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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

I've seen Red Hat as potentially similar. Some customer problem comes up, and Red Hat can task engineers who are among the best people in the world at solving it. Plus all the work into having a well-engineered baseline.

(Though I've gotten the impression that IBM has at times hurt morale at Red Hat, so retention and alignment of skilled people is a concern, so hopefully IBM is improving that.)

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Regardless of what their impact on RedHat has been, this is old hat to IBM. They've had tiger teams like this on the mainframe and as/400 side at least for decades.

Yup. My girlfriend's dad was an IBM mainframe troubleshooter in the 80s. IBM would tell him to be on a plane in 45 minutes, go fix a mainframe, and then go do it again. I think he burned out after a few years, or maybe he quit when they told him to cut his hair. I know I don't have the constitution to be in permanent fire-fighting mode and short notice on-call like that.

He's been a high school teacher ever since.

I did quite a bit of "be on the customer site tomorrow morning when the doors open and stay till it's fixed" over the years. Not as bad as 45 minutes, but still rough. I can't imagine how you do it logistically now, since in the age of 'if you aren't scared shitless the terrorists have won', doing a "single male booked a one-way ticket at last minute with no checked bags and a backpack full of weird electronics" is apparently a 100% guarantee of spending quality time with a TSA 'enhanced screening' these days on top of all the other miseries that travel now brings.

Back in the 70's I worked at Aph that developed handheld LED games for Mattel. Glen, the owner, would put the wire-wrapped prototypes in a Samsonite briefcase, and off the the airport. Security would wonder what the heck it was, so he'd open it up, fire it up, and play the game. It would draw a big crowd! (Back then nobody had seen anything like it.)

Another friend, Eric Engstrom, was developing a phone. The prototypes were made of modelling clay with wires and chips and LEDs. That really set the security guys off.

Booked by corporate on business/first class should help through TSA, I'd guess. Or if it's a real problem, they'd go private and bill the client.

Might be able to get the fixers TSA IDs, which could help get through security too.

True, and I wonder how the care & feeding of blue-necktied elite paratroopers is similar and different from red-fedora'd ones.

Yep, you're not paying for a support team, you're paying for a support team that knows how to find Linus. :)

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