Boeing's 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers

[SiliconWizard]

Outsourcing may not cut overall costs (and often, it's the opposite indeed), but it does cut fixed expenses (less employees for the "same" amount of work), something accountants and shareholders are fond of.

Sure but we had contract workers too, those are supposed to be for reducing fixed expenses. They are often abused though, being kept around for many years.

Yes, contract workers are used liberally as well. I can tell you Airbus uses MANY contract workers. That works better than outsourcing, but they never really feel part of the company, which has consequences.

I suppose that one big difference (at least in the eyes of upper management) is that contract workers require middle management - which itself is a fixed expense - whereas pure outsourcing doesn't (at least in theory). Reality of course is different. It also doesn't require more work space and equipment, other fixed expenses.

Now outsourcing can take different forms. In the aerospace and automotive industries, a lot of subsystems are purchased, either off-the-shelf or 100% custom developments, from specialized companies. This kind of makes sense, and is pretty different from outsourcing projects using general-purpose engineering services based in India.

[GregDunn]

The idiot exec thinks it's $9/hr vs $50/hr, massive profits and love from Wall Street.

But outsourcing takes a great many more man-hours. You have a contractor that really doesn't know the work at hand, has to try learn it and in the end, it was faster and cheaper to do it in house when you review all the costs and include more time to fix deficiencies. Even including pensions and benefits.

I also found outsourcing terrible for the extra overhead.
Writing up requirements documents, meetings, supervising the contractor, communications, answering questions etc. takes up so much time. A total waste of in-house expertise.
The final insult is the work received is low quality compared to what in-house teams can dish out, and the invoices are astronomical because at $9/hr it's overlooked that there was 20X the man hours burned up.

I would say its a myth that you will save money outsourcing engineering of any complexity.

This.

There are so many things not done properly when implementing outsourcing, that even if the chosen company is reputable and good, the result will be poor.  When we outsourced a major inventory creation program back in 2005 we were given a questionnaire to fill out; the stated purpose was to determine whether an application could be legitimately outsourced or not.  Several of the critical questions involved privacy and customer personal data, and a "yes" to any of them was said to be a no-go for outsourcing.  We answered "yes" to several of them and I commented to a manager that this would be a show-stopper for our software.  He replied "That's OK, they're going ahead with it anyway."  It was just another manager check-box, not a real concern.

We had unending problems with the first contractor (after shipping all the documentation to them, they were supposed to be trained by their lead developers, not us).  They had no clue how the software worked, constantly peppered us with questions, and repeatedly shipped broken software to meet deadlines.  So we switched contractors (we developers had no input into the selection process) and had a repeat of the first scenario.  Finally we found someone who could get the job done efficiently and accurately, but they cost too much and we switched from them to an American-owned company which was cheaper (because all their development was done in third-world countries).  Of course, we were forbidden to maintain a contract beyond 18 months, because that might lead to the developers becoming familiar with the system and the company raising the prices accordingly.  When I left that project, it was months behind schedule and with a bug list that increased pretty much every day.

In every project where I was involved, big words were spoken and always followed by cost-cutting, excuses and customer dissatisfaction.  The one project we were given to do locally was estimated by someone who was only vaguely familiar with the software and then given to us.  It was drastically underestimated, and we said so at the beginning.  Never mind, we were told, just do it.  My rating on that program was pretty low because I took the time to do it right, check the results and fix the problems, costing us extra money (which should have been estimated in the first place).  My sole defense is that it was almost completely bug-free and the customer was delighted.  It was, incidentally, a system used to track phone usage and was a major source of data for planning and coordinating inventory.  I suspect part of the reason it was given to us was that there were zero specifications, only the output of an outmoded and slow product which needed replacing.

It's all about money, no matter what the bosses say.  I know a major telecommunications company which "outsourced" all the databases which contain line, switching and trunking details for the continental US so that they are now owned by two European companies.  The cost savings were twofold: the company no longer had to maintain all its US-based customer data, and bug fixes/expenditures were forestalled by quoting a $1M minimum contract to fix anything.  I may or may not have worked for this company and gotten the info directly from the database managers involved.   

