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Comment by dm2 | Hacker News Reader

That's awful for the people who are dead, their families, and the company.

This brings up an important lesson about minimizing risk that many businesses should consider. Many companies forbid the upper management from traveling together in case of a disaster such as this. Maybe the same thinking should apply to other employees, a limit of 5 - 10 employees traveling together, just in case the worst happens.

I wonder how this will affect their stock price. They have about 20,000 employees but news like this might scare away investors, we'll see Monday.

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In semiconductor companies, that danger is very real. It's a common practice to license major parts of chips such as the silicon IP for peripherals or even entire processors so the teams that intimately know the system design of an entire family of chips can be very small. If the 20 people on the flight were even half the team working on one of Freescale's products, they could have just lost six months to a year.

If a startup designing silicon lost that many people, it would probably be irrecoverable.

> If the 20 people on the flight were even half the team working on one of Freescale's products, they could have just lost six months to a year.

Replacing 20 people even at a company the size of Freescale is not just a "6-12 month setback." I would pull a much larger time frame out of my ass, especially if you were to consider the long-term value these employees had.

My company has about 10000 employees and we have strict limits on how many of the board/upper management (C*O) can fly together for that very reason.

Us plebeians below that though are under no such limits. That said, we avoid it by the company not feeling like spending the money to make us travel anyway :P

I work in a small team of developers (there's about 15 of us). It's been an "unofficial policy" at our company for years that no more than two developers can be on any single flight.

Back when we were smaller still (it was just five of us for the longest time), it used to be no two devs could be on the same flight. When we used to go to conferences as a team, managing the logistics of getting five people across the country, leaving from a rather small airport, without duplicating flights took several hours of planning and usually resulted in staggered departure and return days.

But don't you have a higher chance 3 developers dying in individual car crashes than of 3 developers dying in a single plane crash?

Professional drives have statistically less of a probability of fatality than the average every-day driver

Yes, and your point is?

My point is pretty obvious.

For those that are a bit slow: Do you come up with policy like only 2 devs can be on the same flight from data or feeling. It seems this is from 'feeling' and the data doesn't support it. If you're still struggling, I'm saying policies like these are likely irrational.

Do you still need more help? I could draw you a picture.

All five of us would go to lunch together most days, often in the same car. We don't much anymore, but that's more due to our size now. When a team reaches a certain point, getting the whole team together to eat is difficult without serious planning.

It's always been a rule from management (and an unofficial one, as I said - never formally codified). As a [private] pilot myself, I grok the statistics on aviation safety and understand the training required by the air crew. I understand just how much more dangerous the trip to the airport is than anything that happens after that.

But them something like this happens, and I think it's only a natural human inclination to think, "Damn, that could have been us..."

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