They adopted a philosophy of management that explicitly assigned no value to institutional knowledge, and thus eliminated anyone who had it as they were not considered worth their salary. From the article:
> 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.
This has been done so many times at this point, shouldn't MBAs have case studies covering the "how companies have rotted from shit decisions made by bean counters" 101 course?
Does it matter to the MBAs? The effect is on long enough terms that they'll be gone by the time everything falls over. They're not there to maximize long-term value, just to get good enough to get promoted and then maybe switch companies.
In that case, the causality is easy to determine. But that’s not the case with more complex systems, so it’s easier to rationalize a bias (I don’t need this expensive QA)
This doesn't explain Microsoft though, as that's probably a special case. They simply eliminated the Windows QA department, and instead let users do the QA. Why not? It's not like their users are going to switch OSes.
I don’t know about that specifically, but I’ve seen that as a common occurrence as a cost cutting measure in low risk situations. In that case, the risk is low because 1) it’s not safety critical and 2) the switching moat is large enough to ensure they don’t lose customers
In my experience, the term "tribal knowledge" is a pejorative, and has been disparaged by many authors (some, that I respect).
Also, in my experience, "tribal knowledge" is an essential ingredient in classical Maximum Quality engineering. I'm not saying that it's the only way, but I have seen many, many other ways fail.
It's something that -no exaggeration- humans have been doing for thousands of years.
It's just that we have a crew at the top that sincerely believe they know better. Every now and then, one hits it out of the park.
> 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.