but you forget that it's intended to keep the government from promoting a particular religion, which it would be doing if it funded a private school that includes participation in a particular religion as part of its curriculum. You can't have it both ways. If you want to send your kid to Catholic school because you think the quality of education or spiritual instruction is superior, have fun. Don't make me support a religion through my tax money. Bad enough that they're tax-exempt.
Actually, my guess is there is a correlation between parents who can afford to send their kids to these top-rated schools and the interest (and importance) they place on their children's education that results in those schools staying top-rated, rather than students intrinsically wanting to succeed. (That quality seems to be rare on its own; we only need to look at the poorest-performing school districts to observe that.)
Are you implying that people who can't afford to send their kids to school are less likely to value their child's education? How dare they be poor!
That is a good point. I guess what I'm saying is that in the absence of any real intel about what a company is like to work for, salary is the most quantifiable measure of how much an employee is worth to an employer for someone looking to get a job. Also, it's really easy to talk a good game about how great your corporate culture is in a job description, but a lot of the time it's total bullshit. You have to take "omg Xbox free soda etc etc." with a huge grain of salt. And, in the end, you can't eat job satisfaction or pay your mortgage with corporate culture. Show me the money.
There is no "tech skills crisis". There is a "unwillingness of businesses to pay people what they are worth" crisis. The natural function of supply and demand drives prices up when demand rises. While I'm not a proponent of the free market solving all the world's ills (left to its own devices, the damage that big business could do is unacceptable, since the free market requires an informed customer base, and we don't have that), this is a situation where the market is being unacceptably manipulated by moneyed interests influencing labor markets in a way that artificially drives prices down for a given market. If you want to attract high-quality talent (and that's not a given, a lot of employers don't want "good", they want "cheap", and then wonder why their product is shit), in a sane market, you have to treat your employees better than the other guy. Since the world would apparently collapse in upon itself if employees were treated like the valuable assets they are instead of greedy, lazy, expensive liabilities that are always whining about working conditions, we have a "tech skills crisis". It's fixable. Corporate profits are at all-time highs, productivity is off the charts, yet wages have been pretty much stagnant (when corrected for inflation) for decades. It's not rocket science. Pay people more and you'll out-produce the other guy. Sure, your company's profits might drop from 17 kajillion dollars to 16 kajillion dollars, but over the long-term (no wonder they can't deal with the concept) you'll come out ahead by producing a better product. But, improving quality is hard, while treating your employees like shit by paying them less and denying good benefits is easy and saves (short-term) money.
Because the problem with IT security in most organizations isn't training the rank and file, or building more-secure systems. The problem is that you can have all the IT policies in the world (coding standards, complex passwords, granular access), if they're not enforced with real consequences for ignoring/avoiding them, then it's all useless. Case in point: I once worked in a Fortune 500 company that had a pretty strict password policy (change password every 90 days, upper/lowercase/special characters required, etc). Everyone was required to adhere to the policy... except senior management, who felt it was too inconvenient. The CEO's password was the name of the company in lower case, and it never expired. Suggesting that they be required to adhere to the same policy as everyone else was a terminable offense.
Unless people get fired for violating IT policy, the policy might as well not exist.
Whenever I hear people whining about a "skills shortage" I call bullshit. There's no "skills shortage", there's a "people who will work for low wages" shortage. If companies wanted to hire domestic workers, they could, they just don't want to. They love it when supply-and-demand benefits them, but when the workers try to do the same thing (salaries go up when the demand for the skills goes up), well, we can't have that, can we. Those executives might have to forgo that second vacation home or have to settle for a BMW instead of a Bentley.
Yeah, greedy workers! How dare they expect to share in the company's successes! They should just take the scraps they're given and be happy about it. The executive's summer homes don't buy themselves, after all.
