It IS more complicated than that. It's not easy to build within a 1 hour commute of a dense population center. All that land is owned, built, and called for. Calling it "overpopulation" could be fair.
A parallel problem is immigration and, as the top comment pointed out, cheap credit encouraging vacancy.
No one wants to say it, but immigration is a huge driver of housing un-affordability. Skilled H1b immigration and/or foreign buyers drives up home prices, and unskilled illegal immigration drives up rents.
I feel like most of us were wise to the fact that this was a terrible idea on day one. It was funny to watch MBAs try to cash in on the "next big thing" in tech, though.
I recently got a subscription to the HBR and am surprised at how...misguided it is. It's shocking how this locus of low competency is destroying American business. Ditto on the outsourcing, too - left a job at a blue-chip American company because its culture had been internally rotted by outsourcing. (Of course, they were hilariously struggling to keep and retain the talent necessary to stay ahead of the tech curve, now institutionally recognizing they've made a massive mistake. Most good engineers had a tenure of 6 months.)
I think it's important to be passionate about your life's work. However, maintaining "good enough" across all dimensions of particular lifestyle or role is actually incredibly challenging.
Even for a standard engineer, think how many you know can code well, be leaders, AND can write good documentation.
For most things, it's always a "pick 2 out of 3" situation.
Dude, thank you for this. My team has been trying to figure this out - we know we will eventually need a way to utilize in a low-level context, but couldn't dig up any cases of such an implementation. In addition, we were constantly frustrated by the lack of HW acceleration that created a performance bottleneck. Great work!
I would agree that this is narrow minded - and would say that this opinion is a result of exactly what you mentioned - my interaction with them being fairly limited and clinical, despite them having a direct leadership role in my org.
I would argue that this is the problem unto itself. The idea that a manager can work invisibly "behind the scenes" to create these conditions is the squarest negative stereotype of the MBA - that they are clerical, remote, number-crunchers who don't have an intuitive human grasp of the unique challenges their teams face, because they lack experience where the rubber meets of the road of their organization. I think this Boeing case conforms to this stereotype, as does my personal experience.
But I don't believe they're a scourge, or anything. I quantified it with "a lot" but not "most" ;)
Honestly, and I'm being really frank here, a lot of the management "expertise" at fortune 50+ firms that come from traditional (re: MBA) tracks has just two tools in their toolbelt:
1. Meetings to "align"
2. Cracking the whip.
That's it. That's all they have. They have poor insight into creating team chemistry, culture, focused work environments, mentorship, long-term planning, QA processes, sourcing efficiency feedback, etc. - all those things that are crucial to boosting productivity and creating supersonic teams. The people that really know their stuff and can work miracles are people that have been in the trenches for 20 years, regardless of profession. And they hands-down make the best managers.
That's my honest 2 cents, it's a bit of disgruntlement from working in large enterprise environments with engineering and technology.
I heard all silicon valley gurus stating they were "bearish on VR, bullish on "AR". This proliferated as a mantra throughout the industry. I thought they were wrong then, and believed the opposite - because I had a working VR headset that was awesome, but had only heard somewhat meh things about existing AR prototypes.
Until great AR hardware comes out, I'm still sticking with the same opinion.
I read Napoleon: A life - it was a great book with fascinating insights.
For example, Napoleon's first big break came not particularly from outstanding competence but because, in the midst of the french revolution, all reputable officers had fled for the hills in fear of getting guillotined. Napoleon was one of the only halfway competent officers still around in Paris, so they picked him for a mission where he performed heroically.
Additionally, the myth that Napoleon only slept for 4 hours a night is both true in false. It's literally true, but he was known for falling asleep in the middle of roundtable meetings, and all those who were afraid of him didn't dare wake him - so his lieutenants just sat in silence for an hour while he dozed off!
Lastly, his infamous defeat in Russia was initially a sound plan - he was going to capture Moscow and spend the winter there - and he actually defeated the Russian army in combat, forcing them into a retreat. What was incredibly audacious of the Russians was that they burned their own capital city to the ground in order to prevent Napoleon from wintering there, which was incredibly brutal and unexpected. It's like the modern equivalent of American military command nuking NYC to prevent its federal gold reserves from being taking.
I remember reading about the hysteria of this 4 years ago and wondering if me, a non-foodie, could actually taste the difference in chocolate quality. I finally had my first mast brothers bar recently and...
...yeah. It taste like a slightly better quality hershey's bar, definitely not a $10 bar of chocolate. I was kind of floored, it was actually pretty bad.
A parallel problem is immigration and, as the top comment pointed out, cheap credit encouraging vacancy.