Boeing is an iconic American company that is now fighting for its life. Why? Catastrophic failure on a core product.
Many wondered how this could happen to such an iconic American company. The picture emerging is grim.
It seems Boeing is cutting costs by outsourcing American jobs and when you pay a guy $9 hours an hour to do important jobs…Boeing just learned the hard way you get what you pay for.
Now, to be fair, the FAA has identified a chip problem, as well as the widely reported software issues, with the plane – “a computer chip that experienced a lag in emergency response when it was overwhelmed with data in the 737.”
But that is not the point – do you feel safe on a plane run by software designed by unqualified overseas workers making $9 an hour?
From Bloomberg: It remains the mystery at the heart of Boeing Co.’s 737 Max crisis: how a company renowned for meticulous design made seemingly basic software mistakes leading to a pair of deadly crashes. Longtime Boeing engineers say the effort was complicated by a push to outsource work to lower-paid contractors.
The Max software — plagued by issues that could keep the planes grounded months longer after U.S. regulators this week revealed a new flaw — was developed at a time Boeing was laying off experienced engineers and pressing suppliers to cut costs.
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.
In offices across from Seattle’s Boeing Field, recent college graduates employed by the Indian software developer HCL Technologies Ltd. occupied several rows of desks, said Mark Rabin, a former Boeing software engineer who worked in a flight-test group that supported the Max.
The coders from HCL were typically designing to specifications set by Boeing. Still, “it was controversial because it was far less efficient than Boeing engineers just writing the code,” Rabin said. Frequently, he recalled, “it took many rounds going back and forth because the code was not done correctly.”
Contract engineers from Cyient helped test flight test equipment. Charles LoveJoy, a former flight-test instrumentation design engineer at the company, said engineers in the U.S. would review drawings done overnight in India every morning at 7:30 a.m. “We did have our challenges with the India team,” he said. “They met the requirements, per se, but you could do it better.”
Engineers who worked on the Max, which Boeing began developing eight years ago to match a rival Airbus SE plane, have complained of pressure from managers to limit changes that might introduce extra time or cost.
“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.
Boeing outsourced its GROUNDED, FATAL CRASH-INVOLVED Boeing 737 Max software engineering to Indian coders, the kind we import by the thousands with H-1B visas. Trump has just agreed to MORE H-1B workers. #ImmigrationKills
— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) June 29, 2019
