6 ms·

Using a throwaway account. A few years ago I did some consulting work for British Airways. It was interesting in that as far as the planes themselves, and the

Using a throwaway account. A few years ago I did some consulting work for British Airways. It was interesting in that as far as the planes themselves, and the operational risk of the planes was concerned, the company had their shit together. Decisions made from a safety first point of view. Engineers making the calls. Everything else no object. But ALL the software around the planes, from the ops to ALL of the b2c was outsourced to hell. Cue a few months later their entire datacenter went down for 3 days, then a massive security breach. Their idea of agile was to release stuff once every 3 months in a 2 week window. The thing that I found odd was that they didn't really perceive software engineering as engineering. They had time, money and patience on the aero engineering, but software to them was just another cost center.

hkmurakami 7y ago
This mirrors my experience in automotive regarding the sentiment for hardware vs software.
- WWLink 7y ago
  I think that's often the case in any company that doesn't sell software as a product/service. I know automotive companies are really terrible at it. That said, I'm not sure what level of engineering they do anyway. It seems like at best they design the chassis and maybe the engine. Everything else appears to be contracted out to some other firm. Is that the case?
  - x1ph0z 7y ago
    Not sure about other car companies but my last job was at GM where I worked on their android auto platform. GM had before outsourced their development, but found the quality to be lacking so they have started to move software development in-house.
  - icedistilled 7y ago
    Agreed, my company's biggest problems all come from a lack of basic software/programming skills which they've decided is not something they need to spend any effort on. In the words of my managers, "we are not a software company" and "learning to code is easy" and "eughhh I don't want to learn any of that computer science stuff". That latter one was when I mentioned something about clean code.
    - ahartmetz 7y ago
      "learning to code is easy" Oh boy, that's a good one. Like learning to write and learning to paint are easy. You can easily get SOME result... By the way, I have automotive experience. They do, and have to, pay well.
- praptak 7y ago
  The one industry where car analogies are appropriate :)
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
user5994461 7y ago
I feel the need to support your point. British airways software has been utter s* in my experience. It's broken multiple times a year for days, making it impossible to buy tickets. Sometimes it's only the website, sometimes the mobile app, more often than not it's both. My sister has been trying to get a ticket to visit me for Christmas. Couldn't do it because British Airways checkout is broken, tried in multiple browsers. Didn't work yesterday, didn't work today.
- philjohn 7y ago
  Yep - I've complained numerous times about being able to go through the upgrade with points flow on an existing booking, only for something to go wrong after entering my payment details and then just having to wring a call center to process the upgrade. I wonder what the cost of annoyed customers who now fly Virgin and call center salaries is compared to proper engineering?
brycesbeard 7y ago
This was my experience as a contractor for the Navy, years ago. We’ve had radar systems that can detect planes after a reflection on another plane, but the software is dogshit. Someone once told me, it’s because generals and admirals can see hardware, and fell like they got value for their money. Software, not so much. Perhaps it’s something innate in humans. Remember how Beats headphones used to add weights to feel more substantial?
- mrunkel 7y ago
  This reminds me of when I gave an tour of the software development company I was working for (we had about 250 employees at the time) and his reaction was "so many people, but you guys don't produce _anything_". He was right, we didn't ship anything physical. We just lined up electrons. :)
  - smadurange 7y ago
    "We just lined up electeons" :)
- DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
  Adding weight to headphones does have a practical advantage: it keeps them firmly on your head. I had a relatively expensive - but very lightweight - set of headphones a while ago and I swapped them for a cheaper but heavier pair because they just wouldn’t stay in place.
  - nosianu 7y ago
    That doesn't sound right to me. I don't think gravity is or should be the most important or even merely a significant factor keeping headsets in place. That, and less weight on the head should feel better to the head-holding muscles (not to your biased conscious self evaluating "feel" for the only brief time while you concentrate on it). I would even say it is the opposite: The heavier the headset the tighter its grip has to be so that it stays in place during head movements. A tighter grip means more pressure around the ears, which for most people means less comfort. I could see that while you concentrate on the feeling of headsets you may have that same bias as most people probably have that heavier equals better (quality, more solidly built), but I doubt that is true for the rest of your brain and your body. I tried to find something, anything of substance on this concrete subject but this time my Google-foo failed. Links to research would be appreciated, if somebody else has better luck. A possible confounder is that heavier headsets - if it's not a cheat like in the discussed example - might indeed be better built, but I think we are talking about similar built quality here that only differ in weight, and objective criteria, not self-reported biased by already known to exist weightier-is-better value bias. I only found this, which is really just a statement: "Relation between weight and comfort?" -- https://www.headphonezone.in/pages/headphone-weight https://www.headphonezone.in/pages/headphone-weight The weight of objects has interesting effects on our judgement: https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/holding-heavy-objects-makes-us-see-things-as-more-important https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/holding-heavy-objects-... -- but obviously that does not mean the body sees weight the same, physiologically.
perl4ever 7y ago
That's an interesting contrast to what I remember Richard Feynman saying about NASA after the Challenger - that the software was the area that was impeccably run compared to everything else.
- allovernow 7y ago
  Programming was a different game back then, when every kb counted. The bar was much higher. Niche PhDs chasing the cutting edge of technology. Now we have web dev.
  - __m 7y ago
    What’s wrong with controlling spacecrafts with JavaScript?
    - johannes1234321 7y ago
      Lack of a built-in integer type makes it clear that measurements are inaccurate, so there's a good reason for using JS in that domain :)
    - allovernow 7y ago
      You know, you're right. We could even connect it to the net via satellite for real time updates from a headless browser.
pcurve 7y ago
"Their idea of agile was to release stuff once every 3 months in a 2 week window." Can someone explain why this is actually bad? (EDIT: I'm being serious, so please don't just down vote it without explaining. For airline industry with legacy systems, I don't necessarily think it's bad, but maybe I'm missing something.)
- hliyan 7y ago
  Agile Manifesto[1], principle #3: Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, if 3 months are considered "frequent" in your industry (true for mission/safety critical systems, or systems that should not be upgraded frequently for some reason). The idea is to deliver small, non-breaking increments to production frequently, rather than infrequent, big bang releases. 1. https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
- austhrow743 7y ago
  I took it as more of a "only did this one aspect of it" statement more so than a "the one thing they did was bad" statement.
yardie 7y ago
As someone who is familiar with BA IT operations but not connected to B2B/C in any function I can say what a shitshow from experience. Engineering has put up a decent firewall to keep the MBAs from mucking it up. But shit rolls downhill and it’s only a matter of time. Hopefully the Boeing fiasco is causing other engineering lead companies to refocus their priorities.
bumby 7y ago
To echo what others have contributed, I see this as well in the aerospace industry. Project managers are often willing to accept software as a black box component but wouldn’t dare accept hardware without a high level of quality pedigree. I think some of it is the tangible nature of hardware but also because systems engineers on these large projects almost never come from a software background. I often wonder if the cavalier attitude towards treating software as an engineered product is because the software industry is relatively young. I imagine a lot of the cowboy attitudes we see in software were also prevalent in, say, pressure vessel design 130 years ago before adoption of strict design standards became common practice. I’ve heard it said that software is very much in the cave drawing days by comparison.

