Boeing's 737 Max Software Outsourced To Lower-Paid Engineers (bloomberg.com) 355
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: It remains the mystery at the heart of Boeing's 737 Max crisis: how a company renowned for meticulous design made seemingly basic software mistakes leading to a pair of deadly crashes. Longtime Boeing engineers say the effort was complicated by a push to outsource work to lower-paid contractors. The Max software -- plagued by issues that could keep the planes grounded months longer after U.S. regulators this week revealed a new flaw -- was developed at a time Boeing was laying off experienced engineers and pressing suppliers to cut costs. Increasingly, the iconic American planemaker and its subcontractors have relied on temporary workers making as little as $9 an hour to develop and test software, often from countries lacking a deep background in aerospace -- notably India.
Damn man, should've hired locally.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Since when does the Seattle area not have enough H1Bs to accomplish the same thing in-house?
Re:Damn man, should've hired locally.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Can you pay an H1b $9/hour?
Re: Damn man, should've hired locally.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I also work for an international company, with some colleagues in India. Making blanket statements like "they write crap" is of course nonsense. I have worked with Indians that are extremely smart and so engaged and motivated, they put some of my European colleagues to shame. You have very talented and engaged people everywhere, and you also have lazy and incompetent people everywhere.
But if we want to deal in stereotypes, I could say that in general I have encountered two types of Indian IT professionals: there are those that are competitive, positive-thinking and very competent - you have to consider that the Indian middle-class is extremely competitive, simply because there are so many Indians trying to make it in the world, competing for a small number of desirable positions -
And there are those who are also competent, but at the same time very aware of the fact that they are "cheap labor" to western companies. And I have the impression this has a negative morale impact on some, making them think "why should I work hard, doing the same job, for a fraction of the pay of my western colleagues", and this makes them noticeably less engaged and efficient than others.
While I think that anyone can relate to thoughts like that, while not wrong, they are still flawed, since considering the low cost of living in India, most people employed in Indian IT companies are doing very well for themselves.
Re:Damn man, should've hired locally.. (Score:5, Insightful)
According to the rules, H1B's should be paid the "prevailing wage"... while those in india are paid SUBSTANTIALLY less...
you can probably hire 5 offshore for what 1 onshore costs.
Re: Damn man, should've hired locally.. (Score:2)
Re:Damn man, should've hired locally.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Do the needful... Plumbing can wait! (Score:5, Insightful)
San Francisco and LA are in the contiguous US not a subcontinent.
Re:Do the needful... Plumbing can wait! (Score:4, Insightful)
When I worked in India for 2 years a few years ago, I never saw someone I *knew* was a programmer actually shit in the street.
But damn, I saw it so often! Even guys in business suits. I never saw a woman do so, but every 10th Uber driver would pull over and go 1 or 2 right on the side of the busy highway.
It's very real.
You love to see it folks (Score:5, Insightful)
Its like the old adage about having to repurchase cheap tools, you always pay for it in the end. Buy cheap, buy twice.
Re: You love to see it folks (Score:4, Insightful)
for one time use, cheap is good enough.
did they expect the planes to fly more than once? Here's your problem....
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No, that's too simplified as well. There are simple enough tools where they can basically not really make any mistake. A local hobby blacksmith buys the cheapest angle grinders from DIY stores akin to Home Depot... He buys let's say eight. So if during a course of his a student breaks one, he lays it aside and once he has like three or four defective ones, he goes to the store and has them replace the things. After all, even the cheapest electrical tools have two years mandatory warranty here.
But make no mi
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The small saving they made doing this has been completely obliterated by the PR nightmare, and the unfunny saga of yet more issues being uncovered, and most importantly, the poor souls that had to pay for this cheapness with their lives.
I guess that this is all down to 'creep' - in this case the drive to reduce costs so shareholders can get more money, standards become relaxed and then problem areas get exposed, and in this case the FAA are amazingly part of the problem, also by letting boeing certify stuff
We fucking called it (Score:5, Insightful)
You want higher overall costs due to taking longer to get it done and doing it with lower quality? Then outsource to lowest bidder, because that(tm) is how you get higher overall costs while you think you're saving money. There you go Boeing, you deserve everything that happens as a result. The victims don't, though, so that makes the outsourcing especially evil
Re:We fucking called it (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah but the bonuses have already been paid so why would the managers give a shit? If they are even still at Boeing they can just blame the contractors.
