It’s early in the days of the post-iPhone smartphone boom, and this pilot fish is in the weekly status meeting with his fellow development managers, where the on-call rotation schedule for developers is always a bone of contention.
The idea is that all developer must take turns providing back-end support for difficult support requests, says fish.
But at this meeting, fish has a simple suggestion to keep the rotation moving along smoothly: The company should provide a single mobile phone, to be handed off to whoever is on call. That way there would be only one number the help desk has to call in case of after-hours emergencies.
Fish says a smartphone would be worth the investment, because the on-call dev person would at least have something to play with and show off to friends during the much-despised on-call duty.
Almost everyone thinks it’s a good idea. But one dev manager asks, “Wouldn’t it be very difficult to debug code on that small screen during the on-call?”
After the laughter dies down, explains to the manager just how the smartphone would fit into the process.
Sharky’s smart enough to know that only one thing should go into the Shark Tank: true tales of IT life. Send them to me at sharky@computerworld.com. You can also subscribe to the Daily Shark Newsletter.
