Thank you for keeping systems available and safe. I've been there many times in the past, including having to fly at the last minute to a non-internet-connected data center in NJ to babysit an emergency production bug fix that took the entire holiday to create, install, verify, and monitor.
If you don’t do it for the sake of the person you are asking for help, do it because it works better. That’s the most practical advice [0] ever given by Hans Rosling [1], the Fact master himself:
> In fact, I have the secret to how to get the best help immediately from any customer service, like the phone company or the bank or anything. I have the best line, it always works. You want to know what it is? When I call, I say, “Hello. I am Hans Rosling and I have made a mistake.” People immediately want to help you when you put it this way. You get much more when you don’t offend people.
[0]: Unless you are in charge of a developing country’s budget and have to decide between education and healthcare.
Yeah, we discourage production changes starting first or second december week, and start freezing changes third december week until it's frozen solid fourth december week until second week of january.
December tends to be hell for our customers, so stability should be a priority there.
And honestly, no one wants to work on holidays. So lets just wrap everything starting in december, maybe use the third week for some unnoticed issues and then just lay down the tools. Use that time for documentation, or shorter days, quite frankly.
That way we minimize the on-call situations occuring. Let's hope it goes well for the engineer this year as well. We have a streak to keep.
The place I work for pushed v2 of their software, a full rewrite (nothing from the old system, not even databases) by a new team, into production this week for several customers. Mostly they did it so they could say they met their made up 2023 KPIs for the v2 rewrite. There was no good reason to push it out now other than that, and there were several reasons not to, such as it wasn’t well tested and it’s fucking December 20th. Anyways, I’m not really on call so I can’t complain much, but my poor coworkers have to support this over the holidays now.
My little firm have just lifted and shifted a customer's hardware from someone else's computer room (data centre is too grand) and plopped it down in ours. Downtime was roughly six hours which includes two hours driving, unracking, loading, unloading and racking.
Then there was a flurry of network knitting ... oh they've tagged the bloody VLAN instead of untagging it on what are effectively access ports and don't need to be trunks or hybrid. lol, lose 20 mins. I wasn't allowed to look at the "source" switch's config and might (emogi: looking up and whistling) have assumed a few things ...
We did spend quite a long time trying to work out what the customer might have failed to tell us because we hadn't asked the right questions.
... so I plug my laptop into the NIC in question on the Hyper-V box and run up Wireshark ... fuck (dot 1Q tag) ... run back upstairs to my PC and reconfigure the port to hybrid with tagged VLAN 100 instead of access on VLAN 100. A better solution would be a trunk with PVID on the naughty VLAN and tagged v100. I chose the former to make it stand out.
The naughty VLAN thing is similar to a discard VLAN but the traffic is not discarded but instead gets logged. We should never see traffic on the naughty VLAN. If we do its a miss-configuration or something nasty.
As well as that, we have customers for whom Chrimbo is anything up to 50% of annual turnover. Their systems tend to be treated in the same way as yours.
Holiday oncalls are a fun tradeoff. On one hand, no one should be making any changes (and if they do, they'll have some explaining to do), so it's more likely to be calm. On the other, traffic patterns are weird, and it's time off where you'd rather not be tethered to your phone. What's universally bad is being oncall when the code freeze ends or the week leading up to the freeze.
Actually I bet some people like it (I know I do). It's not that crazy to want to dodge the whole mad rush and take lots of time off later in the year when it's actually nice outside. Summer vacation beats winter vacation, so if you have to take days off in the winter there's pressure to try and get somewhere warm where the days are longer. Besides. The "office" is quiet, even if you're a telecommuter, so it's easy to get things done. If you're not touching production, that's fine, there's usually all kinds of fun or quality-of-life projects around tech debt, tooling, whatever. Lots of important work is actually easier to do during a change-freeze or other downtime.
Our customer demands changes for December 1 and for January 1, which sounds like a terrible idea. Fortunately, for legal reasons we don't handle deployment but they do, so it's up to them to decide when to put our changes in production.
I completely acknowledge it's utopian but isn't it a better goal to target continuous stability, or at least semi trusted process for when things inevitably break?
It's a similar concept to not deploying on Fridays. If you're afraid to introduce changes due to some arbitrary timing, perhaps it's worth focusing on the source of that uncertainty.
I think that’s a great policy as it’s clearly intended to help people when they need it, and get people to unplug when it’s valued by their loved ones.