hkmurakami 7y ago

This mirrors my experience in automotive regarding the sentiment for hardware vs software.

WWLink 7y ago
I think that's often the case in any company that doesn't sell software as a product/service. I know automotive companies are really terrible at it. That said, I'm not sure what level of engineering they do anyway. It seems like at best they design the chassis and maybe the engine. Everything else appears to be contracted out to some other firm. Is that the case?
- x1ph0z 7y ago
  Not sure about other car companies but my last job was at GM where I worked on their android auto platform. GM had before outsourced their development, but found the quality to be lacking so they have started to move software development in-house.
- icedistilled 7y ago
  Agreed, my company's biggest problems all come from a lack of basic software/programming skills which they've decided is not something they need to spend any effort on. In the words of my managers, "we are not a software company" and "learning to code is easy" and "eughhh I don't want to learn any of that computer science stuff". That latter one was when I mentioned something about clean code.
  - ahartmetz 7y ago
    "learning to code is easy" Oh boy, that's a good one. Like learning to write and learning to paint are easy. You can easily get SOME result... By the way, I have automotive experience. They do, and have to, pay well.
praptak 7y ago
The one industry where car analogies are appropriate :)

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

user5994461 7y ago

I feel the need to support your point. British airways software has been utter s* in my experience. It's broken multiple times a year for days, making it impossible to buy tickets. Sometimes it's only the website, sometimes the mobile app, more often than not it's both. My sister has been trying to get a ticket to visit me for Christmas. Couldn't do it because British Airways checkout is broken, tried in multiple browsers. Didn't work yesterday, didn't work today.

philjohn 7y ago
Yep - I've complained numerous times about being able to go through the upgrade with points flow on an existing booking, only for something to go wrong after entering my payment details and then just having to wring a call center to process the upgrade. I wonder what the cost of annoyed customers who now fly Virgin and call center salaries is compared to proper engineering?

