A primer: I am the senior metallurgy technician for a small aerospace manufacturing company. We make helicopter transmissions, cruise missile parts, jet engine parts, rocket engine parts, etc.
A couple years ago I blew the whistle on my company for coming fraud against the government. Specifically, my (then) boss was falsifying test documents. But upon further investigation, surprise! So was everybody else above him.
Last year the company settled out of court. I get my old job back. The business gets sold to another company. My old boss gets the axe. The people above him for the most part did a good job of covering their asses and keep theirs.
Fast forward to this week. A helicopter program we work on is facing a crucial deadline: the Navy has ordered the prime contractor to find somebody else to start making their parts, they want their damned years delayed helicopter, and they want it NOW! (It was supposed to be in full production in 2014)
We have new tooling that we are going to use to make those parts, better, faster, cheaper. We have to make one piece, and prove via cutting it up and testing it for tensile strength to prove it’s up to snuff.
It fails.
It fails because we use an exotic alloy that we aren’t really good at yet, though we’ve been at it for a long time.
Everybody above my boss and his boss’s level are, well, to my knowledge there aren’t words in English that come close to the level of anger and hostility in the air.
I convince my boss and his boss to organize a meeting with all the various stakeholders to go over the failure.
I have discovered that all signs point to a “process” problem that could be resolved if we spend $50K for new equipment and take time to research and implement that technology in order to validate the metal meets a certain criteria before we make a part from it.
Also, we can look at historical data from previous tests of these parts, but we have to omit some data, because it was discovered that statistics really can’t explain some of the passable results on those previous tests.
The Product Engineer walks out upon hearing that. His wife, the Quality Director walked out before the meeting even started because “I don’t have time to play these fucking games”.
(Non-salaried “hourly” employees aren’t allowed in meetings unless they regard disciplinary action, let alone chair engineer meetings)
An hour after the meeting, my boss’s boss’s boss calls my bosses into a meeting to order them to apologize to our quality director and to put my immediate boss on an employee improvement program.
And shit, I thought the meeting had went really well.