Again, great response, I think you understand the dynamics better than I. HN is gonna cut off this thread soon but I think your last line helps me sum up my point well:
You can have a company culture that encourages skirting regulations and cutting corners in production regardless of dividends/buybacks and executive compensation.
IMO, a good way to avoid such a culture is to choose and cultivate quality engineers. A better way is to also entice them with high pay and/or prestigious projects. The best way, which is entirely foolproof, is just to have more money so that corner cutting doesn’t come up. And given the scale of Boeing’s behavior, I thinks it’s reasonable to say they could’ve expanded QA/safety/training/testing/etc budgets by a LARGE degree.
In other words: imagine I bought Airbus (lucky crypto run, ofc) and immediately transferred 10-20% of their liquid(izable) assets as cash into my bank account. And otherwise left the company running as is. Wouldn’t you think that’s the most relevant fact when discussing changes to their engineering culture in the preceding years?
Re: “it’s always been this way so if can’t be that”, I don’t think that’s a solid enough premise to support that conclusion. A) context changes, and b) I think it really is crazy out there these days. From Jacobin:
In a 2017 article for The American Prospect that he coauthored with Sakinç, Lazonick identified one especially distressing instance in which Boeing neglected to follow through on its planned redesign of the 737 Max airplane, a project that was estimated to cost $7 billion at the time. That amount, he wrote, was what “on average, Boeing has been spending on stock buybacks annually since 2013.”
In another analysis, Marie Christine Duggan, an economic historian at Keene State, concluded the amount that Boeing spent on buybacks in recent decades has generally outweighed spending on capital expenditures like upgrades and maintenance. Duggan found that in 2017, at the height of its buyback frenzy, “Boeing’s spending on dividends and stock buybacks was 66 percent of total spending, while only 9 percent of Boeing’s cash went into new equipment to manufacture planes.”
Many of Boeing’s mass stock buybacks came after President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, despite the fact that Boeing and other major companies promised to invest their resulting tax savings on capital expenditure and innovation.
