Hacker News Reader

Comment by bobkazamakis | Hacker News Reader

>Seems like this practice needs to expand to more industries.

I think you've mistaken this for something immediately increases quarterly gains with no regard to long-term strategy.

What's most annoying is that there's plenty of employees on the front line who not only care about testing for this sort of thing, but it actually interests them, they're motivated by it, and they understand the dire reality of what happens – to them, primarily – if the company isn't prepared to handle it.

And you can guess what their managers' response typically is: "We need to focus on OKRs and QBRs and KPIs right now... maybe next quarter"

I'm fully convinced that achieving 'manager status' is directly correlated to cowardice. Companies need top-down decision-making, but those decision-makers need to spend more time on the front line.

> Companies need top-down decision-making, but those decision-makers need to spend more time on the front line.

This is not rewarded so it doesn't happen. Managers are rewarded for line goes up so they only focus on line goes up. If line ever doesn't go up it costs them money (advancement, compensation) even if there's little they could have done to make line go up.

Airlines don't have quarterly gains. They regularly go bankrupt and get picked up again, because the country needs airlines and because they have large union contracts.

See any gains here?

https://www.google.com/finance/quote/LUV:NYSE?window=5Y

My wife and I spent a few hours this morning dealing with the cancellation of our return flight. Southwest has long been preferable for me in many cases, including my most flown route. Between the headache of this outage and the apparently dismal state of their operations there's a strong chance I never fly with them again.

Our family was in San Jose last week when our Southwest flight was cancelled.

It used to be that my first priority would be to go into the terminal and try to talk to somebody. I figured they were the experts. From what I've read, the staff use an antiquated system that takes you from one airport to another, then they can try to get you from that city to where you want to go. That's why there's so much tapping of keys and why it takes so long.

It's better to present them with a route that you've found on Google Flights or similar. The Southwest first flight out was supposed to be yesterday evening, the day after Christmas. In our case, the only thing we could find before Christmas was getting us from SJC to Seattle via Phoenix on Alaska. We ended up renting a car and driving home to Portland. Things got bad around Eugene - I stopped counting after 40 wrecked cars and semis - and got worse as you got closer to Portland.

Until regulation steps in.

In that case the government should smash Southwest with a billion dollar fine so the cost of not doing this drilling exceeds the cost of doing it.

Asking the government to step in for additional regulation is rarely helpful. For this type of failure, the free market will determine whether processes and tools improve, or whether the status quo is good enough.

Free market?

Regulation sometimes helps remind the free market that fuckups like this can come with real human costs.

Regulation imposes those costs and more on real humans and rarely heads off fuckups.

Market forces can correct here. Vote with your wallet.

What's an airline got to do with the free market? They're a extremely highly regulated business.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com