The jobs didn't go overseas because the steel workers wanted too much money. They went overseas because management felt they were entitled to obscene profits, and didn't care whose lives they ruined in the process. We're not talking about paper pushers here, we're talking about steel workers working a brutally hard job in an extremely dangerous environment. Why shouldn't they make enough money to support a comfortable lifestyle for their families?
Receiving good wages/benefits for hard work isn't greedy, it's the "American Dream", or at least that's what it used to be. Now, the "American Dream" seems to be "get other people to work hard and keep the profits for yourself." These companies will wish that they'd kept the well-paying jobs here once nobody can afford their products.
My state counts earned time off as wages. When you leave your job, your employer must pay you all accrued wages, and that includes compensation for any unused vacation time.
No, the lesson is work for a company that forces you to take your vacation or you lose it at the end of the year. Vacation benefits both the employee and employer. If you work for a company where management and/or HR secretly discourage vacation, GET OUT.
1) Bad advice in a shit economy, and 2) The next guy doesn't have any motivation to treat you any better.
And just because you lose your vacation time at some point doesn't mean you still don't get punished for actually using it; there's actually a greater likelihood that you'll get punished if you use more than you would if you didn't lose it.
Why not? Let someone else share the burden of the huge tax breaks they've extorted out of local government under the threat of looking 'anti-business.' It's great to talk a good game about 'bringing in jobs", but when the deal with the Devil you have to sign hurts you more than it helps, there's not much point, is there.
Citizens demand lower taxes, get them. Less money coming in = risk of bankrupcy. That's not a failure of government, that's math.
City services disappearing.
For poor people. Rest assured, when the rich guy bitches about a streetlight, it gets fixed that day, while the single mom tries to get someone, ANYONE, to listen to her about the water that's so bad her cat won't drink it gets ignored. (First-hand experience.)
City Attorney tells residents "lock your doors and load your guns".
That's what happens when you can't pay for public safety because the world will end if the rich asshole can't save $100/year on his property insurance. (Again, first-hand experience.)
So services are disappearing, while local governments are increasingly shaking down poor residents for money.
Fixed that for you.
Anything that pulls in money gets resources
Your point?
anything that actually serves poor citizens gets cut.
Fixed that for you.
Inspectors will show up to fine you.
Follow the rules and that won't happen. Don't like the rules? Elect someone else. Can't get that person elected? Tough shit, follow the rules.
Police will run no knock raids, confiscate "drug money", and take anything that isn't nailed down as civil forfeiture. Good luck ever getting it back.
Thanks, "War on Drugs". You can't really blame the cops for wanting to keep the lights on.
The functions of government are being collapsed to collecting money to pay government employees to take more money.
And yet your taxes are lower than they've been in half a century. And, the IRS' budget has been cut for two years running.
Your rage at 'the evil nasty gub'mint" is misplaced. You should really be angry at the rich (most of the above), the liars ("Your taxes are going up! The government wants to take your guns/rights/property/religion away! The size of government is growing!"), and the self-described morally superior (war on drugs.) Who, come to think of it, have an undue influence in government. Maybe we should work on that instead of trashing the idea of self-government without a viable alternative to anarchy.
That's not the fault of the people who make the license plates. The problem there is understaffing by the DMV, and a lack of incentive for high productivity on the part of the DMV management. If the average worker knew that his/her hard work, creativity, dedication, and loyalty would be rewarded at a higher level than someone who shows up and basically occupies a chair for 8 hours, then you'd see a lot of that kind of shit disappear. Once you see someone (or you yourself) work themselves into a stupor and get nothing more than the privilege of keeping their jobs, when they could work just hard enough to not get fired.. well, then hard work is for chumps.
Productivity of the American worker has steadily increased over the last 40 years, while wages have been stagnant. What incentive is there to work hard beyond your own sense of pride? Pride which can't pay your mortgage or feed your family?
No, they're not. However, if you do work on someone's behalf under agreed-to conditions, they are obligated to compensate you. It's the 'agreed-to' part that we're discussing here.
