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.
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.
In offices across from Seattle’s Boeing Field, recent college graduates employed by the Indian software developer HCL Technologies Ltd. occupied several rows of desks, said Mark Rabin, a former Boeing software engineer who worked in a flight-test group that supported the Max.
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.”
And Apple wants to move phone manufacture there? Good luck.
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[–] 19478738? ago
well the boomers who hire indians, their company will collapse.
At this point, refuse to work for any boomer boss. Only work for millennial run companies. Let the boomers destroy their own companies with pajeets, we simply refuse to work for the boomers.
[–] 19505936? ago
I went one step further and got out of tech altogether.
Domestic mining companies, anon. All that electronic shit takes REMs and we can't get it from the norks forever. Canada's north is full of Chinamen. It's all so tiresome but they pay well.
[–] 19505942? ago
so what do you do exactly?