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>The post doesn't say "all outsourcing is bad", I didn't interpret his essay that way. His acknowledgements of some outsourcing being valid doesn't address my

by jasode 5y ago

>The post doesn't say "all outsourcing is bad", I didn't interpret his essay that way. His acknowledgements of some outsourcing being valid doesn't address my criticism. >and your 3 examples are all companies that (as far as I can tell) are very deliberate about what they outsource and deliberate about keeping control of the things they want to keep doing: NVIDIA is not going to go out to someone else and say "we want a GPU chip", but rather they are designing them end-to-end to make full use of what their production partners can do. And this is a great example that ties back to the author's point because he criticized Boeing. Boeing designs the planes and tells the outsourced partners what to make. Boeing then does final assembly in Boeing-owned factories in Washington and North Carolina. So to use your wording, Boeing does not go to somebody else and say "we want a 787 plane". Boeing does more building than NVIDIA. I think a fair reading of his essay is that he thinks that a company that is more vertically integrated via less (but not zero) outsourcing leads to more innovation. He was lamenting that outsourcing productivity software like MS Office 365 wasn't a good trend so presumably, companies that insourced that inhouse would be "more innovative".

detaro 5y ago
From the article re Boing: > They were even telling the manufacturers look, we only put up requirements, we don’t actually tell you what to do From other sources: > Starting with the 787 Dreamliner, launched in 2004, it sought to increase profits by instead providing high-level specifications and then asking suppliers to design more parts themselves. [...] > 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,” 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-... That's the point where you loose your in-house grip on things, and run into trouble if your contractors are not up to it. Keep that up, and you loose the ability to fix it. The chip-designing companies are betting that there always will be an external fab that's world-class, and likely better than what they can do themselves. AMD literally couldn't afford to keep up. (and when world-class was inside Intel, they somewhat suffered for it, but didn't really have an alternative)
- jasode 5y ago
  >That's the point where you loose your in-house grip on things, and run into trouble if your contractors are not up to it. What definitive conclusion are we supposed to get from that Bloomberg article you cited? That cheap outsourced $9/hr programmers from India caused the MCAS flaws which led to plane crashes? Therefore, if Boeing had used in-house American programmers, it wouldn't have been a problem? But if the specifications for the software were designed by Boeing management, it wouldn't have mattered where the programmers were located that actually coded it. From the investigative reports I read, it wasn't the programmers that decided 1 Angle-of-Attack sensor instead of checking 2 redundant ones -- it was the aerospace engineers and managers above the programmers. The Bloomberg article uses a narrative technique to bias the reader a certain way (reader nods in agreement "outsourcing caused the problem") -- rather than present unbiased Root Cause Analysis. As counterpoint, Tesla has programmers inhouse in California to code the self-driving software and yet it had serious flaws which contributed to fatalities. So is the correct conclusion to say that inhouse programming is "bad"? Of course not. Your cite of that type of Bloomberg article gives me an idea of what you found compelling about this thread's blog post. In my case, I was more focused on the "more outsourcing means less innovation" aspect which wasn't convincing.
  - ssivark 5y ago
    In the Boeing case, outsourcing is likely a problem not because of the geographical location of the engineers/developers, but the cost-centric mindset that drives such decisions with utter disregard for technology and technical expertise. Lots of people know the story about killing the golden goose, but few understand the metaphor for the range of actions that actually correspond to slowly strangling the goose, instead of nurturing it.
  - jiofih 5y ago
    The fact that the specification was wrong might actually be a pretty good counter argument to your position that outsourcing doesn’t matter. Do you think the same kind of mistakes would have been made of the people writing the specifications actually did some of the software work? I’m also very sure Boeing does not do more building than NVIDIA. These companies maintain absolute control over design, processes, materials and component sourcing, because it’s critical to their product, whereas Boeing has also outsourced all of that.

by jasode 5y ago

detaro 5y ago

From the article re Boing: > They were even telling the manufacturers look, we only put up requirements, we don’t actually tell you what to do From other sources: > Starting with the 787 Dreamliner, launched in 2004, it sought to increase profits by instead providing high-level specifications and then asking suppliers to design more parts themselves. [...] > 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,” 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-... That's the point where you loose your in-house grip on things, and run into trouble if your contractors are not up to it. Keep that up, and you loose the ability to fix it. The chip-designing companies are betting that there always will be an external fab that's world-class, and likely better than what they can do themselves. AMD literally couldn't afford to keep up. (and when world-class was inside Intel, they somewhat suffered for it, but didn't really have an alternative)

jasode 5y ago
>That's the point where you loose your in-house grip on things, and run into trouble if your contractors are not up to it. What definitive conclusion are we supposed to get from that Bloomberg article you cited? That cheap outsourced $9/hr programmers from India caused the MCAS flaws which led to plane crashes? Therefore, if Boeing had used in-house American programmers, it wouldn't have been a problem? But if the specifications for the software were designed by Boeing management, it wouldn't have mattered where the programmers were located that actually coded it. From the investigative reports I read, it wasn't the programmers that decided 1 Angle-of-Attack sensor instead of checking 2 redundant ones -- it was the aerospace engineers and managers above the programmers. The Bloomberg article uses a narrative technique to bias the reader a certain way (reader nods in agreement "outsourcing caused the problem") -- rather than present unbiased Root Cause Analysis. As counterpoint, Tesla has programmers inhouse in California to code the self-driving software and yet it had serious flaws which contributed to fatalities. So is the correct conclusion to say that inhouse programming is "bad"? Of course not. Your cite of that type of Bloomberg article gives me an idea of what you found compelling about this thread's blog post. In my case, I was more focused on the "more outsourcing means less innovation" aspect which wasn't convincing.
- ssivark 5y ago
  In the Boeing case, outsourcing is likely a problem not because of the geographical location of the engineers/developers, but the cost-centric mindset that drives such decisions with utter disregard for technology and technical expertise. Lots of people know the story about killing the golden goose, but few understand the metaphor for the range of actions that actually correspond to slowly strangling the goose, instead of nurturing it.
- jiofih 5y ago
  The fact that the specification was wrong might actually be a pretty good counter argument to your position that outsourcing doesn’t matter. Do you think the same kind of mistakes would have been made of the people writing the specifications actually did some of the software work? I’m also very sure Boeing does not do more building than NVIDIA. These companies maintain absolute control over design, processes, materials and component sourcing, because it’s critical to their product, whereas Boeing has also outsourced all of that.