[tszaboo]

I've seen 9 USD/hour student workers being absolute geniuses and solving impossibly looking problems. I've also seen people earning somewhere 150 EUR/hour being absolutely useless at their jobs, to the point, when I was actually asking "What the hell did they even accomplish since they are here?". Yes, and I had Indian colleagues, who were very good at their programming job. I've also seen someone with a gardening degree set up and keep a PCBA production line working for years. And other engineer with "decades of experience, you should be lucky that I'm willing to work with you" making idiotic decisions, and getting booted job after 2 months of doing practically nothing.

I dont think think this post has a point. Or the article.

[schmitt trigger]

Consumer electronics has always been a cut throat business, and everything possible was done to lower costs.

But everyone understood that there were certain engineering sacred cows, where the cost, although very important, was secondary to performance and/or reliability.

One of such sacred cows were the aerospace applications. That aerospace has now fallen to the the level of consumer electronics, is a perfect example of the failure of "quarterly-stock-price-only" capitalism.

[coppercone2]

try taking a look at the starlink website applications.

all of it is low cost aerospace. it says so in the job postings. that is liable to turn into the movie 'gravity'

[Brutte]

Is engineering ethics not taught any more, I know when I was in school it was a required course, and it goes WAY beyond merely meeting the given spec the best way you know how 

I cannot imagine ethics in software development.
This concept is totally un-scaleable.
Imagine you have a complex software development, you divide it into zillion of work packages and each work package includes hundreds of smaller tasks. Plus some external dependencies. How the hell would you like to design that with ethics in mind? How to formalize ethics and how to test ethics?
This can ONLY be scaleable when you a-priori assume the development does not require ethical engineers to develop that.

If the requirement says the software should work from Monday to Saturday, I implement Monday to Saturday. It is NOT my problem what happens on Sundays and I am not spending any time on implementing or testing Sundays. I do not deliver what I was not assigned to. I expect my boss to align me if I attempt to introduce anarchy and starting my own competing "management department".
Of course I might ask myself "wht happened with Sundays". Most likely I got Monday to Saturday and someone else got Sundays to implement because Sundays require much different implementation. Or maybe no, we do not implement Sundays at all and if the plane flies on Sunday - oops, BSOD. Not my problem.

Not signing off on a design because while it meets the formal spec you do not consider the spec to have covered the bases is a thing among engineers, and when engineers start abdicating that responsibility I am not at all sure I wish to call myself such.

The problem if the requirements cover Sundays or not is not a problem of an engineer that does implementation. It is a problem of some higher level managing. The responsibility of an engineer is ony limited to the requirements IMHO and not to the lives lost if the requirements are stupid or incomplete.

Do I as an engineer feel responsible when someone dies because of the product of my company?
Buaaaahhahaha.

Do shareholders of Boeing feel responsible for MAXes?
Buaaaahhahaha.

I think you meant ethics in stock market.
Because ultimately not engineers but shareholders (indirectly) decide about EVEYTHING the company does.

[schmitt trigger]

Although I empathize with your pain Brutte, in the real world one as an engineer is still required to determine fail-safe solutions to people's stupidity or malice.

A simplified example: let's say someone is driving at fast highways speeds, angrily discussing with his/her significant other and decides to shift the transmission into reverse. Just to scare the sh!t out of the passenger.

The transmission's software should flag this as an invalid command, and either fully ignore it or default into a safe condition, i.e. neutral.
If it does not, and the resulting mayhem provokes casualties and/or physical damage, I am sure that the auto company and most likely the transmission company, will get their asses sued.

[sokoloff]

What would have happened in the days of a fully manual or hydraulics-only automatic? Does a carmaker have an unending obligation to introduce safety code into a transmission just because of partial electronic monitoring/control?

