And aerospace engineers are dirt cheap. What sort of clown show is the FAA running?
That sounds like they are knowingly underfunded, which they are.
> And aerospace engineers are dirt cheap.
They are? Where are all the airline startups? I assume they measure in the hundreds with all this dirt cheap talent running around.
Aerospace requires lots of capital expense and is very ‘large customer’ driven and aerospace engineers play second (or third) fiddle to that, unlike in software.
I suspect you're letting your software world experience dictate your expectations of what engineering is all about, and what it takes to actually get work done.
Software development is a rare field where the only relevant resource is man hours. In other fields, including aerospace engineering, trained meat bags tend to have a negligible cost to the point where replacing a whole engineering team might be a minor inconvenience. However, crashing a prototype is a project killer due to cost alone.
Also, you're not hiring from a diversely employed Valley pool: most of the engineers with the requisite level of understanding to test Boeing's hardware work for Boeing (and to an extent its supply chain), which might mean you don't have to offer them much of a pay rise, but it also means [i] you're weakening the engineering capability of the firms actually designing and building the stuff by poaching them and [ii] their views on what's safe and what's an appropriate level of testing aren't fully independent anyway.
1) Boeing lays off thousands of aerospace engineers regularly (they did as part of the max disaster), and doesn’t rehire them all back - the industry is highly cyclical, and Boeing is periodically shifting locations anyway
2) the stated concern was Boeing brass was applying undue influence to engineering correct? If those folks worked for the FAA directly after being laid off , wouldn’t they be more than happy to stick it to Boeing brass if they were telling them to cut corners?
3) we’re talking design overview and identifying where Boeing (or others) may be ‘putting their finger on the scale’ or trying to snow regulators by asserting bogus test results or designing tests that they can pass by not including important test criteria they may not pass right? That is certainly something an engineer who was previously in the industry would be aware of, or even a independent engineer should be capable of spotting from ‘the outside’ - and require they do.
4) at (linked in a parallel thread) a median salary of $118k, which is well within something the feds could cover, the FAA can certainly afford to hire a non-token amount of aerospace engineers onto their staff if they actually wanted too/Congress wasn’t trying to kill them. This isn’t like hiring on a FAANG staff software eng for 700k or whatever which would cause outrage or break the pay scale, and this is for something for which there are clear large body counts that can be pointed at.
Now if we want to say Congress has been strangling the FAA for a long time (like the IRS and USPS) and forcing them to outsource to industry or whatever, hey - I could believe it - but that is something that should be yelled from the rooftops because that can be fixed, and that will cost us a lot in blood.
I don’t want more Americans dead due to corruption of a regulatory process, especially not my friends or family, and those are the stakes here.
It should, as it was what I said. I'm really not sure if it's possible to make a point any clearer.
> Boeing lays off thousands of aerospace engineers regularly (...)
Sounds in line with the classical big corp style of management. I'm not sure what any of that has to do with humans not being the critical element of providing a service. In fact, are you sure you're not supporting the point you're trying to refute?
And that Boeing would surely be exerting influence on them so they wouldn’t catch issues - after Boeing laid them off?
And that it wouldn’t matter having competent engineers at the FAA because catching things require expensive tests - that the engineers if they existed at the FAA could mandate Boeing pay for, since they would know they needed them to do them?
Huh?
No one is saying the FAA should be running a full parallel aerospace program. I’m saying if they lack in house competency to call bullshit on what a player they are regulating is passing to them and relying on that player to just always do the right thing, then they are not effective regulators
It would be like taking Facebooks word that they are totally being good privacy wise, and not having anyone available who understands internet tracking or adtech. Which, is of course another failing regulator (looking at you FTC), but at least that doesn’t get hundreds of people killed in giant fireballs?
Like almost every other agency (the FDA didn’t do the vaccine trials; are they incompetent too?) they don’t do the tests. They just police the industry.
Theoretically if you set laws and regulations and dole out severe punishment for bad behaviour, you don’t need to be the one running the tests.
People should want their government to run on trust (if their culture is compatible with trust) because it’s far cheaper and more efficient.
When will Boeing CEO and Board of Directors get locked up as part of the severe punishment?
This is naivette.
See this:
https://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/news/200/lead-boeing-...
From the article:
the case was settled with a deferred prosecution agreement — an agreement that Columbia Law Professor John Coffee at the time called — “one of the worst deferred prosecution agreements I have seen.”
Boeing did not have to plead guilty to any of the allegations.
No Boeing executive was charged.
And the Boeing deferred prosecution agreement included an unusual provision finding that a compliance monitor was not necessary because “the misconduct was neither pervasive across the organization, nor undertaken by a large number of employees, nor facilitated by senior mismanagement.”
“That is without precedent,” Coffee told Corporate Crime Reporter earlier this year. “I have not seen that anywhere else and I’ve looked at a number of deferred prosecution agreements. Prosecutors themselves are not conducting the investigation.”
Boeing’s lead corporate criminal defense law firm is Kirkland & Ellis.
Erin Nealy Cox, the lead prosecutor in the Boeing case, left the Justice Department earlier this year.
And last month she joined Kirkland & Ellis as a partner in its Dallas office.
Last I remember this being a topic of discussion, the stance was ‘trust but verify’ no?
While it may be efficient to rubber stamp things, it is not doing their job. Folks scam all the time, especially if they know no one is looking.
If they lack the competence to be able to independently verify, they aren’t being effective regulators.
Bingo. If I use 3 managers and PMs who don't know how to program for a code review, then that's not a very effective code review.
Inaccurate, please stop sharing misinformation. Seeing this on HN is unfortunate.
Most aerospace engineers are lucky to break 75k/yr to start with little to no equity, and often need to move to the middle of nowhere (compared to say NYC, SF, LA, etc for software), and get hit with periodic catastrophic layoffs with the regular cycles in the industry.
It’s pretty common that software folks are paid 2-5x with far less intense or zero credentialing and better work conditions - at the same company.
Median numbers, so masks variability. But it looks like AEs are generally paid decently, relative to other engineers.
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/mobile/...
That’s roughly half of the initial comp for an entry level software engineer at any of the SV firms, and most folks will be making much more than that at said SV firms within a couple years.
Being able to get a team of 4-5 experienced and credentialed aerospace engineers for the comp of a single ‘senior’ (mid-level somewhat competent but not amazing) software engineer sounds dirt cheap to me?
If you want to baseline off SV salaries, you shouldn't be looking at median all-AE numbers.
We’re on a SV startup website, where the comparison to cheap or not is of course going to be based on this.
You provided as a counterpoint to my statement on aerospace eng’s being cheap, data which shows median salary across all experience levels of the field being half the starting pay of a typical entry level SV software engineer - which typically requires no specific credentials, unlike Aerospace engineering.
If there is a large cluster of companies who pay 4x the median aerospace engineer salary to Noobs, then please provide said data. My understanding is those don’t exist.
SpaceX, a high profile name and maybe the closest to a SV type place you’ll get in the industry pays between $70-100k to their Aerospace engineers, based on multiple sites. Here happens to be a random Reddit thread about it in the first couple results.
[https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/engineering/co...]
Which is exactly the point I’m making. When a straight out of school software engineer has a whole section of an industry they can go to that will pay them 2-5x what an experienced aerospace engineer mid-point or even late in their career can make ANYWHERE (except MAYBE a one-off consulting gig somewhere), then aerospace engineers are cheap no?