A system that is wholly dependent upon a third party weather application with no redundancies seems poorly built. I wish we'd get more transparency out of airlines when "computer systems" crash and cause delays. A post-mortem would be nice...
Everywhere else it is 150k-200k a year with the bare number headcount and you are a cost center and treated like one.
So not surprising to me that every company in the world that has a large physical plant, so already has large single points of failure, doesn’t have redundant data centers or cloud based systems.
Given the number of hacks anything online literally can’t be secured, so they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
One answer is to go back to analog systems, which ain’t happening!
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.
It’s always easy in hindsight to say they should have spent more, but opportunity cost is very real, and margins are very slim.
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.
Mediocre software is eating the world
A cost is a thing you need to pay but if you spend more on it you get very little benefit. Thus it has a binary nature or at least a nature where "good enough" is all you need. A profit center is something where if you make it better you generate more revenue. Therefore things like necessary infrastructure is a cost, whereas adding more routes is a profit.
Whereas I think you are confusing cost and profit to mean "important" and "unimportant". Not having your headquarters fall down is important. Having HVAC for your office workers is important. But no one is going to say "Let's choose this airline, have you seen how awesome the HVAC in their main office is? And how the foundation to their HQ is going to last a hundred years longer than their competitor?" But they will say "Let's choose this airline because it has a direct flight to where we want to go".
Seems to me the MBAs ran the numbers a while ago, and here we are.