Have worked at both, Airbus pays worse but has a much better engineering culture. Also arguably, because of the location(s) the quality of the engineers is quite high despite the pay as they can afford a pretty good lifestyle.
Airbus also functions very much like a quasi governmental institution in many parts, so there's less interest in squeezing everything to death to save money.
Finally, Airbus generally has a KISS mindset, and are very conservative w.r.t change in engineering practice and tooling. When I was there we spent way, way, way, way, way more time testing than writing software - and the software was written in a way that any software engineer could walk off the street and understand it.
Oh, and quite low levels of outsourcing in critical software - they save that for things that don't have people's lives on the line.
HCL was mentioned as a Boeing software outsourcing shop. Not the only India software shop used by Boeing. I recall reading a news story about outsourcing being linked to Boeing sales in India, but there's a pile of news stories about Boeing outsourcing to India, so it's hard to find where and how it started. More recently, Boeing laid off 2000 people in the US and moved those function largely to Tata's BPO. This follows the pattern of how IBM was hollowed-out.
As in understand, German played a minor role in the design in Airbus, for example the flight controls were designed in Toulouse by french engineer.
However they have more responsibility in designing the production system and assembly line. The assembly line in Hamburg is quite unique.
