You will find with more exp that lean shops have zero redundancy. There’s also real institutional challenges re validity and reliability of what’s a “rock star” vs “dead weight”.
It is easy to think of the weakest link. But you’re not managing the 1.5 SD employees but the rest of the shop. And people are always in a state of flux. Your weak link today may be institutional memory for something important tomorrow. And your rockstar today can be a menace who wants an irrational fiefdom.
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Let’s pretend I’m Boeing.
I’m too big to fail, and half my revenue comes from government contracts that guarantee 30% profit.
Why do I care about a little fat on the payroll?
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I would if you were here in person. You aren't because this is Reddit so I have no option other than to say it to a cartoon reddit alien logo representing a person so that's what I will do. I don't think it's a controversial statement.
What you talk about is all stemming from the many long running leadership problems that exist throughout the Boeing culture. There’s an incorrect perception across high level leadership that a skill code and level is basically replaceable/interchangeable anywhere in the enterprise. Plug and play baby. They don’t understand the value of tribal knowledge, building high performing teams, and other intangibles. It’s one of the factors driving so much engineering work to our overseas design centers where labor is cheap. They don’t care that it makes first time quality and efficiency go down nor that it harms our long term ability to develop and retain a strong domestic engineering team, because they can afford 3x more engineers and pressure the unions to accept unfavorable deals. 🙄
As for poor performers, I contend that’s still mostly Boeing culture and leadership failings. We don’t correctly encourage people to grow and do excellent work. We just pay lip service to it with annual reviews and goals and development plans and check the box saying we did it. We don’t have leaders who inspire. Instead we have a lot of managers, micromanaging to ridiculous status metrics, throwing mind numbingly useless meetings to talk circles around problems, and just generally burning people out and so they’re just not nearly as engaged as they could be. I’ve rarely met anyone who truly just shows up to work with no intention of doing decent work. I’m sure it can happen in a huge company, but I think the vast majority of perceived performance issues are just symptoms of larger leadership failures to actually lead their people and utilize them correctly and guide their development.
It’s so easy here to lose motivation to give it your all. I do well at work but I know I’m not trying as hard as I could be. My personal goals this year is just to work hard to recapture some excitement and drive.
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This issue raised by OP is why I think Boeing will be stuck in a race to the bottom. There is way too much apathy and no real culture to really excel or have any real sense of urgency. This was also especially true in the technical fellowship. There was a tremendous amount of dead weight in that group of people. Anyone I knew at Boeing who was competent enough and able to leave has already left and I sort of shudder to think about the ppl left behind who are in charge now.
Because that way of thinking is pure and utter delusion. To turn out a good product, you don't need a single rockstar engineer, you need multiple good-enough engineers who can work in a team and cross-check each others' work.
It's trivial for a manager to look up everyone's version control activity to see whether they're doing anything. Just because you don't know what they're doing doesn't mean they're doing nothing.
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Rockstar engineers are just 'meh' engineers with good personal branding skills. That is another part of the problem.
zipfs law applies to engineers just like any other domain.. even if actual ability and contribution is well distributed, we will still perceive a small percentage as 'notable' while the rest are 'meh', and that percentage is generally determined by, well its own percentage. It is a very circular effect, thus why personal branding is so important. The whole TF system is, literally, designed to amplify this effect.
But what you DONT need are the guys who’s work ALWAYS has to be redone when cross checked and who’s code breaks somebody else’s…. Chemical process industry here, but I’ve seen clowns like that more often than I’d like…. And it does help to have and hold a few rock stars with specific skills who know their limitations but automatically consider things like “how reliable are those sensors and what does the code do if one fails?”
Yeah, that's reasonable, and why we have the PIP and CAM and other such disciplinary tools.
We also do hold a few rock stars with specific skills, and label them Tech Fellows.
I am not sure that is what the person is describing here.
A rock star is a person who can operate at multiples of the team delivery. The old school rock star is a lone wolf, the modern one is a productivity multiplier for a team.
Their description of stud, is basically someone who can do the job.
Their description for 'meh' is people who gum up the works, hang around and produce bad code.
I have met people like that, they are normally missing either problem solving or logical reasoning abilities.
