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The workday here is not eight hours long. It starts in Germany and extends to the UK, to Austin and to LA and then starts back up again. What's your day-to-day like overseeing that kind of handoff?

TL;DRWith no internal 24/7 operations team yet, Mike Jones personally takes emergency calls from any time zone and wakes the right people, with a quiet window only around midnight to two, and a team is hoped for someday.

Mike JonesSenior Director of Corporate and Publishing Technology

Well, yeah, it takes a while to get used to. It kind of just doesn't stop. We have a little window, for me, in my time zone, it's between about midnight and two o'clock when it's quiet. And the other thing is, these guys here talk about the things that they do, but a lot of what we do is responding to emergent issues, or system down or communication failure or some kind of a server not responsive, things like this. And we don't have an internal NOC yet, like a 24-7 team that responds to those types of things. So for now, I'm it. And so if anything happens in one of the other time zones, or maybe they can't publish a build or they can't see a particular network share or something, if it's bad enough, I'll get the call. And then that means, because I have a pretty good idea of who could solve what and in what time zone the quickest, I start dialing out and waking people up. And so that's kind of how we handle this around-the-clock type thing. And I think someday we're going to expand that. But it takes a lot of people to be able to man a 24-7. So the guys here, this team in particular really does spend a lot of extra hours. We have our normal time that we come into the office, but I can tell you that there's not very many times during the day, even on weekends, that I can't send out a message and one or more of these guys will be right there on it and able to respond to an issue.

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Published on this date.15 Mar 2019