I'm not in the trenches any more, but there were many, many times when
my colleagues and I were working consecutive 20-hour days on holiday
weekends to perform upgrades and routine maintenance on the database
servers, because it was the only time we could take down the system.
Just like our emergency personnel, the IT folks keep our world working 24x7, and we often take them for granted.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/zd/20071121/tc_zd/220071
No Holiday for IT Workers
IT
stands among the ranks of vital professionals—healthcare, public safety
workers and government—for whom evenings, weekends and holidays are par
for the workplace course.
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However, without the
glamour associated with saving lives, restoring heat to freezing homes
or guiding people through the sky so they can be reunited with their
loved ones for the holiday, few even realize that IT is keeping the
lights on.
For IT professionals, the biggest holidays of the
year are rarely a cause for celebration. Systems need to be upgraded
when the office is shut down and all too often, servers partake in a
Murphy's Law, going haywire when there are the fewest people around to
restore them.
Almost every long-time IT professional has at least one horror story to share.
"Back
when I lived in Australia—my story is from an Easter weekend—which was
the only weekend that the network could be shut down for long enough to
restructure things," John Terpstra, an IT professional in Austin, Texas
told eWEEK. "Of course, it was stinking hot outside, about 91 degrees.
The door handle to the server room was so hot, I couldn't touch it.
Inside, it turned out the air conditioning had broken, and all of the
servers were still running, but from the moment I walked in, they
started dying, one by one."
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Of
course, Terpstra continued, none of the people who needed to be
contacted could be, and while his job had not been to reorganize the
hardware, this is what he ended up doing. Out of 24 servers, only five
survived the weekend, and each of those died within three months of the
incident.
Kevin Behr, the chief technology officer and managing
principle at Assemblage Pointe in Lancaster, Penn. could commiserate,
having his own story from when he worked for a large retailer a few
years back.
"One of the rock star programmers wanted to leave a
day early for the Thanksgiving holiday, having gotten all of his work
done," Behr said. "Not realizing there had been a change freeze at the
end of October, as the company did 60 percent of their business in the
last two months of the year, he'd put a lot of code changes on their
site. Nobody knew that he did this, and when the operations guys who
were left rebooted their servers, there were literally no items left
for sale on their site."
These IT professionals ended up
spending the days before Black Friday trying to figure out why they had
nothing for sale on their site. They had to restore the site from the
backup, and literally worked three days straight through the holiday
weekend to get the site back up, Behr explained.
Of course, the
biggest and most famous holiday weekend in which nearly every IT
professional in the world was on the clock was the Y2K turnover.
"It
was a horrible experience for all of us in any kind of finance," said a
former independent consultant and IT specialist in New Jersey who asked
not to be identified. "When that Cobalt clock would turn over, we all
had to be there in case someone didn't code it correctly. When midnight
hit and everything was okay, we still had to watch the screens for four
or five hours, while the clock turned over in different time zones.
"That was how we spent our New Year's Eve, while our friends were
drinking champagne at parties."
These stories underscore the
sadness that can accompany professionals, stuck fixing IT disasters
while the rest of the world is out gallivanting.
Bill Light, an
applications development and technical expert at the Permanente Medical
Group in Oakland, will never forget one Thanksgiving weekend that stood
out over two decades he worked at the San Jose water company. His team
had a mainframe conversion to do that could only be performed over the
holiday. They didn't finish until Monday morning.
Page 2: No Holiday for IT
Once he finally made it home from his hellish weekend, someone remarked to him, "Isn't it great just to be thankful?"
"As if!" he thought. "We had a Thanksgiving pizza."
Holidays
and weekend such as that one can take their toll on IT pros, even when
a job offers them comp days or overtime pay, Light said.
"They
tell you that you can take the next Thursday or Friday off, but you've
still missed Thanksgiving dinner," he said. "You can't get that back
next week."
Often, it's not one or two missed holidays that
cause technology professionals to hit their breaking point, but the
combination of this and the lack of sympathy or thankfulness from the
people who were lucky enough to spend the holidays with their loved
ones.
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"So
many companies don't realize that the people who get screwed are those
left on the holidays or the less-senior workers trying to earn their
stripes," Behr said. "Something always blows up and the people who
leave on the lights are screwed. They have no context to try to figure
out what went wrong."
In Terpstra's case, his bosses did finally
say thank you two weeks later when there was a period of
accountability, but there was certainly no bonus.
"Their real concern was that it had been a very costly affair, and how it could have been avoided," he explained.
Behr
argues that these repeated situations—especially considering that he
estimates that 80 percent of outages are self-inflicted by
companies—can eventually make IT professionals hate their jobs.
"There
are a lot of really sharp folks doing their time, but too often the
reward for good work is more work… often, these IT guys were worn out
even before Thanksgiving came," he said. "Thanksgiving is just one
piece of the pie."
In many cases, the smallest human acts from
managers and bosses can make a huge difference in IT worker morale,
reassuring them that their employers aren't just taking advantage of
them.
"I had a boss one year who brought down a plate of dinner
from his house, and a bottle of wine, even though it was forbidden to
have any alcohol on the job," Light said.
The boss hadn't given
him the night off or a reprieve from the work that the company needed
done, but he had shown some thankfulness and understanding, something
that Light has never forgotten.
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