British Airways CEO Won't Resign, Says Outsourcing Not To Blame For IT Failure (bbc.com) 275
British Airways CEO Alex Cruz insisted he would not resign on Monday as he sought to draw a line under three days of chaos at the UK flag carrier after IT problems left tens of thousands of passenger stranded. In an interview -- the first since a global computer outage all but shut the airline down -- Cruz said he doesn't think "it would make much of use for me to resign." Separately, he also denied an outsourcing deal was to blame for the IT problems that hit on Saturday, causing the airline to cancel almost all its services over the weekend. From a report: A leaked staff email revealed Mr Cruz had told staff not to comment on the system failure. When asked about the email he told the BBC the tone was clear: "Stop moaning and come and help us." The airline is now close to full operational capacity after the problems resulted in mass flight cancellations at Heathrow and Gatwick over the bank holiday weekend. Questions remain about how a power problem could have had such impact, said the BBC's technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones. One theory was that returning systems were unusable as the data had become unsynchronised. [...] Cruz told the BBC a power surge, had "only lasted a few minutes," but the back-up system had not worked properly. He said the IT failure was not due to technical staff being outsourced from the UK to India.
Capitalism is at fault (Score:2, Funny)
We need communism now!
Re:Capitalism is at fault (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Capitalism is at fault (Score:5, Insightful)
Both do not have a communist economy. However, Venezuela is struggling today under a leader who has problems with democracy and North Korea is owned by Kim Jon Un and his useless clan. Communism is an economic model where in essence everything is owned by everyone, money does not exist and people are sharing things. While this concept is totally utopian it has also nothing to do with any country which claimed to be communist. However, countries like the the German Democratic Republic or the Democratic Republic of Kongo were/are both named democratic, but they were both dictatorships.
Also "communism now" was mentioned as a joke.
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Yet somehow, Venezuela is doing much worse (we're talking riots because of starvation and forced labor in the fields) than every other countries with just as much (or more) of a basis of their economy on oil. The reason is directly attributable to their socialist government driving companies out of the country by taking over industries "for the people" and getting rid of all those capitalist "exploiters", i.e. living up to their socialist ideals.
Re:Capitalism is at fault (Score:5, Insightful)
Venezuela is struggling today because its economy is based on oil, and oil prices are low.
Absolute rubbish. Venezuela was in trouble at $100/bbl. Has been in trouble since Chavez, but Chavez was better at keeping his house in order. I'm sure Maduro would like to blame oil prices but the real problem is his corrupt out of control government. But I'm sure he and his buddies eat very well.
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*ism not really at fault (Score:2)
It doesn't matter what system of government they have, so long as they rely on oil the consequences of a price war with Saudis who can get oil out of the ground at less than one third of the price are kind of obvious.
Russia didn't cope well either so an oligarchy is not the answer either.
Re:Capitalism is at fault (Score:5, Insightful)
Venezuela's problem have nothing to do with socialism: it's poor mismanagement in so many areas of government.
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Not really - even if the camel was already overloaded that was the straw that broke it's back.
The poor choice (just like the poor choice of Greece to borrow deep and invest in US tech stocks around 2000) was the problem. While it could be argued that a different form of government would not make the same poor choice (although I very much doubt it) the form of government wasn't really the problem, just the choices they made. They've certainly made
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The same communism that failed everywhere it's been tried? Good idea.
I'd rather the Spanish Inquisition return.
Re:Spanish Inquisition (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Capitalism is at fault (Score:4, Insightful)
If you use the "A is bad, hence B must be good" fallacy to make your point for A, you look about as stupid as someone who tries to use it as a point for B.
Re:Capitalism is at fault (Score:5, Funny)
I still think it was BA who was bad here
Re:Capitalism is at fault (Score:5, Insightful)
Power failures happen. Hacks happen. It is the way you handle them that matters. BA's behavior was horrible. They should have had a fall-back paper based system. It would have been slow, error prone, and required them to rush-hire a lot of temps, but they could have muddled through without stranding tens of thousands of people. Also, it would have saved them money. The cost of the paper-pushing temps would have been far less than the cost of all the refunds for cancelled flights.
Re:Capitalism is at fault (Score:5, Interesting)
Um, no. This is an interesting fallacy that I see all of the time - 'go back to paper'. Let's face it - the ONLY way you can run a modern airline, hospital, utility or whatnot is with a computerized system. When it goes tits up, you go tits up until you can get backups on line. Just finding the requisite paper products (and manual credit card imprinters - I'm going to bet that half the BA employees have never even seen one) could take days.
