Even if they were a stellar team, the problem with offshoring anything is always culture. The offshore team is isolated from the company, all of its storied century of knowledge (in this case), about engineering, materials, machining, quality, certification, aerospace, systems, it goes on and on.
It's inconceivable to spawn any human safety article outside of that culture into a vacuum behind a contract written by lay business people and PM's.
That’s not really the culture problem here. The problem is that if they outsourced it to a team at $9 an hour someone at Boeing thought they made a killing.
While the offshore team gets $9 an hour, the engineer itself gets a fraction of that. And those engineers are very well aware that you didn’t choose them because you think they’re amazing. They know you chose them because you don’t value engineering.
So regardless of whether they are good or not they’ll do the minimum work possible.
I remember a bigger automation softwares CTO telling me about a bigger enterprise that offshored their database change management process.
The process was defined as putting a word file put into a jira issue. At the end of the approval process some person in India had to paste it into the database shell. If word auto correct messed it up the whole process gets marked as failed and it started from 0. That person pasting into the database has no interest whatsoever on making any recommendations even if they could.
Not to take the easy pun here, but by making this decision and ones like it, someone at Boeing did make a killing. Or 346 killings, more precisely. The same culture and internal processes that allowed this to occur are the exact same ones that let the MCAS design flaws get through, and I will forever be furious that Boeing as an organization was not ripped into parts for that failure.
I wonder if that cultural problem stemmed from Boeing’s 2001 relocation of their headquarters to Chicago, a decision made explicitly to separate their financial infrastructure from their existing operations.
> The offshore team is isolated from the company, all of its storied century of knowledge (in this case), about engineering, materials, machining, quality, certification, aerospace, systems, it goes on and on.
In company as big and old as Boeing,many teams work isolated and independently. I don't belive knowledge gets shared that easily. Also what I read about Boeing culture (I forgot where but reddit ama I guess), it was declined way back.
Blaming the problem on $9 offshore engineer really look bad on company. I have worked with $5 engineers as well as $100 engineers in past. As long as you don't have proper verification proess both can screw the system. I blame it on company executives who sidelined safety altogether.
It is that the outsourcing is to people who incentivized to get the contract closed.
Same things with outsourcing in IT, the workers on the other side are generally economically incentivized to closing tickets. They don't get negative feedback about doing a bad job, so they just want green tests and their PRs getting merged.
Which is a reflection of the economic incentives in the arrangement between the two companies and how they are measured and how their bosses are measured.
You write the contract, and the workers wind up optimizing for the contract, not for the output of the work. It is sort of a machine that does exactly what you program it to, and the result is bad.
Calling it "culture" I think makes it feel more like its something ineffable that they're missing. Instead it is practically the result of an almost physical law. It isn't some kind of "esprit de corps" that they're missing, they're just acting like water flowing downhill following the gradient. The result shouldn't be a surprise.
And I've seen this at work with PRs submitted where the person clearly didn't test the code at all in reality since it was totally broken when you ran it, while the tests mocked things correctly so that they were green, sometimes tests being changed in ways that clearly show that the code is broken, but the person just charged again making it green rather than making it working. Just trying to get the code shipped to get the ticket closed to get the metric count bumped up by one, without any other care. Then you have to around and around with them on the right design because they always take the easiest route to green first, rather than the right fix.
The passage about sending the designs back 18 times until the people on the other side understood that they needed to hook up the smoke detectors to the electrical system sounds real familiar to me.
The whole lie about how American business uses scientific management principles where we measure metrics and make informed decisions is such a sad joke. The only measurement that mattered was $8/hr and the outcome wasn't measured because of McNamera's fallacy and the fact that the person who made that decision would get a bonus based on the short term sugar high it would give the financial numbers.
The end result of all this sociopathy though is that its becoming more and more flawed for workers to ever believe they should show any loyalty to any job. When managers are all looking for short term gain and workers are all job hopping to find that raise they can't get at their current job, we may find that our domestic production starts to look more like the quality that we get from outsourcing, along with the economy looking more and more like a third world scammy economy. Our incentives are getting very misaligned at home as well.
