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IT Crises vs. Vacation: Sometimes It Isn't Pretty
CWmike writes "It's true that IT systems have become essential to business operations, but the successful functioning of the IT department shouldn't rest on any one person's shoulders. All told, vacations serve as mini tests to prove if a department can function when key players are away. That's the theory, anyway. In reality, IT departments sometimes flunk. The results can either be comical or turn out to be a serious wake-up call to organizations that need a better Plan B. To prime your mental pump before your own vacation, Computerworld compiled anecdotes about good vacations gone bad."
It's essential to have some help from the outside during your IT admin vacation
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
at least in the states is, companies have figured out they can get one person to do the work of two and pocket the other guy's salary. I'm seeing this everywhere in the form of longer wait times for services. It's also really screwing the economy because it means there's 1 less job available, so higher unemployment and less money circulating. We're heading back to the 1800s, when our masters argued that idle hands were the devil's playthings, and the lower class would just spend the time drinking anyway... Kiss your vacations (and your 40 hour work week) goodbye.
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and that lead to the hit by bus problem what do you do then hot shot?
Make person work from the hospital room high on pain killers? What if they are to out of it to work?
Hire some one real fast and hope they can get up to speed real fast on what your setup is like? and you better hope that there is some one there who knows how to hire tech people.
Have some other person fill in the roll + work there own job and hope they can do the tech stuff? And how long can you get by with that before burn out or there own job gets backed up?
> That was the case a few years ago when Laping took his young daughters on vacation to Disney World in Orlando, about a two-hour drive from his Tampa-area office .. Shortly after arriving at Disney, Laping got a call from the CEO and the power user saying one of the servers that provides Web services to Alumni Research's 300 clients was down .. That meant the server had to be rebooted, which required nothing more than pressing a button. The only problem was that nobody back in the office could find the right button ..
You have got to be kidding here, if it was a Linux box all he needed to do is type `shutdown -r 0 now' on the laptop., which begs the question as to the technical skill of the people at Alumni Research, wether on holiday or off ..
... it won't make any difference, I suspect. There are (at least) three big problems here:
And no, I don't know what the solution is. Just pointing out that it's a structural issue, and collecting anecdotes about how badly things tend to go wrong doesn't seem to be doing much to motivate anyone to try to fix the underlying problems.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Most companies stupid enough to follow the OP's observation are stupid enough to bet that nothing catastrophic will happen to key people in their organization.
Basically, stupid companies will do stupid things and will suffer because of it. It's only a problem if it's systemic and I haven't noticed that yet.
When I leave, I look my fellow co-workers in the eye and say, "If anything happens while I am on vacation. Whatever you do, don't call!" then I turn off my pager and put it on my desk and laugh manically!
We started going more exotic places. Places that don't have cell signal or internet access. If they want to call a boat to the tune of $5-$10 a minute they're welcome to.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
This article is the short version for why I'm leaving IT. After eleven years in the industry, with these kinds of demands on my time and crap pay, it's just not worth it. I can make more money working in a garage than I can working in IT, with better pay, better vacation and better treatment.
IT can shove their jobs. If nothing changes in that industry, it's going to get very difficult to find qualified people.
I know anytime I go on vacation, it causes major headaches for those that try to prevent me from being completely buried by the time I get back
But I'm always buried when I return. Then I have at least a week of torture trying to catch back up. People say someone else is going to get trained and certified to serve as a backup for me, but it never materializes.
I think most companies just have to experience the lesson the hard way, by a bus or a plane ticket. And even then, half of them don't learn anything from the lesson.
They're just too short-sighted. All they see is the cost of investment today, not the return of tomorrow. I find it amazing that business majors, managers, and CEOs don't have that skill. They are blind to the benefits to all involved, and are comforted in the peace they find in keeping their heads in the sand.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
"On the night before Thanksgiving last year, T.J. Whelan .. phone started buzzing with texts .. The messages said there was no connectivity to the Microsoft Exchange cluster .. That meant that attorneys in the firm's two U.S. offices and two overseas offices were completely cut off from email .. The network manager contacted Dell support, which confirmed that the disks had failed but also reported that it might be a while before replacement parts could be located" ..
This beggers belief, the IT department of a major law firm don't keep a single harddrive as backup and don't have a standby system in place for just such an eventuality as a failed harddrive ..
Lesson learned: Hire IT staff who have the mental capacity to download a hardware manual for the server, locate the power button on a diagram, and direct the on-site people to the correct button. That's just absurd.
I wonder if part of the culture of 'we can get by without backup for our IT guy' is down to total length of vacation time that someone has? In the UK its something like 25 days minimum (as opposed to the 10 or so including National holidays that were on offer in the US) and so maybe being able to cope with the systems administrator being away for a couple of weeks at a time is forced upon the organisation.
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
I'm personally aware thru my late father, who was an accountant, of two companies that had employees embezzling funds for years. One telltale sign was that they never took vacations, because their replacements would have discovered what they were up to. Businesses should insist that their personnel take time off, just to make malfeasance easier to detect.
My wife and I are expecting to test our company next month when we're due to have our first child. She's the senior programmer and many help desk calls get forwarded to her every day and sometimes at 3AM. We've been joking that we're going to have photos of her taking support calls during labor.
