Boeing's 737 MAX Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)
1–10 of 87 posts
Re: Boeing's 737 MAX Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)
#2The article seems to conflate engineering salaries in a low cost of living country with the quality of the software.
As I understand it, the software performed exactly as designed, forcing the nose of the plane downwards to counter the upwards torque produced by the engines being offset relative to the centre of gravity of the plane.
Mentour Pilot had a great episode on the two tragic accidents. It appears that Boeing did not expose the way the software was designed to behave, and the system silently turned itself back on even after the pilots disengaged it.
Re: Boeing's 737 MAX Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)
#3The article seems to conflate engineering salaries in a low cost of living country with the quality of the software. As I understand it, the software performed exactly as designed, forcing the nose of the plane downwards to counter the upwards torque produced by the engines being offset relative to the centre of gravity of the plane. Mentour Pilot had a great episode on the two tragic accidents. It appears that Boein…
In my experience there is a correlation there. Low-cost outsourced code is generally pretty bad.
Re: Boeing's 737 MAX Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)
#4The article seems to conflate engineering salaries in a low cost of living country with the quality of the software. As I understand it, the software performed exactly as designed, forcing the nose of the plane downwards to counter the upwards torque produced by the engines being offset relative to the centre of gravity of the plane. Mentour Pilot had a great episode on the two tragic accidents. It appears that Boein…
Weird take.
The theme throughout has been cost cutting and poor oversight for the sole benefit of shareholder profits.
A proper in house team would probably say, hey what happens when the sole sensor feeding our software is obstructed by a birthday balloon? Maybe we need an exponentially backoff instead of every 30 seconds. Maybe nose down actions shouldn't be automatically executed at low altitude.
What we see playing out is the result of delegation and "not my problem", outsourcing safety critical systems to the lowest bidder...
Re: Boeing's 737 MAX Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)
#5Is this more, or less, concerning than the growing trend to outsource software to $0.03 / 1000 token AIs?
Re: Boeing's 737 MAX Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)
#6The article seems to conflate engineering salaries in a low cost of living country with the quality of the software. As I understand it, the software performed exactly as designed, forcing the nose of the plane downwards to counter the upwards torque produced by the engines being offset relative to the centre of gravity of the plane. Mentour Pilot had a great episode on the two tragic accidents. It appears that Boein…
In my experience there is a correlation there. Low-cost outsourced code is generally pretty bad.
Not that you intimated this, but I don't know that it's necessarily a problem with the people writing the code. What I've seen is that organizations that try to save money by offshoring are not providing adequate domain knowledge or usable requirements to the developers.
Throw in a massive timezone difference and every misunderstanding winds up living in your system.
Re: Boeing's 737 MAX Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)
#7Outsourcing is a very bad practice. Those softwares tend to be very low in quality.
Re: Boeing's 737 MAX Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience there is a correlation there. Low-cost outsourced code is generally pretty bad.
Not that you intimated this, but I don't know that it's necessarily a problem with the people writing the code. What I've seen is that organizations that try to save money by offshoring are not providing adequate domain knowledge or usable requirements to the developers. Throw in a massive timezone difference and every misunderstanding winds up living in your system.
That could be. However I think the language barrier is also a significant factor. But of course there is nothing inherently problematic about offshore developers.
Re: Boeing's 737 MAX Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not that you intimated this, but I don't know that it's necessarily a problem with the people writing the code. What I've seen is that organizations that try to save money by offshoring are not providing adequate domain knowledge or usable requirements to the developers. Throw in a massive timezone difference and every misunderstanding winds up living in your system.
That could be. However I think the language barrier is also a significant factor. But of course there is nothing inherently problematic about offshore developers.
I've had to deal with offshores my entire career and have even flown out to train them up. They are good people, but almost universally, they contract for U.S. companies via large body shops (you know who they are) that have awful pay, poor treatment of developers, and just a general culture of half-assing work. I've told various great offshore developers personally to leave as fast as possible and join literally any other organization for way more pay. Good developers have zero business working at those body shops that all the U.S. corps utilize.
Re: Boeing's 737 MAX Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)
#10Is this more, or less, concerning than the growing trend to outsource software to $0.03 / 1000 token AIs?
Don't worry, with chatgpt the software is going to be safer. The plane won't even take off :)