"The whole lie about how American business uses scientific management principles where we measure metrics and make informed decisions is such a sad joke."
Anyone who's worked in corporate for a few years should be able to see millions wasted. An accurate parallel for what's happening is not 'efficient market', it's a fashion show - some random fad becomes popular amongst management, most companies adopt it, some get burned.
Then it either passes unevenfully or collapses the whole economy like it did 14 years ago.
> Then you have to around and around with them on the right design because they always take the easiest route to green first, rather than the right fix.
Hahaha this sounds like a side effect of test driven development.
"Boeing has also expanded a design center in Moscow. At a meeting with a chief 787 engineer in 2008, one staffer complained about sending drawings back to a team in Russia 18 times before they understood that the smoke detectors needed to be connected to the electrical system, said Cynthia Cole, a former Boeing engineer who headed the engineers’ union from 2006 to 2010."
I have worked on a couple of projects where we had to use an offshore team for QA. The biggest problem was written instruction comprehension: the offshore team simply could not follow instructions written in perfectly coherent english in an email. The only way we made progress was to set up a call where we walked the offshore team through the steps in the email - as in literally telling them to "run this command, then run that command". It was hell as we kept getting lambasted for not meeting our deliverables because the offshore team couldn't follow simple instructions to run a few scripts and record their output.
That raises numerous questions, and all of them indicate bad management.
Who is in charge of that team? Is there no bilingual, western trained person that can mange these problems?
Are they not understanding what needs to be done, or are they missing that many skills? Do they not recieve training? If training is not helping, why were these candidates selected in the first place? If these were the best candidates avaliable, why was that offshore office created to begin with?
We had no control over the other team. They were already responsible for QA of most of the system, but most of that just consisted of running existing QA test cases and reporting when they failed. As we were implementing new network protocols that they did not have existing test cases for, the work QA was responsible for was rather more complex. The issues were typically of the form "run this test script and tell us what happened for you" => "it failed" and then provided no useful information. Each step was a 24 rtt nightmare until we pushed for conference calls at 11pm local time for us.
At the time we also heard of a horror tales from the offshore team. In one case a new hire had gone through the interview process, accepted the job offer, showed up for the first day, just left and never came back after a better offer came in. Suffice it to say that the offshore QA team was not exactly high quality without the ability to retain employees. It was not like the QA teams I've encountered at other jobs where QA writes a lot of their own testing infrastructure and are on an equal footing with the developers. Sadly they were more like a glorified checklist processing system, and were probably in over their heads.
I just cannot see why outsourcing this way is sustainable, and it probably isn't. Some are great, and some are absolutely abysmal, an internal joke in the company was that a senior engineer was the same a junior engineer or worse. I had an a senior engineer who couldn't change a string to another string in a code base. I don't even exaggerate I had to prove to my manager that he had no skills at all.
I don't think the issue is really outsourcing in the sense of sending this work overseas, as contracting important functions outside of Boeing. Sending this work to an entirely US firm would also have been a problem given the way their interactions with Boeing worked:
> The coders from HCL were typically designing to specifications set by Boeing. Still, “it was controversial because it was far less efficient than Boeing engineers just writing the code,” Rabin said. Frequently, he recalled, “it took many rounds going back and forth because the code was not done correctly.”
Key attributes here are:
- The engineers at the external firm isn't necessarily incentivized to get it right the first time.
- Boeing still has to have engineers on staff to write the specs, and the evaluate the work product of the contractors _repeatedly_ to see whether it meets the specs.
- If it's wrong, it's really really costly.
In that context, I think it makes way more sense for this stuff to be built entirely by people on staff.
The article doesn't discuss it and I don't know to what degree this is still at play, but for years after the merger with McDonnell Douglas, a lot of the Boeing people were frustrated with how processes were changed to depend on many more outside firms. Most of what I have heard centered on other firms producing substantial components that previously would have been done by Boeing itself. Whenever there was an issue with some sub-assembly, the Boeing people felt that if the work hadn't been contracted out, the issue both wouldn't have happened, and would have been faster to resolve.
