Dumb article but note the phrasing from the HR person:
“In certain countries there was huge lockdown, and so we would have our own employees choose to sleep in the data center because they were worried they’d get stuck at a roadblock, trying to go home.”
I could totally see this happening as a real concern (better to be in a building than stuck in traffic at night) if there was actually issues with blockage in roads but 1. I don't trust Microsoft's claims at all and 2. I don't recall there being massive problems with the roads? If anything I remember the opposite that they were mostly empty cause travel was down.
Issues I heard of were more some areas having police stopping people or turning them around if they weren't supposed to be out, keeping essential only employees out and keeping it to/from office transit. Only heard of a handful of instances of this in the US and it was mostly around the beginning of the pandemic in NY/NJ, but it might've happened globally more.
For MS management they may have decided that the potential for added downtime from these interactions would've been too much given their uptime requirements in a lot of their contracts, and forced some of these workers to sleep at their data centers as a result to "fix" the issue.
Holy shit wtf is this nonsense. Microsoft stop being cartoonishly evil for one second.
I actually had something similar to this as a job once pre pandemic. Due to my basic computer knowledge, I got paid just above minimum wage to babysit some servers and ensure they were fine. Spent most of it fooling around on my phone or computer. Eventually decided fuck it and brought my PlayStation to plug into one of the monitors there.
I worked tracking outbreaks and once that shit slowed down and I had the same amount of hours, I got so much gaming in. Shit was great.
They never found out lol. Would do it again if I could, just need to find similar gigs. Most stressful it ever got was restarting some servers/DBMS software and doing basic windows stuff. Except for the time I had to phone someone at 2am to solve a complicated problem lol.
What job title did you have, more or less? I'm looking to switch from one bullshit job to another soon and it would be nice to get IT experience on my resume.
It wasn't an IT job in that way, it was more like "you're the kid that knows what a computer is, we pay you just above minimum wage to watch the servers at night. If anything goes seriously wrong phone the actual sysadmin" kind of thing. I guess job title would be entry level server technician/support?