Can you imagine trying to hire and train 5000 temps to fill out complicated forms while the rest of the staff has complete meltdowns?
Fat chance.
Now, BA should have been able to handle anything short of force majour with backups and redundant systems. The power supply theory is laughable. But paper isn't going to solve the problems on any sort of reasonable time scale.
Re:Capitalism is at fault (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Capitalism is at fault (Score:5, Interesting)
Businesses can and do have contingency plans to work without computers. It's absolutely possible with a little foresight and planning.
Foresight, planning *and* training. I work for a Retailer with about 20 branches. What we do, we disconnect every branch from central IT once a year for a day (granted, on one of the slower days), so that they know how to handle the backup procedures.
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Re:Capitalism is at fault (Score:5, Interesting)
This is an interesting fallacy that I see all of the time - 'go back to paper'. Let's face it - the ONLY way you can run a modern airline, hospital, utility or whatnot is with a computerized system.
There is a modern airline - Air France I think, that does just this. Their systems fail often, but they have a robust paper system to keep people from being stranded.
Thing is, you don't to allow people to buy new tickets in order to function. Lots of what a modern airline does can just be ignored. You need to verify tickets and boarding passes - which can be done by straining the phone network back to a central office with lots of temp workers, and you need to keep aircraft inspection/maintenance logs current, but that's still mostly paper anyhow.
You can make very complex systems work without computers if you care enough to do so. You can also make disaster recovery systems that actually work when you need them - though you do need to follow the expensive advice of professionals, so maybe some corporations are culturally incapable.
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You actually don't even need to verify tickets. In an emergency like this just ask people and believe them, most will be honest. It is not that difficult to calculate fuel by hand. Weather is available. Rosters are worked out in advance, so people just turn up. It should all muddle along without computers for at least a few days.
The trouble is that the systems were made very complex *because* of computers, and then nobody understands them any more.
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the ONLY way you can run a modern airline, hospital, utility or whatnot is with a computerized system.
If you have people at the gate with boarding passes, and a plane ready to fly, it is idiotic to refuse to board them because your computer is down. You get a sheet of paper, you manually write a manifest, and you send them on their way. It was done that way for decades.
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How much fuel do you put on the plane and in which tanks? Is it due for any inspections? Did it throw a code last flight? 'Ready to fly' is an assumption.
You could print it all at the start of a shift, but you know they didn't. It wouldn't be 100% anyhow, gates change, shit happens.
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When a hospital gets 100+ people in one hit do you really think they do complex paperwork instead of falling back to a very simple (and necessarily brutal) system?
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You can't drastically dumb-down the process of getting a passenger jet into the sky.
So glad I never use BA - (the Sucky Airline). (Score:2, Interesting)
They pissed me off more than a decade ago, and I swore never to use their services again. Since then I flew all across the world, for scientific conferences, cooperation, or just fun. This includes even many flights to the US.
I'm not surprised BA sucks this bad, with a CEO like Alex Cruz.
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They seem to be generally quite incompetent. Endless staff walk-outs over conditions, indicating poor labour relations. The food on their flights is terrible even by airline standards. Even the staff uniforms are just terrible, especially the women's which don't seem to have changed since the 60s and require that garish red lipstick.
In any case, Cruz is to blame for this. Ultimately, there should have been regular tests of the backup systems and a plan to quickly recover if it did fail, and it was his respo
Re: So glad I never use BA - (the Sucky Airline). (Score:5, Funny)
"The food on their flights is terrible even by airline standards"
They are just trying to give an authentic British food experience!
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Actually, you can get some really nice food there these days. Of course, the Brexit may roll that back... :-/
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"Keep a stiff upper lip" is the term of endurance you have to make when the figgy pudding hits your stomach. urghhs.
It's so bad that half of the British national dish, fish and chips, wasn't even invented in England it was invented in France, and the fish part was brought to England by Sephardic Jews.
The main reason the British had to let India into the commonwealth,
Re: So glad I never use BA - (the Sucky Airline). (Score:5, Funny)
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Were those 'old people' people who were expected to train someone from Infy or TCS how to do their job, before getting their own employment terminated? I can see why 'proper training' of their replacements might have been low on their priority list
It's amazing: in the 60s, the BOAC used to be the state of the art in airlines. Sad to see where it has fallen, while airlines from Arab countries flaunt superior service
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He confirmed the issue was not his fault, and not that of the new guys maintaining the system... It was obviously an issue of the old people
And who decided to replace "the old people" with an outsourcing firm featuring inadequately-trained personnel?
