> its not shocking to state they are a very ancient infrastructure that is being run and protected by fiefdoms that refuse to even acknowledge best practices of any infrastructure tech released in the past decade
I struggle with the notion that a high quality airline operating system cannot be developed using technologies as of 2015. Most of what we are drowning in right now is the product of the last 10 years.
The last place we need fancy new shit is in air travel. This is precisely the kind of thing where you do want to call someone like IBM to install a mainframe. Failure of an airline's IT systems can begin to approach the kind of impact you get with a payment network outage.
one of those flights was because Alaska Air had not trained their ground crews how to de-ice the plane and refused to use the deice-as-a-service, stubbornly keeping it in-house, which had their entire Alaska flight grounded at KSEA for an entire day for a light dusting of snow.
Oh, was that the reason we were stuck in Orlando, and the only airline that couldn’t fly out of SeaTac due to snow that day was the one with “Alaska” in its name? (Yes, literally every other airline at SeaTac that day was flying, if a bit delayed.)
100% agree on fiefdoms. The work is not hard, but if you're not a culture fit, you won't last more then a few years.
I encourage you and anyone to apply, it's very easy to get in, and the free travel is fun. Most if not all of Tech is remote and does not require any in office AFAIK. One thing though: They do not do cross collaboration and rather churn through new employees to set them up for failure and pin issues on whichever employee is leaving that month.
Hawaiian though is not running anything "modern" except if you count SAAS as modern, their IT is pretty thin and older. Most of Alaska IT does very old things because people who encourage change aren't embrace. The team would say it's conservative and that usually is the safer answer, because when change does happen and it goes bad - what happened here is what everyone is afraid of. They will terminate/this is a resume generating event for this specific engineer in ITS. Anyone can verify this by going to LinkedIn, and reviewing the employees in IT/Tech. You'll see what I mean immediately. Everyone on AS and HA are on LinkedIn so recreating an orgchart and seeing techstacks are very, very obvious, you can also search previous job descriptions for job ads too.
I'd like to be more specific, but I can't. Though to put prospective: in some examples if a plane is delayed at gate, it can be something as simple as SMTP broke, lol.
Oof, Alaska 261 [1]. We say Boeing is bad now, but McDonnell-Douglas had a 30-year run of releasing model after model with catastrophic and foreseeable engineering defects. (Not to say that Alaska was not also extremely culpable in that incident too). In that light, the MCAS and door plug fiascos might just be Boeing trying to live up to the rich traditions they inherited from MD.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAYzBJxOeLw
to make their infra culture even more dire, they require in-office 5 days a week, and moved their office to SeaTac airport. KSEA is a solid 90 min commute each way from the tech hubs of Kirkland and Seattle. not to mention SeaTac the city is a crime ridden dystopia where 3-4 cars are stolen per day from SeaTac airport and the local officials response is "ya but its a lower stolen car average than the city of Seattle".
Virgin America was the best airline in the US and they ruined it by assimilating it into Alaska's kitchyass log cabin motif.
Look at the tenures of some of their senior architects and I.T. Leadership, and you might find that it coincides with the outdated-ness of their infrastructure and practices.
