A false smoke alarm almost drowned Jane Street's only NYC datacenter (michael.bacarella.com)

Though the "55 gallon" drum lift is greatly exaggerated, that was a crew of guys hired off the street who were walking around doing odd jobs in the disaster zone. Kinda wild. For us, we just carried the 5 gallon buckets.

With fuel storage on the same floor for a reasonable runtime, larger fuel storage in the basement and a pump (or two) to move fuel, you're well prepared for lots of things. As long as the fuel throughput on the stairs is better than the fuel use rate, then you're ok for as long as you've got people to move it. Which is ok for exceptional incidents.

shocking how much engineering you can get done when the normal process becomes impossible and waiting isn't an option.

This was in 2012, not 2002. Not having your DC in your office was well known by then to be a bad model especially for a DMM, NYSE itself knew this.

I worked for a MM, we were ready to open the next day because we were in actual datacenters.

Definitely a memorable week. I wonder just how many folks in Fidi were learning the finer points of emergency backup generators.

I've done this job. I only had to do it a few times per day, but it sucked each and every time.

(When I showed up due to a report of an outage for our client's gear at the top of the building, the street was flooded. Water was flowing into a giant metal grating in the sidewalk like something from a cartoon. This grating lead to the basement.

And that basement was where the electrical switchgear was.

It was bad. It stayed bad for a long time.)

So many times it's taken herculean effort to make things happen, usually because of poor planning and poor leadership.

Why these are viewed as "successes" or "heroic" baffles me as well.

My company during Sandy was operated in both NY and SF, and our experience was a bunch of us on the west coast filling in for those who were not only unable to get to the office, but without power themselves in NYC. It was all unfamiliar stuff for us (different business functions were done there, but the NYC office’s work was time critical) but did build camaraderie.

Quitting a job because of this is so funny to me. 2012 was truly a different time.

The chance of a hurricane within 24 months was never 100%. Looking back, it did happen, but you can’t judge future-facing decisions on post-hoc information that you didn’t have at the time.

There is a difference between “no one wanted to admit it wasn’t 0%” and “no one else thought the risk-adjusted return was positive.” When people decline to take some preventative measure, that’s usually what they’re saying implicitly.

I’ve been where you are—frustrated that you predicted and told people exactly what would happen, they didn’t listen, and you were right—many times in my career. It’s infuriating. Part of learning from it is figuring out how to get people to change, not merely figuring out how to be right.

My guess is that this kind of black/white Strong Opinions approach has bitten you throughout your career.

This anecdote hits differently for me. I grew up reading about Fog Creek and consuming all of their writings (and that one film) as an example of what a software development company should look like. It feels strange to have the curtain peeled back to reveal that something like backups, which would be considered basic requirements today, were not part of their early operations.

It really was a shocking wake up period for me in the realities of the real world vs. how we often perceive things.

IIRC it was the whole "Wasabi" thing that kind of opened up my eyes that there was a lot more smoke and mirrors involved than I had realized before.

Firefighters are heroes who bravely enter burning buildings, beloved by children and adults alike, muscular figures who get pictured on sexy calendars and thanked by tearful families.

Officious paper-pushers who make a fuss about a few cardboard boxes stored under the fire escape stairs (like me!) seldom get pictured on sexy calendars.

That's a common bias in management. Heroic fire fighting gets rewarded while silently preventing a crisis with proper planning isn't. Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened.

Anyway, I was the first Fog Creek employee on site at 55 broadway (one of our founders got their first, and two peer1 employees were also on site) and also part of the first wave of the "bucket brigade". Another dozen of us showed up over the coming hours as we assessed and fixed things.

The media coverage on this was never super accurate-- we were carrying (and later, relaying) 5 gallon covered plastic buckets (like the home depot buckets with sealed lids) up to the landing where the generator was to top up its reserve tank. At one point SquareSpace (who was also running exclusively out of this DC) hired a group of muscle to bring a 55 gallon drum up, but that wasn't us.

