look, ma, i'm asserting myself
Feb. 5th, 2009 10:09 pmSent to my boss and my boss's boss:
On Feb 5, 2009, at 18:45, my boss wrote on the Ops list:
As a part of new release process, we will have Ron who is 24X7 support for this week will monitor production until 2am followed by S until 8am tomorrow morning.
I'm a bit upset that this email is the first i've heard of a "new release process" into which i had no input, and which will have me staying up late for what will be, in my opinion, completely superfluous monitoring. I understand that the current state of our production environment is delicate, which leads to a sense of trepidation, so that's acceptable for now, but i certainly expect that we will not be continuing this practice once we're in the new data center for two reasons: we will know exactly what needs to be monitored, and as such our monitoring system will alert the person on call if there is an outage of any sort, obviating the need to remain glued to the monitor like a NOC monkey; and in the new data center, we'll (eventually) have a staging environment to avoid this sort of "let's cross our fingers" release.
Another thing that upset me is that one of the mantras of this job has always been, "If it's time-sensitive, don't use email." However, i didn't receive a call about my required tour of monitoring; if S hadn't kindly called me to ask if i'd read my email, i might not have noticed. I do not believe there is an expectation for us to be reading email after hours, even if we're on call; if i'm wrong and there is such a requirement, it ought to be spelled out as policy and discussed with all members of the team.
thanks
rone
Naturally, this is not the first draft.