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ATT’s botched network update caused yesterday’s major wireless outage
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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Do you think a public IT staffer would be immune to fuckups?
You frame the issue incorrectly.
You see - it’s not some poor IT guy fucking things up (I mean ultimately the IT guy is the one who probably pressed the button, but no IT department acts independently from the system it exists within).
It’s AT&T not having the adequate amount of funding set aside to cover for redundancies + probably adequate staffing.
See… AT&T wants to make the biggest fucking profit margin possible… everything else be damned.
Say what you will about the ineptitude of government, but given funding, the government doesn’t have an incentive to make things shittier specifically just to get some sort of larger profit margin.
Yeah the DMV sucks, but Medicare works well… mostly because Republicans slice and diced budgets as much as they can get away with everywhere they can… and it’s much harder for them to sneak cuts to Medicare - which would clearly and directly affect senior citizens, who would then be less likely to vote for Republicans again no matter what culture war bullshit they spew from the billionaire owned cable TV they stay glued to.
They framed it incorrectly but they're still right, mistakes happen, and no matter what you plan for really bad things can happen.
This wasn't a catastrophe it was some downtown (and it wasn't even all their customers in all their service areas -- my uncle had this problem his wife did not, they're both on AT&T in literally the same house). It's happened with Google, it's happened with Amazon AWS, it's happened with various other major players. Nobody and no department is immune to them, making AT&T a nationalized company is very unlikely to have helped here.
In fact, because we're so bad at raising taxes to fund our federal agencies and things ... it might actually be worse in terms of reliability.
No. They'd hire contractors to run it but they wouldn't get paid if they fucked up this badly. And the infrastructure wouldn't be tied together.
Have you seen the history of US military contracts? Getting paid billions to fuck it up is literally the game.
That's called corruption. You can easily write contacts that hold companies accountable. I know, I've seen and written some. You can offer incentives over a lower base pay for meeting goals. Or the possibility of repeat service contacts especially in spaces where sole source isn't the norm.
That's literally the Republican argument for outsourcing more and more stuff to contractors instead of hiring people in house. All it does is add overhead and waste money.
You hire contractors for temporary work. Because hiring government employees is a long term investment. Government employees have great job stability because they rarely downsize like industry does. I don't like it either but the other option is to have a lot of surplus labor if projects end.
The other reason is that the government just doesn't pay enough for specialists. It's a side effect of slow change due to bureaucracy which helps prevent corruption in house. Also that pay is capped at the VP level which really needs to be raised.
Almost all of these problems could be mitigated but most civil service changes require Congress. So blame them and the Republicans desire to make government workers the enemy so no one really wants to fix it.