| > Nothing I've said here is privileged, in fact most airlines operate this exact way. I consulted for a few large carriers and this was my conclusion also. In fact most very large American enterprises have all the same issues. With airlines the problems simply become really visible all at once really quickly when things go wrong. For the folks here on HN whose experience is mainly in Silicon Valley: it's hard to appreciate how little the execs at these companies care about software. They don't care, not even a little bit, and they definitely don't care what your opinions are. Their priority is growth, the stock price, and answering to the board (not necessarily in that order). The only carrier I heard about that cared for their IT was Continental and they were bought by United. Compounding the issue is how staffing works at these companies. Being a full-time employee at an airline is considered attractive because you get benefits including cheap airline tickets. My understanding is that the airline ticket perk used to be much more awesome than it is today. In any case, airlines bend over backwards not to have full-time employees. Depending on the company they have a vast army of contractors (on shore and off shore) who are on a revolving door policy lasting from 6 to 18 months. These folks come in, get trained up for a few months, turn around tickets in a grueling and dehumanizing environment, then they get to take a hike for a while until they can come back on another short-term stint. I had a colleague who had been full-time at SWA, he said his job literally only consisted of training people up on the systems, he rarely wrote much code himself, he was there to 'keep it all together.' But honestly, the current crisis is not a surprise. The IT systems at big American enterprises are truly horrific. It is decades of homegrown software "integrated" with decades of acquisitions where systems are smashed together on short timelines in service of quarterly goals. If you want to find the true culprit here, look up at the broader structure of the economic system. This mess is created by how we run the economy. |