_However_ (that part is probably best bookmarked until Jan 2nd), it also betrays that your system is brittle and can be broken by a bad commit. Don’t do it because you want people to grind until Dec 24th at 6 pm. Do it because it’s great the rest of the year, too. I’d recommend you look into (or ask me about) feature flags, alerting, and automated roll-backs.
The short version is: there’s a meta-system on top of your release process that can tell (if you are using roll-back not features flags):
- commits until xyzsdf are fine;
- roll-outs starting from commit abcdef have a 2% error rate, 80% on Android;
- revert to xyzsdf, send a message (low-priority, email) to the DevOps on call and the author of abcdef that it happened;
- for all commits after abcdef: if there no conflicts with xyzsdf, re-try to roll them out;
- if there is a conflict because they were on top or abcdef, send a message (low-priority email) to the authors that there is a conflict.
There are more sophisticated versions that can do things like, if you use feature flags, flagging Android users to use the previous version. Another way to do this is to scale who has access to abcdef gradually: say 1% every hour, and revert if you detect issues.
All those seem daunting to teams that haven’t worked like this before, but it my experience, they love it very fast.
Yes, absolutely thanks to all who keep our world running when no one is looking. To keep the yule log on Youtube, to keep our christmas tree lights on, to keep a fresh glass of water from the tap, warm natural gas to keep the freezing cold outside etc. Thank you for keeping society ticking away :)
I’ll give a shout out too to everyone in the military monitoring warning systems and maintaining stance to protect us from being killed while we’re with our families.
Let's not confuse on-call firefighters or a water facility staff with the on-call admins that maintain money-making machines monetizing attention of billions. The latter is a net negative on society.
I get nervous every New Year’s Eve due to date/time issues. I work on emergency 911 software. In our system each time a 911 Call is created, we create an incident number in the format YYYY-NNNNNNNNNNNN where N is an incrementing number. I was oncall a few years ago when a date time bug was introduced that resulting in numbers being created prematurely by a few hours. As each hour passed more customers in a different time zone called in to report the issue. I was the only person working and was getting hammered with cases.
It sounds like an easy isssue to correct, but downstream systems that consume those numbers had already processed them and associated reports and other records with the incidents. I spent the next few months sorting out that mess and helping work with partners to clear out data.
On call sucks so badly. At this point of my life, I firmly believe that there's not enough amount of money that can compensate the mental suffering it implies. Even more if the company you work for has this mentality of "deal with it" without making improvements, which was my case in the last period I did on call and what made the camel's back to break for me. Nowadays I simply refuse it. For those who are still on the trenches, stay strong, never resígnate yourself to just "deal with it" and thank you.
You might be under the impression that what makes you qualified for various positions in software development is primarily your technical acumen and ability to work with other technically-capable engineers.
You’d be wrong.
While a certain minimum of capability is required to do your day-to-day work, what your value really consists of is in grinding yourself against the piercing pincers of elusive bugs and razor-wire bundles of bullshit code until something resembling progress is made. You are not a problem-solver, you are a problem-endurer.
To me, the worst part of being on call is the stress _after_ my shift ends. I understand that it's a necessary part of the job to fix issues that occur during my shift, so I don't really mind it, but it gives me long term issues. I feel anxious whenever I don't have my phone on me, or when I'm far enough into the wilderness to lose my cell signal. Late night when I don't expect to be getting messages from anyone, a random notification can sometimes give me an immediate stomach-drop panic response.
Unfortunately I feel like I lucked into this role and if I left I wouldn't be able to find anything anywhere near as good.
And I am not even sure whether you are talking about just day-time on-call or the 24 hours on-call for at least 1 full week to two week stretches or a simple 12 hours on-call you are talking about? In India the Indian managers (and American managers are just fine with it) have made an environment of this barbaric practice of 24x7 on-call handled by just one person.
In fact, even when there are US/western counterparts these subhumans projects that they will make sure Indian engineers are on-call even during American daytime. This has been happening at my workplace. They employ all tactics - from fear, intimidation, to try to sweat talk engineers into it with shit like, "Oh, we own it, right? So it's our responsibly to support even when it's night".
With that environment it becomes extremely difficult and a pressurised situation for someone like me who simply refuse to even sign up on something like PagerDuty and make it clear that my phone remains silenced and out of my bedroom between 10pm-7am and it really does.
