Somehow Boeing is happening to the whole IT industry at the moment where AI is forced upon programmers instead of "properly developing software" ...
Most design/implementation decisions were basically (or literally) equivalent to "we use Kubernetes cause we've already got a lot of existing Terrraform for it", or "we have React developers." I know real professionalism and maybe even "engineering" practice exists somewhere (I mean it has to, for something rigorously proven, right?), but I've not personally experienced it; I've seen this everywhere, as a consultant and employee, both in the public and private sector.
The number of times I've been on meetings or similar where there's tradeoffs backed by quantifiable data was a handful, at best, so the AI trend makes perfect sense to me.
I really don't imagine with something like Boeing where there's a far higher burden of proof there's discussions around, like, some equivalent subjective thingy like "code smells" or "anti-patterns."
I have been thinking about this recently. What are the most rigorous "software actual engineering" fields, or projects?
Autopilot systems in airliners came to mind. Not just autopilot, but FADEC, and other flight control systems. Medical devices? ... Or, are all those teams just winging it as well?
I am in Medical Devices software. Our main compliance requirements are 21CFR and IEC-62304. I know Automotive has MISRA (more coding guidelines than development process, but still) and a handful of other standards. Aviation follows DO-178x, and so on...
A lifetime ago, right out of high school, I was a sort of sysadmin at a decent sized civil and structural engineering firm. I learned a lot about the profession of engineering there. Adhering to standards does indeed seem like a really good proxy.
There's a whole world of software stuff that just isn't discussed in public forums/places where you'd usually find information on the internet, unfortunately.