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My hell as a 911 operator

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Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#191

Post by 300bps »

eksith wrote: post #189
300bps wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've never answered the phone, have you? I was the CTO of a large publicly traded insurance company that had 3 call centers across the country and thousands of sales reps and customer service agents. I designed user interfaces and system architecture that enabled them to rapidly quote and service prospective customers and existing customers. I spent 1 day per week in one of our call centers every week with a headse…

None of that meets much of the training necessary to save lives. The insurance company has to keep current customers and make sure to gain new ones. That's it. Only monetary loss or gain. The callers at 911 centers (and I'm guessing you still haven't listened to any of these calls) have to handle different systems (with no ability to modify the UIs) contact different services, handle vital data and filter it out from…

You've proven that no matter what I say, you will discount my experience and make guesses as to what I have or haven't done. Why would I continue writing to you? Have a nice day.

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#192

Post by pcl »

lemmsjid wrote: post #164
milhous wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large scale disruption is impossible because the government and its employees are protected by guns and the force of law, permitting special interests, cronyism, and incompetence to flourish. We in the marketplace (minus Industrial Military Complex) have no such protections, and actually have to produce value to make a living in a fair exchange of goods and services. Most government employees are unemployable in the…

Responding to your edit about "a SF startup could've built out an amazing system at a fraction of the price"-- I hear that kind of attitude a lot, I'm not so sure it holds to scrutiny. Tackling the problem of a system that must be 100% reliable, synchronous, with complete uptime from day 1 is very very difficult, and not many startup environments will prepare you for it. A lot of systems that are scaling decently now…

Sounds like it doesn't need to be 100% reliable, though -- they have a painful backup system in place.

Also, replaying traffic from the old system into the new seems like a viable way to test out this sort of system. Or, they could have run both systems in parallel, and just sent a percentage of the traffic to the new system and slowly ramped up. I wonder why they chose to just cut over rather than doing a full and seemingly irreversible cutover.

Not that many startups would have done things that way, since the nature of startups tends towards the green field. But plenty of more-established tech companies would have, I imagine.

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#193

Post by josh2600 »

jimbokun wrote: post #188
josh2600 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

911 isn't being done well anywhere IMHO. If you look at the way 911 works, there's no location information unless you use the cellular radio (and this assumes your carrier is using the cell tower to anchor your location). If you use IP to call, let's say via an application like RingCentral, how does the 911 service know whether you're in San Francisco or New York? It doesn't. This isn't pie in the sky fantasy, this i…

"So IMHO the right approach is a top-down rewrite..." This is almost always an extremely bad idea: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html I have no inside knowledge, but wouldn't be surprised at all if many of the problems of the new NYC 911 system is due to a decision to rewrite the code from scratch, losing much of the knowledge and bug fixes embedded in the old system's source code.

I know but you have to understand, Joel makes excellent points, but if most of the systems are written in COBOL it makes them hard to extend over time.

We're talking about software from 1984 in some cases although it's all littered with security holes, bad interfaces and slow response times.

In the case of NY, I could agree with you, but I would say that the problem was significantly overcomplicated. There are better systems that could be used to deliver something like this. I think that, yes, sometimes you do need to do a top-down rewrite, especially when everything is wrong.

I do agree with your point that the NY incident is likely attributable to poor software design, but I disagree with the conclusion that any rewrite would suffer from the same malady.

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#194

Post by milhous »

milhous wrote: post #46
greghinch wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was freelancing, I did some government work. I was flabbergasted by the slow pace at which things moved, and that I had to create accounts in 3 separate systems to submit and get paid for even very basic invoices. Government is a place that is ripe for disruption, but the walls around it are so high, I don't know how to really breach them. There is a huge machine in place of contractors and lobbyists which ess…

Large scale disruption is impossible because the government and its employees are protected by guns and the force of law, permitting special interests, cronyism, and incompetence to flourish. We in the marketplace (minus Industrial Military Complex) have no such protections, and actually have to produce value to make a living in a fair exchange of goods and services. Most government employees are unemployable in the…

>> Most government employees are unemployable in the marketplace, so it's in their interest to follow orders, at whatever cost, to keep their jobs.