He's the CEO. The buck stops on his desk, no matter what.
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He's the CEO. The buck stops on his desk, no matter what.
Not these days. The CEO not taking responsibility for anything except successes (that he usually had no part in creating) is pretty much in the job description.
Karma (Score:2)
It would be delightful Karma if this is a result of the "training staff" conveniently forgetting to tell them of a devilish bug that they weren't allowed fix because there was a rather simple work around.
A work around that is documented somewhere. Now if they could just remember.
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The food on their flights is terrible even by airline standards.
They're British. What do you expect?
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with a CEO like Alex Cruz
Ted's evil twin, separated at birth?
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Re: So glad I never use BA - (the Sucky Airline). (Score:2)
I have a colleague who raves about them. He only flies with them, tells other people that they'reâ daft not to fly with them. Yet, almost every time he comes back from holiday there's a story about something that went wrong. I bet he's glad he didn't go abroad for the long weekend...
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Stockholm syndrome, irrationality... or plain stupidity. If you have constant problems with an airline, yet you only fly with them, the problem is your decision making.
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My absolute worst travel experiences have also been with British Air.
Fundamentally, what I don't like about them is that if you're rich and don't deviate even slightly from proper British behavior (drinking your tea with the proper pinkie elevation, etc) then they'll try to treat you pretty well. But if you need any kind of accommodation at all or, even worse, if you're not rich, they will go out of their way to make your life as miserable as absolutely possible.
If possible, I fly Japan Air. But these days they're in high demand to their general reputation for good customer service (even to people who aren't rich or need a little extra help). So it's hard to find available flights.
And British Air is the one airline that I go far out of my way to avoid.
Indeed, Japan Airlines is excellent! A few more I feel comfortable to recommend, are Finnair, THAI, and... the machmachine itself, Lufthansa. Lufthansa specifically does everything better where BA fails miserably, and yet they are a similar type of airline. Even Lufthansa's hubs (Frankfurt and Munich) function flawlessly and aren't a total hell, like Heathrow.
What happened to identifying the source of error? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not telling me in detail means I am highly unlikely to fly with them as they are seen as untrustworthy with something to hide.
Re:What happened to identifying the source of erro (Score:5, Insightful)
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" -- or a combination of stupidity and greed.
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"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
I still insist that everybody has that backwards [cia.gov]
Re:What happened to identifying the source of erro (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, there's incompetence here, but it's not the India that's the problem.
In my experience India has an incredible number of talented, capable people, but like talented capable people everywhere they cost more than ignoramuses. But even a country of a billion people has a finite pool of top-notch talent. On the other hand India does have an almost limitless supply of subpar talent, and Indian businessmen are enterprising to a fault. If a Western CEO jis willing to shell out good money for sub-par people, there's a killing to be made.
So who, exactly, is the fool in this scenario?
The British Airways debacle was an instance of a catastrophic failure being brought on by an unusually but statistically predictable event. Therefore, the new vendor the CEO brought in wasn't up to the job he hired them for. That's the CEO's fault, end of story.
The real problem is that people who are good at IT operations make their job look too easy. A fool looking at the lack of drama in a well-run data center is apt to mistake that for the job being easy.
Country of origin isn't the issue (Score:5, Insightful)
Having a foreign IT staff isn't the issue, having an incompetent IT staff that is not able to manage the system and deal with issues like this is. If you are firing people who are able to do this and bringing in people who are barely able to hold stuff together because it lowers the salaries you pay then it is your own fault.
Re:Country of origin isn't the issue (Score:5, Insightful)
“It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When
you pay too much, you lose a little money - that's all. When you pay
too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you
bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The
common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a
lot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well
to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will
have enough to pay for something better.”
John Ruskin
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Nice quote! Assumes a competent buyer of course, and with this joke of a CEO right here under discussion, that one is nowhere in sight.
Re:Country of origin isn't the issue (Score:5, Insightful)
Its not so much about incompetent staff, its about the loss of institutional knowledge when you outsource.
