If you weren’t afraid to fly before, you will be now that you know how Boeing is producing its 737 flight software:
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.”
Boeing’s cultivation of Indian companies appeared to pay other dividends. In recent years, it has won several orders for Indian military and commercial aircraft, such as a $22 billion one in January 2017 to supply SpiceJet Ltd. That order included 100 737-Max 8 jets and represented Boeing’s largest order ever from an Indian airline, a coup in a country dominated by Airbus.
I have had just one experience working with Indian software developers, when I was designing a game-training tool for 3M. To say that they were completely incompetent would have been an exaggeration, as in the end, they did manage to get a very basic, ugly version of what I had designed working. But I would estimate that they were about one-tenth as competent as the worst Western programmer with whom I ever worked.
Think about how poorly Skype and the average application works today in comparison with five years ago. Now apply that level of technological degradation to literally everything that involves putting people in the air and transporting them from one place to another.
Then again, the first rockstar programmer I ever knew was a young Indian who was the best programmer at my father’s company despite being hired right out of college, and who is still a brilliant programmer and entrepreneur. But that was literally the opposite of outsourcing. So, it’s not that Indians simply can’t do it, it’s that the probabilities don’t favor outsiders attempting to determine who can and who cannot.