I disagree. There is always someone who will do your job for less than you are currently making. The difference is, they probably won't perform at the same level, or be as productive. The problem comes in when short-signed bean-counting management assholes decide that "cheap" is better than "good" because it looks better on the quarterly balance sheet. "See, we reduced salaries by 15% while retaining the same staffing level! Yay us!" The fact that the product they produce is now utter shit won't show up on the sheet until after the C-levels bail with their golden parachutes.
There are millions of IT folks that would love to do that, but, inexplicably, they are not the people who make the decisions as to what technology to use. Those decisions are frequently made by MBAs/C-level morons who haven't seen a line of code in twenty years, or by the bean counters in Accounting who can barely open Excel. The IT folks just have to clean up after the tremendously bad decision-making that is a result.
It's like trusting a car salesman that this car is cheaper because it uses full synthetic oil so you never have to change it again.
Not exactly. It's more like trusting your boss to pick out the car you're going to pay for when he plays golf/drinks with/is a frat brother of the car salesman, or he thinks he knows better than you want car you want, despite ignoring what you've asked for (so you end up with a Corolla instead of the Sienna you need to cart around your three kids and two dogs), or just buys whatever is cheapest.
Do you REALLY think that is accurate? Do you really think Boeing put the plane together with a bunch of non-spec'd parts? Do you really think that a plane would get off the ground with that type of engineering? Seriously?
I think that if the bean counters decided that was a good idea, and gave it to the engineers to work on with inadequate support, it's possible that the engineers, being responsible and ethical, made the impossible happen through serious overwork.
If I understand bunratty's response above, it sounds like there were never any prototypes actually built.
I stand corrected. Maybe I should read linked articles first..
But, I still think it was a case of being penny wise and pound foolish. If I read you correctly, they saved some money by not building the prototype themselves, but then got bit on the ass by the fact that that's a really bad idea and lost money in the long run. Typical corporate thinking. If it costs less TODAY, then that's what you do.
So Boeing told the contractors what they needed to build, but didn't give them hard specifications? What the hell? Two things:
Boeing needs to have their collective asses kicked for doing it this way, and: The subcontractors should never have agreed to the work without specs first.
The first one is probably the result of Boeing not wanting to spend the engineering dollars to develop the blueprints, and the second is due to the enormous amounts of money involved in making the parts.
Now that I know this, you'll never catch me on one of those abominations. What the hell was Boeing thinking?
Slashdot Mirror
So now you're saying we're going to dictate to a private company who they can and cannot do business with? Doesn't sound too free-market to me.
The trad
Ignoring the ad hominem for the moment.. What happens when none of the charter schools in your district will accept your child as a student, because they have a learning disability, or are autistic, or they're a poor student? The first two consume more resources than the average student, the third will drag down whatever metrics are used to measure the performance of a school. Are those students just supposed to not get an education?
For-profit entities compete by doing two things: increasing revenue and/or lowering expenses. Increasing revenue is hard in a market where the customer base is finite; it's easier to cut corners. It's only a matter of time before those cut corners lower the quality of the education offered. For-profit schools are not in the business of providing quality education, they are in the business of making money. It's not if you can do it better than the other guy, it's if you can do it cheaper.
Also, this is interesting: Charter schools aren't the free market miracle cures you seem to think they are. tl;dr: Charter schools game the system to make it look like they perform better than public schools, by dropping or turning away poorly performing students. Separation of church and state is also just theory. No fiscal responsibility, either; they don't have to tell you what they're spending your tax money on.
Very few? The public schools? What the hell are you talking about? There seem to be hordes of children around when I drop off my kid at school.
If you want to talk about a service very few use, well, how many people have house fires? Or medical emergencies? Not many, and a shitload fewer than those who send their kids to school.
And as far as private schools go, it's not like they have to compete at the moment; their exclusivity puts them in a different class. But, if all the schools are private, for-profit entities, you can count on the race to the bottom happening eventually.
