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Playing With IT, And Why It Matters
agallagh42 writes "Check out this article at ComputerWorld Canada by Peter de Jager, about how the best IT workers are really just "kids with big toys". How many of you have come across IT workers that obviously have no real interest in technology, and how much does it affect the quality of their work?" (Read more for another article on the more serious side.)
Code_Poet writes: "For anyone that has tried explaining to management the importance of well structured IT in a corporation, here is an excellent article over at The Economist on-line edition that explains the need quite well. Many companies when in a crisis situation just want the problems fixed and want to move on. Few understand it's an integral function of a corporation these days..."
Upshot? Toys are fun, fun is important.
Looks like you've just discovered the difference between the professionals and the clock-punching ilk. I guess you have one brain cell still firing. What you don't see is the sysadmin coming in at 9pm on Sunday to fix some problem. When the sysadmin does his job, everything works, so he plays. When things break outside your narrow 9-5 vision, he's there so you can log on in the morning and whine.
How many sysadmins have you seen come and go where you work. Well we've seen piles of you kind come and go.
- A.P.
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Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
We both would have passed the A+ cert without any studying whatsoever.
We also both thought it was a terribly ridiculous sort of cert to have, if a Mac geek could pass it just by guessing cleverly and knowing what some of the answers _weren't_. I actually beat out my friend the PC tech occasionally :)
Believe me, certs like that are meaningless...
Would you trust a surgeon to operate on you if he didn't take medicine seriously and only thought of it as his day job? Would you really go under his knife if in talking to him he said "Well, I cut people open because it pays well. I happen to hate humanity and I just find people disgusting". I sure as hell wouldn't.
It's really the same thing with technology. If the people working with it don't love it, they're going to suck. I produce much better code when I'm working in an environment I enjoy, both in terms of workplace, as well as the actual development environment.
See ESR's The Art Of UNIX Programming. People do wonderful things with UNIX in part because it's so much fun to use. Just as doctors who enjoy working with prostates are probably good at operating on them.
I have a co worker who is very much like this. She would never write code outside of work, this is what she does to pay the bills etc. On the other hand she is damn good at what she does. If you have a bit of code that needs to be maintianed give it to her. She *WILL* find the bug.
I will admit to spending more of my time fixing old code that writing new code. It may not always be as exciting, but I'm good at it and it always will need to be done.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
I think there is a definite difference. For me personally, anyway. It contributes to the overall culture at work and makes for a much more enjoyable work environment. This environment means a lot to me. I've worked in environments where the people weren't passionate about their work and it wasn't nearly as much fun.
I think most of us like to be around people that have similar interests. At work where we spend 8+ hours a day with the same people, it better be somewhat enjoyable (for me at least) if not, I'd go nuts!
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
It makes me sick when people don't hire someone because they don't spend 18 hours a day in front of a machine plugging code into a text editor with a hard on.
Some people have lives folks, especially this time of year, water skiing, hiking, family time, camping etc..... Why would anyone have passion for a monitor and keyboard when they can spend a day on the water with a brew and some buds. I mean really people, there are much more important things in life than ones "passion" for their work.
It used to be all you needed to get hired was pride in ones work, which is a totally different thing.
But can't I do it 'till I need glasses?
I'm an IT Support Person, and I've had days with "Jack Shit To Do". It's generally when everyone else is on vacation, and I'm all caught up on my trouble calls. I get a lot of web surfing done, and organize things for the days when I go non-stop from 7:30 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. with people screaming at me because they don't bother to save frequently, or back up their data.
I don't think that IT people are a special class or anything, but we tend to see people at their worst, when they're frustrated because something isn't working right. They're usually also embarassed and pissed at themselves, because they've done something stupid, but that won't stop them from taking it out on you.
I don't think IT people are godly, but we do have to put up with more than our share of bullshit, and if we don't get at least a little down time and some toys occasionally (I've got my new 21 inch monitor on the way) then we'd all just burn out like social workers do...
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When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
I suppose this means that for job security, it's better to let little problems simmer for a while (so you appear to be loaded down), then come charging to the rescue like a white knight (so you get appreciated). :-)
Very true. I always use this tactic, as well as telling people that I won't be able to get to their problems for two more days, then showing up in half an hour to fix them. This makes them think that you're a miracle worker (Montgomery Scott - Star Trek) and also keeps them from calling you about things before they engage their brain to solve the problem themselves.
More importantly, it gives you some padding for the call that you thought was just a computer lockup but turns out to be a toasted hard drive that the luser didn't backup in the last six months, so you've got to spend an entire day trying to get that drive to cough up some project that is due TODAY.
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When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
Depends - if someone doesn't take their responsibilities seriously, or have priorities in order it could be a problem - the cost of having lots of paid 'play time' (or OSS R&D I call it) is making sure my mission critical servers, workstations and of course data backups and recovery plans are in good working order - eternal vigilance. That takes maybe an hour, plus maybe a few hours servicing user complaints (this is a little over 50 PC's) - which usually comes to "you'll have to get the boss to spend more $$$ to do that" or a simple reboot, or just sympathize with someone about a Msft oddity, then it's off to d/l OSS and 'playing' with things like, currently, getting a Mosix cluster up on a few old pentiums. Also have to spend some weekend hours doing server maintenance. I've trained my super to not bug me with 'busywork' - I'll make my own damn busywork that also keeps me a sharp, up-to-date sysadmin.
The best hedge against 'disruption' is keep a solid wall between 'production' and the 'test (play) lab' machines.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Now I see why Windoze machines always break: they're CRAWLING WITH BUGS!!!!
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I think that someone needs to have the desire to play with things and see what it can do however they also need to be careful and not let this desire to play consume them and stop them from doing the job they are being payed to do (to often someone will put off helping clients because 'I'm just waiting for this new tool to finish compiling')
--"Karma is justice without the satisfaction"
So he'd ask people if they own a PC. I know a couple of people who don't own PC's anymore. There's Sun Blades, SparcStations, Indigo's, Alpha's and all sorts of things non-PC that you can do a lot more with.
Someday I'd like to say I don't own a PC.
I don't know. After all, we're talking about human beings rather than machines, and when dealing with human beings, there are other important factors to deal with besides whether or not their "specifications" are good enough.
Obviously a more extreme example, but would you really want to hire a highly-experienced code-grinder who insisted on clocking out at 5pm every day, had poor personal hygiene, lacked decent interpersonal skills, and went to KKK rallies on the weekends? Even if that person really was a top-notch programmer otherwise and willing to work cheaply?
Besides, maybe the company in question is trying to keep up with "cutting edge" developments with Java, and considers the ability to make the most of Java developments an important asset to their business model. If so, someone who has no opinion of "what exciting things are happening with Java" may not be too motivated to keep up, beyond a bare minimum to keep getting a paycheck.
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Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Buhaha funny, moderate this up. Maybe we should replace OSS with Open Flesh -- "To really scratch an itch".
Both of my parents are (were) also electrical engineers and they started up a couple companies in related fields. Needless to say, I've known a lot of engineers of those generation(s). While I agree with you that the majority of them (all except for the oldest ones) know assembly, machine code, fortran, and other languages well, I do not agree with the implication that they're all dry and/or geeky. Some of them were geeks, some of them were not geeks all [although I'd say that few of them were trendy in the marketing sense]; technical abilities tended to have little clear correlation to external appearances. I know a lot of non-geek engineers that are extremely capable and accomplished. In fact, the only thing I can really say for "geekiness" is that it tends to be more of a limiting factor--those that appear to be big geeks tend not to be capable of larger responsibilities like management and/or proper planning.
That said, the geeks tend to be more focused purely on technology, but it is neither necessary for skill nor a gaurantee of it by any extent of the imagination. Some of the worst geeks are merely techies....Also, somewhat back on topic, I think a lot of people forget that some people are more driven by results (non-financial) than by the technology itself.
Oh please! The dot com crunch was because stupid suits started companies with no business model and lots of funding and lots of idiots rushing in to buy the companies over inflated stock. It had almost nothing to do with the geek employees.
I work extremely hard. Much harder than most employees. Monitoring systems, hacking together code, etc. Usually on a wage much less than I deserve. A lil time to relax here and there is required to keep me from stressing out and burning out.
This is the same reason I tend to not give a damn if I come in a lil late or take long lunches. When I am at work I am being battered from all sides to keep things running smoothly and don't need the extra stress of following a strict schedule. My brain is usually working through problems no matter where I am so I am working even when I'm not actually at work. Doing something else helps relax me and makes it easier to grasp complex problems.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
That's funny, because I don't think I've heard a Marketing guy say anything besides those phrases. Maybe they have a lot of lunch meetings :)
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
That was true until everyone noticed how much money you could make in the field a few years ago. Now it's about 50/50 as far as loving your job (IMHO).
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Wow, some very good points with regard to my very off-the-cuff remark. I really haven't found a political philosophy that indicates exactly what I feel. I could be a conservative except:
Likewise, I could be a liberal except:
As you can see, I've got some issues :)
I suppose I could be a libertarian, except that I would worry that such a government would allow business interests too much control over society due to their vast resources. So in general I vacillate between Libertarian and fiscally conservative liberal. I would totally support the Libertarian party if corporate citizenship were revoked.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Yes, and we know what kind of crime it is: ThoughtCrime!
Yes, by merely professing to a certain opinion, even if you've never harmed a living soul, you're automatically a criminal. This may come as a surprise to you, but any time a government can tell you what to think, you're a lot closer to Fascism than you think you are. Are you ready to start burning Fascist books in the street, and after that maybe trashing some of their businesses?
And how exactly is being a Communist better than being a Fascist? Stalin killed plenty of people too, you know, and communism can lead to nationalized hate just as easily as any other form of dictatorial government.
Sometimes it gives me pause to defend the right of Nazis (whom I personally abhor) to speak their minds, but I absolutely loathe defending the right to speak of those who would deny such rights to others. I guess it's just the curse of being a "damn liberal" in an enlightened-but-not-quite-entirely age...
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
###I blame the ease of administration in MS products of late for this trend. Someone that doesn't know much beyond their admin tasks can still pass their job requirements and get by in the IT world these days. You won't find those people working on advanced (read: UNIX based) server systems or Cisco/network products, because it involves an inate knowledge and thought processes which only comes (again, IMHO) with years of playing with computer systems (probably teen/pre-teen years) and a desire know how to do something just because, or to see if it can be done. ###
Well in theory, isn't being able to use programs without having to spend years playing with computer systems a good thing?
And of course, that your toaster/microwave/tv/etc really doesn't give a shit what year/month/day it is.
JJ
Really. Isn't "IT" supposed to be so wonderful, change the world, take the smell out of diapers and make Dubya keep his campaign promises after all? I mean, "IT" is so great, we can't even be told what it is, but only who is working on "IT"?
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I want to leave my company because IT here is really really bad - Microsoft all over the place, including MS Exchange which prevents me from running GNU/Linux in my workstation, badly managed Unix servers, no quality standards, lots of people with no interest in technology whatsoever. The funny thing is that we dominate our marketing with a highly successfull... business computer program system!
Sometimes it is not so easy to leave... I have no formal Computer Science education, and I live at Brasil, so offers aren't abounding... what I really would like to do would go back to school, learn CS and get a master degree working towards a working implementation of Chris J Dates' Tutorial D relational database management system language, but I see no way of doing that.
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Leandro Guimarães Faria Corsetti Dutra
DBA, SysAdmin
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
I've seen a few (small) companies throw millions of dollars into hardware upgrades when it was really their code and database designs that were slowing things down. Hopefully, now that the money is much harder to come by, people will have to focus more on building efficient systems instead of bigger ones.
> I work with a bunch of guys, that are as far from the traditional geeks as they come. ... What they do, is write quality code, develop innovative hardware, and usually do it under budget and ahead of schedule.
I congratulate you, and envy you too. In my experience, professionalism is even rarer than joie de hack is. Over half the IT people I've ever worked around lacked both.
I'll grant that professionalism is more productive than joie de hack, but the latter still tends to be much better than neither. Too many people in IT are clueless, unmotivated timeservers waiting for the next paycheck to show up.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
One of the biggest IT problems I've seen out there, possibly the most widespread, is not lamers, disintersted moneygrubbers, kids-with-toys, or tight-assed bosses. It's simply *bad communications*. It's been rare for me to really see a company where the IT department actually understands what the company wants to do, and the company understands the cost and process of getting there. Usually this is due to a lack of a good MIS person. A good MIS must know not only the technical issues, but the political and organisational ones as well. They must be able to speak with the company and act as a go-between for the techies who do the work. People talk about bosses who won't 'spend the money to do it right'. Well.. has anyone *properly, in terms they undersatand* shown them a cost/benefit analysis? Shown them what they really will and won't get?
