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Comment by bmurphy1976 | Hacker News Reader

bmurphy1976

It sure feels like there have been quite a few big outages this summer (Google in particular). I wonder if they are getting sloppy or this is just bad luck?

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My gut reaction is that many companies make the majority of their income/deals during the fall/winter/spring (think back to school shopping, Christmas, re-signing contracts for the next year, tax season, etc.) Thus, many companies try to make major infrastructure changes during the summer, when there will be a slightly smaller negative impact on the business's bottom line in case something does go wrong.

Another way to think about that is that PMs spend three quarters of the year distracted by meetings with external clients, and only have summer to actually ride their teams on implementing the things they've negotiated.

My take is that many people are out on vacation during the summer months and sometimes things break (or break harder than usual) when certain knowledgeable people aren't available.

Also, summer interns. A friend who worked at FB said outages there go up markedly when interns start pushing to prod.

> interns start pushing to prod

hey everybody, I spotted the problem! I'll keep an eye on my mailbox for the giant consulting fee that I assume is enroute.

You really think interns are allowed to push code to production at FB?

I worked at FB for four years, and they are in fact allowed to do so.

Google only hires the best of the best.

The best of the best of the best, Sir! With Honours!

This is one of our favorite jokes internally, often invoked when new signage is put up to clarify how trashcans work or the like.

Maybe memorising algorithms from a textbook does not translate to great system engineering and SRE skills? Who would have thought.

I'm glad you have a good handle on the data about the predictive power Google interviews have about the individuals.

Can you share the data?

I have a good handle on how the customer base for cloud computing services perceives cloud vendors and aws is way ahead of everyone else by a mile.

This is because they have a far better and complete platform, and it appears to be better engineered too with fewer of the downtime incidents we’ve been seeing at the other vendors.

Why do you suspect this is? Let me tell you. Amazon had better people. Full stop.

That's a whole lot of words to say "no"

It’s random. You might as well read chicken entrails; at least then there’d be less racial and gender bias in the process.

This would also require killing a lot of chickens, which feels less pleasant.

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