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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

#161

Post by noduerme »

_8j50 wrote: post #125
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?

Plenty of people working helpdesk that know a bit of python who can learn COBOL if they knew a job offer was on the other end of the investment in learning the language. There are hoards of people learning python and powershell just so they can make more money, trust me when I say they (the people I see learning python for career prospects) have no sentimental attachment to the language.

I don't think it's learning COBOL language that's the hard part. An inexperienced programmer who hasn't worked on financial systems is going to make security mistakes and write buggy code for awhile, both of which can be deadly to a bank. But it would be better to have that person rewrite the infrastructure than try to fix bugs. The problem with these ancient systems is trying to understand how bugs arise from subtle unintended interactions within millions of lines of code. I've been coding many languages for 25 years and I would consider it extremely daunting to try to tackle a bank bug knowing that one wrong assumption about one line of code could crash whole systems or cost millions of dollars.

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

#162

Post by JohnBooty »

anamexis wrote: post #66
thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The union explicitly denies that a sickout is occurring in that same statement you've quoted: > 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 fro…

Was anyone claiming that it was?

Many are speculating it's a possible or likely cause. Not sure anybody is claiming it's the cause.

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

#163

Post by novok »

listenallyall wrote: post #144
coliveira wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banks are genetically incapable of doing anything useful in terms of technology. Their mainframe architecture was outdated 40 years ago! They will forever maintain their hacks and buggy software.

Please define "buggy software." Can you point to a single confirmed case in the US of a person's bank account balance disappearing, or even a deposit not appearing, due to a software bug? I doubt it. Banks' core software is rock solid or they would be out of business very, very quickly.

Transaction reversibility, fear of law enforcement and the ability to react to things is the reason why the bank tire fire doesn't collapse on itself.

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

#164

Post by subsaharancoder »

hodgesrm wrote: post #150
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #14

The explanation of "weather and an FAA shutdown" doesn't make sense given that, according to the article, other airlines aren't experiencing this at all. Oh, and for folks talking about a pilot protest against vaccine mandates, that theory is discussed at length toward the end of the article.

Southwest runs 3 to 4K commercial flights per day, which is about 1 in 7 commercial flights overall in the US. They depend on aircraft doing many short hops over the course of a single day: 7 or 8 is not uncommon. When things go bad it tends to disrupt the system very badly. These numbers come from the US DOT ontime database. You can access the data in ClickHouse at https://github.demo.trial.altinity.cloud:8443 (user…

>You can access the data in ClickHouse at https://github.demo.trial.altinity.cloud:8443 (user=demo, password=demo). This is a public instance running on Altinity.Cloud.

All I get is a white screen with the word "Ok"

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

#165

Post by khuey »

Daneel_ wrote: post #135
riffic wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I have to disagree. These systems aren't "survivors" - they're held together with a fragile weave of scripts, hacks, unsupported hardware and outdated knowledge. Often treated as a black box, they become an object that people have to hand-nurse through issues that would never trouble modern systems. The amount of effort and money that's expended to maintain these systems is typically far more than the upfront cost wo…

And yet the flip side where companies set piles of cash on fire trying to replace that legacy stuff is also common.

e.g. https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252446965/Lidl-dumps-500...

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

#166

Post by nimih »

Daneel_ wrote: post #135
riffic wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I have to disagree. These systems aren't "survivors" - they're held together with a fragile weave of scripts, hacks, unsupported hardware and outdated knowledge. Often treated as a black box, they become an object that people have to hand-nurse through issues that would never trouble modern systems. The amount of effort and money that's expended to maintain these systems is typically far more than the upfront cost wo…

I spent multiple years of my life working on a (at the time I started) decade+ project to retire such a system (i.e. a duct-taped hodgepodge of poorly documented COBOL and mainframe assembler that was understood and maintained by staff who was entering retirement age at an astounding rate), at a "midsize" financial company (i.e. between 3k and 4k employees, all told). While the cost of maintaining the old system was certainly high, it worked astonishingly well (provided you didn't need to add new features, such as a "graphical interface"), and the cost and difficulty in replacing it was truly enormous. I think you're drastically underselling the difficulty of re-implementing a company's entire suite of LOB software, complete with migrations and training, and likely with very little in the way of flexibility to change the core business rules/logic.

Furthermore,

> they're held together with a fragile weave of scripts, hacks, unsupported hardware and outdated knowledge

Swapping out COBOL for typescript and mainframes for linux boxes and a pile of YAML is not going to change any of that. People can and will build garbage with any set of tools you give them. Not ever software problem is like use-after-free where you can fix it forever with a sufficiently clever piece of tech.

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

#167

Post by HamburgerEmoji »

jhugo wrote: post #95
AndrewBissell wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> godawful side effect profiles that characterize the Covid vaccines Can you provide some references regarding the side effect profiles of these vaccines being any worse than a typical vaccine? Genuinely interested, as from casual observation it doesn't seem to be the case.

Well, take a look at e.g. slides 10 and 11 here: https://www.scribd.com/document/530328436/Slides-from-Peter-... That is, adverse reactions from just the COVID vaccines completely dwarf all vaccines from VAERS' entire 31-year history.

The associated talk is here: https://rumble.com/vnbv86-winning-the-war-against-therapeuti...

VAERS data is public. They even provide machine-parsable format.

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

#168

Post by smsm42 »

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…

> our operation has become brittle and subject to massive failures under the slightest pressure

I somehow notice a lot of this lately, in many different areas. I wonder if there isn't a common cause behind those. Is it just covid or something bigger?

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

#169

Post by thrdbndndn »

atatatat wrote: post #152
thrdbndndn wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm saying it doesn't add much to the news.
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