The company built up a large internal IT team for a reason - the IT problems of an airline are complex and convoluted (airlines often cant actually predict what price your ticket is going to be because of the complexity in the ticketing and fare based systems... and that complexity has snuck in over the 60 years of the boom in commercial aviation).
When you then get rid of that internal IT team, a huge sea of knowledge walks out with it. Yes, you can have them document the system, but no level of documentation makes up for practical experience that allows you to give a gut reaction in a given circumstance.
And thats what happened here. The root cause might not be anyones fault - but the recovery time might have been minutes to hours if the company still had that internal institutional knowledge to run with. They didn't, and the outsourced IT team had to troubleshoot the system from first principles - which can take forever.
Now watch BA switch outsourcing contractors again, citing their failure - and watch the knowledge gained via this incident once again take a walk out of the door.
Re:Country of origin isn't the issue (Score:5, Insightful)
Spot on. While it is usually a good idea to outsource non-core functions, IT has become a core function for almost all large businesses. If you do not have control over your IT with an organic (n.b. not the health food organic) workforce, you do not have control over your business.
I would assert that outsourcing IT only makes sense for a small business (e.g. a doctor's office, family restaurant).
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But that's the point. It's not irrelevant, it's actually the core of your business. And it's not a commodity, it's unique and irreplaceable knowledge of how your business works.
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And that is just wrong. If you have more than a PC with office and email on it, IT is _not_ a commodity at all these days.
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Indeed. And given that the root cause was both minor and expected ("power outage" is a very standard IT disaster scenario that a competent organization is well prepared for), but had such a devastating effect, a major outage will probably kill them.
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Outsourcing may not have caused the issue, but I'd like to ask: How much more difficult is it to return your systems to normal, using that outsourced staff?
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And that is just the point. Competent Indian IT staff is _not_ any cheaper, because they can get jobs all over the world at local salaries. And outsources always adds to the cost.
So in house? (Score:2)
"He said the IT failure was not due to technical staff being outsourced from the UK to India."
So is this tacitly blaming the staff they still have?
You know what will fix your IT problems! More staffing cuts and outsourcing!
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He's just admitted that rabid cost-cutting measures were responsible for the outage, and said cost-cutting measures were his fault, it just wasn't outsourcing that was to blame.
Either BA didn't update mission-critical infrastructure that is long past its expiry date, or they ignored the needs of mission-critical infrastructure (which includes having well-trained operators who know what to do when 'things get out of sync'. So it is still his *&^% fault.
Re:So in house? (Score:4, Insightful)
The *failure* wasnt a fault of the outsourcing - the problematic *recovery* almost certainly is a fault of the outsourcing. His statement doesnt cover both of those...
Phrasing (Score:3)
I don't think that it would make much of use for me, to resign.
There, fixed that for you. Commas are important.
Bad Backup? (Score:3)
And now that the backup failed to actually be a backup, we're all shocked and surprised (and it's definitiley not management's fault).
I tested my backups daily by importing the data into a different database. (Of couse, I'm an Oracle admin and am used to having failed backups).
Re:Bad Backup? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think generally backups are badly managed. I don't think most management sees them as all that critical. I suspect admins likely get tired of trying and just go with the flow after awhile.
In all my years professionally I've only ever really needed enterprise backup (i.e. not my desktop etc...) twice (Oracle DB). Both times it was useless. The first was a scheduling issue where the last backup that was done was 9 months old which is really unacceptable. In that case we had to use some complicated data harvesting from log tables (which fortunately we had in this instance), though some data was lots due to format differences. The second time apparently the backup process was broken, and it was under maintenance to fix it, for a month, but no one decided that it might be a good idea to tell anyone, so when we deployed a new version of an application into production which caused a number of data issues, the last good backup was 3 weeks old, meaning we had to get creative with the existing data and live with the rest putting it on users to manual confirm a couple weeks worth of possible changes.
Anyway from my own experience whenever it's been needed, it's not there. Personally I think I am way more fastidious about my backups, but there seems to be a thing about corporate culture, and perhaps the idea of risk management and passing blame and responsibility off on somebody else..
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I think generally backups are badly managed. I don't think most management sees them as all that critical. I suspect admins likely get tired of trying and just go with the flow after awhile.
This is why I always try to build/design my systems with active/active fail-over type mechanisms, doing my best to avoid the single point of failure. During normal operations, both systems are in operation and responding to needs. They are being constantly updated, constantly tested, and constantly monitored. The tricky thing is to ensure that should one of them fail, the other can take the full load.
