Work recently had a bit of a reorg and my “infrastructure” team (me and two other guys who look after the hardware, network, database, OS and everything apart from the the actual website code) were moved from the “online” division to “Central IT” . Next week we physically move down to the basement (yes, really) to be with the rest of IT.
Note: One of my rules of seating is “always be as close to marketing as possible” . This is because marketing (usually) have a bit of clout in any organisation and will always get at least semi-decent offices with things like windows, pool tables, working lifts etc. Departments like IT, Helpdesk, accounting and security on the other hand have no pull and will get pushed into windowless dungeons whenever the reorganisations happen.
The main thing I’m worried about with my new job is that I’m not cut of from my “platform users” , we are about 2 minutes walk away (for now, potentially more later) so it’s not too far for meetings but certainly too far for unsceduled chats. So I won’t know if a major stoary is breaking (with the potential load on the system) just by watching frantic acticity any more, nor will I be able to walk a few metres to check a bug, ask somebody a questions etc.
Just last week we had a bug on the site for a few minutes that caused one article to 302 (temp redirect) to itself for about 10 minutes. I noticed the big jump in hits and was able to talk to the 2 editors in charged or the article and the head programmer right away. As of next week something similar will take much longer as I would either have to run upstairs (and be offline) or phone/skype people until I got hold of the right ones.
It’s a common situation with disjointed teams but it means that things have to get a lot more formal in order to keep the site reliable. So I’ll probably be spending the next few weeks going over rollout, escalation, ticketing and similar procedures because I’ll no longer be able to just turn around and yell to find out if somebody is running something causing a problem.
At least one good thing that’ll come out of this is that we won’t be doing the “level 1” helpdesk stuff for the dept any more, so we’ll be able to concentrate on our actual job.
