At one stop in my career I was at a waterfall enterprise company in production deployment support.
We literally took hand written change requests, manually deployed them step by step after taking careful backups and ensuring that at any point we could revert...and that was pretty much it.
We had to check the paperwork to make sure there was a rollback plan. We had to investigate if there were weird server issues happening. We did the deployments in the middle of the night, 2-3am and were required to be on call.
Because of the after hours and on call schedule, we were really just twiddling our thumbs when we weren’t hunting down an actual issue.
I used the spare time to keep learning new stuff, automating monitoring that I used personally, etc. You needed enough experience to know how to put out fires in a lot of legacy environments but other than that it was probably the easiest job I’ve ever had.
We literally took hand written change requests, manually deployed them step by step after taking careful backups and ensuring that at any point we could revert...and that was pretty much it.
We had to check the paperwork to make sure there was a rollback plan. We had to investigate if there were weird server issues happening. We did the deployments in the middle of the night, 2-3am and were required to be on call.
Because of the after hours and on call schedule, we were really just twiddling our thumbs when we weren’t hunting down an actual issue.
I used the spare time to keep learning new stuff, automating monitoring that I used personally, etc. You needed enough experience to know how to put out fires in a lot of legacy environments but other than that it was probably the easiest job I’ve ever had.