India (Score:4, Funny)
10 CLS
20 If stall = Y goto 40
30 If stall = N goto 40
40 Nose down
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10 CLS
20 If stall = Y goto 40
30 If stall = N goto 40
40 Nose down
You forgot
50 GOTO 10
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Being as these are Indian developers, that would probably be
50 GOTO 50
Re: India (Score:2)
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10 CLS
20 If stall = Y goto 40
30 If stall = N goto 40
40 Nose down
You forgot
50 GOTO 10
Sure; that's how it should have been designed. But somehow line 50 became
50 GOTO 40
$9 / hour (Score:5, Insightful)
Cutting costs is not a viable long term business plan.
Increasing revenue faster than cost increase and keeping a quality workforce is a long term viable business plan.
Who cares about long term business plans? (Score:5, Insightful)
I keep hearing people ask "Should the Government Pick winners and losers". That's a loaded question. The market will pick a winner but then that winner will use their position to distort the market. Boeing is already recovering nicely from this because there just isn't a lot of competition in planes and because the United States itself is exerting pressure to smooth things over.
The government isn't picking winners and losers, it's the Umpire. Imagine a baseball game without an Umpire. Imagine a whole league without them. Whoever's best at cheating wins.
Boeing got what it paid for (Score:5, Insightful)
You have to have an extraordinarily good outsourced team, one with experience/knowledge in the specific topic, if your requirements are not rock solid. Unfortunately Boeing made a shambles of understanding their own requirements from their end, so they got disaster that would be expected in this scenario. Boeing needed a team that would intelligently challenge the requirements. Can't get that kind of integrity and insight on the cheap.
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You have to have an extraordinarily good outsourced team, one with experience/knowledge in the specific topic, if your requirements are not rock solid. Unfortunately Boeing made a shambles of understanding their own requirements from their end, so they got disaster that would be expected in this scenario. Boeing needed a team that would intelligently challenge the requirements. Can't get that kind of integrity and insight on the cheap.
Not to mention oversight. Even with perfect requirements, outsourcing to other countries (particularly the India company I worked with) means you need to make sure they understand not just what the software is supposed to do, but the review and testing processes necessary for the level of software they are producing... and that they don't cut corner.
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True. But oversight is pretty hopeless absent well handled requirements.
Dovetailing with your point, the requirements are a necessary but not sufficient condition for success.
Boeing wanted a simple tweak that would allow the new craft to be classified as a minor variant on the existing craft. There are many, many points where it was many different someones' job to point out the approach implemented was wrong. Clearly everyone believed that the messenger would be killed for delivering the truth, and that
Re:Boeing got what it paid for (Score:4, Interesting)
Boeing wanted a simple tweak that would allow the new craft to be classified as a minor variant on the existing craft.
Boring per se didn't want a simple tweak, their customers did, companies like South West Airlines which has ordered 280 737 MAXes and will order more once the 737 MAX returns to flight and their existing fleet of 737 airframes age out.
SWA has paid Boeing tens of billions of dollars over the years to buy 737-shaped flying blobs and they will spend tens of billions more for yet more 737-shaped flying blobs. Cut and paste for other large 737-fleet operators in the US and around the world and that's why there are over 4000 planes in the 737 MAX order book. Thanks to the existing certification and the flight characteristics of those 737-blob aircraft being so similar a pilot or first officer qualified on 737s who has never flown a 737 MAX even in a simulator can learn how to do it legally with paying passengers in the back on the way to the airport by working through a one-hour tutorial on an iPad.
Boeing has plans and designs for a next-generation airframe to fit into the 737 marketplace, it's all lightweight and composite and fuel-efficient and stuff, a bit like the Airbus 321neo. Nobody's ready yet to spunk down ten billion dollars to buy a bunch of them ten years from now as long as they can get 737-blob airframes next year instead.
Re:Boeing got what it paid for (Score:5, Interesting)
Except for the part that it's not even all that cheap to hire overseas anymore.
Those $5/day figures are the stuff of myths. My firm does hiring in Pune India, and the price they are paying per warm body is higher than those in Romania. Meanwhile Romania is only 1 time zone away and the quality of work we get is far better.
Not that "better" is so hard to achieve. I am unfortunate to some of the technical interviews with Pune candidates, and I see them fail basic programming tests. I've seen candidates with CV's claiming 15 years of industry experience fail basic tasks such as two-level "if" statements. Now it is possible that our Indian HR arm is doing something horribly wrong to counter-select interviewees, I cannot exclude the possibility, but assuming they get a representative cross-section of the talent available, my take is this: never hire from Pune for any kind of job that is of any importance to your company. Not for your customer-facing site, not for your internal systems that you rely on, and most certainly not for the avionics system that could possibly kill people on your planes.
