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Comment by ho_schi | Hacker News Reader

I’m rather sure *Airbus* will prefer a programmer which reads and writes reliable code.

The programmer which delivers useful products is probably hired by Microsoft? Or worse, Boeing. Or Toyota. Some NTSB people or Michael Barr are happy to tell you details about the number of dead people they created.

    Restart braking to brake because our code failed.

Or.

    One single sensor delivers wrong data. Let us put the trim down. DOWN! DOWN!

After that they blame the user. It wasn’t a pilot error, because the didn’t trained the pilots to immediately turn off MCAS. And it wasn’t a driver error, because they didn’t trained driver to lift the feet and start braking again.

    But I’m only programming a text viewer.

Which is used in a power plant to read the emergency manual, after an earthquake. You are responsible.

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For Airbus, Boeing, and others the cost of failure is disproportionately high. Just look at how you consider Boeing despite that 99.99...% of their software and hardware work flawlessly. They will be known for the 737 Max failure for decades.

When OpenAI tells someone that suicide isn't that bad, some bs supplement could be the best thing to treat their cancer, or does anything else that has a negative outcome, the consequences are basically zero. That is even though any single failure like that probably kills alot more people per year than Boeing.

It seems there is knowledge of this and the lack of responsibility placed on these companies so they act accordingly.

But realistically, I just had 2 flights last month, checking what model of aircraft I was on didn't even cross my mind. I survived both flights btw.

Me to until the 737 Max crashes. Now, I will go out of my way(inconvenience) to avoid the Max line. I guess it gives me the illusion of control.

My point was only that you may not have checked but you know about the 737 Max. Do you know about software failures from Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, etc. killing someone? They certainly have but it doesn't get the same press.

There are only so many safety-first companies and products. The vast majority of the economy isn't optimizing for safety

> There are only so many safety-first companies and products

There are only so many companies that think of themselves as safety-first. In practice, basically all companies work on things that should be safety-first.

Does your software store user data? Congrats, you are now on the hook for GDPR and a bunch of similar data handling regulations.

Does your software include a messaging component? You are now responsible for moderating abusive actors in your chat.

Does your software allow users to upload images? Now you are a potential distribution vector for CSAM.

And so on... safety isn't just for things which can cause immediate death and dismemberment

There’s a difference between "safety matters" and “safety is the primary constraint". Most companies manage risk to an acceptable level while optimizing for speed and cost. Aerospace companies optimize for minimizing catastrophic failure, even at extreme expense. Treating a potential GDPR fine as equivalent to a flight-control failure ignores that society, regulators, and markets treat those risks very differently. The inconvenience and economic cost of your Discord messages leaking is not the same category of harm as your pacemaker controller failing. And because the majority of economic activity sits in that lower-criticality category, it would not be surprising if highly specialized, safety-critical human software engineering becomes more of a niche, while much of routine software development becomes increasingly automated or commoditized.

> Treating a potential GDPR fine as equivalent to a flight-control failure ignores that society, regulators, and markets treat those risks very differently

Agreed, though I think that if GDPR fines were actually being levied at the recommended 4% of global revenue, we'd start treating them more similarly to a 737 crash.

> The inconvenience and economic cost of your Discord messages leaking is not the same category of harm as your pacemaker controller failing

Sort of depends who they leak to. Your teen classmates who bully you to suicide? Your abusive ex who is trying to track you down to kill you? The 3-letter agency who is trying to rendition your family to an internment camp?

There are a lot of seemingly benign failure modes that become extremely lethal given the right circumstances. And because we acknowledge the potential lethality of something like a pacemaker failure, we have massive infrastructure dedicated to their mitigation (EMT teams, emergency external pacemakers, surgical teams who can rapidly place new leads, etc). For things society judges less important, mitigations are often few and far between

Could it be that the only large safety-first companies are the ones forced by law (either proactively, or due to reliable legal accountability if things go wrong) to be safety-first?

OT: it's not the first time I see this grammatical mistake: "didn’t trained". Is it some accepted regional variation?

I think he is a non-native speaker, like me. I also do this mistake very often and 'didn't train' is a bit counter-intuitive - at least for me.

I think that happens when as a German you're used to using the Plusquamperfekt which is a somewhat unique tense that's allowed to be used in all past tenses.

It allows you to not having to define the point in time and neither the frame of the timespan's points in time.

Some languages allow to use that type of tense and it's somewhat a language gap I suppose. I have no idea what other languages or proto languages allow that tense though, but I've seen some Slavic and maybe Finnish(?) natives use that tense in English, too.

Maybe someone more elaborate in these matters has better examples?

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plusquamperfekt

id think its germanic, dutch have it too

English has present perfect, and past perfect. E.g. "I have walked" and "I had walked", both tenses are participated (ie "walked" instead of "walk"). These two are similar to the German Perfekt and Plusquamperfekt which are also participated.

The problem here is that the simple past "He went" uses an auxiliary verb for negations "He didn't go". In this case, "go" is not participated.

Thank you! I assume “didn’t train” is correct. Probably my favorite mistake! I like it when people point out mistakes, give me corrections, and explain why. The reason is crucial.

Maybe “hadn’t trained” is even better. Makes sense when ordering times. But I don’t trust LLMs an inch. It makes up options for git[1] and both GCC and CLANG are often immediately telling me that the LLM is lying.

Cookieengineer and illichosky are right.

[1] Considering that man pages exist, it shows how useless their harmful crawlers are.

We're not talking about Airbus or centuries old commodified industrial companies. Airbus sells airplanes, not AI software tools.

But if you did build a core innovation in aerospace that went viral I'm sure Airbus would be interested in hiring you.

The salary would be 3K per month. And lunch coupons to buy a ham baguette.

Airbus pays like shit probably. Just going off the stuff I've read about Boeing.

I can confirm, they do.

It's the interesting work tax, I guess. Though this doesn't look terrible: https://www.levels.fyi/de-de/companies/airbus/salaries/softw...

Ah, you were thinking of the German branch, I was talking about the French one, in Toulouse (I have a few friends working there).

There, a team lead is doing ~$4000 net per month. So not poverty, but not great either.

76k gross per year in Germany is basically the same as that. 100k gross comes out to about 5.5k net per month. The big question is how much is already covered once you're down to the net pay.

I'm not sure of the situation for software engineers but ones on the aerospace and mechanical side working in aerospace in Europe are paid something on the order of 50% less than ones in the US. I always assumed it's just a supply demand problem but I haven't run the numbers.

Did you factor in the highest cost of life (including housing, healthcare, retirement, etc.) in the US in your 50% ?

No, that's just on a salary basis.

If you want to go further into bringing other stuff in I would say, on average, the European folks are only slightly worse off money wise (owning a house there does seem harder overall) but with more security, time off, etc.

In the US there is a much broader range of experiences in the sector, partly because of personal circumstances (student and auto loans being the biggest) and alot because of where you live, as pay tends not to scale with COL. So someone could live like a king in rural Iowa or a pauper in Los Angeles doing the same job.

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