> Apparently we do have time to engage in manual operations but not to make that manual work go away. I am not sure I understand the logic here, but it happens all the time.
It is pretty simple: if whatever you are doing manually is needed, and there is fire (incidents, failures, and other things that impact the company), it is easy to get headcount to grow the team so that we staff a bigger oncall for this super important thing. If things go smoothly and there are no fires, leadership is going to wonder if they could move this headcount elsewhere. All of this to say that dysfunction (as manifested by fires) leads to growth.... and smooth function does not.
Along the lines of why I wrote a modular and easily-expanded ksh-based production monitoring system sooooo many years ago, a tool to create new test databases balanced across available disk with the push of a button, automate switchover and failover procedures, ... Save time, reduce errors, make complex tasks easy to do under stress. Different languages now, but the core requirements are largely the same. I visited a vendor once years ago (~turn of the century? I'm old), to look into a monitoring system from a popular vendor. They brought me to their command center, a darkened room with two levels of large screens and about a dozen people focusing intently on the screens and typing madly into their keyboards. Looked like NASA. When we walked away from that scene and into a conference room I asked if that was really how the system worked. Can't the right person be paged for a system fault? and appropriate diagnostic information delivered? and if you have diagnostic information, can I assume things easily fixed might be band-aided whilst recording the issue so it doesn't get out of hand? Yeah, it was all for show.
Here's a 2 min audio version of "Throwing blood against metal" from Wednesday Wisdom converted using recast app.
https://app.letsrecast.ai/r/92eb6362-75c6-4bde-84e7-71f6cbb8db04
Two emergency releases is sneaky! Hahaha I'm sure they regret agreeing to that when it hits the fan
> Apparently we do have time to engage in manual operations but not to make that manual work go away. I am not sure I understand the logic here, but it happens all the time.
It is pretty simple: if whatever you are doing manually is needed, and there is fire (incidents, failures, and other things that impact the company), it is easy to get headcount to grow the team so that we staff a bigger oncall for this super important thing. If things go smoothly and there are no fires, leadership is going to wonder if they could move this headcount elsewhere. All of this to say that dysfunction (as manifested by fires) leads to growth.... and smooth function does not.
Along the lines of why I wrote a modular and easily-expanded ksh-based production monitoring system sooooo many years ago, a tool to create new test databases balanced across available disk with the push of a button, automate switchover and failover procedures, ... Save time, reduce errors, make complex tasks easy to do under stress. Different languages now, but the core requirements are largely the same. I visited a vendor once years ago (~turn of the century? I'm old), to look into a monitoring system from a popular vendor. They brought me to their command center, a darkened room with two levels of large screens and about a dozen people focusing intently on the screens and typing madly into their keyboards. Looked like NASA. When we walked away from that scene and into a conference room I asked if that was really how the system worked. Can't the right person be paged for a system fault? and appropriate diagnostic information delivered? and if you have diagnostic information, can I assume things easily fixed might be band-aided whilst recording the issue so it doesn't get out of hand? Yeah, it was all for show.