Work Rants

I have some thoughts on planned downtime. Ultimately it boils down to this: is the planned downtime caused by urgent, impending, and guaranteed doom? If yes, then by all means have the downtime whenever you can. If not, affected as few customers as possible, by the numbers. Planned system downtime should minimize impact to system usage - period. By "System Usage" I mean real customers using the system. I recently had a discussion with the systems group about a necessary outage on a system I support. Something important, but not urgent had the possibility to cause downtime on the system. However, if something went wrong and we had to restart a server, the server might not come up. This was deemed as needing pretty serious attention (which I agreed with). They found a fix and wanted to put it into production, as an emergency, planned downtime. We had a downtime window coming up, but this should probably happen before the window. They suggested an evening. Google Anal

Today, a lady got a promotion. Let's call her Gretchen. I had dealings with Gretchen before, however they were not good. Gretchen needed some content in the portal I manage. Simple enough. Unfortunately, it was going to take some time to identify her stakeholders specifically. Impatience was wining over doing something right. They wanted to cram the content onto every employee's layouts - despite the fact that most of those employees would have no idea what this content was. At the time, I still had the quixotic notion that I could keep the portal relevant, compelling, and relevant. I pointed out that having that additional kind of noise in the portal was not a good thing. If we waited a week or two, I could set it up so the tab only went to the people who needed the content. They said tough shit - we'll do this now. Fast forward a year and we find their tab that had to be pushed to the entire employee population that didn't mean anything to them, complete with