Or are there just as many bugs in Boeing code as there are in anything else? Are they held to a higher standard? Some type of accreditation involved? Seems like they are paid lower. Would think they’d be paid higher as our lives are in their hands (unlike movies, social networks, ecommerce). Thinking about the Boeing engineers that wrote the MAX 8 code...
It's not about lives at hand. It's about how much $$ is generated. Actually, how big the Margins/Profits are. Not necessarily morally exciting. But that's our capitalistic world.
You may be surprised to hear this but there is actually extremely little profit on flights (think single digit dollars). Now, volume helps with that, of course, but the real money lies outside of the plane ticket.
I think swe folks at aerospace companies are more formal methods folk rather than regular swe
I worked on flight software at SpaceX. Code at SpaceX was better than Google. The codebase was neurotically pristine. The design space was more focused on fast, stable, redundant flight code as opposed to designing large distributed systems. Google engineers design a lot more often and they design systems that work with systems. SpaceX also has system design but I'd say less.
SWE here usually are more constrained with the tools and processes they are allowed to use to develop software. As with any company there are bright people and not so bright people. Pay while not as high as FAANG is competitive to other non-tech industries and companies, and the great benefits help make up some of that gap.
Aerospace is built on safety so “moving fast, breaking things” don’t apply. For good and for bad, it’s a much slower, methodical, “new isn’t better” mentality
Came from that industry. Lockheed. Engineers were quite mediocre there.
it’s highly dependent on team, as with any company
Can confirm some amazing and some absolutely horrible SWE here
That’s why they take forever to push things.
SpaceX software is pretty culturally different from usual aerospace in software. I can only think of a couple people with aerospace industry background and nobody goes there after. About 1/3 of SpaceX software are ex tech (mostly google, microsoft, and amazon) who already saved a million or so and want to do something that gets them excited to come to work everyday.
Pay is lower but hours are so easy (30 hrs max really), you also get overtime and plenty of time off. I'm comfortably at low six figures, I just don't get those sweet RSUs that fancy tech companies get.
- there is no 787 Max - Boeing problems were not software; it was a garbage in garbage out situation. Though sw folks shoulda been involved in the non-sw design too
Says the MCAS system (software) repeatedly pushes the nose down. Also the fix they’ve created is software, not hardware.
787 was a software problem... Why are people pushing so hard to pretend it wasn't? Very confusing