[RandallMcRee]

Is engineering ethics not taught any more, I know when I was in school it was a required course, and it goes WAY beyond merely meeting the given spec the best way you know how 

I cannot imagine ethics in software development.
This concept is totally un-scaleable.
Imagine you have a complex software development, you divide it into zillion of work packages and each work package includes hundreds of smaller tasks. Plus some external dependencies. How the hell would you like to design that with ethics in mind? How to formalize ethics and how to test ethics?
This can ONLY be scaleable when you a-priori assume the development does not require ethical engineers to develop that.

If the requirement says the software should work from Monday to Saturday, I implement Monday to Saturday. It is NOT my problem what happens on Sundays and I am not spending any time on implementing or testing Sundays. I do not deliver what I was not assigned to. I expect my boss to align me if I attempt to introduce anarchy and starting my own competing "management department".
Of course I might ask myself "wht happened with Sundays". Most likely I got Monday to Saturday and someone else got Sundays to implement because Sundays require much different implementation. Or maybe no, we do not implement Sundays at all and if the plane flies on Sunday - oops, BSOD. Not my problem.

Not signing off on a design because while it meets the formal spec you do not consider the spec to have covered the bases is a thing among engineers, and when engineers start abdicating that responsibility I am not at all sure I wish to call myself such.

The problem if the requirements cover Sundays or not is not a problem of an engineer that does implementation. It is a problem of some higher level managing. The responsibility of an engineer is ony limited to the requirements IMHO and not to the lives lost if the requirements are stupid or incomplete.
. . .

Well, that is an interesting example--even if you are *only* responsible for weekdays, you *do* have the problem of the Sunday to Monday interfacetransition.  So, if this is some continuous process then it seems obvious that we cannot have totally different assumptions based on day-of-week. So, yeah, your attitude is correct, perhaps, but testing is a b*tch.

In the case of Boeing the basic problem always seems to come down to their assumption that making a new type 737 should be "cheap" just because it is a so-slight modification to an existing tried-and-true design. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. They seemed to have made this assumption at the very beginning but then chosen aerodynamic characteristics totally at odds with that assumption.

Epic fail.

[james_s]

Although I empathize with your pain Brutte, in the real world one as an engineer is still required to determine fail-safe solutions to people's stupidity or malice.

A simplified example: let's say someone is driving at fast highways speeds, angrily discussing with his/her significant other and decides to shift the transmission into reverse. Just to scare the sh!t out of the passenger.

The transmission's software should flag this as an invalid command, and either fully ignore it or default into a safe condition, i.e. neutral.
If it does not, and the resulting mayhem provokes casualties and/or physical damage, I am sure that the auto company and most likely the transmission company, will get their asses sued.

Why should it? Everybody should know not to shift a transmission into reverse while the car is in forward motion. I have never had a vehicle that had any sort of feature to prevent this and it has never been a problem.

I mean what if someone decides to angrily slam on the brakes in the middle of a busy highway? Does the car have an obligation to flag this as invalid and refuse to engage the brakes? I don't think so. Part of driving a car is knowing how to properly operate the machine in a safe manner.

[dmills]

This can ONLY be scaleable when you a-priori assume the development does not require ethical engineers to develop that.

Then you are scaling these systems past the ability to Engineer them, don't do that until you have the conceptual tools to be able to do the work right.

When I studied EE, we had Therac-25 as the posterchild for engineering done wrong (Software, also the decision to make it open loop), together with the Hyatt Regency Disaster for structural done wrong, and a whole raft of railway cockups (From which the industry did actually learn, railway signal interlocking is fascinating victorian Engineering (They even had a train crash due to a race condition)). I suppose now you would add the challenger disaster (Several lessons to be had there).

The willingness to throw complex systems together without the ability to fully reason about them (And their failure modes), and then to keep repeating the same basic cockups, is why only software developers consider "software engineering" to be an engineering discipline (Everyone else thinks they are jumped up members of the typing pool ).

Seriously, ethics seldom gives real answers, one can debate the trolley problem until blue in the face, but eventually you have to make the call, it can however give you some tools to make that call somewhat informed. 

