Boeing Outsourced Its 737 MAX Software To $9-Per-Hour Engineers

Via ZeroHedge

The software at the heart of the Boeing 737 MAX crisis was developed at a time when the company was laying off experienced engineers and replacing them with temporary workers making as little as $9 per hour, according to Bloomberg.

In an effort to cut costs, Boeing was relying on subcontractors making paltry wages to develop and test its software. Often times, these subcontractors would be from countries lacking a deep background in aerospace, like India.

Boeing had recent college graduates working for Indian software developer HCL Technologies Ltd. in a building across from Seattle’s Boeing Field, in flight test groups supporting the MAX. The coders from HCL designed to specifications set by Boeing but, according to Mark Rabin, a former Boeing software engineer, “it was controversial because it was far less efficient than Boeing engineers just writing the code.”

Rabin said: “…it took many rounds going back and forth because the code was not done correctly.”

In addition to cutting costs, the hiring of Indian companies may have landed Boeing orders for the Indian military and commercial aircraft, like a $22 billion order received in January 2017. That order included 100 737 MAX 8 jets and was Boeing’s largest order ever from an Indian airline. India traditionally orders from Airbus.

HCL engineers helped develop and test the 737 MAX’s flight display software while employees from another Indian company, Cyient Ltd, handled the software for flight test equipment. In 2011, Boeing named Cyient, then known as Infotech, to a list of its “suppliers of the year”.

One HCL employee posted online: “Provided quick workaround to resolve production issue which resulted in not delaying flight test of 737-Max (delay in each flight test will cost very big amount for Boeing).”

But Boeing says the company didn’t rely on engineers from HCL for the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, which was linked to both last October’s crash and March’s crash. The company also says it didn’t rely on Indian companies for the cockpit warning light issue that was disclosed after the crashes.

A Boeing spokesperson said: “Boeing has many decades of experience working with supplier/partners around the world. Our primary focus is on always ensuring that our products and services are safe, of the highest quality and comply with all applicable regulations.”

HCL, on the other hand, said: “HCL has a strong and long-standing business relationship with The Boeing Company, and we take pride in the work we do for all our customers. However, HCL does not comment on specific work we do for our customers. HCL is not associated with any ongoing issues with 737 Max.”

Recent simulator tests run by the FAA indicate that software issues on the 737 MAX run deeper than first thought. Engineers who worked on the plane, which Boeing started developing eight years ago, complained of pressure from managers to limit changes that might introduce extra time or cost.

Rick Ludtke, a former Boeing flight controls engineer laid off in 2017, said: “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. 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 even recalled an incident where senior software engineers were told they weren’t needed because Boeing’s productions were mature. Rabin said: “I was shocked that in a room full of a couple hundred mostly senior engineers we were being told that we weren’t needed.”

Any given jetliner is made up of millions of parts and millions of lines of code. Boeing has often turned over large portions of the work to suppliers and subcontractors that follow its blueprints. But beginning in 2004 with the 787 Dreamliner, Boeing sought to increase profits by providing high-level specs and then asking suppliers to design more parts themselves.

Boeing also promised to invest $1.7 billion in Indian companies as a result of an $11 billion order in 2005 from Air India. This investment helped HCL and other software developers.

For the 787, HCL offered a price to Boeing that they couldn’t refuse, either: free. HCL “took no up-front payments on the 787 and only started collecting payments based on sales years later”.

Rockwell Collins won the MAX contract for cockpit displays and relied in part on HCL engineers and contract engineers from Cyient to test flight test equipment.

Charles LoveJoy, a former flight-test instrumentation design engineer at the company, said: “We did have our challenges with the India team. They met the requirements, per se, but you could do it better.”

