Technology

Because knowledge work is never ending. There's always more to do.

As an American, I've worked with lots of my European counterparts over the years, and trying to get things done can be downright painful.

We're across multiple time zones, and Europeans refuse to be on a call that isn't in their typical work hours.

Kind of problematic when there's no one "time" where a Central Time American can be on a call during his work hours while a Brit, German, and an Estonian do to.

Multiple people will have to be flexible here, and assuredly it won't be our Western Europe peers.

There are things like change windows, to reduce risk of downtime for users. Those are established by when the users utilize the resources being changed. Sometimes that means I work a normal day, and get back on things at midnight or 2am to make a change and validate it. It needs to be done then, it's important, it's been entered into a massive scheduling system which tracks resources: subcontractor time, staff time, access to things like VM hosts to ensure our change doesn't conflict with other changes to shared hosts/network/power, etc. Many internal and external organizations can be involved in changes, the external generally incur additional cost, so we try to combine as many changes as possible to minimize that cost.

This is just one small example of the coordination involved in herding the cats of large infrastructure.

SMB is much easier, far fewer people and system impacts, practically no change management, so if something happens days later, tracing it back to those changes can be difficult or impossible. It's more wild-west, with knowledge retained in a small set of admins. Even there it can take many conversations between local power, remote power, subcontractors, vendors, telco, cloud providers, etc to manage changes. These can all be geographically disparate (I have a friend with a client with operations in CA, CO, NM, WV, MO). That's 3 time zones, with vendors, subcontractors, and contracts in all of them, under varying legal jurisdictions and regulatory domains. Something as simple as updating/replacing a remote monitor cell router can take months of conversations. Without the upgrade, they're in violation of state and federal regulations, with fines that can be $10k/day or more.

Just because you have no idea what other people do, doesn't make it any less important or valuable. Any boss is very appreciative when you stay on a call "past 5" to help prevent being fined like that. (I've been on calls that lasted 24hrs+, over Thanksgiving).