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British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

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Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#111

Post by objclxt »

paulmd wrote: post #72
DamonHD wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that there's a lot of eating crow and bargaining with rivals for space on their flights to help clear the backlog, but each incident is going to have unique elements to resolve in it...

It's standard practice for airlines to fly each others' crews around even during normal operations (often at no cost). For example, the overbooking that led to the beating on the United flight was the result of an aircrew from another airline being booked on at the last second. I would imagine that when the shit hits the fan like this, the other airlines are very sympathetic and will do whatever it takes to get BA pe…

> For example, the overbooking that led to the beating on the United flight was the result of an aircrew from another airline being booked on at the last second.

That's not quite what happened. The flight was operated by Republic Airlines, on behalf of United. Republic bumped the passenger to make way for more of their own crew - it's just that crew was going to to fly a Republic flight operating under another, different, carrier. But both crews were employed by Republic.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#112

Post by taway_1212 »

wetha wrote: post #92
idlewords wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Krakow is a big tech center, is in the EU, and it's not obvious why moving jobs there would have anything to do with a drop in quality.

What makes Krakow inherently better than say, Bangalore? Not snark, just asking.

Much more friendly timezone (1 h from London, 6 h from East Coast). I'd also say the accent is easier on the ears, but I might be biased since I'm Polish ;) Also, it only takes 2-3 years on average in Polish civil courts to resolve a dispute (as opposed to supposedly decades in India) - in case you want to sue your services provider.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#113

Post by rodgerd »

davidf18 wrote: post #69
ern wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quantas, the airline of Australia, outsources its IT operations to IBM. They did not choose the cheapest alternative, but a reliable one. I believe IBM was responsible for the Australian census debacle in 2016. Hardly a ringing endorsement of their reliability, and not the only high-profile instance of them messing things up. "No one ever got fired for choosing IBM" though.

While I can't speak to the exact circumstances, IBM when it takes over operations often hires the IT staff of the firm it is taking over operations from and runs systems on multiple-year contracts. At any rate, I believe few would contest that IBM in general is a more reliable vendor than Tata, other Indian suppliers or say, offices in Poland. EDIT: Details on IBM and Australian census. http://www.abc.net.au/news/201…

> IBM when it takes over operations often hires the IT staff of the firm it is taking over operations from and runs systems on multiple-year contracts.

And typically has them laid off in 3 - 5 years and replaced by IBM offshore resources or subcontractors.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#114

Post by RekentonBot »

davidf18 wrote: post #69
ern wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quantas, the airline of Australia, outsources its IT operations to IBM. They did not choose the cheapest alternative, but a reliable one. I believe IBM was responsible for the Australian census debacle in 2016. Hardly a ringing endorsement of their reliability, and not the only high-profile instance of them messing things up. "No one ever got fired for choosing IBM" though.

While I can't speak to the exact circumstances, IBM when it takes over operations often hires the IT staff of the firm it is taking over operations from and runs systems on multiple-year contracts. At any rate, I believe few would contest that IBM in general is a more reliable vendor than Tata, other Indian suppliers or say, offices in Poland. EDIT: Details on IBM and Australian census. http://www.abc.net.au/news/201…

India I can understand, but what is your deal with Poland? Historically Poland has excelled in stuff like mathematics and Polish programmers are very skilled. A Polish team even came in second in the ACM International Collegiate Programming Competition recently, so wtf dude?

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#115

Post by alanbyrne »

davidf18 wrote: post #69
ern wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quantas, the airline of Australia, outsources its IT operations to IBM. They did not choose the cheapest alternative, but a reliable one. I believe IBM was responsible for the Australian census debacle in 2016. Hardly a ringing endorsement of their reliability, and not the only high-profile instance of them messing things up. "No one ever got fired for choosing IBM" though.

While I can't speak to the exact circumstances, IBM when it takes over operations often hires the IT staff of the firm it is taking over operations from and runs systems on multiple-year contracts. At any rate, I believe few would contest that IBM in general is a more reliable vendor than Tata, other Indian suppliers or say, offices in Poland. EDIT: Details on IBM and Australian census. http://www.abc.net.au/news/201…

> IBM when it takes over operations often hires the IT staff of the firm it is taking over operations from and runs systems on multiple-year contracts.

