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Since I last posted this summer, we hired a few people, including a couple in my department. But we're looking to hire some more, and I'm told ITA is going to run those ads on the T again starting in about a month. We'll probably get a bunch of applications then, but if you apply now you can come in ahead of them (though you likely won't get a response 'til after new years because lots of people are taking vacation in the last two weeks of December).

The job posting link from before is still good if you want to join Reservation Operations (my department), where we have at least one more opening. There are also various other openings around ITA. When you apply, for "How were you referred to ITA?" select "Employee Referral" and then put my name in the "other details" field ("cos" is fine, HR knows who that is) and either email me or comment here to let me know.

P.S. Google and ITA signed an agreement this summer for Google to buy ITA. It's all agreed on as far as the two companies are concerned, but can't happen until the government approves it. We don't know when that will happen. For the time being, ITA is not part of Google. When/if the government approves the deal, ITA will become part of Google.

That's a quotation from the Systems and Communications Reference Manual, which defines several of the airline industry's communications protocols. Or would, if it made any sense. And if the parts that do make some sense were readable.

For example, one protocol it describes has a field called a "TPR". A TPR is an arbitrary 3-20 character string that starts with either P or Q: It starts with P when it's created by the system sending the initial query, Q when it's created by the responding system. Simple enough, right? Too simple for the SCR. Instead, we get a table ( like this... )

This bit of obfuscation is typical of the description of one of the most commonly used message transport protocols in the airline industry, HTH - "Host To Host Protocol". One of the other most common message transport protocols is BATAP, "type B Application To Application Protocol".

Actually, HTH is an application to application protocol, because it handles getting messages to specific applications. (For the networking geeks: HTH actually has separate headers for each of OSI layers 4, 5, 6, 7. Yeah, OSI isn't as dead as I thought :/) BATAP, on the other hand, isn't an application to application protocol, or even a host to host protocol - it has no addressing at all, it's just a point-to-point protocol.

BATAP got its name, I think, from the fact that it's generally used to transport teletype messages, and teletype messages have addresses inside them that can be used to route them to specific applications. So even though BATAP is not at all an application to application protocol, it's usually used for application to application messaging. *sigh*

"Teletype" - huh, you may think, where have I seen that term before? Or if you're old enough, you probably know right away: a teletype was one of these things. Think "telephone", "television", ... "teletypewriter". Early TTYs appeared in the 1920s, and computers and printers made them obsolete around the 1970s.

This is not a coincidence: those "teletype" messages airlines send were designed for actual Teletype machines. They're still in all caps, with lines limited to 69 characters, and a compact format full of few-letter codes that makes them read sort of like newspaper personals. These messages are how airline computers tell each other about availability of seats on flights, communicate schedule changes, make flight reservations on each others' flights, and many other things. Yes, today.

Early airlines designed these messages for humans who handled reservations before they had computers to do it, and they used teletypes to communicate with their booking offices. People at these offices processed computer-like workflows by hand until IBM met American Airlines and automated it. But even now, when most of this stuff is handled by software, there are places in the protocols where it explains under what conditions a human who has just received one of these teletype messages needs to pick up the phone to call some other airline's booking office. Once they relay the information, that other airline's agent will type it in, which may cause a new teletype message to be sent somewhere.

What we have here are messages designed for computers pretending to act like humans who are pretending to act like computers.

My department at ITA Software is looking to hire several people. I've been here since May and find it a fun place to work, and the boss & grandboss heading our groups are both great. The guy running this department is one of the few people I've worked for who would make me want to take a job somewhere just based on knowing I'd be reporting to him.

We've got openings for:

• Some database people. Mostly Oracle and Postgres.


• A couple of ops tools/build/release engineers who would do things like write and maintain tools we use packaging, testing, deploying, and monitoring software. Heavy Python use on that side of things.


• What I do, which is not exactly "unix sysadmin" but close enough that it calls for the same sorts of people who'd do a sysadmin job. Operations/Applications administration, managing installations of software that was written at ITA. You don't handle the hardware at all, you don't configure the OS. Think of it like what a DBA does for databases, except that instead of databases you'd be dealing with very different (though just as complex) applications. We do things like monitoring, testing support, configuration management, upgrades, high availability, and so on.

ITA is near One Kendall Square, about 8 blocks from the Central Sq T stop and 6 blocks from Kendall.