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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

#71

Post by AnimalMuppet »

iamnotacrook wrote: post #44
la_barba wrote: post #41

I think this is just rabble-rousing. For all the flack outsourcing gets, if you hire an incompetent person, and they fuck up, you're still responsible for hiring an unqualified person. I don't think it matters if that person was outsourced or not. I haven't worked with any offshore teams, but friends tell me you can do what are called "client interviews" where the client, in this case Boeing, has the option of interv…

"but friends tell me you can do what are called "client interviews" where the client, in this case Boeing, has the option of interviewing the actual people who will be assigned to work on your project." LOL! Ahem. You'll discover that they get someone competent in for the phone interview and you'll later discover that the story is now that the person you spoke to was representative - in terms of skills, experience an…

If they're in offices right across from Boeing Field, you'd think that Boeing might be able to do actual face-to-face interviews with the real (not just representative) people. You also might think that anything less is definitively a management fail.

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

#72

Post by rossdavidh »

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?

I have seen this kind of problem before (never in a case where lives were on the line), and I called it "pathological optimism". If you are in a corporate culture of the sort that lionizes "can-do" thinking, then saying "that won't work" is going to look defeatist.

I have to wonder if seeing SV startups go to multi-billion dollar companies on a regular basis, has given CEOs in other industries a case of envy. But more likely, it's just that pathological optimism works, really well, right up until that moment when it doesn't. Taking risks in order to lower costs makes the bottom line better, which seems to call for more of the same, right up until the moment when the risk explodes in your face.

It is not unlike the attitude towards software security, in many industries. People harping about security risks seems like just all cost and no benefit, right up until the point where you have a big problem.

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

#73

Post by CydeWeys »

rossdavidh wrote: post #72
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?

I have seen this kind of problem before (never in a case where lives were on the line), and I called it "pathological optimism". If you are in a corporate culture of the sort that lionizes "can-do" thinking, then saying "that won't work" is going to look defeatist. I have to wonder if seeing SV startups go to multi-billion dollar companies on a regular basis, has given CEOs in other industries a case of envy. But mor…

> I have to wonder if seeing SV startups go to multi-billion dollar companies on a regular basis, has given CEOs in other industries a case of envy.

If so, they're learning the wrong lessons. SV unicorns become valuable because of explosive growth, not because they underpay their engineers. Just the opposite; a lot of engineers at SV startups are paid quite handsomely (especially the early ones at successful unicorns). SV startups don't win on cost-cutting.

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

#74

Post by throwawayMUSE »

danielg6 wrote: post #64
chrismatheson wrote: post #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 sa…

The article mentioned recent grads (working in Seattle for an India-based company) who wrote code on specifications, not “mechanical turk”-style employees. It was followed by a quote from a former Boeing software engineer affirming this. Is your issue just with the amount ($9) being paid?

I worked at a Fortune 10 in the early 2010s for several years. We had a small army of local and offshore Indian contractors through Larsen and Toubro Infotech, an Indian IT company. They were paid between $10-20 an hour, many couldn’t understand English. These guys have no CS background and would get stumped writing fizz buzz. But hey, management got ball game tickets and other favors from the L&TI reps. One of the directors admitted to getting a cut under the table after he left to go work for a competitor.

To be clear, we paid $120-150 per developer and L&TI paid them nothing. You’d see .NET code with a single class that has a few thousand lines of code, no concept of unit tests, integration tests, manual or automated acceptance tests, usability tests, etc.

Shelf life of most of this garbage was a few months if something ever did get delivered. This went on for years.

The whole industry is corrupt.

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

#75

Post by CydeWeys »

salex89 wrote: post #40
mikeash wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The engineers may not have realized they were relying on one sensor, or they might be the $9/hour variety with no avionics experience who don't know any better.

The main problem was higher up. The overall design was bad, and Boeing didn't seem to have a handle on it.

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

#76

Post by dba7dba »

Why worry about meddling of elections by Russians when large American companies that make life/death products and one of the pillars of US economy goes around doing stuff like this, effectively committing a corporate seppuku.

I used to watch PR videos from Boeing on new planes being tested and feeling sense of wonder and awe. Now I feel like puking. Of course not the rank and file. But the ones in corner offices.

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

#77

Post by inamberclad »

tomcam wrote: post #7
inamberclad wrote: post #2

Was just looking at their job listings recently - a lot of the software jobs are in India. I don't know if they're flight software positions or just database/website stuff, but it still surprised me. On a side note, if anyone is looking for all-around engineers, including software/electrical/mechanical stuff, feel free to shoot me a message.

How? No contact information is given.

Right here, I suppose.

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

#78

Post by salawat »

usrusr wrote: post #57

Is that so surprising? I have never worked in a domain like that, but I have always assumed that flight computer software would be built with process so deep that you could almost leave the implementation to trained monkeys, implying that those $9/h workers could still be overqualified. In my mental model of this kind of development (which could be wrong), you'd absolutely not want the 10x hotshot coder, you'd want p…

>In my mental model of this kind of development (which could be wrong), you'd absolutely not want the 10x hotshot coder, you'd want predictable worker bees to faithfully transcribe from one specification format to another specification format slightly closer to the metal (or to a verification tool) until you eventually have a product that is working as designed.

Which gets you exactly what happened here. The 10x "hotshot coder" isn't a coder who vomits out 10x more code than another, but the coder that knows the right code for the job and also understands the provenance of from whence the data operated on comes from, and to whence it goes.

Software engineering and computer science is about so much more than coding. It's about knowing the types of problems an implementation can solve, what boundary conditions have to be taken into account, and knowing what code isn't the right code. All for any subject matter area they end up operating in.

You'll be amazed the speed ups you get from not having to write ten different versions of code implementing the same functionality before finding the one that plays well and reads well with the rest of the system. All that extra time spent not coding can be spent going over the operating environment to make sure the specification you were handed is actually complete.

Unfortunately, I have the feeling Boeing would have hidden that information regardless seeing as their design doesn't even necessarily comply with 25.173 as written without interpreting it as allowing a computer to magically make an unairworthy frame airworthy. But that is beside the point.

Once your management starts assuming the process will spit out product as high quality without your expertise, you can pretty much set up a timer to measure the time until the first impedance mismatch from a false assumption not rooted out rears its ugly head.

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

#79

Post by mikeash »

CydeWeys wrote: post #75
salex89 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The engineers may not have realized they were relying on one sensor, or they might be the $9/hour variety with no avionics experience who don't know any better. The main problem was higher up. The overall design was bad, and Boeing didn't seem to have a handle on it.

I suspect they were told that runaway trim wouldn’t be a serious problem, and they believed it since they wouldn’t have the expertise to analyze the whole thing from first principles.

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

#80

Post by weaksauce »

meowface wrote: post #33
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 re…

someone needs to throw the mythical man month at these managers.
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