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Boeing's 737 Max software outsourced to lower-paid engineers

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Re: Boeing's 737 Max software outsourced to lower-paid engineers

#21
post #18

Money saved by firing experienced engs and outsourcing the development Why is that so hard to understand? Massive fail at risk management maybe?

Can't sell planes, or fly the ones that exist, and pay out huge untold sums in death lawsuits.

Yeah, that too, after the fact seems so stupidly obvious.

Re: Boeing's 737 Max software outsourced to lower-paid engineers

#22
post #13
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Still, for the 787, HCL gave Boeing a remarkable price – free, according to Sam Swaro, an associate vice president who pitched HCL’s services at a San Diego conference sponsored by Avionics International magazine in June. He said the company took no up-front payments on the 787 and only started collecting payments based on sales years later, an “innovative business model” he offered to extend to others in the indus…

How is that allowed? It is like basically the equivalent of dumping products below market and production price like what China frequently does to steel.

Why wouldn't this be allowed? This is the company equivalent of a person working on commission vs salary. Salary is more stable and predictable, commission is riskier but has higher potential for upside.

Re: Boeing's 737 Max software outsourced to lower-paid engineers

#23
post #13
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Still, for the 787, HCL gave Boeing a remarkable price – free, according to Sam Swaro, an associate vice president who pitched HCL’s services at a San Diego conference sponsored by Avionics International magazine in June. He said the company took no up-front payments on the 787 and only started collecting payments based on sales years later, an “innovative business model” he offered to extend to others in the indus…

How is that allowed? It is like basically the equivalent of dumping products below market and production price like what China frequently does to steel.

It’s more like becoming a partner or working for shares. Rather than getting a fixed price up front you take a (presumably larger) payment at a later date but accept the risk that there may be no payment.

Re: Boeing's 737 Max software outsourced to lower-paid engineers

#24
I’m not discounting the possibility of bad workmanship by Boeing. However “temporary workers making as little as $9 an hour to develop and test software” does sound to me like the reporter might have found some highly paid mechanical Turk style employees given the job of battering against a solidly built piece of software just because there would be a possibility of finding a problem.

If the sentence was “the mean salary of $9/hr” then I would be thinking differently.

Re: Boeing's 737 Max software outsourced to lower-paid engineers

#25
>>"...recalled one manager saying at an all-hands meeting that Boeing didn’t need senior engineers because its products were mature. "

Whatever manager that was, should never be working in an aerospace context, where one design failure or fault can literally kill hundreds of people in minutes (and in this case, did exactly that).

Clearly, Boeing has become infested with people who literally do not understand the fundamental life-and-death consequences with which they are dealing, and who treat everything as fungible commodities. The entire story is essentially about how the outsourcing and commoditizing just expanded and expanded until now, when there were fatal consequences for the passengers, and perhaps even for the company (TBD).

Unless this changes, this is no longer a company who can be trusted with such life-and-death engineering decisions.

Re: Boeing's 737 Max software outsourced to lower-paid engineers

#30
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go to India?

That's usually the case, though in my experience from doing a bunch of re-writes of code outsourced to India - you really do get what you pay for.

Had to run an outsourced team out of India a few years back. Had to sign off on the time / pay paperwork. I believe their Senior-level folks were costing us $20 - $25 per hour. Not sure what they made after the agency took their cut. $9 sounds like very Junior-level staffing.

As for code quality, this team was working on a Spring / Java application. They were instructed to use Spring JDBC templates instead of Hibernate. So of course they build their own query-builder that was just concatenating strings. Naturally we paid them to clean up their own mess.

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