While the World Celebrates New Year's Eve, Techies Slog to Run Web World

Are we being fair and aware of each other? During this holiday period, we all want a break, especially the techies. Some might even say that it’s unfair for them to work so hard during this time of the year. But, if you ask the tech support and maintenance folks, they’ll tell you that it’s important to keep our systems running smoothly.

In ecommerce, for instance, a significant percentage of employees who work during the holidays belong to an integral part of the production support and are an essential part of the enterprise that aids business operations. A production support team, typically, is responsible for the monitoring of the production servers, incident management, database management and ensuring that the softwares and servers are up and running smoothly without any disruptions.

Analytics India Magazine spoke to multiple companies across sectors to understand if they are working on the holiday season, and the teams who have to keep the show running. One of the employees from Amazon said, “It is business as usual for those working in e-commerce like Amazon and Flipkart. While some of the divisions in these companies do go for a year end shutdown, we experience accelerated sales and demand in wake of the festive season and production support teams are expected to be in a firefighting mode to support the heavy user loads on their servers during the Christmas holidays as the availability of the site takes paramount importance”.

For travel booking sites like Booking.com that experience massive usage, losing a day is often equal to losing a week in sales and thus imply that support has to be available at all times. Interestingly, several suggestions have been made that ecommerce companies witnessed a 67% increase in support tickets during the holidays. In other words, the teams working in these functions have to work. 

Holiday, no holidays, IT employees continue to work 

Indians like to slog. As winter vacations generally don’t apply to India, many teams in service-based companies have to work through this period.

It is business as usual for those who work in service companies like TCS, Infosys, Wipro, and others. Even though their client companies have Christmas vacations, these teams continue to work to support business operations and complete the deliverables as required, learnt AIM. 

Meanwhile, the story for those working in development operations (aka DevOps) is not any different. Some of the teams in this domain have to work to support the company’s mission critical software systems and ensure product availability for clients 24*7. The team members usually operate in rotational shifts to ensure that support for the product’s operations is always available and, in this way, are able to take some time off but long holidays during festive seasons like Christmas don't apply to critical teams.

Other industries, such as telecom, also need their network operation centres to run smoothly throughout, thereby requiring instrumentation engineers to work during the holiday season.

Although the luxury of not being able to avail long holidays may seem like a downer, there is surely a bright side to it.

Benefits of working during holidays 

Let’s look at the bright side of working during holidays, the year-end shut-down in the majority of companies also helps the infrastructure teams to apply patches and perform maintenance activities. In addition, if a client is working during the holiday season, the project teams are required to work and support the client. 

Interestingly, some of the companies offer overtime compensation and added perks to carry forward leaves for next year, which might not really be a bad idea. 

Let us know what you think, and your plans for Christmas and New year!