Posted by Bobby T. Johnson
https://thedailywtf.com/articles/classic-wtf-teleported-release
It's a holiday in the US today, one where we give thanks. And today, we give thanks to not have this boss. Original. --Remy
Matt works at an accounting firm, as a data engineer. He makes reports for people who don’t read said reports. Accounting firms specialize in different areas of accountancy, and Matt’s firm is a general firm with mid-size clients.
The CEO of the firm is a legacy from the last century. The most advanced technology on his desk is a business calculator and a pencil sharpener. He still doesn’t use a cellphone. But he does have a son, who is “tech savvy”, which gives the CEO a horrible idea of how things work.
Usually, this is pretty light, in that it’s sorting Excel files or sorting the output of an existing report. Sometimes the requests are bizarre or utter nonsense. And, because the boss doesn’t know what the technical folks are doing, some of the IT staff may be a bit lazy about following best practices.
This means that most of Matt’s morning is spent doing what is essentially Tier 1 support before he gets into doing his real job. Recently, there was a worse crunch, as actual support person Lucinda was out for materinity leave, and Jackie, the one other developer, was off on vacation on a foreign island with no Internet. Matt was in the middle of eating a delicious lunch of take-out lo mein when his phone rang. He sighed when he saw the number.
“Matt!” the CEO exclaimed. “Matt! We need to do a build of the flagship app! And a deploy!”
The app was rather large, and a build could take upwards of 45 minutes, depending on the day and how the IT gods were feeling. But the process was automated, the latest changes all got built and deployed each night. Anything approved was released within 24 hours. With everyone out of the office, there hadn’t been any approved changes for a few weeks.
Matt checked the Github to see if something went wrong with the automated build. Everything was fine.
“Okay, so I’m seeing that everything built on GitHub and everything is available in production,” Matt said.
“I want you to do a manual build, like you used to.”
“If I were to compile right now, it could take quite awhile, and redeploying runs the risk of taking our clients offline, and nothing would be any different.”
“Yes, but I want a build that has the changes which Jackie was working on before she left for vacation.”
Matt checked the commit history, and sure enough, Jackie hadn’t committed any changes since two weeks before leaving on vacation. “It doesn’t looked like she pushed those changes to Github.”
“Githoob? I thought everything was automated. You told me the process was automated,” the CEO said.
“It’s kind of like…” Matt paused to think of an analogy that could explain this to a golden retriever. “Your dishwasher, you could put a timer on it to run it every night, but if you don’t load the dishwasher first, nothing gets cleaned.”
There was a long pause as the CEO failed to understand this. “I want Jackie’s front-page changes to be in the demo I’m about to do. This is for Initech, and there’s millions of dollars riding on their account.”
“Well,” Matt said, “Jackie hasn’t pushed- hasn’t loaded her metaphorical dishes into the dishwasher, so I can’t really build them.”
“I don’t understand, it’s on her computer. I thought these computers were on the cloud. Why am I spending all this money on clouds?”
“If Jackie doesn’t put it on the cloud, it’s not there. It’s uh… like a fax machine, and she hasn’t sent us the fax.”
“Can’t you get it off her laptop?”
“I think she took it home with her,” Matt said.
“So?”
“Have you ever seen Star Trek? Unless Scotty can teleport us to Jackie’s laptop, we can’t get at her files.”
The CEO locked up on that metaphor. “Can’t you just hack into it? I thought the NSA could do that.”
“No-” Matt paused. Maybe Matt could try and recreate the changes quickly? “How long before this meeting?” he asked.
“Twenty minutes.”
“Just to be clear, you want me to do a local build with files I don’t have by hacking them from a computer which may or may not be on and connected to the Internet, and then complete a build process which usually takes 45 minutes- at least- deploy to production, so you can do a demo in twenty minutes?”
“Why is that so difficult?” the CEO demanded.
“I can call Jackie, and if she answers, maybe we can figure something out.”
The CEO sighed. “Fine.”
Matt called Jackie. She didn’t answer. Matt left a voicemail and then went back to eating his now-cold lo mein.
https://thedailywtf.com/articles/classic-wtf-teleported-release
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