As a former member of the Odyssey II Environment Support team I had to live through this hell. As the article mentioned each "environment" consisted of somewhere between 12-16 individual systems. The team consisted of a dozen employees/contractors that had to install and maintain each system. Each employee was assigned two or three systems which they had to become the "experts." Because of the complicity and vast number of changes to each system it was difficult to become proficient in more then two or three. This approach sounds okay until you factor in all the development and testing environments required and the long hours of testing.
At the time I there were 18 different environments that were up and running during the day. By day, I mean expected to be up and running between the hours of 7:00am until 10:00pm. The major enviorments (Siebel Dev, System Test, Integration, etc...) ran until midnight. Any changes to the environment had to take place after hours. With the average "kit" install taking between four to six hours it meant the we were running a 24-hour shop.
They tried to split the 12 members of the team into three 8-hour shifts. With each member only trained three systems that meant we could only cover 12 of the 16 systems with four employees. Multiply that by the 18 environments and you can see where the troubles begun. Those 8-hour days turn to 10 and then 12. None of the environment were stable and consistently were down during testing due to bad code. Emergency kits were commonplace and since installation were so long (due to Siebel's shitty product) testing was always behind requiring weekends as well. All this added up to 70+ hours of work, 0 sleep (had a newborn at the time), and one VERY pissed off wife.
I was lucky enough to have left to get another job just before the system went live. It was obvious that it was going to fail and I had a huge shit-eating grin on my face when I heard of all their troubles.
Slashdot Mirror
Move a couple of words around and you get questions that are just as insightful:
You want some small assurance that the people who are doing it know what they're doing (assumes that the employee at RedHat knows what he is doing)
With Fedora, it is a member of a community that polices itself. With RedHat, who? Is anyway to find out?
RedHat is large and diverse enough to contain poor and malicious coders.
3D Porn!!!
As a former member of the Odyssey II Environment Support team I had to live through this hell. As the article mentioned each "environment" consisted of somewhere between 12-16 individual systems. The team consisted of a dozen employees/contractors that had to install and maintain each system. Each employee was assigned two or three systems which they had to become the "experts." Because of the complicity and vast number of changes to each system it was difficult to become proficient in more then two or three. This approach sounds okay until you factor in all the development and testing environments required and the long hours of testing.
At the time I there were 18 different environments that were up and running during the day. By day, I mean expected to be up and running between the hours of 7:00am until 10:00pm. The major enviorments (Siebel Dev, System Test, Integration, etc...) ran until midnight. Any changes to the environment had to take place after hours. With the average "kit" install taking between four to six hours it meant the we were running a 24-hour shop.
They tried to split the 12 members of the team into three 8-hour shifts. With each member only trained three systems that meant we could only cover 12 of the 16 systems with four employees. Multiply that by the 18 environments and you can see where the troubles begun. Those 8-hour days turn to 10 and then 12. None of the environment were stable and consistently were down during testing due to bad code. Emergency kits were commonplace and since installation were so long (due to Siebel's shitty product) testing was always behind requiring weekends as well. All this added up to 70+ hours of work, 0 sleep (had a newborn at the time), and one VERY pissed off wife.
I was lucky enough to have left to get another job just before the system went live. It was obvious that it was going to fail and I had a huge shit-eating grin on my face when I heard of all their troubles.
I blame it on Reality TV. Those shows have brainwashed my wife. I can't pry her away from her Real World 35 and Survivor East L.A...
I am no longer the master of the remote. I feel ashamed...