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The Incompetence of American Airlines and the Fate of Mr. X
- davi 17y agoMore interesting to me, the email that got the guy fired: http://dustincurtis.com/dear_dustin_curtis.html http://dustincurtis.com/dear_dustin_curtis.html An articulate explanation of how good intentions at big companies can often be implemented only slowly.
- adw 17y agoAlso a good argument for never putting someone's email up directly on the Web - you've got to paraphrase if you think anyone might ever object to it. And, yes, that's depressing.
- kolya3 17y agoAlso a good argument against using company email for personal correspondence. "AA searched their exchange database for the text I posted, found the guy, and fired Mr. X on the spot."
- danek 17y agoAnd try not to use a company computer for anything except work. Big corps usually have spyware installed on their computers so they can track everything you do. The last place I worked had software that took a screenshot of your desktop every so often, and the boss could remote into your machine to see what you were up to. I didn't find out till my last day, it explained why he was so good at busting us when we were on facebook
- mwexler 17y agoWhile poor intentions appear to be able to be enacted very swiftly.
- gaius 17y agoBut doing the design isn’t the hard part, and I think that’s what a lot of outsiders don’t really get That's always the way with any non-trivial undertaking. Recognizing this is the hallmark of actual experience.
- gvb 17y agoDialog from Makers, by Cory Doctorow http://craphound.com/makers/Cory_Doctorow_-_Makers.htm http://craphound.com/makers/Cory_Doctorow_-_Makers.htm This dialog comes near the end, Lester and Perry discussing the paradox of working for a big company. According to Cory's bio, he never worked in a big company, but he nails it here. gvb ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Lester: "They said that they wanted me to come in and help them turn the place around, help them reinvent themselves. Be nimble. Shake things up. But it’s like wrestling a tar-baby. You push, you get stuck. You argue for something better and they tell you to write a report, then no one reads the report. You try to get an experimental service running and no one will reconfigure the firewall. Turn the place around?" He snorted. "It's like turning around a battleship by tapping it on the nose with a toothpick." Perry: "I hate working with assholes." "They’re not assholes, that’s the thing, Perry. They’re some really smart people. They’re nice. We have them over for dinner. They’re fun to eat lunch with. The thing is, every single one of them feels the same way I do. They all have cool shit they want to do, but they can’t do it." "Why?" "It’s like an emergent property. Once you get a lot of people under one roof, the emergent property seems to be crap. No matter how great the people are, no matter how wonderful their individual ideas are, the net effect is shit." "Reminds me of reliability calculation. Like if you take two components that are 90 percent reliable and use them in a design, the outcome is 90 percent of 90 percent - 81 percent. Keep adding 90 percent reliable components and you’ll have something that explodes before you get it out of the factory. "Maybe people are like that. If you’re 90 percent non-bogus and ten percent bogus, and you work with someone else who’s 90 percent non-bogus, you end up with a team that’s 81 percent non-bogus." "I like that model. It makes intuitive sense. But it’s depressing. It says that all we do is magnify each others’ flaws." "Well, maybe that’s the case. Maybe flaws are multiplicative." "So what are virtues?" "Additive, maybe. A shallower curve."
- jasonlbaptiste 17y agoI hope Virgin hires this guy and makes a media event out of it. I will now never fly American Airlines ever again in my life. This sincerely pissed me off.
- butterfi 17y agoClearly AA prioritizes the wrong things. I'm betting the guy broke some policy, but is it really a firing offense? Are they going to sack the middle-management bonehead who blew this up into a much more embarrassing spectacle? Like I really needed another reason not to fly AA. These days, its Jet Blue or Virgin America if at all possible.
- Vivtek 17y agoOn the other hand, when I flew from Puerto Rico to Florida with my dog this spring, JetBlue not only didn't have facilities to fly my dog, they had no answer to my dilemma at all. And instead of refunding my ticket, they gave me credit, with JetBlue, who ... can't fly my dog. And then they said, "Well, have a nice day." No help, no money back, no nothing. It took them fifteen minutes even to tell me that they couldn't do it because they didn't have cargo facilities that could handle dogs. I have a year to fly anywhere I need to, with JetBlue, except I needed to fly from Puerto Rico to Florida. American flew me, and my dog, to Florida, no difficulties at all, on the spot. So maybe their corporate culture is screwed up, like many companies in this world, and maybe they're so big that there are a whole lot of people to screw up their Web design. But when it comes to actually flying somebody somewhere with a dog, well, they appear to be an airline. Between AA, whose staff knew what they were doing, and JetBlue, whose staff came off as clueless, I'll continue to take AA.
- wakeless 17y agoIts amazing how someone so obviously passionate can be completely screwed over by such bureaucracy. Do HR departments ever have humans running them?
