Or they could actually charge ticket prices that cover the cost of doing business and stop treating their passengers like a it's a time-share sales pitch the whole way.
They can't do this most of the time because for most of the year on most routes, supply outstrips demand (i.e., many/most flights on most airlines fly at least a little bit empty, often significantly empty – overall load factors are about 80-85%). They have to charge fares that customers will be willing to pay, even if that means losing money on a given flight. They can only charge profitable fares on the routes and times of year when demand surges (peak routes, holiday periods, major events). They have to keep their network capacity high enough to satisfy the peak demand, but for most of the year and most of the network, demand is lower, so they have to settle for break-even or loss-minimization. (For the record, I co-founded a flight search startup that became a fare optimization platform.)
Was that Flightfox? If so, I loved using it, helped me save so much money but also time :)
It sounds like there’s a problem with having too many flights that are barely full and hence unprofitable. AFAIK the federal gov spends significant money subsidising many “small airport” routes even if they’re barely used.
That’s just the nature of the beast. Airlines have to align large capital intensive assets with fluctuating passenger demand and fuel prices. And at congested airports the slots are also expensive assets that get auctioned off, and operate on a use it or lose it basis.
Spirit and the other LCC’s problem is that the legacy airlines are now offering a similar product in their basic economy that has less hassle, higher frequency, is sometimes eligible for earnings on their massive loyalty programs, etc.
Yup, and this is exacerbated by how services like Google Flights work. There's little visibility into any kind of "quality" metric, but prices are always front and center. So why would you optimize based on anything else?
I guess some of the legacy carriers are now drinking champagne since they got rid of one of the more aggressive ULCC competitors.
However, if you wait till your competition goes broke, you need to ensure you survive long enough and stay big enough so you don't get bought. That's not exactly easy.
Southwest used to do this, but then somehow got a CEO that burnt it all down instead of raising ticket prices by $20-30.
Before them Alaska Air was similar, and is now similarly bad.
Having the customers actually own the airline seems like a reasonable approach. The trick is kicking all the assholes off the board, so they can’t fire leadership for treating customers decently while turning a sustainable profit.
Consumers only look at bottom line. There is basically two markets with airlines, higher end market with credit cards and premium seating; lower end where consumer solely looks at ticket price.
A huge number of businesses survive on whales, it's becoming really apparent. I'm kinda surprised how common it is.
I wonder if this will be the next "market" to exploit if ad revenue ever dies down too much, or if it's one that's always been there, and I've simply never been a part of.
Companies are in it to extract as much value as possible for the least spend. Inside a bigco tech company nothing get engineering time allocated unless there is a monetary ROI attached. Which is why basic usability is neglected while features to sell you things are worked on constantly.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. They were not "removed", they were made to be disallowed if and only if the school wanted to receive a certain kind of government funding. Some schools have enough money that they can ignore this. Notably, Stanford said they would give up the funding to keep their policy of legacy admissions.
So the richest, most prestigious schools where legacy admissions are a gateway to the upper classes, will keep the policy.
Laying off 10% of your workforce at a company this size means someone high up has been making some pretty significant mistakes.
So the answer is, when an executive is held accountable for disrupting this many people's lives. When they claw back bonuses they have probably received for hitting or setting those previous hiring targets.
Laying off 10% of your workforce at a company this size means someone high up has been making some pretty significant mistakes.
Why must a mistake have been made, as opposed to just changes in the market? Doesn't this presuppose that people are entitled to keep their job as long as they want to, and if the company no longer needs them, it's a violation of that right?
And even if it's because the leaders of the company misjudged something, I'm unclear how that means that employees who were laid off have had some great injustice visited upon them.
I got laid off from Block a little over a year ago, and I wasn't salty about it at all. They paid me millions of dollars over the years I was there, they gave me great severance, and I don't view myself as entitled to be able to sell my labor to them, just as I don't view them as being entitled to buy my labor. I wouldn't have felt bad ending my employment if it was best for me, why should they feel bad for doing the same?
> Why must a mistake have been made, as opposed to just changes in the market?
If you're high up at a company like Meta, you likely have a compensation package worth millions a year.
The question is what are they being paid for if not to be "better" at steering the ship than others? They always tell us they are brilliant leaders who bring more value to the company than others could or would.
So if they're just following the market like everyone else, and having to react with large reversals, then to me, it starts to poke some pretty large holes in this idea that they are somehow the best of the best. It starts to look like their only real skills are self-promotion and career advancement. Not because they're better at operating the company, but because they're better at office politics.
This is nothing new of course, this is the way most organizational structures have worked since the dawn of time. The people with power are given deference and privilege commensurate with being elite, but really they're just average at doing their actual job and kind of guessing their way through it. I'm not saying Meta is special or uniquely culpable for this mistake here. I'm saying it's a sad fact of life and maybe, just maybe, if we all start saying out loud this truth, that this is something we could change as a society.
the fact that the employees have voluntarily consented to wearing the diapers means that wearing the diaper is better than any alternative available to them, which proves that forcing employees to wear diapers maximizes total social utility
But those are mostly things that were possible before basic web search became nearly unusable.
