Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 166 posts

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

#91

Post by ganeshkrishnan »

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…

"client interviews" don't happen for such massive projects. Most of the time the "host" even lacks the technical capability to interview and it's time consuming.

In all my years consulting for the companies I have never been "client interviewed"

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

#92

Post by pxue »

ganeshkrishnan wrote: post #87
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 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 engineer…

Software was there when we went to the moon and back to ensure hardware failures are handled and communicated. Why can't it do the same for these planes?

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

#93

Post by ganeshkrishnan »

pxue wrote: post #92
ganeshkrishnan wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 engineer…

Software was there when we went to the moon and back to ensure hardware failures are handled and communicated. Why can't it do the same for these planes?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...

Ask Boeing management your question wrt to the hardware failure. Not pile up on software devs

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

#94

Post by nonamechicken »

I really doubt 737 Max's failure has anything to with outsourcing to India. Usually, most of the work outsourced to India are low value work (what I call as 'near brain dead' type). I don't think Boeing would outsource anything even remotely critical to a company like HCL. From the article:

>Based on resumes posted on social media, HCL engineers helped develop and test the Max’s flight-display software, while employees from another Indian company, Cyient Ltd., handled software for flight-test equipment.

>Boeing said the company did not rely on engineers from HCL and Cyient for the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, which has been linked to the Lion Air crash last October and the Ethiopian Airlines disaster in March. The Chicago-based planemaker also said it didn’t rely on either firm for another software issue disclosed after the crashes: a cockpit warning light that wasn’t working for most buyers.

Even inside US, Indian engineers are not allowed in critical software that goes into defense and (most likely) airlines, only citizens can do that. So, there is no way they would have outsourced safety critical stuff to HCL.

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

#95

Post by nonamechicken »

throwawayMUSE wrote: post #74
danielg6 wrote: post #64

Earlier 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…

Why would anyone pay $120-$150 per hour for .net code in India? Most American firms pay $25-30 per hour to the Indian companies. Also, do airplanes run on .net?

>You’d see .NET code with a single class that has a few thousand lines of cod

If we are blaming entire nationalities, I have seen code written by an American. His idea of refactoring was copy paste the function, append a '2' to the function name and use it. There were at least a 50-100 functions like this in the project that had like 30-50 source files.

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

#96

Post by nonamechicken »

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…

I don't like Indian IT companies because they pay us less and some managers exploit us a lot. But one thing they deeply care about is the customer. They would go to any length to keep the customer happy. There is no way they would risk loosing business playing such games.

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

#97

Post by nonamechicken »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #71
iamnotacrook wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

This is what typically happens to h1bs: if someone comes from India to work at the client location (Boeing office in this case), and if the customer is not happy with them for whatever reason, they get send back within a month or 2.

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

#98

Post by touristtam »

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.

If the issue was in the specs, then it is software. Producing code is only really one piece of software development.

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

#99

Post by RachelF »

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?

Most managers only think short-term. In the short term it saved money. In the long term is cost Boeing their reputation.

But in the long term the MBA manager has been likely been promoted and is working elsewhere, killing another company, while his or her CV boasts of "reducing inefficiencies".

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

#100

Post by gotdevops »

nonamechicken wrote: post #94

I really doubt 737 Max's failure has anything to with outsourcing to India. Usually, most of the work outsourced to India are low value work (what I call as 'near brain dead' type). I don't think Boeing would outsource anything even remotely critical to a company like HCL. From the article: >Based on resumes posted on social media, HCL engineers helped develop and test the Max’s flight-display software, while employe…

For DOD no foreign you are correct. Unfortunately 737 max is not a no foreign DOD project. Please understand these outsourcing companies are extremely powerful and influential. They bring In highly trained and connected sales teams to negotiate big deals at the executive and political levels. In this case 11bn deal to Boeing for 1.7bn in services contracts for India. Please consider what level at Boeing that sort of deal is brokered at? Ask yourself what the repercussions are for internal folks who call out the outsourcing firms? As you suggest outsourcing firms often start out with non critical tasks like operations and maintenance. Through this process they actually consider those contracts as investments to gain access to learn the lay of the land especially where the critical systems are and who manages them. Then these firms often including architecture leads who are camouflaged sales people do their trade craft of above board and from my perspective suspicious below board tactics until they open the door to more critical projects and higher paying contracts. HCL, TCS, etc work on critical system not only in this industry but also in Medical, Infrastructure, Utilities, Telecommunications, Broadcasting, etc, etc. I wish you were correct but sadly I’ve seen the transition first hand and have been brought in to unwind what outsourcing firms have done in the name of cost savings. At the same time I was told and my teams were told to investigate, identify and fix the issue but don’t blame the outsourcer or this will be your last contract. This i was told was due to the level of the outsourcers executive Sponsership. Consider the influence these firms have over the execs and the reputation at stake with anything negative or other then thank you so much for the great work. In fact we were told that the outsourcer was to be treated as the customer. Even though months of war rooms and rework fell squarely on their ineptitude.
Post reply on HN