In all seriousness, our options aren't good. We always bring our laptops on vacation with us knowing that our adventures might get put on hold to handle support calls. We're a company of five people, so we're stressing over how to handle my wife being out of work for a month of maternity leave. I'd like to have a week to enjoy the new baby, but understand that may not be practical. Luckily, we all telecommute, so when she comes back online we can work from home and take turns with the baby. : )
I feel for the senior IT people I've worked with in the past, who I've had to get out of bed late at night to assist me with something or other, even when they are bed-ridden with the flu.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
This is a problem with the downsizing of companies. They try to push as much work as possible onto as few people as possible, often burning out the good people because they never get any time off, are constantly on outage calls, etc., and then nobody listens to them because they've identified a myriad of problems... but fixing them would require not putting out that extra new feature so they use operations to hold things together while disregarding their importance.
OCO is Loco
Take a short vacation, when they panic call you ever 36 hours to fix things. Take it in stride, go see your boss and ask for a 5% raise.
If he balks at it tell him you are taking two weeks off this time someplace without cell service and when you get back the number will be 50%
Rinse and repeat as necessary.
OK, let's say you go on vacation and nothing happens. Next time layoffs come around, you'll be perceived as non-essential.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
At a previous company I worked for I went away for 3 days (friday-sunday) at a company that only worked mon-fri, so it was essentially just a single day off. I made everyone well aware that I would be out of town and unreachable.
I returned on Monday to find my boss had flown in from out of town and was sitting cross legged on the server room floor with one of our servers in pieces all around him. He informed me that there had been a hardware failure over the weekend and that I should have been there to deal with it. After I finished fixing the original problem, and the problems he had created by trying to fix things, and once everything was up and running again, he asked me for my security pass and escorted me off the premises citing "budget cuts".
Probably much better that I don't work there anymore...
The same sort of management short-sightedness happens in engineering and software development all the time.
Case in point, at a Fortune 200 companythe senior technical staff all left the project I was on left over the last three years, leaving me as the last senior person. Management saw it as an opportunity to save money and rarely backfilled, and never with senior people. I saw the writing on the wall and started looking over two years ago. Last summer I took a three week vacation and absolutely nothing got done while I was gone. You'd think that would have been management's wake up call, but for some reason it wasn't.
Not too surprisingly, management were blind-sided when I resigned earlier this year.
Anyone who has to be available to re-boot a server is not a "manager."
Sure, in some places I've done the work of 3 people (though confidentiality prevents me from naming the other two), but I've done that within the bounds of a normal working week. The key is to realise that half the stuff you're asked to do is unnecessary or the result of chinese-whispers. Once you get back to the source and actually talk to the people involved I often find that what has filtered through to me via the chain of command is nothing like what they actually need, wanted or asked for.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
My current company, has no vacations. You simply tell them when you are not going to be there, and they decide if they want to fire you for the absence.
They also do not have weekends. On the Friday before each customary "3-day" weekend the owner declares an emergency that, somehow, MUST be finished by Tuesday.
No one wants to work there for very long. Turnover is very high. Projects don't get finished, precisely because of the turnover. Other projects do get "finished', but don't work, also because of the turnover
The owner doesn't seem to realize that he is sabotaging his own projects.
If you are "indispensable" in the sense that without you the IT services can't be maintained/fixed then the company is f**ked regardless. You may go on vacation, get sick, get hit by a car, have a heart attack or simply get a new job. This is true of any job function, but seems especially true of IT, I suspect in large parts because each IT build-out is pretty much a custom job with all sorts of gotchas, exceptions and internal workarounds to address issues, and the system is rarely documented properly.
I find this especially strange since most companies now rely upon IT to carry out basic functions (telephone, email, workflow, etc.) but fail to treat it as a critical service (single points of failure, especially with respect to personal are more the rule than the exception). Oh well.
I wonder if part of the culture of ' ...
I don't think so. I think a lot of the time the techies get caught up in their own self-image. They are often quite impressionable types and see techies in films and on TV - which almost always involves a lone uber-geek who single-handedy runs a billion $$ operation. Just like cops watch cop shows and "learn" how to behave from them, so it is with techies: they try to emulate what they see on TV or in films in some delusional idea that the programme shows how people think they *should* behave. Basically, they're just acting out their own fantasies. It's quite sad to watch as they are so obviously completely out of their depth - and end up utterly overwhelmed by it all.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Then he's your master. Deal with it.
"Make person work from the hospital room high on pain killers? What if they are to out of it to work?"
That didn't stop D*P*nt. My fiance was a sort-of 2nd-in-command for a position that had no official 2nd-in-command. Her department was forced to bring in someone to downsize their IT; after firing most of the support (the Engineers *loved* getting Delhi on the phone for support, let me tell you! "What is METLAB? I have never hear of METLAB only.") staff, they started getting rid of everyone but the top person maintaining the database of engineering software licenses and engineers' workstations---except that the top person was less than a year from retirement and had been out on surgery.
When they called her, less than 24 hours after a full-anaesthesia surgery, to ask if she "really needed" my fiancee as her right-hand-(wo)man [she was going to be out for several more days, at least, following surgery, and had another surgery scheduled in another few months, mind you], she said something like, "Um.. I.. really.. need.. can okay.. not with her," so she was let go. Mind you, the papers you sign before surgery warn you not to make any important decisions for at least 24 hours following general anaesthesia!
