Zoo Tuesdays

[susandennis]

I'm still having issues with that old people skin thing on my back that is benign but just in the wrong place and won't heal over. Some research led me to discover that my doctor's office has a walk in clinic for just this kind of thing! It's not convenient - way north of downtown (and I'm south) but hey, I can deal. I called them yesterday afternoon to ensure my research was right and see what the actual drop in deal was.

A nice young guy answered the phone and said that yep, they were the place and on Tuesdays, the best bet was to be there when the doors opened (7 am). Otherwise the wait could be an hour. "Tuesdays are a zoo."

1. Clearly, they haven't been to a vet lately. Waiting only an hour is nearly immediate service!
2. Why Tuesdays????

I asked if Wednesdays were better and he said "Oh yeah. Wednesdays are usually pretty chill." WTF? So anyway, I'll go tomorrow.

--

My career included more than a decade at both IBM and Microsoft when each was in their heyday. I remember well the tsunamis created when systems failed. Indeed headless bodies lined up like bowling pins and the heads did roll. And that was generally with non-customer facing issues. IBM was particularly unforgiving about errors. It was fascinating to watch how major corporations dealt with their own breakage.

This morning Amazon is broken. There are huge issues throughout their backbone AWS system which affect the who's who of tech but also their own store is broken. It's showing wrong or incomplete data - during the Christmas shopping season.

I cannot even imagine the personnel carnage at Amazon HQ that will follow once their are up and running again.

I loved working in giant corporations and really do miss it some days. It was often like Kabuki theater.

And speaking of theater... Biggie's got a new trick. Lately, when I get up, if he's not here in the room with me, I go look for him. I don't see him in the sewing room or the bedroom but when I go back to the living room, he's walking in a few paces behind me. This has happened at least once or twice a day for a week and it cracks me up. OR he's under the comforter on the bed. A Biggie Bump.

I think I will do the Goodwill walk today. And I think I'll do that now.

Comments

[days-unfolding.livejournal.com]

I was cranky because a tool that we used for work is down, but I bet that it's on AWS. You're right; heads will roll.

[bill-schubert.livejournal.com]

I did used to love interacting with Microsoft when Prudential had a big issue (SQL down or screwed up somehow). They had the resources and took the time to analyze what happened, chronologically record it, and get to the root cause and give us a copy of all the documentation. It was always a full class in SQL and I soaked it up. IBM was pretty much the same from a consumer POV. Amazon and Google didn't do quite as well. We had AWS problems and Google problems on occasion, got little to zero help and really never found out what happened. It really made me leery of using their systems.

The Navy definitely fired people. They would transfer officers from their position to somewhere they could not cause trouble and then they would end up leaving the service when they were not promoted. It was pretty effective and fair. Lots of yelling and growling and such short of that.

[susandennis]

Interesting... the other side. At IBM QA was king. Revered. At Microsoft, it was respected and obeyed but not quite as lofty. I'm sure Amazon has a QA team, I do wonder about Google.

So, on the other hand, I guess I'm glad I'm not in the corporate world any more.

[manue7a.livejournal.com]

Perhaps everybody thinks Mondays will be manic, let's wait til Tuesday...

[susandennis]

Maybe

[msconduct.livejournal.com]

Fascinating to read about what it was like being with IBM on the mothership (ie the US branch). Out here in the outposts it's nothing AT ALL like that. We have frequently had to solve DB2 problems for clients because IBM was totally unable to.

When the cloud first started being a thing we used to warn clients that they were taking a risk depending on third party systems for their data hosting but they never wanted to know, they just wanted the shiny shiny. To be fair local hosting can have problems as well, but it was like people thought a giant corporation could never go wrong. AWS being down is going to be causing untold panic and horror around the world, although not nearly as much as at Amazon itself. I feel for the poor wretches desperately struggling to fix it.

[adafrog.livejournal.com]

I loved working in giant corporations and really do miss it some days. It was often like Kabuki theater.
Interesting.
Sneaky Biggie.

[sleepybadger.livejournal.com]

Very interesting that tuesdays are a zoo but wednesdays are chill. Maybe theyre closed on Mondays?

[lenine2.livejournal.com]

I learned to program at Arthur Andersen in the early 1980s. That training still serves me well 40 years later. I'm appalled at the careless manner that "software engineers" move their tasks from testing to done, with bugs all over the place.

Many places I worked as a contractor would have nothing to do with the cloud. They were wise.

Not that I'm feeling smug or anything.

Biggie Bump is adorable. My two dachshund/chihuahua boys are the same way. Those lumps are so cute I have to go over and bother them until they poke their heads out.

[facecat.livejournal.com]

I was in and out of the vet today in 1/2 hour. I couldn't believe it. Was afraid to leave in case I was being punk'd.

[susandennis]

hahaha honestly, i'd have felt exactly the same way! or maybe like i didn't get my money's worth.

[amw.livejournal.com]

I've worked at a couple of very large tech companies where even a few minutes of outage means a shit ton of lost sales. The trend in these companies isn't to punish people who messed up, but to do an allegedly "blameless" incident report and learn from the mistakes, as detailed in the Google SRE book, which is pretty much a bible for ops nowadays. (See https://sre.google/sre-book/postmortem-culture/) Traditionally these were called postmortems, but all the companies i worked for renamed them into something fuzzy that made them sound less threatening. Often these incident reports are spun into blog posts, papers or presentations that the company uses to market themselves and try attract talent to come work for them over one of the other tech companies. ("See how we learn from failures! Look how epically large and complex our systems are!")

I think that firings in modern Silicon Valley companies happen in a much more passive-aggressive way, so they'll reorg a department in such a way that the people who constantly fuck up just get moved onto busywork projects, or stuff that isn't really a core business, and hope they'll quit. Alternatively they get promoted, since there seems to be some logic that if you can't write good code or maintain the systems reliably, then you perhaps you would be better as a manager. This sort of stuff was parodied really well on the sitcom Silicon Valley which is filled with idiot characters who fail upwards.

[susandennis]

Interesting to hear the modern side of it. Microsoft was fairly ok with firing people but also banishing was a common practice. But, back then, they were changing HR rules hourly so it was kind of hard to get a handle on stuff.

IBM rarely fired anyone, and in those days, was famous for never laying anyone off. So a minor promotion to a group far away was the best and easiest way to move shit from the cog. Lateral moves were more difficult to pull off but happened once in a while.