If you are on call/scheduled for the deployment you may be required from time to time to come online and deploy in off-peak times. This type of maintenance should be extremely rare - in that it requires making your service entirely unavailable, most deployments should be able to be done in a rolling manner and not affect ongoing service availability.
Also usually you are on call every so-often so if your team/company happens to do this often it's not always you performing the deployment.
In regards to "being in the office": most people will do this from home after sleeping most of the night and waking up to an alarm and then coming in a little later the next day. There are a few hardcore ones out there that prefer to pull an all-nighter and do so from the office, although my mileage has been those are quite few and far between.
Experience tells me an allnighter would be a poor idea, as sleep deprivation is just as harmful to cognitive abilities than being drunk. Especially in the times between 5AM and 8AM, which I've found affects individuals the most.
If something goes wrong with your database, you'll be in a shitty condition to make fast and sound judgement calls.
One could say that not everybody's the same, but in those conditions I think that's not true. I've trained extensively under sleep deprived conditions in the military, where we were continually asked to make quick decisions in harsh conditions. Everybody's bad when sleep deprived and everybody's especially shitty at 5AM.
The last sentence is interesting to me - I wonder if there are many sys/devops types who are morning people? I'm a developer and function much better at 5am than 11pm, but it'd be an interesting correlation if server-peeps were almost exclusively nightowls.
> In regards to "being in the office": most people will do this from home after sleeping most of the night and waking up to an alarm and then coming in a little later the next day. There are a few hardcore ones out there that prefer to pull an all-nighter and do so from the office, although my mileage has been those are quite few and far between.
DevOps/Admin here! I prefer the all-nighter, but I've almost always (in 14 hours) done it from home unless physical hardware had to be moved (i.e. forklifted datacenter to datacenter).
Also usually you are on call every so-often so if your team/company happens to do this often it's not always you performing the deployment.
In regards to "being in the office": most people will do this from home after sleeping most of the night and waking up to an alarm and then coming in a little later the next day. There are a few hardcore ones out there that prefer to pull an all-nighter and do so from the office, although my mileage has been those are quite few and far between.