3 ms·

I honestly found this completely unreadable. For example (and there are many others), what does this even mean: > This place hadn't quite ascended to the level

I honestly found this completely unreadable. For example (and there are many others), what does this even mean: > This place hadn't quite ascended to the level of giving outages notable names ("Call the Cops", "Silent Night", "A Tree Did It" being just a few from elsewhere), it remained just "1152" after an associated ticket in a bug tracking system.

pjc50 6y ago
Just as some vulnerabilities have names like "Heartbleed" or "Spectre", some incidents leave enough of a mark on the company culture that they are assigned names.
eecc 6y ago
I think she used the wrong conjunction, but the meaning is quite clear
- rachelbythebay 6y ago
  I definitely screwed that one up, and it's slightly different now. I was going for one of those voiceover-y "not having attained X, they went for Y instead" approaches and it fizzled. I think it's because it was too long and because it's text and not an actual voiceover. (If that makes sense.)
  - eecc 6y ago
    I got it, and indeed if you read it at “talking speed” it works ok. By the way, I also appreciated the post. I’ve been in similar situations in several occasions and never quite figured out how to avoid stigma and bad feelings for stepping on other peoples’ ego. I’ll give your technique a try
yaacov 6y ago
Facebook names their biggest outages and turns them into parts of the company mythology. Part of that is cool naming.
- vitus 6y ago
  It's not just Facebook. It's easier in a conversation to refer to an outage that was caused by a system called Maya by a descriptive canonical name like "Mayan Apocalypse", than to refer to it as 14351. As companies grow and accumulate more interesting outages, it becomes harder to keep all these magic numbers in your mental cache.
  - busterarm 6y ago
    In this case the company being referred to IS Facebook though.
    - rachelbythebay 6y ago
      https://money.cnn.com/2014/08/04/news/companies/facebook-outage-911/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2014/08/04/news/companies/facebook-out... I always wanted to apologize to Sgt. Brink for having to take my calls that day.
klyrs 6y ago
She's recently quit a company, and is not naming that company. She's written a few articles about the reasons for her departure, and they're all very opaque. Full of stuff that folks on the inside will understand, that the rest of us can make guesses about. At times, she's pretty explicit that she's writing for her former co-workers, if not to give hope, at least to make them feel seen & heard about experiences they can't talk about.
- spamalot159 6y ago
  Does anyone know what company she is referring to? Seems like Facebook could be likely.
  - busterarm 6y ago
    Facebook is the previous company she quit to this one. I found myself in yet another tech gig in an attempt to provide reliability to a company that (as it turned out) was about to have its IPO. There's a big hint as to the name of the company in the post. If you look at companies that are expected to IPO in the very near term, I'm sure you'll figure it out.
  - MapleWalnut 6y ago
    Lyft
xsmasher 6y ago
"It" refers to this outage. Changing the subject mid-sentence does harm readability.

pjc50 6y ago

Just as some vulnerabilities have names like "Heartbleed" or "Spectre", some incidents leave enough of a mark on the company culture that they are assigned names.

eecc 6y ago

I think she used the wrong conjunction, but the meaning is quite clear

rachelbythebay 6y ago
I definitely screwed that one up, and it's slightly different now. I was going for one of those voiceover-y "not having attained X, they went for Y instead" approaches and it fizzled. I think it's because it was too long and because it's text and not an actual voiceover. (If that makes sense.)
- eecc 6y ago
  I got it, and indeed if you read it at “talking speed” it works ok. By the way, I also appreciated the post. I’ve been in similar situations in several occasions and never quite figured out how to avoid stigma and bad feelings for stepping on other peoples’ ego. I’ll give your technique a try

yaacov 6y ago

Facebook names their biggest outages and turns them into parts of the company mythology. Part of that is cool naming.

vitus 6y ago
It's not just Facebook. It's easier in a conversation to refer to an outage that was caused by a system called Maya by a descriptive canonical name like "Mayan Apocalypse", than to refer to it as 14351. As companies grow and accumulate more interesting outages, it becomes harder to keep all these magic numbers in your mental cache.
- busterarm 6y ago
  In this case the company being referred to IS Facebook though.
  - rachelbythebay 6y ago
    https://money.cnn.com/2014/08/04/news/companies/facebook-outage-911/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2014/08/04/news/companies/facebook-out... I always wanted to apologize to Sgt. Brink for having to take my calls that day.

klyrs 6y ago

She's recently quit a company, and is not naming that company. She's written a few articles about the reasons for her departure, and they're all very opaque. Full of stuff that folks on the inside will understand, that the rest of us can make guesses about. At times, she's pretty explicit that she's writing for her former co-workers, if not to give hope, at least to make them feel seen & heard about experiences they can't talk about.

spamalot159 6y ago
Does anyone know what company she is referring to? Seems like Facebook could be likely.
- busterarm 6y ago
  Facebook is the previous company she quit to this one. I found myself in yet another tech gig in an attempt to provide reliability to a company that (as it turned out) was about to have its IPO. There's a big hint as to the name of the company in the post. If you look at companies that are expected to IPO in the very near term, I'm sure you'll figure it out.
- MapleWalnut 6y ago
  Lyft

xsmasher 6y ago

"It" refers to this outage. Changing the subject mid-sentence does harm readability.