August 28, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Steve... nice to see a fellow Jack Reacher fan 🙂
September 2, 2008 at 5:43 am
Late to the game...
Great comments Steve. I agree 100%. I remember a dot com emergency where I spent almost three days with little sleep and I was messing up at least half the time, extending the problem instead of fixing it. Unfortunately that was the attitude of the place. In my current company we've instituted a "tiger team" for emergencies. It's split in half so that we can immediately go into shift work, sharing the load so that no one is pulling stupid long hours and making mistakes due to a lack of sleep.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
Author of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning
September 2, 2008 at 11:37 am
One of my last job, my first assignment had to get the system working in two months. I was hired in the very late stage of the project. There were two people working on the project for four months and nothing had done much. After I was hired, I replaced both of them, worked 60 to 65 hours a week and got the project into QA stage in two months. My new manager was skeptical when he hired me. But after he saw me getting the project into QA after two months when two people could not get anything done in four months, he was very pleased.
So I did not mind to work under pressure, I considered it as a challenge as long as I worked with a good team of people that gave me help and support.
However if the people I worked with gave me a lot of negative comments or remarks or feedback, then I considered it very stressful and there was the situation that I still did not know how to handle.
September 2, 2008 at 9:13 pm
Love those Jack Reacher novels. A welcome break from the real world.
Working under pressure and stress is something you have to be able to do in IT, but managers have to remember to manage the team and be sure that you still have people able to effectively handle the regular stuff. I highly recommend that anytime there's an emergency, you immediately send at least one person home to get rested and ready to come back if things aren't fixed. Rotate it around so that if things do get fixed quickly sometimes, people appreciate the break they've been given.
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