Is it really fair to blame it on the technology? After a couple of oopsies it seems like it's more of a management issue than a technology issue.
I imagine it's a lot easier to deflect blame by blaming it on computers though.
I imagine it's a lot easier to deflect blame by blaming it on computers though.
“Every problem blamed on ‘computer error’ involves at least two human errors, one of which is blaming the computer.”
— Tom Glib
Factually describing the outage doesn’t remove responsibility; whoever didn’t take the first crisis seriously enough will face it soon enough. Right now, they need engineers, the FAA, flight controllers, etc. to unstuck them. Then there will be a blameless diagnostic. Then heads will roll and I’d be surprised if the most demotion won’t be a general manager.
Thank you for completing your job application for the [not available] position!One of the key processes that failed over Christmas was assigning personnel to crews and crews to flights. You can store a working option regularly (every hour) and revert to that, with local modifications, when things stop working. It won’t make things good, but it will avoid having to strand all flights for days.
That's a hardware problem.
>How many software engineers does it take to fix broken flight software?
That's a management problem.
>How do you fix this software problem?
This question has been closed for being off-topic.
- Weinberg’s 'First Principle of Financial Management' and 'Second Rule of Failure Prevention’
- 'First-Order Measurement', Quality Software Management, Volume 2, Gerald Weinberg, Dorset House Publishing, 1993
Oddly, the economy one seems to be the one that people vote for, with predictably stupid results. Also for some reason the economy only includes the gasoline refining industry, so make sure to switch careers so you can be a productive member of society!
Throughout the 80s Jack Welch, then CEO of General Electric, was seen as a genius. My god! Look at the stock!
He gutted the company in favor of financial services, and now is just a shell of what it once was.
C'est la eighties.
In lieu of that management should require business resiliency processes allowing the business to continue manually when the computer systems inevitably fail.
At least it’s better than root cause analysis, which is walking back until you want to stop and declaring that the root.
The real root is the creation of the universe. I mean that sincerely. When you follow definitions of causality, time and the universe, you end up with the Big Bang as the root of your graph. Everything is else is editorializing.
The important part of the above is by refusing create the whole tree you actually get something solved. Sometimes you will get the right one, sometimes you won't. You can spend a lot of time building a tree of problems, and find tens of thousands of things you can fix - and now you have a larger todo list than you have time to do and likely you don't get anything done. Or analysis paralysis in other words.
So, in this case the real question is “will they pick the branch that blames the people that pay and promote them, or take the branches that are of the least resistance.” Something this contentious would be vetted by committee in some way or another and at that point any upward finger pointing would be almost certainly curtailed in favor of a less contentious branch.
But once in a while it really isn't. My "favourite" was a fishing vessel which capsized killing everybody aboard. Why did it get into trouble? Because the entire crew were using heroin. That report has zero recommendations because there's nothing to recommend. It's already both illegal and obviously a bad idea to operate vessels at sea under the influence of drugs or alcohol, so there's nothing to recommend, those guys had only themselves to blame for their deaths.
And probably on the boat when it capsized and high on heroin too.