If that's who the person you have to report to, the politics and paperwork are the key. The MIS should be able to document, and say, to his hypothetical grey-haired corporate zombie 'this is what needs to be done. Here's how long it will take; here are the resources we need' and get his answer.
Zombies can be dealt with. It's when you get all these 'okay I'll go talk to Sam and ask if we can have some more machines' or 'I'll bring it up over coffee next week' that things don't get done.
I knew a corporate account type (CFO) who I thought initially was 'accountant' and wouldn't understand anything, and this would make things difficult. Turns out, things were only 'difficult' when we simply asked for stuff. If we presented proper business documents (ie: terms he can understand, becaues as CFO, he *HAS* to understand the impact of what they do in financial terms, things went really smoothly.
I expect that those IT professionals working for me will have input into what our department does, that's why I hired them... I can't possibly plan how long something will take or what resources are required without talking with them first.
And dammit, YES, I *DO* want people who will do what they're told, because it's my JOB to keep the department doing what we're supposed to be doing. Just because one of my IT Professionals thinks something else is 'more important' doesn't matter.. he can bring it to my attention, but in the end, I decide what gets done and what doesn't, and if the department doesn't do what it's supposed to, I LOSE MY JOB.
Yes, it's an unfortunate blip in the IT world, especially with this Internet thing, that lots of 'neat ideas' came about from very green IT people (read: young, inexperienced, but smart and creative) and were exploited by the company, and it sucks. That's life.
Managing an IT department is *NOT* a piece of cake, though of course every new 'IT Professional' thinks he knows it all and could do everything, and criticizes his boss who doesn't 'know' every detail about everything. It's not our JOB to know every little detail; it's our job to ensure the company's IT departmen runs smoothly, doing what the company requires it to do.
Another thing. All too often I hear crap like 'management knows nothing about IT! THey don't know what they want.. they're idiots'. Well... one thing experience has shown me is that IT people (me included) like to overengineer everything, and solve every problem with computers, whereas Mr. Suit doesn't *give a shit* how it works, as long as his fax machine faxes and his email emails.
Good points! Here are my thoughts.
Yes, the IT Manager *should* understand, and care, how things work, and about scalability and such. In fact, it should be his JOB to ensure that whatever is done by his department is communicated properly to those outside in terms of cost. What's the cost for a scalable system? How long will it take? what are the risks of not doing it? These are all things that he is supposed to do.
As for Management -vs- Employees in terms of salaries, in many cases, managers should make more. The flip side of your argument reads 'how can I Manage some employees for the company if they all get paid more than I do?'. You don't pay people more than those who work under them, very bad practice. Managers, however, should be paid appropriately. Let's say tehre are 5 mid-level IT workers working for the manager.. and those 5 guys make, say, $75k, the manager should make perhaps $90? He should NOT be making $150. Now, if that manager is responsible for managier 50 or so of these employees, in a larger department, perhaps he SHOULD make more.
If you are in a situation where managers are not held accountable to their duties, then something is wrong. If you take 20 IT workers, and try to run a department without management, though, it doesn't work.
I've been in the frustrating bad-management positions before: The manager in charge of the IT guys makes shitty decisions, doesn't listen, doesn't care, yet limits what the IT guys can do. In turn, the IT guys are the ones who are given shit when things don't go the way the manager's boss wanted. Had I had teh experience I have now, I woudl have taken the other IT guys, and talked directly to the boss.
Of course, in a huge company, this probably won't get you too far.
Also... on the topic of salary. I'm sure you've heard the phrase 'The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.'. That holds true at work too... You shouldn't take a job unless you accept the terms of employment, and are satisified with them. Just because you found out someone else makes more than you is no reason to suddenly be bitter; you accepted the job.
Oh yeah.
Of course, it's true that a great many people were made 'IT Managers' by their bosses because they appeared to know more about computers than the boss, and the boss trusted them, because they were friends, and neither of them are 'experienced' at running companies.
. . .I like to always be trying out new stuff and be tweaking things. This is a really bad trait to give into as a sysadmin
Nonsense. These are great things for a sysadmin, as long as trying new stuff and tweaking isn't happening on the production systems. New technology is constantly appearing and wanting to be implemented (at least for the systems I administer), and it's much better to make all your stupid mistakes in advance on a noncritical system.
Actually his example works perfectly, its called research. Most many of your best doctors work long hours experimenting with new
procedures. This grant funded research makes organ transplants, cancer treatments and other medical advancements possible. In
essence it is the same thing, no I'm not saying I think it is say important the human race as hacking a piece of code.
*KNOCK* *KNOCK*
Mother's voice: What are you doing in there?
Voice behind door: Nothing Mom, I'm just combing my hair!
Dot-coms failing because of poor business models have absolutely nothing to do with the work ethic of IT professionals. Using the dot-com bust as a general-purpose sledgehammer to beat on everyone who has more creativity and technical expertise than yourself is a bad way to go about making friends. And money.
Every time someone suggests that creative, motivated, and flexible people are an asset, there's some wanker like you to stand up and shout "Somebody's gotta pay the fuckin' bills." Thanks, Captain Obvious, and apologies for having interrupted your masturbation session in front of Quicken 2000.
Don't try that "protecting the children" shit you people use to keep the tits and bad words off my TV. --Seanbaby
Sorry, when I posted before I missed the fact that you were trolling. My bad, you've got the right idea.
Don't try that "protecting the children" shit you people use to keep the tits and bad words off my TV. --Seanbaby
Beats working.
You probably weren't interviewing for a position as a Java coder were ya? :)
See, that would be the type of answer I'd love. It shows a wide range of experiences, knowledge that a hammer isn't the right tool for every job, and also shows that you weren't just going to kiss up to someone to get a job.
Except sometimes there's no room for "cute" people. If you have a hard deadline in 30 minutes and something breaks, you need someone who can quickly find the problem and fix it. You don't need someone who needs his/her hand held.
Also, some people who are competent but not curious aren't really "professionals". They're more like clock-punchers. They come in, do their bit, but instead of being motivated by career or money, they're more interested in getting out to have a beer with buddies after work or something. Sometimes that's fine, but they often don't make the best managers, unlike the "professionals".
Yes, she had used all the technologies, but only that. It sounded like in the past she had only followed directions and never experimented with anything. It sounded like she had used the technologies but had no curiosity. I guess when I said "she seemed to understand the technology well" really meant "she knew the names of the IDEs she had used, and the name of the databases she had used". Her understanding was very narrow, but she seemed to know certain things well. She said he had worked with XML, so I asked her what parser she had used and she said "I don't know, the one my husband gave me".
This was only one answer but the answers to the other questions were no better. Basically it sounded like she had experience programming but no experience doing anything that wasn't specifically assigned to her.
Now sometimes it might be ok to hire someone with experience in the right technologies but no creativity, curiosity or interest in the technology, but not around here. We have only vague deadlines, vague requirements, and almost no supervision.
Basically my office is like Junkyard Wars. We often get vague requirements that we can solve however we see fit, often in a really tight timeline. The folks who seem to do best on junkyard wars aren't the certified mechanics or PhD's, they're the "car hackers", the guys who are toying with blowtorches and wrenches for fun.
My company (which incidentally is in Canada) is currently looking to hire some Java developers, and as a guy who knows Java I was asked to sit in on an interview today and ask some questions. I asked a few technical questions, tried to get a feel for how well the jobseeker knew Java, OO principles, and that sort of thing. What I heard was pretty good -- she had used all the same technologies we use, and seemed to understand the technology well, but she didn't seem to have much passion about it.
I took the opportunity to ask her what she really liked doing, and what she thought were the exciting things happening in Java... and she didn't have an answer. All she mentioned was how Java's lack of pointers and garbage collection makes it more forgiving than C++. Because of her lack of real interest in the technology I really couldn't recommend her.
I think to most "geeks" this is all pretty obvious. The more you play with computers, the more you learn, and the more diverse the experiences you can draw on when solving a problem. Most of the time managers understand this -- the exception seems to be big companies that seem to value predictable programmers over their creative (but sometimes more unpredictable) peers.
I've always been able to produce my best work in companies where I had the most freedom to be myself. Sometimes I have a bad day and produce almost nothing. When it's one of those days I often don't even try to program. I know that if I did I'd invariably have to go back and fix it. On the other hand when I'm on a roll I can go through lunch and stay late without even realizing it. Mostly I can get away with that here -- my boss understands because he's the same way. But unfortunately the non-geeks don't always get it. When I have a bad day I still have to show up and look like I'm working, just to keep up appearances. The main problem is that while the IT types get it, the rest of the company doesn't.
So my question is: if we all know that the best coders do it for fun, and are hairy, unpredictable people who have bad days, how do we convince the non-geeks to let us do things in our chaotic way?
> Damn, I converted my girlfriend to computergames [...]
What's the exchange rate on something like that?
Too bad you didn't think of it first! At my previous job, we had servers named "IT" (pronounced "it" not "eye-tee"), "What", "ThemThar", etc.
It became a fun game to say "Hey, IT's down!" "What?" "It!" "You talking about ThemThar server??" =P And we had way too much fun with the Faith No More lyrics "What is It?! It's IT! *What* is it??!"...
I got in a lot of trouble for naming those servers, but we got laughs out of playing the bastardized "Who's on First" game. And my argument to keep them that way was that no one had to really care what the names of the PDC or WINS server were except for the MIS team.
Heeeeee....
You have no understanding of what a sysadmin does do you.
It's more than just breaking things when they fix. It's security, system upgrades, patching thigns as they need. It's also dealing with attacks from the outside and making sure your network runs smoothly.
It's more than just hardware. There will always be a need for people who know the system really well. Maybe help desks will go away (which I doubt) but a unix adminstrator will be around for a long time since your secretary can't learn all that.
this space for rent
Do you mean like the Surgon that loves his trade so much he volenteeres at the free clinic on the weekend and after work? Spends all of his time reading trade papers? Works with the people pushing back the bounds of medicin? Yes, that is also what I would like to see in the poeson that takes care of my servers and mans the hell-desk.
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You're right he does need a better example
__ Fast - Cheap - Good Pick any two
I can't tell you how many times I've told people how to put their stupid printer back "online", even though the answer was taped to the printer. We've got at least 50 more years of suffering through people who view it as their god-given right to be computer illiterate. I haven't found many secretaries who could handle a simple install. In fact, I got canned from a temp job once because I changed the screensaver, which meant I was doing Very Very Dangerous Things. Too bad she married into citizenship; she'd really be much better off cuttin sod. Make computers foolproof, and the fools will keep breaking them.
I've seen the other side, too. To my mind, "IT" stands for "barely brighter than the idiots they're helping" or else "too lazy to learn real administration and programming." I've suffered under plenty of petty motherfucking dictator assholes from hell who don't know shit about anything, but know enough to tell me how to "fix" the installation I made, then fuck everything up completely, then tell me that I'm not allowed to install IDEs, alternate web browsers, PhotoShop, DreamWeaver, Homesite, or Image Ready, even though I was hired to do web sites, and had everything up and running without their help. Trust me if I could remember that dumb cast mem^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H fuck's name I'd be publishing anon right now.
But, hey, keep trolling. When you make a coherent point I'll reply.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Now to convince the PHB that Linux is the biggest of the big toys...
Imagine a mechanic who doesn't like to tinker, and doesn't care about what makes a car work. You sure don't want him tinkering while you're paying him, but you sure do want him tinkering on his own time, so that the amount of time you pay him is reduced, because he knows what he's doing.
I've seen too many who don't have that curiosity, and want to be spoon-fed.
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Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Female Prison Rape in NY
"doing nothing useful at all"
;)
Ahh, so your in management eh? I used to love driving you types nuts by looking lazy, just to see how high I could get your blood pressure. One of my favorite amusements, especially since I could get away with it. I was a systems operator/fire-stomper/problem fixer for US Steel and if I wasn't doing anything, there were no problems in the department.
