Hacker News Reader

Comment by rhodozelia | Hacker News Reader

Say people with the skills and incentives to build these systems all go to faangs where they can make 500k/yr and have the budget to build the system since that system is the revenue generator.

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!

View on HN

I'm sorry, but it is laughable to imply that a team of developers each making 200k a year can't build a stable product. It also isn't like the FAANGs of the world don't have downtime themselves.

I’m in industrial control and the move fast and break things never ending stream of updates subscription software mentality has taken hold of the big players like Rockwell and Schneider.

Mediocre software is eating the world

I was going to say the multiple failures at high profile cloud systems just in the last year is enough to prove that all the FAANG engineers in the world won’t save you.

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.

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.

"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.

Seems like a profit center to me if the company is 100% shut down without it.

Actually that's much closer to the definition of a cost center.

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".

Thank you. In retrospect, I had a feeling something was off about my thinking, but I couldn't articulate where. Importance and profitability are different domains. They might penny pinch weather reports, and risk management probably characterized it as "low risk, high impact", saw "low risk" and underinvested.

Southwest's stock price seems to be unaffected by the outage. Southwest is down 0.28% on the day, but most of that drop happened at market open, before this incident, and is probably related to the S&P 500 being down 0.21% over a similar time period. Southwest's stock stabilized at shortly before 10am, and is actually up almost a tenth since then.

Seems to me the MBAs ran the numbers a while ago, and here we are.

The news wasn’t priced in yet. Stocks are usually not priced rationally and there is plenty of room for someone good at performing accurate corporate valuations to become handsomely rich. Case in point: Enphase (ENPH). How can a stock of a predictable solar-parts company be priced at $130 then $220, then $120, then $164? All within a 7 month period. Finally what MBAs are you referring to?

200k a year at these companies is a stretch.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com