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by certifiedloud 2799 days ago
As someone who holds a commercial pilots license but works in software development, I'd love to find a hybrid job solving problems I'm aviation with tech.
6 comments

I've gotten close to this as a software developer with a paramedic certification working for an EMR company. It's definitely nice...
You probably don't. Aerospace is horribly conservative and slow, both in the work itself and in office culture. Imagine spending an entire week checking every calculation in a 50 page technical report. It must be correct, and it has to be that way.
I mean, I hope people would want to do that. Otherwise the people doing it are the ones who don't.
Although I agree aerospace is slow, it's not that bad. Yes there is a lot of verification, paperwork, etc. however, safety is number one so it's understandable. Also if you get into early TRL projects, you don't even have to deal with such restrictions.
Any particular area you’re interested in? Hacking on a side project right now with frequent flier miles and points.
Southwest is hiring all sorts of software people here in Dallas.
Boeing must hire software devs?
They definitely do. They usually end up leaving because of the culture and the pay.

Reading about X is very different from working in X professionally.

Yeah, I don’t understand why companies like Boeing don’t pay competitively.

Their revenue is pretty good.

Also, they seem to hire a lot of people.

What am I missing? Why do they hire so many people at less than awesome comp?

CS people are not the main revenue driver for an aerospace company. Aircraft have been built without software engineers for over a hundred years, and they still are being made that way in some places. Software devs are still often seen as branch from the IT department. Most of the work is in supporting the actual aerospace/mechanical engineers, and is stuff like internal tool development, data engineering/warehousing. You're not doing any physical testing or generating drawings for parts, which constitute the actual IP worth billions that is used for manufacturing planes. For mechanical engineers the salaries are quite competitive and in line/better than other companies. These are generally much lower than FANG salaries for software engineers.
I've found the pay to be decent. The culture on the other hand is horrific.
uAvionix?