I don't view this as lionizing failure, though I can see your perspective. Across our products (then FogBugz, Kiln, Trello) we had different backup strategies in play, but we were definitely putting a lot of eggs in the local-datacenter-that-claimed-to-have-resilient-power basket. Kiln in particular had decided to use SANs for data resilience, and that proved particularly troublesome for trying to find a workaround once the storm hit-- FogBugz on the other hand was able to spin up an EC2 version and start a slow-but-would-have-worked-eventually migration (and we even had an employee hit the road for us-east-1 location with a bunch of encrypted backups so that we could get a fast data restore online), and Trello fast-tracked-and-completed its local-to-cloud migration. While it was true that the DC had a backup generator, the fuel tanks for the generator being in the basement and becoming unavailable was not part of their resiliency plan. I don't fault us for not catching that.

...although I did have to later write the dreaded "I'm sorry, we've been hacked" blog post as a direct consequence of us not properly deprovisioning a "temporary" AWS credential that we created during that sprint. I will fault us for not catching that.

Shortly after Sandy, I switched my role from core dev on FogBugz over to DevOps, and I built out the backup and restore resiliency we had been missing. It wouldn't have kept us online during Sandy, though.

It was dangerous, and a couple folks slipped and fell. That's not a good thing and I won't celebrate that. Many employees opted out of the bucket brigade for family, safety, or personal reasons. I threw out all the clothes I wore that week as they reeked of diesel... not great.

I wouldn't wish that experience on anyone, but having come through it with fortune and no slip-and-falls, I still think about:

- Walking around FiDi post storm and seeing the flooded tunnels, clogged with cars that had been washed into them from the street parking.

- Dropping off big armfuls of coffee and bagels in the lobby for the building work crews. The folks who were essentially dredging out the basement and getting the building back online did much harder work than us.

- Going shopping for aquarium supplies in order to best jerry-rig the pump that our founder has repurposed from the office fish tank in order to transfer diesel from the drums on the curb into our 5g buckets.

Something that kept me going was that I knew that one of our FogBugz customers was the emergency response service in Haiti, and they got absolutely walloped by the storm. They were using FogBugz to coordinate relief, so there wasn't any way I was going to let FogBugz go offline if I could help it. Turns out that meant climbing a lot of stairs.

You should have billed as an emergency courier for $50k.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that (my 30's), and now I keep my conversations with my coworkers very utilitarian and divulge minimal information about myself. I try not to be a dick or anything, I'm polite enough, but pretty much everything I talk about is either directly relevant to work and/or so surface level as to border on "vapid".

ETA:

Just as an example, I used to have really bad sleep issues in my 20's that would make it so I wouldn't be able to get to sleep until around 4am, if at all. I made the mistake of bringing that up at work to my manager. Two weeks later I got a phone call at 3am because there was something he wanted to look at and "he knew I would be up". I was up, but I didn't really have much desire to get my laptop out and do work. I liked that job at the time and I liked my manager, so I did it anyway, and it wasn't until years later did I think about that incident and how utterly weird it was that I was sort of being punished for my insomnia.

My sleep issues have gotten a lot better now, so if someone calls me at 3am I probably won't hear it because I'll be asleep, but I remember that incident now and have it constantly spinning in my brain when I chat with coworkers.

I received many strange requests like to come in Friday night while drinking at a concert and ransack the offices looking for a laptop or possible phone left behind that they suspected was triggering alerts by repeatedly trying to connect to a foreign server. "You want me to drunkenly rob the offices at night and walk out the lobby carrying a stack of laptops? Ok"

Some of them have half-floors for all the cable routing, where you can't really stand up.

I think this is why I like them. To me they're not just an ugly box but I always wonder what's inside.

Nitpick, but the headline is not confusing at all, even though a couple of people are apparently confused. I suspect that is the fault of a hasty read through, not the headline itself.