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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

#101

Post by gotdevops »

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…

You sound suspiciously like every other outsourcer I’ve worked with who breaks something critical. A million reasons why it wasn’t their fault. They did exactly what they were told right and didn’t take one second to validate the assumptions surrounding the systematic nature of the solution. The goal, the mission, the end state solution. That was another departments concern right. That was QA’s concern, that was designs concern, that was the testing center of excellence’s concern. Blame them. The perfect circle of siloed fiefdoms and no feedback blame. The problem is that lives were at stake here on this one and the entire house of cards is coming crashing down if this is determined to be true. There will be public outcry and no matter how many excuses you have the fact is families and lives have been ruined FOREVER, NOTHING ON THIS EARTH CAN REPLACE THEM and something must be done.

https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/13/suppl_2/ii22

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

#102

Post by throwawayMUSE »

nonamechicken wrote: post #95
throwawayMUSE wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. T…

I wasn’t blaming a nationality. Not sure how you’re drawing that conclusion. There’s a legitimate problem of offshoring programming work to “coders” in India who produce garbage only because management gets kickbacks.

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

#103

Post by gotdevops »

ganeshkrishnan wrote: post #93
pxue wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s the hardware people’s fault right. Oh no it’s managements fault. It’s everyone else’s fault. I see a pattern forming here.

https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/13/suppl_2/ii22

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

#104

Post by throwawayMUSE »

ganeshkrishnan wrote: post #88
throwawayMUSE wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I sense sarcasm. Is it because I called out a legit issue? For my employer, it didn’t matter because IT had a reputation of delivering garbage and so our business partners weren’t shocked at what they delivered. If something like this happens at a Boeing (I don’t know if it is), then heads ought to roll and people should be going to jail.

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

#105

Post by AlexCoventry »

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…

> Articles like this are just drummed up to stir negative emotions about "others"

The negativity seems more targeted at the leaders who arranged this than at the developers. Both the examples you cite are from the same comment, and even that comment is more about resentment towards management corruption than about the incompetence of the developers hired as a result of the corruption.

> The software did exactly as it's supposed to do

I gather new issues with the software have come to light since the accidents, as a result of the heightened scrutiny, and they seem likely to keep the planes grounded for longer than Boeing hoped.

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

#106

Post by xtracto »

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?

That Indian company is HCL. Ive hired and fired people that have worked in HCL here in Mexico. The culture seems veeery bad, as engineers coming from there have a culture of "do the minimum". And no ownership at all.

As an extreme example, one ex-employee stopped working one day because his wireless keyboard did not have batteries (a kB connected to his work MacBook Pro). Colleagues told him to just buy some AA batteries while I was back (I would have refunded them to him) and he did not want to do it.

Nowadays if I see HCL or Tata in resumes here in GDL, it is an automatic pass.

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

#108

Post by AlexCoventry »

leetcrew wrote: post #59
xerxex wrote: post #51

I wonder if this is unchecked laissez faire capitalism at work? Nobody wants to fly on Boeing 737 Max anymore but this has cost hundreds of lives to get to this point.

there's very little "laissez-faire" about the relationship between Boeing and the US government.

There was definitely regulatory capture which led to lax FAA oversight, though. Maybe a free-market fundamentalist would argue that they would have done better if they weren't dragged down by all that red tape, but it suggests to me that a looser regulatory environment was more dangerous.

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

#109

Post by djmips »

wp381640 wrote: post #84
newsoul2019 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Understand the sentiment, but can anyone be sure that Airbus isn't doing something similar.

Interesting - a completely hypothetical whataboutism

LOL - yeah what about China? If they were making commercial aircraft they might be doing the same thing!

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

#110

Post by thisisit »

codingslave wrote: post #61

"In offices across from Seattle’s Boeing Field, recent college graduates employed by the Indian software developer HCL Technologies Ltd. occupied several rows of desks, said Mark Rabin, a former Boeing software engineer who worked in a flight-test group that supported the Max. The coders from HCL were typically designing to specifications set by Boeing. Still, “it was controversial because it was far less efficient t…

You have got it the other way around. TCS etc don't have that much power over Indian military contracts. Instead Boeing had to comply and open an Indian development center to win those contracts.

I talked to couple of people at the Indian center and they tell me because the center was created due a compulsion and not strategy the quality of work is terrible. Most of them are paid well but have no work to do.

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