Do you really want your DBA "killing" your application by accident?

Every time I see one of these stories about how truckers, or emergency responders, or (today) medical interns makes more errors and kill more people when they haven't had enough sleep , I wonder when the great Gods of IT in the Sky will understand that this applies to technology workers, too?


How much risk are you introducing into a project when you say, "You know what, we can't have these 10 customer service agents show up and not have a data entry system, so that critical patch is going to require our database people to work round the clock on the weekend. That way we won't loose any time." How, exactly, do you expect your technical people to respond in an organized, cohesive, effective manner when you don't let them sleep?



There's only so much coffee and caffeine tablets can do. Awake but not rested doesn't lead to quality work; any student who has pulled an all-nighter to cram for an exam, only to blow it due to fatigue can attest to that.


Yet, time and time again we hear the tales of IT shops who require extensive overtime, job descriptions where 70-hour weeks are written in, managers who just tell people to "get it done." Mistakes cost money. Working your staff to the bone so that you can meet unrealistic deadlines (some of which are arbitrary or only exist because the IT manager is unwilling to tell someone else "No.") and still come in under-budget is foolish.


Plan.


And plan for sleep.