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FYI I used to date a girl with a Masters in CS who got a job with Boeing. She worked on the OpenGL overlay for the B1 Lancer. She wrote about 3 pages of justifi
by SEJeff 12y ago
FYI I used to date a girl with a Masters in CS who got a job with Boeing. She worked on the OpenGL overlay for the B1 Lancer. She wrote about 3 pages of justification for every 5-6 lines of code she wrote. After 2 years she bounced as the job satisfaction in that type of environment, simply wasn't there. Also OpenGL from ADA is... interesting.
She worked at the Boeing San Diego office, which is quite beautiful.
- foobarqux 12y agoWhere do you go after that type of ultra specialized experience?
- coldtea 12y agoWere ever you want? If you have the kind of skills to write Open GL in Ada for Boeing, then you're not the kind of person who's depending on having rote-learn some latest tech (J2EE, RoR, Node, Go, whatever) and only can get jobs looking for that.
- zeeshanm 12y agoOr you can start a startup.
- vonmoltke 12y agoI don't know. I frequently run into people who stereotype aerospace/defense software engineers as stodgy, inflexible dinosaurs.
- jacquesm 12y agoThat's most likely people who would not have the discipline or ability to write software at that level.
- pjmlp 12y agoSorry just downvoted you when I wanted to upvote. Pesky mobile browsers.
- joevandyk 12y agoWherever you want. I moved on to Ruby on Rails/e-commerce after leaving Boeing in 2006. At Boeing, I did a lot of C/C++/Ada/OpenGL.
- pjmlp 12y agoRetire to a tropical island with the savings gotten from the hourly rates.
- angersock 12y agoOpenGL from Ada? That's a special sort of hell.
- learc83 12y agoA friend of mine is rewriting Doom 3 in Ada.
- archgoon 12y agoThis one? https://github.com/AdaDoom3/AdaDoom3 https://github.com/AdaDoom3/AdaDoom3
- learc83 12y agoYep, that's the one.
- techdragon 12y agoWhat ever for... Masochistic enjoyment?
- axman6 12y agoWhy do people seem to think Ada is painful? It's quite strict, but that's a blessing, not a curse. You end up making anything remotely dodgy but necessary very obvious, and in general well founded ideas are clear and concise. You can also define your program much more precisely and make sure that things never go wrong (You can't accidently treat an int and an enum)
- yaantc 12y ago> Why do people seem to think Ada is painful? I have a possible explanation on this. A lot of people only know Ada in passing, from classes. For someone fluent in another language typically derived from C, the syntax is very new and frustrating initially. People normally comfortable with coding in their preferred language become newbies again, making a lot of frustrating mistakes. And they hate Ada for it. I've seen several persons being forced into using Ada for a longer time. Geek types, including two long haired ones. They all hated it initially, but after a while they all come to appreciate and enjoy it. Two of them ended up contributing to GNAT. The cross-over time is roughly around 6 months of full time work with Ada, so more than what you get from a class. So I guess Ada is different enough to be frustrating at first, and most people don't use it long enough to come over the initial shock and appreciate the good sides of the language. They just hate it, and stay with the "Ada is bondage" meme. Too bad. For any one interested in large software system design and languages, I recommend looking at the "Rationale for the design of the Ada programming language" book. Even if you don't like the result ;) it's an interesting analysis of the challenge of doing large, safety critical system software IMHO. Just read the latest version, the intial one (though interesting) is now dated and made some wrong bets, like using synchronous tasks as the base for concurrency because there was hope that a formal model enabling proving behavior would develop around it, and that never happened.
- ubernostrum 12y agoIf she has experience writing 3 pages of justification for every 5-6 lines of code, perhaps she should join the functional-programming community...
- eru 12y agoWe don't tend to write that much justification (at least in industry).
- coldtea 12y agoI think he meant it as a joke. As in: "for every line of code a functional programmers writes" he'll write 5 blog posts and 10 HN comments on why functional programming is better, how currying, functional composition, monads, etc, work etc...
- atburrow 12y agoCan I ask what her first name was? I used to work the exact same job. They moved all their operations to Oklahoma City and I helped with the transition.
- SEJeff 12y agoHer name was Genevieve (Gen) and she worked with another girl name Jen. This was a few years back, around 2006-2008
- possibilistic 12y agoConsidering the importance of not crashing, both literally and figuratively, I can understand the need for that heavy of a software process. Isn't this par for the course in high CMMI [1] [2] organizations? I don't really know much about this side of engineering, but I find it fascinating. Thanks for sharing the anecdote with us. :) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Maturity_Model_Integration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Maturity_Model_Integ... [2] http://boeing.mediaroom.com/2011-10-26-Boeing-Huntsville-Site-Achieves-CMMI-Level-5 http://boeing.mediaroom.com/2011-10-26-Boeing-Huntsville-Sit...
- drumdance 12y agoYeah, I can't imagine the QA process for, say, the satellite industry.
- roedog 12y agoTesting flight software is very intense. 50 KSLOC of C will take a few dozen man years to develop. As a side note on terminology, QA means a very different thing in the aerospace industry. The function of QA in this world is to witness the tests and attest that we did indeed run the test as written. Usually in the form of stamping a printed procedure as it is followed. This mirrors the process used to test the mechanical and electrical parts. The testing of the software is called verification and validation testing not QA.
- genericresponse 12y agoI worked in a CMMI 5 organization and it wasn't even close to this level for our developers. However, for our testers, project managers and business analysts it's probably pretty accurate.
- dscrd 12y agoCMMI seems to be mostly a moneymaking scheme directed at business types with no skill. In contrast, Boeing used actually effective engineering disciplines.
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- a-priori 12y agoI can vouch for this. I once worked on a similar project, an OpenGL-based cockpit display unit for business aircraft (Honeywell DU-875/885). We wrote it in MISRA C instead of Ada, purely for personal reasons.
- pjmlp 12y agoAll software should strive for quality. Sadly our industry only regards security as a cost that is often imposed by external processes. It will only charge at large when companies start to be made accountable for their software, like in other industries. In this regard the industry is still at its infancy.
- ilikevideos 12y agoMost software doesn't control a fuel-filled aluminum tube hurling through the air at 500mph. Get over it.
- CrLf 12y agoCorrect, but even software that doesn't cause deaths on failure ends up causing real losses (often invisible). Consider every time Word crashes and work is lost. There are billions of Word users out there, mostly being paid to use it. How much does that cost over the course of a year? And the accumulated frustration from unreliable software, causing loss of productivity, resistance to change, stress... How much does that cost?
- illumen 12y agoHow much do the extra features shipped 5 years earlier save? There are trade-offs to be made.
- tankenmate 12y agoI suspect the point of diminishing returns for Word have long since been passed.
- pjmlp 12y agoMy job is to take your job to offshore, because your boss doesn't care about quality. Get over it.
- yoran 12y agoCompanies are made accountable if there are human lives at stake. Most of the time there isn't (if there's a bug in some accountancy software which requires the accountant to restart the program, the accountant's life is not at stake) but wasn't there that software bug in one of the Toyota cars (Prius I believe?), where the brakes didn't work anymore under certain conditions? I remember Toyota had to take all those cars back in and had law suits against them, so they were certainly made accountable for the software they wrote for that car.