I could continue to bitch about my fiance losing her job here, but my beef is with the exec brought in to lay people off---who didn't respect the team leader's request not to be bothered after her surgery. She *was* high on painkillers, still had GA in her system, and he expected her to make personnel decisions regarding a person she had been training to take over when she retired.
I didn't follow the fiasco afterward, but I did hear they didn't have much fun when she was trying to retire.
Every time I go on holiday, something weird will happen with a system that's been running perfectly for years. It's guaranteed. And it won't just be because I've been kicking that system back into action all the time and "would get around to fixing it", I would get the really esoteric interconnected problems that suddenly crop up out of nowhere and you're never entirely sure you've solved until months afterwards.
However, my employer knows I'm on the end of a phone if it is indeed an emergency. They have called on me in Italy several times. The trick is to take holidays FAR AWAY from your place of work, and then they can't do anything but cope without you. Flying back to fix a company server? No thanks. Not unless you provide DOUBLE the time I'd taken off in lieu as compensation for ruining my long-planned holiday through poor planning / hiring. If a company can't cope without any single individual, then its hiring policies suck. What would you do if he went under a bus and was *never* coming back?
The worst that's ever happened to me is that I lined up my own brother to go into the company should the emergency they were having not be solved by my instructions. It was, however it would have be after-hours, because he works too, but they would at least have someone there who knew the right switch to press, could be talked through a RAID rebuild, etc. and not have to be led every step of the way and incur only a single day's downtime without making things worse.
Think the downtime wasn't important? It was a school with automated billing, parental contact, phone system, heating controls, registration, medical records, salaries, you name it, not to mention IT lessons and exams. Without registration, etc. the school is legally not allowed to open because they have no records of which children are where, no medical records, etc. Guess what? They coped for the day because they had contingency plans (i.e. cancel all IT lessons and do something else instead, catching up again next week, manual financial control, manual registration, etc.). There are very few companies that *can't* carry on if the IT dies. It might be inconvenient, it might mean harder and more work, but it's rarely impossible unless you're something like an ISP or a datacentre.
If there was nobody else suitable to come and fix the problem? Not hard - hire an IT guy to come in. You do have support contracts for your gear and software, yes? Or you could organise an emergency contractor to visit and fix your problem? It's not hard and the only problem there is finding the right guy (i.e. someone who *can* walk into the middle of a mess and at least get something working enough to last until the "real" IT guy gets back).
If you honestly, genuinely can't cope without an employee - you need him to train an assistant, or even two. It won't be perfect but it's better than nothing. Failing that, you need a large enough team that you can do something on the guy's instructions. Failing that, you need your support contracts which pretty much come as standard with business-level hardware/software. Failing that, you need a contractor at short-notice. If you can't do those four and get to a working system of some fashion within 24 hours, you were always going to be in deep shit whenever anything went wrong anyway. What would you do if the guy left and you had to find a replacement? What if he died? What if he suffered amnesia and forgot all the passwords? What if he was arrested? What if, what if, what if. Or you could just do the normal IT-thing and have backups - lots of them.
Nobody is that invaluable that they have to abandon holidays and drive away from their kids to come back after-hours. Sorry, it's just not true, and if it "is" then that's only the company's fault. It's purely a money saving solution rather than hiring someone else to fix the mess - get the guy who's away on holiday and pay him for a few extra hours - it's cheaper than calling on your support contracts or call-out fees for an emerge
When I am on vacation, that is MY time, no one else's. It is a cherished benefit of the job, and as such, I make it clear that I will have LIMITED access to email only. That said, I usually take vacations in the mountains where there is no internet and no cell signal. I like it that way! My idea of a vacation is getting away from what is modern to what is simple.
Just wait until the economy improves, this guy is going to be in a world of hurt when there is a mass exodus.
The flip side to being "one deep" is you are more valuable. I would lean towards hoarding knowledge and being on-call. I don't WANT my employer to be comfortable functioning without me.
Business is a team sport and you are definitely NOT being a team player. I have fired people for doing exactly what you are suggesting. It doesn't make you more valuable, it makes you a liability. You are putting the organization at risk for your own gain. If you make everything dependent on you and then you get hit by the proverbial bus, your selfishness has endangered everyone who depends on you. Single point of failure is a bad thing and information hoarding makes you a single point of failure. If the people you work for tolerate that kind of behavior from you, they are extremely foolish.
Another poster mentioned the necessity of understanding how other people in the organization think and communicate. I think this is critical in any technical role, as half of what you do is ensuring that people understand the value of what you do. They could find a dozen warm bodies on the street to fill my chair and do the physical things that I do, but my mind and my ability to look for better ways to do things is what makes me valuable.
Be that guy and no matter how capable others in the organization are of doing your job, you never lose your value to a good manager.
As such, he also has a habit of making sure that when he does go on holiday, it's normally to the middle of nowhere where he gets no mobile signal and especially no internet for a week so that he isn't bothered by work stuff.
On the other side of the coin, that same boss recently asked me to drop 9 days off that i had booked off down to 4 days, as we're nearing crunch time for a critical project that will set us up for much much more work in the future if we get it right - I'm not going to get those 5 days of holiday back, as i'll have no chance to use them for the rest of the year, but they are at least going to sort me out with an appropriate bonus of some sort, so I figured why not :)
Fortunately, I like my job, the people I work with and my boss so as I didn't really have any plans for my holiday time (they fell through) it was an easy decision for me...
