Comment by crisdux | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crisdux | Hacker News Reader

I don't buy the narrative that inadequate technology is the main reason for the Southwest debacle. We must ask, why did this happen now and not before? Southwest has previously been able to better deal with disruptions like this. While the weather event did happen in the middle of their network, it wasn't unprecedented.

I think a more obvious reasons is because of staffing issues brought on by covid, layoffs, and the vaccine mandates. They lost experienced employees who were able to wrangle the bad scheduling software. Throughout 2022, Southwest was having hiring issues because they were still mandating the vaccine through at least the summer for new employees. Their pilots association warned about this causing disruptions after a bunch of summer cancellations. Do people forget how flaky Southwest was during summer 2022? Southwest just recently reached staffing levels that matched their 2019 high. This "inadequate technology" narrative just seems like a convenient scapegoat.

> This "inadequate technology" narrative just seems like a convenient scapegoat.

My brother has worked in the white and blue collar unions (he prefers his ramp job). It's not like there's some impermeable cover of secrecy. These are just regular people who you can talk to. It's a combination of computer problems and regulatory controls (sleep blocks) leaving insufficient staff (and mechanical dangers) due to weather. The ramp teams were sitting at almost quad pay with no planes to service out of Minneapolis for a significant part of the weekend. This same situation has occurred, to some degree, every year.

Due to the inevitable Guld Stream collapse, this will be a routine problem until SWA triages it.

This is probably a contributing factor but will get buried by the media. However, I doubt it was the sole or even primary cause. There is definitely a staffing component here in addition to their bad software.

> They lost experienced employees who were able to wrangle the bad scheduling software.

Employees could quit because they don't want to get vaccinated, but they also could have like just died from COVID too, or won the lottery, etc.

So to me this still points to the technology as something of a root cause. Your tech is as brittle as the number of people who know how to use it. Losing the people who make your sunk-cost old tech actually work, and not planning for the "bus factor' still makes it your fault for not addressing.

someone should calculate this.

"Dieing from covid is like winning $1000 in the lottery"

// It sure isn't like winning $1 Million. // And it sure isn't a $2 winner // Somewhere in between.

As with any event, multiple factors were involved. I have no doubt tech and process could be at the center, but our self-imposed response to COVID undoubtedly had major impacts.

They also had mass cancellations in Oct 2021

They had the same computer related problem and mass cancellations in 2016.

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