Programming against specs is an antipattern. It doesn't matter how detailed your specs are, there is always a way to implement them wrong. Software requires understanding of the problem space and you cannot abstract away the problem space into a bunch of expected outputs and other measurements. Worse still: writing specs to the detail where the quality of the implementation no longer matters is the same (or higher) effort than implementing the spec.
Re:Boeing got what it paid for (Score:4, Insightful)
From my experience, your HR department is probably failing you.
I worked for a company which had its largest office in Pune. Hiring was almost exclusively done by hiring IIT graduates straight out of university. The company, although small, was well known, having developed a relationship with IIT schools over time and because it had a respected training program for new hires.
Using this hiring process, the company was able to hire and retain very bright and productive people.
The people you want to hire never come near your company because they were already hired and retained by other companies, like the company I worked for.
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When you look at it that way, Sturgeon's law is almost a form of prescience.
Re:Boeing got what it paid for (Score:4, Interesting)
Now it is possible that our Indian HR arm is doing something horribly wrong to counter-select interviewees, I cannot exclude the possibility, but assuming they get a representative cross-section of the talent available, my take is this: never hire from Pune for any kind of job that is of any importance to your company.
I had a conversation with a contractor I worked with that immigrated from India. I don't recall how we got on the topic but he told me that in India they have an affirmative action system there much like we have in the USA. The difference is that in the USA the affirmative action is on race and gender, over there it is based on the old caste system they are trying to dispose of. There are quotas on how many people must be selected from the lower castes regardless of how they score on selection exams. Those within each caste are selected based on score, so they will select the best within these castes, but the total percentage of workers from each caste must meet this quota.
Now, consider what happens to the work ethic of a person that knows they scored in the top 90% out of the pack of people that as a group cannot be fired without risking punishment from the government. These people get to keep their jobs even if they merely show up and pretend to produce. To get fired would mean having to be so incompetent that there is a blatant lack of ability to perform.
I see this kind of affirmative action coming to the USA. If a person can show they are a member of some kind of traditionally oppressed group then they will find work not on merit but on some immutable quality they inherited. Without this competition for jobs they will quickly learn, as a group, that there's money to be made by just showing up.
That said, the really smart ones will do EVERYTHING they can to not be associated with this oppressed group. That just makes them look bad. They will lie about their heritage, keep quiet about it, play it down, and just generally do what they can to distance themselves as an individual from this group. If a person gets into a school or to a job on merit then their membership in a caste is just kind of "lost". Unlike in the USA where membership in most every traditionally oppressed group is highly visible by looking at one's face the people in India don't look any different based on caste.
Does this mean members of a lower caste cannot compete? No. As stated before they do compete but if they can then they pretend to not be a member of these castes. It means that they have no expectation to compete, no incentive to excel, and it's simply a logical conclusion for many to find work where they can maximize their income for the least amount of effort.
India will have to learn to acquire employees based on merit alone or find themselves in the near future unable to hire themselves out like they used to. The USA will be in a similar situation too if this "diversity" hiring isn't taken down a notch.
I expect to be moderated down for this, not because it lacks logic but because facts hurt people's feelings.
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an Indian can
never, ever, never change their caste.
I didn't say that they could. I was merely told that if a person from a certain caste had demonstrated valuable skills then they'd be considered a valued employee and that their caste would be overlooked.
I didn't ask but I suspected this man telling me this, making VERY good wages in the USA by the way, was a member of a lower caste.
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Except for the part that it's not even all that cheap to hire overseas anymore.
It is often not done because of dollar savings, but to avoid the business costs to the program of further delays. So they write the check for 100 engineers hoping they can do the work that 20 experienced guys could have done. (Cross fingers.) It costs more than 20 experienced guys would cost in dollars, but you cannot find 20 such people in 3 months while your project is already falling behind.
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Re: Boeing got what it paid for (Score:2)
Who said anything about _good_ engineers?
Most likely their management is 100% bean counters, 0% engineers. Making management utterly unable to discern a good engineer from a bumbling mediocrity.
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Indeed. Cheap coders are excessively expensive if you depend on result quality.
MBAs do not understand that, because they think engineers are a standardized component and they get the same quality of work, just more of it for the same money from cheap ones. Extreme arrogance, coupled with no understanding how things actually work.
