March 28, 2024

Reposting here something I slapped up onto the forum, but given that that had reached ~900 pages last time I looked I suspect it’ll be read by about three people.

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So what’s likely to be happening behind the scenes.

At the coal face: Techies cursing, trying to find out who changed what, how they changed it, why and understand why the hell such a simple change caused such a major impact.  If they have good line managers (LM) they’ll be shielded from the upper layers allowing them to firefight this.  I would suspect that any engineers with specific experience with the type of problem will have been phoned up and pulled in from days off by now as well.

Next level up: The LM for the techies will be politely telling the management to f__k off and not to contact the techs directly, pointy haired bosses poking their noses in never helps.  They’ll be collecting information from everyone they can and probably having the joy which is hourly (at least) reports up the chain to the next level.

Next level: Sitting around in a conf call demanding timescales and answers and demanding that everyone is pulled in but not actually promising to pay overtime or TOIL for broken holiday.

Top level: Cursing everyone below them and making threats.

Web / forum engineers: Cursing the customers for trying to perform a denial of service by whining and posting ASCII art to the forum.

Customers: Getting that glint in their eyes seeing “compensation” and “sue Blizz” in their future dreaming of a month of free game time, gold and server transfers.  None of which will happen.

Back to the poor sods at the first two levels, seriously.  They and the other side (Telia I suspect) will be sat on a joint conf call trying to debug what has happened how to first mitigate the issue and then return normal service.  Shift changes will be happening, some people will be working near non-stop for 24h (and no.. that’s not their job no one really gets paid to work 24h without a break)

I have faith in the techies working it, I have little faith in Blizzard’s customer service to calm the fires partly because they can’t and partly because their history on handling such things is not brilliant.

Do I think someone f__ked up, hell yes, will demanding stupid things resolve anything.  No.

Have I been there.  Yes, you think this is horrible, trust me, it isn’t.
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