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Spoken like someone who's never caused a prod outage at a real company, I guess. I'd say that - outside of some startup or small company that has few (or no?) u

Spoken like someone who's never caused a prod outage at a real company, I guess. I'd say that - outside of some startup or small company that has few (or no?) users - the cautious approach is right. The IT guy knew that he was a podunk pissant warden of a very, very small portion of very, very large organization (an org of a few hundred people is basically nothing compared to the vastness of many oil companies) and that the value that his org provided was compromised by this automated approach, without knowing how to mitigate that compromise. He made the right call, assuming he was just there as a bulwark against exactly this.

airstrike 6y ago
There's no "prod outage" here. It was a data entry script.
- WaxProlix 6y ago
  What happens with that data, though? Is this a non production data entry job?
  - airstrike 6y ago
    Same that would happen with the manual typing process. The workflow either includes a process for auditing data quality or it doesn't, regardless of how it was entered in.
    - WaxProlix 6y ago
      Okay, is that a manual process or not? Why not start with automating the testing and not the entry?
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Because testing is probably not done at all. And even if it was, it isn't the bottleneck in this story.
jsharf 6y ago
It's a data entry script. If it fails they just do their job the old way until the guy fixes it. It's typing text into forms. Just make everyone do things the "old way" once a week so they still know how to do it if the script ever fails.
- WaxProlix 6y ago
  Okay, but after a week (or two or whatever), how do you rectify the issue you found? It's easy to say get those people back and have them start entering again. What about the customers whose information was inaccurate, the resources that were misallocated, etc? Do you think data entry is done for fun? At AWS we use massive metrics and piles of data to decide what's right; why would an oil company be different, just because their metrics are collated by hand from smaller oil wells into larger spreadsheets or whatever? "By Hand" doesn't mean "totally without value", that's completely wild. Does your super low opinion of data entry people cloud your vision of their value? There's not been a response to my question of how you reconcile things after this script messes up for the first time; how does that happen? What's the DR plan? if you have real business and real clients working on this data, tell me what the plan is; it shouldn't be that hard.

airstrike 6y ago

There's no "prod outage" here. It was a data entry script.

WaxProlix 6y ago
What happens with that data, though? Is this a non production data entry job?
- airstrike 6y ago
  Same that would happen with the manual typing process. The workflow either includes a process for auditing data quality or it doesn't, regardless of how it was entered in.
  - WaxProlix 6y ago
    Okay, is that a manual process or not? Why not start with automating the testing and not the entry?
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Because testing is probably not done at all. And even if it was, it isn't the bottleneck in this story.

jsharf 6y ago

It's a data entry script. If it fails they just do their job the old way until the guy fixes it. It's typing text into forms. Just make everyone do things the "old way" once a week so they still know how to do it if the script ever fails.

WaxProlix 6y ago
Okay, but after a week (or two or whatever), how do you rectify the issue you found? It's easy to say get those people back and have them start entering again. What about the customers whose information was inaccurate, the resources that were misallocated, etc? Do you think data entry is done for fun? At AWS we use massive metrics and piles of data to decide what's right; why would an oil company be different, just because their metrics are collated by hand from smaller oil wells into larger spreadsheets or whatever? "By Hand" doesn't mean "totally without value", that's completely wild. Does your super low opinion of data entry people cloud your vision of their value? There's not been a response to my question of how you reconcile things after this script messes up for the first time; how does that happen? What's the DR plan? if you have real business and real clients working on this data, tell me what the plan is; it shouldn't be that hard.