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That's not a fact, it's a tautology, i.e., it is true by definition.
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When you're at the bottom, very often you have no personal or social achievements to be proud of, so you revert to being proud to a random occurrence, i.e. being born of a specific race. The fact that this by itself brings to innate quality whatsoever completely escapes the bottom-feeder.
And just in case, by being at the bottom I don't mean being poor.
Re:Boeing got what it paid for (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, people smart enough to do it well are smart enough to do other things well....like things that are harder to outsource.
What would those occupations be? I'll give a list of fields with tested IQ as a start.
https://www.iqcomparisonsite.c... [iqcomparisonsite.com]
The center of the bell curve for engineers and computer occupations is centered on an IQ of 110. What other occupations are there that require similar intelligence, are difficult to outsource, and have similar levels of income? When it comes to income and intelligence there is going to be market forces that make that shift. If there are more smart people generally then people in any given occupation will likely rise. As people compete for jobs then compensation shifts as well.
Where will these people go? I have a few guesses. Medicine could be a big one, this doesn't mean necessarily physicians but most anything that deals with drugs, physical and mental health, research, and so on that deals with keeping people healthy. Lawyers, paralegal, law enforcement, social work, etc. There's lots of engineering to do with big immobile projects, like bridges, airports, power plants, streets, buildings big and small, etc. Work in education, research of many kinds, and many sciences might be able to be outsourced with things like distance education, teleconferencing but even that has limits when the education or research is on something physical or uniquely local.
What does this mean for a college student today studying computer science or computer engineering? That maybe they should take some classes in management, law, biology, civil/environmental engineering, or education. Or, while an undergrad they should consider looking towards graduate school in something other than computers.
Someone that studied computer science as an undergrad and then gone on to get a law degree just might find a lot of work in the future. Just food for thought.
Re: Boeing got what it paid for (Score:2)
IQ has no predictive value in esimating future life success beyond being a filter specifically at the very low end of the curve.
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IQ has no predictive value in esimating future life success beyond being a filter specifically at the very low end of the curve.
That's an interesting claim, and I'd like to see sources so that I may investigate this further, but I'm not sure how that relates to this thread.
We started with the claim that computer programmers being nearly unemployable, no? Then comes where will they find work, no? Then comes my suggestion on where that might be, no? If we assume that IQ is a filter at the low end of the curve. Further assume that there are people reading this in colleges now or starting soon. Then assume that these people wish to
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Richard Feynman had an IQ of 125..
That single fact (if true) should do more to bring some common sense into the debate on intelligence than a whole library of books. Of course some people think Feynman was just kidding when he said that.
Software developers/engineers/programmers have a special kind of intelligence that most people lack. They have the ability, and even the inclination, to tackle hard abstract problems and keep working until they solve them satisfactorily. So there are fewer good candidates for such jobs than simple IQ measure
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IQ is a measurement, but it really isnâ(TM)t measuring what virtually anybody thinks it measures.
I think it measures one's probable suitability to a number of occupations. How do I know this? It's on the chart I just linked to.
The number of college professors with an IQ below 105 is 5%. The number of truck drivers with an IQ below 105 is 95%. Do you dispute this?
For a person that has an IQ of 100 their chances of finding work in the computing field will be very small, and getting smaller if these jobs are outsourced. Do you dispute this?
If this person is creative, has high "social intelligence" (w
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The number of college professors with an IQ below 105 is 5%. The number of truck drivers with an IQ below 105 is 95%. Do you dispute this?
And right there, you lose anything even vaguely resembling credibility. You look down on truck drivers, without any experience with them or the job, and therefore you think they are stupid. That's the prejudice and bigotry I expect from Slashdot, alright.
Professors are more educated not smarter. Truck drivers are probably less educated than professors, but given the planning and memorization skills the job requires, they cannot be stupid. Stupid drivers get into accidents. They get lost. They damage t
Re:Boeing got what it paid for (Score:5, Interesting)
This.. easy to post about "stupid truck drivers" when you have never done it.
Trucking life has gotten easier over the years (GPS, etc) but they can still take your cargo across the country with nothing but maps, intuition,and experience.
The OP should try to drive a big, fully loaded truck (preferably a B-train) throught down town of any major city... and come back and let us know how well he did.
The moment someone starts talking in a condescending way about someone's chosen profession, they lose.
