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It's amazing that the team worked through what is likely the least fun night of the year to be working to fix this issue.
by ______ 14y ago
It's amazing that the team worked through what is likely the least fun night of the year to be working to fix this issue.
- cperciva 14y agoI wonder who gets stuck working those shifts -- would it just be following the normal schedule, in the name of fairness? Do more senior people get to claim the day of vacation? Do parents get priority over single people?
- cmelbye 14y agoThey might've had employees that don't celebrate Christmas.
- peripitea 14y agoMost teams I've seen have at least one person willing to bite the bullet voluntarily. Perhaps they don't celebrate Christmas, or they want to do a favor to their team, or they'd prefer to take vacation at a different time. I have volunteered to be on call during Christmas in the past specifically because it is Christmas: other than rare events like this, it's the quietest time of the year. I get a relaxed week of work while everyone else is out, and can then use my vacation on a normal workweek instead. Some managers also give makeup vacation time for people who go on call during the holidays.
- waterlesscloud 14y agoYeah, I've volunteered for such shifts before. Usually there's some "unofficial" extra compensation, extra time off or something similar.
- thrownaway2424 14y agoI don't mind being on-call for my service over holidays, because at least for my service there's significantly less traffic, but mainly because all the developers are on vacation, and most outages are caused by new software or modified configs. That was true in this case with AWS. Whoever was in there on Dec 24th modifying load balancer configs should have just taken the day off instead.
- reeses 14y agoI do not know if it is still the case, but when I worked at Amazon in the late 1990s, one of the aspects of the "frugal" culture involved all of us working in the Seattle DC during the run-up to the xmas holidays. You could be standing next to Jeff Bezos, putting books in boxes. The irony for me was that it was one of the few times I could expect to see him, despite my (small slice of an) office being two doors down from his. Now that there are multiple, largely automated, DCs, I'm not sure if this still happens. Amazon isn't really "the little guy" anymore, at least not in the retail sense.