A perfect shifts meant about 20 minutes worth of work out of every 8 hours. Finding projects to play with on the system was a productive way to pass time, learn, and keep sharp; enjoying them and driving management nuts were just added bonus.
(I know you're trolling, but I felt like responding anyways.
- "When I say dance, you'd best DANCE motherf*cker!" -Violent Femmes
"You'll lay him off and laugh when we (programmers in general) get it right. There's no reason for backups to be a problem, and there's no excuse for crashes at all."
Hmmmm, this reminds me ALOT of what micro$oft was saying when win95 came out....
....and I have just about as much faith in it.
I think I can safely speak for all the sys ops, (and ex-sys ops and future sys ops), out there when I say, "Rigggghhhhhtttt."
- "When I say dance, you'd best DANCE motherf*cker!" -Violent Femmes
"Check out this article at HackerWorld NewZeland by Peter de Man about how the best CEOs are really just "kids with really expensive toys". How many of you have come across CEOs that obviously have no real interest in running their company, and how much does it affect the quality of their work?"
Until our children are no longer molded into castrated sheep democracy remains a fake and a danger. -A. S. Neill
ROFLMAO.
Reminds me of an episode from my larval stage. Back in high school, we were supposed to do some sort of graphics thing in BASIC, using a series of PEEKs and POKEs to clear graphics RAM, create a graphic object, and move it around.
So I did. In assembly.
(I figured if anyone wanted to give me a hard time about it, I could argue that technically it was still written BASIC. Of course, the BASIC code was just a series of POKEs to poke the data and code into RAM, and one call to start running it ;-)
Let this be a warning to y'all. Love juices and server farms don't mix. Don't bend her over the NetApp box when you do her.
Coulda been worse, I suppose. What if he'd bent her over the back of a 21" monitor while humping away in a Halon-controlled server room?
Right up until the point when something happens that Clippy can't help her with, and the secretary blows away half the filesystem.
Then you'll be on the phone to the nearest headhunter, begging for the opportunity to pay $500/h for a sysadmin to come over now, because the SEC is breathing down your neck if your firm's annual report isn't filed on time, and your secretary didn't realize she needed to make the backups.
You don't need a full-time sysadmin per computer. But you sure as hell do need at least one per organization. Organizations forget this at their peril.
An excellent point - but it requires that laymen become sophisticated about computers. That ain't happening, not from where I sit. If anything, it's getting worse.
I'll grant you that if the secretary's enclued, and the OS is well-designed, she won't blow things up.
I just won't grant you that Joe Sixpack is gonna get enclued over the long term.
The increasing level of abstraction in today's PC world has led to less clue, not more, at the user level.
Although Joe Sixpack isn't putting two floppies in the 5.25" drive ("because the manual didn't tell me to take the last one out!"), that doesn't mean he's learned anything lately. Ask him where that spam came from and he'll read you the From: line. Ask him why his mail server is bogged down and he'll say "My machine's just fine" (sure, but the mail server's bogged down because he just got hit with Hybris). Ask him what kind of CPU he has and he'll tell you it's a Dell. Ask him what operating system he's running and he'll say "Office".
> With no perceptible peril at all, organizations have long since forgotten their need for blacksmiths, elevator operators, typists, dispatch riders, and archers.
We don't need to know how to turn the crank to start the engine because we have starter motors. We don't need to downshift before entering a curve because we have an automatic transmissions. But somehow there's still a market for mechanics.
The scariest moment of my life was when a cow orker told me she'd never changed the oil in her car because she didn't know where the dipstick was.
Don't get me wrong here - I'm all for usability. It's great that you don't have to grok CONFIG.SYS and set your FILES and BUFFERS stuff to run WordPerfect 4.0, or all that Lotus/EMS stuff for 1-2-3.
But the ability to use a computer should not be confused with the ability to administer a machine on a network.
I'd love it if people enclued themselves to do both, but in general, they don't. They enclue themselves only to the point that they can accomplish the desired task.
That's not a slight against the secretary - she's not paid to make sure that her RedHat box is running a current version of BIND (or better yet, that it's not running BIND at all - does her workstation really need to be acting as a nameserver? An FTP server? identd?). There are, after all, only eight hours in the typical workday - is she being paid to write 8 hours of memos, or 3 hours of memos, and 5 hours of reading CERT advisories and applying patches?
As long as most users don't need to know what's going on beneath the hood in order to accomplish their goals, they won't learn it. The trend for the past ten years has been increasingly towards insulating the user from the nuts-and-bolts stuff. Therefore, just like we still need auto mechanics 85 years after the Model T, we'll continue to need sysadmins for the forseeable future.
NOT TRUE!
I work for a bank, and I come in when I want, leave when I want, wear jeans and T-Shirt, web-browse as much as I want etc etc...
There is a lot of stress, but it comes from knowing that if you screw up the system then the <insert big company> stops working...
If you are good at your job, work hard enough to get the work done, and aren't on call, you can get away with pretty much everything else...
Gav
"There's no such thing as data that can't be manipulated"
We are the Geeks, of the Temples of Slashdot
Our great computers fill the hallowed halls.
Now what is it today? Will playing with IT make me go blind or not?
jon katz? Didn't he set up us the bomb?
My former boss fired a whole group because they refused to learn anything. They swore they could program anything in Quickjob. It was easier to shitcan them and find some people with skills who were learning to code in Quickjob until everything moved over. I've coded in Cobol, Delphi, VB, CSP, Quickjob, REXX, Algol, Perl, PHP, Fortran and a half dozen languages I can't remember in the past 20 years. You either keep up or get left behind. The people who are willing to be flexible are the people who get the jobs. Shoot, I got a COBOL assignment after being away from COBOL almost 5 years. Now I am doing Oracle development along with some VBA.
Now I'm doing Linux at home and it has helped me tremendously on our unix boxen here. I don't work with unix enough to keep up so I have to fire up the terminal at home and play with vi.
If you can setup a nix box and hook people up to it, you are doing better than 90% of net admins I have met. And I bet I have setup Mandrake about 12 times at home.
It's not the toy itself; it's the willingness to learn and do.
Peace, out
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
I have to take exception to this; I have TONS of facial hair, and while I love writing hackey little code -snippets for personal use, the code I write for my business clients is clean, clear, and (*gasp*) pretty well documented.
And both types of code are "clever", when possible. Where "clever" means short, efficient, and elegant.
Not that I don't appreciate the stereotype, but if you could get over my facial hair, I'm sure you'd like my style of coding.
This was possibly the most boring article I've ever waded through. C'mon - where's the Jon Katz Movie Reviews!
They call me the working man. I guess that's what I am.
I know more about 'IT' than 90% of people who work in 'IT', yet I work at Wal Mart for $7 an hour. Go figure... Maybe I should go to college or something, so I can learn the same shit over again.
Of the people I know in the tech. field, the ones that studied double degrees with their IT Eng / Comp. Sci. tend to be the ones uninterested in the technology. Specifically the ones studied commerce.
One girl now works for DeutchBank as a banker because "they have a lot of money". It's a pity that she'd wasted 4 years studying Information Technology.
It's just like wannabe rev-heads. People who want to get a computer because it has flashing lights and cool-counding statistics attached to it are looked down on by hard-core programmers as much as car enthusiasts laugh at those that buy a V8 to pick up chicks (don't even start on balding, middle aged guys in red convertibles).
Isnt this the same simplistic old creative vs. productive view? There will always be the creativly reckless finding new things that the productive can clean-up, make friendly, market etc.
The fringe always provides choices for the mainstream to choose from.
We both would have passed the A+ cert without any studying whatsoever
I used to work for a large VARish type place that required everyone in a service type role to have the A+ cert. I went and took the exam one afternoon when it was slow in the office, took me 20 minutes and I got some rediculous score like 97% or something (couldn't remember the switches for smartdrive). Another guy I know managed to only miss 1 question on both exams. That thing is a joke, or at least was 6 years ago.
Too many people in IT are clueless, unmotivated timeservers waiting for the next paycheck to show up.
They're luckier than the clueful, geek without a degree, who knows quite a bit and is self taught, but is forced to work in a factory to pay the bills, can only take classes part time (which is taking FOREVER!), and feels even more life-force and geek-soul being drained from him every day because of the crappy job they must endure.
The only thing worse than a clueless dork doing geek's work is a geek doing clueless dork work.
:-(
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Sure, use it.
It wasn't meant to be funny, unfortunately.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Oehm... And how old are you again????
I have the feeling you don't quite haven an idea on WHAT exactly rides on the Network at most modern companies, much less what all those "boxes with blinking lights" are really doing.
I see it right now... You'll turn into a manager and make the real IT guy's job a living hell.
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
Aehm, now I have a problem with your statement.
Have you ever DONE sysadministration? No? What a surprise.
If a SysAdmin does a good job you DON'T see him, if he's an idiot you'll see him all the time.
There is a bit more to the job than just jerking off because everything is fine, there is a reason why everything is fine: Because they do it.
Programmers are the heros, the ones who get the credit for a "job well done" usually nobody gives SHIT about the server the stuff is running on because nobody sees us doing our job.
But guess who's in in the middle of the night upgrade a HDD or doing other stuff so that YOU can work during the day? Or who get's yelled at when your preciouse piece of code develops memory leaks etc. because you didn't test it? Right, NOT you guys, but the SysAdmin gets shaftet for that.
SysAdmin is a very ungrateful job, if we do it right, nobody sees us, if something goes wrong, we're to blame, and once the problem is fixed hardly ANYBODY even says: "Thanks".
So if you pay the guy only 50K be happy, he deserves much more I am sure about that.
[end of rant]
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
>>You'll lay him off and laugh when we (programmers in general) get it right. There's no reason for backups to be a problem, and there's no excuse for crashes at all.
The day YOU programmer get it right I guess I win in the lottery as well.
Programmers are some of the most ignorant tech people I know, hardly anybody EVER looks past their little piece of code.
I see it every day on our development box, Space Wars with programs.
Let's face it: If programmers take over, it'll be a couple of weeks and then they hire a consultant. Was that way at a company I worked (before I came) and now it is the same way. Sure, I change my title from SysAdmin to Consultant, put a hefty markup on it (you won't believe how desperate companies can get when they're systems are down) and enjoy it.
But I am sure you're already working on the Software that will eliminiate the use of your SysAdmin tomorrow.
Michael
P.S.
Correct me if I am wrong: Your Network Admin blocked you from using Napster at work and now you're pissed?
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
hehe, getting off topic, but yeah, I thought the same thing: "playing with it and why it matters..." hell, if I say playing with it matters, then it matters!
Am I the only one who misread the story title "IT" as "it"? I thought maybe the Americans for Purity had gotten a Slashdot story. :P Scary.
-Puk
Woah, when I first read the title I thought that they had finally released IT! Ginger!
:(
And I thought we were gonna have those cool skateboards from back to the future...
Hrm.. I'm astonished to find that there is no entry for "Geek" in the jargon file.
Well, regardless, I think I know what a geek is, and I think I know that being a geek means more than just playing with nerf and being able to install an operating system. Geeks aren't just happy go lucky overpaid (or out of work) dot commies, there is something more there. I wont do it the injustice ofr trying to classify what a geek is exactly, but it's there.
Sigs are awesome huh?
I work with a bunch of them now. To them, work is an awful chore. Computers are just there because it pays. They have a three-year old PC at home for websurfing, and it never gets turned on. They hate UNIX because it requires more skill than shoving a mouse around. I have no backups from their servers for several months running, because no matter how many times I ask them to send me the troubleshooting logs from servers I cannot access, they ignore it, as if fixing problems is beneath them. Some of them are my bosses.
I hate those people. They have taken a job a a company that was already fucked, and made it a royal nightmare. And lucky me, living in a town where thousands of people have been getting laid off every week from dying telcos and dotcoms; I am unable to find a new job because employers hire people without jobs so they can pay them terrible salaries.
Well, Sir, I don't know what to think of your comments. I am an IT professional. Professional because I can accept responsibility for things as critical as DNS, fileservers, databases, and the company network. But I act irresponsibly because I know how to use the hardware, my job, to me, is simple and fun. See I write scripts to do my job for me so I can enjoy my time at work (requirement because some suit forces me to be at the office 40 hours a week) playing games and learning new technology, browsing the web, etc. Things I enjoy doing with my time tend to cut down the stress I get from explaining how computers work to ignorant users all day.
