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Boeing's 737 MAX Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)

industryweek.com

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Re: Boeing's 737 MAX Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)

#71

Post by RobertSchoenb »

rramadass wrote: post #56

It is absolutely a Boeing failure and not due to subcontractors/outsourcing as the clickbait title seems to imply. If you parcel out parts of your job in something as critical as Airplane Construction, it is your responsibility to validate all specifications/testing/verification/etc. If you treat "Airplane Engineering" as mere "Embedded Engineering" you need to be put out of business. The article explicitly says MCAS…

No disagreements on your main points, but I would dispute calling that headline clickbait. We published this story in 2019 when software issues were the central issues at Boeing, so establishing how the company was coding was very newsworthy. I typically associate clickbait with bait-and-switch tactics, tricking readers into reading content unrelated to the headline. This article provides material directly related to its title. Robert Schoenberger, editor-in-chief, IndustryWeek

Re: Boeing's 737 MAX Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)

#72

Post by DanielHB »

rednerrus wrote: post #24
jkic47 wrote: post #2

The 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.

Coming from one of those countries where a lot of engineering gets offshored to, the best and brightest engineers in those countries DO have options (no, not just immigrating to a rich country) and won't be a code monkey for multinationals.

I have been to IBM offices in São Paulo a few times and let me just say, although they paid reasonably okay salaries it wasn't the first choice of work for most engineers...

And that is on top of the problems you are describing.

Re: Boeing's 737 MAX Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)

#73

Post by rramadass »

RobertSchoenb wrote: post #71
rramadass wrote: post #56

It is absolutely a Boeing failure and not due to subcontractors/outsourcing as the clickbait title seems to imply. If you parcel out parts of your job in something as critical as Airplane Construction, it is your responsibility to validate all specifications/testing/verification/etc. If you treat "Airplane Engineering" as mere "Embedded Engineering" you need to be put out of business. The article explicitly says MCAS…

No disagreements on your main points, but I would dispute calling that headline clickbait. We published this story in 2019 when software issues were the central issues at Boeing, so establishing how the company was coding was very newsworthy. I typically associate clickbait with bait-and-switch tactics, tricking readers into reading content unrelated to the headline. This article provides material directly related to…

Glad to see that news websites (in this era of fake news) are willing to stand behind their stories; Much appreciated.

While i understand your point, the headline gives the impression that Boeing's problems stem from outsourcing which then emboldens the racists to come out of the woodwork (as can be seen from some of the downvoted comments here) and start manipulating the conversations in a different and unproductive direction. Some of the folks commenting didn't even read the article before dunking on the outsourced country/engineers. It is highly frustrating when this sort of thing happens and hence my warning in the first line of my response to ignore the title and read the article.

It would be great if you folks (maybe in collaboration with others sources/folks) could collate all the available info. on the disaster that is now "Boeing Engineering" (HW/SW) and publish a point-by-point synopsis of everything known until now. This would be a great learning lesson to the entire Industry on what not to do in pursuit of mere profits.

Re: Boeing's 737 MAX Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)

#74

Post by uuddlrlrbaba »

NullPrefix wrote: post #20
uuddlrlrbaba wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

birthday balloon? In front of a landing plane at 170mph?

It actually happens, similarly to bird strikes or collisions with essentially any object that can float or fly into the path of a plane.

https://simpleflying.com/avianca-airbus-a319-balloon-strike/

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-09-22-me-41720-...

https://dronedj.com/2021/08/31/update-faa-says-envoy-air-pas...

Re: Boeing's 737 MAX Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)

#75

Post by trafficante »

rramadass wrote: post #73
RobertSchoenb wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No disagreements on your main points, but I would dispute calling that headline clickbait. We published this story in 2019 when software issues were the central issues at Boeing, so establishing how the company was coding was very newsworthy. I typically associate clickbait with bait-and-switch tactics, tricking readers into reading content unrelated to the headline. This article provides material directly related to…

Glad to see that news websites (in this era of fake news) are willing to stand behind their stories; Much appreciated. While i understand your point, the headline gives the impression that Boeing's problems stem from outsourcing which then emboldens the racists to come out of the woodwork (as can be seen from some of the downvoted comments here) and start manipulating the conversations in a different and unproductive…

Your frustration is understandable, particularly in this situation where the critical failures weren’t the fault of outsourced engineers.

