Is it me or are big provider outages getting more common these days?
There’s always this question on every “X is down” post on HN.
Quite boring commentary tbh.
Google Outage in Europe
61–70 of 186 posts
Re: Google Outage in Europe
#62There were outages around the same time last year. Somebody in the HN thread commented back then that the employees evaluation and promotion window ends around december/eoy, thus more releases are made. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_services_outages
Perf has been over for almost a month now, and the evaluation period was over more than two months ago.
Could it not be knock-on effects of earlier changes? Or indeed post-review changes from scared/precarious engineers?
Re: Google Outage in Europe
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Googler here, not speaking on the behalf of the company, my opinions are my own People do absolutely NOT get fired over incidents. Making mistakes is human. An incident will prompt a review of the systems and safeguards in place to prevent such an incident, much like an airline incident investigation - basically "somebody fat-fingered it" is never the answer, postmortems are always blameless EDIT: now that I think of…
> Googler here, not speaking on the behalf of the company, my opinions are my own Why do employees at big tech names (FAANG et al.) are so often so cautious as to include this as a foreword everywhere? Twitter bios are full of that, for instance. It is crazy to me; who would expect anything else that our opinions being your own and nothing more? Who would expect that your word (with all due respect) is worth anything…
I work at a large tech company, and they do mention in the on boarding materials that we represent the company, so we should be careful in our social media profiles. My solution to this is to not associate my social media profiles with my employer. This is technically not really what we’re supposed to do, and I might have to change that approach at some point if I move high enough in the org to start getting attention from people, but this works for me better than disclaimers on all my posts.
Re: Google Outage in Europe
#64There were outages around the same time last year. Somebody in the HN thread commented back then that the employees evaluation and promotion window ends around december/eoy, thus more releases are made. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_services_outages
Some people are definitely not gatting a raise.
Re: Google Outage in Europe
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perf has been over for almost a month now, and the evaluation period was over more than two months ago.
Could it not be knock-on effects of earlier changes? Or indeed post-review changes from scared/precarious engineers?
I think we are exactly mid way between the end year 2021 perf and mid year 2022 perf, so its not clear to me that this could be to blame
Re: Google Outage in Europe
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
What tech company spends millions on training anyone?
The other comments already explained it, but I'm wondering how you haven't come across this 'saying' before. It's so overused and also cheesy in my opinion.
Lol maybe if people actually did spend millions training their people up front we could do better?
Re: Google Outage in Europe
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Googler here, not speaking on the behalf of the company, my opinions are my own People do absolutely NOT get fired over incidents. Making mistakes is human. An incident will prompt a review of the systems and safeguards in place to prevent such an incident, much like an airline incident investigation - basically "somebody fat-fingered it" is never the answer, postmortems are always blameless EDIT: now that I think of…
> Googler here, not speaking on the behalf of the company, my opinions are my own Why do employees at big tech names (FAANG et al.) are so often so cautious as to include this as a foreword everywhere? Twitter bios are full of that, for instance. It is crazy to me; who would expect anything else that our opinions being your own and nothing more? Who would expect that your word (with all due respect) is worth anything…
Can't speak for other companies, but this is covered in basic training at Google - if you're not authorized to speak on behalf of the company, you must make it clear when your writings may be mistaken or constructed to represent the company.
Basically the company has specially trained people that speak on behalf of the company, and that message should not be confounded by personal opinions of other employees. For example, on the recent FB outage, there was an employee posting inside information on reddit - media companies just took it at face value and ran around with it reporting as it was what FB itself was saying about the outage.
I'm not aware of any actual risks in the US, but then again I'm not in the US. For me this seems a minor point, and I actually enjoy separating my public persona from the company for which I work, being it Google or a small startup.
Re: Google Outage in Europe
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Googler here, not speaking on the behalf of the company, my opinions are my own People do absolutely NOT get fired over incidents. Making mistakes is human. An incident will prompt a review of the systems and safeguards in place to prevent such an incident, much like an airline incident investigation - basically "somebody fat-fingered it" is never the answer, postmortems are always blameless EDIT: now that I think of…
> Googler here, not speaking on the behalf of the company, my opinions are my own Why do employees at big tech names (FAANG et al.) are so often so cautious as to include this as a foreword everywhere? Twitter bios are full of that, for instance. It is crazy to me; who would expect anything else that our opinions being your own and nothing more? Who would expect that your word (with all due respect) is worth anything…
> Why do employees at big tech names (FAANG et al.) are so often so cautious as to include this as a foreword everywhere?
This isn’t just ‘big tech’ - I work at a relatively small tech company, but I’d never want anything I say about the company to be mistaken as some sort of ‘official statement’ especially if it related to an incident that possibly had a financial impact on external parties, and could conceivably be misused in that context in the future.
I go as far as never writing private emails from my work mail for the same sort of reasons - although that is from a possibly over-abundance of caution.
Re: Google Outage in Europe
#69We just released a rewrite of an (web)app today so lot’s of support calls and mails. Really unfortunate timing, hah
Re: Google Outage in Europe
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now that I think of it, I might have blamed my provider or at least restarted my modem if Hacker News was ever down...
It’s the perfect connection test. 9 times out of 10 if you can’t connect to hn the problem is you, not them. Probably even 99/100
HN is down pretty frequently, but I think it shows custom error page served from Cloudflare.