Hell there is an attempt being made to get ethics taught as part of the MATHEMATICS degree curriculum, because you know someone innocently going for a fields medal by publishing a solution to the discrete log problem or publishing a log N fast prime factorisation over a finite field would kind of break civilisation (By basically destroying the underpinnings of the crypto used to secure finance). 

Engineers take responsibility for the systems they produce, A civil does not get to walk away unquestioned when the dam bursts because the interface between the concrete and the rock didn't work quite right, the power plant guys gets hard questions when that steam bubble revels a large positive void coefficient in part of the core, the railway signalman gets AUTOMATICALLY charged with manslaughter if there is a coming together of two trains [1].

Regards, Dan.

[1] That interlocking thing again, in the early days the signal men objected because they thought they knew better then the room full of cams and gears where the trains were, so a big red key was added that could override the interlocks.... Turns out that in short order most train crashes featured the use of that big red key, so in the UK the practise became to automatically charge any signalman in charge when there was a train crash due to conflicting signals or points.
This discouraged the use of the big red key without sending people to physically check, and the crashes stopped almost overnight. Note that charge is not the same as prosecute is not the same as convict, there was felt to be a case to answer, but if you could answer it then fine. 

[Tomorokoshi]

...
Engineers take responsibility for the systems they produce
...

They may, but rarely do they have authority over specifications, scheduling, and budgets.

[dmills]

The responsibility of an engineer is ony limited to the requirements IMHO and not to the lives lost if the requirements are stupid or incomplete.

You are describing a typist not an Engineer.

Requirements documents are essentially ALWAYS incomplete, so you need to get the bigger picture to be able to even recognise where the blanks are.
Sunday? In what timezone? What happens in the transition? What happens when crossing the international date line (This one has actually caused real problems with Aircraft!)? What about the OTHER way? Lots of questions, even if I have established that someone else is doing Sundays....

You better believe I will go and find that architect or PM and ask questions, and that I am quite capable of going as high as I must to get answers before that code gets written or that circuit designed.

Kipling had the right of it in the "Sons of Martha", we check, we test, we don't assume, and 'It'l be right' is not an appropriate attitude for any kind of engineer anywhere safety might matter. 

We may not have the authority over specs, schedules and budgets but we can say "No", cost me a job once, but if your bosses boss is not listening to the expert, do you really want the responsibility!

Regards, Dan.

[Siwastaja]

...
Engineers take responsibility for the systems they produce
...

They may, but rarely do they have authority over specifications, scheduling, and budgets.

Engineers have full authority of denying the design. They have the most authority. A manager has never managed to get a product out without the engineers.

Worst thing that can happen is to lose your job.

Well worth it, to have clear conscience, and to sleep well. You'll always find something else to do. Contrary to the popular misbelief, losing your job is no biggie. Unless you artifically design your own life so that it becomes a biggie. This is the root cause of the issue - as an engineer you should prefer root cause analysis, and start re-engineering your life so that you can afford losing the job if it needs to be that way.

Bonus points: make the whistleblowing as public as you can. If you succeed, it can force them to correct the design, instead of finding a new ape to perform the manslaughter. Although I do understand that this can get really messy, and may put your personal safety in danger. Hence "bonus points", not expecting everyone to go full public with the matters.

If more of us wouldn't be fucking cowards, then we wouldn't even lose our jobs because we would have some power of masses behind us. Not expecting this would happen, though. We'll continue being selfish cowards. The engineer wants to have his hybrid Toyota, just like their manager wants to have their BMW, and their boss needs their Ferrari.

An engineer who chooses to get paid instead of designing a safe system, is absolutely no different from a manager who chooses to get paid instead of designing a safe system.

Everybody's in the chain is at fault, equally. Everybody made an explicit choice of purposedly killing people in order to have a nice car.

Yet we at the "lower end" of the chain love the idea that we were somehow forced to do what we did. But factually, our bosses and their bosses were equally "forced", by the very same social norms and constructs.

