I was reading a post on Hacker News the other day on how Boeing has started working on a 737 MAX replacement following the catastrophic mistakes made when producing the 737 MAX. Basically, design decisions were made by people at the company who did not know a lot about airplanes and, consequently, the airplane was fraught with problems and had to be grounded while the many issues were being investigated.
I found the following two comments on the Hacker News thread very interesting to explain how aeronautical decisions were made by people who were not qualified:
- First comment: “There’s a phenomena that ofter occurs with large organisations where once their markets mature, everybody who can build a product end-to-end leaves or gets forced out, leaving only people with highly specialised maintenance skillsets. The former group has no work to do, after all, so why should the company keep them around? But then if the market ecosystem shifts, and a new product is necessary, they no longer have the capacity to build ground-up new products. All those people have left, and won’t come anywhere near the company.”
- Second comment: “To add to this & the Jobs interview – an oil industry proverb: a healthy oil company has a geologist in charge, a mature one has an engineer in charge, a declining one has an accountant in charge, and a dying one has a lawyer in charge.”
The two comments refer to a short interview by Steve Jobs where he explains why, when a company promotes sales/marketing people instead of product people, the company stops creating good products (i.e. Apple now with the macOS Tahoe debacle).
Aha! Now I understand something. Politicians are essentially sales/marketing people. For a country to work correctly, “product people” need to be given the possibility to solve the problems faced by citizens, not politicians.
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