Boeing is an engineering and manufacturing company, that is the culture. There are a lot of false narratives out there about Boeing's internal culture being a bunch of bean counters, etc. Of course there are pockets inside any large company that may not be ideal and mistakes are made in the development of any complex system. In my experience, however, Boeing is filled with dedicated engineering professionals trying to do the right thing in the face of increasing complexity. Sometimes there are structural problems in an organization and you get bad results despite everybody's best efforts.
Boeing, like the government, has a lot of antiquated heavy weight processes that slow development down. As a field matures, it gets more complex, many past mistakes result in new processes to follow. Eventually, it is cruft that is difficult to remove and hard to navigate. Overtime, this increases development costs and slows projects down.
Personally, probably the most difficult thing I've experienced is moving towards iterative processes (away from waterfall) and having a government customer wanting to support it but not really being able to.
For example, if one were to begin to develop/evolve a complex system, the government about half way through would want a list of materials so they can be reviewed for a variety or purposes. Well, in an evolving system, this list is generally everchanging as people learn more about the domain and are able to make better choices over time. Something as simple as a list of materials can create all kinds of headaches. I could probably give a dozen or so examples where the government wants to, but cannot interface with modern engineering programs and practices.
I also know that both the government and Boeing are trying to change, but it is difficult to change direction when so much of a large behemoth is made to work a certain way.
Boeing, like the government, has a lot of antiquated heavy weight processes that slow development down. As a field matures, it gets more complex, many past mistakes result in new processes to follow. Eventually, it is cruft that is difficult to remove and hard to navigate. Overtime, this increases development costs and slows projects down.
Personally, probably the most difficult thing I've experienced is moving towards iterative processes (away from waterfall) and having a government customer wanting to support it but not really being able to.
For example, if one were to begin to develop/evolve a complex system, the government about half way through would want a list of materials so they can be reviewed for a variety or purposes. Well, in an evolving system, this list is generally everchanging as people learn more about the domain and are able to make better choices over time. Something as simple as a list of materials can create all kinds of headaches. I could probably give a dozen or so examples where the government wants to, but cannot interface with modern engineering programs and practices.
I also know that both the government and Boeing are trying to change, but it is difficult to change direction when so much of a large behemoth is made to work a certain way.