This beggers belief, the IT department of a major law firm don't keep a single harddrive as backup and don't have a standby system in place for just such an eventuality as a failed harddrive ..
I wouldn't be shocked by this at all. I've seen several companies keep all their financial records on a 10+ year old PC with NO backups of any kind. This sort of behavior is not uncommon. You would be shocked at how many companies (even big ones) are playing a game of Russian roulette with their IT systems.
You wouldn't believe how many people I've talked to in a panic because they are having an issue and need to access the server, but the ONLY person with the key or password is unreachable. (On vacation with no contact number, not responding for some reason, or in a couple of cases, recently deceased.)
I know security people will often tell you to limit these things, especially passwords, so that only one person has it and it's not written down. Ignore that. You need to control access, but not so tightly that if one thing goes wrong your company is screwed. Always have a password log, and have it stored in a safe and fireproof location. Same with duplicate keys. It's actually safest if there are 2 backups, and at least one kept at a separate location. (In case of fire, flood, building blowing up, etc.) Obviously keep those secure, like in a safe. Is this 100% security on those things? No, but there's no such thing as 100% security, but it will allow you to keep reasonable security and acceptable ability to respond to emergencies. Both are important, and ignoring one to favor the other will eventually leave you screwed.
And follow the same advice for backups, you need them, they may fail, and they can get destroyed just like everything else. (Easier in a lot of cases.)
The CEO and the power user were mortified that they couldn't figure out which button to push, says Laping, but this particular machine was a Dell rack server with a flat design rather than the tower configuration with which the men were more familiar.
The two kept pushing a button that was for adjusting the display, not turning the unit on and off. When nothing happened, they panicked.
Wait! The "Power User" has never seen the system restarting? He did not even know how to find the manual? The CEO and the power user where not able to take a photo and mail it so that a nice red mark could be placed and sent back, but they panicked over a server which is down?
Trust and maturity? You mean delusional, holier-than-thou, naivete. I've known people who got tossed on their ass because they completed their project to spec, with a high degree of quality, reliable performance, on time, and under budget. Why? Because management won't fire the people on an half done project. And, they where the only ones finished.
Indeed, and there are plenty of organizations which have that trust and maturity as part of their culture. Unfortunately, there are also a lot that don't. Personally, I've been extraordinarily lucky in my working life; the couple of times I've found myself working at places that pushed the "everyone has to be a superhero" mentality, or had such poor communication that it was nearly impossible to find out what people actually needed, have also been when the economy was doing well and there were better jobs available. In the current economic mess, people caught in that situation have a lot fewer options.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Depending on his reserves, he might not be around when the economy improves :-P
Just wait until the economy improves, this guy is going to be in a world of hurt when there is a mass exodus.
Eh, that'll be in 10 years if we're lucky, at this rate.
I just don't answer my work phone when I'm on vacation or not on call. Sure, maybe someday someone will consider me non-essential, but at least I'm not stressed out all the time. If you answer calls when you're not on the clock you're just encouraging that sort of behaviour and showing your boss why he doesn't need to hire another IT person.
but if it's one thing our ruling class is good at, it's screwing guys like you. Look at the IT field. They spent 10 years frantically training people for jobs that were being sent overseas (or given to H1-B visas). Hell, during the worst unemployment in 80 years they're arguing for MORE H1-B visas. There's even a law firm that specializing in telling businesses how to offer a job without having to hire an American (they're videos on youtube of them, too lazy to google right now).
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what it's like in the rest of the world, do you? In India, China and the 2nd and 3rd world, you don't got to 'choose to stop working longer hours'. It's a rough scramble for bare existence. That's what the super wealthy want here. Right now they're allowing the the luxury. For one thing, you've forgotten what unemployment insurance is really for. It's to keep the unemployed from desperately flooding the job market and removing that choice from you. For another thing, you've forgotten that people in this country DIED for the 40 hour work week, and I don't mean guys in trenches, I mean union strikers beaten to death by (privately hired) jackboot thugs.
Never forget this: No matter how little you have, there's always someone that can make himself rich if he takes it away from you and a million others.
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you're right, it's happening because we allow it, but it's broader than IT. The only way to stop cowering in fear of losing our jobs is to force our society to put up a permanent and complete safety net. That means unemployment benefits that don't run out, ever, and it means not getting our panties in a bunch if some lazy bloke doesn't want to work at all.
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They panicked at Boeing when they couldn't get me after hours. So I told them to hire backup. They transfered a guy in from IT who (supposedly) knew Perl (and other stuff). So, on the first day when I was showing him the ropes, I opened up one of the CGI files to show him some of our coding style and conventions. He stared at the file for a few minutes /usr/bin/perl staring him right in the face) and asked, "What language is this written in?"
(with #!
Management had a bad habit of calling everyone down to the shop floor at any hour if any little thing went wrong. I had remote login capability and could generally fix anything from home. One night, I get a call. Panic! All hands to the shop! So I ask, "What's the problem? Maybe I can fix it from here." I'm told I've got an attitude problem. So I get dressed and drive in. An hour and a half later, after reading the error message on the ATE equipment console, sure enough, a 15 minute fix from any terminal in the world.
