Boeing’s 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)

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.<p>It&#x27;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&#x27;s.

&quot;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.&quot;

I just cannot see why outsourcing this way is sustainable, and it probably isn&#x27;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&#x27;t change a string to another string in a code base. I don&#x27;t even exaggerate I had to prove to my manager that he had no skills at all.

This is what happens when Boeing is run by accountants and MBAs instead of engineers (as it once was). Short term financial &quot;wins&quot; like outsourcing eventually make Boeing unrecognizable from the industrial behemoth that cranked out 747s in Everett.<p>What these finance and business people fail to understand (or simply don&#x27;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 &quot;cost plus&quot; pricing.

As a CEO, if your team sets up a company to succeed, the payoff is likely not for the next decade. You&#x27;re setting up some other executive&#x27;s payday. If you burn the co&#x27;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&#x27;s to solve.<p>Anyone suggesting there&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>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?<p>(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&#x27;t yet seen anything to indicate that outsourcing was used for development of MCAS-related software)<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Maneuvering_Characteristics_Augmentation_System" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Maneuvering_Characteristics_Au...</a><p>[2] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2019-06-28&#x2F;boeing-s-737-max-software-outsourced-to-9-an-hour-engineers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2019-06-28&#x2F;boeing-s-...</a><p>[3] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pulse.icdm.com.my&#x2F;resource&#x2F;boeing-a-plane-wreck&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pulse.icdm.com.my&#x2F;resource&#x2F;boeing-a-plane-wreck&#x2F;</a><p>[4] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;simpat.tech&#x2F;did-boeings-software-development-outsourcing-contribute-to-its-737-max-8-failures&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;simpat.tech&#x2F;did-boeings-software-development-outsour...</a>

About 20-15 years ago we found offshoring teams had terrible communication and software skills.<p>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.

Something I don&#x27;t think is mentioned here is that <i>initially the Boeing designers thought that both sensors were being used for the data</i> 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.<p>(I don&#x27;t remember the exact source, I&#x27;d written a report of the Max-8 crashes and this was part of what I found. If you&#x27;re interested in a generally excellent source for the accident&#x2F;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.)

The <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rottentomatoes.com&#x2F;m&#x2F;downfall_the_case_against_boeing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rottentomatoes.com&#x2F;m&#x2F;downfall_the_case_against_b...</a> documentary is a good take on this

“Yep, just fungible code monkeys.” -every company, even FAANG

&gt; 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.<p>Lol at the industry thinking that deferred bundles and services discounts are revolutionary

&gt; making as little as $9 an hour to develop and test software, often from countries lacking a deep background in aerospace -- notably India.<p>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.<p>That being said, in most places I have worked, developers don&#x27;t get a lot of influence in big picture decisions. If Boeing is like that, it would not have mattered.

Pay peanuts, get monkeys

&gt;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.<p>Feels like most of the commenters missed this from the article.

Keep in mind this is the tip of the iceberg as the FAA had outsourced safety to Boeing via Boeing employees also being FAA employees.<p>Very hard to complain against your financial master unless you fly on that plane make daily as a passenger,

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.

&gt; 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<p>This is bullshit. At least, for anything important.<p>&gt; Bloomberg | Quint is a multiplatform, Indian business and financial news company.<p>So this is <i>defintely</i> bullshit.<p>Edit:<p>I don&#x27;t even know what the implication they&#x27;re trying to make is. Are they saying that the airplanes crashed because some incompetent Indians wrote the software?

$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.<p>There is a vast salary difference between software engineer and software tester.<p>Let&#x27;s not sensationalize things unnecessarily.

Maybe that is a little it harsh of an judgement, but IMO the person responsible for this decision should be in jail.

The last line should be the title of the article.<p>“Senior company leadership,” the statement added, “was not involved in the review.”

Who did the design, architecture and tests? The tests seem more important to me.

mmh.<p>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?<p>And of course it&#x27;s always them outside teams that are to blame, while the actual elephant isn&#x27;t.<p>On the other side, when you outsource everything, .. you&#x27;re what, just a web-site? oh wait, not even that..<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;berthub.eu&#x2F;articles&#x2F;posts&#x2F;how-tech-loses-out&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;berthub.eu&#x2F;articles&#x2F;posts&#x2F;how-tech-loses-out&#x2F;</a>

Makes sense, software is not their core competency - obtaining contracts.<p>Everything non-core, like engineering or software should be outsourced to the lowest bidder.

That seems like a bad decision from a security perspective too.<p>I can imagine cyberattacks meticulously crashing airplanes during a time of war.

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&#x27;re a corporation like Boeing who&#x27;s gross negligence kills hundreds the company just gets an inconsequential fine. Why do we have to play by the rules but corporations don&#x27;t? Every Boeing executive who was involved in this should be in prison right now.

[I may be wrong. Hence deleting.]

This is just modern capitalism. If a few dozen lives are lost, it&#x27;s not significant compared to the quarterly earnings per share numbers.

There&#x27;s good&#x2F;bad engineers everywhere. I have worked with students that earned less than $9&#x2F;h and produced better quality work results than highly payed senior engineers. Nationality is also not a reason for high quality&#x2F;sloppy work.<p>However, I can accept that expecting to get the same quality work for a fraction of the cost should be viewed skeptically.

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.