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Raider99
Raider99

Shocker! I work in the software industry and sell the software products used in application development, quality and testing. Indian outsourcers like HCL are dog shit! I believe this is just the tip of the iceberg for Boeing and other commuter companies like them- railroads do the same shit BTW. It’s all about cost, and not quality. I bet if the executives at Boeing would have a mulligan knowing what they know now they would have kept their American employees. The litigation and lawsuit payouts will be exponentially more than what they would have paid to develop software right the first time. It’s likely their Chief Information Officer and CEO won’t survive, but at least they’ll get their golden parachutes. Hopefully they can count their millions from behind bars, but I doubt it!

Trapped in Portlandia
Trapped in Portlandia

Raider, the only ones getting fired at Boeing are the folks in the PR Department. They obviously failed by not putting the right spin on all this bad news. Plus they didn’t dig a hole deep enough to sufficiently bury the facts about outsourcing their engineering tasks.

Two years from now the same executives will be running Boeing and the same foreign engineers making $9/hour will be doing the technical work and people will again be flying the 737Max because the FAA will say the problem is solved.

Of course the problems will not be solved but it is all about perception, not reality in the USA of the 21st century.

Impartial Observer
Impartial Observer

Lotta people’s problems will be solved when they are riding the “new”, “safe” 737Max when it plows into the ground. When you are riding an airplane that is headed straight towards the ground at terminal velocity, all your other problems suddenly seem not so important. Of course, I don’t want my current problems solved that way. Another reason to never ride in an airplane.

The FAA guys, the ones who declare the new, improved 737Max to be safe, will also keep their cushy jobs, salaries, and great benefits, just like the big exec’s at Boeing. Kinda makes a person think interesting thoughts. Don’t wanna say more: don’t wanna get into trouble the other guys who share this computer.

Pequiste
Pequiste

Shareholder value boys and girls. Shareholder value is what is important.

Betting the CEO, CFO, and COO of Boeing get around on an Embraer.

CCRider
CCRider

The market, left to its own devices would penalize such transparently bad management with bankruptcy. That won’t happen of course. The gumment will bail this great ‘american’ company out with money stolen from Americans earning $9:00/hr.

Steve C
Steve C

The software at the heart of the Boeing 737 MAX crisis was developed at a time when the company was laying off experienced engineers and replacing them with temporary workers making as little as $9 per hour, according to Bloomberg.

When you pay peanuts, you get monkeys…

Anonymous
Anonymous

Wow , it sounds like Boeing saved a lot of cash shit canning good people to employ cheap foreign labor to gain a market share against Air Bus by turning their latest and greatest product into a lawn dart with hundreds of paying victims on board .
Out sourcing the destruction of American working people from the bottom up destroying tax bases for countless communities evaporating modest profit incomes for a quick kill of higher profits as pensions for workers go up in smoke like the crash site they may have prevented .
I hope corporate America learned something here besides trying never to get caught without plausible deniability , a technique taught by the American Shit bags we call congress !

Frank
Frank

Worked IT at a shop in NC. Management ran a trial offshore project that came back messed up, so we had to fix it up.
Second verse, same as the first.
Management then pronounced that the trials were so successful that they would send all contract work to an Indian contractor firm.
I got a job in another state instead of hanging around. Heard later from some who stayed that they wished they had followed my example.

Anonymous
Anonymous

Think of all the savings from not building any planes. R.I.P. BA

niebo
niebo

Idiocy. If this is how they pad their financials, by selling out their employees, customers, and travelers . . .
they deserve to be out of business. THEY FAILED ON EVERY FRONT. And why? To look good to some cucks?

AC
AC

You can live in a First World country, or you can live with Diversity. You can’t have both.

Joey Joe Joe Shabadoo
Joey Joe Joe Shabadoo

The fuckers in India can’t even answer phone calls on customer “service” phone lines or process payment of invoices on an outsource basis … and they were going to engineer a fucking airplane??

Ghost

If you think the only elephant in Boeing’s boardroom is the Outsourcing pachyderm, well you might consider the other Congress Critters bellying up to the Military Industrial Complex Buffet.