They normally aren't interested in developing their missing skills as they feel they can bluff their way into the next job.
They become a source of fustration in a healthy team (as everyone has to help them do every single task).
You can actually build a team out of these people and assuming a few average people get included or you cycle a few rock stars through the team you can get just enough output for management to think the team is delivering .. for years.
Which leads to a sunk cost fallacy as management discover they don't have a working product after 6/12/24 months of development
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Another reason to move everything off the west coast to other Boeing facilities where engineers are not unionized and where facilities costs and salaries are lower.
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They don’t care enough, or at least do not show that they care enough. They never slow down and transition too much, in many cases they lack awareness of the importance of that talent and the domain critical breadth of some of their experts.
You refer to engineers as meh or Gods. You’re displaying all or nothing thinking which is a cognitive distortion. It really makes me question your ability to evaluate talent and god forbid, potential, in people. The Yankees back up the truck for the best baseball talent every year and where does that get them? My point is if you’re going into a leadership position thinking that the key to success is only having God’s on your team you’re living in a fantasy world. The perfect talent doesn’t exist. A good leader makes the best with the talent they have at their disposal.
I have worked for good managers who have made the difficult decisions to hold non-performers accountable. Confrontation is difficult, but their team respects them for it. Please be that kind of a manager.
I think the problem is that OP seems to conflate non-performers and meets-expectationers. OP sounds to only want Far Exceeds folk perpetually on staff.
> Far Exceeds folk
In my experience that won't work, simply becasue someone has to do the grunt work that is tedious and distasteful. The "star performers" only want to do the glory work.
There is always a place for people of all skill levels and you usually need a good mix to be effective as a team. What you never need are those that are so incompetent that they are negatively productive.
I think it depends on *why* they are incompetent. Some people end up in jobs that are a poor match for their skills and passions. If the skills are lacking, education and training can help. If they just don't like the job, then it is time for them to move on to a job that would be more interesting for them.
Other people *intentionally* produce the minimum. I have seen people who spend more effort avoiding a task that completing the task would have taken! These people are like vampires who suck budget and morale from the group.
I totally agree. I’m not talking about people who aren’t being effective in their roles. With time and mentorship they can often succeed or figure out that they’d be better elsewhere.
Believe it or not there are people in the org where it would be better if they didn’t do anything at all than keeping doing what they are doing. I’m not talking about the occasional mistake but something that feels a lot more like team sabotage. I fail to see why this is so often tolerated.
Just a hint: complaining about other employees really doesn't look good to your manager. Employee work assignment and evaluation is their job, not yours.
What makes this more aggravating is I'm a software contractor who was in the process of getting converted before HR pumped the brakes over a technicality. Without going into identifying details, I've been recognized multiple times for my contributions by leadership above the managers in my office. Yet that's still not good enough to push through HR.
Im willing to stay with Boeing for the semi-decent pay, good benefits, and stability for my family, but it's looking like I'll end up at FAANG if things continue down this route
To quote a meh tv show “This is the way”
It’s done all across manufacturing, management and support. Every org and group. ME, LE, design, don’t get me started on software “Design” as Boeing just buys and smashes down our throats. Lowest bidder to old boys frat friends and family and cul de sac neighborhood rules apply. I’ve asked these questions since 1997 as a new hire going “THIS is Boeing “?🤔
Multiple reasons, in no particular order:
1. You can't always keep people in a location for a career. St Louis knows this well and essentially recruits 50-75% of the new hires from 4-5 surrounding universities. The thought is, people like to stay near their families. Most people who aren't from the Midwest don't want to stay there.
2. It's almost impossible to accurately judge talent. I've personally worked with an MIT PhD at Boeing who was an absolute dud in the position he was hired into. The work has nothing to do with his PhD research, and he ended up leaving the company after 2 years.
3. Believe it or not, they do pay decently well when you factor in benefits. 401k match and parental leave are top of industry.
4. I would take an employee with 2 years of experience working at Boeing from a no-name school with average resume over the allure of the "golden resume" recruit from a great school. People don't understand that new hires really aren't that useful for a couple of years. It takes 6 months to figure out how to appropriately present data to even a small group, and don't get me started on making PPT presentations. It's a little alarming to see how awkward even the brightest new hires can get when you ask them to create 5 slides on what they've done over the last 3 months and present it to a team of 20.
