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RobertSchoenb | 1 year ago

No disagreements on your main points, but I would dispute calling that headline clickbait. We published this story in 2019 when software issues were the central issues at Boeing, so establishing how the company was coding was very newsworthy. I typically associate clickbait with bait-and-switch tactics, tricking readers into reading content unrelated to the headline. This article provides material directly related to its title. Robert Schoenberger, editor-in-chief, IndustryWeek

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rramadass|1 year ago

Glad to see that news websites (in this era of fake news) are willing to stand behind their stories; Much appreciated.

While i understand your point, the headline gives the impression that Boeing's problems stem from outsourcing which then emboldens the racists to come out of the woodwork (as can be seen from some of the downvoted comments here) and start manipulating the conversations in a different and unproductive direction. Some of the folks commenting didn't even read the article before dunking on the outsourced country/engineers. It is highly frustrating when this sort of thing happens and hence my warning in the first line of my response to ignore the title and read the article.

It would be great if you folks (maybe in collaboration with others sources/folks) could collate all the available info. on the disaster that is now "Boeing Engineering" (HW/SW) and publish a point-by-point synopsis of everything known until now. This would be a great learning lesson to the entire Industry on what not to do in pursuit of mere profits.

trafficante|1 year ago

Your frustration is understandable, particularly in this situation where the critical failures weren’t the fault of outsourced engineers.

But we really need to pump the brakes on the whole “everything must be in the passive voice and overly euphemized to the point of nigh-incomprehensibility”. If anything, it contributes to the click-bait problem.

I see: “Boeing outsourced to $9/hr SWE” and immediately start thinking about a dangerous corporate culture that prioritizes profits over lives. I’d argue most people probably interpret the headline in a similar fashion.

Just because some already-inclined reactionaries wrongly jump to “India lol” doesn’t mean the publication has some moral responsibility to contort the headline into something less effective that will get even more dramatically outcompeted by click bait headlines that actually bait racists (“Deadly Boeing crash was running Indian software”).