https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/boeing-s-737-max-software-outsourc... 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 US 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 $US9 ($12.80) an hour to develop and test software, often from countries lacking a deep background in aerospace -- notably India. [...] In one post, an HCL employee summarised his duties with a reference to the now-infamous model, which started flight tests in January 2016: "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)." [...] "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," said Rick Ludtke, a former Boeing flight controls engineer laid off in 2017. "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." [...] Sales are another reason to send the work overseas. In exchange for an $US11 billion order in 2005 from Air India, Boeing promised to invest $US1.7 billion in Indian companies. That was a boon for HCL and other software developers from India, such as Cyient, whose engineers were widely used in computer-services industries but not yet prominent in aerospace. [...] "Engineering started becoming a commodity," said Vance Hilderman, who co-founded a company called TekSci that supplied aerospace contract engineers and began losing work to overseas competitors in the early 2000s. US-based avionics companies in particular moved aggressively, shifting more than 30 per cent of their software engineering offshore versus 10 per cent for European-based firms in recent years, said Hilderman, an avionics safety consultant with three decades of experience whose recent clients include most of the major Boeing suppliers. With a strong US dollar, a big part of the attraction was price. Engineers in India made around $US5 an hour; it's now $US9 or $US10, compared with $US35 to $US40 for those in the US on an H1B visa, he said. But he'd tell clients the cheaper hourly wage equated to more like $US80 because of the need for supervision, and he said his firm won back some business to fix mistakes. [...] The MAX became Boeing's top seller soon after it was offered in 2011. But for ambitious engineers, it was something of a "backwater," said Peter Lemme, who designed the 767's automated flight controls and is now a consultant. [...] "It was a stunning fail," he said. "A lot of people should have thought of this problem – not one person – and asked about it." Boeing also has disclosed that it learned soon after MAX deliveries began in 2017 that a warning light that might have alerted crews to the issue with the sensor wasn't installed correctly in the flight-display software. A Boeing statement in May, explaining why the company didn't inform regulators at the time, said engineers had determined it wasn't a safety issue. "Senior company leadership," the statement added, "was not involved in the review."