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Admin
Oh, Jessica is spoilt. I once worked as a dev for a major investment w^Hbank. After three months you had to do PROD support for a month. Investment banks were exempt from regulation back in the day and hence there was hardly any focus/time spent on documentation on what to do when.
Admin
There's an unwritten rule about not deploying on Friday, or just before a holiday. Guess somebody needs that rule in writing.
Admin
Famous last words spoken during every production update:
"It's just a data update," the manager said weakly. "What could go wrong?"
Admin
And the correct response to that is, "Anything and everything."
Admin
I work in the UK for a firm of chartered surveyors, and this scenario sounds awfully familiar. A major change to the business rates schemes (rates being a form of taxation on properties in the UK) comes along every few years. The next one comes out in April 2026 - this has been known about for a couple of years. The scheme for England was just announced, the scheme for Wales ought to be out 'real soon now', and the scheme for Scotland won't be announced until January. Once upon a time, all three regions used the same scheme, but since devolution they've all diverged and they're all getting more complicated, and we have to have the software updates programmed and tested ready for the 1st April!
Admin
The company I work for has over 8500 in IT. We have a policy about month-end AND holiday change freezes. I'm assuming they learnt this lesson the hard way.
Admin
Oh, hey, look who just volunteered to be support on Dec 25th!
Admin
Another good response: "Ask Murphy".
And if they say "We don't have anyone named Murphy", someone needs a lesson.
Admin
Admin
I'm standing /right here/
Admin
The large tech company I used to work with had a 2-week "release freeze" at the end of the year.
But they were at least not in need of having to release anytime early January. The problem with a freeze is that changes keep being pushed to trunk... or not since most code reviews didn't happen as the senior reviewers were off, which balances since there's nobody to check the various health dashboards.
Admin
I used to work on a SAAS team that did regulatory reporting for insurance companies. We had at least two times per year where we would get the latest regulatory changes, often requiring a variety of software changes if not upstream software changes, and would get the requirements 2 months before we needed to have them done, if we were LUCKY. It could be a month or even less. These changes needed to be in production before the new year/quarter started, so prior to Jan 1, Apr 1, Jul 1, or Oct 1.
Ironically it didn't really impact my ability to take Christmas week off (thank god for bank holidays), but it did mean that I'd be pulling long nights after Jan 1 for a week or so.
Admin
"So tonight thank god it's him instead of you ..."
Admin
As far as possible, the legal system shuts down over Christmas. In my part of the system, they've just canceled all jury pools from mid-December.
There will still be legal-aid duty solicitors for police interviews (part of the UK/English system), but the Christmas / New Year shutdown is not an inherently bad time for doing paperwork changes.
Admin
"As far as possible, the legal system shuts down over Christmas.... not an inherently bad time for doing ... changes."
That is semantically equivalent to saying it's safe for someone to consume a particular substance because they're only a little bit pregnant.
Admin
Clarification needed:
For those people not in the UK, Christmas Day and Boxing Day are holidays for most people. If either one of them is a Saturday or Sunday, that holiday is carried over to the next week day. Likewise, New Year's Day is also a holiday and can also be carried over to a weekday if it falls at the weekend. There are always exactly three normal weekdays in between. Many companies make it mandatory to take those three days as leave so they are closed from Dec 25 to Jan 1 inclusive. Other companies do not do that but accept that most of the staff will want to take those three days as leave to get a nice long break.
The question I have is was Jessica being asked to work on Christmas Day and Boxing Day or just those three days between Christmas and New Year. If it's the former, that's a bit of a downer but on the positive side, she'd probably be paid double time. If it's the latter, unless, planning to be away, I always used to volunteer. It's the absolute quietest time of the year. Nobody ever calls with problems because they are not working and you can be really productive if you choose or do personal development, if not. Many years ago, I taught myself how to program Windows applications during one such period.
Admin
I'm sorry, Paddles, but I don't see the analogy.
Admin
Changing processes while the workflow is slow and many tasks have stopped completely means workers have free time in their workday to learn about the changes and adjust to them.
The difficulty of course is that the reason all that stuff is slowed down is so many workers aren't there working. They're off having fun instead.
Admin
Back in the day we used to treat those words as volunteering to stay on call to fix it when it does. Not even joking here. We made that standard practice.
Admin
The analogy would seem to be "not an inherently bad time for doing ... changes" with "consume a particular substance because they're only a little bit pregnant." In other words, they are both examples of someone lying or fooling themselves.
I already don't know what it means. walrus? whale?
Admin
Confirmed. We also had the (physical) emergency phone handed right over to anyone who started to say things like "It's just a...", "But it's only a...", "Never mind, we'll simply..." or "I don't care, we have to immediately..." - and that attitude stopped quickly, which made the programmers happy (and stopped them from quitting).
Admin
When Michael R. started to type the word "bank", they originally started it with a "w".
Addendum 2025-12-15 12:21: In this case, "^H" (ctrl-H) represents the ASCII backspace character (hex 08).
Admin
To be clear - no-one is asking me to work, I know nothing of legal aid! And the question was specifically about the 3 working days between Christmas and New Years. (We've since had an email telling us the company will be closing over Christmas and everyone must book it off as holiday, which I also suspect is too short notice and they legally now have to give us those days free... must look into that one). My main point with this story is the timing. Regardless of people working or not over Christmas, having the deadline of 22nd isn't sensible. Who is working their best in December? Holidays are rampant so even if dev get the work done, we're struggling to find someone to test it. And then there's the need to push the release out to all clients by the appropriate date, whilst there's huge changes to the system (2 sets of rates now as the new one will be replacing the old one soon but for now, just map the codes....) Someone has to trawl through all the documentation provided from the government, not all of it makes sense as there's multiple deparments involved who don't talk to each other... And this is just my company... there are lots of SW providers affected and all have to do all of this work.... Happy Christmas to anyone who works in Legal software... it's a minefield!
Admin
I'm working in a global company. So one option here is always: Lets do a a release just before X-Mas, then the Indian and chinese teams can test it over vacation... And at least half of the time the first E-Mail you see in the new year is "Can somebody please help me with XYZ" (written the first day nobody was working anymore. So no testing could get done and the team was sitting around doing nothing...). You would think people learn... Experience show: They don't... (or at least they manage to switch to new people fast enough that it seems like that)
Admin
We get the days between Christmas and New Year as nominated days off; they don't count towards our yearly allowance. (My employer gets to turn off the heating in most buildings as well as reducing other power usage to a minimum, saving quite a bit of money while earning lots of good will with staff.) I tend to take some extra days off as well, just to round things out.
Admin
Adding ^H is usually done for humor, for example where the original word is deleted for being too honest. What was the original "w" word?
Admin
I assume it was alluding to the word “wank” (or maybe “wanker”)
Admin
I had an colleague who always deployed on his last day of the week (Thursday) or before his vacation, fun times