And aerospace engineers are dirt cheap. What sort of clown show is the FAA running?
Like almost every other agency (the FDA didn’t do the vaccine trials; are they incompetent too?) they don’t do the tests. They just police the industry.
Theoretically if you set laws and regulations and dole out severe punishment for bad behaviour, you don’t need to be the one running the tests.
People should want their government to run on trust (if their culture is compatible with trust) because it’s far cheaper and more efficient.
When will Boeing CEO and Board of Directors get locked up as part of the severe punishment?
Last I remember this being a topic of discussion, the stance was ‘trust but verify’ no?
While it may be efficient to rubber stamp things, it is not doing their job. Folks scam all the time, especially if they know no one is looking.
If they lack the competence to be able to independently verify, they aren’t being effective regulators.
Bingo. If I use 3 managers and PMs who don't know how to program for a code review, then that's not a very effective code review.
That sounds like they are knowingly underfunded, which they are.
> And aerospace engineers are dirt cheap.
They are? Where are all the airline startups? I assume they measure in the hundreds with all this dirt cheap talent running around.
Aerospace requires lots of capital expense and is very ‘large customer’ driven and aerospace engineers play second (or third) fiddle to that, unlike in software.
I suspect you're letting your software world experience dictate your expectations of what engineering is all about, and what it takes to actually get work done.
Software development is a rare field where the only relevant resource is man hours. In other fields, including aerospace engineering, trained meat bags tend to have a negligible cost to the point where replacing a whole engineering team might be a minor inconvenience. However, crashing a prototype is a project killer due to cost alone.
Also, you're not hiring from a diversely employed Valley pool: most of the engineers with the requisite level of understanding to test Boeing's hardware work for Boeing (and to an extent its supply chain), which might mean you don't have to offer them much of a pay rise, but it also means [i] you're weakening the engineering capability of the firms actually designing and building the stuff by poaching them and [ii] their views on what's safe and what's an appropriate level of testing aren't fully independent anyway.
Inaccurate, please stop sharing misinformation. Seeing this on HN is unfortunate.
Most aerospace engineers are lucky to break 75k/yr to start with little to no equity, and often need to move to the middle of nowhere (compared to say NYC, SF, LA, etc for software), and get hit with periodic catastrophic layoffs with the regular cycles in the industry.
It’s pretty common that software folks are paid 2-5x with far less intense or zero credentialing and better work conditions - at the same company.
Median numbers, so masks variability. But it looks like AEs are generally paid decently, relative to other engineers.
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/mobile/...
