At the end of last month, on the same day that Boeing touted plans to hire 10,000 people this year, senior leadership convened virtual meetings internally to break bad news to nonunion staff in human resources and finance.

Despite the growth elsewhere, those corporate positions will be slashed through substantial job cuts and layoffs.

"We expect about 2,000 reductions this year primarily in Finance and HR through a combination of attrition and layoffs," Boeing confirmed Monday.

Boeing is outsourcing about a third of those jobs to Tata Consulting Services in Bengaluru, India.

The rest will disappear as Boeing reduces its finance and HR support services, according to Mike Friedman, a senior director of communications at Boeing.

"Over time, some of our corporate functions have grown quite large. And with that growth tends to come bureaucracy or disparate systems that are inefficient," Friedman said. "So we're streamlining."

Even with the 2,000 white-collar job cuts, plus attrition as employees retire throughout the company, Friedman said the push to hire production workers and engineers will ensure that overall Boeing will "significantly grow" this year, particularly in the Puget Sound region.

With ramping up jet deliveries the top priority, he said Boeing Chief Financial Officer Brian West is "working to focus our resources and hiring in the factories, in manufacturing and engineering."

About 1,500 jobs will be cut in finance, about a quarter of the roughly 5,800 total companywide, and up to 400 more in HR, about 15% of the total there.

Staff in those organizations, many of them longtime employees, are shellshocked by the news that their jobs may be gone later this year.

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