[exprez135]

I recently had this idea about email servers. In addition to configuring my IMAP clients to normally fetch mail manually or more infrequently, I set up one mail server that “closes” from 7 p.m. till 7 a.m. my time.

During that time, it returns a temporary error `450 4.3.2 We're sorry! The mail room is closed from 7 p.m. till 7 a.m. [Time Zone]. Email servers automatically retry, so your mail should be delivered in a few hours.` Depending on their mail provider and the time of evening, some will never see an error, while others will eventually receive the standard “Delayed Mail: no need to retry” message in their own inboxes.

I see it as accomplishing three things: first, it tests email servers to see if they properly handle temporary delivery errors by retrying; second, it prevents me from checking my email after hours, or rather, leaves me overnight with only the email I got during the day, perhaps encouraging better habits; and third, it could provide an opportunity for others to consider assumptions about always-on digital services.

[dheera]

> assumptions about always-on digital services

And maybe also always-on humans, which some companies seem to ridiculously expect.

I really don't understand this obsession with 24/7 uptime for non-critical systems. Requiring your engineers to be always on-call and debug something at 3am is a health hazard and should be treated like one.

If a photo-sharing app is down at 3am, I'm sure the users can go to sleep and wait till 10am. This isn't some oxygen life support system. If you have that many users in multiple time zones, then hire people in multiple time zones.

Even if TurboTax crashes on 4/15 at 11:35pm and the engineers don't fix it until the next workday, resulting in millions of people not being able to file their taxes, I'm sure the IRS might grumble a lot but would give people an extension. It'll all be good, and everyone will get to sleep .

[Dylan16807]

> Even if TurboTax crashes on 4/15 at 11:35pm and the engineers don't fix it until the next workday, resulting in millions of people not being able to file their taxes, I'm sure the IRS might grumble a lot but would give people an extension. It'll all be good, and everyone will get to sleep .

That's way too big of a risk, and way too much stress to put on your customers.

For something like tax software, you should have people on call, or even 24/7 staffing, for that specific week. 2% of the year.

In general, big release dates or important deadline should often have extra resources. 0-10 days per year. Pay extra for the health hazard, but that doesn't mean don't do it.

[KronisLV]

> For something like tax software, you should have people on call, or even 24/7 staffing, for that specific week.

In my country, the tax system (EDS, Electronic Declaration System) is down pretty much every single year on the day when tax declaration submissions start.

2020: "SRS: Significantly increasing EDS capacity is expensive and not cost-effective" https://www-lsm-lv.translate.goog/raksts/zinas/ekonomika/vid...

2022: "SRS urges not to rush to submit annual income tax returns so as not to overload the EDS" https://www-lsm-lv.translate.goog/raksts/zinas/ekonomika/vid...

2023: "The SRS urges not to rush to submit income tax returns in the first days of March" https://www-lsm-lv.translate.goog/raksts/zinas/ekonomika/vid...

2025: "A virtual queue will be open this year for submitting annual income tax returns to the SRS" https://www-lsm-lv.translate.goog/raksts/zinas/ekonomika/28....

So basically their "solution" for the longest time was to just tell people that it's too expensive to make it have high availability and that they shouldn't use the system on the first days of the period when you can submit the data and eventually just adding a queue in front of the system to manage the concurrent users.

It seems that taxes still get handled correctly and that nobody really cares that much. Found this to be an interesting example of going against the established culture of trying to go above and beyond for availability, even if I scoffed at it a few years ago.

It definitely wouldn't be horrible to live in a world where a prod outage doesn't mean "Sorry wife, I'm not coming home today, will be stuck in some random war room for hours and then fudge up the groceries massively due to sleep deprivation" but rather "Sorry boss, the system is down, what a bummer. I'll look into it tomorrow at 9 AM." for pretty much anything aside from truly critical and time sensitive systems (e.g. air traffic control, as opposed to your music streaming app).

[Dylan16807]

If it's down on the day that submissions open, then don't rush it. But when the window is closing there are thousands of dollars at stake for millions of people and I consider that pretty critical. It's not a generic outage. And it's also not unexpected. There's a lot less "Sorry wife, I'm not coming home today" when you scheduled it three months in advance.

[dheera]

Health and Life >> thousands of dollars at stake

[Dylan16807]

Millions of thousands of dollars. When "health and life" is talking about whether ten people have overtime for a week, it's far less important than billions of dollars. And you can easily easily pay them enough to compensate for the stress.

And as I already said, when it comes to missing the tax deadline, leaving things broken would have a huge impact on the customers' heal and life. The total stress levels they'd feel would be enough to kill your server engineers outright.

[dheera]

I disagree.