Often, crisis are engineered to make people look important. Build a system that never dies and nobody notices you. Build one that causes trouble (or hire people who move their lips when they code to maintain it) and you get noticed. And promoted. We had a saying at Boeing: Heads roll uphill.
Have gnu, will travel.
It's called CMM Level 3.
If a service is business critical, it had best be at least the following:
1. Documented
This means the process is documented well enough so that a reasonably experienced person coming in off the street should be able to muddle through it successfully. This also means that there is budget for documentation.
2. Trained
This means that all people responsible (and their backups) are trained on how to perform these critical functions. This means that there is budget for training.
3. Consistent
All people responsible (and their backups) perform the same task in the same manner. This means that there is budget for performance verification (auditing).
CMM level 3 does not eliminate fire drills or IT crises. It does make them less frequent, more manageable, and of shorter duration.
Downtime is lost productivity. Downtime is lost opportunity. Downtime is lost sales. Downtime means missed deadlines. The cost of these issues can (or should be able to) be determined.
Risk mitigation and cost avoidance are critical components of any business plan. If your business organization does not have these components in place, a disaster will occur.
If your business is a public company, expect institutional investors, major stockholders, and the stock market to punish the business when the disaster occurs. If your business is a private company, you may not recover from a serious infrastructure failure.
IT management needs to be able to articulate the implementation costs and infrastructure risks. Business management needs to be able to articulate the business costs and business risks. Senior or "C" level executives need to match costs and risks so that the appropriate CMM level can be chosen and reached.
This is not rocket science. CMM has been around for about 20 years. CMMI (the successor to CMM) has been around for 9-10 years.
and your resume and references were up to date and you described that work situation to me; I would say to myself: "Hmmm...this guy can put up with a lot of work and a lot of demands. This is a sometimes stressful position but I bet it would be a paid vacation to him"
But of course you would not mention sloppy work in the interview, you would say "I was worried that my work might be suffering due to long hours so I decided to seek another position" (if the question was brought up).
Anyway, I cannot be unique in thinking this. What you have to do is start looking for another job, send out resumes left and right. Craft those resumes and cover letters to target the position you want, have many resumes that are worded differently and have many cover letters so after a while you just make a few modifications and send them out.
You have to do this so that another group can take advantage of your awesome work ethic (who will treat you better) and so you can keep your sanity, and ...most importantly so your work doesn't suffer so much that you lose your reputation. If you work hard, too hard and you crack, you will be amazed at how fast the people who were prodding you on with dangerous work hours will turn against you.
Its like those horror movies of the 80's. A spirit voice said "Get Out!" and walls bleed, children get sucked into television static and yet the family decides to "tough it out". In the end there is a hole in the ground, a murderous man running around in a fedora, arterial spray and glowing eyes that promise a sequel. What they don't show is the family saying "hmmmm....we should have got out when it asked us to leave".
If I had a boss like that, I would frag him/her. Literally. There would be so many suspects, if you were even a little bit careful you wouldn't get caught. It worked in 'Nam, it would work here.
is it government projects? what the guy is doing is maximizing billing for the customer and you guys are just fodder in that. if it just works, he can't keep on sending the bills and the project is hostage in that, if they stop paying the bills the deal goes off(and so do the workforce).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Sounds like a violation of labor laws to me.
Before I was in charge of hiring for my team, my managers employed a guy who didn't know anything because they did not check his references for some reason. He would always call me while I was on vacation because a simple procedure that he should have known was confusing him. Later our company cell phones were switched from Verizon to AT&T and AT&T had no signal in the Aosta Valley in the Italian Alps.
That is where I would go on vacations.
So if you have AT&T, go to the lovely Aosta Valley but do not cross over into France or else your voicemail will be filled with messages.
I'm in the IT department at my company.... I'm pretty sure if the Director of the department and our single Network Admin left simultaneously for any reason, the IT portion of the company would completely collapse.
This isn't the fault of people loading things onto them or what not, it's primarily the fault of an unwillingness to share information about the job. The rest of the department CAN'T start taking over to ease their load and their single point of failure, because we don't get told about things we need to know to do that.
It's infuriating a lot of the time.
I was one of two sysadmins at a 9/11 call center (Fire, Ambulance) for a city of (over) a million people. Unix servers, unix workstations, oracle on microsoft databases (data and GIS maps), GPS location tracking, telephone company number/address data spills, traffic light controls, NTP (time data) spills, trunking radio interfaces, station alert scada interfaces, etc, etc. The other guy went on vacation. The software vendors main software support guy went on vacation. The server that interfaces with all of the data interfaces (I just mentioned) dies (at 11:45 at night) due to hard disk failure --it had only been running non stop for a little over 10 years--, although I seem to recall that it looked like the 50 ohm SCSI terminator seemed to be missing. There are no software backups of the software, just the training machine. Its a proprietary unix box, so change the name of the machine and its network IP address in the bios (the only place you can change it on that machine), then reconfigure all of the software to have it act as the primary machine (had to change the IP address because some of the proprietary software didn't use gethostbyname() for interfaces but instead had hard coded IP addresses in the software when the vendor compiled it on the machine...bad,bad,bad). There were also 48, 25 pin serial cables on the back of the old machine that had to be swapped to the new machine. I had to have the hardware vendor swap memory from the (now dead) main box to the secondary the next day as the box was limited in (proprietary unix) memory. I was done in a rather anxious 90 minutes, including getting all of the oracle databases resynced. I suppose it was faster that I had no one to call. When I went on holidays though, I would leave the phone and pager in the desk drawer at work. I'm not in charge of life and death, just the computers. I'm not in charge of putting water on fires, nor am I responsible for all the CPR done in the city. If the system can't generate a shortest (street) path using Djikstras algorithm, then its my problem, but emergency vehicles are allowed to go down one way streets the wrong way. All the crews are on duty when they are on, and not on duty when they are off. When I'm on and all hell breaks loose at about midnight, then I'm on, but when I'm on holidays, then I'm off. I insist!
