What Happened To Down Time?
So PSN is down for maintenance today between, get this, 8am and 10pm. For those with a time telling deficiency thats slightly more than half a day through the middle of the day time and in to the evening.
Now I’ve been doing IT work for approx 14 years and never have I heard any one make the statement that it’s “ok” to take a network down during business hours or during peak times. NEVER. In this case I wager during the middle of the day probably isn’t peak but I’d guess 5pm-11pm when every one is off work and home from school is probably peak. I guess I give them credit for doing it closer to the middle of the week but wouldn’t 3am-5pm have been a better time?
Yet lately both in this instance, and where I work, it seems to be increasingly more acceptable to take something down when ever you darn well feel like it. Did I miss something? Are we becoming so reliant on our network 24×7 that it no longer matters when it becomes unavailable because it has to happen some time eventually any way? Or is it that we’re increasingly bowing to what management wants? The symptom is obvious but what do you think the cause is?
Facing A Metrics Avalanche
May be this is a little philosophical for a Monday morning but I’m going to throw it out there any way. I was just reading a Linkedin article about books that VC’s and startup CEOs recommend. One of them was preaching the importance of metrics. This caught my eye.
I work in a place where metrics are king. To the detriment of the common worker. I waste upwards of 50% of my time involved in activities designed to gather metrics(in a flawed manner) when my job is to keep the servers that make the business run up and running.
I fear that such preaching of metrics metrics metrics is really a bane in disguise. I understand we need to have a way to measure success, or failure, to have knowledge to change our processes and try to make them better but at the same time we’re all ready facing an over load of data and letting that interfere with getting actual work done is a very real thing. As I stated above it happens almost daily where I work. This is going to become a bigger and bigger problem as more and more devices and methods to gather metrics grows. Be cautious that you don’t hinder your businesses growth because your employees are spinning their wheels on metrics.
When there are to many numbers it makes it harder to chose which numbers are the important ones.
Update:
Thanks to my buddy Mike for catching this. This screen shot was taken from his Google Buzz feed. For those who may not be aware I work for the company of note.