The IRS can wait. If a million people can't file their taxes the IRS will wait and I'm okay with that.

I'm not risking another cardiac arrest so that a bunch of people can file their taxes on time.

[Dylan16807]

> If a million people can't file their taxes the IRS will wait and I'm okay with that.

Even if you're right, it would cause a fuckton of stress in the people filing taxes, many of them now undergoing a significantly higher risk of cardiac arrest than the guy who's on call 1 week per year.

And if there's even a few percent chance you're wrong, the fallout would be enormous. In both money lost and even more stress.

And how many people do you think it'll take to make the IRS wait? What if you're a bit under that threshold, still with a whole lot of very stressed customers?

As long as the amount of on-call time is very small, I don't think it needs to be restricted to a super critical subset of jobs.

[1dom]

I feel you're missing the point. Your angle is self perpetuating. People have a higher risk of cardiac arrest at the fear of the consequences of missing the IRS date. The argument being made is that there won't really be any major consequences - if millions of people miss it because of a TurboTax issue, an extension will be granted.

Why should the engineers be stressed and overworked because other people are scared of something that doesn't have to happen?

The world is less stressful and - I think - better without manufactured urgency like what you're defending.

Don't get me wrong, some things are life and death, like life support machines. Taxes are not.

[Dylan16807]

Pretend it's a smaller company. 100k people late. That's small enough to make a special exception quite unlikely, but big enough to be a lot of very stressed people. It's not self-perpetuating logic, it's how deadlines work. Letting those engineers off the hook won't solve the deadline, those people will just be told they should have done it sooner and they will suffer the consequences.

Despite not being anywhere near life or death, the stress is real. And for most people it's not crippling stress, but neither is being on call for a single week out of the year. If we're going to blow that level of on-call into a "risk of cardiac arrest" then to be reasonable we have to do the same thing for tax filing failures.

There's no way for deadlines to not be moderately stressful. You can't decide to avoid urgency and stress.

[lukan]

"If a photo-sharing app is down at 3am, I'm sure the users can go to sleep and wait till 10am"

There will be people, who will feel it is critical important to post some pictures at 3 am and they will get stressed, if it is not working (say people preparing an event and the pictures should be online the next day).

But .. whether that is worth that engineers must be on call, is a differnt question. I never had a job like this and I know I would never accept it as default for myself.

[em-bee]

just before going to sleep is the only time i do hobby stuff. in the morning i have to work. putting something off to the next day always means putting it off to the next evening. i don't care how long things take. i care that i can do them right now and then forget about them. if i can't do that then i have to keep the tasks in my mind. i can write them down, but that only helps if i have a habit of doing that.

sometimes i remember some important message i need to send colleagues or clients... for that i like the telegram feature where i can send a message with a delay. i can write it now and it will be sent the next morning or whenever i think is a good time. i wish my email client had that feature too.

[genericperson66]

It might be 3 am for you but 3 pm for the user

[dheera]

> people preparing an event and the pictures should be online the next day

They can use a different platform, print the pictures on paper, there are a million ways to deal with these kind of issues.

An earthquake could strike and the event might need to be postponed.

If nobody's life or health is at risk, it is not urgent enough to sacrifice someone else's health for it.

[lukan]

"If nobody's life or health is at risk, it is not urgent enough to sacrifice someone else's health for it."

I agree. But I think being on call is possible in a healthy way, if there are long enough brakes in between. Occasionally being a night on call is possible. (Well and normal if you have small kids, but having small kids and having to worry about getting an emergency call any minute, that would be draining)

[em-bee]

They can use a different platform

not if they already committed to this one. you can't make such a change in a few minutes. limitations are so unusual that nobody would expect them and be prepared. and even if they were known ahead of time, you are also not expecting the kind of situation where you have to upload pictures in the middle of the night.

[dheera]

They are pictures. They can skip them. They can run the event without it. They can print the photos on paper and hand them out. They can hand-draw posters, like everyone did in the 1700s. They can cancel the event. They can postpone the event.

This isn't a 911 dispatching system.

[em-bee]

if they are a business then none of these alternatives are acceptable. they could loose customers over this. and surely you are joking with cancelling or postponing an event over this. please try to be realistic. you have to consider that in our society we have come to certain expectations. these may not be ideal, but closing an online service at night is a violation of that. things would look different if everyone did that, but then i'd be the one offering night service and use it to beat the competition.

[xtreme]

If only 10% of Tax software users are affected, IRS may not give an extension and the customers would be cursing you. Probably worth it to keep those extra engineers on call during the tax season.

[neilalexander]

This reminded me somewhat of Pony Messenger which does one "mail drop" a day.

[ryao]

This would be an interesting variant of greylisting. Anything sent after business hours goes on the greylist.