Well, you might not start out that way, you could have multiple vendors providing competing services. But the inevitable consolidation that would happen would leave you with one company owning all of them. Then you're pretty screwed, aren't you. Even if there were no consolidation, you can bet your ass that there would be a rapid race for the bottom in terms of who can provide the service the cheapest, quality be damned.
Oh, and your taxes are paying for things you don't personally use? Cry me a fucking river. I've never needed the fire department, should I be pissed that I'm paying for that?
How exactly, as a consumer, do you punish a corporation acting badly? Example: Car dealership rips you off. You go to the manufacturer, who says "Sorry, can't help, they're a private business." You complain to the dealership's parent organization, who hangs up on you. Short of filing a lawsuit (hey, look at that, government intervention), what do you do? You get fucked. Another example: BP. 1) Destroy an entire ecosystem that millions of people make their living from. 2) Wring your hands and look concerned. Pay a pittance (relatively speaking) in fines, while admitting no wrongdoing. 3).. 4) PROFIT. Still another: Bank of America and their contemporaries. Knowingly wrote thousands of shit-quality mortgages, but ultimately got to decide FOR THEMSELVES who was wronged by the practice.
There's something we do every couple of years or so called "an election". You have far more say over who runs your local government than some faceless corporation hiding behind the corporate veil and a handful of shell companies.
I don't see how that's a benefit here. If we hand over education to the private sector, and the company running your school district goes bankrupt, yay free market, but where do your kids go to school while another company extorts massive tax breaks out of your town to take over the schools?
We have a similar problem in our town. The water company is privately owned. They run the company about as well as a bunch of howler monkeys on acid; when there was a boil order for a couple weeks in 2009, the company's response was to send a manager to the state regulator's chosen testing facility with samples so loaded with bleach that they couldn't measure the concentration, instead of actually fixing the problem. (That manager is facing criminal charges at the moment, and is likely going to jail.) But it's not like we can let them go bankrupt; a town needs a water supply. They've even had the balls to demand a near-doubling of our (already highest in the region) water rates, because they started building a new water treatment plant without securing financing first. Same principle applies; your children need an education. Once a company has a monopoly, they have no incentive to perform efficiently, or to even perform at all. Soon, your children would be instructed by telepresence from someone in Mumbai who they can pay one-tenth of what a newly hired, actually qualified teacher can make. Sure, the education is about as high-quality as offshore tech support, but hey! Free market!
If you get to complain about your tax money supporting a public school system, I get to complain about my tax money supporting an institution that has no prohibition from discriminating on race, gender, religious affiliation, and so forth. You wave around the first amendment when it's convenient for you, but you forget that it's intended to keep the government from promoting a particular religion, which it would be doing if it funded a private school that includes participation in a particular religion as part of its curriculum. You can't have it both ways. If you want to send your kid to Catholic school because you think the quality of education or spiritual instruction is superior, have fun. Don't make me support a religion through my tax money. Bad enough that they're tax-exempt.
Are you implying that people who can't afford to send their kids to school are less likely to value their child's education? How dare they be poor!
That is a good point. I guess what I'm saying is that in the absence of any real intel about what a company is like to work for, salary is the most quantifiable measure of how much an employee is worth to an employer for someone looking to get a job. Also, it's really easy to talk a good game about how great your corporate culture is in a job description, but a lot of the time it's total bullshit. You have to take "omg Xbox free soda etc etc." with a huge grain of salt. And, in the end, you can't eat job satisfaction or pay your mortgage with corporate culture. Show me the money.
