If Only AI Could Diagnose Network Traffic Problems What happens when hundreds of call center employees suddenly find their systems grinding to a halt, only for everything to return to normal at 5 pm? And why does the same problem return at 9 am the next morning? Wolf O’Rourc joins Jack Smith to revisit a…

Technical Hiring Failures and Why Companies Mismanage IT Talent Companies complain that they can’t find the right technical people. Technical people complain that companies have no idea who they’re actually looking for. This time, Jack crosses to the other side of the table with Ashley Randall to find out why both might be right. We…

Air Traffic Control Technology: Outages, Failures, and Recovery Jack talks with Harvey Scolnick about his years working with air traffic control technology and the failures that came with it. From construction work accidentally cutting a critical cable and knocking an air traffic control facility offline, with systems unavailable and aircraft still in the sky, to…

When Global Teams Don’t Work the Same Way IT may run on the same protocols everywhere, but the people operating it certainly don’t. Put teams from different countries, companies, and working cultures onto the same project and apparently simple questions about responsibility, communication, deadlines, and escalation can suddenly have very different answers. This episode looks…

Diagnosing an IBM Mainframe Hardware Failure Texas, 1978. Robert was working at a cotton co-op running what may have been one of the world’s earliest online auction systems. Farmers received punch cards representing their bales of cotton — occasionally complete with enough stray cotton fibres to jam the card readers — while buyers placed bids…

When Arcade Machines Go Online A modern pinball machine isn’t just flippers, bumpers, lights, and a very large box making expensive noises. It’s a connected computer with software updates, online score tracking, player accounts, remote management, and an Internet connection. Evert Brochez from Torius joins Jack to explain how pinball evolved from electromechanical machines into…

Blame, Reorganize, Repeat There is an old management joke about an outgoing manager leaving three numbered envelopes for their successor. When the first crisis arrives: blame your predecessor. The second: reorganize. And when the third arrives… prepare three envelopes. We look at why this joke has survived for decades, and why anyone who has worked…

Software Testing Done Right – Where, When and What Should You Test? Testing software sounds simple enough. But what exactly should you test, where should those tests happen, and how do you decide which parts of a complex system need the most attention? Jack talks with Mooly Beeri about software testing from a developer’s perspective:…

How a Mainframe Timer Bug Slowed an Entire Development Team One day, a busy IBM-compatible mainframe began slowing to a crawl. Hundreds of programmers noticed immediately — some even resorted to banging on the server room window when the system became unusable. The problems had started after a microcode upgrade, but there was no obvious…

How a Betting System Crashed at the Worst Possible Moment Every year, the Melbourne Cup pushes Australia’s betting infrastructure to its limits. In 1991, a known software bug turned one of the busiest days of the year into an IT disaster. As millions of bets poured in, CPU utilisation unexpectedly collapsed and the betting system…