A poor creature called manager

What would you do when you get a very complex bug on the day of your production release? This was one of the questions I faced in my Amazon interview and I never even imagined in my wildest dream (well… I don’t waste my dreams thinking about work ;)), that I might have to fact the same situation … And that too in the very first project.(Well... Not really production release but code freeze)

Since I was not involved in the technical and design part, all I could do is get status updates, watch developers running around here and there and pray for some miracle to happen. In the remaining time, I think of the good old days when I was a developer and when my manager was getting status updates, watching me running here and there …

I know that theoretically I should have added buffer for all such unwanted situations but practically it just doesn’t work that way ( What … Four days for an exit button ???) Atleast as of now I am having plans for a relaxed schedule for the next release and am also pretty sure it’s not going to work that way. Well… Program management seemed easy when I read the mythical man days and joel on software !!

Form the next release, I am planning to get hands on and take part in development also. In this release, the only technical thing I did was to write some perl scripts for an intranet page … Should go some steps deeper …

This release has increased my BP and worsened my neck pain. Apart from that, I have learnt a lot about Amazon internals, but it was not worth for the pain. Does anyone has suggestion how to keep cool when your boss is yelling at you?