There is no "tech skills crisis". There is a "unwillingness of businesses to pay people what they are worth" crisis. The natural function of supply and demand drives prices up when demand rises. While I'm not a proponent of the free market solving all the world's ills (left to its own devices, the damage that big business could do is unacceptable, since the free market requires an informed customer base, and we don't have that), this is a situation where the market is being unacceptably manipulated by moneyed interests influencing labor markets in a way that artificially drives prices down for a given market. If you want to attract high-quality talent (and that's not a given, a lot of employers don't want "good", they want "cheap", and then wonder why their product is shit), in a sane market, you have to treat your employees better than the other guy. Since the world would apparently collapse in upon itself if employees were treated like the valuable assets they are instead of greedy, lazy, expensive liabilities that are always whining about working conditions, we have a "tech skills crisis". It's fixable. Corporate profits are at all-time highs, productivity is off the charts, yet wages have been pretty much stagnant (when corrected for inflation) for decades. It's not rocket science. Pay people more and you'll out-produce the other guy. Sure, your company's profits might drop from 17 kajillion dollars to 16 kajillion dollars, but over the long-term (no wonder they can't deal with the concept) you'll come out ahead by producing a better product. But, improving quality is hard, while treating your employees like shit by paying them less and denying good benefits is easy and saves (short-term) money.
Because the problem with IT security in most organizations isn't training the rank and file, or building more-secure systems. The problem is that you can have all the IT policies in the world (coding standards, complex passwords, granular access), if they're not enforced with real consequences for ignoring/avoiding them, then it's all useless. Case in point: I once worked in a Fortune 500 company that had a pretty strict password policy (change password every 90 days, upper/lowercase/special characters required, etc). Everyone was required to adhere to the policy... except senior management, who felt it was too inconvenient. The CEO's password was the name of the company in lower case, and it never expired. Suggesting that they be required to adhere to the same policy as everyone else was a terminable offense.
Unless people get fired for violating IT policy, the policy might as well not exist.
Whenever I hear people whining about a "skills shortage" I call bullshit. There's no "skills shortage", there's a "people who will work for low wages" shortage. If companies wanted to hire domestic workers, they could, they just don't want to. They love it when supply-and-demand benefits them, but when the workers try to do the same thing (salaries go up when the demand for the skills goes up), well, we can't have that, can we. Those executives might have to forgo that second vacation home or have to settle for a BMW instead of a Bentley.
Yeah, greedy workers! How dare they expect to share in the company's successes! They should just take the scraps they're given and be happy about it. The executive's summer homes don't buy themselves, after all.
The jobs didn't go overseas because the steel workers wanted too much money. They went overseas because management felt they were entitled to obscene profits, and didn't care whose lives they ruined in the process. We're not talking about paper pushers here, we're talking about steel workers working a brutally hard job in an extremely dangerous environment. Why shouldn't they make enough money to support a comfortable lifestyle for their families?
Receiving good wages/benefits for hard work isn't greedy, it's the "American Dream", or at least that's what it used to be. Now, the "American Dream" seems to be "get other people to work hard and keep the profits for yourself." These companies will wish that they'd kept the well-paying jobs here once nobody can afford their products.
Wow, you sound like a douchebag. How many backs have you had to stab to get where you are?
My state counts earned time off as wages. When you leave your job, your employer must pay you all accrued wages, and that includes compensation for any unused vacation time.
1) Bad advice in a shit economy, and 2) The next guy doesn't have any motivation to treat you any better.
And just because you lose your vacation time at some point doesn't mean you still don't get punished for actually using it; there's actually a greater likelihood that you'll get punished if you use more than you would if you didn't lose it.
Why not? Let someone else share the burden of the huge tax breaks they've extorted out of local government under the threat of looking 'anti-business.' It's great to talk a good game about 'bringing in jobs", but when the deal with the Devil you have to sign hurts you more than it helps, there's not much point, is there.
Citizens demand lower taxes, get them. Less money coming in = risk of bankrupcy. That's not a failure of government, that's math.
For poor people. Rest assured, when the rich guy bitches about a streetlight, it gets fixed that day, while the single mom tries to get someone, ANYONE, to listen to her about the water that's so bad her cat won't drink it gets ignored. (First-hand experience.)
