>> Bear in mind that when something "breaks" a business can freak out, but they're not freaking out about lots of other arguably more important problems
THIS.
Worked for a huge corporation when I first started contracting as a developer. This was a daily occurrence. Someone would push some stuff to prod and it would break their very large e-commerce site. Sometimes it was minor stuff, other times it would cripple the entire site. Most of the time, nobody GAF at all.
I remember sitting at my desk one day and my senior dev walking by my desk like Lumbergh in Office Space. Coffee in hand and just casually said to me, "Looks like someone broke the build, most of the video game pages are throwing 404's right now, going to lunch, see you soon." and then just walked away.
I also found out one day one of the CDN folks that was running the Akamai account quit and then a month later, we found out one of our secondary content servers had been down since the day he left. When dude left, he never transferred any of his knowledge to the other team members so once they found out the server was down, it took another two days to get in contact with someone at Akamai who was handling our account.
At my previous job if something went down on our site, it was a four alarm fire, war room, and all hands on deck to get it resolved or heads would roll. It was so dysfunctional to work somewhere when something broke or stopped working, nobody was in any hurry to fix it. Several times I just thought, "Is this what they mean when they say "the inmates are running the asylum""?
>> At my previous job if something went down on our site, it was a four alarm fire, war room, and all hands on deck to get it resolved or heads would roll. It was so dysfunctional to work somewhere when something broke or stopped working, nobody was in any hurry to fix it. Several times I just thought, "Is this what they mean when they say "the inmates are running the asylum""?
That's funny, because reading your first sentence I was thinking that was the dysfunctional place. I had a boss that would take problems from 0 to 10 in a flash, when the problem was really a 4 or 5, and it really was not a great environment.
Yea, nobody seems to be able to handle problems that require solid, but moderate, non-urgent effort. The problem is either a 0, where nobody even knows, let alone cares that it's happening or a 10, where it's treated as though everyone's chair is on fire and the company is losing $10M per millisecond.
THIS.
Worked for a huge corporation when I first started contracting as a developer. This was a daily occurrence. Someone would push some stuff to prod and it would break their very large e-commerce site. Sometimes it was minor stuff, other times it would cripple the entire site. Most of the time, nobody GAF at all.
I remember sitting at my desk one day and my senior dev walking by my desk like Lumbergh in Office Space. Coffee in hand and just casually said to me, "Looks like someone broke the build, most of the video game pages are throwing 404's right now, going to lunch, see you soon." and then just walked away.
I also found out one day one of the CDN folks that was running the Akamai account quit and then a month later, we found out one of our secondary content servers had been down since the day he left. When dude left, he never transferred any of his knowledge to the other team members so once they found out the server was down, it took another two days to get in contact with someone at Akamai who was handling our account.
At my previous job if something went down on our site, it was a four alarm fire, war room, and all hands on deck to get it resolved or heads would roll. It was so dysfunctional to work somewhere when something broke or stopped working, nobody was in any hurry to fix it. Several times I just thought, "Is this what they mean when they say "the inmates are running the asylum""?