It isn't my fault users don't know how to use a computer, but it is my responsibility (read my job) to make sure nothing that computer is doing is causing the problems users are having with it. So once the moment of critical problem solving is done I will go back to playing and waiting for another problem to happen.
Now comes the funny part. I don't like helping users. I think they should learn how computers work. I don't like being at work 40 hours a week. I don't like living in this rat race in a large city. I would much prefer to spend my time at home on the ranch, but this is where IT is needed the most and it is honestly the best place for me to learn. I still have a job, and if I didn't I could find one quite easily, even in this market. But I would like to see any company operate a month without an IT department. The weird thing about my job is somebody has to do it. So I guess it might as well be me, at least until you learn how. By that time I'll be retired.
Have a nice day
I agree. Going home early or doing "Jack Shit" all day is better than going postal.
heh. looks like it world needs to get some better IT people.
I work at an Archtechtural firm as the CAD Manager/IT Guy. We are a largish firm with 3 other IT staff; one systems, one network, and one Manager. None of them "Like" computers. They all just chug along and follow the "How To Be An IT Staffer" three ring binder.
:)
When the new computers, monitors, cameras, scanners, or these really cool LCD pen tablets come in I have the box open before you can say "where's the exacto knife?" I was playing around with some of the old monitors here setting up a triple 21" monitor setup and after trying some of the combinations we may do it on all the systems, and save space (aka $) in our new office because of it.
My whole reason for keeping this job is to play with the big toys. In a few months I will have my wireless 800Mhz tablet PC and then I can really have some fun playing around and I know the other IT guys here will just shrug....But the architects here, they grew up playing with blocks
Is this the end yet?...How 'bout now...how 'bout now...how 'bout now?
I have to agree with the artcle 100%. Most of the stuff that I have done that has gotten the most apperciation have been my own side projects that I was playing around with, as opposed to the designed by (non-technical) committee projects that come my way too.
/. right now, as are you so get off the high horse) but my boss knows that good stuff comes out of it.
I play (hey, I'm reading
but my mechanic is a goddamned thief! Death to them all!
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
However there are more useful things. Maybe a nice Wagner opera or something but usually it's just cold miserable calculation and grief.
Until your program works! Then it's a symphony! Every time it runs it's like beautiful music! da dum, dum, dum... Until it crashes. Then it's like an atomic bomb and you can feel the shock waves destroying all your hope and incinerating the orchestra playing that beautiful music. "No! I fixed it! I thought I was done!" while the midnight deadline for that assignment approaches... Programming is like music and war. Cold calculation and grief my ass!
-----
"Goose... Geese... Moose... MOOSE!?!?!"
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
The daytime admins usually didn't know a thing about computers until they went to college, and use the knowledge they learned there and in whatever training classes they've been sent to to do their job, and that's it. And most do their job very well; they use their knowledge as a means to put food on the table.
The geeks, on the other hand, usually gets in to computers at a young age. The geek works not only for the money, but for the love of the technology. These are the people that check /. six times a day, have a bookshelf of O'Reilly books, write webpages for their friends, teach themselves new programming languages, etc. Geeks make the effort to learn every technology they can not because their job dictates it, they just love to know it.
The important thing to remember is that one is not better than the other, there's a definite place for both types of people in the IT industry. The daytime sysadmins are bountiful and relatively cheap. You might say that they're the worker ants; they fill cubicle chairs, and they get the work done and they do it well. But every IT needs it's share of geeks. Geeks are always the dreamers, and it's their spirit of curiosity that drives the IT industry forward. They're never happy with "it does what it's supposed to do", they're concerned with "let's see what it CAN do". To us geeks, being a sysadmin (or programmer or whatever) isn't work, it's fun. I remember when I got my first hand-me-down 286 computer when I was 8, that feeling of excitement of a new toy. I couldn't wait to dig in to it and find out everything it can do. I still get that same feeling now when a new state-of-the-art server comes in for me to setup, or our my boss asks me to evaluate new software. It's that spirit of curiosity that will continue to drive technology in to the future, along with the help of the daytime admins.
--- Rectum?! Damn near killed em'! - Confucius
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
Bah! Excuses. Get back to your cubicle stat!
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Thank God! It wasn't just me!
You've made me feel much happier today. I did the same kind of thing, only I got failed because "I hadn't fulfilled the requirements of the assignment" because it [quote]"Wasn't in BASIC"[/quote] - this was a Computer Studies teacher who didn't understand assembler etc. properly. *Sigh*
I say we take off and nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure...
Usually this is due to a lack of a good MIS person.
That is because if they were good, they wouldn't be MIS.
Hey, I remember a similar thing. This girl at school asked me what I wanted to do later in life. I wasn't sure, but I knew it would involve computers (this was around '98-'99). She said something like what people said to you. "Oh, wow, that's a good business to be in. You can make a lot of money." And yes, you can. Computer programmers can get paid a lot of money. Just like, say, car mechanics or engineers. These people make a lot of money, not just because people like to throw money at them, but because they do a job that people want and, these days, need.
:) ). I've learned a lot by 'playing' with computers. I've wasted a lot of time with them and I think I now have a valuable skill. Hopefully someone else will think so, too, heehee :).
I had thought about this response before, so I was a little prepared for it. I replied with something like "Well, yeah, but it's a very volatile market. What if people just decide that they do not need computers any more? They are not a necessity. It might be better to be in, say, the food industry. People will not up and decide that they do not need food."
All in all, I'm aiming to go into a tech-related field (nearing the end of my second year in a university pre-ECE program) because I think it will be fun. Sure I might stand to make a sizeable amount of money, that certainly has kept my attention. But even when I was in 5th grade, I had this feeling that I wanted to do something with electronics*.
In order to keep this post ontopic I'd like to say that I agree with the general point of the story (not that I read it, I can just get the gist of it from the post's title
*A little anecdote. On a 'career day'-like thing in 5th grade, other people were dressing up as teachers and doctors and sports players ("I want to be a pro-basketball player!"). I just wore some comfortable clothes ('grubbies', you might say). When we were announcing what we were supposed to be dressed as, I said that I didn't know what I wanted to be but I knew it would deal with electronics. I still find it funny to consider that I knew that and now am aiming to enter a College of Electrical Engineering. Not that it matters to you at all...
kickin' science like no one else can,
my dick is twice as long as my attention span.
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
(Smash amp, burn guitar, take home the groupies)
This is kinda off topic, but how do you break into the industry now? I just got laid off from a dream job... promoted form tech support at an ISP to sysadmin work for the same company, working with Sun boxes, and some x86 Slackware boxes in the mix... I was in that position for 6 months, before they laid off half of their workforce (over 2000 people), the entire Sysadmin staff in the Local City included. In the month that I've been searching, every single place I've dropped a resume in has told me the same thing: "Too little professional experience." It's been an ongoing frusterating experience, and with the glut of laid off dotcommers like myself (except with much more exp) on the market, I don't predict this getting any easier. Suggesstions?
EveryDNS. Use it. It works.
AC's need not reply
Now THAT'S the way a troll should be!
I can't wait for the day that a secretary can configure an HP4000m in one of our outside offices, save me a lot of travel. And when she's done she can install that custom kernel and build our firewall, then set up the new Cisco router.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
LOL!
/.
.exe.... Sparky.
Sparky?
Calling it a "troll" won't make it go away, Sparky. Sorry 'bout that.
No need to say sorry. All you need to do is read the definition. I calls 'em as I sees 'em, and you're simply spewing to start an argument. *shrug* it is what it is. And a good one, too, considering the number of sysadmins, IT, and network people who read
Anyway, when you write this amazing do it all program, I'll start looking for another skive. Until then, I don't think I'm going to loose any sleep over the "the people who have to pay the bills" replacing me with an
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
Having an interest in techie stuff has no direct link to how good you are at your job. I know people who have no interest in the tech world outside of their job, but they are excellent engineers. I'm not saying they're the best programmers, designers or whatever, but they have the best attitude and the better communication skills. Communication is my one big nit-pick with the techie world. I don't find that my job grows me as a person, but that's just my opinion. I digress.....
No interest in technology? That sounds like my ex-boss! Totally clueless and had absolutely no desire to educate himself. Yet somebody decided to put a clueless wonder like him in charge of making IT related decisions In an IT company I worked as a SysAdmin for last year. You want to talk about factors that adversely affect job performance? Wonder why he's my ex-boss? Wonder why the company is practically tits-up?
You're using her as bait, Master!
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
I run into this in the sysadmin field (it's one of the things I can do and have done to bay the bills). By nature I like to always be trying out new stuff and be tweaking things. This is a really bad trait to give into as a sysadmin, where stability, caution, and slow-moving perfectionism are the ways to excel. Being a programmer gives me more freedom to cut loose (although not as much as I am with my own code, fast-and-loose is no way to run a project somebody is paying for).
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Hi there.
At first I read your post and was like okay so maybe your pretty good.
You have no clue tho.. really.
Your in your first year of COLLEGE with no actual work experience. Repeat after me, "NOTHING REPLACES ACTUAL JOB EXPERIENCE"
Ok then that about sums up my post. Anyone here who actually has work experience will back this little saying up. Theory and Implmentation always differ.
Your at the theory level in your thinking and education. Theory: Lay cable, throw some computers there, toggle a few buttons. Reality: There is a concerete wall between IT department and marketing department.. oops cant lay cable yet there went your pretty little picture.
So I must classify this IMO as a troll or someone truly without a clue (which is even more sad)
Jeremy
...that actually give a shit about the customer and want to see them more productive, for less, now and in the future.
Back in the day, most engineers had the credo "I'm going to do my job so well, I'll put myself out of work".
I've been disillusioned by the industry. Managers who control, rather than assist...coworkers who don't, and just want to get a check and say "I'm so cool making money with a 'puter"
There are times when I just put my head down and tell people to BACK THE HELL OFF, I'M FUCKING CREATING HERE!!!
...fortunately, they do...
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
"Yeah, Perl is pretty resourceful, but Beaver is really overlooked. You wouldn't believe the things I can do with Beaver."
When I was in college (graduated in 2000) every family member, family friend, etc. who asked what my degree was responded "CS? That is where the money is! Good choice!" Sure, the money is better than education or geology, but this comment made me sick. I decided to pursue a CS career many years before the Internet gold rush, simply because I loved computers. What could be better than picking a degree and a career where I get to "play" with expensive toys all day? And throughout my education and in my short work experience, I have noticed a huge difference in the quality of work coming from people who chose an IT or other CS job for the money/availability over the people who actually love the work.
Issue Date: April 20, 2001
Playing with IT
Greetings Folks. Welcome to my new ComputerWorld column. My objective is to explore the obligation and responsibilities of the IT department within the context of the organization that pays the bills. I'll focus on management issues relating to technology, policy and our interactions with the rest of the organization and even, from time to time, with society. I'd like the column to be interactive. If you disagree with something I say, speak up and let me know. If you happen to agree on rare occasions, add your voice to mine. And if I'm not addressing a topic you think is crucial then let me know and if I have a strong opinion on the subject I'll write something in response. The e-mail address is easy enough: pdejager@technobility.com.
By Peter de Jager
Let's face the truth. We're in this thing called IT because we get to play with new technology, the gorgeous gizmos and glitzy gadgets. Even better? Someone pays us big bucks to do this, and they buy the toys! Kewl.
When we're opening those boxes filled with plastic that goes p!o!p we're like kids at Christmas. The same smiles and the same childlike glee. Even the same gloating, if we're the first on our block with the latest and greatest.
All this childlike behaviour is not necessarily a bad thing, even in a professional. Years ago when I was an Information Centre Manager I had an unusual "filter" when hiring staff. I'd ask applicants if they owned a PC. If the answer was no, they'd have a tough time convincing me they were right for the job.
Accusations of economic discrimination aside, this question was an extremely good measure of someone's interest in the type of position I was attempting to fill. First, anyone with any work experience in IT could afford some type of personal computer. Secondly, if your computer interest wasn't strong enough to compel you to spend your own money on your toys - sorry, technology - then I didn't believe you were interested enough in technology to succeed.
Playing with something is how we learn how it works and doesn't work, what it can do and might do. It's how children explore the world, and our potential is diminished when we put toys aside.