That's what happens when you can't pay for public safety because the world will end if the rich asshole can't save $100/year on his property insurance. (Again, first-hand experience.)
Fixed that for you.
Your point?
Fixed that for you.
Follow the rules and that won't happen. Don't like the rules? Elect someone else. Can't get that person elected? Tough shit, follow the rules.
Thanks, "War on Drugs". You can't really blame the cops for wanting to keep the lights on.
And yet your taxes are lower than they've been in half a century. And, the IRS' budget has been cut for two years running.
Your rage at 'the evil nasty gub'mint" is misplaced. You should really be angry at the rich (most of the above), the liars ("Your taxes are going up! The government wants to take your guns/rights/property/religion away! The size of government is growing!"), and the self-described morally superior (war on drugs.) Who, come to think of it, have an undue influence in government. Maybe we should work on that instead of trashing the idea of self-government without a viable alternative to anarchy.
That's not the fault of the people who make the license plates. The problem there is understaffing by the DMV, and a lack of incentive for high productivity on the part of the DMV management. If the average worker knew that his/her hard work, creativity, dedication, and loyalty would be rewarded at a higher level than someone who shows up and basically occupies a chair for 8 hours, then you'd see a lot of that kind of shit disappear. Once you see someone (or you yourself) work themselves into a stupor and get nothing more than the privilege of keeping their jobs, when they could work just hard enough to not get fired.. well, then hard work is for chumps.
Productivity of the American worker has steadily increased over the last 40 years, while wages have been stagnant. What incentive is there to work hard beyond your own sense of pride? Pride which can't pay your mortgage or feed your family?
No, they're not. However, if you do work on someone's behalf under agreed-to conditions, they are obligated to compensate you. It's the 'agreed-to' part that we're discussing here.
I disagree. There is always someone who will do your job for less than you are currently making. The difference is, they probably won't perform at the same level, or be as productive. The problem comes in when short-signed bean-counting management assholes decide that "cheap" is better than "good" because it looks better on the quarterly balance sheet. "See, we reduced salaries by 15% while retaining the same staffing level! Yay us!" The fact that the product they produce is now utter shit won't show up on the sheet until after the C-levels bail with their golden parachutes.
There are millions of IT folks that would love to do that, but, inexplicably, they are not the people who make the decisions as to what technology to use. Those decisions are frequently made by MBAs/C-level morons who haven't seen a line of code in twenty years, or by the bean counters in Accounting who can barely open Excel. The IT folks just have to clean up after the tremendously bad decision-making that is a result.
Not exactly. It's more like trusting your boss to pick out the car you're going to pay for when he plays golf/drinks with/is a frat brother of the car salesman, or he thinks he knows better than you want car you want, despite ignoring what you've asked for (so you end up with a Corolla instead of the Sienna you need to cart around your three kids and two dogs), or just buys whatever is cheapest.
I think that if the bean counters decided that was a good idea, and gave it to the engineers to work on with inadequate support, it's possible that the engineers, being responsible and ethical, made the impossible happen through serious overwork.
If I understand bunratty's response above, it sounds like there were never any prototypes actually built.
I stand corrected. Maybe I should read linked articles first..
But, I still think it was a case of being penny wise and pound foolish. If I read you correctly, they saved some money by not building the prototype themselves, but then got bit on the ass by the fact that that's a really bad idea and lost money in the long run. Typical corporate thinking. If it costs less TODAY, then that's what you do.
So Boeing told the contractors what they needed to build, but didn't give them hard specifications? What the hell? Two things:
Boeing needs to have their collective asses kicked for doing it this way, and:
The subcontractors should never have agreed to the work without specs first.
The first one is probably the result of Boeing not wanting to spend the engineering dollars to develop the blueprints, and the second is due to the enormous amounts of money involved in making the parts.
Now that I know this, you'll never catch me on one of those abominations. What the hell was Boeing thinking?