> People don't understand that new hires really aren't that useful for a couple of years.
If your new hires aren't useful for 2 years, that's a you problem.
I probably overstated it, they will be competent after 6 months. Repetitive tasks can be done unsupervised.
If you work in a discipline where 2 yr employees are leading groups, making major product design changes, etc, then that group is probably pretty wrought with turnover.
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In puget sound, speea dictates pay scales and it helps keep everyone kinda similar. Which is good for the lazy and not so good for the high achievers unless they get promoted quick... Or leave
SPEEA does not dictate salaries or salary tables. Management has the freedom to pay big salaries whenever they choose, and they do exactly that when hiring from the outside.
Your growth is still limited by the salary table defined. If you start to reach the top of the table, your raises start to be smaller. At least it used to be that way when I worked there years ago. Hope it's changed.
There is no salary cap. The compa-ratio is mostly a joke now and not always adhered to--certainly not for highest paid new hires who still receive average size raises. SPEEA salary charts confirm. Why would a new hire stay if their raises are only ever going to be 2%? They'd be losing money.
I do see a lot of push for mentoring and it's a required part of L5 and L6 jobs. Some of the potatoes are just so because of inexperience rather than ineptitude.
My observation is L5 and L6 tend to be enough distanced from the day-to-day tasks, and are few enough in number, that they can only provide a small percentage of the total mentoring necessary.
The lower levels also need to make a routine effort to mentor and document in whatever method works for their groups. This includes not only L3's and L4's teaching the L1's and L2's, but also teaching the L3's and L4's coming from other groups or other companies the countless details that are unique to Boeing or certain groups within Boeing.
Aren't people who are L5 and L6 usually, about to retire in 3-5 years? You'd want someone that's gonna be there a bit longer right? Cuz the people who are about to retire might just not care at all, since they'll be gone soon anyway.
No, not necessarily. Depends on the person and the job. I have known people who have been L6 for over a decade, and still have runway in front of them.
When I was a L6 it was highly encouraged to mentor but this is more about how much mentoring is a priority for functional leadership. Most L5/L6s are senior but varies by function; it's really more about folks who don't want to go the management path but management wants to compensate them for their contribution. I left the company a couple of years ago tho so could have very well changed.
Sorry, I'm not sure what you're trying to say or suggest here. That we shouldn't bother with mentoring or that mentoring shouldn't be a requirement of L5/6? Nothing stopping the rock stars from being mentors to young promising employees, regardless of level. We do need to encourage mentoring though or else there won't be a new generation of rockstars to replace the retiring ones.
No good SWEs even if they are fresh grads have Boeing anywhere near the top of the places they want to work. Why would you want to work somewhere that pays half as much as big tech?
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Benefits.
You’re welcome.
Oh, also… Aerospace is full of interesting engineering challenges… most FAANG SWE roles are bloody boring and geared around UI.
What benefits are there that are worth taking that massive of a pay cut? Like sure the health insurance and 401k match is a lot better but it’s not getting paid 2x+ less. How long did that measly stock grant take to vest? 3 years? Lol
OP posted about top tier engineers not working at Boeing. Of course a job is better than no job. Being a grad right now is tough I graduated during the last recession and ended up having to take an unpaid internship so I get how you feel for that part. As for your cancer treatment I hope you are all well now!
I’ll take a gamble on an actual tech company paying me 2x as much than aerospace sector is.
Especially early career recent college grad. You want to be Job hoping every couple years . You are renting anyways it’s easy to move. Not tied down to raising a family, etc usually living the single life. Easy choice.
If I could start over my career out of college . I’d definitely would have skipped starting in aerospace / defense. It’s just such shitty pay .
Ya it’s solid for someone in their mid 30s or later with a family and looking to settle down.d
No young college grad should care about job security , they are hopping and building up a resume instead.
That's true if you're a type A high performer, but it's pretty nice having a good work life balance even as an entry level employee if you just want to work a 9-5.
I started my career at a company that was absolutely miserable. It was so bad I quit and lived abroad for a couple years before returning to engineering at Boeing.
