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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[–] 19489802? ago
I hate to interrupt a good copypasta against poo in loo's, but most of Bell Lab's team spun off into Lucent back in 1996. Netravalli was in charge of Bell Labs between 1999-2001, he was already out by 2003. Carly Fiorina is responsible for Lucent getting assfucked in 2000, since she did accounting bullshit to make it look like the company was fine when it was bleeding money. Then in 2001, Alcatel offered to merge with Lucent, but Henry B. Schacht refused to let Alcatel have more power. Lucent stock dropped hard, and the company started selling itself off piece by piece to stay alive. Later in 2006 when Alcatel made a similar offer with less generous terms, Lucent jumped at it.
I work in tech, and I hate poo in loo's, but Netravalli had nothing to do with Bell Labs having any issues, or Lucent's problems. Carly Fiorina was the problem for Lucent. The stagnant period at Bell Labs happened under Jeong Hun Kim's tenure, when Alcatel-Lucent decided to pull out of all major research into anything that wasn't code or networking. Please get your facts straight for future infodump copy pastas.