Go North Young Man

Dominic Vautier
6/2012

I went north. I took one of the jobs at Boeing and moved.

It seamed that my roots were once again pulling me back to the land of my childhood.  That’s where I started out, in Seattle, and that’s where I will probably end up.  Such is life, sometimes a circle--or maybe always a circle.  I missed the rain and the fantastic water sports.  But you get used to the rain.

Flight of Fancy

And thus began my final journey.  I can’t even begin to describe my 23 years at The Boeing Company because there were so many things going on.  My time there was a mixture of great excitement and achievement, anxiety, frustration and periods of absolute boredom.  One adventure seemed to proceed the other in some kind of diabolic rotation, but I was always on the go, always moving.  The excitement remains most of all in my memory.  The times of frustration and disappointment are faded into the background and just remain as shadows.  The good times are still there.

Boeing had many, many programmers, somewhere in the thousands I suspect, great hoards of guys and the organizations and departments. They were so big and had such technical names that nobody knew what other people were doing or how they were doing it.  My official title was “analyst” which meant that I could be just about anything I wanted to be, and do what I wanted to do, and work where I wanted to work.  Some years later the company got around to instituting “job descriptions” by which workers were required to become part of a classification and were expected to work within that classification.  The world began to close in on the freewheeling, the lose cannons and the "independent contributors".

I always considered myself a generalist, i.e. one who is not limited to a defined job description but who makes his own job description.  I wanted to do everything, and my resume was indeed copious by that time.  But job security is not measured by your value to a company.  Rather it is measured by what they think you are doing and how important your job description is and who you work for and how well you can find a spot that nobody knows how to do.  Boeing has always been a company subject to economic vicissitudes, so layoffs did come, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, but they were a fact of life with such a company that depends so much on economic conditions and the vicissitudes of government and the market.

In this environment of uncertainty, there developed the culture of “rice-bowl-ism”.  This mains that if employees wanted to be protected from layoff they needed to find a “rice bowl”, that is, a position or job that convinced every manager that the task performed by the rice bowl was so critical that it had to remain, or serious delays and dire shortages would be the certain result.

My first job at Boeing was with customer support spares pricing.  It was a simple system that gathered all kinds of information from other systems, putting it together on databases and helping the estimators do their job of estimating.  I was project manager with four guys under me.  We were very successful and we wound up doing much more than the original requirements.  I kept getting bonuses and rewards and bicycles and business trips and meaningless certificates.

But again I got restless and wanted to move to another department.  I really desired to get into machine tooling down in Auburn, so I moved to a group called MRD (Manufacturing Research and Development).  Most of the data processing systems they had in place were true troglodytes, but nobody had the nerve to rewrite them for fear of making mistakes.  Mistakes are always part of development.  I spent a year in that group.  It seems every day we got different assignments.  Most of our work was with automated composite manufacturing.  Composite parts are laid up on a tool.  Each layer of material has to be placed in a particular angle. Then the part is covered with a plastic wrap and depressurized, and then sent into a big kiln and heated.  Sometimes the processes I worked on would suddenly disappear completely (into a black hole) leaving no trace, and we were assigned a new project.  It was a strange and unrewarding environment.

I started to look into post-processing.  Post processing is a special program that takes the center line data from a CAD (computer automated drafting) environment and modifies it to work on a specific NC milling machine.  We had a variety of machines in Auburn.  Many were three-axis Cincinnati mills.  The post-processor boss ran a tight ship so I gave up that idea.  I had a very supportive boss, but he did not want to mess with the postprocessor guys.  They had a rice bowl.

About this time my old manager asked me to come back to Renton for a special assignment so I went back to customer support.  I was put in charge of three new systems, which were all in deplorable shape and needed to be redesigned and rewritten from scratch.  The next few years were very exciting.  I organized a crew and we went to work.

My first challenge was to reorganize the drawing control system.  It keeps track of engineering drawings.  It controls where the drawings are, who’s working on them, and at what level of design they are.  Engineering drawings are the life blood of the company.

The redesign was pretty straightforward.  It was a consolidation of several different systems that independently controlled their own drawings.  This eliminated the constant problems of duplication.  On the old system drawing control cards were stacked in these long rows of file cabinets and the file girls had to constantly run back and forth holding phones with very long cords, that often got twisted together. Under the new system all they had to do was sit in front of a terminal.  The girls’ main complaint was how they could keep their figures.

The difficult part of this system was implementation or "buy-in". because it involved four divisions cooperating together.  Everybody had their own “rice bowl” and wanted to control their own drawings.  It took many long hours of discussions to get the divisions to accept the plan, and a long time to install.

My management changed again and they didn’t like me because I was too independent, so I became dissatisfied and was offered a job with WIRS.  WIRS is the wiring system at Boeing.  This is what the engineers use to design wires, wire bundles (wire harnesses), connections, and it tells the workers how to put the wire bundles into an airplane.  It does a lot of other things too.  WIRS hasn’t changed much since WWII.  The company has tried to redesign it several times but each time failed.  It has caused the downfall of many a manager.  So WIRS is the third rail.  Touch it and you die.  The company installed a new system for hard parts about 15 years ago called DCAC which did the same thing with hard parts, but WIRS took ten years to install and a lot of managers lost their jobs and fell upon their swords over DCAC and the company was shut down for a week because of it.  WIRS deals with wiring and is more complex than DCAC which handles only with hard parts.  Many of the parts on an airplane are wiring.

Anyway I moved to WIRS but decided to work on a new graphic project that was supposed to do away with physical mockups.  It was CAD/CAM based.  I did a lot of work in this area which was never used or ever implemented completely.

Into the GAD/CAM monster world...