LogFAQs > #962037727

pogo_rabid posted...

My first IT job, I had about 12 seconds of backup, and the server room circuit was tied into the bathrooms, and one of the hand air dryers had a short in it, so every few months we would get a hard crash of everything when the dryer heat up the circult and tripped the breaker. We couldn't get budget or approval to get dedicated power.

So happy I don't work there anymore.

It's insane how some companies only consider up front cost, but refuse to consider the cost of outages. This is one of the problems I had with my last job.

At first, they said they were only ever going to open one brick and mortar store. We did the full network setup... full size server rack, redundant switches, redundant firewalls, redundant servers, etc.

Then somehow they changed their minds and wanted to open 75 stores.

Then someone in retail operations decided that they didn't want to spend $72k per store for the network and systems infrastructure any more. They only wanted to spend $5k on the network infrastructure. One switch cost about $6k. So, they also didn't want to pay for redundant firewalls any more.

I sent lengthy emails explaining the nightmare scenarios that could happen. They just shrugged them off as fear mongering. I was stressed AF. I was already working 60 to 80 hour weeks all the time and I didn't have time to chase down every little outage immediately to keep these proposed stores up and running with shitty $5,000 network designs.

I ended up putting in my 2 weeks notice a few months later for a number of reasons, this included. My 2nd to last day, the security camera vendor unplugged the only firewall they wanted to pay for at one of the stores where they didn't want to pay for redundancy. Store down. No sales happening. The firewall model they used takes ~30 minutes just to boot up.

So then at 10am, I had to drive through Austin traffic jams on Mopac trying to get from Southwest Austin to Northwest Austin. It took an hour. About 45 minutes into the drive, the firewall had come back up. I was pissed, and it just further solidified my reason for leaving.