This is of course where carefully laid out employment agreements come in. Unions used to be damn good about making sure you didn't fall into "cross-training" bullshit without the proper compensation. If I'm trained to fill two or three roles, and are expected to do so when need be, I am at least two or three times more valuable... right?
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Where I work we have a small 24x7 onsite team. So when someone takes time off the rest of the team breaks their backs to cover. Then they need relief when you return, so you then in turn to do overtime. End result is hours are moved from one week to the next instead of the time being taken off.
I do get paid overtime so I'm told not to complain. Don't get me wrong I don't mind the overtime pay, but I did ask for the time off that's allotted to me in my contract not overtime.
I feel really burned out after years of this.. If you are a manager and reading this, please consider it...
The companies I've worked for spent as little as possible on I.T. including personnel. They don't CARE about the future; they want money NOW, and hiring more people costs money. As for digging in youjr heels and refusing; with all the unemployment, they can fire you, and hire a replacement in less than a day, and go on with "business" as usual. Be glad if you've got ANY vacation; the trend now is to make I.T. personnel "independant contractors" and give them NO benefits at all, and NO vacation.
The stories I looked at from the article definitely had a lot of suckers playing the hero. Such as they guy who drove two hours to push a power button. I'm and absolutely positive that they could have called some dork at the Geek Barn who could have found the button to push, or called up the temp agency, etc. If you say "I'm sorry, I'm on vacation on the beach right now with my family" and the management fails to say "I'm sorry, I'll call someone else, have a nice time" then you should look for a new job as soon as possible.
Your suggestion will work if we allow to BAN the republican party and also BAN Christianity.
Otherwise, only civil war and revocation of the constitution will stop the rich white euro-trash from enslaving the rest of the population.
Twitter: @dainsanefh
This is of course where carefully laid out employment agreements come in. Unions used to be damn good about making sure you didn't fall into "cross-training" bullshit without the proper compensation. If I'm trained to fill two or three roles, and are expected to do so when need be, I am at least two or three times more valuable... right?
Sorry, but in my organization, if they can make you learn two or three roles, then they know you're willing to put up with or two or three times as much crap. It's the guy who threatens to quit who actually becomes valuable.
What's with people escalating to the max at the first hint of trouble? Did you a) talk with them first? Try to persuade them their thinking is incorrect? And set things up so they could not make them indispensable? Which is good to do regardless. Then if none of that worked, did you warn them? Or you b) went straight for the throat? Sure sounds like you did b). If workers weren't so damn cheap, disposable and replaceable, you'd quickly change your attitude. Because if you didn't, you wouldn't have anyone left to manage.
Plus, with a different attitude on your part, you might discover that your employees are less inclined to try such things. It would also help immensely if jobs were plentiful, but admittedly there's not much 1 manager can do about that. Still, you could do somewhat so they would feel less pressured and paranoid. So many businesses make the employee-employer relationship so damned adversarial, always act like the average employee is a stupid, light fingered slacker who has to be forced to work for their own good. Micromanaged so they don't screw up or off.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
I've dealt with this in the tech world, not just IT, for almost 40 years. The first thing is to make a list of what you are supposed to be doing, with estimates of how long it will take. Then LET YOUR MANAGER prioritize. Then publish the list and watch the fur fly. Graciously drop whatever you're doing for re-prioritization, but immediately re-estimate the work, including time lost in the change. Oh, and NEVER plan work outside of normal working hours unless they are willing to pay. You may end up working the extra hours, but, as Mr. Scott noted, then you seem like a miracle worker. And any questions about priorities you refer to your boss. That's why they pay him the big bucks.
My experience is that this brings on a 'What do you really need?" discussion in about 4 days.
Go on vacation. To hell with your job.
My father gave me great advice: always have a "Fuck You Fund." Told me to work my ass off and bank a years salary (in addition to retirement savings). This was great advice that I am glad I took. A years current salary in the bank means they can kiss my ass if they even attempt such a trespass like impose on my holiday.
That said I would never tell anyone this at work. I maintain a nice demeanor. A helpful attitude also helps a lot. Sun Zhu The Art of War I suppose.
I simply smile, give them plenty of notice of my vacation plans, and I go.
You do realize, I hope, that "anonymous" only means "people reading this don't know your IP". It doesn't, however, also mean "people subpoenaing this place don't know your IP". One should not recommend illegal courses of action. (Wait, did I just?)
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Look at it this way.. at least your fiance "got out" before all the shit hit the fan!!! Wait for the phone calls and bring the marshmallows!