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We had a fire. Burnt the whole place down. Fortunately, we had backups on tape, and we'd tested the backups using the tape drive, to make sure that they extracted correctly.
Trouble was, the only tape drive that seemed to be able to extract the tapes, was melted in the fire. Other tape drives appeared unable to do so, due to some subtle misalignment of the tape drive itself. Luckily, the data turned out to be available in other places, and our (frankly, pretty great) IT guys had us back up in a couple of day
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Common practice now is to do forced failover testing during none peak hours. Google create DiRT tool for testing fail overs. Amazon does testing also.
Hate it when PHB's are cheapasses or they just know better than you. Worst one I ran into was that we were trying to explain it would be better to have site redundancy vs one big machine at one location.The government side just wanted it running on big data center no matter what.
Earthquake hit 1 week after setup, all hard disks were destroyed/ data unrecovera
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As a naive observer, I'm just wondering why there is a single point of failure in this system. It seems to be that such a mission critical application should have distributed data and functionality to provide resilience... kind of like this new fangled Internet thingy.
(But what do I know?)
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Which is why this is the CEO's fault. When the CEO pushes for cost cutting, every manager scrambles to push out important work, so they can make the quarterly bonus; it is silly to criticize manager for doing what they are literally paid extra and patted on the back to do. But there are certain business critical systems that the CEOs must take responsibility for making sure that they are checked thrice on a regular basis. No manager can stand up to a CEO directly or indirectly, because that manager alway
An open letter to BA upper management (Score:5, Insightful)
Dear British Airways Upper Management,
This is your fault. To avoid another incident, you will bring in the operations IT managers, who are quite frankly, much smarter than you. Then sit down and shut the fuck up and listen to the solutions that these managers already know about, and which will easily fix the problem.
It would be best if all fools, MBAs, accountants and other technical illiterates were excluded from that meeting. A lawyer or too, on the other hand, may be quite helpful.
Hint. The solutions cost money. Guess why they were never implemented. Bonus question! Guess how expensive an unplanned failure is going to be.
Cheers!
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Guess how expensive an unplanned failure is going to be.
They no longer need to guess.
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On the plus side, by statistics, they are not going to have another of these for quite a while now, so all is well! Oh, wait...
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Guess how expensive an unplanned failure is going to be.
Early estimates peg this at a fraction of a percent of yearly net profit. Combined with the rarity of the event I would say that this incident will come and go without any change.
Mind you these costs are also offset by not having planes in the air. British airways in one year had their fuel bill change by more than the IAG 2016 net profit. There's far more expensive things that can and do happen to airlines regularly than stranding all their customers for a day.
Re:An open letter to BA upper management (Score:4, Informative)
Early estimates peg this at a fraction of a percent of yearly net profit
The numbers I've seen quoted are closer to 10% of their annual profit.
That's not a trivial sum.
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A while ago I worked in a large bank. The staff there consisted of large numbers of imported Indians, and larger numbers of non-imported Indians. The management staff consisted of South Africans - I was one of the few odd ones out. (I apologize for seemingly racist descriptions, but it was in fact true. Of the developer staff, there were about 5 non-Indians).
The results were pretty horrible. The code was made up of collections of frameworks-de-jour, whatever was trendy that month, layered. Maintenance was n
Pull The Other One (Score:4, Insightful)
Fuck you Alex. I hope this kills BA off.
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Re:Pull The Other One (Score:5, Interesting)
I often recall this piece of sagely advice from guitarist Robert Fripp, talking to author Tony Bacon:
TB: What advice would you give a young musician?
RF: Never fly Air Iberia.
TB: No, seriously.
RF: Seriously. Never ever fly Air Iberia.
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There is an obvious solution (Score:2)
Outsource the CEO position and fire Cruz; see how he likes it.
So the CEO says he "won't resign" (Score:2)
Bet you anything that some more IT people get fired, though. Just keep firing IT people until all of your IT problems go away, BA!
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No, bad IT people get paid 50000$ a year at age 47 while their peers are married with children, make 6-10 times that wage, and don't feel the need to fabricate a life on Slashdot.
That's too funny. My sysadmin peers on a nation-wide government IT project make $50K+ per year (engineers get $80K+ per year), most are ex-military and married with children, and none of have ever heard of Slashdot. And everyone has 20+ years of IT experience.
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In Silicon Valley, the kids pushing fries at Burger World make more.