I agree with you - there is no amount of money that can put on on-call, definitely not on a night shift on-call.
With the last (and only) job that required me to be on call I quit the day before I was scheduled. I've always refused to do it. Devs have no business doing it.
Meanwhile a huge number of us (non-religious? introverted kernel compiling cave dwellers?) treat this period no differently than any other week in the year. I'll be here keepin the servers runnin :horns:
It's actually my favorite time of the year. Everyone is gone, it is quiet, and I can get shit done.
Holidays are special because they’re special, both the winter solstice festival (rebranded for christianity) and the spring equinox one (same deal) can be treated differently for cultural variety by the non-observant.
I’m a militant proselytizing atheist raised by a jew and I still have a tree with pretty lights, give presents, and drink and eat some things I only drink/eat once per year (never make homemade eggnog if you ever want to enjoy it guilt free again, you’re basically drinking a megacalorie of heavy cream, yum). It’s fun to celebrate the generic concept of “holiday” - a time that is different from other times.
You’re allowed to feel nice about peppermint candy (and/or chocolate gelt, I go for both) at the end of December without bringing the supernatural into the equation. :)
Certainly doesn't have to be religious. I think you probably have all your family living near each other or don't like them. To me, this is the only time of year outside of major events like weddings, funerals, and graduations that I can be reasonably assured my parents, all my sisters, all of my nieces and nephews, and at least a few aunts, uncles, and cousins will all be in the same place at the same time. It's both nice and convenient to be able to travel to one place and see all of them together. It's the kind of thing that can only realistically happen at a coordinated national level, and if took a religious holiday to give the country an excuse to give us all a holiday at the same time, I'm fine with that even if I don't practice the religion.
>A community effort to construct a 300-mile wall in one week and prevent Burning Man attendees from returning to the Bay Area.
>About This Project
>We want to help Burning Man attendees continue their favorite week of the year, and allow them to keep experiencing the genuine community and deep connections they can only feel while at Burning Man. To do this, we will build a 300-mile wall around the entire Bay Area during Burning Man.
>For the rest of us, what’s normally our favorite week of the year… lasts forever!
I do partake in Christmas stuff now because my family appreciates it. But I used to love the quiet around Christmas. One year also I just completely forgot my own birthday. It was a good day (I started editing OpenStreetMap on that day).
100% - as a fairly staunch atheist though I do enjoy the small pause in reality to catch up on life admin, volunteer, or even just sit in the sun and drink beer.
My D-I-L is a nurse and will be working the coming weekend. That's her "price" for getting Thanksgiving (in the US) off. We'll schedule as much as possible around her work hours and make sure there's food left for her when she gets home.
Many thanks to all of the health care workers who take care of us over the holidays. (Along with all of the others, of course.)
My mum always worked on most of the public holidays because we never really cared about them but it did mean everyone owed her favors (she was a physician and would be on call, at the hospital etc) so she could get someone to cover for when whenever she wanted.
Growing up ignoring holidays is mostly great (fly on xmas and everybody feels sorry for you, even though they are the ones working on xmas). But it causes relationship problems bc even when you genuinely try to participate you’re “doing it wrong”.
And for all those of you trying to hold the world on your shoulders: don't be a hero. If you don't let things fail (that aren't your responsibility), nobody will notice it's at risk of failing, and thus will keep letting you hold it up by yourself.
Is it a US thing to push updates right before holidays and force people to be on call?
European companies I've been working on are planing releases till the end of November, first week of December max. All project plans are baked like there is one week in December.
While US company tried to force every contractors to work everyday and some weekends too. Are you Indian? You don't celebrate Christmas, you'll be on call. Are you Eastern Slavic? You celebrate Orthodox Christmas in January. You'll be on call.
Not all breakage happens because of new updates. Sometimes the servers go down, sometimes a bug that already existed gets triggered by something, sometimes there's extra volume over the holidays and the load is too much. Full agreement that you shouldn't push new code in late December, but that won't stop the need for some folks to be on call.
We discourage changes starting early/mid november and completely freeze deploys a week before thanksgiving and christmas, but there's still so much that can go wrong. The other commenter summarized it well, but in addition there's also systems that require continuous automatic updates as part of their functionality, and sometimes those automatic updates can start to go haywire. For some systems, the holidays are the most important part of the year, and it's extra crucial for people to be monitoring and ready to respond at a moment's notice.
