5:30 in the morning…

What the christ am I doing up at 5:30 on a Sunday morning? It would be one thing if I’d not slept and was just staying up to watch the sunrise, but that ain’t the case. At 7:30pm last night, I was asleep in my living room and woke up only long enough to drag my ass into bed. So here it is, 5:30am on a Sunday and I’m wide awake. Why?

Ah yes, the work rant. Yes, I’m awake at 5:30am because of work. Specifically, the fact that I knew that I’d be working all night Friday through Saturday morning into Saturday afternoon. We had a huge release planned and there were only 3 of us (instead of 4, not that the 4th would have cut down on our time spent working because of the size of the release) available for the site release angle and 1 of us (as per usual) for the CRM angle. I cannot overemphasize how large this release was and the fact that it tied together two of the biggest aspects of the Business meant that it had visibility all the way up the chain. It was because of the CRM bit that we had to alter our normal release schedule (Saturday or Sunday mornings starting at 5:30am) to Friday night starting at 11:00pm.

The best part is that the CRM team had absolutely no sympathy for our group or any other group who knew they’d be working the full release. Their opinion was that we should work in shifts, which we agreed would be an excellent solution were we staffed with enough people to actually work in shifts. They made their opinion (that the release would not be considered complete until they signed off) clear multiple times during the planning meetings leading up to the release. The person who kept making this strong statement also knew that she wouldn’t be coming into the office until 6:00am on Saturday morning. Meanwhile, the rest of us had to be in the office at 10:00pm on Friday night (in order to finalize prep for the release starting at 11:00pm). Her attitude and the attitude of some of the managers demonstrated a certain lack of respect for their employees and coworkers.

So Friday morning I stayed up until 4:00am and woke up at 8:00am to work from home on final release tasks. I was in a group chat with the rest of my team going through our tasks and completing all open items. Adding to the “fun” of the release was a potentially severe hardware error on one of our primary database servers. We expanded our release plan to include a reboot of that server when everything else was down in order to gather logs from the EFI and see if the hardware error would require us to perform emergency maintenance or if it was something that would require further troubleshooting in conjunction with the vendor. I was able to sneak in a 4-hour nap later in the day, waking up at 8:00pm. The other guys weren’t so lucky.

So we all showed up at work a little before 10:00pm and dug in for the night. We finished up some tasks before 11:00 then kicked off the release at 11:00pm. We brought everything down and then focused on the database server. We gathered the logs and determined that there would need to be more troubleshooting with the vendor, so we were able to bring the server back up and move along with the release with only an hour slide in our original timeline. The release continued. Like all releases, there were issues discovered at many points along the way. Of course, integrating the CRM software with the site turned out to be the biggest problem of all and with the greatest number of bugs. Meanwhile, all the various QA teams had arrived around 6:00am to start their testing.

Unfortunately, the politics of the organization (which all organizations have) started to take precedence over the technology and getting it to work. Soon it was finger pointing time, which distracted from the actual work of troubleshooting the issues because suddenly the top people in our group had to dump what they were doing to attend conference call after conference call with high-level managers. Members of my group were attempting to catch cat-naps in bean bags and I somehow fell asleep sitting upright in my chair. None of our naps were more than a few minutes long.

To sum up, the release was never completed to the satisfaction of all teams. My manger finally told everyone, including his managers, that we were done at 4:00pm and that anything else that had to be done would have to wait until Sunday unless it was the most critical of issues. We ended up leaving the office at 4:30pm, that’s 18 and 1/2 hours after we arrived in the office. As an aside: the QA teams that had arrived at 6:00am were bitching because they were “tired” and had “worked so many hours”.

Needless to say, I was falling asleep almost immediately after returning home. I managed to stay awake until 8:00pm Saturday night with only a couple of pass-outs in my chair. At 8:00pm I gave up and went to bed. Hence my waking up at 5:30am.

If I ever run a company, I think I’d make it a selling point to my customers that I have as much respect for my employees as I do for my customers. I think I’d point out that I don’t endanger the health and well-being of my employees by demanding that they work insane hours (do you think I had a fun time driving home after working 18 1/2 hours from 10:00pm Friday night through 4:30pm Saturday afternoon?). I think I’d tell them that I balance their needs with the needs of the people who work for me and I think I’d let them know that I understand that, even though I pay them their salaries that doesn’t mean that I own them. And when I needed to perform emergency work in the middle of the night or when something absolutely had to be done on the weekends, I’d make sure I was staffed in such a way that I could support that emergency or weekend work and still have a fully staffed team available during regular hours while the person or persons who had to work the emergency/weekend was given the proper compensation time-off.

I think any customer who had ever had their employers make such unreasonable demands upon their time would understand, appreciate and support my company and my philosophy.

Meanwhile, I’ll be working this afternoon to release the final hotfixes that development has been working on (poor development has been working longer hours than our group has) and we will need “all hands on deck” during the next week to support the inevitable bugs/hotfixes that arise as the site “settles in” after the release.

Needless to say, I’ll be making it clear to my manager (for whom I have nothing but respect and who understands our plight because he worked more hours than the rest of us, right alongside us) and the VP of our organization that I am unwilling to work such a release for this company ever again. I do excellent work for this organization and they get their money’s worth out of my efforts. I fully believe that I don’t have a “right” to be employed and that I must earn my employment, which I do every week. Up to this point, I’ve enjoyed working for this organization, and I know that such releases are supposed to be considered a rarity. But now that they’ve tied these two, huge aspects of the Business together, I have a sinking feeling that such ridiculously scheduled releases will become more common. Should that be the case, and they don’t find a way to manage their people better, I’ll be looking for another job.

The one good thing is that I’m doing my laundry now, as no one else in my building is dumb enough to be up this early with the intention of doing laundry.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 16th, 2006 at 6:33am and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.