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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."
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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... 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.
When I leave ... then I turn off my pager...
So I'm guessing the last time you left was sometime in the 90's?
*ducks*
If what I just said sounded like a troll, it was probably just a failed attempt at humor.
I'm not at all surprised by this, actually.
In my experience, there is a significant percentage (IME, most, but others may differ) of businesses that rely on Best Buy for hardware replacements. They see additional hardware lying around as a waste, and will not keep spares handy.
I can EASILY see this happening. EASILY.
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.
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...
Why would you welcome a call from work to a boat you are vacationing on?
I've spent roughly one extra day this last week alone on the phone from home trying to fix technical problems at a couple of remote sites. If, as GPP stated, it was going to cost the company $5-$10 per minute to have me work those particular issues, that would be (($5|$10)/minute) x (60 minutes / hour) x 8 hours = $2400 - $4800, not including overtime (if GPP gets overtime; I'm salaried, so it wouldn't apply in my case), to fix the problem. That's somewhere between two weeks and one month's salary for another entry-level to somewhat-experienced IT person.
When it starts costing the company more to call me for help when I'm out of the office than it does to hire more help to take up the slack, they'll finally get the picture, and my life will get better.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
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.
You are weak to rely on your own knowledge to keep yourself employed. Be good at managing others in IT and you'll be far more indispensable.
You can, and will be replaced, and are foolish to think otherwise.
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
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.
I off and on contracted for a place where this was hugely important.
What they'd do is come up with some bullshit reason they were giving a bunch of people 2 or 3 extra weeks of vacation but it must be taken within a short time frame (that quarter or the next two quarters), usually times to align with the summer already planned vacations, and sometimes not entirely bullshit.
Either way, if you were gone for about 3 weeks, and no one really needed you for that time off, your job was going to be axed shortly. Maternity leave? No problem, your job will definitely be here when you get back because we'll try not to fill it at all, and if we don't need it, you're gone as soon as we're legally allowed when you get back.
It's slimy, but it's business.
Fault tolerance is a serious problem. If you only have two people who know a system, both of whom work in the same area, and both get the same infectious disease for a week you have a problem. On the other hand, having 3 or 4 people with redundant skills is a waste of money. I can see the appeal of cloudsourcing to a 3rd party in that regard.
On a personal basis, if you don't have something you, and only you can do until the day you retire you're taking serious risk. That doesn't have to be technical of course, you can be the only one who knows how to deal with the crazy redhead secretary in another department who bothers you all the time, or you could be the only one who knows how stuff in storage is laid out or whatever. It's a tricky balance between 'manpower intensive to replace' and 'crippling the company if you get hit by a bus'.
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.
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.
Print them out.
Put them in an envelope.
Seal the envelope, and sign across where it is sealed.
Let 'whoever' know where they are, and if the envelope is opened you want a damn good reason for it.
If the envelope disappears or is compromised without a good reason, you know to change the passwords.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
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.
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