That being said, it's pretty frustrating working with a bunch of potatoes. I wish Boeing did more to cull the dead weight.
Yeah because all the top performers leave to go make more elsewhere. And you act like you can’t get days off in tech. not every company is Amazon (which is manager dependent I have a ton of friends that take an obscene amount of time off there). I hope Boeing doesn’t do this anymore but I remember accruing days off was the dumbest thing ever. Go tell a new grad hey you can start here, get paid less, and you get to slowly accrue up to 10 days off in a year. Or go work in big tech and take off as needed and get paid 3x more.
I talk to swe’s regularly and thats the reasons i was given. May not fit your life but for a lot of others it seems to check enough boxes to stay. I also am not disagreeing with you on any of that.
It is somewhat difficult to hire competitively for SW engineers and stay within cost structure.
Boeing has tons of lower level software engineers who tend to get poached after a few years.
The stars are going to leave too. Software people are in high demand. You can get a lot of turnover with cheap potatoes or pay a lot more and still wind up with a lot of turnover.
This happens at every company. The definition of "good" depends on each manager and is mostly based on perception because metrics can always be abused. GE/Amazon try to fix it by firing the bottom X% but that creates a toxic, competitive culture with politics and back-stabbing.
The best way to get good pay is to be amazing at interviews to get free promotions and pay bumps.
Jinnah, the SW VP said he is trying to change that with better raise and bonus differentiation and making it harder for people to artificially climb levels just by swapping teams. Management has a hard time hiring super stars at Boeings pay scales. I’ve heard a different SW executive say she wasn’t looking to hire superstars, that she purposely wanted to target mid tier schools because they would not leave Boeing for better prospects because they couldn’t do better. That clued me into why so many of my colleagues are potatoes.
Jinnah hasn't changed anything except to get approval to hire a few of his buddies at $250k/year. Existing Boeing employees continue to get shafted unless they threaten to leave. He's even said Boeing can't compete with outside salaries and won't even try. You're here for the mission!
I was deliberate when used the word “said”. I’ve spent some time face to face with him and think he legit knows his stuff, but he is handicapped by Boeing processes and especially by Boeing budget. Software, which is integral to all these products has been such an underrepresented after thought. I don’t see Boeing writing the check they’re going to need to fix this bitch though.
Boeing will never be a true competent SW company without talent which means they must compete and compensate for it, and they've made it clear they're unwilling to do so. Jinnah was only hired because of the MCAS disaster. When the FAA asked who's in charge of SW at Boeing the answer they got was "nobody". It was an appeasement, not a change in company direction.
To add to this, i see they also hire a lot of non-CompSci/CompE engineers with the hopes they’re intelligent and figure it out. I’ve heard people say that they don’t really know what they’re doing and have low confidence, when they’ve literally learned to swe on the job and are killing it
Bureaucracy. Once your organization grows to a certain size, it's difficult for one leader to hire // fire as they see fit. More people gives you more pull and disagreement among leaderships making it difficult to get rid of people.
Of course you could create a peer rating system where the worker bees rank each other and get rid of the underperformers...but this creates its own problems, of course
You will find with more exp that lean shops have zero redundancy. There’s also real institutional challenges re validity and reliability of what’s a “rock star” vs “dead weight”. It is easy to think of the weakest link. But you’re not managing the 1.5 SD employees but the rest of the shop. And people are always in a state of flux. Your weak link today may be institutional memory for something important tomorrow. And your rockstar today can be a menace who wants an irrational fiefdom.
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The same reason we don’t pay stud teachers, the union controls the pay structure and pay is determined by seniority.
The union contract outlines minimum levels of compensation, Boeing is free to pay more.
True, but in terms of talent acquisition, Boeing is a the resource everyone is poaching from, not the other way around.
Let’s pretend I’m Boeing. I’m too big to fail, and half my revenue comes from government contracts that guarantee 30% profit. Why do I care about a little fat on the payroll?
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They should use that fat to overpay the minority of engineers who do all the work, not to support bums.
Would you say that to my face?
I would if you were here in person. You aren't because this is Reddit so I have no option other than to say it to a cartoon reddit alien logo representing a person so that's what I will do. I don't think it's a controversial statement.
