This is in no way a comment on work/life sustainability but rather on organizational capacity:
You can imagine a spectrum of organizational ability to inject data, with one end being “9 to 5 in one time zone” and another being “internationally distributed with 24 hour coverage.”
You can imagine a spectrum of organizational ability to inject data, with one end being “9 to 5 in one time zone” and another being “internationally distributed with 24 hour coverage.”
In sysadmin land, this is sometimes called “follow the sun.” US teams handoff to APAC teams handoff to EU teams or similar depending on an organization’s footprint.
There are some organizations that one would expect to be able to follow the sun in times of crisis. I think some of them can’t, because it requires systems, processes, and organizational culture built in times of non-crisis.
I think you would expect, say, national governments to be able to do 24 hour coverage, but particular sub orgs suddenly finding themselves above capacity during crisis might not have the concept of a pager rotation in their conceptual toolkit yet.
Meanwhile the military is presumably scratching its collective head saying “The Roman Empire was able to organize duty watches; don’t the rest of y’all read books? Negative developments happening at night or on weekends is not a particularly novel problem.”