FYI Israelis are not on holiday - our holidays are on whole different dates. Hire Israelis and experience no down time while working with Silicon Valley level talent
I announced a downtime for a smallish GPU Cluster starting from christmas eve just a few hours ago. It is just the perfect time to schedule a day or two of downtime for a system like that. And if IPMI doesn't fail me, I can get a lot of things done without leaving the comfort of my home. I scheduled this without pressure from my boss. It was a totally voluntary decision... While being raised as a Christian, this time of the year is for me more about solstice then about the Christian clelbration. A time to enjoy the comfort of a heated home. A time to celebrate that the days are going to be longer from now on again. A time to reflect on the past year. And all of this is easily done while having a few terminals open and waiting for remote stuff to complete...
Holidays are excellent times for hackers to take advantage. It’s not just Christmas or other Western holidays, either.
Extend this principle to any holiday/world conflict/anniversary of conflict made into holiday/calendar new year and then adjust your time of attack.
protip: US companies with offshore groups are usually underfunded, understaffed, and underskilled. Time to see if that disaster recovery environment works!
Happy holidays to those who encounter system stress tests. Can’t spell salary without some elements of slavery…
Some people just wake up in the morning wanting to fight. If you're providing support, you might just be the first person they find on a given day.
It's crazy to want to fight someone who is trying to help you, but lots of people end up in crazed states when hammering away at projects behind their computer terminals.
Taking a step back even further, I think that requiring any form of software support or correspondence with software makers is a completely alien concept. I have done it under 5 times in more than 30 years of using computer software and writing documentation.
No doubt that countless people encounter show stopping software issues for which they cannot find alternative tools, workarounds, or workflows, but I find that it's almost always better to just go shopping at these junctures, rather than enter into some kind of chain of correspondence hoping that someone out there in the ether might possibly one day fix your problem.
In a similar vein, I'm grateful for the people who maintain the foundational pieces of our digital world that often go unnoticed like date & time systems.
I worked four years in the military, and three of those I had evening and night shifts during the holidays.
Absolutely nothing happened, no activity whatsoever - just babysitting systems deep inside a bunker. Closest I got to new year's eve was watching the fireworks through CCTV.
The last year I was on call, which was miles better, but those years definitely cemented my will to get a job with normal work hours.
I remember playing Unreal for 3 days solid while working an IT service desk in the late '90s. Compaq Deskpro in software mode later upgraded to a Matrox G200 which upended my world. Working Christmas and New Year was a bonus as far as I was concerned. Dodged the family drama and got in plenty of gaming. Also tidied the office...
I'm not sure if there is something in the water this year, but this week, Dec 18th to Dec 21st (only a partial week), has been our busiest week all time already.
Sweating over here trying to make it through the week and praying that it slows at least for the first half of next week.
[+] [-] bertil|2 years ago|reply
If you don’t do it for the sake of the person you are asking for help, do it because it works better. That’s the most practical advice [0] ever given by Hans Rosling [1], the Fact master himself:
> In fact, I have the secret to how to get the best help immediately from any customer service, like the phone company or the bank or anything. I have the best line, it always works. You want to know what it is? When I call, I say, “Hello. I am Hans Rosling and I have made a mistake.” People immediately want to help you when you put it this way. You get much more when you don’t offend people.
[0]: Unless you are in charge of a developing country’s budget and have to decide between education and healthcare.
[1]: https://blog.ted.com/qa_with_hans_ro_1/
[+] [-] tetha|2 years ago|reply
December tends to be hell for our customers, so stability should be a priority there.
And honestly, no one wants to work on holidays. So lets just wrap everything starting in december, maybe use the third week for some unnoticed issues and then just lay down the tools. Use that time for documentation, or shorter days, quite frankly.
That way we minimize the on-call situations occuring. Let's hope it goes well for the engineer this year as well. We have a streak to keep.
[+] [-] ok_dad|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gerdesj|2 years ago|reply
My little firm have just lifted and shifted a customer's hardware from someone else's computer room (data centre is too grand) and plopped it down in ours. Downtime was roughly six hours which includes two hours driving, unracking, loading, unloading and racking.
Then there was a flurry of network knitting ... oh they've tagged the bloody VLAN instead of untagging it on what are effectively access ports and don't need to be trunks or hybrid. lol, lose 20 mins. I wasn't allowed to look at the "source" switch's config and might (emogi: looking up and whistling) have assumed a few things ...
