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

[Peresvet]

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

 

Planemaker and suppliers used lower-paid temporary workers

 

Engineers feared the practice meant code wasn’t done right

 

It remains the mystery at the heart of Boeing Co.’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.

 

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-737-max-software-outsourced-to-9-an-hour-engineers

 

I see no mystery there as corporations only care about the profits.

[DocM]

The MAX investigators are also  looking at the 787 Dreamliner factory,

 

https://www.businessinsider.com/boeing-justice-department-investigation-subpoena-787-dreamliner-records-2019-6

[BetaguyGZT]

Hoo boy.  

[FloatingFatMan]

3 hours ago, Unobscured Vision said:

Hoo boy.  

Indeed. 

 

So, it's impossible to say this without sounding racist, but I'm not so please bear with me...

 

I've spent 30 years as a professional developer in large firms, and I can tell you that from my experience, outsourcing work to foreign programmers is never a good idea.  It's not so much the programmers themselves, but more how they seem to be trained. You pay for a program to do X & Y, and you get a program that does X & Y and ONLY X & Y.  As soon as Z turns up, all bets are off.  Western programmers are far more likely to think "Oh, but if Z happens, it'll go all kablooey, so I'd better handle that..."

 

It's a shame, because generally these guys are nice guys and I've had good working relationships with many of them UNTIL it comes to the testing phase.  They just don't seem able to think out of the box and if your testing practices are inadequate, stuffs going to go badly.

 

I've literally had this conversation with them, many times.

 

Me: It works but if the user does this, then it crashes.

Them: But you didn't ask us to handle that...

Me: *facepalm*

 

It's not just Indian programmers either. I've had the same issues with Croatian and Chinese programmers too.  Their code works fine, but ONLY as long as nothing unexpected happens.

[BetaguyGZT]

You aren't wrong.

[neufuse Veteran]

14 hours ago, FloatingFatMan said:

Indeed. 

 

So, it's impossible to say this without sounding racist, but I'm not so please bear with me...

 

I've spent 30 years as a professional developer in large firms, and I can tell you that from my experience, outsourcing work to foreign programmers is never a good idea.  It's not so much the programmers themselves, but more how they seem to be trained. You pay for a program to do X & Y, and you get a program that does X & Y and ONLY X & Y.  As soon as Z turns up, all bets are off.  Western programmers are far more likely to think "Oh, but if Z happens, it'll go all kablooey, so I'd better handle that..."

 

It's a shame, because generally these guys are nice guys and I've had good working relationships with many of them UNTIL it comes to the testing phase.  They just don't seem able to think out of the box and if your testing practices are inadequate, stuffs going to go badly.

 

I've literally had this conversation with them, many times.

 

Me: It works but if the user does this, then it crashes.

Them: But you didn't ask us to handle that...

Me: *facepalm*

 

It's not just Indian programmers either. I've had the same issues with Croatian and Chinese programmers too.  Their code works fine, but ONLY as long as nothing unexpected happens.

Yeah, that's pretty much my experience also...

 

and code clarity, cleaning up code smells, unit testing, exception handling, conciseness and sometimes finding out that the code you were provided was just copy and paste of someone's online example code have all been major problems.......

 

and sometimes you get spaghetti code that is so bad you just have to say no redo it and use Object oriented design......

 

and if you want to really drive some of them nuts... ask them for code complexity values, and Big-O notation on all their functions...

Edited July 3, 2019 by neufuse