Originally Posted by
Turb
I feel sorry for the code-writers who are working on this. I mean the ones actually doing the job, trying to understand and solve the problems of the system they need to change, while the rest of the company and its suppliers, thousands and thousands of people mostly with families and mortgages, just stand around twiddling their thumbs and praying that today is the day the damn thing actually works. Just think what that must feel like for the coders, knowing that all those thousands of other people are kind of peering over their shoulders and willing them to stop messing about and just fix this, right now. And I bet the team of coders is tiny. It has to be tiny. The job can't be done by a huge team, it's not that sort of job. Throwing extra resources at it would be nonsense - in fact it would be counter-productive. If I'm right there's this tiny group of very clever people coming in to work each day, to spend another day struggling to dig the whole Boeing company out of the hole it's in, none of them making the sort of money the Boeing board does, and none of them responsible for the design errors which caused the problem in the first place. So I feel sorry for them.
Think you are spot on!
We know that the MAX still uses 286s, very limited computers dating back to the 1980s. I suspect that the software is written in assembler language rather than some modern high level language, because that allows the limited hardware to be exploited to the maximum.
Unfortunately, such near machine language programming is a bear to write correctly and a beast to debug. So it is not a popular pursuit, especially as computing resources are normally dirt cheap compared to software writers.
If this supposition is correct, the work now falls on the small bunch of surviving veterans left over after the waves of 'efficiency improvements' cut the headcounts. There is no backup Team B available, nor could one create such from scratch.