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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

#211

Post by listenallyall »

rurounijones wrote: post #197
listenallyall wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/n…

Thanks, these examples confirm my point. The old, ancient, "outdated" (as the original poster claimed) software worked fine for years/decades. The failures that you cited were introduced during an upgrade, a rewrite/outsourcing, or due to a 3rd party outage.

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

#212

Post by nradov »

jhugo wrote: post #104
logicchains wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

That first link doesn't really back up "zero effect on reducing the spread of covid". It's a non-peer-reviewed discussion of some graphs from Our World In Data. Their analysis is incredibly shallow, for example comparing Portugal or Iceland (high vaccination rate, mostly open, lots of COVID cases) to Vietnam (low vaccination rate, completely locked down at the time the analysis was done, not many COVID cases). You ca…

I encourage everyone to get vaccinated if they can, but its effect on reducing transmission is only limited and temporary.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y

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

#213

Post by drstewart »

silisili wrote: post #171
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…

This COBOL shortage myth has been around since I was a kid. It wasn't true then, and isn't now. The entire problem is that they don't pay well for what is supposedly a rare resource. And nobody wants to learn a dead language for peanuts. Offer 500k/yr, and me and about 100 million other people will be learning COBOL starting tomorrow.

Sounds like it isn't a myth - you yourself admit there aren't people who know it, just that would OFFER to learn it given the appropriate compensation.

By that logic, there isn't a shortage of anything if you have enough money.

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

#215

Post by andreskytt »

killerdhmo wrote: post #201
doctorwho42 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is large due to corporations taking on lean-business models from MBAs over the last decade+. When a business runs lean, it becomes more fragile to disruptions. Unfortunately due to our economic system, there is a semi-regular boon-bust cycle, so if it wasn't COVID, it would have been something else that kicks the stool out from under the legs of these corporations. In the past this wasn't as big as an issue becaus…

Your hate of MBAs is unfounded and unproven. Their COO has worked there since 1993, and doesn’t have an MBA: https://www.swamedia.com/pages/michael-van-de-ven

MBA here. Does not sound like hate but statement of fact. In my experience the US MBA and general management management teaching is very dollar-based in stark contrast to, say European management education. This will lead to extreme efficiencies and the M&A boom of the past few decades is probably linked to it as well. And it does not have to be the CEO: most practical daily decisions cutting all buffers for maximum efficiency are made by mid to upper management.

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

#216

Post by listenallyall »

chefandy wrote: post #203
listenallyall wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You've cited two comparatively minor failures confined to a very small subset of what banks do. There's a whole lot of critical software systems in banks that don't touch personal bank accounts. If you've ever worked on bank systems before, it was certainly in a very limited capacity. I did code-level support for a large internal data management system for the federal reserve bank in the mid aughts. I'm not really in…

Money disappearing from a bank account is a "comparatively minor failure"? Sorry, I stopped reading at that point.

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

#217

Post by valray »

killerdhmo wrote: post #201
doctorwho42 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is large due to corporations taking on lean-business models from MBAs over the last decade+. When a business runs lean, it becomes more fragile to disruptions. Unfortunately due to our economic system, there is a semi-regular boon-bust cycle, so if it wasn't COVID, it would have been something else that kicks the stool out from under the legs of these corporations. In the past this wasn't as big as an issue becaus…

Your hate of MBAs is unfounded and unproven. Their COO has worked there since 1993, and doesn’t have an MBA: https://www.swamedia.com/pages/michael-van-de-ven

Your statement shows lack of understanding of how the modern corporation works.

The COO may have been there 30 years, and may lack an MBA, but increasingly it is this type of CxO that has been reyling upon MBAs and other consultants (operations research) to restructure the organization into an optimized-but-fragile state.

It is the rare old-hand that can standup to younguns talking tech and math, subjects he does not feel comfortable with.

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

#218

Post by oh_sigh »

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…

This seems like a strategy designed to kill airframes via sheer number of pressurization cycles?

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

#219

Post by soylentnewsorg »

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 does not mean duct-taped. It means every edge case has been hit, it's rock solid, and it works. There are many patches on top of patches, and the system is hard to comprehend for someone new. But it's a heck of a lot more stable that something redesigned.

The real issue here, is during bad weather and understaffed ATC, for some reason the airforce decided to do some training in airspace used by commercial flights. This military training part in the article is mentioned quickly, then completely ignored.

This was the US Military causing delays, cancellations, and people getting stuck overnight at airports. This was the US Military causing huge operational and financial issues for one of the most customer-friendly airlines out there. And the did this while eating up millions of dollars that are taken out of our paychecks - that they used to screw us. Time for congress to remove the funds that allowed them to conduct this training at a time when it caused problems for the general population paying their salaries.

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

#220

Post by jhugo »

logicchains wrote: post #190
jhugo wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That first link doesn't really back up "zero effect on reducing the spread of covid". It's a non-peer-reviewed discussion of some graphs from Our World In Data. Their analysis is incredibly shallow, for example comparing Portugal or Iceland (high vaccination rate, mostly open, lots of COVID cases) to Vietnam (low vaccination rate, completely locked down at the time the analysis was done, not many COVID cases). You ca…

>It's a non-peer-reviewed discussion of some graphs from Our World In Data. A discussion published in the European Journal of Epidemiology. It doesn't just look at those two countries; its statistical analysis covers 68 countries and 2947 US counties. You don't think that if the vaccine were effective at preventing spread, there should be at least some evidence of this effect when comparing vaccination rate and sprea…

The discussion completely ignores basically all the potential confounding factors. Two huge ones are lockdown measures and level of testing.

Even in a largely vaccinated population, if you do widespread community testing you will find a lot of asymptomatic cases. If you don't do widespread community testing you won't. So you can have wildly different caseloads in two highly-vaccinated populations, yet no meaningful medical difference in the outcomes (since, as we know, vaccination is an effective prevention against serious illness and death).

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