Boeing has this interesting ability to “hire” former military commanders into positions which do not exist. For instance, when I worked for Boeing, or for a Boeing minority subcontractor, I went to church with a former Commander who signed contractual material as a steward of the public trust. When he announced his retirement, he told me privately he had a job at Boeing, but it was hush-hush. Inwardly, I rolled my eyes.

Nine months later, after the required one year out of uniform, he showed up in the office where I edited technical material and I had to teach him how to use Word. And a former US Navy chick I call Payola the Gunn had to teach him how to use a computer.

Do you remember Opie No Real Names, Payola?

Many elephants look like a bit like pigs, as do rhinos (and rinos) and hippos, too, might look like donkeys during a famine.

https://www.wilhelma.de/nc/en/animals-and-plants/animals/pachyderms-and-non-african-hoofed-animals.html

And, as you all know, I come from that state over in flyover country… Misery loves company.

comment image

I love old maps and think they should be considered art form. Of course, that would make a mapmaker an art former or an artist former or something along that line.

Ghost

So, I asked an old friend of mine I will refer to as Payola the Big Gun to come here and talk a bit about the rotten underhanded (literally manhandled by a big whig at Boeing, weren’t you, Paula?) stuff you saw at Boeing?

How about while in the US Navy? Want to hep Maggie find an old Air Force comrade who was gang raped by some pigs in AWAX? I think we both know a few women who deserve that respect and who have earned it. I know you served, too. I served too. A lot of other women served too.

Others claim they did, but we know they did more harm than good. It is just that baby and bathwater thing. There is always a bit of bad with the good.

ragman
ragman

A flight control problem is the most terrifying emergency a pilot can face. We can safely handle(and train for) engine failures and fires, electrical failures and fires, hydraulic problems, loss of pressurization, &TC. But if ya can’t control the jet, nothing else matters. I simply can’t fathom that an airplane company would certify something like this(blessed by the FAA) and then not even tell the pilots about it? Permanently ground this POS, and criminally charge senior management with homicide. They knew exactly what they were doing and tried to cover it up. I have flown the B707/720, 727, 737, 757, and 767 as a crew member. I have had nothing but respect for the company and the incredibly well designed and built airplanes produced by Boeing. No more!

WestcoastDeplorable
WestcoastDeplorable

MCAS was supposed to only have .6 authority and wound up with 2.5 and Boeing didn’t bother updating the certification application. That’s one smoking gun; I’ll bet this sucker has a bunch! And watch that 787 documentary I posted earlier. It’s almost unbelievable for a company manufacturing aircraft. 9 of 15 workers refuse to fly on one.

The wonder Of it all
The wonder Of it all

The 747 was a model airplane with extreme quality and engineering proofed by its longevity. As this example shows, leaning off a great reputation can work till the Kings clothes show. Just like this new junk navigating the skies with a duct tape design, the core of the country is being eaten away from the inside out. Good values were the pride of yesterday

Dutchman
Dutchman

As a Computer Scientist I have had experiences with these ‘Dot Heads’ – I don’t have anything to do with them. Any organization with ‘Curry’ run away. They lie, the don’t know WTF they are doing.

Rajiv J. Chakrabarty
Rajiv J. Chakrabarty

That cannot be true. My parents bought a very good Computer Science degree for me from East Bangalore School of Technology. I know it is good because it cost my mother over 50 silver bangles from her arms and I spent over one whole month with the East Bangalore people learning all the hot IT words to put on a curriculum vitae.

My parents also bought my brother Vijay a splendid medical degree from East Bangalore School of Technology. He works at a hospital in the USA and does a very good job. The proof is that he has never killed more than 5 patients per month. That is better than the AMA average.

WestcoastDeplorable
WestcoastDeplorable

I know all about “junk” software. I once worked for a guy who had a room full of former Eastern Bloc H1-B coders and every time he would replace their leader the software would totally be re-written and none of the XML stuff would follow the new version since it was totally a different program. And the company refused to make it good and the upgrade wasn’t reversible. Can you imagine the customer service calls I got? I can just imagine if this guy got a contract to write something deliverable to an aircraft company. Yikes!

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