brycesbeard 7y ago

This was my experience as a contractor for the Navy, years ago. We’ve had radar systems that can detect planes after a reflection on another plane, but the software is dogshit. Someone once told me, it’s because generals and admirals can see hardware, and fell like they got value for their money. Software, not so much. Perhaps it’s something innate in humans. Remember how Beats headphones used to add weights to feel more substantial?

mrunkel 7y ago
This reminds me of when I gave an tour of the software development company I was working for (we had about 250 employees at the time) and his reaction was "so many people, but you guys don't produce _anything_". He was right, we didn't ship anything physical. We just lined up electrons. :)
- smadurange 7y ago
  "We just lined up electeons" :)
DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
Adding weight to headphones does have a practical advantage: it keeps them firmly on your head. I had a relatively expensive - but very lightweight - set of headphones a while ago and I swapped them for a cheaper but heavier pair because they just wouldn’t stay in place.
- nosianu 7y ago
  That doesn't sound right to me. I don't think gravity is or should be the most important or even merely a significant factor keeping headsets in place. That, and less weight on the head should feel better to the head-holding muscles (not to your biased conscious self evaluating "feel" for the only brief time while you concentrate on it). I would even say it is the opposite: The heavier the headset the tighter its grip has to be so that it stays in place during head movements. A tighter grip means more pressure around the ears, which for most people means less comfort. I could see that while you concentrate on the feeling of headsets you may have that same bias as most people probably have that heavier equals better (quality, more solidly built), but I doubt that is true for the rest of your brain and your body. I tried to find something, anything of substance on this concrete subject but this time my Google-foo failed. Links to research would be appreciated, if somebody else has better luck. A possible confounder is that heavier headsets - if it's not a cheat like in the discussed example - might indeed be better built, but I think we are talking about similar built quality here that only differ in weight, and objective criteria, not self-reported biased by already known to exist weightier-is-better value bias. I only found this, which is really just a statement: "Relation between weight and comfort?" -- https://www.headphonezone.in/pages/headphone-weight https://www.headphonezone.in/pages/headphone-weight The weight of objects has interesting effects on our judgement: https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/holding-heavy-objects-makes-us-see-things-as-more-important https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/holding-heavy-objects-... -- but obviously that does not mean the body sees weight the same, physiologically.

perl4ever 7y ago

That's an interesting contrast to what I remember Richard Feynman saying about NASA after the Challenger - that the software was the area that was impeccably run compared to everything else.

allovernow 7y ago
Programming was a different game back then, when every kb counted. The bar was much higher. Niche PhDs chasing the cutting edge of technology. Now we have web dev.
- __m 7y ago
  What’s wrong with controlling spacecrafts with JavaScript?
  - johannes1234321 7y ago
    Lack of a built-in integer type makes it clear that measurements are inaccurate, so there's a good reason for using JS in that domain :)
  - allovernow 7y ago
    You know, you're right. We could even connect it to the net via satellite for real time updates from a headless browser.

pcurve 7y ago

"Their idea of agile was to release stuff once every 3 months in a 2 week window." Can someone explain why this is actually bad? (EDIT: I'm being serious, so please don't just down vote it without explaining. For airline industry with legacy systems, I don't necessarily think it's bad, but maybe I'm missing something.)

hliyan 7y ago
Agile Manifesto[1], principle #3: Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, if 3 months are considered "frequent" in your industry (true for mission/safety critical systems, or systems that should not be upgraded frequently for some reason). The idea is to deliver small, non-breaking increments to production frequently, rather than infrequent, big bang releases. 1. https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
austhrow743 7y ago
I took it as more of a "only did this one aspect of it" statement more so than a "the one thing they did was bad" statement.

yardie 7y ago

As someone who is familiar with BA IT operations but not connected to B2B/C in any function I can say what a shitshow from experience. Engineering has put up a decent firewall to keep the MBAs from mucking it up. But shit rolls downhill and it’s only a matter of time. Hopefully the Boeing fiasco is causing other engineering lead companies to refocus their priorities.

bumby 7y ago

To echo what others have contributed, I see this as well in the aerospace industry. Project managers are often willing to accept software as a black box component but wouldn’t dare accept hardware without a high level of quality pedigree. I think some of it is the tangible nature of hardware but also because systems engineers on these large projects almost never come from a software background. I often wonder if the cavalier attitude towards treating software as an engineered product is because the software industry is relatively young. I imagine a lot of the cowboy attitudes we see in software were also prevalent in, say, pressure vessel design 130 years ago before adoption of strict design standards became common practice. I’ve heard it said that software is very much in the cave drawing days by comparison.