this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2025
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you know the computer thing is it plugged in?
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It shouldn't happen for a power button. Even if your IT people are regional, you need somebody on site who can follow technical directions so emergency drives aren't necessary if you have something like a server that needs to stay up.
I've seen this happen, its always because managers make bad decisions.
Keeping people on-site at every facility is impractical, because most of the time they're not needed, it's just the occasional 'woops the routing table has shit the bed' or 'woops we're getting no signal to that CO', etc. For something like a datacenter, sure, you absolutely need round-the-clock staff. But for off-hours it just makes more sense to have people on-call (and thus pay them less than their hourly wage), and the incentive for businesses is to have as few of those people as possible rather than ensuring reasonable coverage and short travel times.
I'm not disagreeing with you, just saying managers tend to error in the direction of understaffing or under resourcing their technical staff.
I used to work at a place where a non IT manager with a high billing rate to clients had to setup computers and fix servers because the company was too cheap to hire an IT person in house - even though the freed up billable time would probably more than pay for an additional employee.
If you need an IT guy to come and press a button there, the staff at least need like a tech savvy intern or staffer who can follow directions. Because lets get real, the people that need that help will need more help.
Oh yeah, agreed, it's definitely a problem. I once had to drive 4 hours on short notice because we had 3 guys covering the entire state of New Mexico, one was on a long call and the other was out sick. The on-site guy kept insisting that the outage was some arcane server issue he couldn't suss out himself, so I hit the road. But when I pulled up in the parking lot there was a fucking backhoe not 300' from the building that had clearly been digging where our fiber ran, and about 15 people standing around it scratching their heads. Worse, guy could see it from his fucking office window, and just.. never bothered to look outside I guess. I just took a picture of it that also showed the sign in front of the building, fired it off to him with a lengthy rant about his obliviousness, and went home. I had a list of incidents like this in my internal email signature and they still refused to hire anyone else.