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The article seems to conflate engineering salaries in a low cost of living country with the quality of the software. As I understand it, the software performed
by jkic47 3y ago
The article seems to conflate engineering salaries in a low cost of living country with the quality of the software.
As I understand it, the software performed exactly as designed, forcing the nose of the plane downwards to counter the upwards torque produced by the engines being offset relative to the centre of gravity of the plane.
Mentour Pilot had a great episode on the two tragic accidents. It appears that Boeing did not expose the way the software was designed to behave, and the system silently turned itself back on even after the pilots disengaged it.
- silent_cal 3y agoIn my experience there is a correlation there. Low-cost outsourced code is generally pretty bad.
- Smeevy 3y agoNot that you intimated this, but I don't know that it's necessarily a problem with the people writing the code. What I've seen is that organizations that try to save money by offshoring are not providing adequate domain knowledge or usable requirements to the developers. Throw in a massive timezone difference and every misunderstanding winds up living in your system.
- silent_cal 3y agoThat could be. However I think the language barrier is also a significant factor. But of course there is nothing inherently problematic about offshore developers.
- cityofdelusion 3y agoI've had to deal with offshores my entire career and have even flown out to train them up. They are good people, but almost universally, they contract for U.S. companies via large body shops (you know who they are) that have awful pay, poor treatment of developers, and just a general culture of half-assing work. I've told various great offshore developers personally to leave as fast as possible and join literally any other organization for way more pay. Good developers have zero business working at those body shops that all the U.S. corps utilize.
- pfannkuchen 3y agoCulture issues do exist. IME different cultures have very different approaches to communicating e.g. “I don’t know” or “I made a mistake”. Not everyone in a particular culture acts the same, but it definitely affects the average outcome.
- initplus 3y agoIt’s not a problem with individual offshore engineers. The problem is the way the business they are employed by operate.
- rramadass 3y agoFalse. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39700806 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39700806
- silent_cal 3y agoMy experience is false? Ok..
- rramadass 3y agoCorrelation is the inference that you draw from your experience which can absolutely be wrong.
- silent_cal 3y agoCorrelation is the inference I draw from my experience? That's one of the more nonsensical things I've ever heard.
- rramadass 3y agoPerhaps a course in "Inferential Statistics/Statistical Inference" is in order here.
- silent_cal 3y agoI've taken several graduate courses in statistics. That's how I know this makes no sense at all.
- rramadass 3y ago> several graduate courses in statistics. Ha, Ha, Ha!
- uuddlrlrbaba 3y agoWeird take. The theme throughout has been cost cutting and poor oversight for the sole benefit of shareholder profits. A proper in house team would probably say, hey what happens when the sole sensor feeding our software is obstructed by a birthday balloon? Maybe we need an exponentially backoff instead of every 30 seconds. Maybe nose down actions shouldn't be automatically executed at low altitude. What we see playing out is the result of delegation and "not my problem", outsourcing safety critical systems to the lowest bidder...
- NullPrefix 3y agobirthday balloon? In front of a landing plane at 170mph?
- moosedev 3y agoGP is (quite reasonably) using a deliberately slightly silly example as a rhetorical flourish. I would do the same. Think of it of a stand-in or totem for all of the possibilities (from silly to very real) that leap into horrifying life in an engineer's brain when they learn that a critical system has a single point of failure.
- neuralRiot 3y agoIn a safety-critical design you have to take in account what will happen if what cannot happen happens.
- jiggawatts 3y agoYes. It happens. In a recent news clip a pilot was interviewed about the MAX and he raised the risk of bird strike and birthday balloons as something that “happens all the time”.
- uuddlrlrbaba 3y agoIt actually happens, similarly to bird strikes or collisions with essentially any object that can float or fly into the path of a plane. https://simpleflying.com/avianca-airbus-a319-balloon-strike/ https://simpleflying.com/avianca-airbus-a319-balloon-strike/ https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-09-22-me-41720-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-09-22-me-41720-... https://dronedj.com/2021/08/31/update-faa-says-envoy-air-passenger-plane-hit-balloon-not-drone/ https://dronedj.com/2021/08/31/update-faa-says-envoy-air-pas...
- hgfghj 3y agoMy experience is that contract work like this ends up being done by ordertakers; the contractors execute the design, no matter how stupid. Whereas, the best performing companies hire engineers who are empowered to understand the goals, understand the problem, and push back when appropriate. The results are much better, because the people working on each system, understand it deeply and care. A low-cost contractor isn’t allowed to care. They aren’t even allowed to talk to somebody who matters. This is a management disgrace.
- genman 3y agoI think that this a fair take, especially about the possible power structure.
- jiggawatts 3y agoOften this is the entire point. The in-house staff are seen as obstructionists, whereas outsourcers provide the equivalent of meat robots. Many managers far prefer the latter over the former.
