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

161–166 of 166 posts

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

#161

Post by supercanuck »

su30mki117 wrote: post #138
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…

How are the points you have mentioned in your post relevant to the MCAS fault, which the article is supposed to be about? It is explicitly mentioned in the article that the Indian companies DID NOT work on the faulty MCAS system - 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 t…

You are missing the point. This information is necessary in making the decision to continue flying on Boeing 737 Max Airplanes.

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

#162

Post by la_barba »

atpalmer wrote: post #159
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…

The article you just read told you that the teams working on critical software have to be cheap, not good. That's not "just rabble-rousing." That's a scandal. As you say, you're commenting without having any experience with the issue, but, as you can imagine, there's very little overlap between cheap and good.

Actually, the article just broadly mentioned that they worked on some aspect of the software. There is no evidence (in the article) that they were working on critical software, and it was their piece of software that caused the current problem. You can't blame the notepad team because the windows kernel crashed.

In any case, even if we accept your premise, my point was that assigning blame to the person you hired rather than your process of hiring that let a large team of unqualified people work on your critical software is odd. (Not saying you personally are blaming them, but that was my general point)

>but, as you can imagine, there's very little overlap between cheap and good.

Why? Even outside of software, for e.g. my wife is a post doctoral scientist and she gets paid a pittance for working 9 sometimes 10 hour days doing critical research. Somebodys wage being associated with the quality of their output only happens in a small cross-section of industries. I work in pharma and while I'm happy with my compensation, its a fraction of SV startup salaries. I know.. this might come across as super salty, but I don't think their wage is in anyway co-related with the quality of their output.

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

#163

Post by ensiferum »

RachelF wrote: post #99
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".

As long as they can get a RSU package and get a promotion it's s win.

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

#164

Post by mannykannot »

dTal wrote: post #130
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…

This comment is glib and misinformed. Firstly, no the software did not do exactly as it's supposed to. It crashed the plane by rendering it unflyable. It's not supposed to do that. And your description of the MCAS specification is vastly over-simplified - it is not an autopilot and its job is to gradually change the behaviour of the plane in different flight modes (which it must detect), not to directly fly the plane…

> Firstly, no the software did not do exactly as it's supposed to. It crashed the plane by rendering it unflyable. It's not supposed to do that.

This belongs in the true-but-trite category. The decision to depend on a single, unverified AofA input was not a programming error, and neither was the increase in power in the second version. These decisions were made by Boeing, and endorsed by the FAA (to the extent that Boeing informed the FAA of them.)

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

#165

Post by mannykannot »

gotdevops wrote: post #101
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…

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 desi…

In your world, Boeing designed (and the FAA endorsed) MCAS to use only one sensor and made it dangerously powerful, yet the crashes are the coders' fault for being the ones who did not anticipate the problems this would cause.

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

#166

Post by mannykannot »

TarlanT wrote: post #131
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…

Experienced software engineer would NEVER code something like that. Both physically and logically it makes no sense to get same AOA reading after many iterations of trimming. That clearly means something is wrong. And probably the sanity of data being fed is in question. It’s the dumbest mistake in critical system I’ve ever heard. Even in non critical software these types of logical mistakes are rare.

AofA is a function of a number of factors, such as control inputs -- data not available to MCAS.

It would be disturbing if the coders on aircraft control systems were modifying the specifications on the fly, and on the basis of misconceptions like that displayed here.

Responsibility for the dangerous capabilities of MCAS lies with Boeing, which chose to fix an aerodynamic problem this way, and the FAA, which endorsed it.

Post reply on HN