[whimsicalism]

Why would tech companies be more rational at pricing labor than other companies?

Because that's what it is - if your entire fleet is going down and you could have spent more to hire engineers, you just are irrational at pricing the value of engineering labor.

[macintux]

Yet every other airline is up and running, having (presumably) spent roughly the same on engineers.

It’s always easy in hindsight to say they should have spent more, but opportunity cost is very real, and margins are very slim.

[ta991919]

"Yet every other airline is up and running, having (presumably) spent roughly the same on engineers"

That's an odd line of thinking. Other airlines have catastrophic outages too. Just at different times/dates. They do sometimes share 3rd party dependencies, but that happened to not be the case this time.