Think back to the first time you attempted to use a particular technology. You start out by touching this and twirling that. What does this do? How do I? What if I? Oops! I shouldn't have done that! That didn't work, I'll try this! Why did that happen? Oh, a manual? I'll get to that later.
Sound familiar? Now you could, if your ego and pride have become calcified over the years, refer to this as research but what you're doing, by any reasonable definition, is still called playing.
The next step in this process, even in childhood, is a pilot project. Something small enough to be thrown away, yet large enough to explore most of the functionality of the new technology. This doesn't have to look pretty, it need only explore functionality. Children do this with great glee. A child with Lego blocks builds pilot projects, then breaks them apart and builds another one, and another one, until all functionality is explored and boredom sets in.
This isn't the last stage, especially if we're adults being paid to play. Building a pilot is fun, but the real fun is building something bigger, something that'll push the boundaries of functionality. It might even, if we're not careful, produce something useful.
That's ultimately the goal of all our playing with the gizmos and gadgets. How can we get this new opportunity to work to the benefit of our organization? Once you've played with the Internet for awhile, or WAP, or peer-to-peer technologies, then hopefully you can answer the question "How can I use this?" If you can't think of a good application, then toss it aside and open up another shrink-wrapped box and start playing again. Sooner or later you're going to hit pay dirt and find the thing that turns your industry on its ear.
It's important to remember though that the people paying the bills are watching carefully. They'll put up with the playing provided we keep them informed of our progress. They'd also like to have some confidence that the areas we're playing in really could deliver a significant business improvement sooner or later. It's not really an unreasonable position for them to take; after all that's why they hired us.
de Jager is a consultant based in Brampton, Ont. He is at pdejager@technobility.com.
I'm not going to say I love every aspect of the IT field but i do enjoy working with computers and i'm not writing any books yet. From someone like ninenine.org and yourself who said you both don't really enjoy the IT industry yet both have excelled at it, i'd like to hear some of your thoughts regarding excelling in the field..?
Work? Uh? I grew up playing with turing machines! -steve
We'll forgive you. Except for the French. No, not them. The rest of you Europeans, okay.
Lighten up, Forrest. It was a j-o-k-e...
You'll lay him off and laugh when we (programmers in general) get it right. There's no reason for backups to be a problem, and there's no excuse for crashes at all.
Amen. You speak the truth, brother. Once we manage to write that last, perfect piece of software there will never again be any need for a software upgrade, or the accompying hardware upgrades, or the installation of new systems or functionality or security.
But just how long will it be before that perfect software is written, and all of use programmers and system administrators and hardware manufacturers can pack our bags and go home, secure in the knowledge of a job well done? When, exactly, do we get to the point when we never have to install new software ever again for as long as we live? I'm not putting any doubt on your claim -- it most certainly will happen, and soon. But I want to cash in my vacation time before I'm out of a job.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
Michael Jordan played basketball outside of work...
and that other fields are filled with people who love what they do.
You don't have to read Slashdot as part of your job surely?
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
I have long realized that one must be passionate about a job to truely succeed in the long term. I recently had my first oppurtunity to hire someone, and the number one thing I looked for was passion. The person I chose had much less of a resume, but showed their interest through their "extra-curricular" projects.
The cliche of the day, "find a job you love and you will never have to work again", I think that everyday. I used to think that athletes and porn stars were lucky (ok they maybe still lucky) but I honestly cannot think of another job I would like more than programming. (may a few i would like equally. . . )
WHen I worked for a large auto supplier most of the IT staff were secretaries, that when a real it person left were drafted to take their place. I believe they chose the particular individuals for a couple of reasons:
First the IT mangers looked around the office to see who was basically doing nothing and therefore would not be missed for several weeks of training.
Then if that person was dumb enough, and lacked motivation they were deemed a "good" investment because they figure these people were not as likely to leave for greener pastures.
They also knew that there stupidity would mean they would generally be good "yes-men" so when management wanted to impose stupid policies they would havethe support of the "trained" techs.
I was a programmer and wrote cust MRP software and interfaces for the myriad proprietary systems hanging around. Programmers were treated like dirt because most of us had more inherent knowledge in our pinky fingers than the entire IT department. Hence we were a threat. If IT spent half the time actually implemeting and doing IT type tasks (it took over three weeks for one new hire to get an email address and an account on the NOVELL server) rather than the time they spent lobbying the higher up suits, on all the wonderful things they could do with more money, and lobbying for buying more proprietary canned apps, and lobbyingn against giving the inhouse devlopers anything, because its "much cheaper to buy packaged apps, yada yada yada blah blah blah.
I want to rant more but I digress. As I am sure many of you know it sucks working of rpointy haired bosses, or having stupid IT departments would have the ear of the execs. . .
-ms2k
that's funny b/c it's my mom, and a large number of "do nothing in high school" females she's friends with here in the dallas area. And a good portion of the elderly, who are trying to somewhat come out of retirement and looking for a non physical effort type job, and see IT as it.
at least people are competent enough to turn on the computer, open up the desired office (or open source deriviative) application, and print it out. I have a friend at school who downloaded and tried out napster once, b/c after that "it broke the computer" and they don't want to do that again. when it "broke" the computer, windows just happened to have a GPF at the moment napster's window was on top. These things happen all the time; people just need to be educated that GPF = save and close everything and reboot. Just like people should know that when they get a flat, they should pull over to the side of the road and change it (with the black circular thing in the back). NOT sit in that lane and cause a traffic jam.
sigh.
moox. for a new generation.
"The simple fact is that any idiot can fix a printer. If there weren't an IT guy to handle that crap, people could do it for themselves."
I sure wish I could support your idiots. My idiots are lucky if they can put paper in a printer. One has little pieces of paper taped all over his computer. One of those pieces of paper is over his power button and says "push to turn on." I guess you just have a better class of idiots.
--
The point is that not taking showers, wearing geek clothes, and coming in late, are not a substitute for actually being creative or intelligent. Similarly a lot of normal looking people who wake up at 5am in the morning and work hard are actually twice as smart as the smelly geek with the bloated ego and social dysfunction.
I know many people who come in 7.30 am and are quite creative and clever and responsible. They finish their work on time and don't goof off. They take deadlines seriously and have a professional appearance and work ethic.
On the flip side I have also known highly unprofessional lazy people who assume that growing their hair long and wearing gothic clothing can be an effective substitute for actual work or creativity.
Sorry. It doesn't work that way.
The whole geek subculture really puts me off. Appearance, smelliness, lack of responsibility, and not being able to get up in the morning has very little to do with creativity or productivity.
Just because you have no time management skills does not mean you are a creative genius. Maybe you are just an idiot with no time management skills.
Similarly just because you have a picture of Einstein on your shirt does not mean you are Einstein. Sorry. Try again.
--
You are the weakest link. Good-bye.
I tell every single person I hire, "You gotta be in love with computers to do this everyday. You have to go home and play with your computer to be part of this IT team."
I don't care about certs or any of that stuff. Has the person ever set up a UT server...in Linux? just to see if they could? Does the phrase Pirates! bring a gleam to their eye? Are they Perl or Python ( or better both?) Are they bashing Microsoft for a reason or because they think it is cool? Do they call them animals or O'Reilly's?
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This
What's wrong with that?
I love my job. I love what I do. Subsequently I do it really well and malke a lot of cash in the process. I want people like that with me.
While dot coms crash and burn my company is expanding. Now there's 400 people who love what they do. There would be 450, but 50 (or so) of them didn't "get it."
Guess what we rarely work more than 10 hours. In fact a lot of my crew leaves after 8.5. Life is good. Maybe even for that Janitor.
---
This
I hope your attitude at work is better than the one you're displaying in your post.
*wishing I had a mod point about now*
"Hey, Martha, I've got this new spleen-hack that regenerates tissue at twice the normal rate!"
"That's nice, dear, but would you please remember to load the dishwasher before you come to bed?"
Maybe you need a better example...
John
John
I am a tech coordinator for a school. We have all kinds of cool toys. At night I take the projector home to play Counter-Strike and DVDs on a 150" screen. I integrate iBooks into my home network. I go to work to play with computers and then go home and play with them some more. I take the schools iBooks to the park and read slashdot with a small directional antenna and the school's wireless network. Who else in the city has 11Mb/s wireless any where in the city just by pointing a high gain antenna at the place they plan on being before leaving work? Slashdot in the park, Tom's Hardware and at the local computer shop and IRC at the coffee shop. My crowning glory was pricwatch at the computer show. You can get great deals if the vendor can see you are a smart shopper and knows you are comparing his hardware with the entire planet's hardware. By all means have fun at your job, if not you have no business being a computer geek. You are just a pointy haired boss in training.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
What do you propose for data storage, then? There's no solid state storage medium that can even touch magnetic platters in terms of cost/GB. What about cooling? There's not many processors out there that don't require active cooling. Besides, even solid state parts are prone to wearout due mostly to thermal effects. Thermal expansion and contraction cycles as its load varies over time can wear out solder joints, and then there's stuff like electromigration down at the micron level. You simply don't know what you're talking about.
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_______
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine." -- RFC 1925
... they're supposedly archiving and restoring historical documents for corporations with rich and detailed backgrounds. A tour of their complex reveals only two consumer scanners, storage facilities that consist of 3 "IDE RAIDs", and not a single paper/book restoration lab. Yet their employee rec center has a 140" projected TV and movie room and a retro arcade. Their "data center" has a 12-node beowulf cluster that seems to run benchmark scripts around the clock. When I asked what sort of scanning and storage facilities they had, the rep dodged the question and told me that they have achieve a sustained 25 GFLOPs with their cluster.
I wasn't impressed and took my business elsewhere.
Have you looked at or used his code?
System administrators were indispensible fifteen years ago, but they're barely useful now -- and in a short time they'll be completely superfluous
That's got to be the funniest thing I've read on Slashdot in a month.
It's pretty clear to everyone here by now your just trolling. Go away.
I am one of those "Kids with toys".
:( )
I am 1 of 2 sys admins. I have to take of of an office of about 80 with about 40 servers at my fingertips. On "slow" days... we load up some games and play. If we don't feel like a game, we read up on things we need daily (It's a mixed NT/Linux shop, NT for the file/print/crap and domain auth, Linux for the real world, as well as our product)
I like my fun that I do have, IE, shopping for Palm Vx (I am in Canada, no Palm VIIx for me
Fossil driven companies are the one's that are likely still running Windows NT 4 shops: That ActiveDirectory and Windows 2000 is too dern confusin'! (Note: There are shops that are still NT 4 because it makes more sense, however in general the fossil shops take many, many years to transition because of an IT crew that doesn't want to negate what they already know)
No some shops just do not wish to pay M$ for a upgrade to another unstable POS Opertating System.
Got Code?
Some things to remember: 1. The majority of college sysadmins don't get paid shit compared to what they could make elsewhere, hence, one of the 'perks' for being ripped off is a 'relaxed' atmosphere. 2. Capitalism isn't about working hard, it's about working smart. It's about the exchange of something of value for money. In other words, if you only have to work 4 hours a day and your employer feels that you are giving something of value in return, then that is ok. You do not owe anyone your life, if you are ripping them off by not doing your job, the market will correct this and you will be replaced. On the other hand, if you have a unique skillset, or something of value to offer, then you should be paid accordingly, again, to whatever the market will bear. If every person in the working class realized this, we wouldn't have near as much of a problem with labor unions, because the constant bargaining for higher salaries would naturally ensure that they got paid what they were worth. This is called capitalism, it's too bad that the average Joe doesn't feel that this applies to him and that he owes nothing more than what the market will bear in exchange for what he gets paid.
FYI, bub, I am not looking down my nose. I have had to work my fair share of shit jobs. They sucked, I was treated with no respect, and was paid very little in comparison to what I make now. Again, it's about working smart. Only in America, do people expect to make a living doing something such as packing a bunch of shit in a box all day, or sorting and stacking things, etc. Only with an active vision of how what you are doing, is contributing to others, can you be ensured that what you are doing is of any value. Ditch digging doesn't pay well, because typically these people have shut the most valuable thing they have off, that is their mind. I worked at a factory, and one of my jobs was standing in the same spot, like a robot, and simply picking up the newly printed forms, putting them into a box, and running the box through a machine that taped up the top. The reason that jobs like that pay so little, is because the task being done is essentially worthless. Perhaps at the beginning of the industrial revolution, these jobs were necessary, but now, it's no longer needed. Most employers keep these jobs simply because it's easier to keep a few low paid workers around, than to buy an expensive machine that can do the same task, but they DO have that option. If more people realized that in order to get ahead, you need to bring something of real value to your employer, not just a warm body, they wouldn't be abused in such a manner, because the ones left over that were STILL willing to do such menial tasks would be few and far between. As a result, they would get paid better, and overall, people would make more money. I am not oblivious to the hardships that the working poor face. However, I have also seen through experience, that many of them are in such positions not only because of bad choices that they have made in the past, but because of a persistent belief that capitalism does not apply to them, that they will never succeed at anything, and that only 'lucky' or 'rich' people get the good jobs.
