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Comment by jerhinesmith | Hacker News Reader

Is that true? I'm not being sarcastic -- I just have always generally assumed that maintenance was better performed "off-hours".

Also, 1pm and 1am aren't the only options. 8am EDT would have been within the work day but still avoided peak usage in the US.

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Yes, Amazon have a rule to deploy during working hours, during core hours when engineers are around and available should things go wrong. Also, Amazon is one of a number of organisations who don't deploy releases on Friday.

Amazon does not deploy changes during times that they feel can be customer impacting. For North America this means that deployments will be during the night.

IF you can afford the service interruption, which is true for lots of companies and their internal IT systems, you always follow this policy. All concerned including the users are awake and on their normal sleep and work cycle, if you mess something up you find out immediately from those users, etc. etc.

8AM EDT is 5AM PDT, which is where web tech can be found in the United States.

I'm sure you can find engineers willing to work garbage-man hours, but it's gonna cost you.

8AM EDT is 5AM PDT, which is where web tech can be found in the United States.

I'm not sure if you're just being sarcastic, but talent in North America isn't limited to the Pacific Timezone, and such a claim borders on hilarious delusion. I don't say hilarious emotionally or pejoratively, but rather it is actually ha ha funny that anyone would actually believe that.

However yes, there are endless loads of top-skill talent that will happily do "maintenance" in the middle of the night. I've done it on occasion, and slept in the next day. Big deal. Half the time I simply took a timeout from some online gaming I'd been doing.

We don't have "loads" of top-skill talent to begin with.

The pool of top-skill-talent-with-a-self-esteem-problem is rapidly diminishing.

To do something off hours implies a self-esteem problem? That is absurd. People do stuff off hours in return for something, which might be compensatory "time off", additional pay or bonuses, etc.

To do scheduled off-hours work on top of scheduled on-hours work and not get paid for it indicates that the worker has a damaged sense of self-worth.

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