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Feb 09More or Less Random
by in Feature Articles on 2009-03-31
Chris J's manager had just returned from a meeting with The Admirals and called for an impromptu debriefing with the team. As everyone gathered, they noticed he wasn't wearing his we finally sign-off face.
"Overall," the manager said in a serious tone, "the Navy is very pleased with the application. There weren't any data problems on their side, and they were satisfied with the quantity and quality of documentation. Even the number of manhours we spent on the project was well within their acceptable limits."
When Steven saw that there was an opening in the Plant & Enterprise Dashboard Activity New Technology group, he jumped at submitting his application and, much to his delight, was accepted. PEDANT was an elite group within the IT organization that was responsible for the system that ran the large plasma status screens spread throughout the plant and corporate offices. At a glance, one could see everything from the number of new orders entered for the day, the thoroughput of the shipping department, the current stock trading price, employee-related news, and even the five-day forecast.
It took him twenty years of playing corporate politics and climbing his way up, but Scott had finally made it to the top. Not the tippy-top, but close. He was the Director of Applications Management at an international, ten-thousand employee, forty-billion dollar company and was responsible for running a department of a few hundred people.
Cabe B. closed his eyes tightly and sighed. His pager was vibrating and beeping a sad interpretation of O Fortuna. And yet again, their most important server had gotten precipitously hot. If the situation wasn't remedied, XDISP1 would shut down.
Credit card companies push around gobs and gobs of data every single day, and MonsterCharge (where Mike worked) was no different. However, the one thing that set MonsterCharge apart from many other credit card companies was the sheer volume of data that they worked with on a daily basis. The production environment had tiers, the test environment had tiers, heck, the tiers even had sub-tiers!
1:53 AM, and Sacha's phone was ringing loudly. The woman on the other end of the line was trying to speak calmly, but the fear in her voice was obvious. It was clear that this was the first big production failure she'd had to deal with.
After a hard day of writing code at the Department of Justice, Sabbo settled into his favorite chair to watch the evening news. But instead of his usual glass of iced tea, that night it was a tumbler-full of Johnnie Walker Black on rocks.
McGillicutty Power and Light was a small utilities company with a big problem: Their customer base was growing by leaps and bounds but the supposed-to-be simple task of printing a batch of invoices was taking a glacial age to complete. Things got to be so bad in fact that each of the accounting clerks needed two PC's – one dedicated to everyday tasks like email and spreadsheets and the other for printing invoices.