341–350 of 402 posts
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Which is why we've not had a commercial plane crash since.......2009? Seems FAA is pretty effective at reducing risk.
I haven't had a car crash, should I also thank the FAA?
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People like to think that the alternative to "move fast and break things" is "move slowly and not break things" but it's not, it's "move slowly, break things anyway, then take days to resolve the problem because you never learned how to move fast".
That's just not true. Moving faster does not mean moving more effectively. Frantic activity should not be mistaken for progress. I'm OK with the FAA taking "days to resolve the problem" if it means that nobody dies. For what it's worth, my team and I are partial to "move carefully, and tend things".
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This has nothing to do with excuses - I’m challenging the assertion that “because something bad happened, they must not have any mitigations in place at all”. This seems like a bad case of binary thinking, and my point was that the occurrence of an incident like this is not sufficient to support that claim. It’s just as likely that an ancient process that wasn’t accounted for somewhere in the architecture broke down,…
Those were the wrong procedures. If you were regularly rebooting systems left and right you'd learn quickly if things didn't come up.
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> 1) mostly thank the airline operators for that. This is a 100% proof that you have not the faintest clue what you're talking about. The #1 priotity of airline operators is profit, not safety.
Another way to think about it is that safety is good for profits, at least in so far as consumers care about it. And I think consumers do care quite a bit. Of course there are arguments to be made for regulation, but I think your statement is overly emphatic.
In theory, if you ask explicitly, of course they do. In practice, they choose the cheapest ticket and maybe avoid airlines that have had a high profile incident recently. They don't have the time or means to actually evaluate an airline's safety culture.
Meanwhile, executive decisions are driven by quarterly earnings reports, and you can cut a lot of corners for quite a number of quarters before your luck runs out and 200 people die.
My statement is, if anything, not emphatic enough.
> In the overnight hours of Tuesday into Wednesday, FAA officials decided to shut down and reboot the main NOTAM system -- a significant decision, because the reboot can take about 90 minutes, according to the source. 90 minutes; this certainly appears to be an advertisement about Windows OS.
Or just a legacy UNIX with a lot of disks. I've seen PH-UX take over an hour to boot due to that.
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Which is why we've not had a commercial plane crash since.......2009? Seems FAA is pretty effective at reducing risk.
a few things 1) mostly thank the airline operators for that. 2) the fact the 737 Max disasters happened outside the US was a matter of chance not exemplary policies by the FAA. FAA policies did not prevent the deployment and roll out of this dangerous aircraft in the United States and did not lead to grounding of the aircraft until multiple events occurred. 3) I'm mostly talking about software here, and I believe a b…
You all seem to think this is similar in value or operation to a web app. It is not. It is a safety-critical system that requires very stringent operational and development guidelines ON PURPOSE. The idea that the FAA shouldn't be risk averse in this system is absolutely ridiculous. The complexity of operating the airspace of an entire nation is nothing to scoff at and the importance of the NOTAM system should not be…
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I was a software engineering manager at the FAA for more than six years.
That doesn't make the statement any less ridiculous. What was the ultimate reason for the 737 MAX debacle? That airlines want to save money on type rating training. Look at accident reports, and half the time the airline's safety culture (or lack thereof) is at least a contributing cause. The FAA may be in many ways dysfunctional, but so are the airlines, and it's sure as hell not them who are pushing for better safe…
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You've got it exactly right. There are a lot of people here who are completely deluded into the "move fast and break things" mindset not realizing that sometimes you really do not want to move fast, because you REALLY do not want to break things. A corrupted file throwing up panics like this is a good thing, because you don't want corrupted files to pass through like everything is fine.
People like to think that the alternative to "move fast and break things" is "move slowly and not break things" but it's not, it's "move slowly, break things anyway, then take days to resolve the problem because you never learned how to move fast".
He has now moved on and we sometimes chat, he works for a huge corp, still sucks at writing SQL.
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If they’re so risk averse, why are their systems failing so severely? It’s absolutely a corruption issue, in that the government prefers to pay 2-3x what they would to solve things internally to contractors who then perform a poor job and lobby to keep whatever they build in place for decades.
> It’s absolutely a corruption issue, in that the government prefers to pay 2-3x Being serious, I wish I could find one of these 2-3x multiple payouts in government. Every time I've looked at anything government related (including direct contractors) the pay is garbage. Usually 15% to 50% of what the private market pays for my skill set.
(Also, OP is probably underestimating the full-sheet cost of a federal FTE, as well as the complexities of fund-based budgeting and forecasting.)