Many "blue collar workers" are very skilled, and are not dumb at all (My dad was a woodworker, his math was impressive, and his abililty to plan his cuts to minimize waste was amazing).
Slashdot is full of Arrogance and Ignorance.
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This.. easy to post about "stupid truck drivers" when you have never done it.
Whoa - is that what he actually said? you quote "stupid truck drivers". I can't find him writing that.
IQ of 105 is normal, not below normal. Not stupid. Stupid isn't even related to IQ.
IQ is just one measurement of standard deviations of learning ability. And it's a part of a suite of personal traits.
I test out to 151, yet that doesn't say whether or not I would/will be successful. I have a pretty decent social IQ, with some deviation with not suffering fools gladly. That makes me adept at science
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I put it in quotes, not to quote what he was saying, but parapharse what he was implying.. might be just me, but i found it condescending to truck drivers.
I have three kids, one was tested to be 'high-IQ" How high, we dont know, just that she is at least the top 2%.. .Mabe higher, but the true score isnt important, just that she is different and we wanted to her to go a school which tunes the classes for her abilities.
Raising the three of them i have a general understanding of the differences between her,
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I put it in quotes, not to quote what he was saying, but parapharse what he was implying.. might be just me, but i found it condescending to truck drivers.
You really shouldn't paraphrase in quotes though. Someone might come along and think yoou were quoting someone.
IQ by itself doesn't mean much - just like other personal attributes. It's a combination oa all of the personal aspects. It does tend to make a person demonstrably different. Make certain that she gets to be socialized enough. For some reason, a lot of people concentrate on the learning aspect of high IQ, which is the easiest part.
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yeah, should have used italics or something.. but not a huge slashdot poster and didnt want to bother figuring out how they worked...
We didnt have her tested so we can brag about her score, which is also why we never had her re-tested to find out just what it is.
We had her tested as she was around 6 at the time and clearly wasnt the same as the other kids, and was having a hard go at school. Once she was tested, and moved to a "gifted" school, her social life greatly improved as she was with other kids at
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Low IQ does not mean stupid. Stupid used to be a definition for people that couldn't talk (before we knew about mental disability), later on stupid implied 85 IQ or less which even the US army doesn't know how to train someone to do anything useful at that level.
You can be smart and have a low IQ, IQ only measures how well you solve complex logic problems. Hence why retraining a "truck driver" to be a programmer won't work well, they have other things they have trained well at such as memorization and pathf
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Many managers don't like teams that challenge requirements, and certainly not teams that cost a lot. They should, of course, but they don't.
Indeed. It is not a comfortable way of working for people who may be inclined to think their job is to tell the little people what to do.
But the better people recognize the whiff of wobbly requirements, and know that discomfort is better than just rolling the dice and hoping someone else will be blamed when things go south.
The chickens have come home to roost (Score:2)
Good grief.
Re:The chickens have come home to roost (Score:5, Insightful)
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What IS the cost/benefit here? (Score:5, Insightful)
Boeing software probably saved millions of dollars by getting cheap code. That saving will probably be a drop in the bucket of the cost of the lawsuits and penalties. I would also not be surprised of charges of criminal negligence got filed. In the end, that code will end up costing them a LOT more than solidly built and tested code would have.
Re:What IS the cost/benefit here? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What IS the cost/benefit here? (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely agree, and I hope it happens that way, especially criminal charges. Cutting corners on flight surface control software, that's invisible.
It seems like the disaster was bound to happen. Why do these kinds of disasters keep happening? Why aren't people, esp. MBAs and other managers and executives, learning? Why is short-term cost-cutting so blinding?
Another different thought: I wonder how much the few remaining Boeing engineers knew about the offshore software? I wonder if their morale was damaged and didn't really review the system and possible failure scenarios? I wonder if they were too young and inexperienced to even know what to look for? Maybe they were told MCAS was a magic bean from India- don't worry, just trust it. It seems impossible to have any kind of quality control when you lay off the people who should be doing the work, get it done overseas as cheaply as possible, but now you have nobody to review, test, and qualify it.
This thing just gets worse and worse.
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That moment when you finally realize you live in a shithole governed by greedy imbeciles who don't see more than 5 minutes in the future. Its not like these things are unknown, see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon_Wars . But somehow nobody does anything - why is that?
Demand transparency and direct democracy today or keep receiving more and worse crap. But we all know how this will go on don't we? Enjoy eating shit, you will get 'accustomed' to it eventually.
I wonder if their morale was damaged and didn't really review the system and possible failure scenarios?
