Boeing's 737 MAX software outsourced to $12.80-an-hour engineers | Hacker News Reader

Boeing's 737 MAX software outsourced to $12.80-an-hour engineers

brisbanetimes.com.au

23 pointstaspeotis15 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20309052

What's interesting to me is that no matter how much bad news comes out about Boeing--and it hasn't stopped at all since the second 737 Max crash--stocks haven't really dropped much. They're still higher than they were a year ago.

Laymen have been led to think stock prices are linked to company performance. But witnessing this, I realize I have zero clue how the stock market works. I can't imagine anything Boeing could do that could actually cause their value to dip. I'm not sure if this is a flaw or a feature of the market.

The price is based on the future earnings of the company from now until forever which is one reason why companies have wildly different PE ratios. This is a short term problem but the commercial jet market is still basically a duopoly with a huge moat around it. Most carriers try to have a roughly half-half split between Airbus and Boeing in case any fleet gets grounded so, in the long term, Boeing will be fine.

What did you expect? Why do you think 80% of the software developed on this planet in the last 10 years sucks?

And this is not problem of India. Humans are greedy by nature. "Look we can do it in FILL_RANDOM_CHEAP_LABOR_COUNTRY_NAME_HERE for just couple of bucks per hour!!!" Cut cost cut cost they say. But ladies and gentleman - software is STICKY! Once you put crap in, it is hard to fix/replace it.

The problem is not the low price of the outsourced developer but the outsourcing managers.

Most managers do not control outsourced IT projects because they don't want to or - if business managers - they can't because of a lack of knowledge. I've seen that dozens of time.

the article talks about long review cycles which imo implies the managers were involved

Cheap outsourcing itself is kind of a problem in this case. The best Indian engineers just don't work in cheap outsourcing places, they work for proper companies with better salaries. You just get the worst developers who can't find any better by using these methods.

Geez man. This isn’t good. Not only do you have a code base that kept having to go back and forth for corrections; you also have another country that can do whatever it wants with that code. Steal it, sell it to the highest bidder, etc.

How much is the value of code for MCAS or other airplane component? It is not like you can plug it in your Airbus and get more performance?

My opinion is that this could could be open sourced, similar for driving assist code, if the code is open and all companies contribute you get more safety at lower costs.

Seems to be a dupe of similar post that is also "trending" on HN at the moment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20310938

So what they are saying there were no issues found in 13 dollar per hour engineers code. But the 40 dollars per hour engineers made the plane dive. Interesting. I would rather bet my money on the former.

(Aus$12.80) = about US$9

It says in the article they were paid $US9 or $AUS12.5

Looks like hiring enterprise architects payed out.

Next thing we’ll learn is that the entertainment system is actually just a WordPress theme.

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