Fivrrr for airplane safety,… it’s like that BM episode, flywheel of death…
Boeing's 737 MAX Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)
21–30 of 87 posts
Re: Boeing's 737 MAX Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)
#22The 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 playi…
I understand that it may be more likely for this to happen with an in-house team, but my experience working in large companies makes me think it would still be unlikely. "Not my problem" is necessary armor at a company with 15 levels of management between ICs and the C-suite and a rich weft of (official and unofficial) "dotted lines", where every interaction outside your immediate team is fraught with political implications. Code monkeys, in-house or not, might not even know that they are working on software for an airplane, let alone a Boeing airplane, let alone in a safety-sensitive system. Even if they do, and understand that the overall plan they are contributing to is folly, there is often no linkage by which they can make that insight known to someone who can change things (often there is literally no one, including the CEO, who could change course even if they want to). Even trying to do so is often a career risk.
Large companies are mechanisms that run on their own. People have limited agency in a lot of situations but for big decisions ("our company's only real product is fundamentally dogshit, lets start over") there literally are no people on earth who can actually make them. They are pre-made by the structure of the company, capital markets, and historical accident.
Re: Boeing's 737 MAX Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)
#23Fivrrr for airplane safety,… it’s like that BM episode, flywheel of death…
> BM episode, flywheel of death
what is this? do you have a link?
Re: Boeing's 737 MAX Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)
#24The 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…
The biggest problem with offshore engineering teams is their dedication to delivering exactly what you ask for. One of the qualities of a good software developer is to take the requirements and interpret what needs to happen then deliver appropriately. Delivering exactly what's written without thinking about the implications is a huge problem and one of the biggest issues I've run into working with offshore teams.
Re: Boeing's 737 MAX Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)
#25[flagged]
The country is not what counts, there are good and bad engineers in any location. The hourly rate is a much more reliable statistic, though without a good quality control feedback loop anything can happen.
Re: Boeing's 737 MAX Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)
#26Earlier 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.
It’s not a problem with individual offshore engineers. The problem is the way the business they are employed by operate.
Re: Boeing's 737 MAX Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)
#27[flagged]
Re: Boeing's 737 MAX Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)
#28The 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…
> As I understand it, the software performed exactly as designed
This is very likely correct.
People on HN don't seem to understand how software is created in regulated industries outside the tech bubble.
In a complex system such an aircraft, the behavior of the system is modeled and detailed requirements are generated.
These models are created by the system engineers.
The models and requirements are then handed off to the software engineers to implement the modeled behaviour in code.
The software is then tested to see if the behaviour matches the models.
So it doesn't matter how much the SWEs were paid, if the software met the requirements, and implemented the models as designed, then the software engineers did their jobs.
Re: Boeing's 737 MAX Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)
#29> The Max became Boeing’s top seller soon after it was offered in 2011.
Seriously? I mean, could you still order anything but a Max from Boeing in that size? And that being the most useful size, of course it became the top seller. Because it was the only offering.
Re: Boeing's 737 MAX Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)
#30Fivrrr for airplane safety,… it’s like that BM episode, flywheel of death…
> BM episode, flywheel of death what is this? do you have a link?
They are referencing Black Mirror but a cursory search with those keywords does not return an episode. I'm sure with a bit more searching that you can find it!