New boss had ‘more ambition than technical skill’ • The Register

On Name Because the outdated saying goes, there are few certainties in life past demise and taxes. However on this week’s On-Name – The Register‘s common reader-contributed tales of techies being requested to rescue the ridiculous – we will think about one other: new managers who needlessly change programs that work completely properly.

The supply of this story is a reader named “Scanlon” who as soon as labored for an organization that employed a brand new operations director. Not lengthy after taking the gig, the brand new man declared his intention to “audit all the things you guys are doing incorrect.”

Which relatively rubbed Scanlon up the incorrect manner as a result of, as he advised On-Name, “I do not pander to somebody who has extra ambition than technical nous.”

Ouch.

Scanlon could not cease the brand new ops director working his eye over the corporate’s tech, which on the time was principally midrange programs because it moved away from mainframes.

When Scanlon arrived on the firm, he discovered a number of IBM P570 programs in place. Curiously, they have been being utilized in bare-metal mode relatively than working digital machines.

“The consequence was costly tin that wasn’t performing anyplace close to capability and there have been plans to purchase much more equipment,” Scanlon scoffed.

Our hero was sorting that out as the brand new ops director arrived. He had one remaining concern to handle: a difficult SAN driver improve to get a third-party vendor’s storage equipment taking part in good with the IBM servers.

As a result of the improve was not full, it was included within the audit.

I did not obtain a phrase of thanks and I used to be by no means compensated for my misplaced holidays

“I had an preliminary assembly with the brand new chap the place he launched me to an exterior marketing consultant that he had engaged to audit our programs,” Scanlon recalled. “I ran via the configs and identified that we have been nonetheless coping with a vendor to resolve the motive force updates and that consequently there was a patch that we have been holding off making use of.”

Scanlon reckoned different work might wait till the SAN was sorted, identified he was taking vacation the next week, and requested if the audit might wait till he returned. He left the room feeling his plan had been accepted, so headed off for his break.

On the primary Tuesday of his vacation, a colleague tracked him down with information: the marketing consultant had been given root passwords, commenced the audit in Scanlon’s absence, and had run some scripts to start his probe.

These scripts took some time to run, which the marketing consultant defined, naturally, on his manner out the door for the day.

Not lengthy afterwards workers observed an eruption of alerts, adopted by shoppers complaining they may not course of transactions.

Which was why colleagues referred to as Scanlon, who tried to triage the scenario from afar.

Earlier than lengthy, the brand new ops director demanded he come to the workplace.

Fortunately, Scanlon was solely 5 hours away by street and was respectable sufficient to reply the decision.

When he arrived, within the wee hours of Wednesday, he observed all of the servers had surrendered to a kernel panic.

A look at log recordsdata rapidly confirmed the script run by the auditor was the reason for the crash.

The script was buggy, however when the primary server turned unresponsive the marketing consultant dismissed it as a mere pause whereas the script did its job.

So he ran it on extra machines. Which additionally crashed.

Scanlon’s evaluation of the scenario was that the script disconnected all of the digital servers from the community and storage, so the servers promptly hung.

As soon as he restored issues to working situation, the SAN and community paths got here again on-line, databases recovered, and enterprise resumed.

Scanlon acquired again in his automotive and drove one other 5 hours to renew leisure together with his household.

Is he nonetheless slightly bitter concerning the incident? Perhaps only a smidge.

“I did not obtain a phrase of thanks from the corporate, and I used to be by no means compensated for my misplaced holidays,” he wrote.

“The one saving grace is that I remained with the corporate for a number of years after that, whereas the tenure of the ops director was considerably shorter.”

“And my response to the corporate was quiet quitting for the following 12 years” – exhibiting as much as work with out giving it his finest effort.

Have new managers and their minions impacted your work, and seen you referred to as out to handle their messes? Click here to email On-Call along with your story, which it could be our privilege to contemplate for a point out on this house on a future Friday. ®