You sub contract out hardware assemblies (and software) when you start feeling market pressure and your cost has grown to be competitive.
Then you find, as a prime contractor, that you are still responsible for the product. You still have to maintain expertise. And, to keep the vendors in line you have to be able to at least threaten to bring the work back in house. All of this greatly reduces the cost advantage.
Now days, the concept is "only sub out work that is done better than you can do; where better includes technical performance".
What I think many people fail to recognize is that all aircraft vendors outsource quite a bit and have for a long time. Neither Boeing nor Airbus make the avionics. They buy them on spec from Honeywell or Smiths.
Back when I was a DS9 working in the ASL, we’d sometimes use a full software stack to try something out with pilots and airlines. But the result was a spec that went to Honeywell for implementation. And then when we got their output, we’d put those hardware boxes into our engineering sims and see if everything matched up.
I like the key attributes part. The engineers are paid by the hour, so they are incentivised to have the project running for as long as possible.
I don't think it's cheap to get an offshore team to do because the engineers might be cheap but the whole team + mgmt + reviewers are expensive. I have heard stories (from a person who did work in such environments) that the managers would charge a ton and do nothing basically. The work was handled by engineers and was reviewed by offshore people. Not sure what the managers were managing.
There are 2 advantages of an offshore team, especially India,
- Round the clock work
- Contractors can be hired for a few months and don't cost as much in terms of benefits that the company needs to provide to full time employees. So when you know work is going to pour in for 2 quarters, hire a bunch of a contractors. That way you don't have to pay for the equivalent on-site staff all year.
But obviously, this only shows up in quarterly financials and it's hard to judge the quality of the product over multiple years and iterations which is abused.
Not all execs care about "sustainable". They often have quarterly targets. To get some wins an exec could outsource, complete a bunch of tasks, then move to another company on a higher paid job, leaving former company to mop up.
See this a lot with sales also. Transactional client relationships promising the world to get the deal and hit commission multipliers. They then move to another company with "success stories" leaving implementation teams to reset client expectations.
It's worse than that. Lots of executive positions are bullshit jobs. They may or may not produce good results, and there may or may not be a way to determine that promptly. The important thing is to be able to fill up some slides in a deck with visionary plans. The engineers should have gotten them to discussing bike sheds.
I think it’s lack of long term thinking. The IT and HR departments at my company constantly come up with new shiny initiatives for saving cost. They centralize a lot of stuff and save some money that way. Over time it turns out that things don’t work but the initiator has already been promoted away and the next guy starts his own initiative. So there is this constant cycle of short term savings that cause long term cost. And it seems nobody cares about these long term effects because they all are focused on putting up a good short term show.
If you bought some stock, and were forced to keep it for atleast 5 years, the CEOs would have to behave a lot more carefully (=good for the company in the long term), than they currently do. With millisecond stock tradings, noone cares about long term future, because the stocks are sold and rebought and resold again and again many times by many trading houses and their financial products.
The whole stock market is just a speculation game now. With no real value defined behind it's price. All software and strategy is defined on finding stock at a higher price due to any reason. If you can't find a reason, make one. Like CEO's buying more stocks to limit the supply of their stock and propping up the "value".
It's all about the "sugar rush". Doesn't matter if the commodity is worth shit. The GameStop fiasco demonstrated that amply. It had no real viable plan, so it shouldn't have been worth a lot but you could artificially increase it's value.
They have to do it because VCs aren't going to stick around years for your organic growth. It was supposed to be a proof of viability and then proper quality product. With this model of money making, it's just the PoC.. no need for quality.
Cost cutting. Speed to market. Expectations of perpetual continuous improvements. Quarterly mindset. Inability to admit mistakes. Move fast break things.
It’s basically the same thing that led to the Volkswagen fiasco.
Unfortunately there’s so much code in these products, they start to believe they are SV style startups a fail whale situation has slim consequences when it’s completely opposite.
Sustainability doesn't matter when faced with a quarterly review. You do whatever to get it over the line in time for that and then don't have time to fix the snotball of hacks that is hidden.
