I work in video games, for one of the largest publishers in the business - I can vouch for the Xbox part of that. If you have a game out there with a critical bug that makes it crash or interrupt gameplay for hundreds of thousands of players, you get direct access to the Xbox team, all the way to people behind the OS. Most intense 3 days of my life, fixing something that ultimately ended up being an unannounced change in their API behaviour that maybe looked harmless on paper but caused our game to be unplayable for about 2 million players. Basically Microsoft gave us direct line to their best teams so we got the fix in as quickly as we could.

One of my college classes was taught by someone who worked in whatever that group was/is called. One of the best classes I took and definitely had some great stories to tell as well.

He didn't have a degree so in order to have a class that was accredited his co-worker(who was also fantastic) had to be the "professor of record" and they co-taught the class(since he actually had a masters and was "qualified" to teach).

Yea that doesn't surprise me. This is how they have that unbeatable marketshare lead over practically anything else when it comes to gaming. They'd probably drag bill gates out of bed at 3am if it was important enough.

Not just aerospace, I vividly remember the first, and last, time I saw an An-124 in person. They were hired to fly some 60 ton heavy mining equipment, a gearbox for a ore mill if I remember correctly, from Munich to some place in Asia. All in all, from hiring the Antonov to it leaving loaded for Asia, tool 3 days. That included sourcing and transportimg the equipment from the manufacturer to the airport.

Sometime time is so much money, that money is a seemingly second thought. Still the economics work out.

Side note, I was sure to see you under this submission before clicking on it! A pleasure as always!

I used to have the equivalent job for a Rock'n'Roll lighting company. I always went to work with my passport in my pocket, and more than once hit the airport for a trip that would last a week with nothing more than a toolbox and a credit card: clothes and toiletries you can buy once the show has started. That sort of service was one of the reasons that people bought this company's equipment.

There's quite high stress when having to fix something so that the 15,000 punters waiting outside can actually get to see the band they've paid for. Fun though, in retrospect

Those high-stress business situations, in which you're the one person who has to urgently make something big happen, often with uncertainty about the situation and solution, are... high-stress.

But you can play it as Astronaut Mode. Analogous to the spacecraft that will run out of air in a few hours, and you have to remain calm and sharp and fast-thinking, and in command and coordinating with others, maybe a touch of humor, to make a miracle happen. And somehow it comes together, sometimes more creatively than others. Stressful, but doable, and invigorating and rewarding.

The stress that I think kills you much harder is when when it's a year of mind-boggling pathological big-corporate dysfunction, and you just aren't allowed to make things happen. (The spacecraft has a few hours of air. Various roles in mission control are misaligned, don't know what they're doing, secretly want that mission to fail, random people getting on the radio to countermand, etc. Even Capt. "Ice" Borland will despair when they realize.)

Hence, do your own startup, or find a place you're similarly empowered to make the occasional stressful situation come together, without deadly Type BS stress.

Yep, short term stress won’t do anything to you, it will even let you have a lot of dopamine during and after the stressful situation.

Stress will kill you when it becomes chronic, that is when the stressful situation never ends.

If I understood correctly it’s because instead of getting some cortisol then flush it from your organism once everything is okay, you will add up cortisol over time and this hormone is inflammatory. So chronic stress is physically harming you.

Good point about short-term vs. long-term.

I think I conflated that in my example, with an additional factor: degree of stress. Such as I'd guess differs between when you can rise to the challenge successfully, and when all your efforts are thwarted.

I worked at a rather large bank at the start of covid and we overnighted a bit of networking kit on a first class flight when everything was more or less grounded, I think there was a 50x multiple to the cost of the item vs the cost of transport for it, time is very much money

> I read that Microsoft also has an "AOG" crew, to fix broken critical software systems.

From what I know, back in the day (more of less 10 years ago) MSFT had some Premier Field Engineer (PFE) that operated more or less like this, at least in some places in America.

For databases, I saw some of those folks fixing quite complex scenarios of corrupted log shipping, spin locks, disaster recovery, fixes of corrupted of hundreds of GBs and so on.