Your math is wrong. Minimum wage is $10/hour in Silicon Valley. I make three times more than that (thanks to an extra month of pay as a Christmas bonus). The CEO of Burger World is fighting tooth-and-nail to prevent minimum wage from rising to $15 per hour by 2019.
The issue could be moot, however, if San Jose adopts the Cities Association of Santa Clara County recommended $15 minimum wage by 2019, which the city's representative to the association endorsed back in June in a non-binding vote. That schedule calls for an $11 an hour wage on Jan. 1, 2017, $13.50 in 2018 and $15 in 2019.
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2016/09/30/san-jose-raises-minimum-wage-but-fine-print-once.html [bizjournals.com]
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If someone making more than three times what you claim is "scraping by" in Silicon Valley, well, you don't need a lot of math.
The math is simple. I have money left over after I pay the bills each month. People who make three times more money than I do and whine about it have money issues.
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You have life issues.
No, I live a modest lifestyle. Other people have issues with the way I live. That's their problem, not mine.
How many times a month do you go to Goodwill?
I gave a box of old clothes to Goodwill last month.
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Besides the fact that you are wasting your time, and can simply get an Arduino and blow away anything you could make from TTL chips?
When I learned electronics in the early 1990's, you couldn't simply dropped in a microcontroler and program your way out of it. (An FPGA was a bit different but I never got far enough in electronics to use that.) I was surprised how much of the old electronic theory came back when I started building circuits again. Maybe some day I'll get around to building a Z80 computer from scratch.
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If you have money issues, you think food and shelter, out of work for two years, etc.
I'm actually at the self-actualization level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. By living a modest lifestyle, I can focus on who I want to be and not on what everything think I should be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs#Self-actualization [wikipedia.org]
Please do the needful (Score:2, Insightful)
Please do the needful and let me put my point.
Time to resign.
Oh, and insource. Your data is your most precious resource.
Governance failure (Score:3)
He is right that "Outsourcing Not To Blame".
Power might of well have been the trigger, but the scale of the outage indicates much bigger problems afoot. The root cause of this turning out to be poor IT Governance, those big picture processes that prove the resilience is designed in, tested and proven. That is a failure of IT management.
IT treated as a cost centre, everything is outsourced on a lowest cost basis. Those suppliers are further whipped into line by crude metrics by managers that got a leg up by doing things quickly or cheaply, not properly. I see this kind of lack of concern for proper governance every day, address this lack of proper governance is by far the most difficult challenger I face as a consultant working in QA.
The NHS failure was exactly the same thing, the attack was the trigger, the root cause of the collapse of IT was governance failure by very senior management failure to ensure resilience was built in and proven.
Evaluation Problem - double handicap (Score:4, Interesting)
Back in the day at BA... (Score:3)
We detected a CME hit over the weekend on the 27 (Score:2)
It seemed weak but produced a strong G3-class geomagnetic storm, several other outages occurred as well...but you don't see even a hint of it in any MSM.
If this fucker resigns.... (Score:2)
FIGURE IT OUT, Fuck head! It's a bag! I need it! I'm in fucking Ghana for fuck's sake!
outsourcing = cheaper labour (Score:2)
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It would already be enough if their CEO has to personally pay for the blunder, and you'll see them replace cheap code chimps with sensible IT staff pretty fucking quickly.
CEOs don't give a shit about anything as long as it doesn't cut into their bottom line. And I mean their personal one, not the one of the company they are allegedly responsible for.
Re:Can someone explaing to me (Score:4, Interesting)
What I can't explain is why he is STILL the CEO.
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He cut costs and made shareholder's money. Who cares about customer satisfaction...
Re: Can someone explaing to me (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe it wasn't a single supply, but rather a series of failures over the last 6 months which never got fixed.... and then the last one failed as well.
Or some forgot to plug in the monitoring cables for the redundant power supplies? I worked at a company where a hallway suddenly smelled like an open sewer for several weeks. What made it mysterious was that no sewer line went through that part of the building, leaving the building owner and plumber puzzled about the source. The smell came from leaking batteries inside a redundant UPS in the network closet on the other side of the wall. Since the monitoring cable wasn't plugged in, the one-man IT department didn't know that the UPS stopped working a long time ago.
I'm Sorry... (Score:2)
...we have to cancel your flight, but we are experiencing computer problems and our computer staff is currently asleep. We will contact them as soon as it is working hours in India.