I've certainly done this for sprints. I suspect if you examined code quality by when a ticket was started in a sprint, you would find it plummets a few days before the end.
As an American, I think that arguments about outsourcing that boil down to ability being all over the map don't feel right. Plenty of American engineers are all over the map.
The biggest difference is distance, the time zone split, and cultural differences.
I say this as someone that thinks limiting insourcing raises wages in the short term.
I agree, I've had plenty of colleagues whom really didn't excel in the field. I think for the most part with outsourcing as you say is the distance, but for me/us (team) it was cultural, we simply couldn't mix with the foreign part of the team. I've left the country out, because I don't want to point fingers, but it was simply about face, and no asking questions at all. To be honest, there were mistakes on both fronts, I feel like we as the engineering team in the country where the company was located was, felt entitled to our way of working, while the other party had to fit in.
wow, and here i am coding off and on since i was nine years old (port scanners, bots, blogs, ezines, chat servers, simple games, apps etc) cd and feeling like an imposter, so i don’t bother applying to tech jobs because i think i am not good enough and yet guys like the guy you worked with are getting all sorts of positions. maybe i should push myself more. having social anxiety sucks
Honestly, at least in my country it doesn't take a lot to get a programming job, at least if you can show you've got some skills. Though most companies won't take a look at you if you haven't got a diploma. If you've got the interest go for it. You cannot really lose anything by applying to some companies other than maybe a bit of time.
This is what happens when Boeing is run by accountants and MBAs instead of engineers (as it once was). Short term financial "wins" like outsourcing eventually make Boeing unrecognizable from the industrial behemoth that cranked out 747s in Everett.
What these finance and business people fail to understand (or simply don't care about) is that every point of outsourcing becomes a point of friction. You now need to negotiate specs, deliverables, timetables and payments. There are often perverse incentives that reward change orders. You often get cost blowouts from "cost plus" pricing.
Two excellent resources on this. [1] A memo written by analysts at Boeing who were clearly pissed off about the outsourcing situation and how counterproductive it all was, and [2] an article about the cultural changes that took place at Boeing after the executives from McDonnell Douglas took over.
If I started my own aerospace company I would try to put in a legally binding rule that the majority of management and the executive team has to be engineers. But I don't know if an executive team can tie its successors hands like that. Unless the majority of voting shares remain in the hands of the family of the founder and successive generations commit to keep the company run by professional engineers.
Engineers don't necessarily make good managers. Engineers actually have a narrow view of what a company like Boeing does. They may be the best at designing an airplane, but not at building, selling and flying it. So why not have executives be pilots, or even assembly line workers, they are all just as essential as engineers.
What they do sometimes is have their top executives work every job first. Engineering of course, but also getting their hands dirty on the assembly lines, ordering from suppliers, maybe even fly the plane. So when they finish their years long path, they may be MBA, but they know what they are doing.
I've never worked in Aerospace. The best corporate workplace I've ever worked in (in terms of development culture) had a role that was somewhat akin to a developer's advocate. I can't recall its actual name now though. This person served as the most senior engineer in the department, and was responsible for the delivery of all engineering projects. They were given considerable latitude to uphold good development practices, even when it would conflict with senior management's priorities, and expectations. In my time there, I saw this manager constantly throw his hat into the ring, making the case for the right technical decisions against upper management. I've never worked in another workplace that had such a role, or such a person doing it. It was very early on in my career, and it unfortunately set a very high expectation for corporate software engineering culture that has never been met since.
I think this is better as a theory on HN than it would be in reality. There are plenty of engineers that are just as greedy, ruthless, and willing to do anything for a profit as the current execs.
I doubt a leadership team half comprised of engineers would be significantly better than a current one.
I’ve worked for technical experts and many of them are crappy managers. They don’t understand the bigger picture of the business or how the financial side works.
What medical business is like this? You don't need to be a doctor to own or run a hospital or pharma company.
The legal business is like this however. I'm fairly certain that, offices must be owned by lawyers. The thought being that if a law office was owned by a non-lawyer you'd have a conflict of interest if your boss told you to do something illegal or unethical.
