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

Boeing's 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers

finance.yahoo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 31 posts

Re: Boeing's 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers

#21

Post by logjammin »

nutjob2 wrote: post #17
nell wrote: post #8

People in the industry would instantly recognize that there are many layers to a big system and some are less critical than others. There is no proof here that the contractor touched any critical flight system software. But this is written for a general audience who are unable to tell the difference. The piece rides on the narrative that Boeing was careless, which may be true overall wrt 737MAX, but not necessarily i…

These planes run over $50 million each, and even a misprogrammed galley oven could potentially bring down a plane in flight. Given that, would you be happy that they outsourced any engineering in this way?

Didn't SwissAir 111 crash because of faulty in-flight entertainment systems? I think there's precedent for lower-rung stuff having unexpected and outsized impact in aviation.

Re: Boeing's 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers

#22

Post by rbanffy »

olah_1 wrote: post #10
dentemple wrote: post #3

The real kicker is that the software worked exactly as intended. It wasn't the programmers' fault that the planes went down. It was the specs they were given that were bad.

Anyone that has ever worked with outsourced developers knows the truth of this. If you give them a spec or requirements, they will do exactly what that thing says. Even including the typos or grammatical errors. I don’t blame them. They have no incentive to care beyond this type of business transaction. But applying this model to anything other than vaporware is terrifying.

About typos, if the typo is part of the spec, that's what the software should implement. If the spec gets revised, then the programmers should implement the revised version.

When you have software that interacts with other software, you follow the spec because you know the spec is going to be followed by the other parts, and that you should not get imaginative when human lives depend on your software working correctly.

The MCAS incident shows software that worked as expected, based on a spec that had incorrect and missing information and pilots that didn't have the information to understand the erroneous behavior. Also, the motors that actuate the trim wheels exert so much force that the pilots weren't able to counteract their action.

Re: Boeing's 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers

#23

Post by jonas21 »

olah_1 wrote: post #10
dentemple wrote: post #3

The real kicker is that the software worked exactly as intended. It wasn't the programmers' fault that the planes went down. It was the specs they were given that were bad.

Anyone that has ever worked with outsourced developers knows the truth of this. If you give them a spec or requirements, they will do exactly what that thing says. Even including the typos or grammatical errors. I don’t blame them. They have no incentive to care beyond this type of business transaction. But applying this model to anything other than vaporware is terrifying.

Sometimes including the typos is important!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer

Re: Boeing's 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers

#24

Post by hobofan »

nutjob2 wrote: post #16
hobofan wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because it is impossible to formally specify all possibilities that can happen, and noone can forecast all the desired specs before the thing is built and tested in real. Is that so? Wouldn't it be in theory possible to verify it against our current understanding of all laws of physics and the corresponding equations?

It also has a user interface. Are you saying it's possible to formally quantify human behaviour as well?

Every program has a inputs, and with that some more ore less direct version of a user interface. You define the acceptable input values and then define what happens with unacceptable ones (and same for combinations).

If that were not verifiable, then no program would be.

Re: Boeing's 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers

#25

Post by ori_b »

hobofan wrote: post #15
posix_me_less wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If so, this may be a good back-to-reality counter-example for all the over-zealous formal proof enthusiasts. There is an old paper from 70's by people who designed complex systems where they stress the point that even if your system was designed and formally checked and if it obeys all the known rules and specifications, it will still fail in real world unless you test and iterate it a lot. Because it is impossible t…

> Because it is impossible to formally specify all possibilities that can happen, and noone can forecast all the desired specs before the thing is built and tested in real. Is that so? Wouldn't it be in theory possible to verify it against our current understanding of all laws of physics and the corresponding equations?

But it obeys the laws of physics perfectly as it nosedives into the ground.

Re: Boeing's 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers

#26

Post by yash_8141 »

To all those who are criticizing 9 dollar per hour is actually top tier salary in india. It translates to 18 lakh rupees per year which adjusting according to PPP with respect to Cali or ny around 100k dollars.This is honestly confirmation bias for Americans who think outsourcing is bad . Which kind of is but don't think in this case.

