Boeing says it can’t make money with fixed-price contracts
arstechnica.com
Boeing says it can’t make money with fixed-price contracts::"Rest assured we haven't signed any fixed-price development contracts, nor intend to."
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Jeez, if you can't make money off of defense industry contracts, you should probably just hang it up.
They can, they just use cost-plus contracts so they make money no matter how far off schedule or budget they end up.
Doing work with government, I understand why - ten billion different stakeholders to wrangle, strained budgets (probably not as big of an issue in defense but rampant throughout the rest of gov't), lawmakers changing things mid-project that have a material effect on how the project is carried out, and endless redtape throughout the process. I don't propose FF for gov projects either because inevitably they violate our assumptions by not getting their shit in order which kills the timeline, adds a ton of overhead, and results in a change order anyway which then just starts the whole process of approvals all over again.
I was under the impression that those sweetheart deals were getting hard to come by, but I don't work bids.
There's still a few out there. Take Clear for example, the subscription line skipping service that works alongside TSA.
Somebody's palms got heavily greased to allow this company to thrive in the airport security space.
Admittedly, it was quite a while ago that I had anything to do with government contracting, so you could be right.