My guess is they were 'fuck
Re:What IS the cost/benefit here? (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems like the disaster was bound to happen. Why do these kinds of disasters keep happening? Why aren't people, esp. MBAs and other managers and executives, learning?
Because there's no penalty for said MBAs, managers, and executives. They still get their bonus, and the shit hits the fan long after the fact.
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Why aren't people, esp. MBAs and other managers and executives, learning? Why is short-term cost-cutting so blinding?
It is not about learning. Most people are incapable of learning anything that requires actual understanding. The core problem is the wrong people in the wrong positions.
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It seems like the disaster was bound to happen. Why do these kinds of disasters keep happening? Why aren't people, esp. MBAs and other managers and executives, learning?
They are learning. The MBAs who made the decision got very nice bonuses for cost cutting. Once they've destroyed Boeing, their resumes will discuss how they saved Boeing ${MILLIONS} per year, which the hiring manager MBA will see as a good thing and hire them. At the new company, both will get very nice bonuses for cost cutting.
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All losses will be covered by a small increase in the price of their cruise missiles.
Boeing will do fine. Some poor schmuck in middle management will take the fall, and that will be the end of that.
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In the end, that code will end up costing them a LOT more than solidly built and tested code would have.
It will. But it takes some actual skill and insight to see that in advance. They do not have that anymore. They made sure to get "profit-oriented" (i.e. greedy and stupid) "leadership" and they got rid of anybody that has actual skills because these people were always bringing up concerns and wanted to do things in more expensive ways. I don't think this company can be fixed.
Meanwhile our gov't (Score:2)
Re: Meanwhile our gov't (Score:2)
Good news! Silicon Valley wages will stay stagnant for another year, while cost of living continues to rise. Thanks President Trump! Thanks Demopublicans! Thanks Republicrats!
Non technical managers can recognize expertise (Score:5, Insightful)
Non techincal managers have a difficult time recognizing expertise or lack of same in employees and this can lead to poor hiring decisions.
I've seem too many managers think engineers are a commodity and decide to keep inexpensive ones and ditch the expensive ones.
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I've seem too many managers think engineers are a commodity and decide to keep inexpensive ones and ditch the expensive ones.
And that comes from them not even understanding the basics of their job. Sure, not every expensive engineer is good, but the cheap ones are never good and you _need_ the good ones or your business dies.
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Hmm... Perhaps Boeing (and other aircraft manufacturers) would do well to have the people reviewing the code be actual pilots who would ask the question "Would I fly with this software?" (The engineers that I've worked with in the past who were active pilots would surely have asked that question.) And if management wanted to preserve the company's reputation, they'd lis
CEO should be booted out (Score:2)
nose down
Sounds like Boeing took a page out of HP's playboo (Score:5, Insightful)
Lay off everyone, outsource everything your company is known for to some low cost shithole, and watch your market share turn into crap.
Re:Sounds like Boeing took a page out of HP's play (Score:5, Insightful)
Lay off everyone, outsource everything your company is known for to some low cost shithole, and watch your market share turn into crap.
Who cares about market share? People DIED. They died. Innocent people just going about their day, traveling to see family or friends or for business or vacation died because some jacka**es in an air conditioned skyscraper wanted to cut costs.
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Their market share is doing just fine (Score:2)
Their brand isn't damaged either. Most people outside of tech forums don't even know it happened since the media has long since dropped it, again, the establishment takes care of it's own.
It's a little extra work for their PR firms and they'll have to give the politicians a little something extra.
Boeing's reputation in the toilet (Score:5, Insightful)
Boeing has been trashed by this fiasco. And every revelation, it comes out that the MBAs were at fault. The engineers did their best but they weren't in control of what was going on. The MBAs...were. Making a second sensor cost extra? Insanity. Making teams unaware of what the big picture was? Control freakism. And now they're pinching pennies on a mega-billion dollar project. At every point along the way, it was the MBAs who made the harmful decisions.
And naturally the poor engineers get the blame. It's good to be an executive.
Re:Boeing's reputation in the toilet (Score:5, Interesting)
... And every revelation, it comes out that the MBAs were at fault. The engineers did their best but they weren't in control of what was going on.
Yup, what I've been saying ever since my first job a long time ago. Of all people, NASA has done this over and over, most notably with Challenger and Columbia. Heaven only knows how many near-disasters there have been.
Engineers are constantly being blamed and nobody seems to know we don't make the decisions.
