The tenure of the average Boeing engineer is getting shorter, as rank-and-file talent departs the struggling plane maker.
Boeing is cutting jobs by 10 per cent across the company, and this month a second round of lay-offs brought the total of union-represented engineers leaving to 400.
The blow to morale comes as engineers — freed from the “velvet handcuffs” of long-term benefits — are contrasting Boeing’s turmoil with the allure of space companies staking out exciting goals.
The average tenure of a Boeing engineer has fallen over the past decade from 16.4 years to 12.6 years, according to data from the union representing 12,000 Boeing engineers, the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace. Tenure shortened in almost every age bracket, with employees in their 20s and 30s averaging fewer years, as well as those in their late 40s through 65.
The risk of this “brain drain”, as analysts, recruiters and union officials have described it, is that it drags on current operations and could make it harder for Boeing to launch its next new plane.
“All of this experience is gone,” said Matt Kempf, SPEEA’s senior director for compensation and retirement. That raises concerns because “aerospace engineers aren’t made, they’re grown”.
Boeing said that it “continues to be in a strong position to compete for and retain top aerospace engineering talent with market-leading pay, benefits and work-life balance.
“Over several years, the voluntary attrition rate for Boeing Engineering has remained in the low single digits and has decreased since 2022.”
Competition with the space industry to hire and retain talent is one factor in engineers’ diminishing tenure at Boeing.
The company is fertile recruiting ground for Blue Origin and SpaceX as the space industry has boomed in Washington state over the last four to six years, said Stan Shull, founder of the advisory firm Alliance Velocity. He estimates about 15 per cent of Blue Origin’s workforce in Puget Sound has prior experience at Boeing.
Boeing has struggled in recent years. Two fatal crashes led to a worldwide grounding of the plane in 2019, while this year it suffered two public mishaps, first when a door panel flew off a jet during a commercial flight and then when Nasa chose rival SpaceX to return two astronauts to Earth.
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The catastrophes of the last five years have left the company trying to repair its balance sheet, and chief executive Kelly Ortberg said in October that Boeing would eliminate 10 per cent of its workforce, or 17,000 jobs.
Boeing also has held back on announcing a new plane, depriving engineers of a moonshot project to excite imaginations. The last “clean sheet” aeroplane was launched 20 years ago and became the 787.
Ortberg said in October that “at the right time in the future, we need to develop a new aeroplane, but we have a lot of work to do before then”. By contrast, rival SpaceX said it is pursuing interplanetary travel.
“Engineers are simple,” said Bank of America analyst Ron Epstein. “If you put them in a room with Coca-Cola, doughnuts, a pizza and a cool problem, they’ll never leave. So do you want to fix some old aeroplanes that are having production problems, or do you want to go to Mars?”
Seyka Mejeur is chief executive of AdAstra, a Washington-based recruiting firm specialising in engineering talent. Not every engineer can make the jump from aviation to space — they need experience on safety-critical systems — and not all of them want to. Some prefer the work-life balance available at Boeing, versus the long hours demanded at newer companies.
Still, Mejeur said she has watched the outflow from Boeing and other legacy defence contractors for the last five years, a trend she said has accelerated this year because of Boeing’s troubles.
“One of the bigger pushbacks candidates have about start-ups is the risk,” she said. “They traditionally have felt safer going with a legacy organisation. When these legacy organisations go through these big lay-offs . . . it opens them up to considering more risky start-ups, because now that factor’s neutral.”
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Boeing can no longer stem departures through the promise of a pension and retiree healthcare, powerful draws that used to keep employees there for decades. The company ended retiree healthcare for those hired after 2006 and the pension for those hired after 2013.
SPEEA said about 1,700 engineers retired in 2022, compared to a normal range of 240 to 360. A change in federal law and climbing interest rates meant a significant number of engineers needed to retire that year or see their pension lump sum reduced by up to $350,000.
Union officials say the departures cut into Boeing’s “tribal knowledge”, the shorthand term for workers’ understanding of how to design and build planes, cultivated over decades. The remaining engineers are less efficient because they now might need to spend an hour looking up the answer to their question, rather than asking a more experienced colleague.
It also has created workflow problems for Boeing employees assigned to act as inspectors on behalf of the US Federal Aviation Administration, a programme known as Organization Designation Authorization, said Rich Plunkett, SPEEA’s director of strategic development.
ODA members told FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker when he visited Boeing earlier this month that Boeing employees presenting their work for ODA approval sometimes lacked the experience to do so properly, Plunkett said.
A February report written by aviation experts from airlines, academia, unions and Boeing itself found that “experienced personnel are leaving and not being replaced and efforts to retain them are not effective or timely . . . A similar problem exists in the FAA and its corresponding oversight of the ODA.”
Boeing said engineers who belong to the ODA unit were some of the manufacturer’s most experienced, and their coaching was a vital part of training early-career engineers.
The FAA said it would continue “aggressive oversight” of the plane maker.
Boeing’s approach to the recent lay-offs has also affected work, Plunkett said. In the past engineers typically worked their notice period. Now the company is paying them for 60 days but telling them to stop working.
“We’re getting calls from people saying, ‘Who’s going to pick up my work?’” he said.
But the biggest question raised by engineers leaving Boeing is what will happen when the company embarks on designing and building a new plane. Epstein compared the problem to muscle memory: “If you want to design new stuff some day, you have to use that muscle.”