- potatolicious 17y agoYeah they do, but it's a tough situation for everyone. If the HR person didn't fire Mr. X, someone else more opportunistic and less scrupulous would've done it - and the original HR guy's head would've rolled with Mr. X's. Things like this will keep happening so long as we're willing to trample all over each other in our race to the "top".
- michaelcampbell 17y agoSadly, the sole purpose of an HR dept. is to keep a company from getting sued. The bigger the company, the more that's their sole focus. This guy admitting anything but the most perfect of environments and purity of process, while not a firing offense to normal folk, opened a vector for the possibility of the hint of something bad being done. So he had to go.
- Confusion 17y agoSadly, the sole purpose of an HR dept. is to keep a company from getting sued. When that company is a US company, then yes, because of the sue-on-sight culture that has grown there. The same thing wouldn't have happened if this was Air France, Scandinavian Airlines or Iberia Airlines.
- billswift 17y agoBureaucrats don't want passion, they want repeatability - see Robin's new post about sports rules http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/11/sports-signals.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/11/sports-signals.html.
- padmanabhan01 17y agoFrom the point of view of the management - this is someone who wrote an article about the company having big time bureaucracy, lot of teams that don't talk to each other and hinting that the company culture is all messed up. well, what can one expect.
- arohner 17y agoAnd firing him obviously confirmed that notion. AA just got Streisand'd
- ghshephard 17y agoThis is nothing but positive, actually. Someone who is passionate, thoughtful, and caring about his trade will have a _much_ greater impact, career, and reward at a different organization than the one described by http://dustincurtis.com/dear_dustin_curtis.html http://dustincurtis.com/dear_dustin_curtis.html
- drusenko 17y agoA bit off-topic, but Dustin Curtis' site really hurts my eyes reading on my MacBook pro... I have a really hard time reading his text, and when I look away, I have very pronounced stripe patterns in my vision.
- DarkShikari 17y agoI have the exact reverse here. I love sites and applications that use a dark background; bright backgrounds are like staring into a lamp. It probably depends on the environment you tend to read in; I usually read in a darker room.
- drusenko 17y agoI'm quite OK with a lot of dark sites, but this one produces an insane "buzzing" feeling. Might have something to do with the gray-ish text. I couldn't get through the entire article even if I wanted to. I'm reading in a dark-ish room right now. I suspect it may have something to do with the type of monitor used to view the site, because on mine the physical effects are very pronounced.
- potatolicious 17y agoI agree. I can't put my finger on it, but the white/red text on the page positively glows at me, not in a pleasant way either. It feels like I'm staring at a lit light bulb.
- mcav 17y agoI'd guess that it's a difference in screen brightness. Try turning down your brightness and see if that helps.
- symptic 17y agoIf he changed the background color to a very dark shade of grey rather than straight black, it would lessen the contrast and ease the strain on your eyes. If you're feeling buzziness from reading inverted type, there is also a good chance your screen is at an unhealthy brightness. Great for picking out contrast, but painful on the eyes. One trick my friend taught me was to place a light source off in the distance to the side, to break up the focused source of light from the screen. It cured his computer-induced headaches immediately, along with lowering his brightness.
- edw519 17y agoAA searched their exchange database for the text I posted, found the guy, and fired Mr. X on the spot. As upsetting as this is, it's just not that big of a surprise. Some companies take non-disclosure very seriously. Why didn't Mr. X just use gmail? I can't imagine discussing any company's internals on their own email system. OTOH, maybe Mr. X just committed corporate suicide by email. That's one way to escape the insanity. Thanks for the update, Dustin. I sure hope Mr. X lands on his feet fairly soon and I applaud your contribution. I like to think that integrity still trumps idiocy.
- trevorbramble 17y agoI wondered that as well and assumed he used his corporate account to make his identity claim more credible.
- 3pt14159 17y agoHe could have emailed Dustin from gmail then told Dustin to make a throw away email that he would email "hey Betsy, hope the trip went well. Did you bring me back any chocolate from Switzerland?" Done. Verified and completely secure.
- buugs 17y agoThis however is an idea usually reserved for hindsight.
- dtran 17y agoIMHO, any employee not on the customer service team that reaches out to customers should be awarded not punished, given that it's done somewhat reasonably. In most cases filing a complaint with the customer service people would get you nothing - you need to talk to the ux designer.
- pyre 17y agoMaybe AA's customer service or PR team is unionized, and this was just a CYA maneuver? (I realize that this is a huge stretch, just saying...)
