Are you a morning person or a night owl?

[SWBTATTReg]

16. Night Owl. Worked in IT for many many years and the times we often had available to bring IT systems (batch and

online) new releases and new programs implemented.

Usually, these shifts began the start of the evening shift until the very next morning, from 6-7 p.m. to usually by 4-5-6 a.m., so you could quickly test all of the online and batch systems quickly (and of course, you had tested everything fairly well before putting the new code out there, often weeks at a time), before giving everything an OK (to implement LIVE or production vs. a test system).

So, you bring the systems down, implement the new or revised code on your test platforms, test, test, test, and then bringing the systems back up, at normal times, and then hold your breath, hoping for the best. Usually, 95% of the installs went ok, but sometimes they didn't, and you couldn't figure out why the install didn't work. Perhaps a module was missing...perhaps code in one or more modules were messed up. Perhaps steps were omitted by the vendor when you were going through the installs...perhaps you didn't have enough resources (Storage, DASD for example, direct access storage device) for a particular file or table. Numerous things.

And you had to get it all done by your deadline. Especially if you had a large online presence. Batch was usually better, as you could hold off on not running a batch cycle or two (a batch cycle is like a single run of a stream of software programs and/or tables, etc. Could be one instance per day, or each instance a magnetic data tape was received). Online was a little different, as you actually have live people interacting w/ the systems then.