And naturally the poor engineers get the blame. It's good to be an executive.
And remember, the pilots were blamed early on.
The fatal part wasn't designed by Indians (Score:3, Insightful)
"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 the Ethiopian Airlines disaster in March. The Chicago-based planemaker also said it didn’t rely on either firm for another software issue disclosed after the crashes: a cockpit warning light that wasn’t working for most buyers.
“Boeing has many decades of experience working with supplier/partners around the world,” a company spokesman said. “Our primary focus is on always ensuring that our products and services are safe, of the highest quality and comply with all applicable regulations.”
There is a whole bunch of companies involved from many nations. But yeah! go ahead right ahead and blame the Indians. How can any Americans be blamed for this? It must be the pilots too.
FMEA (Score:2)
To be honest it doesn't matter who wrote the code, what matters is the systems engineer who was responsible for the FMEA for the MCAS. That FMEA will be getting a lot of scrutiny if it isn't in the shredder.
Re: (Score:3)
So "it wasn't someone else's incompetence, it was our own"?
Well, that's a PR win for the company then...
Countries do not design software (Score:2)
obnoxious fumes of Mergers and Aquisitions (Score:4, Interesting)
Boeing used to do everything in house with excellent engineering talent. After the Cold War, however, something big changed that most Americans did not notice:
As Democrats and Republicans in DC scrambled to cut military spending to get a "peace dividend", which Republicans wanted to use for tax cuts and Democrats wanted to use for more social spending, the big defense contactors went up to capitol hill to tell the government that the reduced defense spending meant there would not be enough money in the industry to support multiple companies maintinging development capacities year-round while few new things were contracted for development. The solution these companies offered was pure evil for the taxpayers, but happily embraced by the government: the defense contractors wanted all the antitrust and monopoly rules eliminated and they wanted to be allowed to merge. This was approved and it went on for something like a decade.
The mergers are how we ended up with one provider of space launch services ("United Launch Alliance" aka ULA) which provided both the Atlas and Delta family of rockets which had previously been competitors. Government was promised that this merger would save the tax payers a lot of money, but as is predictable in any monopoly, at actually caused launch costs to skyrocket.
And here's the bit most miss about Boeing:
Beoing was allowed to gobble up its airline- and tactical-aircraft making competitor, McDonnell Douglas. This merger had an unusual twist: in a normal acquisition the management of the gobbled-up company gets gradually laid off and the bigger company's management remains, but in this merger the opposite happened. McD management had extensive experience in outsourcing and the owners of Boeing wanted that to cut costs so a lot of the Boeing people were let go and McD people replaced many. The firm that had historically known every detail of their aircraft, having designed and built in-house (up through the 747) now had different managers who preferred to farm out sub assemblies to foreign suppliers. It took many years for the side effects of this huge and irresponsible shift to show up - which they did with the 787 Dreamliner which had many parts farmed-out and when they arrived at Boeing for assembly and test they did not fit together properly and had many issues. 787 production was way behind schedule and they had problems like the battery fires that Boeing planes had not historically suffered.
The new Air Force tanker (the KC-46 Pegasus) has been a mess too, probable for related reasons.
I have always preferred to fly Boeing and have done work for them, but if they have truly farmed-out software work to Indian firms, I now consider their aircaft unsafe and also a threat to national security. It's simply impossible to have engineers woring on a system and not give those engineers access to all the data required to do the job, so either Boeing is exporting data they cannot legally export, or they are not providing those engineers the needed data to do their jobs safely.
It's not like software keeps the plane in the air (Score:2)
737 Stack Exchange (Score:4, Funny)
So the 737 Max code is just random crap copypastad from Stack Exchange and massaged till it compiles? That'd explain a lot.
You could probably even find the posts if you dug hard enough. 'Hello, please, how am I to be doing stall protection on a plane with dual airspeed sensors?' 'Here's exactly what you'd do in .NET 4.7: xxx xxxx xxx' 'Excuse me, but this is not to be compiling in .NET 3.1 which is used. Please rewrite this all for me in .NET 3.1, rapid.' 'Am I doing your homework?' 'No sir, of course not!' 'Here you go: yyy yyy yyyy'. 'Excuse me sir, this is not working and I am not understanding why there to be [ and ].' 'It's an array because you have two sensors... in the single sensor care you would zzz zzz zzz. Does that make sense? BUT NEVER DO THIS IT WOULD BE VERY DANGEROUS.' 'Many thanks, I have been using this.' [closed]
Don't be silly (Score:2)
They probably outsourced the infotainment system or something like that. This is just somebody trying to be sensationalist and to shift blame away from the fact that Boeing should've just provided tose warning lights as standard (for free) instead of charging $4000 a pop.