Sorry for the eyesore of all that bold text.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Umm... you are aware that a CPU has moving parts, right? Let me put this in terms even you can understand: Very small moving parts, like tiny little light-switches (we grown-ups call them "diodes"), live in the land of the computer chip and direct the flow of electricity (the stuff that's in lightning!) and allow your magic box (or "computer") to pretend it's thinking.
Furthermore, even if computer and printer maintenance becomes as trivial as you say, the company still does not me wasting my precious time with it. That's what we hire IT people for. Any programmer can do the janitor's job, too... but we don't. Instead, we hire a janitor. Since few people want a janitor's job, we are forced to pay a pretty darn good salary for somebody who never went to college. With sysadmins, it's the same thing.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
You have to have a lot of cars before hiring your own mechanic is cheaper than taking them to the garage.
Correct.
Now, to apply your logic, how many people employ a full-time sysadmin for their home computers?
Not many... However, any company with a serious reliance on information technology owns the equivalent of one (1) Shitload of cars.
Just as somebody who runs a fleet of busses or taxis employs full-time mechanics, a company that relies on doing lots of math in a short period of time (i.e., a financial company) desperately needs a staff of IT professionals who know they're doing.
For a large segment of the corporate world, their data is their product. An insurance company that loses their data and can't restore from backup in a timely manner is a bankrupt insurance company before the month is over.
By the way, I do exactly no (0) system administration work in my job. I'm just a programmer, so I really have no vested interest in the debate to bias my viewpoint. (Our sysadmin spends most of his day swapping files on Napster, and we are all very happy that things are running smoothly enough for that to be the case, but there is no way in hell we would ever lay him off. Less that 50 large a year allows us to never worry about backups, crashes, or system upgrade decisions. We just sit around writing code and let the IT department take care of itself.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
see subject... You can predict work performance based on personality type... You can be excellent, yet dullard, IT worker without constantly dabbling in IT toys... Although I think geeks who "play" are more technologically well rounded, and can potentially have more diverse experiences to "draw" from when problem solving... Although an overly exuberant geek can spend more time being distracted discussing "making beowolfs of this or that" or there favorite Natalie Portman film/scene/timestamp =P Or maybe they are just too busy shift-refreshing /. to find the latest story to post to.
E.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
There are at least two different cultures, however.
One is the corporate culture where the company has been running the same system for ages, and the guys are grooved in to pumping out comapny reports, and other business functions, be it across the wan, or whatever. You get good at what you do, and learn all kinds of shortcuts, etc to getting the job done, regardless of how screwed up the system gets when someone messes it up
Another is the Linux/unix wizard who is able to create things on the fly etc. But note that this is not the same as a project with finetuning for multiple years on end. (Take an extreme example of this long term fine tuning the programming for the Space Shuttle) This is where projects are generally short term. Days, weeks, and sometimes months.
Each one is a different personality
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
glad you know everything there is to know about networking.
just know that one day, when you least expect it, your 'perfect' network will crash to its knees. you'll toil for hours hours on end to discover the problem.
it won't be some massively complex problem that your vast amount of networking knowledge solves.
it'll be something stupid, like a bent pin in an RJ-45 jack somewhere
Silly slashdot, sigs are for kids!
There's also one other aspect to IT life that I think you're missing. If the network goes down, the server has a problem, if data is lost, guess who's head is going to roll? The IT professional. He/she will be up late nights, periods over 24+ hours, seeing to it that that network is alive and kicking the very soonest possibility. For your 1 server, 50 workstation environments, yes, Mr. IT Professional hardly has any work to do beyond maintenance. For companies that do business rated in the millions of dollars, those servers and their uptime are rather keenly felt if they're absent.
Before you go knocking on all IT professionals as simpletons, maybe you should get out of school and into the field. Get yourself a little experience in a corperate environment before you start claiming how easy it is. For what you've played with, no doubt it is easy. Out in the world, the stakes are higher. Good IT professionals wind up spending most of their time doing nothing more than testing/playing on new things to impliment, because their servers are always online and available. Bad ones tend to run around fixing problems that shouldn't've existed in the first place. It all goes in levels too. A good IT professional on a small network may not be a good IT professional on an enterprise network. Besides, IT departments hardly ever are the revenue generating division. They are technical support, a part of the company that spends money to ensure that the rest of the company can do their jobs faster and more efficiently.
I have worked in the corporate world for pretty much all that time, though it wasn't as strict as you might find in a Fortune 500 or NYC Financial District company for most of that time.
It saddens me when I read articles like this, because I know that, once, I did enjoy technology, I did enjoy tinkering, playing with computers, learning new things about them, checking out the latest and greatest technology. I was never a programmer, but I did sort of hack on the hardware and procedure side of things, a very little bit. (I'd contend that procedures, as well as code, can be hacked. A bit of a stretch of the definition, but I think it's appropriate, maybe.) I used to get a lot of enjoyment from getting the computeers to work.
Three years is a long time. I now have (erm, had, it was taken down by my supe) a sign in my little tiny server room that relates that quote by Steve Wozniak: "Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window." I come to work in dread. I have long since no longer considered computers to be a hobby. The less I open my case, the better, and so I praise the coming of USB and FireWire. I find myself groaning whenever my neighbor or even, Heaven help me, my own parents have even the most innocuous computer question. I would very much like to be in another field entirely, but quitting is not wise right now considering the job market, and that I already have a job (albeit a sucky one, IMO) that pays the bills and then some and which, I have to admit, when I'm not trying to keep myself from defenestrating the Dellboxen, I'm reasonably good at.
Burnout? Maybe. Maybe not from technology, but certainly from helpdesk. I certainly have no desire anymore to go out of my way to make these systems more than they are, despite working for a kicka$$ consulting group. It just bothers me, that the article above notes that the best people for these jobs are the people who enjoy the technology, who revel in the changing scope of it, at the advancement of the technological boundaries, at the realms of promise afforded us by Moore's Law.
My day is filled with examples of Murphy's Law. I used to like technology once.
---
Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
As for management of IT departments - I find it's more a factor of maintaining a balance among personalities. If you have too many fun-loving geeks, nothing gets done. Too many reclusive geeks, nobody has a clue what they do and can't talk to them. Too many button-down professional types, and the place is simply too boring. Managers should actively seek to strike a balance to keep things running smoothly. Variety works. IT certainly doesn't *need* the formality of a law school to work well; but it certainly needs a bit more professionalism than pre-school.
czep
Dictionaries are for loosers.
Sounds like someone is jealous. You know, if you ask nicely some people might share their toys with you. But not me...you're too mean.
Um. What about "fucking off" trolling and then replying to your own threads on slashdot?
Now shut up and get back to work.
a lot of other girls have a negative portrayal of people who work on computers, being that they dont wanna "turn into a computer geek who sits in front of the computer all day" ;)
:)
i interact with a large group of teenage girls 3 days a week, and for the most part they know how to operate a computer, and use certain programs.. (napster, icq). we can only hope that someday, some of those girls take an interest in figuring out more about it, how it works, and what more they can do with it.
and maybe we can get more girls embracing geekdom
Damn, I converted my girlfriend to computergames and now she has a faster PC than me.
</slightly Off Topic>
You do not need a company full of geeks, just a few. There are lots of poeple that need to take the sales part. Hey, If i need a test for a monkey test ("just press some buttons and see the app does not crash") I need those sales/middle management people for that!
And if you like the lateste HW/SW use it, if not there are still a lot of cobol programmers needed. The ppl that do not like all the latest tech stuff but just wait for their pay will be the cobol programmers of the future.
I recently graduated from a fairly large University in the Philadelphia area, and can honestly say that the entire IT department exemplified the "just for a living" approach to their jobs. They were there to collect their miniscule salaries, and it reflected in the quality of campus technology; we clocked our average internet speed during the day at .128 kbps... The computer labs opened and closed on whims, much to the chagrin of students without connections in their dorms. The network server would crash regularly (BDC ? Didn't have one. When I asked why not, I got a big shoulder shrug.)
From what I understand, the situation has only gotten worse.
When there's no pride in your job, no desire to excel, it becomes very apparent in your productivity. It's too bad these individuals' lack of pride affects so many students.
I alternate between posting +5 and -1 Comments. Karma: +53 -47 = 6
IRC is not for me. Used to chat alot, and I actually still use irc.openprojects.net when I need a quick answer to a problem. But my regular hangouts from the highschool days are still mostly populated by highschool kids - and we all know what they're like :)
^]:wq!^M
You don't get that "edge" if you simply learn what you need to stay employed, and you don't have any interest in computers beyond that. A true IT workers day does not end at 16:30.
Believe it or not - even reading Slashdot has been a great help for me professionaly, as I pick up on new "toys" to play with that in the end turn out to be a great help when solving work related problems.
An unhealthy side-effect, of course, is that I have become an anti-social geek, addicted to Redbull, and nobody want to talk to me anymore. But hey, it's a small sacrifice ;)
^]:wq!^M
yeah we believe you - the story is about people who have "no real interest in technology", you must have some interest to read slashdot, or you enjoy boring yourself by reading stories that tend to be technology related.
Having said that You are right, pretty much anything beats working - like when you are a kid and anything beats studying, or tidying your room.
Seriously I know people who work with IT who dont have a genuine interest in technology, sadly a lot of those people turn out to be the people who's eyes bulge out and mouths froth with spittle as they insist you use Microsoft Outlook, and Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Windows.
no sig.
Really, is it news that the people that just *love* to play with the higher technologies are the ones that are learning it, picking it apart, and if it's found cool and useful, really really grok the technology just to make it work well ?
Aren't these, or shouldn't they be, your most sought after employees?
Is it really not that obvious?    :)
When I think of professionalism (what a lot of people here are advocating), I think, "Oh God, how stifling." In particular, the following flashes across me:
I question the value of turning people into programs, rather than programmers. ("Who you callin' Program, Program?" --Tron)
It does not seem to be a very stable configuration for humanity. I'd refer you to Leiji Matsumoto's Galaxy Express 999 and the machine planet, but only a few of you will know what I'm talking about.
Sure, the world is harsh, but it's not that harsh. Do we really need to make sure that all our employees are stuffed in suits, and behaving like automotons? Do we really want to live in that world? I've seen plenty of projects that succeeded, "despite" not having people stuffed in suits.
Geoffrey James translated Yong Yo Sef when he wrote:
Looks like you'll continue to pay the sysadmins $50,000, even in the future.
The way I see it, if a sysadmin is lazy, you have a good sysadmin. What should [s]he be doing? The best sysadmin will automate it all the way, and hold the keys of the structure in his or her head.
What, would you like your sysadmin to be pedaling a bicycle? A good system administrator is like a security guard, making sure your data is safe. Guards doesn't "do" anything but stand there and protect you against danger. Sure, a certain amount of keeping up with the latest security updates and installations is important, but for the most part, the best should be able to automate quite a bit, and then just sit on the keys.
I'm not saying that to become a good system administrator, do nothing. A sysadmin should know the tools and tricks of the trade. But once a fort is secure, they shouldn't make themselves look busy just to appease you.
Again, you will always need system administrators because no system, out of the box, is tailored to your needs.
In my experience, you've got a point. A female friend of mine is a very good sysadmin, but she has very little interest in playing with the new stuff. She's excellent at managing routers etc, and any company would be lucky to have her, but she's not likely to be the one to come up with an entirely new solution. Her main strengths are organization and planning. Of course, you can't generalize about 50% of the population from one case, but still...
I don't know maybe it's a function of crappy teachers and despair.
