Tenure decreased in almost every age bracket and the risk of this “brain drain” as analyst and union officials have called it, is that it drags on current operations and could make it more difficult for Boeing to launch its next new plane.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/average-tenure-boeing-engineers-drops-113008684.html
Boeing has outsourced most of the actual design engineering to suppliers. It’s actually difficult to find a true design position at Boeing. Before they closed the design centers in Moscow and Ukraine, that’s where most of the internal design engineering was going.
I don’t know how as a company you can expect to design a next generation aircraft when most of your design engineering is being done by suppliers or suppliers.
If they thought the delays with the 787 was bad they have no idea what will happen when they try to do another airplane with a workforce. that’s never designed an airplane before
AI will solve everything
Boeing doesn’t think they need senior engineers anymore. They believe all they need is a lead engineer and level one and level two engineers working for them.
One of the concessions the engineering union made was that they no longer guaranteed retention ratings based on years of service for engineers.
After that concession at the next layoffs during Covid they laid off a lot of 20 years plus veteran engineers.
I believe the long-term plan was to replace them with engineers in Moscow and Ukraine. They were caught off guard having to close both of those design centers.
But it’s well known that Boeing doesn’t like their older engineers. Or at least they didn’t when they used to have some. So many have left or retired that they don’t have enough experienced people but they don’t only look at the salary.
Boeing is no longer an engineering company. In fact it's more lucrative to be a mechanic. A DE's OT pay is regular + 5 dollars (even on holidays). Incentives for patents are 2000, even though you may be saving the company half a million a year. You have to essentially beg for a promotion (even when you get far exceeds PMs at the end of every year). We get blamed for every fu--ing thing, and when we come up with a new design or improvement it takes years and countless loops to get it implemented. Recent layoffs impacted mostly engineers while MTs got a massive raise, and bonus. Need a few more reasons for lower tenure? Point is, they are not making it very inviting to become a DE.