Some good points were raised about this, and what I should've said instead is that it would be extremely difficult to suddenly absorb a lot of displaced government workers into private industry. But aside from the protections they receive of near-absolute job security in any market condition, I subscribe to the thesis that as government expands, rights are lost.

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#196

Post by rdl »

dkarl wrote: post #154
josh2600 wrote: post #87

Ok, I have something to add here for the following reasons: * I build big call centers for a living * I'm a really big Telecom Nerd You might be wondering why something as important as 911 is not automated or accessible via any other mechanism; why is it that the most critical service in the country runs on a system that hasn't materially changed since 1984? For one, the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) is ex…

The supposed advantage of a hodgepodge is that somewhere the right approach has been tried and is working well, and pressure will mount on cities with inferior systems to either match or adopt the better systems. Where, if anywhere, is 911 being done well, and how slowly or quickly will the successful approaches spread? Do you think this dynamic will lead to places like New York having faster and more reliable 911 sy…

I call CHP 911 frequently (2-3 times/week, for reporting objects in roadways, etc.); it seems to work better than any non-military 911-type service I've ever used.

CHP was traditionally where all cellular 911 calls went, too, but that got improved over time.

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#197

Post by snitko »

moocowduckquack wrote: post #130
snitko wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To where? To another country which is going to tax me the same or more?

You could try Monaco, though you might not like the fact that they have socialised health care. Those billionaire commies.

If there was a 0% tax in Monaco, there would be no way to fund public healthcare. In reality, employers are required to contribute to the CSM (Caisses Sociales de Monaco) for each employee. That's a tax.

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#198

Post by brokenparser »

ams6110 wrote: post #90
Ind007 wrote: post #86

Any idea on which technology the current system is built upon?

I will go out on a wild limb and say Windows servers and either SQL Server or Oracle database.

Hate to break it to you, but that sounds more than adequate. I would choose differently if given the choice, but it's not a valid excuse for pausing 3 minutes to generate a job number by quite a long shot.

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#199

Post by 300bps »

doorhammer wrote: post #94
300bps wrote: post #30

Holy hyperbole. Definitely seems like this worker is frustrated beyond sense or has an agenda with saying things like: They give rookie operators two months training, and after that just throw ’em in. They’re not ready. Two months training is not enough training? This is implausible. At its core, they're answering the phone, determining the reason for a call and typing information from the call into a computer. They'…

I'm mostly glad to see a lot of reasonable responses to this. This attitude is one of the reasons why so many people have such terrible experiences calling in to companies. I'm talking about companies that have nothing to do with real life emergencies and life threatening consequences. Management tends to think "they just answer phones, so we can hire anyone, put them through a week of training and bam, they should b…

This attitude is one of the reasons why so many people have such terrible experiences calling in to companies...Management tends to think "they just answer phones, so we can hire anyone, put them through a week of training and bam, they should be good to go, right?"

You've missed the mark pretty terribly on this. The reason why so many people have such terrible experiences calling in to companies is because of substantial training.

People in call centers today are trained to give you poor customer service. I can't tell you how many scripts I've seen that are written like:

1. If customer asks for X, tell them we can't do that

2. If customer insists, explain we can't do X because of A, B and C.

3. If customer still insists for X, tell them we can't do X but we are willing to do Y

4. If customer still insists for X, tell them we will call them back and then don't call them back.

5. If customer calls back for X, give them X

And these types of scripts are written for things where a company is legally obligated to give their customer X.

Sure, there are training issues but by far you are receiving poor customer service because the company doesn't really want you calling in the first place and they're training you not to call.

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#200

Post by ams6110 »

brokenparser wrote: post #198
ams6110 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will go out on a wild limb and say Windows servers and either SQL Server or Oracle database.

Hate to break it to you, but that sounds more than adequate. I would choose differently if given the choice, but it's not a valid excuse for pausing 3 minutes to generate a job number by quite a long shot.

I actually agree, I wasn't making a good/bad comment, just speculating. Very few government contractors would bid a linux or open-source-software-based system.

I do agree, a well designed and implemented system running on Oracle and Windows can certainly handle something like 911 dispatch and do it well.

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