191–200 of 207 posts
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Just hope stuff doesn’t break on sabbath, they ain’t touching no computer that day :)
Most Israelis in tech are not religious and take on call duties on Saturday (Sabbath) just like Christians take on call duties on Sundays.
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With the last (and only) job that required me to be on call I quit the day before I was scheduled. I've always refused to do it. Devs have no business doing it.
> Devs have no business doing it. Agree but, I have to say that, as a DevOps, it was infuriating to me to have to deal with developers without any care for the quality of what they were delivering. Sometimes for pressure from someone higher in the chain, other times, for pure laziness and/or incompetence. I remember coming in the morning after a hell of a night on the on-call, reporting the issues to the Devs in char…
Always be kind, and say it’s your fault. If you don’t do it for the sake of the person you are asking for help, do it because it works better. That’s the most practical advice [0] ever given by Hans Rosling [1], the Fact master himself: > In fact, I have the secret to how to get the best help immediately from any customer service, like the phone company or the bank or anything. I have the best line, it always works.…
Meanwhile a huge number of us (non-religious? introverted kernel compiling cave dwellers?) treat this period no differently than any other week in the year. I'll be here keepin the servers runnin :horns: It's actually my favorite time of the year. Everyone is gone, it is quiet, and I can get shit done.
I’m surprised more people don’t know this. I love end of year because nobody’s pushing anything or needs help. Then you take vacation in January when the floodgates open.
The right way: slow way the fuck down to the point you're practically on vacation during the holidays without taking vacation. Take your vacation during other times in the year.
Yes, absolutely thanks to all who keep our world running when no one is looking. To keep the yule log on Youtube, to keep our christmas tree lights on, to keep a fresh glass of water from the tap, warm natural gas to keep the freezing cold outside etc. Thank you for keeping society ticking away :)
You ever read something and it's just like... yeah, I'm absolutely done with interacting with this userbase forever? Yeah
Always be kind, and say it’s your fault. If you don’t do it for the sake of the person you are asking for help, do it because it works better. That’s the most practical advice [0] ever given by Hans Rosling [1], the Fact master himself: > In fact, I have the secret to how to get the best help immediately from any customer service, like the phone company or the bank or anything. I have the best line, it always works.…
One habit I picked up from a previous job was that if something is negative then it's always "I", if it's good, it's the team, "we". So "I failed to meet our deadline", "We successfully delivered the project on time and within budget". It basically helps move things forward, blame has been allocated, how do we move on from here, but this only works if you have a health work environment. This wasn't a company policy o…
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I think this works great sometimes, but I've been in plenty of situations where "I messed up" leads to being railroaded into the "boilerplate tech support" discussion tree. "Did you try doing X", "Did you confirm that Y is Z", "Make sure your VPN is working, try installing a new config", and finally "That's strange, double check all your parameters, there may be a typo in there somewhere"
My dad once took apart his motorcycle to change out a cylinder seal. He put it all back together and it wouldn't start. The mechanic at the shop heard the story, and then checked one thing: indeed my dad had forgotten to refuel it. That tech support tree is always worth checking.
The kill switch was set to “off.”
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I appreciate setting boundaries but I don't really understand this attitude. Frequently on call issues are caused by problems with the application logic, therefore solving them requires an understanding of the code. It's not usually my experience that oncall issues are a simple case of force-restarting something or provisioning more boxes, although that can happen from time to time.
A system that can get itself into a non-functioning state and that can't be supported by an operator or dedicated support person is fundamentally broken and should not be in production. In my view devs should never have access to production, under any circumstances, ever. This is an artifact of devs (and others) not knowing what they're doing, and just hacking and hoping for the best. It's really not that hard to dev…
On the other hand, there will be production issues caused by a complex interaction within the system that arises in an unforeseen edge case. These issues frequently require a code change which requires the ability to understand the codebase. In that case, the system is broken, but it's not "fundamentally" broken, it's broken for a particular edge case. Unfortunately, we may not have the luxury of waiting until 10 AM PST to start looking into the problem and coming up with a fix for it.
System Administrator Appreciation Day
https://www.google.com/search?q=system+administrator+appreci...
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Admitting weakness gets exploited very easily by people. Me: Sorry, I forgot about some details about the stuff I was working on last month. Him: Your memory is so bad. I can literally remember all the details of the last 6 months. Try to become more like me.
And this is a great asshole filter.