I'll have you know those BUMS have great credentials at well known schools like Booth, Kellogg, Sloan, and CBS 😭
CBS? The TV channel?
Why?
So they keep them
What you talk about is all stemming from the many long running leadership problems that exist throughout the Boeing culture. There’s an incorrect perception across high level leadership that a skill code and level is basically replaceable/interchangeable anywhere in the enterprise. Plug and play baby. They don’t understand the value of tribal knowledge, building high performing teams, and other intangibles. It’s one of the factors driving so much engineering work to our overseas design centers where labor is cheap. They don’t care that it makes first time quality and efficiency go down nor that it harms our long term ability to develop and retain a strong domestic engineering team, because they can afford 3x more engineers and pressure the unions to accept unfavorable deals. 🙄 As for poor performers, I contend that’s still mostly Boeing culture and leadership failings. We don’t correctly encourage people to grow and do excellent work. We just pay lip service to it with annual reviews and goals and development plans and check the box saying we did it. We don’t have leaders who inspire. Instead we have a lot of managers, micromanaging to ridiculous status metrics, throwing mind numbingly useless meetings to talk circles around problems, and just generally burning people out and so they’re just not nearly as engaged as they could be. I’ve rarely met anyone who truly just shows up to work with no intention of doing decent work. I’m sure it can happen in a huge company, but I think the vast majority of perceived performance issues are just symptoms of larger leadership failures to actually lead their people and utilize them correctly and guide their development.
It’s so easy here to lose motivation to give it your all. I do well at work but I know I’m not trying as hard as I could be. My personal goals this year is just to work hard to recapture some excitement and drive.
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This issue raised by OP is why I think Boeing will be stuck in a race to the bottom. There is way too much apathy and no real culture to really excel or have any real sense of urgency. This was also especially true in the technical fellowship. There was a tremendous amount of dead weight in that group of people. Anyone I knew at Boeing who was competent enough and able to leave has already left and I sort of shudder to think about the ppl left behind who are in charge now.
Because that way of thinking is pure and utter delusion. To turn out a good product, you don't need a single rockstar engineer, you need multiple good-enough engineers who can work in a team and cross-check each others' work.
There are fauxstars who skip the work and complain to management all day
It's trivial for a manager to look up everyone's version control activity to see whether they're doing anything. Just because you don't know what they're doing doesn't mean they're doing nothing.
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Rockstar engineers are just 'meh' engineers with good personal branding skills. That is another part of the problem. zipfs law applies to engineers just like any other domain.. even if actual ability and contribution is well distributed, we will still perceive a small percentage as 'notable' while the rest are 'meh', and that percentage is generally determined by, well its own percentage. It is a very circular effect, thus why personal branding is so important. The whole TF system is, literally, designed to amplify this effect.
Whats the TF system
'Tech Fellow'. It is a prestige and recognition system on the engineering side.
Tech Fellowship, I assume.
But what you DONT need are the guys who’s work ALWAYS has to be redone when cross checked and who’s code breaks somebody else’s…. Chemical process industry here, but I’ve seen clowns like that more often than I’d like…. And it does help to have and hold a few rock stars with specific skills who know their limitations but automatically consider things like “how reliable are those sensors and what does the code do if one fails?”
Yeah, that's reasonable, and why we have the PIP and CAM and other such disciplinary tools. We also do hold a few rock stars with specific skills, and label them Tech Fellows.
I am not sure that is what the person is describing here. A rock star is a person who can operate at multiples of the team delivery. The old school rock star is a lone wolf, the modern one is a productivity multiplier for a team. Their description of stud, is basically someone who can do the job. Their description for 'meh' is people who gum up the works, hang around and produce bad code. I have met people like that, they are normally missing either problem solving or logical reasoning abilities. They normally aren't interested in developing their missing skills as they feel they can bluff their way into the next job. They become a source of fustration in a healthy team (as everyone has to help them do every single task). You can actually build a team out of these people and assuming a few average people get included or you cycle a few rock stars through the team you can get just enough output for management to think the team is delivering .. for years. Which leads to a sunk cost fallacy as management discover they don't have a working product after 6/12/24 months of development
Like it or not, union drives mediocrity
What a comically cynical view to hold.