If a company is THAT utterly, and completely irresponsible that they would fire somebody from a department without cause while the boss is out for medical treatment they deserve what they'll get. Trouble is that somebody with a job will work 65+ hours a week to bail them out and things will limp along.. standards will just go down.. but you'll have your downsizing numbers for the quarter!
If you're so indispensable they have to call you in on vacation etc, when you come back is a good time to ask for a raise. "what you'd you do without me"
I'm going on a 16 day road trip later this month. I'll have my cell phone but I'm not going to be able to VPN into work while driving. Last year I took some time off and received work related phone calls, including requests to join conference calls 7 of my 9 days off.
We're understaffed and there's very limited backup support for the high level technical support staff.
Good fucking luck.
Chances are, most functional organizations under 400 hundred people have only one or MAYBE two people who can effectively troubleshoot a bad outage. Sure, they may have an IT staff of 3, 4, 5, 10... but chances are, they're not of the 'sysadmin' type. They're frontline support, most likely, and deal mostly with Windows workstations and servers. For any crucial role, there is no more than one capable person on hand in most IT organizations. The pay masters wouldn't hear of duplicated functionality (that's inefficient!).
After all, if something in IT breaks, the worst management sees that can happen (unlike a dead body from neglegence/overworking your staff) is for there to be a fired employee. They don't see the big picture.
Sure, it's nice to feel needed. It's job security. But it's better to be needed and have someone else who can help pull the weight while you're sitting on a beach with a drink in hand, live a little longer, and have your resume ready to go. Being unemployed for a long period of time isn't half as bad as month after month of high-stress environments where you're pressed with "fix it now under pressure" or "I'm completely burnt out and can't maintain this level of service".
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Add two extra days buffer to your vacation.
Script in a disaster to call you in on the second day.
Scream and complain that this has:
1) Cost you money
2) Ruined your vacation
Insist upon
1) Financial compensation
2) Extra Time in Lieu
If you're smart holiday just got paid for and doubled.
*Boggle* At 2 years in the business you think you know it all? Vacation time exists for a reason, the same as the 40 hour week. People are more productive if they get a reasonable break every now and again (some studies say a minimum of 2 weeks interrupted at a time is required to reset stress levels to base). Even people doing what they love need a vacation.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
We had one IT person who handled keeping about 50 servers up and running, 3 or 4 domains, multiple websites, 30 laptops, 3 different FTP servers, communications with the outside agencies that were sending us data, RFPs, customer support, and who knows what else. He quit for another company where he will probably have 1/4 of the job duties, will not have to work weekends, and will get paid more. Our company has not hired a replacement yet. The first IT related issue that came up was a failed backup that occurred about 12 hours after he quit (failed on a weekend). The next one occurred about 24 hours later when a client locked their FTP account because they can't remember their password, and nobody could figure out how to reset it. They eventually had to call him and ask. That debacle resulted in about 200 hours of unpaid overtime.
Supposedly, they are interviewing replacements, but so far I think they are patting themselves on the back for saving money (about half an IT person's salary, as a guess) and spreading around his work mostly to the overworked development group, including myself, who are now getting surprisingly little development done.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
The last company I contracted for made me work two days after I had back surgery. I fielded calls from underlings while in the ER. Good times.
You kid, but I worked remote with acute pnuemonia to complete a project and later to help a developer find his way around it.
The same happened when I was home a month with mononucleosis; I remotely wrote a telephone service platform to cut time.
Or in the last 4 years I have dropped about 120 holidays.
Just until I couldn't take it much longer and was bordering burn-out. I've settled for a less demanding job now.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Giving up vacation days because you couldn't use them, interrupting vacations or cutting them short for work - if you find yourself anywhere near that list, you're a fucking idiot, and the one you're fucking is yourself. And that was the polite way of putting it.
A few years ago, I've had to become a bit of an expert in vacations for business reasons (negotiations regarding vacation times, rules, company procedures, etc.). Two things are absolutely frightening when you do that.
One is that we need vacations at all - for thousands of years, there was no such thing. That's because work has become condensed to a point where it's detrimental to health at good times.
Two is how little almost everyone, employers, employees, even most union people, realize how important vacations and other free times are. I've seen many people crash and burn in those years and lack of vacations, interruptions of off-work time and not being able to "shut down" when you leave work were almost always present and at least contributing factors.
In all those years, I have encountered one group of people who can do that, who can go on without vacations and free days and suffer no ill consequences. These people share two important characteristics: One is that their time is self-determined to a large degree. In other words: They could close up shop and go away for a few days at any time if only they wanted. They have no boss pressure and no customer pressure that would stop them, because they've organized their work so that if they ever need to, they can. Obviously, most of them are self-employed, but not all. A great example is a cobbler who has his shop down the street from where I live: The official opening times of his shop, as posted in the window, are: "When I'm here."
Two, these people work their dream. They do what they want to do, they have meaning in their jobs, and they've cut out as much of the crap as possible, and some that other people thought would not be possible to cut. They never ask themselves "what the fuck am I doing here?".
None of them make a killing. But they make a living. And I try to be one of them over being rich, but hollow. I've worked with too many so-called "successful" people and seen their dull eyes. Five minutes with someone from the group above and you can never go back into the machinery.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
1) Company wants to maximise profits (painted over as 'saving money') = company follows staff-cutting recommendations that look great on paper.
