There is a lot of pride to be had from seeing something you worked on, with your own hands, successfully work - look at mission control videos for examples of how excited people get. Conversely, if it fails, there’s a lot of disappointment.
You can’t compare something like these massive pieces of hardware with people inside failing and taking all your work with it, with some software launch that maybe fails and takes a couple of bugs to be fixed before relaunch.
The Boeing story is tragic because they were a source of pride for America overall, played a huge part in winning WW2, made some great technological advances, but succumbed to MBAs fleecing all their goodwill. There are still world class aerospace engineers working there, and sure they could probably get a job somewhere else, but they might need to uproot their lives to do so.
Interestingly the market for Aerospace engineers is really small. For many of those guys, they could only go work at Airbus or Embraer. Some could potentially get jobs in military with Lockheed or something. Very few may be able to find work with Textron or similar.
You can’t compare something like these massive pieces of hardware with people inside failing and taking all your work with it, with some software launch that maybe fails and takes a couple of bugs to be fixed before relaunch.
The Boeing story is tragic because they were a source of pride for America overall, played a huge part in winning WW2, made some great technological advances, but succumbed to MBAs fleecing all their goodwill. There are still world class aerospace engineers working there, and sure they could probably get a job somewhere else, but they might need to uproot their lives to do so.