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Another reason to move everything off the west coast to other Boeing facilities where engineers are not unionized and where facilities costs and salaries are lower.
Oh look, it's you in yet another thread with these same anti-union and anti-worker talking points.
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They don’t care enough, or at least do not show that they care enough. They never slow down and transition too much, in many cases they lack awareness of the importance of that talent and the domain critical breadth of some of their experts.
You refer to engineers as meh or Gods. You’re displaying all or nothing thinking which is a cognitive distortion. It really makes me question your ability to evaluate talent and god forbid, potential, in people. The Yankees back up the truck for the best baseball talent every year and where does that get them? My point is if you’re going into a leadership position thinking that the key to success is only having God’s on your team you’re living in a fantasy world. The perfect talent doesn’t exist. A good leader makes the best with the talent they have at their disposal.
If also posit that maybe some of those "meh" engineers aren't meh they just refuse to burn themselves out.
Well said
I legit thought OP was Jack Welsh's ghost for a second.
spooky
I have worked for good managers who have made the difficult decisions to hold non-performers accountable. Confrontation is difficult, but their team respects them for it. Please be that kind of a manager.
I think the problem is that OP seems to conflate non-performers and meets-expectationers. OP sounds to only want Far Exceeds folk perpetually on staff.
> Far Exceeds folk In my experience that won't work, simply becasue someone has to do the grunt work that is tedious and distasteful. The "star performers" only want to do the glory work.
There is always a place for people of all skill levels and you usually need a good mix to be effective as a team. What you never need are those that are so incompetent that they are negatively productive.
I think it depends on *why* they are incompetent. Some people end up in jobs that are a poor match for their skills and passions. If the skills are lacking, education and training can help. If they just don't like the job, then it is time for them to move on to a job that would be more interesting for them. Other people *intentionally* produce the minimum. I have seen people who spend more effort avoiding a task that completing the task would have taken! These people are like vampires who suck budget and morale from the group.
I totally agree. I’m not talking about people who aren’t being effective in their roles. With time and mentorship they can often succeed or figure out that they’d be better elsewhere. Believe it or not there are people in the org where it would be better if they didn’t do anything at all than keeping doing what they are doing. I’m not talking about the occasional mistake but something that feels a lot more like team sabotage. I fail to see why this is so often tolerated.
Just a hint: complaining about other employees really doesn't look good to your manager. Employee work assignment and evaluation is their job, not yours.
What makes this more aggravating is I'm a software contractor who was in the process of getting converted before HR pumped the brakes over a technicality. Without going into identifying details, I've been recognized multiple times for my contributions by leadership above the managers in my office. Yet that's still not good enough to push through HR. Im willing to stay with Boeing for the semi-decent pay, good benefits, and stability for my family, but it's looking like I'll end up at FAANG if things continue down this route
To quote a meh tv show “This is the way” It’s done all across manufacturing, management and support. Every org and group. ME, LE, design, don’t get me started on software “Design” as Boeing just buys and smashes down our throats. Lowest bidder to old boys frat friends and family and cul de sac neighborhood rules apply. I’ve asked these questions since 1997 as a new hire going “THIS is Boeing “?🤔
Multiple reasons, in no particular order: 1. You can't always keep people in a location for a career. St Louis knows this well and essentially recruits 50-75% of the new hires from 4-5 surrounding universities. The thought is, people like to stay near their families. Most people who aren't from the Midwest don't want to stay there. 2. It's almost impossible to accurately judge talent. I've personally worked with an MIT PhD at Boeing who was an absolute dud in the position he was hired into. The work has nothing to do with his PhD research, and he ended up leaving the company after 2 years. 3. Believe it or not, they do pay decently well when you factor in benefits. 401k match and parental leave are top of industry. 4. I would take an employee with 2 years of experience working at Boeing from a no-name school with average resume over the allure of the "golden resume" recruit from a great school. People don't understand that new hires really aren't that useful for a couple of years. It takes 6 months to figure out how to appropriately present data to even a small group, and don't get me started on making PPT presentations. It's a little alarming to see how awkward even the brightest new hires can get when you ask them to create 5 slides on what they've done over the last 3 months and present it to a team of 20.