I did not had access but I read in some docs that MSFT used to charge almost thousands of dollars for that kind of support.

Thousands of dollars is.. not that much.

When I was a junior strategy consultant they charged 175 dollars per hour of my work. And the company managed to find clients who paid for days of such work, sometimes even with overtime. As much as I like to think of myself as a smart person, the decks that I made were solid but in my opinion nothing special, nothing really groundbreaking. Just standard strategy decks, based on "research" (google), internal analysis (data pulled from ass) or statistical model (excel with lots of assumptions). I also doubt they pushed anyone anywhere apart from making some sales.

On a side note, the rates for tax consultants were generally lower, for example a partner charged 500 per hour, but they usually couldnt charge the client for more than few hours.

So I could imagine those microsoft guys charing something like 2000 per hour, or rather something like 15 000 per day (because it sounds much better) for someone who is actually critically needed. Or maybe those guys think that others are ones charging high rates because the grass is greener on the other side

(Obviously you would take maybe 15% of your hourly rate...)

tbh sometimes I think the most important skill for any consultant is being able to find people who will pay for your services, anything else is secondary

I remember getting a call from an unnamed bank who needed to connect two Microsoft software components. They had spent tens of thousands with top-line Microsoft support and their final answer was that it was impossible.

For some reason the bank called me and my buddy. I asked why they called me. "Because you never use the word 'impossible'." I told them I wanted $20K if we got it working. Two hours later we had it working. I waited two weeks to deliver it because it needed to seem like they got their value out of us o_O

I've seen Red Hat as potentially similar. Some customer problem comes up, and Red Hat can task engineers who are among the best people in the world at solving it. Plus all the work into having a well-engineered baseline.

(Though I've gotten the impression that IBM has at times hurt morale at Red Hat, so retention and alignment of skilled people is a concern, so hopefully IBM is improving that.)

Regardless of what their impact on RedHat has been, this is old hat to IBM. They've had tiger teams like this on the mainframe and as/400 side at least for decades.

Yup. My girlfriend's dad was an IBM mainframe troubleshooter in the 80s. IBM would tell him to be on a plane in 45 minutes, go fix a mainframe, and then go do it again. I think he burned out after a few years, or maybe he quit when they told him to cut his hair. I know I don't have the constitution to be in permanent fire-fighting mode and short notice on-call like that.

He's been a high school teacher ever since.

I did quite a bit of "be on the customer site tomorrow morning when the doors open and stay till it's fixed" over the years. Not as bad as 45 minutes, but still rough. I can't imagine how you do it logistically now, since in the age of 'if you aren't scared shitless the terrorists have won', doing a "single male booked a one-way ticket at last minute with no checked bags and a backpack full of weird electronics" is apparently a 100% guarantee of spending quality time with a TSA 'enhanced screening' these days on top of all the other miseries that travel now brings.

Back in the 70's I worked at Aph that developed handheld LED games for Mattel. Glen, the owner, would put the wire-wrapped prototypes in a Samsonite briefcase, and off the the airport. Security would wonder what the heck it was, so he'd open it up, fire it up, and play the game. It would draw a big crowd! (Back then nobody had seen anything like it.)

Another friend, Eric Engstrom, was developing a phone. The prototypes were made of modelling clay with wires and chips and LEDs. That really set the security guys off.

Booked by corporate on business/first class should help through TSA, I'd guess. Or if it's a real problem, they'd go private and bill the client.

Might be able to get the fixers TSA IDs, which could help get through security too.

True, and I wonder how the care & feeding of blue-necktied elite paratroopers is similar and different from red-fedora'd ones.

Yep, you're not paying for a support team, you're paying for a support team that knows how to find Linus. :)

Many large software and hardware vendors have something like this, sometimes multiple variants - a “fly and fix” team to do onsite troubleshooting or a critical customer program which usually provides project-management oversight to get different teams involved to help get complex problems fixed (but which might also have an explicit or just de facto ability to compel teams to prioritize certain fixes.)

So much so that I would almost count that as the definition of a serious enterprise software company.