[sandorscribbles]

i have applied and interviewed at AlaskaAir in order to help my "hometown" airline + get free travel. 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. as a former business traveler of AlaskaAir, i stopped flying on them after the 6th flight in a row that was either delayed hours, or never showed up, with no humans at the gate to even provide updates. 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. the AlaskaAir app would consistently route me to the wrong gate, for a flight that was still two hours away, shouting notifications that boarding was closing. i used FlightAware and ignored the AlaskaAir app as it is completely worthless. now with their merger with Hawaiian Air the plan (from an insider) is to ignore all of Hawaiians modern-ish infra and just slam everything into Alaskas ancient tech stack. and if you are still not convinced, research how long Alaska Air was running without a Chief Safety Officer, before and after, Flight 261, and thought it was fine. a true disaster of an airline from the infrastructure culture to the safety culture. i now keep applying just to get on a call with anyone infra related to shout at them for ruining that hometown airline.

[bob1029]

> 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.

[somat]

Hell, you could run a high quality airline on the tech of the 60's. You could run a high quality airline on the tech of the 30's nothing except radios and the planes.

It's not a tech problem, it's a culture problem. Just because the infrastructure is old does not mean that it is bad. The main deciding factor is how well it is maintained. But that is to hard for many people. So much easier to say "It'S bAd bEcAuSe iT is oLd" and walk away.

[coliveira]

The US has a severe brain drain issue in the tech industry. American companies don't pay good salaries for people who specialize in well tested technologies, like the ones you mention from 2015. These same companies prefer to throw tons of money at shiny new things, like blockchain, AI, or whatever the next buzzword will be. Engineers in stablished tech areas will either have to move with the crowd or retire, and never be replaced. New engineers will by necessity have to learn the new shining tech. So the answer is that, yes, we could do these things with 2015 tech, but we cannot because they won't pay experienced people to do this.

[Aeolun]

It can be developed. I think it’s more of an indictment of the type of company that doesn’t even consider changing anything not currently screaming bloody murder at them.

[mikestew]

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.)

[sandorscribbles]

yep! at least it was entertaining watching the ground crews standing around doing nothing while the updates broadcasting into the lounge were making it sound like the apocalypse, with Delta, United, SWA, well basically everyone else taking off....btw the Alaska lounge is like paying $500 a year to eat at a Holiday Inn buffet, no the HI buffet is better.

[jefurii]

Nope, no snow in Seattle yesterday.

[alaskalol]

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.

[12_throw_away]

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

[sandorscribbles]

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".

[Schiendelman]

90 minutes? I live in south Seattle - Link from downtown Seattle takes half that. It's crazy to drive on I-5 and you don't have to.

[bsimpson]

Virgin America was the best airline in the US and they ruined it by assimilating it into Alaska's kitchyass log cabin motif.

[arwhatever]

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.