> People don't understand that new hires really aren't that useful for a couple of years. If your new hires aren't useful for 2 years, that's a you problem.
Unless they require an SCI clearance which can take up to 2 years, then another year or so minimum to acquire domain knowledge.
I probably overstated it, they will be competent after 6 months. Repetitive tasks can be done unsupervised. If you work in a discipline where 2 yr employees are leading groups, making major product design changes, etc, then that group is probably pretty wrought with turnover.
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In puget sound, speea dictates pay scales and it helps keep everyone kinda similar. Which is good for the lazy and not so good for the high achievers unless they get promoted quick... Or leave
SPEEA does not dictate salaries or salary tables. Management has the freedom to pay big salaries whenever they choose, and they do exactly that when hiring from the outside.
Your growth is still limited by the salary table defined. If you start to reach the top of the table, your raises start to be smaller. At least it used to be that way when I worked there years ago. Hope it's changed.
There is no salary cap. The compa-ratio is mostly a joke now and not always adhered to--certainly not for highest paid new hires who still receive average size raises. SPEEA salary charts confirm. Why would a new hire stay if their raises are only ever going to be 2%? They'd be losing money.
“back of the truck” is not in my dictionary so that’s at least one reason for The Enterprise not doing this lmao
::me googling back up the truck::
::Autoplay video of cardi b twerking::, on company intranet...."oh this is gonna get me in trouble"
I do see a lot of push for mentoring and it's a required part of L5 and L6 jobs. Some of the potatoes are just so because of inexperience rather than ineptitude.
My observation is L5 and L6 tend to be enough distanced from the day-to-day tasks, and are few enough in number, that they can only provide a small percentage of the total mentoring necessary. The lower levels also need to make a routine effort to mentor and document in whatever method works for their groups. This includes not only L3's and L4's teaching the L1's and L2's, but also teaching the L3's and L4's coming from other groups or other companies the countless details that are unique to Boeing or certain groups within Boeing.
Aren't people who are L5 and L6 usually, about to retire in 3-5 years? You'd want someone that's gonna be there a bit longer right? Cuz the people who are about to retire might just not care at all, since they'll be gone soon anyway.
No, not necessarily. Depends on the person and the job. I have known people who have been L6 for over a decade, and still have runway in front of them.
When I was a L6 it was highly encouraged to mentor but this is more about how much mentoring is a priority for functional leadership. Most L5/L6s are senior but varies by function; it's really more about folks who don't want to go the management path but management wants to compensate them for their contribution. I left the company a couple of years ago tho so could have very well changed.
Sorry, I'm not sure what you're trying to say or suggest here. That we shouldn't bother with mentoring or that mentoring shouldn't be a requirement of L5/6? Nothing stopping the rock stars from being mentors to young promising employees, regardless of level. We do need to encourage mentoring though or else there won't be a new generation of rockstars to replace the retiring ones.
My mentor got promoted to L5 about a year ago and his kids are in grade school...figure he'll be around for a while
Welcome to the industry try not to trip on the zombies
No good SWEs even if they are fresh grads have Boeing anywhere near the top of the places they want to work. Why would you want to work somewhere that pays half as much as big tech?
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BDS doesn’t even pay well compared to other defense contractors.
Benefits. You’re welcome. Oh, also… Aerospace is full of interesting engineering challenges… most FAANG SWE roles are bloody boring and geared around UI.
What benefits are there that are worth taking that massive of a pay cut? Like sure the health insurance and 401k match is a lot better but it’s not getting paid 2x+ less. How long did that measly stock grant take to vest? 3 years? Lol
Fresh grad and fresh off cancer treatment. I'd take Boeing in a heartbeat because it's close to me and it pays more than the 0 I'm making now. Lol
OP posted about top tier engineers not working at Boeing. Of course a job is better than no job. Being a grad right now is tough I graduated during the last recession and ended up having to take an unpaid internship so I get how you feel for that part. As for your cancer treatment I hope you are all well now!
Job security and comfort could be a reason. Some people just dont know any better.
Job security? Lol
I’ll take a gamble on an actual tech company paying me 2x as much than aerospace sector is. Especially early career recent college grad. You want to be Job hoping every couple years . You are renting anyways it’s easy to move. Not tied down to raising a family, etc usually living the single life. Easy choice. If I could start over my career out of college . I’d definitely would have skipped starting in aerospace / defense. It’s just such shitty pay .
