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this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
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I remember WebMD was one of the most chaotic places I worked at. It was 2000-2001 and there was a president Marv Rich and a CEO Marty Wygod. They were both building duplicate ERP systems that basically did the same thing. One day, my boss Al was in a meeting, and they told him that he needed us to move the data center to the East Coast. The most valuable part was a bunch of big EMC Symmetrix arrays with all their data. He was freaking out because he got into an argument about loading all of them into one airplane, and he didn't want to do it. He was telling them that if the airplane goes down, all of WebMD would be gone, and it needed to be loaded onto two airplanes. I don't know why, but for some reason, that story always reminded me of my time at WebMD.
The one time I moved a data center, we did it in two trucks for this very reason. Of course, it wouldn't have been the whole organization lost, we had more than one data center. But yeah - the two planes part of this story makes complete sense to me.
Yeah, I feel like the part about developing two different systems to apparently do the same thing, was much stupider.
The planes were protection against an incredibly slim chance considering how incredibly safe air travel is (dramatically more likely to lose them in a truck accident on the way to or from the airport than on the plane), while the two different systems were guaranteed to be a massive waste of resources and time
Or, as they called him down the pub, Wygod Y.
Nah, pretty sure they just called him Wangrod