Comment by justin66 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by justin66 | Hacker News Reader

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At this point I think you’re just committed to the bit but you cannot possibly believe what you’re writing, as it’s a blinkered analysis and truly misanthropic in its effect. A metropolitan library system employs hundreds of people in a variety of roles and if we can prevent them from having a frustrating and wasteful start to their day, it’s worth an on-call person’s time.

> and on-call has a human cost.

In the context of this thread, we’re talking about this job description:

Senior Datacenter Network Infrastructure Engineer Full Time San Francisco, CA, US 30+ days ago Requisition ID: XXXX Salary Range: $140,000.00 To $200,000.00 Annually

It’s not like we’re talking about indentured servitude or something.

> Perhaps put another way, is there any computer service now that doesn't need a guarantee? Or is everything just critical now?

That’s an interesting strawman you have there. I thought I killed it upthread when I wrote “Depends on the service.”

No, I quite strongly believe it actually. I likewise find it hard to believe you're serious, so I'll raise my question again: if not even a municipal library (which, I'll remind you, aren't even open the majority of the time and we all get by just fine), what is an example of a non-critical service in your mind? Maybe the online checkin for a specific Great Clips? It depends on what? Pointing out that "it depends on the service", and that a library clearly isn't critical was my whole original point.

Misanthropic to me is making every IT job require getting up in the middle of the night to save a 100*epsilon of theoretical frustration lest we be perceived as lacking the requisite seriousness. And when someone points out that actually a given case is really not a big deal, we're met with "but hundreds of thousands of people might think 'oh, darn' for a moment!" And for a library, IME librarians tend to be really chill, so I suspect they'd, like me, attest that actually they'd prefer you not work at midnight on their account. Like I said, as a citizen funding and using my library, I sure hope they don't treat their employees that way.

> a municipal library (which, I'll remind you, aren't even open the majority of the time and we all get by just fine),

At least half of a modern library's lending happens digitally. But let's put aside the example of the library.

> what is an example of a non-critical service in your mind?

I thought the example above of hundreds of people being unable to start their work day until someone solves an especially serious IT problem was universal, not unique to a library system's network. It's relevant to the Internet Archive, and even relevant to...

> Maybe the online checkin for a specific Great Clips?

Maybe not? Their entire WAN being down, affecting dozens of stores, possibly yes?

I'm not sure what's difficult here. Paying a person to be available to deal with a problem serious enough to justify the call makes sense. Sending trivial, less serious problems that can easily wait until business hours their way at night makes less sense.

Taking those calls isn't necessarily a bad job, but somehow that assumption is baked into what you're saying.

> Misanthropic to me is making every IT job require getting up in the middle of the night

Let's not do that, then.

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