Re: (Score:2)
You could RTFA instead of speculating what it was about?
Re: Don't be silly (Score:2)
I did, smartass, and it says exactly what I was saying - system that was subcontracted wasn't part of the advanced flight calculation software. Smartass.
Re: (Score:2)
It wasn't the infotainment system either. TFA specifcally mentions: flight-display software, flight-test equipment, and cockpit displays. I don't think any of these refer to the infotainment system for passengers.
Wouldn't some accountability be nice? (Score:2)
"The Max software...was developed at a time Boeing was laying off experienced engineers and pressing suppliers to cut costs. Increasingly, the iconic American plane-maker and its subcontractors have relied on temporary workers making as little as $9 an hour to develop and test software..."
The bean counters who successfully pushed for this should be taken out into the nearest public square and horsewhipped. It wouldn't bring back any of the people who died because of their soulless greed, but perhaps som
I hope this will be an eye opener for the public. (Score:2, Troll)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I've got some bad news for you. In my 25 year career as a programmer I rarely see good quality code coming from anywhere.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm sure India has some excellent programmers (Score:3)
Harvard Business School thinking strikes again (Score:2)
Off-shoring KILLS (Score:2)
Today's hatchet job brought to you by Bloomberg (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's be clear what happened here.
During wind tunnel testing it was shown that in 1 particular emergency maneuver that is almost never used there is an issue with the engines producing some extra lift. This extra lift causes the pilot to lose his 'feel' on the stick which is not allowed. Pilots rely on stick feedback for safe flying, not having it can cause disorientation. People look at the engines and after the fact want to say, no kidding, look at it. This isn't really the case, it's only in one fringe crazy scenario they are.
Boeing first tried to redesign the cowling a bit to fix it adding some strategically placed vortexes and other things. Didn't work. So they went the software route and created mcas. This particular maneuver pulls higher than normal Gs so they tied it to 2 sensors, AOA and a G force indicator. They also maxed the mcas trim to a movement of like 0.6 degrees.
Then they did their magic to come up with a failure probability and it came out to something crazy like 223trillion flight hours. Again, this is with AOA and G force sensor, and a max limit. Boeing submitted it as a major criticality not hazardous. Hazardous would have likely required redundant sensors. FAA accepted this.
However, during flight tests, pilots weren't happy with the feel during some low speed maneuvers. My understanding is as a drop in replacement it didn't quite feel like a 737 which was a big selling point but maybe it was more major than that. So MCAS to the rescue again. However at low speeds the G force sensor wasn't applicable. So it was removed. And at low speeds you need larger trim adjustments, so the max trim of 0.6 was removed as well allowing for a runaway if triggered multiple times.
But here is the kicker, Boeing didn't reevaluate criticality, kept it a major which doesn't require redundant sensors. The argument here being the MCAS system criticality didn't change, the triggers to the system did. FAA accepted this based on the documents submitted. Not having seen the submittal this part seemed nuts.
The after the fact crazy part is that they never seemed to have tested a bird strike to the AOA scenario in the simulator. Presumably because of the low criticality assessment.
It doesn't matter what Boeing paid... (Score:2)
This software is tested exhaustively as a system an dI mean every jot and tiddle of the requirements is tested. I can assure you that this MCAS system worked within the set out requirements regardless of how much they paid their outsourced software engineers.
You do NOT run Agile when you are developing software for aircraft and deliver only 80% of a solution. There are strict requirements and maintaining your airworthiness certifications demands that you can prove the individual components work as required
Re: (Score:2)
Will love to hear their darling planemaking company is using outsourcers to design their planes.
The 737 derivatives in military use, like the P-8, was finalized as a design long ago. Any software development in the navigation and control systems has long been split off from the civilian market. Same goes for other Boeing airliner derivatives in military hands like the KC-46, E-3, E-6, E-8, and KC-135. These airplanes often carry powerful radar, unlike anything a civilian aircraft would carry, so they use different electronics. They also are going to be tested for operation in conditions that no ci
Re:No Its OUT (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That you accept that condition on the order is no different to voluntarily doing this anyway.
At worst, you'd let that happen, and then just throw away their code or have it triple-checked through your normal processes. Not just slap it into a plane.