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Comment by _RPM | Hacker News Reader

"5am beer" Is it normal to stay in the office all night? (CS undergraduate, never had full time job)

If you are on call/scheduled for the deployment you may be required from time to time to come online and deploy in off-peak times. This type of maintenance should be extremely rare - in that it requires making your service entirely unavailable, most deployments should be able to be done in a rolling manner and not affect ongoing service availability.

Also usually you are on call every so-often so if your team/company happens to do this often it's not always you performing the deployment.

In regards to "being in the office": most people will do this from home after sleeping most of the night and waking up to an alarm and then coming in a little later the next day. There are a few hardcore ones out there that prefer to pull an all-nighter and do so from the office, although my mileage has been those are quite few and far between.

> In regards to "being in the office": most people will do this from home after sleeping most of the night and waking up to an alarm and then coming in a little later the next day. There are a few hardcore ones out there that prefer to pull an all-nighter and do so from the office, although my mileage has been those are quite few and far between.

DevOps/Admin here! I prefer the all-nighter, but I've almost always (in 14 hours) done it from home unless physical hardware had to be moved (i.e. forklifted datacenter to datacenter).

Experience tells me an allnighter would be a poor idea, as sleep deprivation is just as harmful to cognitive abilities than being drunk. Especially in the times between 5AM and 8AM, which I've found affects individuals the most.

If something goes wrong with your database, you'll be in a shitty condition to make fast and sound judgement calls.

One could say that not everybody's the same, but in those conditions I think that's not true. I've trained extensively under sleep deprived conditions in the military, where we were continually asked to make quick decisions in harsh conditions. Everybody's bad when sleep deprived and everybody's especially shitty at 5AM.

The last sentence is interesting to me - I wonder if there are many sys/devops types who are morning people? I'm a developer and function much better at 5am than 11pm, but it'd be an interesting correlation if server-peeps were almost exclusively nightowls.

Not at any decently functioning company, but during a huge operation like a data center migration or a core technology change, having all hands on deck during non-business hours is fairly normal.

Not at a company worth working at, no.

That sort of thing should be the extreme exception--anything else is just burning out employees.

I worked for a telco years ago. We had separate development and operations teams. Operations worked on 3 turns of 8 hours, 7x24. They took care of every installation (pre-production and production) and they usually did them in the night shift. The staff was rotated over the months and there was no particular employer burn out.

By the way, one full time equivalent (that is, a hypothetical person working 24 hours a day all year long) equalled to five real people. That is, if they wanted ten people to be always available they had to hire fifty. You can easily understand why these arrangements are not common for Internet companies. Furthermore telcos have different requirements. Devops wasn't there yet and I wonder if it is accepted by management even now. My bets are against it.

I also wonder if companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook are organized in that way too.

Sounds like a sound way of managing it...as others have pointed out, occasional on-call duty or what have you is fine--it's the idea that staying at the office until 3 is "normal" and accepted as part of your equity payout is insane.

I think all of us where at home during this. I certainly was.

I was too. And I had that beer when we finished. ;)

So awesome.

During massive migrations, yes. Doesn't count if you're working remote though, you're already at home.

If you read carefully, it seems that it was 5am Saturday, not through the night, and it looks like it was done by 7:15am. The beer was just labelled with the start of the process.

Migrations like this don't happen often, and being on-site would be common when you are running in a physical data center rather than the cloud. When we switched backend DB systems we did it from home.

No, but it's also not normal to migrate your production database servers to new datacenters. And when you do, you want to do this in a way that will minimally impact your users (i.e. after hours).

It's not normal, but this was an exceptional situation.

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