We did spend quite a long time trying to work out what the customer might have failed to tell us because we hadn't asked the right questions.
... so I plug my laptop into the NIC in question on the Hyper-V box and run up Wireshark ... fuck (dot 1Q tag) ... run back upstairs to my PC and reconfigure the port to hybrid with tagged VLAN 100 instead of access on VLAN 100. A better solution would be a trunk with PVID on the naughty VLAN and tagged v100. I chose the former to make it stand out.
The naughty VLAN thing is similar to a discard VLAN but the traffic is not discarded but instead gets logged. We should never see traffic on the naughty VLAN. If we do its a miss-configuration or something nasty.
As well as that, we have customers for whom Chrimbo is anything up to 50% of annual turnover. Their systems tend to be treated in the same way as yours.
[+] [-] dehrmann|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] photonthug|2 years ago|reply
Actually I bet some people like it (I know I do). It's not that crazy to want to dodge the whole mad rush and take lots of time off later in the year when it's actually nice outside. Summer vacation beats winter vacation, so if you have to take days off in the winter there's pressure to try and get somewhere warm where the days are longer. Besides. The "office" is quiet, even if you're a telecommuter, so it's easy to get things done. If you're not touching production, that's fine, there's usually all kinds of fun or quality-of-life projects around tech debt, tooling, whatever. Lots of important work is actually easier to do during a change-freeze or other downtime.
[+] [-] ainiriand|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcv|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _kb|2 years ago|reply
It's a similar concept to not deploying on Fridays. If you're afraid to introduce changes due to some arbitrary timing, perhaps it's worth focusing on the source of that uncertainty.
[+] [-] bmulholland|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bertil|2 years ago|reply
_However_ (that part is probably best bookmarked until Jan 2nd), it also betrays that your system is brittle and can be broken by a bad commit. Don’t do it because you want people to grind until Dec 24th at 6 pm. Do it because it’s great the rest of the year, too. I’d recommend you look into (or ask me about) feature flags, alerting, and automated roll-backs.
The short version is: there’s a meta-system on top of your release process that can tell (if you are using roll-back not features flags): - commits until xyzsdf are fine; - roll-outs starting from commit abcdef have a 2% error rate, 80% on Android; - revert to xyzsdf, send a message (low-priority, email) to the DevOps on call and the author of abcdef that it happened; - for all commits after abcdef: if there no conflicts with xyzsdf, re-try to roll them out; - if there is a conflict because they were on top or abcdef, send a message (low-priority email) to the authors that there is a conflict.
There are more sophisticated versions that can do things like, if you use feature flags, flagging Android users to use the previous version. Another way to do this is to scale who has access to abcdef gradually: say 1% every hour, and revert if you detect issues.
All those seem daunting to teams that haven’t worked like this before, but it my experience, they love it very fast.
[+] [-] maerF0x0|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kridsdale1|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] 15457345234|2 years ago|reply
Yeah
[+] [-] akomtu|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cebert|2 years ago|reply
It sounds like an easy isssue to correct, but downstream systems that consume those numbers had already processed them and associated reports and other records with the incidents. I spent the next few months sorting out that mess and helping work with partners to clear out data.
[+] [-] Octabrain|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] x86x87|2 years ago|reply
You might be under the impression that what makes you qualified for various positions in software development is primarily your technical acumen and ability to work with other technically-capable engineers.
You’d be wrong.
While a certain minimum of capability is required to do your day-to-day work, what your value really consists of is in grinding yourself against the piercing pincers of elusive bugs and razor-wire bundles of bullshit code until something resembling progress is made. You are not a problem-solver, you are a problem-endurer.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160317234837/https://medium.co... -> Point 4
[+] [-] hatthew|2 years ago|reply
Unfortunately I feel like I lucked into this role and if I left I wouldn't be able to find anything anywhere near as good.
[+] [-] crossroadsguy|2 years ago|reply
In fact, even when there are US/western counterparts these subhumans projects that they will make sure Indian engineers are on-call even during American daytime. This has been happening at my workplace. They employ all tactics - from fear, intimidation, to try to sweat talk engineers into it with shit like, "Oh, we own it, right? So it's our responsibly to support even when it's night".
With that environment it becomes extremely difficult and a pressurised situation for someone like me who simply refuse to even sign up on something like PagerDuty and make it clear that my phone remains silenced and out of my bedroom between 10pm-7am and it really does.