2) Company then realises that saving money on paper has left them paying more in contractors to make up for the positions they got rid of = company will be happy to do this if it means they don't have to admit that step 1 was short-sighted.
3) Company realises that someone will be shot when the figures are presented in the correct way (e.g. how much staffing now costs compared to pre-step 1) = company gets rid of most of the contractors taken on in step 2.
4) Company now relies on single permanent staff member who eventually quits = company then decides that 'outsourcing is the way to go' for the same reason as listed in step 2.
I've seen this happen over and over and over, at banks, hospitals, investement companies and councils. In every single instance, they weren't employing enough people to begin with before even reaching Step 1. But the one thing that remains constant is that regardless of the outcome, companies will do *anything* rather than admit a failure and take a step backwards.
At the bank (one of the biggest), for instance - before the crash;
"This is Bob, make sure you all spend time with him, we're taking on another 150 servers from X branch"
"This is the third time this has happened"
"That's correct. Any questions?"
"What are you going to do when things go bad?"
"What?"
"You've sacked another team"
"Yes"
"You're giving the full-time work they were doing to another team that already has full-time work"
"Yes"
"Your share price that you force us to look at every time we open a browser has gone from £3.50 to £7 in less than a year"
"So?"
"So this isn't belt-tightening, this is greed"
"What's your point?"
"My point is - you're acting like companies do when they're against the wall or about to go down, even though this company isn't. So considering you're still behaving as if it is, I'd like to know what you're going to do when things really *do* get sticky, as opposed to pretending they are right now in order to maximise profits".
"......moving on to the next item on the agenda...."
And the only thing I can possibly suggest to you only makes the problem worse...
New job time. Seriously.
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
"... the successful functioning of the IT department shouldn't rest on any one person's shoulders.". This is know as "Truck Factor". http://www.agileadvice.com/archives/2005/05/truck_factor.html
"Make person work from the hospital room high on pain killers? What if they are to out of it to work?"
I actually had to do that.
Was so pumped up my wife had to hold the phone to my ear because I kept dropping it.
I did not and still do not remember the conversation in the least.
But apparently I walked them through fixing a ODBC connection issue and then got them running an update query to fix/regen a few thousand MEDICAL RECORDS..
I hope I did not fuck up anyone else life that day by getting their medical insurance claim denied.
Would be kinda' funny if it messed up payments to the POS hospital I was in though.
What's with people escalating to the max at the first hint of trouble?
Who said anything about "escalating to the max"? We're talking generalities here and each circumstance is unique. That said, generally speaking, if someone shows that they intend to ensure their job security by hoarding information and cannot be (very quickly) shown the error of their ways, I would not hesitate to fire them. That is someone who is not looking out for the interests of the organization. That is a problem of ethics, not a problem of skills or training. Keeping someone like that around puts the organization and its members at risk.
If workers weren't so damn cheap, disposable and replaceable, you'd quickly change your attitude.
Workers AREN"T cheap or disposable, though usually they are replaceable with considerable effort and expense. If you think people are easy or cheap to replace, you probably haven't ever hired anyone and certainly haven't fired anyone. A typical worker costs tens of thousands of dollars to train for all but the simplest tasks. Companies don't want to fire anyone. Firing someone means something went wrong.
If you let your staff horde information and don't actually pay for cross-training time, it's not their fault there's a single-point-of-failure, it it?
You are correct that what you describe are both failures of management with similar results. However the solutions are very different because the causes are different.
The information hoarder is putting the organization at risk through his/her own actions. They are attempting to enrich themselves at the expense of the organization. That is an ethics problem and the solution is (usually) to fire the information hoarder.
If management does not invest in cross training then that is obviously not the workers fault. If anyone is fired for that mistake it should be management. More commonly the answer is simply to start cross training. Better late than never.
Building in a little safety net may not be the best for your business, but it's the best for me.
Actually it isn't best for either the company or for you. If you really are valuable, it won't be because you've hoarded information. It will be because you are contributing something truly useful and valuable to the company. If you aren't doing something valuable, then you are a liability and should take whatever skills you have elsewhere. I would fire you in a heartbeat if you were hoarding information or sandbagging on your performance.
There is a solution for your insecurity. If you don't want to be replaced, start your own company. Prove that you can take the risks and have the skills to succeed. Get your own Mercedes.
In the end I resigned and started at a different company simply because I felt I was stuck being an expert in one area they'd never let me leave.
If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted. Truer words were never spoken.
The last company I contracted for made me work two days after I had back surgery. I fielded calls from underlings while in the ER. Good times.
It happens just like you say. True stories from previous employers: Father passes away. At funeral home receiving friends and family expressing condolences. Boss drives 120 miles round trip to express his condolences and while he's there, not 5 feet from Dad's casket, hands me a piece of paper with DNS changes that need done. No one wanted to learn it and he was way too willing to stick his head in the sand and not deal with it. Getting married the next year. Reorg happens and I get a new boss. Have honeymoon and wedding vacation time scheduled with previous boss. New boss tells me -- I didn't get vacation from him. Resubmit or I can't go. Told him to go pound salt. He did and I went on vacation and got married. He was going through an ugly divorce so maybe he was trying to do me a favor. :-D
These are just two that are directly relevant to this thread. I have many stories of patently dysfunctional things done to me by bosses that make me understand why lawsuits happen.