Interested to hear from folks in tech what they think about the job Saul is doing?
I have heard 2 consistent points of view.
The first one is “no he is awful, completely out of his depth and just more of the same”.
The other is “yes, he is trying to turn the titanic around but there is so much rot and cronyism throughout tech leadership levels that it will take a long time for the trickle down ideas from the top to get to the engineers in the trenches”
That attitude is part of the problem - thinking of it as a terrible burden. If your secondary environment is set up properly, moving from primary to secondary should be a non-event. A little change and the business is working, monitoring is up and running, no one really has an issue.
The problem is that a lot of LOBs treat BCP as a separate environment from prod. So they go days/weeks/months with prod and bcp out of synch. They don’t do validation when they do releases and as a consequence when they do have a forced test or heaven forbid an actual event, it becomes an incredible PITA and hours long incident trying to get the environment to work properly.
We deploy our apps to both prod/bcp on the same night. We validate each on the same night. We have two BCP failover test per app each year. Then there are the Enterprise events as well. These are all non-events. It’s a couple hours over the weekend to failover, test, fall-back and everyone is done. We see other LOB’s doing the same exercises and it takes them all weekend to become successful after hours and hours of work, or they fail and suffer from the management questions about why they failed. Better planning and maintenance of your BCP environment makes life much easier on all those involved.
My vote is "Yes, he is trying to turn the Titanic around."
More BCP events???? Please god no!
I can’t think of any grand original ideas that originated with him. Examples of great changes are job family changes, career paths, and university/develop you changes. However, those are across the enterprise and nothing he came up with for tech.
Things that i like that have changed since he came on would be better BCP. More frequent, better tests. Moving mainframe apps from one datacenter to another and leaving there for six months are welcome and great changes. But those are low hanging fruit that anyone could come up with changes for. Most of our LOB have been clamoring for those for years. It’s nice someone up top finally listened tho and implemented.
On the flip side, he hasn’t done anything that is truly outrageously stupid like his predecessor’s Shoreview event.
In the end he doesn’t being anything good or bad to the table, he just exists.
Charlie, if you are doing the yearly Review of your directs, please don’t ask random people on layoff board from their opinion.