Untrained techie broke the rules, made a mistake, and found a better way to work
- Reference: 1765179005
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/12/08/who_me/
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This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Leo” who shared a story from the early 1990s, when he provided network and software support for a speciality vehicle manufacturer that ran both a mainframe and an AS/400 midrange machine.
Just one member of the IT department was trained to use the AS/400, but the rest of the small tech team helped each other out because some jobs ran overnight and someone needed to be awake to log on from home by modem to get them going. Sometimes those jobs failed, but competition for time on the AS/400 was fierce so it was worth the attempt.
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This arrangement relied on colleagues in the office completing other jobs by an agreed time, so Leo and his colleagues didn’t have to wait deep into the wee hours.
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One night, that system broke down and Leo found himself unable to access the processing queue he’d been told to use.
Eventually he spotted an empty queue and, despite knowing it wasn’t the right resource, decided to use it.
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Half a heartbeat later, the job finished.
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The point of this late-night login regime was to run workloads through the wee hours when nobody else was around. Leo therefore assumed the sudden conclusion of the job indicated an error and called his supervisor to confess and ask how to restart the job.
“My supervisor was flabbergasted, not by what I thought was an error or how quickly the job ran, but because it had never occurred to her or anyone else to use that queue, which had the highest priority of all queues,” Leo told Who, Me?
The supervisor decided Leo was onto something, and from that night on standard procedure changed to use the high priority queue.
Leo’s mistake therefore meant that whoever was left to do the late night log-ons could see if the job worked, and run it again if necessary. Now, the night shift even had time to verify the output of the job, and close files so backup systems could do their thing overnight.
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The company therefore emerged more efficient and resilient.
“My error, if it can be called an error, was a godsend in disguise for the company and for our small I.T. staff,” Leo concluded.
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There are some people I know of that would call the work Leo did a major security breach.
After all a quote I have heard is “knowledge shared is overtime lost” so by making things work faster there is lost opportunity for earning more money. Personally I would prefer not to have to do the work myslef but then I am salaried not paid by the hour….
“knowledge shared is overtime lost”
“knowledge shared is overtime lost”
What a horrific mindset ,I dont care if your salaried , hourly or self employed. Thats no way to work , especially in I.T. where the entire ethos is to get computers to make our work more efficient.
or am i just being naive?
Re: “knowledge shared is overtime lost”
sounds like you've never worked in the civil service.
i had to go in 1 weekend to do some work and saw a bunch of colleagues & their families enjoying the facilities.
These colleagues where booking double time for half days on Saturday's and Sunday's while doing no work as they'd done it during the week.
2 days pay for using the gym & amusing their families all at tax payers expense.
“knowledge shared is overtime lost”
In a previous role the IT department used to run period end transactions remotely* for the Finance department on a Sunday morning. For doing so we'd take a half day off in lieu as although the actual work time was barely an hour it was spread over around 3 hours and messed up the day (well that was our excuse). The site manager then decided we weren't allowed the time off so we unilaterally decided that the updates were no longer part of our role and that Finance should be running them. Strangely the "must be run out of hours" diktat was withdrawn!
We lost a good way of getting an extra bit of leave but weren't too sorry to be rid of the hassle as well.
*On one occasion remotely meant sat outside my tent at an event, can of beer in hand and the laptop connected to a Nokia mobile via IrDA - none of this fancy blue tooth stuff! :)
Speciality
Upvote for not writing 'specialty'.
Leo
With a designation of "Leo", I was expecting a really ancient story from the days of the Lyons Corner House tea shops and the Lyons Electronic Office!
Re: Leo
i had suspected the link to Lyons too
Re: Leo
I think that applies to all of us of a certain age. If the mainframe wasn't ICL perhaps the manufacturer had a lion mascot. Jaguar would have been a bit of a zoological oopsie.
I did something similar. I had a tonne of computer jobs to run on HPC. There was scheduled downtime, so the admins fiddled with the queues but in a dumb way to stop new jobs that would then have to be killed. As a former HPC admin, I knew enough to look at what they'd done and then tweaked my jobs to run on an otherwise empty cluster; the said jobs were all done before the downtime.