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Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

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Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#31

Post by riffic »

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #19

Seeing stories like this makes me wonder if we'll ever see a company actually go bust based purely on the instability of its decades-old, duct-taped architecture. I have a relative who works for a large credit card processor running on mainframe systems and I hear over and over again that they're all retiring and unable to fill the newly opened roles. This problem is compounded by the fact that their offshore contrac…

> decades-old, duct-taped architecture

The way the survivorship bias works out, this is generally a strength, not a weakness.

You want to get good money, you learn how stuff works under the hood and get familiar with your predecessor architectures, emulate them if you need to.

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#32

Post by dilyevsky »

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #19

Seeing stories like this makes me wonder if we'll ever see a company actually go bust based purely on the instability of its decades-old, duct-taped architecture. I have a relative who works for a large credit card processor running on mainframe systems and I hear over and over again that they're all retiring and unable to fill the newly opened roles. This problem is compounded by the fact that their offshore contrac…

Not exactly but https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Capital_Group

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#33

Post by wonnage »

cratermoon wrote: post #13
malwarebytess wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a baseless rumor as far as I can see. SW says there's a staffing problem at "one location in florida," and blames weather otherwise. Meanwhile at least the SW pilot's union says "our pilots are not participating in any official or unofficial job actions." Union goes on to say the disruption is because of SW's "bad management." Given that the people who are ostensibly striking have yet to say anything, I thi…

[flagged]

Said troglodytes are furiously downvoting/flagging anything that casts doubt on their preferred conspiracy theory as always

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#34

Post by TMWNN »

iJohnDoe wrote: post #21

Doesn’t add up. Severe weather and military training in the same airspace? Other airlines not affected? Odd to say the least.

To me,

>Online speculation that Southwest’s new vaccine mandate has led pilots to stage a sickout is being denied by the union representing Southwest pilots.

>That follows reporting on social media that some of the issues the airline is suffering could be related to that issue. A spokesperson for the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SWAPA) told the Arizona Republic it was not aware of any work stoppage and wouldn’t condone it anyway.

>SWAPA, however, has authorized its members to demonstrate against the mandate.

sounds like there is a vaccine mandate-related sickout going on, and the union is unofficially encouraging it but doesn't want to be seen as doing so. I don't know why that would be the case; there's no law against airline employees doing an industrial action. Maybe the union doesn't want to be denounced for being allegedly "anti-science"?

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#35

Post by proc0 »

malwarebytess wrote: post #22
cratermoon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

My take on it. If it was a strike I think we'd hear about it in more definitive terms than rumor. That's the point of a strike, disruption and attention.

So everyone just got sick?

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#36

Post by hnburnsy »

Comment from the Southwest Pilots Union...

>SWA has claimed that the immediate causes of this weekend’s meltdown were staffing at Jacksonville Center and weather in the southeast U.S., but what was a minor temporary event for other carriers devastated Southwest Airlines because our operation has become brittle and subject to massive failures under the slightest pressure. Our operation and our frontline employees have endured continuous and unending disruptions since the first time our airline made headlines in early June due to widespread IT failures. Our Pilots are tired and frustrated because our operation is running on empty due to a lack of support from the Company.

https://www.swapa.org/news/2021/swa-in-the-news/

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#37

Post by pupdogg »

cratermoon wrote: post #13
malwarebytess wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a baseless rumor as far as I can see. SW says there's a staffing problem at "one location in florida," and blames weather otherwise. Meanwhile at least the SW pilot's union says "our pilots are not participating in any official or unofficial job actions." Union goes on to say the disruption is because of SW's "bad management." Given that the people who are ostensibly striking have yet to say anything, I thi…

[flagged]

Downvote me all you want but I will wait for your comment to age.

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#38

Post by _8j50 »

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #19

Seeing stories like this makes me wonder if we'll ever see a company actually go bust based purely on the instability of its decades-old, duct-taped architecture. I have a relative who works for a large credit card processor running on mainframe systems and I hear over and over again that they're all retiring and unable to fill the newly opened roles. This problem is compounded by the fact that their offshore contrac…

Right... they can't train someone on COBOL? I call b.s. on that. It's an HR issue, you need blah blah degrees and yadi yadi yada experience. Big corps don't adopt to job economy changes over time like this unless their core business is built to adopt to economic changes. Inability to make exemptions and place the right first line managers over teams is what kills big companies, or forces them into an endless loop of unoriginal aquisitions and failures imo.

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#39

Post by toomuchtodo »

TMWNN wrote: post #34
iJohnDoe wrote: post #21

Doesn’t add up. Severe weather and military training in the same airspace? Other airlines not affected? Odd to say the least.

To me, >Online speculation that Southwest’s new vaccine mandate has led pilots to stage a sickout is being denied by the union representing Southwest pilots. >That follows reporting on social media that some of the issues the airline is suffering could be related to that issue. A spokesperson for the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SWAPA) told the Arizona Republic it was not aware of any work stoppage and woul…

If this is the result of a sickout, I assume the current administration could direct the Dept of Defense to make military pilots available to Southwest in the event of an extended availability issue with their union pilots.

Not as brutal as Reagan breaking the ATC union, but supporting a common carrier in a time of crisis. I don’t believe a federal case has been heard yet where the vaccine mandate or terminating those refusing it has been found unlawful.

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#40

Post by tdeck »

mberning wrote: post #29
thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #19

Seeing stories like this makes me wonder if we'll ever see a company actually go bust based purely on the instability of its decades-old, duct-taped architecture. I have a relative who works for a large credit card processor running on mainframe systems and I hear over and over again that they're all retiring and unable to fill the newly opened roles. This problem is compounded by the fact that their offshore contrac…

It is maddening. Even if the stated goal is to “get off the mainframe” everybody deep down knows it isn’t going anywhere for 10 years. We recently had a discussion about porting from one mainframe “module” to another due to cost. I asked why we don’t just continue paying for the current module since the goal is to sunset mainframe. Everybody on the call laughed. So we will go ahead and “invest” several man years and…

I've been on the other side of this and seen too many teams neglect to fix even the simplest and most frustrating bugs in a system because they're going to rewrite it "in the next six months". Usually the rewrite is still going years later, and the actual code used in production is left to rot, holding back other teams as well.
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