In fact, sometimes the "low end" is the worst. The engineer almost always knows about the shit that's going on. The closest boss should know. Their boss likely should have an idea. But really, it's well possible that the engineer just keeps his mouth shut by fearing that he's not being taken seriously anyway. While probably completely right, this is no excuse. You have to try.

[floobydust]

You are way off.

Expecting the engineer to be the lone one with integrity in a corporate environment of corruption - executives, project managers, manufacturing, accountants etc. is absurd.

Projects are months or years long and involve many people. Thinking the engineer oversees the whole chain, every link on the design is unrealistic on large projects. The best engineers cannot design and build quality, safety when they're in a sick, corrupt environment with no support.

Whistleblowing, now that you're unemployed due to having integrity and walking out, multi-billion $ Evil Co. goes after you with a lawsuit and can you finance that? A wife and kids worried about money, and you are fending off mega lawyers who can squish you like a bug. Wow engineering is a great profession, surely my whistle blow will be heard by the world and something great will change. Oh and that clause in the original employment agreement telling you to shut up or else...

Blame the engineer, always blame the engineer.

I'm seeing a lot of sociopaths climb the corporate ladder and use their iron fist to destroy any ethics or values, all for power and profit. The mob has the same mission.
Corporate policing is a problem, the highest priority is maximum profit as quickly as possible, while eluding laws for tax, export, environment, safety and regulatory.

Since engineers deal with reality - physics, electrons etc. we have to be honest in order to be any good, at the technical level. But reducing us to toy soldiers and expecting us to change the war?

Everyday google, facebook, reddit, twitter, microsoft software engineers go to work and write code to mine your private data and exchange it with third parties and affiliates, for profit. Do they walk out the door? The CEO would still be enjoying caviar on his yacht.

[Siwastaja]

You are way off.

No I'm not. I'm oversimplifying a complex matter (on purpose), but I think it's an important aspect, and I don't hear this side too often, which is why I wrote what I wrote.

Expecting the engineer to be the lone one with integrity in a corporate environment of corruption - executives, project managers, manufacturing, accountants etc. is absurd.

Exactly. What was I saying about the bosses being in a similar situation themselves?

You are not alone. You are only alone because you think you are.

Projects are months or years long and involve many people. Thinking the engineer oversees the whole chain, every link on the design is unrealistic on large projects. The best engineers cannot design and build quality, safety when they're in a sick, corrupt environment with no support.

I agree, but I didn't say anything to contradict this.

If you know you are committing an atrocious thing, then you have full authority to stop it from happening by your hands. The more people realized this, the more effective it would be. It's not an excuse that they'll hire another one to perform it.

And not all managers/investors/etc. are psychopaths. If a certain division has an alarming quit rate of experienced design engineers, some of who are brave enough to generate a few internal reports of what's happening, it's well possible that the situation is rectified. An engineer being a small cog doesn't mean they are meaningless, replacable machines. Good high-level managers up the ladder, yes they do exist as well, know this very well, but are hindered by the communication break.

Whistleblowing, now that you're unemployed due to having integrity and walking out, multi-billion $ Evil Co. goes after you with a lawsuit and can you finance that? A wife and kids worried about money, and you are fending off mega lawyers who can squish you like a bug.

Which is exactly what I was talking about:
I do understand that this can get really messy, and may put your personal safety in danger. ... not expecting everyone to go full public with the matters.

Yet, I have a huge respect for those who make the decision, putting their well-being, physical included, in danger while exposing such things.

I'm seeing a lot of sociopaths climb the corporate ladder and use their iron fist to destroy any ethics or values, all for power and profit.

The higher at the ladder, the higher the chances they are full-blown sociopaths and couldn't care less about the wellbeing of others.

OTOH, number of such positions is lower, as well. The low-level engineers have to work in masses to make it happen. The psychopaths really need these easy-to-manipulate people to perform. But if you have to work in an environment where you are scared about being fired, you have already lost. It's mentally so distracting that it's probably a wise choice to redesign your life principles, and get a better job, even if it takes time, or seems to pay less (initially). BTW, really competent people are, I think, more likely to do this. Psychologically ill workplaces end up reducing in quality of their personel. It's a slow process, but finally it leads to financial problems and probably the company going under. (This doesn't apply to companies which specifically do immoral business on purpose, like Facebook or Microsoft: they get the kind of people they need, and it's only good for them if they get rid of the emphatetic ones. Their technical quality gets lower and lower, but it doesn't matter, they are not competiting with it.)

