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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

#151

Post by Covzire »

mandatethis wrote: post #141

I work in a fortune 100 company. I publicly spoke up at work about mandates being illegal, immoral and an affront to decent society. Especially, when there are alternatives we can provide (such as testing daily). I made a post and shared it across multiple locations in the company. As a people manager, I knew the risks. My post was up only 10 min before being taken down. Eventually, internal HR contacted me and told…

Good for you. I believe the mandates are absolute fascism, of the kind everyone always warns about. The DNC is intent on starting a civil war it seems.

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

#152

Post by atatatat »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #114
hnburnsy wrote: post #36

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…

Maybe there is something between the lines, but it really does not say much other than the obvious "our operations are worse than other carriers".

What more should leadership (or investors) need to hear?

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

#153

Post by aardvarkr »

throwaway224466 wrote: post #115
thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also explicitly deny that a sickout is occuring: > There are false claims of job actions by Southwest Pilots currently gaining traction on social media and making their way into mainstream news. I can say with certainty that there are no work slowdowns or sickouts either related to the recent mandatory vaccine mandate or otherwise. Under the RLA, our Union is forbidden from taking job action to resolve labor dis…

[flagged]

"Pfizer Comirnaty" and "Pfizer BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine" are biologically and chemically the same thing.

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

#154

Post by JohnBooty »

rsj_hn wrote: post #142
ctdonath wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if they can’t find anyone willing to learn COBOL. There’s huge demand for developers on modern systems. Seriously, how much are you going to pay a developer to do mainframe COBOL - and is that developer going to produce commensurate value, really able to hold together a crumbling antique infrastructure?

For enough money they will find someone willing to learn COBOL.

Maybe, or maybe not.

Suppose you accept 1.5x or 2x or even 3x your annual salary to take a COBOL job. Nice... for now.

What happens in 2, 5, or 10 years when this COBOL gig ends?

Now your skills have withered or disappeared and you're 2, 5, or 10 years behind when it comes to "modern" technologies where 99.9% of the job opportunities are.

In a sense, that COBOL job is a gamble. You are gambling that you can ride that sucker until retirement.

Of course there are other possibilities. You could sock most of that extra $$$ away and spend a year retraining yourself, or something, if/when that COBOL job ends. Or whatever.

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

#155

Post by hodgesrm »

mhh__ wrote: post #146
Decabytes wrote: post #139

How difficult is Cobol to learn compared to other languages? I admit I had a bias against it when I was watching Dave Plummer’s software drag race between it, C++, and Fortran[1] but I was absolutely blown away at it being faster than the Fortran implementation, and about 50% slower than the C++ one. For something so verbose, I wasn’t expecting it to compile to such efficient machine code. [1] https://youtu.be/yYcHWG…

50% slower than C++ is pretty terrible. Verbosity is almost more helpful for optimization in a way, in the sense that C code ends up being fast because it's simpler than C is harder to optimize. As for COBOL, isn't one of the issues that it's super complicated and not specified properly until recently?

Back in the day it was mostly very verbose but extremely fast. Cobol was designed for batch processing on use cases like accounting systems. We used it on signal processing apps, which had a lot of data, mostly on tape. It could rip through data stored on high-density mag tape--it was able to process data at the speed of the device.

(I did COBOL apps in the early 1980s.)

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

#156

Post by angelzen »

mandatethis wrote: post #141

I work in a fortune 100 company. I publicly spoke up at work about mandates being illegal, immoral and an affront to decent society. Especially, when there are alternatives we can provide (such as testing daily). I made a post and shared it across multiple locations in the company. As a people manager, I knew the risks. My post was up only 10 min before being taken down. Eventually, internal HR contacted me and told…

May decency prevail.

I stumbled recently on an interesting chart. Have not doublecheck the math, but comes from FinancialTimes, so I expect it to be credible. Bottom line, you need to vaccinate between 800 (60+yo) and 25,000 (https://www.ft.com/content/3439145a-80a4-47ad-9ceb-54a0cb707...

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

#157

Post by itronitron »

ctdonath wrote: post #103
_8j50 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not if they can’t find anyone willing to learn COBOL. There’s huge demand for developers on modern systems. Seriously, how much are you going to pay a developer to do mainframe COBOL - and is that developer going to produce commensurate value, really able to hold together a crumbling antique infrastructure?

>> crumbling antique infrastructure

Are you talking about the hardware or software? It's worth considering that Lindy's Law [1] might apply here.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

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

#158

Post by tawayffee »

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…

You're falling for misdirection. This isn't IT related.

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

#159

Post by ctdonath »

rsj_hn wrote: post #142
ctdonath wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if they can’t find anyone willing to learn COBOL. There’s huge demand for developers on modern systems. Seriously, how much are you going to pay a developer to do mainframe COBOL - and is that developer going to produce commensurate value, really able to hold together a crumbling antique infrastructure?

For enough money they will find someone willing to learn COBOL.

Will they learn enough COBOL to be worth the money? Seeing how hard it is to find good mobile developers, and having lived in a COBOL shop back in the heyday, I don’t see a meaningful number of talented “show me the money” types passing up modern tech for antiques.

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

#160

Post by itronitron »

JohnBooty wrote: post #154
rsj_hn wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For enough money they will find someone willing to learn COBOL.

Maybe, or maybe not. Suppose you accept 1.5x or 2x or even 3x your annual salary to take a COBOL job. Nice... for now. What happens in 2, 5, or 10 years when this COBOL gig ends? Now your skills have withered or disappeared and you're 2, 5, or 10 years behind when it comes to "modern" technologies where 99.9% of the job opportunities are. In a sense, that COBOL job is a gamble. You are gambling that you can ride that…

I'd rather learn COBOL and get paid 2x salary for the next 5 years than learn some BS JS framework that I'll have to forget in the same timeframe.
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