I highly doubt they will ever say who is officially to blame, but most likely it was a combination of pressure from 'above' for the developers to complete the upgrade by xxxxx, for the roll-out team to implement & verify the upgrade globally with absolutely no downtime, the lack of time to test the application for every possible bug or 'feature' that may arise (including going through the code step-by-step to make sure no weird situations or invalid data input/output could occur) and the sheer complexity of the system(s). Some level of management are definately to blame for the outage. At least one person is going to loose their job or get a severe telling off over this.
As for the non-critical upgrade statement, if it was non-critical how come it caused a major outage, and in the case of where I work, caused a reasonably significant loss via disruption of communications? I'd classify that as more than non-critical, but I'm funny that way...
I work for a rather large and well known company, and quite a while ago management realised that men drastically outnumbered women in their IT department (as in, 3 women for every 50 guys or so). They made it company policy to hire more women, to the point where they appointed a manager specifically because she was the only female to apply for the position, even though the person in question had no formal IT qualifications, no IT experience and was coming from a retail sales background.
Shortly afterwards the company did had a recruitment drive, and hired approx 20 additional people, of which 6 were female. Four months later, 3 out of 14 guys have quit, and 4 out of 6 women have left. Whereas males tend to be more willing to sacrifice a work/life balance, women are less tolerant and simply look for something better when they wake up one day and realise that work IS their life.
My work environment is very demmanding, with the company openly admitting that they expect people to burn-out within 2 years. Long hours, at weird times (the joys of 24/7 operation), lack of sleep resulting in poor health and a struggle to maintain any sort of social life. If you talk to literally anyone within my business area, they will all say the same thing "I'm here because the pay is good and because the company name will look good on my resume". We've all long accepted that this job is just a step up the ladder, and 1-2years of struggle will be worth the payoff in the end (if we can hold out).
Women tend to be less willing to make such huge sacrifices for something that may or may not provide significant benefits a few years down the track. In one respect this makes them smarter than men, and in another, not quite so smart. It all depends on your perspective.
The IT industry as a whole needs to take a step back and seriously re-examine how it runs its day to day business. I think it's pretty much agreed across the board that IT is very stressfull, requires at times extremely long hours, hard work and in a large percentage of cases, the willingness to sacrifice your own quality of life/lifestyle for your job. Companies would rather have one person absolutely flat-out the entire day, than two people working at a comfortable pace (and staying in the company for a number of years). After all, if the person burns out, they aren't cut out for the industry and there's plenty of people willing to replace them...right?
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I highly doubt they will ever say who is officially to blame, but most likely it was a combination of pressure from 'above' for the developers to complete the upgrade by xxxxx, for the roll-out team to implement & verify the upgrade globally with absolutely no downtime, the lack of time to test the application for every possible bug or 'feature' that may arise (including going through the code step-by-step to make sure no weird situations or invalid data input/output could occur) and the sheer complexity of the system(s). Some level of management are definately to blame for the outage. At least one person is going to loose their job or get a severe telling off over this.
As for the non-critical upgrade statement, if it was non-critical how come it caused a major outage, and in the case of where I work, caused a reasonably significant loss via disruption of communications? I'd classify that as more than non-critical, but I'm funny that way...
I work for a rather large and well known company, and quite a while ago management realised that men drastically outnumbered women in their IT department (as in, 3 women for every 50 guys or so). They made it company policy to hire more women, to the point where they appointed a manager specifically because she was the only female to apply for the position, even though the person in question had no formal IT qualifications, no IT experience and was coming from a retail sales background. Shortly afterwards the company did had a recruitment drive, and hired approx 20 additional people, of which 6 were female. Four months later, 3 out of 14 guys have quit, and 4 out of 6 women have left. Whereas males tend to be more willing to sacrifice a work/life balance, women are less tolerant and simply look for something better when they wake up one day and realise that work IS their life. My work environment is very demmanding, with the company openly admitting that they expect people to burn-out within 2 years. Long hours, at weird times (the joys of 24/7 operation), lack of sleep resulting in poor health and a struggle to maintain any sort of social life. If you talk to literally anyone within my business area, they will all say the same thing "I'm here because the pay is good and because the company name will look good on my resume". We've all long accepted that this job is just a step up the ladder, and 1-2years of struggle will be worth the payoff in the end (if we can hold out). Women tend to be less willing to make such huge sacrifices for something that may or may not provide significant benefits a few years down the track. In one respect this makes them smarter than men, and in another, not quite so smart. It all depends on your perspective. The IT industry as a whole needs to take a step back and seriously re-examine how it runs its day to day business. I think it's pretty much agreed across the board that IT is very stressfull, requires at times extremely long hours, hard work and in a large percentage of cases, the willingness to sacrifice your own quality of life/lifestyle for your job. Companies would rather have one person absolutely flat-out the entire day, than two people working at a comfortable pace (and staying in the company for a number of years). After all, if the person burns out, they aren't cut out for the industry and there's plenty of people willing to replace them...right?