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 isn't just "culture"

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.