Comment by groundtruthdev
7 days ago
Would you feel comfortable flying on an airplane where the programmers don’t care about secure code, correctness, or the ability to reason about and optimize algorithms—where “good enough” is the philosophy? Most people intuitively say no, because in safety-critical and large-scale systems, engineering rigor isn’t optional. Software may look intangible, but when it runs aircraft, banking systems, or global platforms, the same discipline applies.
The “Facebook/YouTube codebases are a mess so code quality doesn’t matter” line is also misleading. Those companies absolutely hire—and pay very well—engineers who obsess over security, performance, and algorithmic efficiency, because at that scale engineering quality directly translates to uptime, cost, and trust.
Yes, the visible product layers move fast and can look messy. But underneath are extremely disciplined infrastructure, security, and reliability teams. You don’t run global systems on vibe-coded foundations. People who genuinely believe correctness and efficiency don’t matter wouldn’t last long in the parts of those organizations that actually keep the lights on.
Do you think the people writing the code that operates aircraft care about code quality? After the boeing incident I do not.
Fair point and that’s exactly why Airbus has been eating Boeing’s lunch. When engineering culture takes a back seat to cost, schedule, and optics, outcomes diverge fast. In safety-critical systems, rigor isn’t optional, it’s the competitive advantage.
I find it difficult to believe software is Airbus’ competitive edge. First, their software for aircrew bidding is an absolute and utter disaster. Date filtering has been broken nearly a year despite multiple releases being pushed. Date management is like THE KEY functionality of aircrew bidding. I also use their flight plan software and it’s like they never bothered to ask a pilot how they use a flight plan in flight.
I think Airbus is riding the coat tails of solid engineering done in the 80s and continuing to iterate that platform vs Boeing trying to iterate on a hardware platform from the 60s. Airbus benefited significantly from 20s years of engineering and technological progress. Since the original design of the A320, changes have been incremental. Slightly different engines, addition of GPS/GNS, CPDLC, CRT to LCD screens. Meanwhile Boeing has attempted to take a steam gauge design from the 60s and retrofit decades of technology improvements and, critically, they attempted to add engines significantly altering the aerodynamics of the aircraft.
Which Boeing incident? The 737 Max was a correct implementation of bad requirements -- there's no indication of a code quality problem here. Starliner definitely had more indications of code issues, but was not an aircraft.