Comment by piaste | Hacker News Reader

Comment by piaste | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, but not because software engineers are worse human beings than civil engineers, which is all too often the undertone of these discussions.

Rather, because software engineering hasn't killed enough people to advance; or when it has, it wasn't obviously the culprit.

In which fields of software engineering do we find actual solid procedures and standards? Avionics. Medical hardware. Fields where the link between bug and death is as short as possible, and so the stakeholders have demanded solid engineering.

What are the consequences of GP's acquaintance writing poor code? Some trading firm becomes slightly less efficient at trading. Impossible to evaluate the net human loss from it (if it's a loss at all).

The civil engineering equivalent would be something like façade design or layout. If your building is ugly or confusing, it will annoy or waste the time of the people who live and work in it, but as long as it doesn't fall on their heads nobody is going to withdraw your certification.

> not because software engineers are worse human beings than civil engineers, which is all too often the undertone of these discussions

I think the undertone is usually that the software developer at fault had no idea what they were doing, and had no place working on critical systems, rather than that they had ill intent.

> software engineering hasn't killed enough people to advance

and where it had, you get pretty serious control and certification process put in place to avoid it (Boeing notwithstanding)

The 737 Max issues were not with the software.

There seems to be plenty of software issues found:

The MCAS software was modified to read from both angle of attack sensors and to be less aggressive in pushing the nose of the plane down. The software that controlled the indicator light that illuminated when the two angle of attack sensors disagreed was also fixed.

While reviewing the software systems, a number of other software issues were found.

The wiring bundle issue was also found during these reviews.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/these-6-issues-are-preventi...

https://simpleflying.com/boeing-737-max-software-update-3/

I phrased that poorly, I should have said The 737 Max issues that caused the crashes were not with the software implementation. They were at the level of requirements and high-level design, and were not specific to the discipline of software engineering. We're not talking about a missing break statement here.

> The MCAS software was modified to read from both angle of attack sensors and to be less aggressive in pushing the nose of the plane down.

That strikes me as a design issue in the domain of aeronautical engineering, rather than in software engineering. Software engineers aren't the ones with the domain expertise to determine the right aggression parameters.

> The software that controlled the indicator light that illuminated when the two angle of attack sensors disagreed was also fixed.

I thought the issue was that the sensor-disagree warning light was not included as standard, it was sold as an optional extra. [0]

> While reviewing the software systems, a number of other software issues were found.

Interesting, I wasn't aware of that. If I understand correctly these issues aren't thought to have a direct bearing on the crashes.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/05/business/boeing-737-max-w...

Exactly. People seem to have skipped the V&V lectures. The code did exactly what it was asked to do. But the system/aero engineers made that decision. Even the lights issue was specified that way in the system diagram.

But the biggest defect was the decision that the pilots didn't have to be told about the risk (to avoid retraining and certification costs). If they had been told the pilots/airlines may well have protested about the lack of redundancy. All those higher ups in Boeing and the FAA should be in prison.

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