But reducing us to toy soldiers and expecting us to change the war?

That's exactly what the sociopath managers are doing, and they do it regardless of what you think. By allowing it to happen to yourself, then cry in the corner that "I was used, it wasn't my fault, it wasn't my fault", is exactly what they want. They have completely won. They will remain anonymous, faceless symbols of the "broken process" that caused the failure. But guess what? Being sociopaths, they couldn't care less. Personally they survived, and are laughing all the way to the bank, and their yachts. While you, as an engineer who was a real part of the process, have problems sleeping at night knowing that you, maybe, after all, might have been able to do something about it.

Everyday google, facebook, reddit, twitter, microsoft software engineers go to work and write code to mine your private data and exchange it with third parties and affiliates, for profit. Do they walk out the door?

You seem to assume that a Google, Facebook, or Microsoft engineer would be an emphatetic person caring about the privacy of the others, comparable to one who is designing safety systems for an airplane. While this might be true in some individuals, I would think that most people looking for a job at Facebook know exactly what kind of job they are going to do, and have a moral agreement with their sociopath bosses.

I think whistleblowers from such corporations create a good story though, along the lines of "I was doing the immoral thing from the beginning, as I knew I would, but one day my consciousness totally snapped". These are stories of ex-kinda-maybe-psychopaths healing and trying to make up for their own wrongdoings, not to expose a problem of a corporate culture everybody knows about already. Think about Snowden for example.

[dmills]

That's mostly the software industry, and is why I have a lot of trouble considering it engineering rather then the negative side of H.S. Thompsons 'cruel and shallow money trench'.

Nobody said taking that decision to face down the boss is easy, or that it doesn't have a cost (I was unemployed for about 6 months after walking out on those clowns), but there are places to cut corners and places not to.

If engineering is a Profession then surely professional standards should apply, including reasonable professional ethics with a responsibility to the public that uses, travels in, is treated by, and sometimes walks on or under our designs? And yes, that includes a responsibility to make sure as far as we can that the systems we work on the design of are safe (You won't always succeed).

There is probably a reason I lasted less then a year doing automotive software (And most of it was not even anything higher then SIL 3).

I expect the engineer to get a gig in a shop that doesn't suck if the company is that bent out of shape, it usually is not that hard to find a gig that at least keeps the bullshit to the boardroom and stock price games and away from anything that matters.

Regards, Dan.

[thm_w]

I dont think think this post has a point. Or the article.

Its interesting information though, if true.

Some other info:
- The average hourly wage in India is $1.40.
- Median wage for a developer is $208 USD per month (which is approx $1.30/hr), engineer is almost the same.
So they were being paid about 7x the typical wage for that position. I would imagine they would have to be decent devs to get that rate.
Of course there are downsides mentioned here which can't really be avoided (time zone, english skill, etc.).

http://www.salaryexplorer.com/salary-survey.php?loc=100&loctype=1

[sokoloff]

Its interesting information though, if true.

Some other info:
- The average hourly wage in India is $1.40.
- Median wage for a developer is $208 USD per month (which is approx $1.30/hr), engineer is almost the same.
So they were being paid about 7x the typical wage for that position. I would imagine they would have to be decent devs to get that rate.
Of course there are downsides mentioned here which can't really be avoided (time zone, english skill, etc.).

http://www.salaryexplorer.com/salary-survey.php?loc=100&loctype=1

Based on my actual payroll in India, the figures above [at least for software engineers] are complete crap. These figures are closer (but still well short of what my teams over there are making by about a factor of 2): https://www.payscale.com/research/IN/Job=Senior_Software_Engineer/Salary

I have 21 employees working for me in India. Of the 21, I don't have a single software engineer (even a level 1 fresh college graduate) making less than 10 Lakh (a million) INR (~$15K) and several of the more senior folks are making a significant multiple of that.