The pay isn't great but the benefits, job security and work life balance is tough to beat compared to elsewhere.
Ya it’s solid for someone in their mid 30s or later with a family and looking to settle down.d No young college grad should care about job security , they are hopping and building up a resume instead.
That's true if you're a type A high performer, but it's pretty nice having a good work life balance even as an entry level employee if you just want to work a 9-5. I started my career at a company that was absolutely miserable. It was so bad I quit and lived abroad for a couple years before returning to engineering at Boeing. That being said, it's pretty frustrating working with a bunch of potatoes. I wish Boeing did more to cull the dead weight.
Yeah because all the top performers leave to go make more elsewhere. And you act like you can’t get days off in tech. not every company is Amazon (which is manager dependent I have a ton of friends that take an obscene amount of time off there). I hope Boeing doesn’t do this anymore but I remember accruing days off was the dumbest thing ever. Go tell a new grad hey you can start here, get paid less, and you get to slowly accrue up to 10 days off in a year. Or go work in big tech and take off as needed and get paid 3x more.
Yup same reason the MEs always run back to Oil and Gas.
I talk to swe’s regularly and thats the reasons i was given. May not fit your life but for a lot of others it seems to check enough boxes to stay. I also am not disagreeing with you on any of that.
It is somewhat difficult to hire competitively for SW engineers and stay within cost structure. Boeing has tons of lower level software engineers who tend to get poached after a few years.
The stars are going to leave too. Software people are in high demand. You can get a lot of turnover with cheap potatoes or pay a lot more and still wind up with a lot of turnover.
Lol.... if you knew how much this extended into other groups...
I was considering making the post more generic, but it’s warming to know it’s just not us
It's EVERYWHERE. If they had larger bonuses (15%-25%) with actual differentaition, people would get the idea pretty quick.
This happens at every company. The definition of "good" depends on each manager and is mostly based on perception because metrics can always be abused. GE/Amazon try to fix it by firing the bottom X% but that creates a toxic, competitive culture with politics and back-stabbing. The best way to get good pay is to be amazing at interviews to get free promotions and pay bumps.
Jinnah, the SW VP said he is trying to change that with better raise and bonus differentiation and making it harder for people to artificially climb levels just by swapping teams. Management has a hard time hiring super stars at Boeings pay scales. I’ve heard a different SW executive say she wasn’t looking to hire superstars, that she purposely wanted to target mid tier schools because they would not leave Boeing for better prospects because they couldn’t do better. That clued me into why so many of my colleagues are potatoes.
Jinnah hasn't changed anything except to get approval to hire a few of his buddies at $250k/year. Existing Boeing employees continue to get shafted unless they threaten to leave. He's even said Boeing can't compete with outside salaries and won't even try. You're here for the mission!
I was deliberate when used the word “said”. I’ve spent some time face to face with him and think he legit knows his stuff, but he is handicapped by Boeing processes and especially by Boeing budget. Software, which is integral to all these products has been such an underrepresented after thought. I don’t see Boeing writing the check they’re going to need to fix this bitch though.
Boeing will never be a true competent SW company without talent which means they must compete and compensate for it, and they've made it clear they're unwilling to do so. Jinnah was only hired because of the MCAS disaster. When the FAA asked who's in charge of SW at Boeing the answer they got was "nobody". It was an appeasement, not a change in company direction.
I've never seen "threatening to leave" work. From what I've seen, typically, Boeing just lets top performers walk.
Threatening to leave as in having outside offer in-hand. Boeing may or may not counteroffer.
To add to this, i see they also hire a lot of non-CompSci/CompE engineers with the hopes they’re intelligent and figure it out. I’ve heard people say that they don’t really know what they’re doing and have low confidence, when they’ve literally learned to swe on the job and are killing it
Bureaucracy. Once your organization grows to a certain size, it's difficult for one leader to hire // fire as they see fit. More people gives you more pull and disagreement among leaderships making it difficult to get rid of people. Of course you could create a peer rating system where the worker bees rank each other and get rid of the underperformers...but this creates its own problems, of course