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Working as a sysadmin, I was once pulled in to an executives office and got a very stern talking-to for appearing too calm during a major outage. Our phone syst
by aedocw 12y ago
Working as a sysadmin, I was once pulled in to an executives office and got a very stern talking-to for appearing too calm during a major outage. Our phone system upgrade was taking 4x the planned time to complete, but we had the situation under control and were finishing as quickly as possible. It sucked and was stressful, but being worked up about it served no purpose. I think I laughed about it at the time, but he did not find that endearing.
- csixty4 12y agoSame here as a developer. The server was down. The clients' sites were unreachable. I was busy trying to figure out what happened instead of panicking and was told I need to be more engaged because I seemed to have no sense of the scale of the problem and how were they supposed to know otherwise if I wasn't visibly upset?
- johansch 12y agoWhen asked what was going on, did you say "I don't know" or something like "I don't know yet, i'm looking into it right now"? There is a difference. It is frustrating to manage people who don't see the value in communicating properly. (Or maybe you had a clueless manager.)
- csixty4 12y agoI said I was looking into it and showed them the log files. I was specifically told that if I wasn't visibly panicking they didn't believe I was engaged in solving the problem. This is the same agency that accused me of doing freelance on the side because they saw me with a C# book and there was no reason for me to be learning another programming language if I wasn't doing work on the side in violation of my contract.
- johansch 12y agoOk, then they are not that bright and I hope you have gotten out of there :).