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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

#191

Post by mandelbrotwurst »

noduerme wrote: post #161
_8j50 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Eh, someone's got to do it. Letting thing stagnate in perpetuity isn't cheap either. Move slowly and write tests.

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

#192

Post by haroldp »

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…

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

What happens in 1 or 2 years when the current hottest new full-stack, mvc, reactive 3.0 whatever is old and tired and you have to learn the new thing? You learn the new thing.

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

#193

Post by logicchains »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #76
AndrewBissell wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Can you explain employers and schools who previously had vaccine mandates (hepatitis and measles are examples I’ve seen for schools and healthcare workers) and what makes this vaccine different? If the argument is “mandates are wrong”, we’ve had them for over 150 years. If the argument is it’s not safe, its FDA approved and has been administered over a billion times. https://www.healthline.com/health-news/vaccine-man…

These vaccines are also more dangerous. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/finland-pauses-use-mode... Finland and Sweden have now halted Moderna vaccination for under-30s due to side effects.

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

#194

Post by vxNsr »

AceyMan wrote: post #179
vxNsr wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Military politicians are older than humankind itself. Just curious, is this just hyperbole or do you have an actual example? ETA: I mean the "older than humankind itself" part. Like what does that mean in this context?

OTTOMH, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muammar_Gaddafi?wprov=sfla1

I meant the older than humankind part, obviously there are many humans throughout history who were both military generals and political leaders.

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

#195

Post by alanbernstein »

vxNsr wrote: post #105
thaumasiotes wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have always had military politicians. Military politicians are older than humankind itself.

> Military politicians are older than humankind itself. Just curious, is this just hyperbole or do you have an actual example? ETA: I mean the "older than humankind itself" part. Like what does that mean in this context?

Maybe a group of apes led by (political) the strongest one (military)?

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

#196

Post by narrator »

throwaway224466 wrote: post #78

Southwest's pilot union sued the company over its Covid-19 vaccine mandate a few days ago[1], this is clearly related. The media isn't reporting this because the media owners don't want the masses hearing about others beginning to revolt against the draconian and illogical vaccine mandates (i.e. Why wouldn't a naturally derived antibody test be allowed in place of a vaccine, considering that's the whole point of gett…

Thanks for the real story. I always scoot all the way to the bottom of the page to the lowest rated comments and start reading there to get the real story on any non-technical HN thread.

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

#197

Post by rurounijones »

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.

Not the US, but in the UK which I think is comparable:

* https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/aug/28/many-hsbc-cust... (I believe this one was caused by firing greybeards who understood a certain very complicated batch processing system and offshoring to undertrained staff in India who then make a mistake and basically brough the entire system down as a knock-on effect)

* https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/nov/19/tsb-it-melt... (Insufficiently tested software upgrade although to be fair this was a major upgrade)

* https://scottishfinancialnews.com/article/rbs-it-failure-pre... (Not sure on root cause. Other interesting stats at the bottom of the article regarding failure counts)

Now, in all these cases I believe the outages lasted a few days at least where people had limited or no access to bank accounts, salaries not paid on time, incorrectly charged overdraft fees, automated payments not happening etc.

It can probably be argued what is "core" here and as far as I know no money actually disappeared into the ether but, in the UK at least, I am not sure I would be so confident in my declaration of Rock Solid software.

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

#199

Post by snotrockets »

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…

As a manager, you represent the org and it policies. If you want to speak against it, give a notice (or ask to be demoted to non-managerial role) and then do so.

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

#200

Post by anovikov »

There's a cutthroat competition between the airlines so how can we be surprised that they have to "optimise" everything until fuckups like this start to happen?

Consumers who are looking for someone to blame for this, should look in the mirror: those people who pick the cheapest picket at Expedia just by "sort by cheapest first", are the main culprits. Airline industry is in the pathetic state it is due to irrational, irresponsible penny-pinching by consumers.

There are no ways to fix it unless you roll back deregulation and mandate fixed ticket prices as they used to be, which is of course impossible. Airlines who don't save on everything not leaving any buffers for anything, will simply go bust.

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