Rather than that, have the executive pay be delayed so that they have incentive to ensure the company is doing well in ten years. Essentially, similar to a vesting schedule.
As a CEO, if your team sets up a company to succeed, the payoff is likely not for the next decade. You're setting up some other executive's payday. If you burn the co's reputation to get your payday, probably nobody really notices and is likely enough for there to be no real consequences to management until after you leave. The problem you paid yourself with is someone else's to solve.
Anyone suggesting there's an easy answer to that is likely full of it. How expert, competent and interested are the board of directors? How do you know? Some people look and sound plausible and convincing but aren't. Credentials are not much guide, all the board candidates have them including the total self-serving Muppets. Even noting who was great 10 years ago might not care much anymore.
Boeing stock price is up more than 1% on the last day of trading. Not as much as Lockheed and Raytheon.
Perhaps a dumb question, but is there a definitive connection between the outsourcing mentioned here and the MCAS[1] system that has caused the 737-MAX tragedies?
(I have searched the web to try to confirm a link; there are some articles[2][3][4] that mention both MCAS and the outsourcing, but I haven't yet seen anything to indicate that outsourcing was used for development of MCAS-related software)
$9/hour devs in India are less likely to say "Only listening to one angle-of-attack sensor is stupid; you need to redesign this." They are especially less likely to keep pushing until they get management to listen.
I mean, sure, the designers should have known that, too. But by outsourcing the software development, they missed a chance to have the bad design questioned and corrected.
in general, a software dev anywhere might not realize the flaw. but an systems engineer or other aircraft and flight controls engineer would notice it. and they should have, when the requirements were written. and again when each requirement was verified prior to flight.
The software was not truly to blame for the deaths.
Management was fully aware that a redundant AOA sensor was desireable: they charged extra for it. Management also demanded a product that did not require pilot training. Then there was the whole certification malfeasance.
The software was one piece of an impossible configuration.
Aerospace still uses traditional waterfall processes (usually called the 'V' lifecycle in the industry because if you put a 90 degree bend in the waterfall it looks like a V).
The flow of responsibilities is strictly hierarchical. If Boeing specified to to their outsourcers that the software should have read from two sensors, then the outsourcer would be 'in the wrong' if they didn't implement that. With a strict interpretation of the rules Boeing doesn't necessarily have to check their outsourcer's work (In Safety-Critical the outsourcer has not just a commercial but also a moral obligation to perform all actions with competence)... But at the same time, because Boeing retains overall responsibility for its products no matter who it subcontracts to, it would be a mistake to not double check the work.
So to at least some extent (at least with moral-tinted glasses), it doesn't actually matter whether or not the fault was introduced by the subcontractor or not. Boeing is responsibility either way, Answering your question only tells us if the subcontractor is also at fault.
It's very important to note that in the Aerospace world, the subcontractor's moral duty only requires them to do exactly what they're told to do (assuming that the subcontractor was only reponsible for software design and not systems design). If Boeing told them to use one sensor, then the subcontractor has done nothing wrong if they failed to notice that this was fundamentally unsafe.
This is not entirely true anymore. Many aerospace organizations attempted to move to less rigid/structured development process (e.g. wishing to become more agile) to attempt to "move fast and break things".
This trend actually has lead to an decrease in software quality and more quality escapes.
The larger aerospace manufacturers have mostly stuck with more structured process for safety/mission critical process, but around the edges (e.g. other systems running on aircraft), less structure and faster turnaround/more "testing in the field" is happening.
There was always the "skunk works" type of teams in aerospace organizations who worked with a lot less guardrails as well.
Source: worked for an avionics company previously.
The articles states, "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."
Thank you, my mistake - I did scan through the article and scrutinized a few sections, but I had missed that. I think I was expecting to find the acronym as opposed to the full expanded name.
About 20-15 years ago we found offshoring teams had terrible communication and software skills.
In the past 7-5 years the communication and techskills for a little better but it’s still no where near close to an onshore resource. However occasionally i find an offshore resource who is exceptional.