I don't disagree with you at all, I have found that I turn to LLMs to answer questions that I would have just searched with Google before.
It feels like a case of companies creating a problem to sell you the solution. The problem in their eyes is that they couldn't squeeze any more money out of search. So they bring us LLMs to replace it at what is sure to be a much higher cost. But they had to torpedo search to force users to use LLMs.
Fair point gtowey. I am with you up to a point. But we have to admit, the new AI way is often faster and needs less brain power. Let's be honest, consumers love that.
The interface can be independent of the implementation. Under the hood git does everything you need. If learning to use it at a low level isnt appealing, then you can put an interface on top which is more ergonomic.
Git still doesn't work well with non-text data, including being incredibly slow. There's a reason why game studios use things like Plastic SCM and Perforce.
There may be situations where the git defaults aren't ideal.
I found that for the special scenario of game development git-lfs did the job quite well for me.
> Git still doesn't work well with non-text data
Seems like you are either mishandling git in your situation or you require another tool (different merge driver or difftool?). But I would argue that in either case git infrastructure is not "Buggy" as you suggest neither does it need a rewrite like the original article suggests.
It works as intended and additionally it provides you with the hooks and possibilities to adapt it to your workflow, for example handling large binary format files.
Perhaps for your usecase you would be better off using an alternative for example: one drive business, Plastic SCM, Perforce, google drive or an internal file server. That doesn't mean that git should be rewritten to fit your needs.
It feels like you want a regular sedan to both race in F1 and carry the same load as a lorry, use a specialized tool for your needs.
I mean, this can go both ways. "Git solves the problems I care about and any problem outside of that is a misuse of Git" versus what I'm stating.
> Seems like you are either mishandling git in your situation
It's not my fault that Git has become the standard for source control even though not all source is text-based. All the tools integrated with Git, like GitHub, diffing, merging, etc. are based upon text being the norm.
> There may be situations where the git defaults aren't ideal.
Citation needed on this one. Every problem I've ever seen arise with git came from someone not understanding the model or not knowing all the commands. Those don't make it better, but they don't mean it's buggy either.
The computing power we all have in our pockets is staggering. It could be tool that truly makes our lives easier, but instead it's mostly a device that is frustrating to use. Companies have decided to make it simply another conduit for advertising. It's a tool for them to sell us more stuff. Basic usability be damned.
I've worked on honing my communication skills for 20 years in this industry. Every time I have failed to get the desired result, I have gone back to the drawing board to understand how I can change how I'm communicating to better convey meaning, urgency, and all that.
After all that I've finally had an epiphany. They simply don't care. They don't care about quality, about efficiency, about security. They don't care about their users, their employees, they don't care about the long term health of the company. None of it. Engineers who do care will burn out trying to "do their job" in the face of management that doesn't care.
It's getting worse in the tech industry. We've reached the stage where leaders are in it only for themselves. The company is just the vehicle. Calls for quality fall on deaf ears these days.
yes, so situational awareness is even more fundamental than communication
especially because people hired by people hired by people (....) hired by founders (or delegated by some board that's voted by successful business people) did not get there by being engineering minded.
and this is inconceivable for most engineering minded people!
they don't care because their world, their life, their problems and their solutions are completely devoid of that mindset.
some very convincing founder types try to imitate it, some dropouts who spent a few years around people who have this mindset can also imitate it for a while, but their for them it's just a thing like the government, history, or geography, it's just there, if there's a hill they just go around, they don't want to understand why it's there, what's there, what's under it, what geological processes formed it, why, how, how long it will be there ...
So the takeaway isn't how good or bad I may be at communicating, it's that I was fundamentally speaking a language that was wholly orthogonal to the interests of leadership. No matter how good I became at making persuasive arguments about fixing technical debt and preventing outages, the management simply didn't care about those things. They say they they do, because it would sound insane to say otherwise, but they largely keep their goals and motivations clandestine.
Which for many engineers who got into this industry because they loved solving problems, it can be quite a shocking realization.
Which is why you both listen to what they say, and pay attention to what they do, and what they prioritise. You use the actions to figure out where they were coming from with the message, and then you adapt your message to suit that.
> Which for many engineers who got into this industry because they loved solving problems, it can be quite a shocking realization.
It's just another problem to solve, based on the same foundational skill set you develop as an engineer: Observation, interpretation, analysis, experimentation, and implementation.
All-hands meetings are boring as hell, but they'll give me all sorts of signal about various managers up the line. I'll also take any opportunity I can get to be "in the room where it happens" when decisions are made (or speak to people who were in the room) while I'm building up a mental picture of what motivates someone.
If they're glory hunters, I'll figure out how to pitch my thing as something they can brag about. If they're people oriented (rare, but it happens), I'll pitch the human impact angle. If they're money pinchers, it's all about that $/month savings figure, put it front and centre in the opening sentence.
Everyone has an angle, a bias of some description. If you watch what projects do and don't get approved, and what language was used in them, you'll be successful too.
I remember that literally everything, including basic necessities like food and housing jumped 30% higher overnight and never really returned to pre COVID prices. It erased about a decade worth of wage increases for most people.
I think the doomers are probably anticipating another round of that and they're probably right.
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