But we really need to pump the brakes on the whole “everything must be in the passive voice and overly euphemized to the point of nigh-incomprehensibility”. If anything, it contributes to the click-bait problem.

I see: “Boeing outsourced to $9/hr SWE” and immediately start thinking about a dangerous corporate culture that prioritizes profits over lives. I’d argue most people probably interpret the headline in a similar fashion.

Just because some already-inclined reactionaries wrongly jump to “India lol” doesn’t mean the publication has some moral responsibility to contort the headline into something less effective that will get even more dramatically outcompeted by click bait headlines that actually bait racists (“Deadly Boeing crash was running Indian software”).

Re: Boeing's 737 MAX Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)

#76

Post by silent_cal »

rramadass wrote: post #58
silent_cal wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience there is a correlation there. Low-cost outsourced code is generally pretty bad.

False. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39700806

My experience is false? Ok..

Re: Boeing's 737 MAX Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)

#77

Post by jkic47 »

gregors wrote: post #15
jkic47 wrote: post #2

The 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…

And yet we seem to conflate salaries with competent leadership positions.

I think you are comparing apples and oranges here.

An individual contributor is typically given a tangible task (eg: deliver a product that does x in y months for a cost of z). There are several qualified people they could choose from to achieve this task, which drives down the cost. I worked for a company with 10,000 engineers. Oversimplifying for effect, but their skills are not unique.

A leader is given a far more intangible task (eg: gain 30% market share in z years for your division OR deliver 9M of product per day through 202X), and they are taking a huge risk. The team under them may not have the slightest clue how to do this. The interest rates can change. Currency fluctuates. They are paid to calmly chart a path through the chaos and deliver a result. At this level, there were about 60 of us, and the atmosphere gets rarer as you rise further in the ranks. They made absolutely certain we were kept super happy because we could create tangible value orders of magnitude above the average employee, and they REALLY did not want us working for a competitor.

Re: Boeing's 737 MAX Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)

#78

Post by rramadass »

trafficante wrote: post #75
rramadass wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad to see that news websites (in this era of fake news) are willing to stand behind their stories; Much appreciated. While i understand your point, the headline gives the impression that Boeing's problems stem from outsourcing which then emboldens the racists to come out of the woodwork (as can be seen from some of the downvoted comments here) and start manipulating the conversations in a different and unproductive…

Your frustration is understandable, particularly in this situation where the critical failures weren’t the fault of outsourced engineers. But we really need to pump the brakes on the whole “everything must be in the passive voice and overly euphemized to the point of nigh-incomprehensibility”. If anything, it contributes to the click-bait problem. I see: “Boeing outsourced to $9/hr SWE” and immediately start thinking…

In this case the publisher has a responsibility to not throw shade at outsourcing since it was already known that it was not responsible for critical software implementation. Whether by accident or design a lot of folks will draw the inference that i pointed out. You can also look at the previous articles submitted on HN on this topic to see how everything gets manipulated.

Outsourcing is a perfectly logical approach to saving costs. But the company doing it has to be careful on how it does it, have necessary modeling/tests/verification/QC/QA in place and be very very careful in outsourcing highly critical/specialized/domain specific subsystems (if at all doing it).

From all that has been published on this topic so far, there seems to be a systemic rot in the entirety of Boeing Engineering and Management which needs to be investigated thoroughly as a whole rather than piecemeal i.e. focus on the system itself rather than the simple cogs in the system.

Re: Boeing's 737 MAX Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)

#79

Post by rramadass »

silent_cal wrote: post #76
rramadass wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

False. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39700806

My experience is false? Ok..

Correlation is the inference that you draw from your experience which can absolutely be wrong.

Re: Boeing's 737 MAX Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)

#80

Post by pipe01 »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #40
tledakis wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry, with chatgpt the software is going to be safer. The plane won't even take off :)

"To save us time I tasked my AI, Anton, to debug the code, and Anton decided that the best way to get rid of all SW bugs was to delete the entire codebase, which is technically and statistically the right solution to what I tasked it to do." -Gilfoyle

That's why we shouldn't ask AI to fix climate change
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