Re: Boeing's 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers

#27

Post by nell »

nutjob2 wrote: post #17
nell wrote: post #8

People in the industry would instantly recognize that there are many layers to a big system and some are less critical than others. There is no proof here that the contractor touched any critical flight system software. But this is written for a general audience who are unable to tell the difference. The piece rides on the narrative that Boeing was careless, which may be true overall wrt 737MAX, but not necessarily i…

These planes run over $50 million each, and even a misprogrammed galley oven could potentially bring down a plane in flight. Given that, would you be happy that they outsourced any engineering in this way?

There is no evidence that the software the contractors wrote ever ran anywhere on the plane.

Given, how many admin tools are built for simple SaaS apps, a project such as a new airplane will have a ton of tools that are built purely for the development cycle, most of them running offline or in the lab.

Re: Boeing's 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers

#28

Post by mannykannot »

posix_me_less wrote: post #13
dentemple wrote: post #3

The real kicker is that the software worked exactly as intended. It wasn't the programmers' fault that the planes went down. It was the specs they were given that were bad.

If so, this may be a good back-to-reality counter-example for all the over-zealous formal proof enthusiasts. There is an old paper from 70's by people who designed complex systems where they stress the point that even if your system was designed and formally checked and if it obeys all the known rules and specifications, it will still fail in real world unless you test and iterate it a lot. Because it is impossible t…

> Because it is impossible to formally specify all possibilities that can happen, and noone can forecast all the desired specs before the thing is built and tested in real.

You cannot exhaustively test software either - the number of cases to cover are beyond astronomical.

The effectiveness of both specification and testing ultimately depend on the same thing: thinking of all the relevant possibilities. If you overlook a possible failure mode, there's no guarantee it will be caught at any phase. The main benefit of formal methods, I think, is that the rigor tends to make such oversights visible.

the only people who think formal methods are a magic bullet are those who have not tried them. Likewise, the only people who think more testing (and especially unit testing) is a magic bullet are those who don't understand combinatorial complexity.

Re: Boeing's 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers

#29

Post by mannykannot »

anon121212 wrote: post #14
dentemple wrote: post #3

The real kicker is that the software worked exactly as intended. It wasn't the programmers' fault that the planes went down. It was the specs they were given that were bad.

I understand what you mean but no tester/developer worth their salt should say or hide behind this. Sadly, too many do. The job of the tester is to go beyond just blindly testing the spec but to find and report faults, those that somehow were missed earlier in the chain. And oh, no idea how Boeing missed it but some Indian companies are just not worth the bother. HCL, TCS, Cognizant, Infosys included. But hey, they'r…

> The job of the tester is to go beyond just blindly testing the spec but to find and report faults, those that somehow were missed earlier in the chain.

So these testers should have been test pilots? - because the interaction of MCAS and the difficulty in manual trimming was not going to be found until someone tried it in the air (there is considerable doubt as to whether simulators accurately model it.)

And if this was the tester's job, what was the job of the engineers at Boeing who decided on using MCAS to solve a problem, and those at the FAA who endorsed it?

Re: Boeing's 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers

#30

Post by anon121212 »

mannykannot wrote: post #29
anon121212 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand what you mean but no tester/developer worth their salt should say or hide behind this. Sadly, too many do. The job of the tester is to go beyond just blindly testing the spec but to find and report faults, those that somehow were missed earlier in the chain. And oh, no idea how Boeing missed it but some Indian companies are just not worth the bother. HCL, TCS, Cognizant, Infosys included. But hey, they'r…

> The job of the tester is to go beyond just blindly testing the spec but to find and report faults, those that somehow were missed earlier in the chain. So these testers should have been test pilots? - because the interaction of MCAS and the difficulty in manual trimming was not going to be found until someone tried it in the air (there is considerable doubt as to whether simulators accurately model it.) And if this…

You obviously missed my point, so kindly re-read my comment, particularly the part about the entire chain. Everyone involved is responsible for the deaths of innocent lives. Testers are at the end of the chain and have the power of approving or halting the deployment but the ones working for these inferior companies don't put on their thinking caps because they're just incapable of doing so. They test the spec and collect the check.
Post reply on HN