I've seen this happen many times and it's always been successful. They can replicate the business processes they've honed over time whilst keeping that important business knowledge. It's also often better for the staff as they can hand off that knowledge and move internally within IBM to new and more challenging roles without switching employers.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#116

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

branchless wrote: post #57
raesene9 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Land costs in the South East of England may be too high, but that really doesn't apply to the whole of the UK...

They are very high in most urban areas where you are likely to have a dev centre.

Land costs are really not high in Birmingham and the Black Country, the second biggest urban area in Britain. You could build within walking distance of (say) Sandwell & Dudley station, with mainline trains to London, for comparative peanuts.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#117

Post by GnarfGnarf »

This is a distant early warning of the impending demise of commercial aviation. The inexorable rise of the price of fuel will eventually make flying unaffordable for all but the military and civil servants. Airlines are already struggling to remain solvent, and are cutting costs everywhere they can: salaries, squashing passengers to increase seats/plane, nickel & dimeing us with baggage surcharges, etc.

Offshoring IT is an example of cutting costs to the bone.

Your grandchildren will only know of flying as an ancient legend.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#118

Post by ajeet_dhaliwal »

mancerayder wrote: post #63

In the tech-related (but now fully mainstream, unlike a few years ago) news these days, there are a number of recurring themes. 1. Massive security breaches affecting major corporations, governments, and so on. 2. Massive IT outages, affecting corporations, governments and so forth. It doesn't take a lot of incidents to mark them as 'massive' since things are strongly centralized in this world. Meanwhile, in the last…

Ignoring the offshoring part of this for a moment I think you're on point about the CTOs, it baffled me too at the beginning. When I started doing sales for a startup service and was targeting CTOs I discovered based on my interactions that outside of Silicon Valley companies or obviously tech centered companies, CTOs in other countries and industries are in many cases just the usual political shark type person interested in showing how they were able to cut costs to help improve profit and often there isn't the real interest in tech to understand why doing things better is so important.

As an example a person in a tech leader role at a major company in the UK who I thought may be interested in hearing about a product was quite rude about me never contacting them again and refusing to take any calls or emails before even hearing about something that other CTOs has at least looked at and some had even become customers. She happened to have a personal blog that I checked out and all it mentioned was her passion for swimming, nothing at all, not a single thing about tech. Why is this person in this role then? Beats me but it is sadly commonplace, until you get people at the top that truly understands tech and was actually a software engineer themselves at the start of their career and are things won't change.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#119

Post by sgt101 »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #106
raesene9 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key is incentives. An IT outsourcer's goal is generally to fulfill their contractual obligations (to the letter not the spirit) for as little money as possible. So if something like security or reliability isn't clearly stated in contracts (and it's extremely difficult to do that well) it is disregarded. An outsourcing company is not going to spend money it doesn't have to, simple as that. SAAS like gsuite is an…

I don't see why an IT outsourcing company would not have the greatest incentive to take security and reliability extremely seriously. Is there anything worse for an IT service provider than being blamed for a massive IT outage at a global corporation? This is headline news. And I don't see any difficult contractual issues at all. On the contrary. A massive outage, by definition, means that the contractual obligation…

Here is the list of things that are worse for an IT outsourcer.

1. Being more expensive than the other guy.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#120

Post by 65827 »

GnarfGnarf wrote: post #117

This is a distant early warning of the impending demise of commercial aviation. The inexorable rise of the price of fuel will eventually make flying unaffordable for all but the military and civil servants. Airlines are already struggling to remain solvent, and are cutting costs everywhere they can: salaries, squashing passengers to increase seats/plane, nickel & dimeing us with baggage surcharges, etc. Offshoring IT…

This is nonsense, fuel prices have been plummeting amid new extraction tech and long term demand destruction. These are fundamental changes and if you're still droning on about peak oil you're just operating on old bad info.
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