I’m reminded of an article many years ago about when Boeing was outsourcing to to improve return on capital or some nonsense and at some point someone just said to maximize return on capital they should just have someone else design and make the planes and put a Boeing sticker on them
Boeing's 737 Max software outsourced to lower-paid engineers
81–90 of 166 posts
Re: Boeing's 737 Max software outsourced to lower-paid engineers
#82Money saved by firing experienced engs and outsourcing the development Why is that so hard to understand? Massive fail at risk management maybe?
> Why is that so hard to understand? Massive fail at risk management maybe? Managerial bonus or promotion for saving money this quarter >> money lost more quarters out than I'll be around
This is really it. Board of directors set goals, say reducing costs, they offer a big bonus, you meet the goal, get the big bonus. Problems become someone else's proble. You buy a big car, house, go to fancy non-profit's $500 dinners.
Re: Boeing's 737 Max software outsourced to lower-paid engineers
#83When is the media going to get the message that this wasn't a software issue?
Software was definitely part of the issue.
But it wasn't a software issue! /S
https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/04/08/boeing-737-max-...
Any competent engineer would raise moral and ethical questions when working on software that is "mission ciritical". Causing a passenger plane to continually go into a nose dive because of data coming from a single sensor is absolutely ludicrous. Just because the software was horribly designed, doesn't mean it isn't a software issue.
Re: Boeing's 737 Max software outsourced to lower-paid engineers
#84"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.
Interesting - a completely hypothetical whataboutism
Re: Boeing's 737 Max software outsourced to lower-paid engineers
#85Money 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…
Which means they have no business managing. It’s to tiresome to repeat because it should be obvious , but engineering is not a commodity.
The end product may be, but not the design problem process nor the manufacturing process.
Re: Boeing's 737 Max software outsourced to lower-paid engineers
#86first, they tried to blame the foreign pilots and now they are blaming the foreign workers. 9$ per hour in India is quite good. they are not paying 9$per hr in the USA. It was Boeing management which decided to put big engines. These foreign workers were supervised by Americans only. don't tell me no American was checking and testing before implementation. grow some balls and admit to your mistakes. P.S I hate outsourcing but they are not to blame for the greed of top management.
Re: Boeing's 737 Max software outsourced to lower-paid engineers
#87Money saved by firing experienced engs and outsourcing the development Why is that so hard to understand? Massive fail at risk management maybe?
The software did exactly as it's supposed to do: If the AOA sensors tells you the plane is tilting too high up, pitch the nose down a little.
The main issue was that there was only one AOA sensor connected in standard packages and the hardware for it failed.
The pitot tubes failed for the doomed Air France incident which caused the software to read incorrectly and stall.
For what it's worth AirBus has a huge engineering department in India: https://www.airbus.com/careers/search-and-apply/opportunitie...
Articles like this are just drummed up to stir negative emotions about "others" (with "struggling to understand English" and "unable to code fizzbuzz") as is evidenced in the rest of the comments below.
Re: Boeing's 737 Max software outsourced to lower-paid engineers
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 d…
You must have been a pleasant employee to work with.
Re: Boeing's 737 Max software outsourced to lower-paid engineers
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Irrelevant. If Airbus is doing the same, then they are also dead to me.
Dead meaning you won't fly any more? (beneficial for the environment)
Dead meaning that, in my opinion, they have sold their soul to Satan. Boeing was previously at the apex of engineering. The 747 was a respectable achievement in 1968. The MAX debacle has exposed a catastrophic fall in engineering standards.
Re: Boeing's 737 Max software outsourced to lower-paid engineers
#90I 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…
Absolutely rabble rousing. Given that it was the angle of attack hardware sensor which was stuck in the wrong position and giving out the wrong reading.
The software got the reading that the nose was too pitched up and to prevent stall it pitched the nose down.
The software could handle reading from multiple sensor which Boeing sold separately.
It's an American management decision to make more money, not a $9 an hour software engineer's job to decide how to fly the plane.
Coming up after the break: How EA loot boxes are programmed by $10 an hour cheap software engineers from India. Grab your pitchforks on aisle #3