Talking online with friends the other day, someone brought up that crane operators in NYC can make $400-$500K a year. Yes, a year. I figured I’d confirm that before writing this post and it appears to be accurate.

At first glance one may think this is outrageous, or perhaps they chose the wrong field. I mean I enjoy being a DBA and a disaster geek, but I can’t say I’ve ever made $400K in one year!  And for what, I mean you lift things up and them down. Right?

Let me come back to that.

So, last night, I got paid quite a tidy bundle (but not nearly that much) for literally logging into a client computer, opening up VisualCron and clicking on a task and saying, “disable task”. On one hand, it seemed ridiculous;  not just because of what they were paying me, but because this process was the result of several meetings, more than one email and a review process.  All to say, “stop copying this file.”

But, this file was part of a key backup process for a core part of the client’s business. I had initially setup an entire process to ensure that a backup was being copied from an AIX server in one datacenter to a local NAS and then to the remote datacenter.  It is a bit more complex than it sounds.  But it worked. And the loss of a timely backup would impact their ability to recover by hours if not days. This could potentially cost them 100s of thousands of dollars if not into the millions.

So the meetings and phonecalls and emails weren’t just “which button should Greg click” but covered questions like, “do we have the backups we think we have?” “Are they getting to the right place(s)?” “Are they getting there in a timely fashion?”  And even, “when we uncheck this, we need to make sure the process for the day is complete and we don’t break it.”

So, me unchecking that button after hours, as much as it cost the company was really the end of a complex chain of events designed to make sure that they didn’t risk losing a LOT of money if things went wrong. Call it an insurance payment if you will.

Those crane operators in NYC? They’re not simply lifting up a beam here and there and randomly placing it someplace. They’re maneuvering complex systems in tight spaces with heavy loads where sudden gusts can set things swaying or spinning and a single mistake can do $1000s in damage or even kill people.

It’s not such much what they’re being paid to do, as much as how much they are being paid to avoid the cost of a mistake. I wasn’t paid just to unclick a button. I was paid (as were the others in the meetings) to make sure it was the right button and at the right time and that it wouldn’t cost even more.

Sometimes we’re not paid for what we do, as much as we’re paid for what we’re not doing.