The last mega-corp I worked for had this program where they primarily hired offshore workers, and they offered the really good ones the chance to move to the US on work visas.
I made friends with one of them and he told me there is rampant fraud on the offshore teams. There's 2-3 people doing all the work, and they let other people claim it, because that's just the culture somehow. The off-shore managers are in on it and sometimes are one of the few doing the work.
He claimed this was the norm at multiple big-name contracting firms he'd worked for. I have no way of confirm any of this obviously, but it did offer an explanation for some of the experiences I had.
That could easily be a reference to a team. Honestly, when outsourcing, you really don't know who or how many people are doing the work (and that's kinda the point).
Something I don't think is mentioned here is that initially the Boeing designers thought that both sensors were being used for the data but the code written only took it off a single sensor. Whether it was not properly communicated to the coders or what, it is not clear, but someone at Boeing had wanted multiple sensors.
(I don't remember the exact source, I'd written a report of the Max-8 crashes and this was part of what I found. If you're interested in a generally excellent source for the accident/design flaws, the (latter) US Department of Transport report is excellent. I can also share my work if someone is curious, though its quality and depth is of course much lesser.)
If they don't get the requirements right, they'll just write the tests wrong as well. You have the same problems, just with a bunch of extra green oks.
FAANG and other companies outsource lots of (sometimes critical) stuff to obscure service providers that just kind of employ bodies to do generic work. There are American companies that employ people in the US, that may have half or more their employees in India or other places. Very non-household names, even compared to a company like Infosys.
Those companies that are paying people in India $5-10K equivalent (I assume) aren't paying US employees 6 figures. The wage disparity is an implicit threat that their US employees cannot expect a raise ever, and should be happy not to be laid off. Most of the US is akin to "flyover country" even near the coasts and over $50K is a good living for people who will never consider moving to a megacity.
I think people occasionally ask in places like HN, "if corporations will go to the other side of the world to hire people cheaply, then why don't they go to low wage areas of the US" and the answer is duh, they do. Someone can go to no particular place in Appalachia and hire Americans who have no better options.
There are two obvious reasons (but I've never seen someone state out loud) why FAANGs or other prominent companies should outsource critical functions.
One is that super genius software engineers who make six figures often do not do an adequate job on anything they dislike or feel is beneath them. "Prima donna syndrome".
The other is that when super genius employees making the big bucks screw up in some extremely high-profile way, it's very embarrassing, and it's better to be able to point the finger at an external service provider, since at least they are (ostensibly) specialists and how could anybody be expected to know their inner workings.
Plenty of things are critical, but not core. I'd expect something outsourced to be defined as non-core, and also that is a very flexible category.
For instance, Google had egg on their face in a court case a while ago, because they accidentally produced documents that tended to undermine their case vs Oracle.
They didn't account for gmail autosaved drafts, didn't group them properly with the final email that was sent, and so they didn't claim lawyer-client privilege.
Unfortunately, as they say, "you can't unring a bell" and once Oracle and the court saw them, they didn't agree that they were in fact privileged.
Subsequently they outsourced legal IT to a greater extent, and I infer a connection.
I don't know from an insider's perspective what their reasoning was, but it seems to me that outsourcing forces people to be more explicit about information sharing and provides a buffer.
Like, the engineers must know about gmail, and the in-house legal staff must know about producing documents, and they assume too much common knowledge because they're under the same roof.
Whereas if you send documents elsewhere, then you know they know nothing about gmail, and they know they know nothing, etc. And if you send similar documents, grouping them together is a standard generic process that will be done on everything.
If this all seems rather far afield from aerospace engineering, well, it so happens that one of the companies (I haven't worked for them) that people outsource legal IT to is one of the largest and best known aerospace/defence companies (but not Boeing).
When I found that out, I was like "Ah...their core competency is...paperwork! Of course..."
Even if they can afford it, it still defies rational behavior to pay 6 figures for an american programmer when they're "fungible" with indian programmers making $9/hr. I'm sure a FAANG programmer "extracts more value" from a $20 cup of coffee than it costs. That doesn't mean it's not highly unusual/irrational behavior, considering that other coffee shops charge a few bucks for a cup.
