I am not surprised at all. There are a lot of contractors involved in the development of the software for the A400M, and they are basically competing for price and employing undergraduates making below €18K/year, which they replace every few months due to burnouts and bad working conditions. Projects get continuously delayed, and key people barely stay more than a couple of years.
I can confirm similar situations for other EU IT projects. Currently, I am a contractor working on the IT side for the Galileo Satellite System. Although the IT consulting company that I work for pays significantly better then the 18K mentioned (25K-30K range) the quality of the work that is delivered is terrible. The mentioned salary is for graduate engineers.
The attrition rate is terrible and its impossible to keep people who have knowledge of the program on board.
I would guess that 30-50% of our team are inexperienced java software engineers with less then 5 years of working experience. Around 100 people work on our project but there are probably 3-5 people who still have a clear picture of how everything is working / supposed to work.
In America such things are more often done by DoD contractors and they are paid well and space systems are more tightly controlled than civil aviation.
I was not speculating. I've been working in one of the contractors. The same situation applies to Railway Control Systems and other Telecommunication Infrastructures.
> ...and they are basically competing for price...
and if the contractors are from India, the competition does not stop after the contract have been awarded. During the execution of the project, the competitive behavior will continue. One contracting firm will compete with an aim to reduced the tasks/responsibility of the other contracting firm, thus (or hoping to) capturing more contracting hours. Very vicious and dangerous..
This would not be the case if they invested in automated (Unit Test) tools which would boost productivity dramatically and allow automated regression testing throughout the project life cycle.
I thought that 'lowest bidder wins' was an American phenomenon? Certainly, Boeing and others have figured out how to game the system here in the states and abroad.
My german architect clients say: “Ze lowest bidder wins to start ze project with ze highest bidder’s plans.” Which is funny when you squint enough to ignore the tragedy.
I'm European ... and I upvoted you. They sold us the EU as a big brotherhood of the European people, instead we got a giant bureaucracy at the service of big corpo.