I agree with you - there is no amount of money that can put on on-call, definitely not on a night shift on-call.
[+] [-] dkjaudyeqooe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whalesalad|2 years ago|reply
It's actually my favorite time of the year. Everyone is gone, it is quiet, and I can get shit done.
[+] [-] sneak|2 years ago|reply
I’m a militant proselytizing atheist raised by a jew and I still have a tree with pretty lights, give presents, and drink and eat some things I only drink/eat once per year (never make homemade eggnog if you ever want to enjoy it guilt free again, you’re basically drinking a megacalorie of heavy cream, yum). It’s fun to celebrate the generic concept of “holiday” - a time that is different from other times.
You’re allowed to feel nice about peppermint candy (and/or chocolate gelt, I go for both) at the end of December without bringing the supernatural into the equation. :)
\m/
[+] [-] nonameiguess|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DonHopkins|2 years ago|reply
Build A 300-Mile Wall Around SF During Burning Man:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190213021206/https://megagogo....
>A community effort to construct a 300-mile wall in one week and prevent Burning Man attendees from returning to the Bay Area.
>About This Project
>We want to help Burning Man attendees continue their favorite week of the year, and allow them to keep experiencing the genuine community and deep connections they can only feel while at Burning Man. To do this, we will build a 300-mile wall around the entire Bay Area during Burning Man.
>For the rest of us, what’s normally our favorite week of the year… lasts forever!
[+] [-] kaashif|2 years ago|reply
Or a member of one of the religions that don't celebrate Christmas.
[+] [-] JCharante|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anytime5704|2 years ago|reply
I love end of year because nobody’s pushing anything or needs help.
Then you take vacation in January when the floodgates open.
[+] [-] globular-toast|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] actionfromafar|2 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38727987
[+] [-] _kb|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] HankB99|2 years ago|reply
Many thanks to all of the health care workers who take care of us over the holidays. (Along with all of the others, of course.)
[+] [-] gumby|2 years ago|reply
Growing up ignoring holidays is mostly great (fly on xmas and everybody feels sorry for you, even though they are the ones working on xmas). But it causes relationship problems bc even when you genuinely try to participate you’re “doing it wrong”.
[+] [-] starbie|2 years ago|reply
Having a family that accepts rescheduling Holidays helps. We've celebrated Thanksgiving, New Year and Christmas on different days before.
[+] [-] throwawaaarrgh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ponector|2 years ago|reply
European companies I've been working on are planing releases till the end of November, first week of December max. All project plans are baked like there is one week in December.
While US company tried to force every contractors to work everyday and some weekends too. Are you Indian? You don't celebrate Christmas, you'll be on call. Are you Eastern Slavic? You celebrate Orthodox Christmas in January. You'll be on call.
[+] [-] JoshTriplett|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hatthew|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iancmceachern|2 years ago|reply
Here's to those out there plowing the roads so we can get there safe!!
[+] [-] iddan|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lynx23|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itqwertz|2 years ago|reply
protip: US companies with offshore groups are usually underfunded, understaffed, and underskilled. Time to see if that disaster recovery environment works!
Happy holidays to those who encounter system stress tests. Can’t spell salary without some elements of slavery…
[+] [-] cfr2023|2 years ago|reply
It's crazy to want to fight someone who is trying to help you, but lots of people end up in crazed states when hammering away at projects behind their computer terminals.
Taking a step back even further, I think that requiring any form of software support or correspondence with software makers is a completely alien concept. I have done it under 5 times in more than 30 years of using computer software and writing documentation.
No doubt that countless people encounter show stopping software issues for which they cannot find alternative tools, workarounds, or workflows, but I find that it's almost always better to just go shopping at these junctures, rather than enter into some kind of chain of correspondence hoping that someone out there in the ether might possibly one day fix your problem.
[+] [-] frakt0x90|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TrackerFF|2 years ago|reply
Absolutely nothing happened, no activity whatsoever - just babysitting systems deep inside a bunker. Closest I got to new year's eve was watching the fireworks through CCTV.
The last year I was on call, which was miles better, but those years definitely cemented my will to get a job with normal work hours.
[+] [-] wavemode|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doingtheiroming|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cco|2 years ago|reply
Sweating over here trying to make it through the week and praying that it slows at least for the first half of next week.