I have no idea where the site you cited got their figures, but they're wildly off the market rates, IME.

[floobydust]

You are way off.

No I'm not. I'm oversimplifying a complex matter (on purpose), but I think it's an important aspect, and I don't hear this side too often, which is why I wrote what I wrote.

I'm not seeing a solution other than "vote with your feet".
It's career suicide in many ways. There are few, if any employers in industries such as aviation and automotive in some countries/regions. Engineering gets specialized so career hops can be tough.

Job interview: "So you left Boeing?"
"Yes, they specialize in engineering death machines"
"Uhhhh"
"I left because their business ethics are corrupt"
"But they have $205 billion market cap and buy from us"
...Mighty Mouse does not get hired.

Other professions can't kill people en mass like engineering.
This whole debacle will just keep repeating, there's nothing to fix it 

[Siwastaja]

Job interview: "So you left Boeing?"
"Yes, they specialize in engineering death machines"
"Uhhhh"
"I left because their business ethics are corrupt"
"But they have $205 billion market cap and buy from us"
...Mighty Mouse does not get hired.

You don't have to put it exactly that way.

You can pull it off as being a really experienced safety analyst, if you wish. Of course, you are not going to get hired to another piece of shit corporate culture where safety is a swear word and where you would be another replaceable cog. But why would you want to?

I don't understand the idea of needing to get hired to a particular type of job at any price. The world is full of opportunities and jobs where you don't need to compromise your integrity. You can build one for yourself if everything else fails.

Other professions can't kill people en mass like engineering.

Oh, there are many:
* Airline pilots
* Bus drivers
* Soldiers
* Politicians and lawyers (indirectly)

[SiliconWizard]

Other professions can't kill people en mass like engineering.

Yeah, there are many others.
Besides, that's what verification and validation processes are for. A design fuck-up should ideally not compromise safety, as it's supposed to be caught during V&V.
Of course no process is perfect, but that's still a lot more than what is done with many other safety-critical professions.

[SiliconWizard]

And that said, I agree with the fact that storming out of a reputable company claiming that they are shit at doing things properly is a huge professional risk. Nobody is going to take you seriously unless 1/ dozens of other engineers do the same, 2/ there is no evidence that those people were led by one (then it's easy to find something wrong with this bad guy), and 3/ you have a solid file proving what you claim and a very good lawyer. Then if you do, I suggest you pay for some personal protection.

[Siwastaja]

A design fuck-up should ideally not compromise safety, as it's supposed to be caught during V&V.

Exactly, and the whole verification thing is completely based on the employees speaking up, including showing whenever an automated test procedure is fundamentally flawed and can't pick up an obvious issue. If that vital part of the verification process is missing, then it will become just an automated report generation business, run by the management to minimize "hassle".

Verification needs to be done for specifications, as well. If you only verify whether the implementation reproduces the specification, you have done exactly nothing to prove the safety of the system.

Human factor is very much needed in finding these flaws, and the process needs to have a way to report and discuss the concerns. Otherwise, it's not a verification process.

But almost never it's about a single person being responsible. The atrocities tend to go through many hands, any of which could react to the situation, in many different ways, some very productive and supported by the system.

Losing the job and "looking bad on CV" is the worst case scenario. No, actually it isn't. The worst case scenario which actually does happen, is that you don't speak up, hundreds of people get killed, and your self-consciousness won't let you sleep properly, and you commit a suicide and leave your wife and kids in unlimited grief.

[dmills]

The US navy has a couple of interesting verification programs, thinking of their directorate of reactor safety and the "Subsafe" program.

Basically neither organisation answers to the operational chain of command, so there is no conflict of interest at the sharp end between reporting issues (and putting a hold on work) and needing to deploy the ship.

Rickover had the right of it, but difficult to make that sort of thing work in the context of a company.

Regards, Dan.