I'm glad I don't work for Southwest Airlines's IT department

[Bob Juch]

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/southwest-a ... ve-delays/

[TheConfessor]

Unless I'm mistaken, we all know someone who does.

[tubadave]

Unless I'm mistaken, we all know someone who does.

[danielh41]

Unless I'm mistaken, we all know someone who does.

I've got a friend of mine who is fairly high up in Southwest's IT department, but he hasn't mentioned anything about the trouble (at least on his Facebook page).

[BackInTex]

Unless I'm mistaken, we all know someone who does.

I've got a friend of mine who is fairly high up in Southwest's IT department, but he hasn't mentioned anything about the trouble (at least on his Facebook page).

Not something anyone should comment about on social media. There are news stories about the unions (mechanics and one other) pressuring the CEO to resign as a result of the SNAFU, as if he was the one that wrote or approved the faulty code. Though he could be to blame for budget cuts in IT that resulted in improper testing, accelerated timelines, and the hiring of unqualified H1-B Visa staff.

[Bob Juch]

Unless I'm mistaken, we all know someone who does.

I've got a friend of mine who is fairly high up in Southwest's IT department, but he hasn't mentioned anything about the trouble (at least on his Facebook page).

It just occurred to me that your portrait is very similar to busts of Roman generals and emperors, e.g. Germanicus Julius Caesar.

[tubadave]

I've got a friend of mine who is fairly high up in Southwest's IT department, but he hasn't mentioned anything about the trouble (at least on his Facebook page).

There is no union representing or protecting anyone associated with Technology, so it's not likely that anyone from Technology is willing to say very much of anything in public.

Not something anyone should comment about on social media. There are news stories about the unions (mechanics and one other) pressuring the CEO to resign as a result of the SNAFU, as if he was the one that wrote or approved the faulty code. Though he could be to blame for budget cuts in IT that resulted in improper testing, accelerated timelines, and the hiring of unqualified H1-B Visa staff.

The recent votes of no-confidence came from unions for the pilots, flight attendants and mechanics, with a union for the Ramp workers also giving their support. Those groups represent roughly 38,000 out of SWA's 48,000 employees. A video from our CEO, which was released in an article on our internal employee website on Tuesday, has received almost 2400 comments. To put that into perspective, most articles and items posted on that site receive less than 50 comments, and anything over 100 is fairly rare. There's a widespread feeling that SWA, which was always unusual and perhaps even unique in the way that it put its employees above the bottom line, is not the company that it used to be when Herb Kelleher (founder and long-time CEO) was running the show......that it's become more about the money than the people.

As someone who has worked at our internal IT helpdesk for nearly a decade, I've watched contractors and outsourced support become the norm over the last 5-6 years. I've watched most of our higher level support teams get outsourced to India and Mexico in the last few years. I've watched most of the jobs at our data center get outsourced to IBM in the last 12 months. I've watched our helpdesk not hire an actual employee in nearly four years.....we've taken on nothing but contractors, who aren't allowed to stay beyond three years, which causes them to go elsewhere in search of security, or just be forced to leave, and so our hiring and training treadmill never ends. The only employees we've gotten in recent memory were refugees from the outsourced data center whose prior jobs ceased to exist. Those of us who were already there before all of this got started are pretty much stuck, as all avenues of advancement and career growth have been cut off......when a position on a different or higher level team comes open, they never look internally to fill it. They just hire another contractor.

Nothing in that previous paragraph is an uncommon story in the IT world today, but.....I'm inclined to agree with the pilots and flight attendants and mechanics.

[geoffil]

Was the outage a result of the outsourcing (offshore) workers? I know many IT people who are on call 24 hours so the system at work can never go down, but the offshore contractors don't have to be on call. They wont tell the truth when they make a mistake due to their "culture" so it is lots of work to figure out problems. As soon as I heard about the outage at SWA I thought the offshore people may have left for the day and now the USA people have to figure it out themselves.

[tubadave]

Was the outage a result of the outsourcing (offshore) workers? I know many IT people who are on call 24 hours so the system at work can never go down, but the offshore contractors don't have to be on call. They wont tell the truth when they make a mistake due to their "culture" so it is lots of work to figure out problems. As soon as I heard about the outage at SWA I thought the offshore people may have left for the day and now the USA people have to figure it out themselves.

Actually, our outage (to differentiate from the more recent Delta one, for which I have no extra information) was entirely caused by the failure of one router. Yes, one. It was an odd set of circumstances where the router stopped working, but didn't completely go offline, so the redundant systems that are supposed to cover for it in the event of completely failure didn't kick in. There was no contingency in place for such a thing, because no one thought something like that was even possible. Or that there would be better odds of winning the lottery. Or something like that.

The outsourcing to offshore workers had nothing to do with it, directly, but the same mentality of cutting costs on technology wherever possible that leads to all that outsourcing can be partially blamed......the router in question was supposedly an older one, and all such routers like it are in the process of being replaced, or so I've heard.

[Bob Juch]

Was the outage a result of the outsourcing (offshore) workers? I know many IT people who are on call 24 hours so the system at work can never go down, but the offshore contractors don't have to be on call. They wont tell the truth when they make a mistake due to their "culture" so it is lots of work to figure out problems. As soon as I heard about the outage at SWA I thought the offshore people may have left for the day and now the USA people have to figure it out themselves.

Actually, our outage (to differentiate from the more recent Delta one, for which I have no extra information) was entirely caused by the failure of one router. Yes, one. It was an odd set of circumstances where the router stopped working, but didn't completely go offline, so the redundant systems that are supposed to cover for it in the event of completely failure didn't kick in. There was no contingency in place for such a thing, because no one thought something like that was even possible. Or that there would be better odds of winning the lottery. Or something like that.

The outsourcing to offshore workers had nothing to do with it, directly, but the same mentality of cutting costs on technology wherever possible that leads to all that outsourcing can be partially blamed......the router in question was supposedly an older one, and all such routers like it are in the process of being replaced, or so I've heard.

They way to fix that is to not have a hot backup but to have two or more routers working in parallel. If one dies then the traffic will go to the others with no visible outage.