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If you have to drive 3 hours to push a power button then that sounds like you're way too far from the jobsite, aka a management problem where they're trying to contract IT consultants nowhere near their business or hiring too few people who know how to work a button.
Or,, why are we hiring people who don't know how to press a button properly?
It's not about knowing how to press a button, it's about knowing which button and when.
The only button, front and centre
This and like wtf are they hiring out of town IT consultants when they need a much higher level of service, apparently.
Some companies have multiple offices and doesn't necessarily have IT staff on-site at all of them
If you need this level of service you definitely need to hire somebody who can manage to at least follow technical directions at site.
I've worked at places where the only people who can follow technical directions don't have access to the server. Its very much managers not wanting to pay a person on site to manage critical infrastructure.
It's more about the size of the area on-call IT personnel are expected to cover, cause they're frequently huge. It's normally not a problem because the more remote regions have less hardware and thus are less likely to have issues, but it does happen occasionally.
It shouldn't happen for a power button. Even if your IT people are regional, you need somebody on site who can follow technical directions so emergency drives aren't necessary if you have something like a server that needs to stay up.
I've seen this happen, its always because managers make bad decisions.
Keeping people on-site at every facility is impractical, because most of the time they're not needed, it's just the occasional 'woops the routing table has shit the bed' or 'woops we're getting no signal to that CO', etc. For something like a datacenter, sure, you absolutely need round-the-clock staff. But for off-hours it just makes more sense to have people on-call (and thus pay them less than their hourly wage), and the incentive for businesses is to have as few of those people as possible rather than ensuring reasonable coverage and short travel times.
I'm not disagreeing with you, just saying managers tend to error in the direction of understaffing or under resourcing their technical staff.
I used to work at a place where a non IT manager with a high billing rate to clients had to setup computers and fix servers because the company was too cheap to hire an IT person in house - even though the freed up billable time would probably more than pay for an additional employee.
If you need an IT guy to come and press a button there, the staff at least need like a tech savvy intern or staffer who can follow directions. Because lets get real, the people that need that help will need more help.
Oh yeah, agreed, it's definitely a problem. I once had to drive 4 hours on short notice because we had 3 guys covering the entire state of New Mexico, one was on a long call and the other was out sick. The on-site guy kept insisting that the outage was some arcane server issue he couldn't suss out himself, so I hit the road. But when I pulled up in the parking lot there was a fucking backhoe not 300' from the building that had clearly been digging where our fiber ran, and about 15 people standing around it scratching their heads. Worse, guy could see it from his fucking office window, and just.. never bothered to look outside I guess. I just took a picture of it that also showed the sign in front of the building, fired it off to him with a lengthy rant about his obliviousness, and went home. I had a list of incidents like this in my internal email signature and they still refused to hire anyone else.