Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 255 posts

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#241

Post by justinclift »

ajeet_dhaliwal wrote: post #234
justinclift wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahhh. That's a misconception on your part. There is literally no difference between any kind of sales email, and spam. All sales email to people that haven't opted-in previously, is spam. 100% of it. Thankfully, some countries have even introduced laws against it. That's the reason for the FOAD response.

This may be your opinion but this is not a fact.

Well, you were wondering why the FOAD reaction, and we've clearly described why based on the info you provided.

Your willingness to listen or otherwise is on you. ;)

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#242

Post by exadeci »

bitmapbrother wrote: post #199
davidf18 wrote: post #62

By using IT outsourcing in India (Tata?), Poland, BA and its parent is revealing some important information: They are cutting corners to the point of risking airline operations. The question is, where else are they unnecessarily cutting corners? Are they cutting unnecessary corners on airplane maintenance? Other quality airlines have outsourced IT or part of their IT operations, but they are careful about choosing th…

>Quantas, the airline of Australia, outsources its IT operations to IBM. They did not choose the cheapest alternative, but a reliable one And where do you think that work awarded to IBM is being done? Chances are it's India. As for IBM being reliable - are we talking about the same company known for its brazen incompetence in Australia?

Just send them feedback!

https://gfycat.com/AnyLegalBlackmamba

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#243

Post by ajeet_dhaliwal »

justinclift wrote: post #241
ajeet_dhaliwal wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be your opinion but this is not a fact.

Well, you were wondering why the FOAD reaction, and we've clearly described why based on the info you provided. Your willingness to listen or otherwise is on you. ;)

I was not wondering why at all, if it appears that way I did not intend it but I can't see anywhere I said that above.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#244

Post by hinkley »

madeofpalk wrote: post #240
hinkley wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Airlines are logistics companies that fly planes. They have to have a functioning plane at the right location - and only the right location - at the right time, or they bleed money. It baffles me that they ever thought outsourcing part of that logistics was a good idea. But then I've worked at tech companies that tried to outsource their IT departments too.

Retailers are in the business of selling things, yet 'outsource' their Point of Sales systems. This is just the same thing.

No, it isn't. The point of sale system is about taking payments. If your core business isn't 'the processing of financial transactions', then buying that is the sane thing to do. IBM being able to field a POS system doesn't make them a competent retailer. But they handle regulatory rules for you and let you be a competent retailer.

Airlines aren't just responsible for flying planes. They are responsible for the planes. It's not enough for the plane to show up in Chicago by 5pm, it has to be there and all of the necessary maintenance and safety work has to be done by 5pm. Anyone who could figure that out for them would simply go into business for themselves and compete.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#246

Post by mbaha »

gaius wrote: post #135
mbaha wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their tech is not open enough to even allow for proper innovation and differentiation. That's the main issue with legacy IT. When you live in a world w/ Docker, REST (and every other open tech there is), you can build systems which are way more innovative.

When you live in a world w/ Docker, REST (and every other open tech there is), you can build systems which are way more innovative That's quite funny because Docker and REST are just half-arsed reinventions of mainframe features from the 1970s.

I completely get where you're coming from, but you also have to acknowledge for example that Docker is open source.

That's not a trivial add-on to IBM mainframes, it provides every developer (w/ minimal resources e.g a laptop or free tier cloud service) the ability to run production-like environments.

Sometimes, we take that for granted, but having worked for an airline IT, I noticed the bottleneck didn't come from hard algorithmic issues (most advanced route features were very basic to implement), but from the huge leap between production and dev environments: this was not Ubuntu on a server VS a MacOS on a laptop (manageable...), this was Ubuntu VMs (so should be close to prod?) vs cryptic data center clusters that had impossible-to-replicate features.

As for REST, airline IT use an outdated messaging mechanism. It implements versioning and grammar, so should be clean and nice to work with? Not really... The messages were impossible to read for an inexperienced dev (opposed to XML or JSON).

I heard plans to put JSON blobs in one of the fields of the messaging mechanism (completely destroying the value of versionning and grammar btw). That was not necessarily a bad idea, just a reaction to the lack of supported tooling, and readability for an obscure messaging mechanism.

Again, I get where you're coming from, but I'm just allergic to nostagia for the sake of nostalgia where the old features clearly lacked essential features for 2017.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#247

Post by haveopinion »

The facts are clear. No effective mirror system or failover system. I've architected major 365x24 systems repeatedly in my career: Removing the possibility of power supply failure across the primary and secondary sites (and even within single site) is absolutely fundamental. That clearly has not been done here, at least to the extent of making sure that the solution is effective- and the blame I would guess lie within a crazy management and decision structure that seems to increasing permeate IT within large companies. Tata do have some good staff (from my first hand experience over many years):However, from my more recent experience, there is an increasingly MASSIVE CLIFF EDGE in talent/competence in within Indian companies generally, (and to some lesser extent UK companies as well): So the possibility of having "very assertive, but stupid or incompetent" middle and even senior managers is becoming an ever greater real-world problem. The criteria and method for selecting candidates for IT related work does not help - in particular role, competency, and "modus operandi" of recruiting agencies, is pretty atrocious, as many a seasoned contractor will attest! But ultimately, I think Alex Cruz and his CIO must take responsibility for a lack of diligence and competence. They clearly do not understand the most basic truth of high reliability, mission-critical IT: i.e. They NEVER needed cheaper IT staff (with all the attendant risk within their industry) , but rather much fewer technical staff, of the HIGHEST QUALITY, for all BA's key systems. And that I’m afraid means probably not putting Indian companies at the top of the list.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#248

Post by inflagranti »

raarts wrote: post #188
dchichkov wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's a cyclic trend in IT: Step 0. Well functioning and balanced company. Step 1. Why these engineers are so expensive? We can hire 'ten for one' in 'country A'. Step 2. Cut local IT budget twice, put goals to have *zero* local IT budget in 2 years. Outsource everything to 'country A'. Step 3. People are fired, everything is outsourced, operational knowledge accumulated over the last few years is lost. Step 4. W…

The problem is (and I've seen this happening) for many managers or C-levels, it's really hard to see the distinction between high- and low quality. They just can't tell. So if all offers look the same quality to you, you obviously buy the cheapest.

Or you delegate to people who can? Or at the very least don't change anything you don't understand!? The root cause of course is the MBA type without the technical background being put in charge of engineering teams in the first place.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#249

Post by matteo789 »

isostatic wrote: post #172
matteo789 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Polish engineers, similarly to Polish fighter jet pilots in WWII, who saved your lazy british asses BTW, do have high-reliability IT systems experience, due to major investment banks and GDSs operating in the Cracow area. Next time you write something, do some research dude. It shows how ignorant you brits are, especially taking into account the recent Brexit vote !

Only 52% of us.

And nobody of your enlightened politicians explained to your oh-so-clever nation, that Switzerland has already tried to negotiate passporting rights despite remaining outside of the EU, but failed? That's why you have had the swiss banks mostly operating from the UK. They sold you the immigrant-hatred propaganda, especially against the well-assimilated Polish, while it's the Muslims making most damage to your society, but spared for the sake of political correctness and you 'swallowed it like young Pelicans' as we say in Poland. Please..., you are a case study for a democracy failure.
Post reply on HN