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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

#31

Post by NKosmatos »

stcredzero wrote: post #3

How in the world does one hire $9 an hour software engineers?

Without wanting to sound disrespectful, most of the engineers outside US and some EU countries, get paid a lot less from what you’re used to and from what you read in major tech sites. I know a lot of good engineers in many countries (Greece, Croatia, south-east EU, India...) that get paid less than 9$/hr (myself included). The bad thing with all the big companies outsourcing positions and working with external partners is that it’s difficult to distinguish the good engineers from the copy-paste developers, self-taught coders and really bad engineers that give some countries a bad name. I have first hand experience of really bad engineers, working for top companies, who get paid low wages and don’t care about the quality of their work. I guess that’s how the system works...

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

#32

Post by mikeash »

pseudolus wrote: post #16
mehrdadn wrote: post #9

When is the media going to get the message that this wasn't a software issue?

The final verdict isn't in, but it appears to have been a systems engineering problem with a software component.

The software performed exactly as designed. The problem is a faulty spec for how it should behave. The software is pretty much incidental.

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

#33

Post by meowface »

crorella wrote: post #11

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

For one, in part because many managers don't really understand software or software projects and think it's mostly just people * man-hours. "Through this cost-saving measure, we've tripled the amount of people working on the project and expect to reduce the amount of time it'll take to complete by two-thirds without incurring any additional costs." In their minds, it's an easy win.

And they were probably regularly reassured by various internal and external entities that the code was high-quality and thoroughly tested and very safe. Obviously they're not going to outsource if they think it's likely to cause a safety hazard; they just didn't place the odds of this outcome anywhere near what the actual odds ended up being.

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

#35

Post by tomxor »

mieseratte wrote: post #30
tomxor wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Hiberna…

> Naturally we paid them to clean up their own mess.

Heh, basically funding external developers too learn without the benefit of retaining them then.

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

#36

Post by pjc50 »

crorella wrote: post #11

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

The risk management is being TBTF. In a nationalist era, is the US going to buy planes from Airbus, or are they going to bail out Boeing?

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

#37

Post by dongping »

crorella wrote: post #11

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

The managers who saved money would have been promoted well before any accident happens.

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

#38

Post by newsoul2019 »

chimpburger wrote: post #27

"Rabin, the former software engineer, recalled one manager saying at an all-hands meeting that Boeing didn’t need senior engineers because its products were mature." Boeing is dead to me.

Understand the sentiment, but can anyone be sure that Airbus isn't doing something similar.

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

#40

Post by salex89 »

mikeash wrote: post #32
pseudolus wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The final verdict isn't in, but it appears to have been a systems engineering problem with a software component.

The software performed exactly as designed. The problem is a faulty spec for how it should behave. The software is pretty much incidental.

You are correct, however... I can't imagine a single engineer with any kind of proper education (formal or not) implementing any piece of software or hardware without thinking:"One sensor? Really? What's the failure rate on this thing". That might have been enough to stop the chan of events.
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