4 ms·

In our defence, our customers are a compete joke in terms of the price they are prepared to pay for quality sfotware. See MCAS programmers at $9/h.

dotancohen 7y ago
I just checked and it is true. The subcontractors who wrote the MCAS software were paid $9/h: > Increasingly, the iconic American planemaker and its > subcontractors have relied on temporary workers making > as little as $9 an hour to develop and test software, > often from countries lacking a deep background in > aerospace -- notably India. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-737-max-software-outsourced-to-9-an-hour-engineers https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-...
- salawat 7y ago
  Note those engineers (HCL) only worked on the Multi-Function display code. I don't have the article on hand, but they did ascertain at one point that the MCAS code was written in house. I'll try to find the article again. I think it was Seattle Times. Found it. Was Bloomberg. Here is the old thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20309052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20309052
  - slumdev 7y ago
    It doesn't mean much that the software was written in-house. Boeing has literally relocated their plant operations cross-country in the past in order to break the workers' unions. Just think about how much pressure they can exert on a non-union profession like software development.
  - thawaway1837 7y ago
    It’s a lot more comfortable to blame Indian engineers (and of course the HN crowd loves that explanation, no matter how invalid it is) than to place the blame where it belongs. Squarely on Boeing management.
- anticensor 7y ago
  That is just enough for one employee.
coldpie 7y ago
That's still an industry problem. No one hires doctors or architects for $9/h.
- PeterisP 7y ago
  If you go for countries with lower wages (just as Boeing did for engineers), you definitely can hire doctors and architects for $9/hour or even less; as $9/h is more than the average doctor or architect gets paid there, you could definitely pick some who are quite decent. E.g. just to use a random example, Russian statistics show that the average pay of an architect is something like $800/month in many regions - in some more, in some less, but definitely well withing $9/hour; and for doctors in regions outside Moscow it's something roughly similar; Moscow seems to get something like 2200$/month in the average statistics so that's more than $9/hour if they're working sane hours.

dotancohen 7y ago

I just checked and it is true. The subcontractors who wrote the MCAS software were paid $9/h: > Increasingly, the iconic American planemaker and its > subcontractors have relied on temporary workers making > as little as $9 an hour to develop and test software, > often from countries lacking a deep background in > aerospace -- notably India. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-737-max-software-outsourced-to-9-an-hour-engineers https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-...

salawat 7y ago
Note those engineers (HCL) only worked on the Multi-Function display code. I don't have the article on hand, but they did ascertain at one point that the MCAS code was written in house. I'll try to find the article again. I think it was Seattle Times. Found it. Was Bloomberg. Here is the old thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20309052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20309052
- slumdev 7y ago
  It doesn't mean much that the software was written in-house. Boeing has literally relocated their plant operations cross-country in the past in order to break the workers' unions. Just think about how much pressure they can exert on a non-union profession like software development.
- thawaway1837 7y ago
  It’s a lot more comfortable to blame Indian engineers (and of course the HN crowd loves that explanation, no matter how invalid it is) than to place the blame where it belongs. Squarely on Boeing management.
anticensor 7y ago
That is just enough for one employee.

coldpie 7y ago

That's still an industry problem. No one hires doctors or architects for $9/h.

PeterisP 7y ago
If you go for countries with lower wages (just as Boeing did for engineers), you definitely can hire doctors and architects for $9/hour or even less; as $9/h is more than the average doctor or architect gets paid there, you could definitely pick some who are quite decent. E.g. just to use a random example, Russian statistics show that the average pay of an architect is something like $800/month in many regions - in some more, in some less, but definitely well withing $9/hour; and for doctors in regions outside Moscow it's something roughly similar; Moscow seems to get something like 2200$/month in the average statistics so that's more than $9/hour if they're working sane hours.