Boeing’s 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers (2019)

While the offshore team gets $9 an hour, the engineer itself gets a fraction of that. And those engineers are very well aware that you didn’t choose them because you think they’re amazing. They know you chose them because you don’t value engineering.

So regardless of whether they are good or not they’ll do the minimum work possible.

I remember a bigger automation softwares CTO telling me about a bigger enterprise that offshored their database change management process.

The process was defined as putting a word file put into a jira issue. At the end of the approval process some person in India had to paste it into the database shell. If word auto correct messed it up the whole process gets marked as failed and it started from 0. That person pasting into the database has no interest whatsoever on making any recommendations even if they could.

It is that the outsourcing is to people who incentivized to get the contract closed.

Same things with outsourcing in IT, the workers on the other side are generally economically incentivized to closing tickets. They don't get negative feedback about doing a bad job, so they just want green tests and their PRs getting merged.

Which is a reflection of the economic incentives in the arrangement between the two companies and how they are measured and how their bosses are measured.

You write the contract, and the workers wind up optimizing for the contract, not for the output of the work. It is sort of a machine that does exactly what you program it to, and the result is bad.

Calling it "culture" I think makes it feel more like its something ineffable that they're missing. Instead it is practically the result of an almost physical law. It isn't some kind of "esprit de corps" that they're missing, they're just acting like water flowing downhill following the gradient. The result shouldn't be a surprise.

And I've seen this at work with PRs submitted where the person clearly didn't test the code at all in reality since it was totally broken when you ran it, while the tests mocked things correctly so that they were green, sometimes tests being changed in ways that clearly show that the code is broken, but the person just charged again making it green rather than making it working. Just trying to get the code shipped to get the ticket closed to get the metric count bumped up by one, without any other care. Then you have to around and around with them on the right design because they always take the easiest route to green first, rather than the right fix.

The passage about sending the designs back 18 times until the people on the other side understood that they needed to hook up the smoke detectors to the electrical system sounds real familiar to me.

The whole lie about how American business uses scientific management principles where we measure metrics and make informed decisions is such a sad joke. The only measurement that mattered was $8/hr and the outcome wasn't measured because of McNamera's fallacy and the fact that the person who made that decision would get a bonus based on the short term sugar high it would give the financial numbers.

The end result of all this sociopathy though is that its becoming more and more flawed for workers to ever believe they should show any loyalty to any job. When managers are all looking for short term gain and workers are all job hopping to find that raise they can't get at their current job, we may find that our domestic production starts to look more like the quality that we get from outsourcing, along with the economy looking more and more like a third world scammy economy. Our incentives are getting very misaligned at home as well.

In company as big and old as Boeing,many teams work isolated and independently. I don't belive knowledge gets shared that easily. Also what I read about Boeing culture (I forgot where but reddit ama I guess), it was declined way back.

Blaming the problem on $9 offshore engineer really look bad on company. I have worked with $5 engineers as well as $100 engineers in past. As long as you don't have proper verification proess both can screw the system. I blame it on company executives who sidelined safety altogether.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Boeing_787_Dreamliner_gro...

The biggest difference is distance, the time zone split, and cultural differences.

I say this as someone that thinks limiting insourcing raises wages in the short term.

See this a lot with sales also. Transactional client relationships promising the world to get the deal and hit commission multipliers. They then move to another company with "success stories" leaving implementation teams to reset client expectations.

I've certainly done this for sprints. I suspect if you examined code quality by when a ticket was started in a sprint, you would find it plummets a few days before the end.

> 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.”

Key attributes here are:

- The engineers at the external firm isn't necessarily incentivized to get it right the first time.

- Boeing still has to have engineers on staff to write the specs, and the evaluate the work product of the contractors _repeatedly_ to see whether it meets the specs.

- If it's wrong, it's really really costly.

In that context, I think it makes way more sense for this stuff to be built entirely by people on staff.

The article doesn't discuss it and I don't know to what degree this is still at play, but for years after the merger with McDonnell Douglas, a lot of the Boeing people were frustrated with how processes were changed to depend on many more outside firms. Most of what I have heard centered on other firms producing substantial components that previously would have been done by Boeing itself. Whenever there was an issue with some sub-assembly, the Boeing people felt that if the work hadn't been contracted out, the issue both wouldn't have happened, and would have been faster to resolve.

That, or a federal law.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/6974...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing...

That second article contains this incredible line from their CEO circa 2006

"When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.”

Management was fully aware that a redundant AOA sensor was desireable: they charged extra for it. Management also demanded a product that did not require pilot training. Then there was the whole certification malfeasance.

The software was one piece of an impossible configuration.

I mean, sure, the designers should have known that, too. But by outsourcing the software development, they missed a chance to have the bad design questioned and corrected.

The flow of responsibilities is strictly hierarchical. If Boeing specified to to their outsourcers that the software should have read from two sensors, then the outsourcer would be 'in the wrong' if they didn't implement that. With a strict interpretation of the rules Boeing doesn't necessarily have to check their outsourcer's work (In Safety-Critical the outsourcer has not just a commercial but also a moral obligation to perform all actions with competence)... But at the same time, because Boeing retains overall responsibility for its products no matter who it subcontracts to, it would be a mistake to not double check the work.

So to at least some extent (at least with moral-tinted glasses), it doesn't actually matter whether or not the fault was introduced by the subcontractor or not. Boeing is responsibility either way, Answering your question only tells us if the subcontractor is also at fault.

It's very important to note that in the Aerospace world, the subcontractor's moral duty only requires them to do exactly what they're told to do (assuming that the subcontractor was only reponsible for software design and not systems design). If Boeing told them to use one sensor, then the subcontractor has done nothing wrong if they failed to notice that this was fundamentally unsafe.

I made friends with one of them and he told me there is rampant fraud on the offshore teams. There's 2-3 people doing all the work, and they let other people claim it, because that's just the culture somehow. The off-shore managers are in on it and sometimes are one of the few doing the work.

He claimed this was the norm at multiple big-name contracting firms he'd worked for. I have no way of confirm any of this obviously, but it did offer an explanation for some of the experiences I had.

In these times when “master” is renamed to “main”, I still find it strange that calling human beings “resources” is tolerated in the industry.

Why are they paying american programmers 6 figure salaries then?

The implication is that Boeing cares so little about the quality of the product that they are willing to pay $9 an hour for it.

Anyway, regardless of the merits of the offshore team, Boeing is still responsible for any flaws in their work product. You can't just point fingers at your subcontractors when you're the one who hired them and then signed off on their work.

Why is still there nobody in prison over this ?

In some ways it can be, though. Poor countries tend to be poor for a myriad of reasons, but among these reasons should be the lack of a quality education system. Wealthy countries tend to have excellent school systems and universities, and a better trained student body, than poor countries. If poor countries had the education systems of wealthy countries, they wouldn't be poor, but the reason that can't sustain a system like that is precisely because they are poor.