[rramadass]

It is absolutely a Boeing failure and not due to subcontractors/outsourcing as the clickbait title seems to imply.

If you parcel out parts of your job in something as critical as Airplane Construction, it is your responsibility to validate all specifications/testing/verification/etc. If you treat "Airplane Engineering" as mere "Embedded Engineering" you need to be put out of business.

The article explicitly says MCAS and "cockpit warning light not working" problems (which were the cause of the two crashes) were NOT outsourced.

Key points;

“Boeing was doing all kinds of things, everything you can imagine, to reduce cost, including moving work from Puget Sound, because we’d become very expensive here,” said Rick Ludtke, a former Boeing flight controls engineer laid off in 2017. “All that’s very understandable if you think of it from a business perspective. Slowly over time it appears that’s eroded the ability for Puget Sound designers to design.

Rabin, the former software engineer, recalled one manager saying at an all-hands meeting that Boeing didn’t need senior engineers because its products were mature. “I was shocked that in a room full of a couple hundred mostly senior engineers we were being told that we weren’t needed,” said Rabin, who was laid off in 2015.

“Engineering started becoming a commodity,” said Vance Hilderman, who co-founded a company called TekSci that supplied aerospace contract engineers and began losing work to overseas competitors in the early 2000s.

The last point is the most damning; Airplane Engineering cannot be commodity engineering.

[RobertSchoenb]

No disagreements on your main points, but I would dispute calling that headline clickbait. We published this story in 2019 when software issues were the central issues at Boeing, so establishing how the company was coding was very newsworthy. I typically associate clickbait with bait-and-switch tactics, tricking readers into reading content unrelated to the headline. This article provides material directly related to its title. Robert Schoenberger, editor-in-chief, IndustryWeek

[rramadass]

Glad to see that news websites (in this era of fake news) are willing to stand behind their stories; Much appreciated.

While i understand your point, the headline gives the impression that Boeing's problems stem from outsourcing which then emboldens the racists to come out of the woodwork (as can be seen from some of the downvoted comments here) and start manipulating the conversations in a different and unproductive direction. Some of the folks commenting didn't even read the article before dunking on the outsourced country/engineers. It is highly frustrating when this sort of thing happens and hence my warning in the first line of my response to ignore the title and read the article.

It would be great if you folks (maybe in collaboration with others sources/folks) could collate all the available info. on the disaster that is now "Boeing Engineering" (HW/SW) and publish a point-by-point synopsis of everything known until now. This would be a great learning lesson to the entire Industry on what not to do in pursuit of mere profits.

[trafficante]

Your frustration is understandable, particularly in this situation where the critical failures weren’t the fault of outsourced engineers.

But we really need to pump the brakes on the whole “everything must be in the passive voice and overly euphemized to the point of nigh-incomprehensibility”. If anything, it contributes to the click-bait problem.

I see: “Boeing outsourced to $9/hr SWE” and immediately start thinking about a dangerous corporate culture that prioritizes profits over lives. I’d argue most people probably interpret the headline in a similar fashion.

Just because some already-inclined reactionaries wrongly jump to “India lol” doesn’t mean the publication has some moral responsibility to contort the headline into something less effective that will get even more dramatically outcompeted by click bait headlines that actually bait racists (“Deadly Boeing crash was running Indian software”).

[rramadass]

In this case the publisher has a responsibility to not throw shade at outsourcing since it was already known that it was not responsible for critical software implementation. Whether by accident or design a lot of folks will draw the inference that i pointed out. You can also look at the previous articles submitted on HN on this topic to see how everything gets manipulated.

Outsourcing is a perfectly logical approach to saving costs. But the company doing it has to be careful on how it does it, have necessary modeling/tests/verification/QC/QA in place and be very very careful in outsourcing highly critical/specialized/domain specific subsystems (if at all doing it).

From all that has been published on this topic so far, there seems to be a systemic rot in the entirety of Boeing Engineering and Management which needs to be investigated thoroughly as a whole rather than piecemeal i.e. focus on the system itself rather than the simple cogs in the system.