Or Both. When I did my Computing degree, I sat on the course committee in my final year (token student member) and at the time there where a massive number of drop outs in the course. The answer was to raise the TER entry score (similar to SAT's). It didn't fix the problem, because it wasn't the people with lower TER's that where dropping out, it was the ones that had the Higher TER's and where getting frustrated and bored with the teaching. These people could go anywhere with their TER, they didn't have to put up with it. Those who stayed did so because they wanted like Hell to get their degree, for what ever reason
"They can't seem to understand that sometimes I do my best work at night so I sleep in and come to work a little later."
I to, am a night owl. which is perfectly accepctable within Computing and/or Computer Science but IT is the Business side of Computing. and in the Business world you do as you are told and do not ask questions. This is why there is so much stress I suppose
"I can understand how the attitudes and behavioral differences can seem odd, different, or annoying. However, it is one of those things you have to deal with. Trust me, someone who acts like a kid with a big toy will be far more productive than some one who does it just for a job. "
I have a hard time thinking that way with the things that I write since they are usually stupid little programs that are more for the academic waste of time and probably never will be useful. CS has the problem that all areas have and that is they rarely actually give you some idea and maybe some projects that might be similar to ones that are often encountered in industry.
The "kids with toy's" idea isn't new, but it does imply somebody who has a passion, the want to do what they are doing because they enjoy it. But being from a Computing degree, I to noticed that the assignments that we got somehow seemed to be a unproductive waste of time, but sometimes it was fun to play around with.
Playing with toys really isn't something that I do and I very much doubt that it would make me more efficient. I see programming as a person doing battle. The problem is I often have the evil soldier battling me and pinned to the ground. There is little room for imagination or creativity with stupid things like data structures or random acts of prearranged coding and there really isn't any use for it because then you have problems pleasing the compiler gods.
Ohhhhh, I so play with toys, helps me when I'm stuck in a rut, spill the lego out on the floor and start creating. but lego is such a logical toy and helps me get my mind into a logical frame, which you need for programming. But programming, as mentioned above, doesn't always allow creative outlets, people don't want something creative, they want a tool. that is all. and they done apreciate the effort that you, the programmer, put into it. If I asked for a Hammer and I was given a Pink one with purple pokla dots, I would question why, but it would still function as a hammer right? I guess it has to do with the world still viewing anyone in IT as nerds.
In conclusion I would welcome a systematic process that would work over a process that would most likely be done in an area that actually could use something like that. However there are more useful things. Maybe a nice Wagner opera or something but usually it's just cold miserable calculation and grief.
It would be nice for a systematic approch to work, but numbers are evil.
PS. I had a professor who acted like everything was just a big game to him. Jackass couldn't even bother to teach right and just plowed right through the course material without bothering to actually address anything properly. Took 5 chapters in two weeks or work and then proceeded to make the wost presentation of all the worst complexities of object orientation (this was a cs1 class). He obviously knew information but damn if he wasn't going to let that information out to anyone in a comphrensible way. Yeah playing around is really so terribly useful that it is indespensible. Sometimes it's better to shut up and teach something properly.
The problem is that Universities hire people on the skill that they have, not their ability to teach, 99% of the lecturers that I had where quite gifted in their chosen field, luck if 20% of them had any idea how to teach something though.
I guess what I am trying to say is that Computing/CompSci/IT is so individual to us all. does it really matter what somebody's motivation is as long as they do the job, from the buisness side, no, and that is where most of the money comes from, but if you can find yourself in a job that you love, and you get paod well for it, then best of luck to you, isn't that what we all really want?
Trav
Leg Godt!
Firstly a lot of people have correlated these when they are different fields (generally). IT is generally the guys who administer the servers and install (or plan) the network cable, whereas software development is a whole different discipline.
However I will completely and absolutely agree that there is ZERO doubt that those who enjoy computers and software engineering will far outproduce those who do it purely as a career (in general terms though this is not an absolute and there are exceptions). Those driven by passion will constantly bring new ideas that they garnered playing around with their PC at night (although good management has to be in place to ensure the ideas are applicable and not just doing it for the sake of doing something different), and they will train themselves in the newest technologies just for the sake of doing it. The career programmer on the other hand will be busy amassing collections of "How To" books to fill their shelf, albeit never reading them, while putting up resistance to anything that isn't what they already know. Fossil careerists are the ones who debate against any and every "new" way of doing anything, because it represents work to them : They actually have to learn things. Fossil driven companies are the one's that are likely still running Windows NT 4 shops: That ActiveDirectory and Windows 2000 is too dern confusin'! (Note: There are shops that are still NT 4 because it makes more sense, however in general the fossil shops take many, many years to transition because of an IT crew that doesn't want to negate what they already know)
If there is a longterm downterm the careerists simply will be out of a job. I hate to say it but you can't compete with the guy who spends 40 hours unpaid time per week learning and absorbing because it's what he loves. This isn't like knitting where you learn it and slowly perfect: This is constantly evolving and what you know is being obsoleted so you constantly have to upgrade your skills. The burnout rate among careerists is and will remain incredibly high, and rightly so.
one can wonder how many of those companies went under from the overspending on 'toys`.
I would wager extremely few. Companies often make a huge deal about getting that IT guy a "toy" Palm for $300, while at the same time flying around the country racking up hundreds of thousands (or millions) of dollars in travel charges, paying managers ridiculous salaries (usually far more perverse that the notorious software developer/IT salary), paying millions to ad shops and legal firms, etc. In the grand scheme of things those toys are usually an absolute drop in the bucket. The sad fact is htat jealousy (as seen in many of the posts in this discussion) inflates these trivial expenses to way more than they really comprise.
So you see, "play" is one way to look at what we do and why we do it well, but the correct way to look at things is in terms of profit -- the way our corporate lords and masters do.
And none of that fuzzy-wuzzy stuff about "profit to society" -- the reasonable thing to aim for is profit for your employers. Our corporate surrogate parents don't want to end up like those idiots at CERN who haven't made any money off the Web.
(For an antidote to the above, go do a search on Alan Kay, or Marvin Minsky, or Seymour Papert -- and find out what play and computers are really all about.)
--Holden
bipartisanship, n.: when both parties gang up on you
Hey Fearsome, you are an excellent troll. Why don't you start to make it a challenge for yourself and spell out the word Troll using the first letter of every sentence or something along those lines.. make it an art form.. :)
I thought someone said there was going to be free beer!
have come across IT people that are worth their salt?
admit defeat, live in decline, be the victim of our own design
I totally utterly agree! :-)
It is the same situation at the university where I am. I'm currently writing my master thesis in cs, and a lot of the students, especially the 1st and 2nd semester students have a lot of retakes and low grades in general. And from the gossip I often hear, a lot of the younger students have been motivated by the "IT pays well"-thing, and generally have no clue about computers and even matematics.
Surely, this must be the recent high demand for IT people, that has spawned this. Now computer science is chosen both by traditional geeks as well as non-geeks. And my experience is that most non-geeks fail miserably, though there are exceptions that actually manages to learn it quite well.
The non-geeks often also have problems finding the real good jobs (especially now), whereas the "real" geek have no problems at all, even now. Actually companies here in Denmark are still raving for the talented people.
Anyway, my point - the less talented people that have a sort of non-enthusiastic approach to IT will have a hard time. But is that really so strange? Don't think so.
Oh and this "lazy"-thing that some pointy-haired bosses can exibit towards us night-loving geeks - Been there and tried that
My cousin has been a LAN administrator at Nynex for a long time now, yet he has no computer at home, and uses AOL for internet access when he does bring home his laptop from work. His idea of a good time is working in his yard or playing golf when it's not snowing in upstate New York.
From what I've seen, he's a great IT worker, runs everything well, is always on call. He just doesn't take the job home with him, and is not terribly interested in computers, despite graduating with a degree in Computer Science.
The hardest part of his job is keeping up with the changing company name. It was Nynex for a long time, then BellAtlantic, and now Verizon.
The most interesting part of his job is the subtle nuances of "the union," of which he is not a part. As someone unfamiliar with unions, it was strange to hear tales of what union workers at his company will do (and especially, what they WON'T do). Kind of sucks when they go on strike, since he gets to take up all their slack for 13 days straight. (When the union strikes, non-union folks who dare cross the picket line get to work 13 long days before taking one day off ahead of their next 13 days.)
Not sure why I just told you all this.
"And like that
And now it's just "Office skills" type lessons they teach there-which ,while important, just don't inspire the same kind of creativity.... Oh well, I've still got my Uni dissertation to do, so I think a few exploding heads should liven it up....
"Truth is only what we need it to be"
No, but it helps.
It's much easier to get good at something if it interests you, further -- and more importantly -- it's easier to care about the quality of your work if it interests you.
I've been in IT in one form or another for 20 years. Thinking back over those years, the people who stand out in my mind as being very good programmers or very good sys admins are the people who also had fun with it, who had multiple systems at home or who wrote complex 2000+ line programs simply because it was fun.
That's not to say there weren't others who were competent. But the *really* good ones had fun with it.
And the flip side is just as important. While there are (and were) people I know who programmed or sys admined just as a job and did it competently or even moderately well, it's a lot more likely those people would be the ones who shouldn't be in programming. They could write the code. And it would do what was asked of it. But it took them longer, the code was much less efficient, and was often practically unreadable.
It's not required to think of programming or sys admining as fun to be good at it. But it helps a lot.
Sean.
Most applications can't actually break your computer. But if there were one that could, it would be the notoriously shitty napster client.
---
"Watch these suckers jump when I get Administrator."
It's rubbish to say the best IT workers are "Big kids with big toys". Some of the best IT workers that I've known were actually just lazy and were searching for easier ways to get things done whilst the "Big kids with big toys" were screwing up their systems.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
I've seen (and been a part of) bastard systems that no one enjoyed working on. No one wanted to take the credit (=blame) for that junk. If the team does not care about what they are building, no amount of process will produce a great system.
Enjoying the work you do is not not the same as enjoying coming to work. That is something different.
During the dot-com boom having toys in the office became a big fad. I'm sure successful teams have had nerf-guns and basketballs around the cubes but that is not what made them successful. If they produced great product it is because the team had fun making the product despite having the toy destractions!
Show me a programmer that does not enjoy the challenge of putting together a program for a project and I will show you a programmer I would never want to hire or work with on that project.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~ the real world is much simpler ~~
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
Last post. This is what the IT industry is coming to! I'm raking in dough doing this now :).
~
A busy, determined little troll, aren't you?
Here, here. You don't have to love something to be good at it. Do I care if my surgeon really loves his work ? No, I just care that he is good at it. Do I care if my mechanic or plumber loves *his* work ?? No, I just care that he is good at it. Do I care if a programmer/sysadmin/dba loves *his* work ? No, I just care that he is good at it. The notion that IT workers should love their work is a lame attempt by some IT workers at romanticizing a job. Surely there are some IT workers love their work...but it sure does not say anything about whether or not they are any better at it because of it (are the Slashdot guys really great programmers and DBAs ? Looking at the /. code, I would suggest not, but I would also guess they love their work) . There are lots of would-be doctors who probably would have loved their work, too, but they weren't able to get into medical school. On the other hand I know several doctors and lawyers who ultimately couldn't give a damn about their work, but they are good at it.
As far as IT guys with toys - you got to look at it this way - either let the IT guys play with the new stuff and figure it out, or let the non-IT people play with the new stuff and break it.
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
Caution, Composer, or you run the risk of falling into the same hole as Bliss, to whom you replied. You're trying to apply the rules of knowledge workers to non-knowledge workers, which is as bad an idea as trying to apply the rules of non-knowledge workers to knowledge workers. These two sets don't play by the same rules at all. To take your points:
> 1. The majority of college sysadmins don't get paid
> shit compared to what they could make elsewhere, hence,
> one of the 'perks' for being ripped off is a
> 'relaxed' atmosphere.
You can't assume that all college admins are in these position by choice alone. Some are there due to inertia (which isn't in and of itself bad, but but can be), and some are there because they're either not smart enough or not motivated enough to "get out into the real world".
> 2. Capitalism isn't about working hard, it's about working smart.
This only applies to knowledge workers, Ace. Actually, capitalism is about both of these things, working hard where appropriate and working smart where appropriate. A ditch digger or dishwasher doesn't get paid for working smart, and there are very few situations where working four hours a day in such a job will make your employer satisfied, no matter how good you are at the job. This simple difference is why labor unions are necessary in some cases, and why as a general rule knowledge workers don't unionize. In the ditch digger's case, if the foreman says, "work for ten hours a day for the same pay, or I'll replace you with another ditch digger that will", the threat has teeth, because there are lots of well qualified ditch diggers out there. In the IT manager's case, the odds that they'll find someone who's just as qualified, but willing to work longer for less is much smaller, so they can't really do this lest all of their IT talent walks out the door.