- solarwindy 3y agoThey prefer the latter because the mere existence of the knowledgable, informed, involved engineer questions the need for the manager at all.
- gregors 3y agoAnd yet we seem to conflate salaries with competent leadership positions.
- jkic47 3y agoI think you are comparing apples and oranges here. An individual contributor is typically given a tangible task (eg: deliver a product that does x in y months for a cost of z). There are several qualified people they could choose from to achieve this task, which drives down the cost. I worked for a company with 10,000 engineers. Oversimplifying for effect, but their skills are not unique. A leader is given a far more intangible task (eg: gain 30% market share in z years for your division OR deliver 9M of product per day through 202X), and they are taking a huge risk. The team under them may not have the slightest clue how to do this. The interest rates can change. Currency fluctuates. They are paid to calmly chart a path through the chaos and deliver a result. At this level, there were about 60 of us, and the atmosphere gets rarer as you rise further in the ranks. They made absolutely certain we were kept super happy because we could create tangible value orders of magnitude above the average employee, and they REALLY did not want us working for a competitor.
- renewiltord 3y agoMCAS wasn't outsourced to India LOL. People here are gullible idiots hahaha.
- rednerrus 3y agoThe biggest problem with offshore engineering teams is their dedication to delivering exactly what you ask for. One of the qualities of a good software developer is to take the requirements and interpret what needs to happen then deliver appropriately. Delivering exactly what's written without thinking about the implications is a huge problem and one of the biggest issues I've run into working with offshore teams.
- struant 3y agoIf just deliver exactly what you are told to, you aren't doing any "engineering" at all.
- datavirtue 3y agoRight,I just spend a little extra time on prompts and get much better, faster, work done completely stress free.
- jkic47 3y agoI agree with you on the problem with offshoring, having done this myself in a previous role in a regulated industry. However, the offshore team are usually not intended to act as domain experts. In fact, they were very likely explicitly proscribed from interpreting the specifications handed to them to guard against them trying to act as domain experts and delivering something different from expectations. As such, they were (likely) not the ones who specified that MCAS should silently turn itself on after a pilot turned it off. That misjudgment probably lies with the engineering team who made that design decision, and it had tragic results.
- rramadass 3y ago> However, the offshore team are usually not intended to act as domain experts. In fact, they were very likely explicitly proscribed from interpreting the specifications handed to them to guard against them trying to act as domain experts and delivering something different from expectations. Finally! Thank you for stating this explicitly. In safety critical systems specifications are everything and is always done by a team of domain experts to an enormous amount of detail (with optional formal methods verification). The actual coder has to just use the chosen implementation language carefully to meet the specification with no personal interpretations; everything has to be explicit and documented.
- wannacboatmovie 3y ago> As I understand it, the software performed exactly as designed This is very likely correct. People on HN don't seem to understand how software is created in regulated industries outside the tech bubble. In a complex system such an aircraft, the behavior of the system is modeled and detailed requirements are generated. These models are created by the system engineers. The models and requirements are then handed off to the software engineers to implement the modeled behaviour in code. The software is then tested to see if the behaviour matches the models. So it doesn't matter how much the SWEs were paid, if the software met the requirements, and implemented the models as designed, then the software engineers did their jobs.
- adriancr 3y agoThe software engineers job is also to think about what happens in corner cases. What if sensor malfunctions?, how should software act?, will it crash the plane? If yes, then raise problem and refuse to implement / avoid killing people. Then you have QA which should have the same questions and test plan to make sure corner cases are covered. QA is also responsible. Then you have management which is supposed to make sure there are people skilled enough doing the above and the initial systems parts and encourage this environment. Then you have business people to ensure sufficient resources to hire competent people above. So what is happening is a massive problem everywhere...
- nine_zeros 3y ago> If yes, then raise problem and refuse to implement / avoid killing people. Often, software engineers are pipped, written up, berated, stack ranked - and churned via various management processes for doing exactly as asked for. Until the culture of the company aka ALL levels of management changes to full accountability without blaming the actual engineers, nothing will change. The current corporate structure just isn't set up to incentivize good work.
- applied_heat 3y agoPerhaps software engineers looking for accountability would like the same level of liability that is enjoyed by their peers in civil, mechanical, mining, and electrical engineering?
- karmakaze 3y agoYep, the problem with the software wasn't the implementation, it was the spec: to operate contrary to the expectations and experience of pilots. The problem was that they didn't outsource the design spec. I doubt an externally developed design would be so contrary, with a flippant we'll document it and include it in the short brush up training.
- datavirtue 3y agoThe umpteenth comment trilling on as though MCAS was built by contractors when it was explicitly stated in the article that it was developed in-house by Boeing employees.
- karmakaze 3y agoStill blame the ones defining the spec rather than implementing it.
- acchow 3y agoExperienced engineers don’t just build things to spec. They question the spec and the human experience of using the technology.
- rramadass 3y agoNot true. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39700847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39700847