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Comment by Scramblejams | Hacker News Reader

This works out to $840/page. How many hours does it take to write the page, by people who are making how much? And don't forget, they get revisited and revised as the design changes.

On the subject of why it's billed differently: well, first, transparency. What would you make you feel better? Getting a $4 billion lump quote for a giant project, or seeing that $4 billion itemized down so you can check the underlying data?

Edit: Oops, sorry, data entry failure. Thanks for the corrections. Fixed.

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At the MIL-SPEC level? $840/page sounds like a bargain. This entity is the polar opposite of "move fast and break things".

It's more like, we're going to bury this in a cavern, and when we dig it up in 100 years, it absolutely, positively has to work.

No, things cost what buyers are willing to pay. Transparency would be saying the product costs the total sum so that everyone making purchasing decison knows the total cost. A manual in this case is as much part of the plane as is the wing! The product is a pile of metal without the docs. Is there a separate cost like this for R&D,labor,parts,paint, "service charge"? I mean come on,imagine the outrage here if microsoft made msdn cost even $10/year!

Salaried employees don't get paid by hour our output. If it takes a team a half a year to write the doc, they still get paid for the rest of the year.

Regardless, the cost nevet reflects the effort put into it. It is simply what they charge because they can and because the buyer pays and because the competition is not offering something better when bidding.

Salaried employees don't get paid by hour our output. If it takes a team a half a year to write the doc, they still get paid for the rest of the year.

One of the reasons I left aerospace is I found out that when a project ends, you and 2,000 of your closest friends all hit the street at the same time. :-)

Or as another friend put it when we were discussing the big companies: "If you work for Boeing, you'll always have a job. But you may have to move to Florida to keep it." And current events show the first part isn't even true any more...

> things cost what buyers are willing to pay

That's a ceiling but not a floor. Things never cost less than the expense of producing them. 840 per page or so does not sound excessive for this sort of thing--I'm surprise it's not 10x more.

(Yeah, loss leaders occasionally, but don't look for that in military contracts.)

Also, it must not be forgotten that there is a lot more than writing the pages themselves.

On a document this big, you need to properly organize and index it so that the maintenance personnel would be able to find the relevant bits easily. that's a lot of editing job required, and a lot of coordination (to properly reference and label each subsystem for example).

Also, this document requires a lot of reviews and a lot of the maintenance procedures needs to actually be performed to actually check if they are clear enough to be executed reliably by operators/maintenance personnel.

All that is a lot of work, requiring a significant amount of man hours by skilled people and hardware and tooling available for validation.

Off by a factor of 10, $840 a page. I think you make a compelling argument but I’d rather see some data comparing costs of similar projects.

> This works out to $84/page.

You're off by an order of magnitude. It works out to $840/page.

$840/page. 100k+ pages rather than 1M. Doesn’t change your other points, however.

Uh, $840/page.

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