- daleharvey 17y agoits ironic that he signed the reply off with Very truly yours (and hoping I don’t get fired for being completely incompetent), but yeh I hope it turns out positive, the guy seems to have a good attitude and is apparently talented, so will be nice to have people like that at companies where I can actually get the benefits of someone caring about ui
- jrockway 17y agoOuch. I have top-tier status on AA, and they will be getting a note from me about this. Not cool. That said, I am still confused as to why Dustin thinks AA's website is so relevant to its business model. Their website is not very Web 2.0, it's true. But, they make up for that... I can fly non-stop from Chicago (my home airport) to thousands of cities around the world on AA quite cheaply. They have three-class international service, which means I can use frequent flyer miles to get a really nice seat once in a while. They have lounges. They have international partners where my status benefits can be used. I get free domestic upgrades to first class. They have customer service that cares. (I have never been greeted by name on Southwest, but it happens rather frequently on AA.) So anyway, the legacies are not totally incompetent. I fly at least every month and I would never even consider WN or JetBlue. The fare is about the same, and I have no chance of receiving anything other than a middle-seat on the back of a 737. No thanks. Perhaps the website UX is nice, but the rest of the trip won't be. And when I'm in a metal tube for 18 hours, I don't really give a damn about how much AJAX the website had. (I am a little defensive here, I know. AA has been really nice to me, so I feel that they deserve some compliments for that.)
- wakeless 17y agoI think this is less about AA being crap and more about you being a frequent flyer with ANY full service airline.
- jrockway 17y agoAgreed. Although I do think AA beats the other US airlines on paper, which is why I haven't tried any others. (I have flown on Southwest. Once. I got to the airport two hours early for a domestic flight. Waited in line for an hour and 45 minutes to check my bag and get a boarding pass. The boarding pass was "the wrong one" and security wouldn't let me through. Ticket agent didn't care. Gate agent didn't care. I then ran around the airport like a crazy person, "oh, you can connect in Kansas City, go to gate whatever". "She told you that we had room? HA! Try Oakland." Then I was stuck in Oakland for 6 hours. This was before I was a frequent flyer and perhaps I was being stupid. But I have missed a fair share of AA flights and have never had any problems.)
- noonespecial 17y agoThe mistake Mr. X. made here was not about caring about his job or even criticizing his employer. He contacted an outsider, with his company's email server, ostensibly on their behalf. At bigco, you just can't do that folks. Everything that leaves corporate walls must be vetted by legal, (and probably marketing too). There are lists of 100's (maybe 1000's by now) of innocuous seeming words that you just can't use. Language, nationality, gender, and racial issues all must be considered. Like it or not, at Bigco International, everything is a press release. Personally, I would have given the guy a warning. What he said was quite harmless and almost certainly common knowledge, but we don't know the whole story here. He may have been warned before, or AA burned by this type of thing before or both. Its unfortunate, but understandable. In the name of tolerance and acceptance, we've built one of the most intolerant and litigious societies ever. This is just one of the many sad side effects.
- jf 17y agoThanks, this is a great reminder: Work email is strictly for work, personal email for everything else.
- DrJokepu 17y agoI can't help but think that this approach cannot work anymore in the current communicational golden age. We really have social media, twitter, blogs. Content accessible to the public is not constrained by publishers anymore. If you're a big organization, people want to hear things from your employees directly and not from the usual boring PR channels, and they find a way to do so because it's so easy. I believe companies have to embrace allowing their employees to communicate independently while making it clear that what they say is not the official position of the corporation. There's simply no other way, the age of controlled communication channels is just over. A good example is MSDN blogs - anyone at Microsoft can launch his or her blog and talk about whatever they want (except, of course, confidental information).
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- nrr 17y agoFrom http://dustincurtis.com/dear_american_airlines.html http://dustincurtis.com/dear_american_airlines.html (struck-out): "Fire your entire design team, if you have one." I guess AA took some of that advice to heart here. I can only hope this guy does land a job someplace where the company culture isn't completely and utterly fucked all across the board, all the way from the hangar to the board room.
- raquo 17y ago> Very truly yours (and hoping I don’t get fired for being completely incompetent) Last line from his email, ironically.
- cakesy 17y agoThat is not ironic. I expect people to use words they don't understand anywhere else, but come on hacker news, I expect more from you and the people who comment here.
- njn 17y agoThere's a common attribute that makes for good designers, good engineers, good employees, and good companies. For a long time, I couldn't figure out what it was. Was it practice? Was it skill? Was it innate ability? Turns out, it's none of those. It's taste. Steve Jobs also cited 'taste' as the fundamental difference between Apple and Microsoft. His high-and-mighty attitude almost made me want to puke, as Dustin's does here.
- dangoldin 17y agoI'm not sure why no one's mentioned this but isn't Dustin responsible for having Mr X fired? It seems the proper thing to have done would be to make the email untraceable to Mr X rather than just anonymizing the name.
- symptic 17y agoAnd this, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is a lesson in why establishing a brilliant culture in your company is of utmost important. It's amazing to me to see all the praises in this thread for JetBlue and would be interesting to see a case study comparing the differences in culture between the two brands.