We are valuable commodities. Something being expensive doesn't mean that it is valued on an individual basis. An ounce of gold is expensive, but extremely fungible.
> Still, for the 787, HCL gave Boeing a remarkable price – free, according to Sam Swaro, an associate vice president who pitched HCL’s services at a San Diego conference sponsored by Avionics International magazine in June. He said the company took no up-front payments on the 787 and only started collecting payments based on sales years later, an “innovative business model” he offered to extend to others in the industry.
Lol at the industry thinking that deferred bundles and services discounts are revolutionary
> making as little as $9 an hour to develop and test software, often from countries lacking a deep background in aerospace -- notably India.
I have always wondered about the consequences of vast numbers of devs working in fields they barely understand (myself included) and the relatively rapid churn of those devs.
That being said, in most places I have worked, developers don't get a lot of influence in big picture decisions. If Boeing is like that, it would not have mattered.
>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.
Feels like most of the commenters missed this from the article.
The problem with profit optimising companies like Boing is that they don’t know when to stop. They will keep squeezing every last drop of blood out of their products, and their employees, until the business fail, or a competitor gets competitive enough. Especially when they hire a “General Manager” who’s only expertise is to force a 10% cost reduction on the business every year. Until the business is a dead corpse. But by then of course the CEO has already skipped ship and started the cycle again with another company.
> 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
This is bullshit. At least, for anything important.
> Bloomberg | Quint is a multiplatform, Indian business and financial news company.
So this is defintely bullshit.
Edit:
I don't even know what the implication they're trying to make is. Are they saying that the airplanes crashed because some incompetent Indians wrote the software?
>I don't even know what the implication they're trying to make is. Are they saying that the airplanes crashed because some incompetent Indians wrote the software?
The implication is that Boeing cares so little about the quality of the product that they are willing to pay $9 an hour for it.
Anyway, regardless of the merits of the offshore team, Boeing is still responsible for any flaws in their work product. You can't just point fingers at your subcontractors when you're the one who hired them and then signed off on their work.
$9 is probably a rate for a software tester. Even in the US, you can get a software tester for not much more than $9 an hour, at least that was the case in 2019. Probably, not true any more with the current rampant inflation.
There is a vast salary difference between software engineer and software tester.
Not all $9-per-hour engineers are the same. Been there done that.
And some of these $9 may buy them more of their-own bread-or-house than the $$RICH ones can with their 6-digit $s. Thus being happier. Envy? Competition?
And of course it's always them outside teams that are to blame, while the actual elephant isn't.
On the other side, when you outsource everything, .. you're what, just a web-site? oh wait, not even that..
We seriously need to start charging the people who make these decisions at companies like Boeing for the crimes they committed like we would anyone else. Colorado sentenced a truck driver for a multiple fatality accident that killed 4 to over 100 years in prison because the driver was deemed negligent. But if you're a corporation like Boeing who's gross negligence kills hundreds the company just gets an inconsequential fine. Why do we have to play by the rules but corporations don't? Every Boeing executive who was involved in this should be in prison right now.
ITAR doesn't have a clearance process with extensive background investigations. It is the lowest level of control for sensitive development operations. Non-citizens can work on it but there are paperwork hurdles that some employers don't want to bother with. It does also need to be conducted in US territory.
ITAR pertains to export/import. I'm not aware of person-specific clearances. In any case it would depend on the specific component or task being worked on.
there are not person-specific clearances, but there are person-specific non-clearances; e.g. there are lists of people and companies that you cannot do business with because of them being non-compliant with ITAR.
There's good/bad engineers everywhere. I have worked with students that earned less than $9/h and produced better quality work results than highly payed senior engineers. Nationality is also not a reason for high quality/sloppy work.
However, I can accept that expecting to get the same quality work for a fraction of the cost should be viewed skeptically.
> Nationality is also not a reason of high quality/sloppy work.
