3 ms·

Perhaps his real customers are internal, and his continued employment proves they are satisfied.

VLM 12y ago
The above, and I'm on call 24x7x365 although I only get a call about once a month. Also both the company and I have a motto of fail gracefully. So the automated testing system and the ticketing system decide they're not on speaking terms anymore, well, we could all set our hair on fire and run around and scream, or just buckle down and do it manually, 5x as slow and much more error prone than my integration system. They expect me to fix anything 24x7 or have an excellent excuse (most recent excuse was my kid is in surgery so I'll go home and log in later) but they only expect me to invent or create new stuff in a much more restricted set of working hours (And the end users have absolutely no idea what those hours are...). Actually they're pretty pissed off at me if I make any production changes outside of certain work hours, unless I have an excellent excuse, so in the ebb and flow of work sometimes I have to read HN until I get the mgmt thumbs up if there's nothing else on my plate. Enlightened self interest provides a strong motivation to automate the hell out of all error recovery and have backups to the backups. My systems for error recovery and resumption of production are much more complicated than the actual production itself, most of which is fairly simple although on a very large scale. I literally can't remember the last time I was woken up at 2am, although it could very well happen tonight... (Oh and edited to add, I don't work in Ops. A drive fails in the NAS, a vmware server needs rebooting, they take care of it, that type of thing. The problems I get involved in after hours are higher level than ops, like somebody thought it would be funny to upgrade the software on a testing machine removing my access, or they changed firewall rules without telling anyone, that kind of thing, big fun)
- walshemj 12y ago
  So your doing 4on4 on call I hope your getting paid for that - must ruin your social life to be tied to a computer. I assume you on the standard 15 min response and onsite or connected and working on a fix inside an hour.

VLM 12y ago

The above, and I'm on call 24x7x365 although I only get a call about once a month. Also both the company and I have a motto of fail gracefully. So the automated testing system and the ticketing system decide they're not on speaking terms anymore, well, we could all set our hair on fire and run around and scream, or just buckle down and do it manually, 5x as slow and much more error prone than my integration system. They expect me to fix anything 24x7 or have an excellent excuse (most recent excuse was my kid is in surgery so I'll go home and log in later) but they only expect me to invent or create new stuff in a much more restricted set of working hours (And the end users have absolutely no idea what those hours are...). Actually they're pretty pissed off at me if I make any production changes outside of certain work hours, unless I have an excellent excuse, so in the ebb and flow of work sometimes I have to read HN until I get the mgmt thumbs up if there's nothing else on my plate. Enlightened self interest provides a strong motivation to automate the hell out of all error recovery and have backups to the backups. My systems for error recovery and resumption of production are much more complicated than the actual production itself, most of which is fairly simple although on a very large scale. I literally can't remember the last time I was woken up at 2am, although it could very well happen tonight... (Oh and edited to add, I don't work in Ops. A drive fails in the NAS, a vmware server needs rebooting, they take care of it, that type of thing. The problems I get involved in after hours are higher level than ops, like somebody thought it would be funny to upgrade the software on a testing machine removing my access, or they changed firewall rules without telling anyone, that kind of thing, big fun)

walshemj 12y ago
So your doing 4on4 on call I hope your getting paid for that - must ruin your social life to be tied to a computer. I assume you on the standard 15 min response and onsite or connected and working on a fix inside an hour.