In some ways it can be, though. Poor countries tend to be poor for a myriad of reasons, but among these reasons should be the lack of a quality education system. Wealthy countries tend to have excellent school systems and universities, and a better trained student body, than poor countries. If poor countries had the education systems of wealthy countries, they wouldn't be poor, but the reason that can't sustain a system like that is precisely because they are poor.
It's a generalization. Regarding Indian SWEs in particular: I've worked with completely inept as well as very competent ones. Writing a headline that promotes a stereotype is not helpful.
That's one point of view, yes. Like I said, there are a lot of reasons why poor countries became poor, or failed to industrialize. Personally I don't think India would be America 2.0 (or China 2.0) had the Brits never colonized it.
The partition of India happened 75 years ago, however. The British Empire is no longer a valid excuse.
Its not about the partition of India, its about the colonization of India. This is like telling a person whose legs were cut off to grow a pair and start running.
How many years would it take for a colonized country to develop. Does anyone have an answer? You can't show countries like singapore (too small and practically a one party country). South Korea (was a military dictatorship, homogeneous population).
> The partition of India happened 75 years ago, however. The British Empire is no longer a valid excuse.
This particular argument is usually made without understanding history.
India, the country, did not exist before British enslavement & colonisation. India’s diversity and size are comparable to the entire EU, with double the population. I don’t see why 75 years is /too long/.
It's quite tiring to hear such naïve takes. I would really recommend reading some books…
There are bad engineers in the US as well as India. If you are paying $9 per hour, you are not getting the good Indian engineers. It is like going to a local McDonalds and hiring programmers. You deserve what you get.
That’s becoming hard to fathom when you can now get hired as a React developer with about 3 years experience for $170k without any understanding of how things work under the hood.
Why would a React developer (and hopefully SME, if they've been at it for 3 years) need to know anything "under the hood" to earn their value?
I work on compilers for a living, but I couldn't build an IC if you put me in front of an EUV machine. Does that mean that I don't have an understanding of how things work "under the hood"?
"under the hood" can go arbitrarily deep; nobody thinks everyone needs a deep understanding of the quantum physics governing how a transistor works to build a web app.
But in my experience, people saying "under the hood" are using it with respect to the level of abstraction they are working with. There's a major inflection point in effectiveness when you go "one level deeper", or understand how the tools you are directly using are implemented, even though there are certainly many layers of abstractions below those tools. It helps a ton with debugging and performance work, and you start to really understand the limitations of your toolchain.
“Under the hood” is fancy talk for doing more than put text on screen. Whether or not that’s needed depends on the employer.
BTW, nobody is an expert within just 3 years. That is a key indicator of a Dunning-Kruger moment that becomes clear by drilling down just a bit into key performance indicators from research and experience.
> “Under the hood” is fancy talk for doing more than put text on screen. Whether or not that’s needed depends on the employer.
This isn't a satisfying explanation, since "putting text on the screen" can be a pretty complicated task. My limited understanding of web development is that the conceptual model is actually a decent bit more complicated than non-web-developers give credit, and React seems like a prime (if somewhat self-inflicted) example of that.
A trivial example of someone being an expert in 3 years is being the original creator of a thing. Time is a sufficient factor, but I don't think it's a necessary one (and we acknowledge this implicitly by acknowledging that people learn at different rates).
As a web developer I can promise that putting text on the screen is not complicated, though shops tend to find a way to bury themselves in abstractions and bad decisions that anything can become impossibly complicated and take 10+ seconds to execute.
As the creator of a once extremely popular productivity tool I can firmly attest that being the creator of such tool is not a sufficient qualifier to elevate one to “expert” of the given problem space provided just 3 years time.
It’s easier to understand when you look at profits per employee at the major tech firms. Google, Facebook and Apple generate over $1M in profit per employee. From what I can tell, Software is the highest value/employee industry in the world.
Even weirder thought is that how many of these are even actually needed? The amount of new fundamentally market changing products form these companies seem to be limited...
Or is it just keeping them away from new competitors. Or just general games of corporate fiefdom and team sizes?
It's inconceivable to spawn any human safety article outside of that culture into a vacuum behind a contract written by lay business people and PM's.