So, while you're looking down your nose at union members and the "working class", remember that there are some very ambitious people in that class, and to deride them because they don't play by your rules of capitalism just shows your lack of understanding of how the two markets differ. If you spent a year as an auto worker or coal miner, I suspect your perspective would change, and your compassion would improve.
Virg
I work in a largely MS shop. We have a lot of people we've hired lately who are daytime geeks only. They know MS products only (because of the ease of administration IMHO) and are totally against anything non-MS.
I blame the ease of administration in MS products of late for this trend. Someone that doesn't know much beyond their admin tasks can still pass their job requirements and get by in the IT world these days. You won't find those people working on advanced (read: UNIX based) server systems or Cisco/network products, because it involves an inate knowledge and thought processes which only comes (again, IMHO) with years of playing with computer systems (probably teen/pre-teen years) and a desire know how to do something just because, or to see if it can be done.
Placing the blame of dying dot-coms on techs with toys is just a lack of insight. Those techs with toys are probably what kept them going as long as they did. The whole dot-com attitude was of free flowing cash, and I think that if they didn't spend on geek toys it would have been wasted by sales monkeys palms or whatever or by management on golf games and the like. It all evens out, and blaming geeks is just a lack of thought about the issue.
en
conf t
Max Inglis
Where I work, we avoid IT like the plague. Then again, we're also convinced that Scott Adams works in our department under a pseudonym.
My .02,
My .02,
zencode
iactivist.org/jason
Amen, brother. While it would be nice if I happened to like computers, I don't think that I would've been nearly as successful.
Other IT jobs like making web sites, setting up networks, and administering networks. Those jobs are so easy. I could probably get any of those three jobs right now, and I'm a first year CS major. People who want to be one of those only have to get a degree in IT so someone will hire them. I knew everything there is to know about networking years ago.
I couldn't help laughing after reading this. Kid, no offense, but you have a LOT to learn. And I'm not talking about technical stuff, either.
Hell, ever since I can remember, I was playing with IT. My earliest memories are of laying on my back in my crib, my parents' faces hovering overe me, and my mother gently moving my hands away from IT.
As I got older I got my first real computer, a piece of junk Tandy from Radio Shack. My best friend was this tomboy Shelby from down the street. She'd come over after school and we'd spend hours reveling in the wonders of IT. Before then it was only my guy-friends who showed any interest in IT, so that's when I first found out that girls could be just as into IT as boys were.
During middle school most of the other guys were into football or soccer while me & my friends spent most of our time in the dark corners of the computer lab, showing each other what IT could do to change the way we interacted with the world. High school was tougher though - both teachers and fellow students felt obsessing about IT all the time was having a warping effect on my brain. I won't go into it, but I pretty much spent all my high school years in my room reading magazines about and playing with IT.
College on the other hand was a different story. It was the 'net boom times, and all the girls seemed crazy about IT. It was like it was suddenly cool to be a geek. I was able both to excel and spend all the time I want playing around with IT with as many as 4 or 5 men & women with the same interests I had. Not only that, I discovered many other toys and was able to discover new uses of them with IT which has totally changed the way I approach my life.
And now, I've got a high-paying job with a secluded, windowless office where I can sit at my 24" monitor writing programs and playing with IT all day! Hallelujaih!
The only tool you've got against psychosis is experience.
The question was, does anyone see people not even interested in IT, and how it affects performance. I've personally seen this at its worst. If IT workers are totally disinterested, they don't work on expanding existing skills and learning new ones. As the company moves forward with new technologies, they don't. They remain stagnant, and wonder why they aren't progressing in salary and position like the people who ARE interested in technology do. That's just my 2 cents.
I was submitting an entry for a one-act play contest. There was a sudden requirement for three copies. The English professor looked at my submission, realized I'd duplex printed it, and said "I'll show you where the copier is, but you'll have to take it from there, because I don't do two-sided."
I held my peace, and managed to take third place. Not bad for an engineering major.
I wonder if that teacher is competent with table implements...
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I'm no sysadmin, so I have no turf to protect here. But the sheer entropy of modern configuration control argues heavily against your viewpoint.
I got a soda says you'll have as many, or more, sysadmins in five years just to deal with the botched HTML/XML/SGML/VRML/??ML... nonsense.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
This sounds curiously like my stepfather: he has worked as Maintenance Supervisor in a factory for years (fixing manufacturing machines, not computers). He is tired of doing it, and so one day he gets the idea that he wants to be an MCSE. He takes a class, and has a very hard time understanding the material. At first, he was going to build his own PC, which his instructor recommended, but now he seems more compelled to buy some prefab system (prefab==boring IMHO) from Dell/Compaq/Whoever. He doesn't visit any technology/PC/IT websites (including Slashdot, which is why I'm not too worried about making this post). He once said to me, "Yeah, we use Win2K sometimes in class. I don't really like it..." (I start to think that my openly pro-Linux and anti-MS attitudes are getting to him) "...I like Windows95 a lot better."
He has almost no passion for computers at all. Hell, the system that he uses is a P133 (he actually wasted money buying an extra 64MB of RAM for this unholy beast, bringing it up to 96MB; it only figures that he bought RAM that his mboard wouldn't accept the first time out, and he had to go back to Fry's Electronics and ask them what type he needed) running Windows95. Ughhh...
The thing that really gets me is this: he finally passed the A+ Certification class, and yet he is no rush to go take (and pass) his A+ Certification exams so that he can go on to the Win2K classes (networking and such).
My manager once said that he feels workeers ought to get at least one tech journal. I think I agree with him now. :) Anyhow, the point is that I still get VBPJ because I could glean *something* from it that may help at work. Furthermore, once I find something interesting, currently hacking around with PHP, I'm *very* interested.
:P ...but I can make VB do anything that is possible in Windows because I researhced and learned alot of API tricks and other stuff.
I admit I don't code too much on my own anymore, because I've become disenchanted with doing private Winders programming. Ok, flame away
However, many of my coworkers definitely don't seem to have anything to do with computers once 5pm hits. I doubt they even browse the web much...and they're obviously missing out on alot by not doing that. No matter what your language and OS of choice (or merely profession), you'll find info every day out there. Obviously alot of that content is right here at slashdot. But they don't, and thus I'm not all that surprised that I'm the junior member of the team, yet I seem to run alot of the show, and have most of the answers. And I don't even consider myself any kind of expert...hell, I program in VB
Unfortunately there are now a smaller percentage of females in university or college Computer Science than 10-15 years ago. AFAIK there are more women in Physics, and Math per capita than Computer Science.
While the absolute numbers have increased, the percentage has decreased. I think over the last two years has been skewed by the dot com get rich quick profit craze which has affected enrollment (much higher first-term drop out in CS). Maybe the geekiness has worn off, and after this dot com silliness is gone we will hopefully see more women in Computer Science and IT.
Have fun.
I have met very few female System Admins, Database Admins, Assembly Programmers, while quite a few females in System/Business Analysts, Application Programers, Support, and Technical Writers.
I think I called it the "gee-whiz" factor, of playing with a new toy. It seems to be more common to find women in the analyical roles, which might be more abstract than hands-on (Helpdesk and Support are the exception).
I also have found fewer women in "heroic effort" teams, where the team works in death march style repeatedly, due to poor planning or poor management.
Hate to break it to you, but as far as management (and accounting) can see, if you're not a computing services company, IT is a cost center, not a profit center.
The cost savings/increased revenue generated by well-run IT are not directly attributable to it, since it serves to make other departments and employees more efficient, rather than producing results itself. Consider this: if you hire a good IT guy, and your 40 other employees each spend one hour a day less on average on "overhead" tasks, you're ahead by 160 man-hours a week.
As for the secretary argument, it seems that in spite of the software world's best efforts, the software that's designed to either manage itself or be manageable without a specialist's expertise breaks down in an open environment. Embedded systems can be a lot more bulletproof and/or idiot-proof, but they live in a closed world-- they're not in a constantly shifting network, constantly having to handle new tasks and run new software, and getting exposed to whatever the latest vendors, managers and users want to throw at them.
A truly good sysadmin should be all but invisible to the people who use the system he/she maintains, by making things work right. However, that means nobody sees you working, and all they remember is what you do on apparently idle time. I suppose this means that for job security, it's better to let little problems simmer for a while (so you appear to be loaded down), then come charging to the rescue like a white knight (so you get appreciated). :-)
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
IT departments aren't departments that make money. Money making departments are SALES and the like.
.kb
Its the igornant management (or people) like yourself when we go to you and say "HR wants to setup a centralized database on a server" and give you a quote on a server that costs $8,000 (minimum requirements "to fit the budget") and you say no, and you make me put in some Gateway Desktop machine with no RAID in it that makes your company lose business..but hey! We just saved $7500 short-term! woohoo!
-- Based On A True Story
Two Wrongs Don't Make A Right-- But They Make Me Feel A Whole Lot Better
in refrence to your napster comment..you know what, too? I don't spend time on napster, but I do spend time on Instant Messenger..not only do people ask me questions relating to my job on it, but, I'm the first to know when "the net is down."
.kb
Two Wrongs Don't Make A Right-- But They Make Me Feel A Whole Lot Better
funny though as simple as computers are, these stupid corporate bastards can't map a drive, or "add a network printer"...amazing how the entire office goes to shit if i'm not in it because one person can't print or can't get email...
.kb
and they tell me they'd rather wait for me to come back then call my backup in another state...
i'm not saying my job is tough, because you know what, its not, but its amazing when I'm walking people through how to send an email out...stupid shit like that...this happens every day...if there was a PANIC button on people's desk, my board would be bright red.
Two Wrongs Don't Make A Right-- But They Make Me Feel A Whole Lot Better
must've been a schooled computer guy..you know, the one's with MCSE's, CCNAs and the like :)
.kb
Two Wrongs Don't Make A Right-- But They Make Me Feel A Whole Lot Better
As an senior IT guy in a large, multi-national bank, I can see where you're coming from. However, I have to reply to a few of your points:
.NET for example) means that there will be fewer, higher paid deep specialists working for megacorps and a lot of us generalists on the streets."
"The shift to Application Service Providers and services on the web (Microsoft's
Nope... can't agree with you there. ASPs (and especially MS.NET) are mere wet dreams for the bulk of corporations out there - especially those with lots of bricks-and-mortar to connect. The ASP model has HUGE flaws (bandwidth requirements, SLAs, data ownership, security admin, etc. etc.) that, today, render them useful for only trivial functions. Trust me - been there in a serious way.
"Globalization. I'm not competing with Chicago and New York any more, but with Singapore and Bangalore. It's just as easy to cut code and FTP it around the world as it is across town."
You'd think this is an issue, but it ain't. Fact is, development is a very social thing and having your developers half a world away from your designers/analysts is tough to manage. Few IT departments can employ such a rigid Waterfall methodology that they can produce firm specs and throw them 'over the wall' to Bangalore. Then there's logistics of design changes, integrated testing, etc, etc. Again, been there in a big way.
IMHO, the biggest threat (??) to corporate IT is the whole dot-com fashionista movement. I see way too many corporate execs getting woodies from reading Wired - and then trying to implement the geek-chique environment in their shops. It don't work, it just looks stupid.
CrazyLegs
"Pork!!" said the Fish, and we all laughed.
I loved the comments about gray, "mature" people writing quality code, getting things done on time and budget, etc. The only time I've worked with people like that are at companies where their IT is so fossilised and badly managed that they wonder why they're being driven into the ground. These "mature" IT people watch the clock and go home precisely at 5 regardless of whether their work was well done or even done. These are people who so dislike their jobs that they count the days till retirement.
At other companies I've worked at with "geeks with toys" culture, they were extremely professional with excellent work ethics. They produced quality code on time and on budget.
I think people have confused two separate types of people: those who do what they love and get paid for it, which was de Jager's point; and those who do what they love, but it isn't what they're supposed to be doing.
On a note of balance: Peter de Jager was one of those Y2K Chicken Little's.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
Or you can take your approach and pretend that well paid professionals are cogs in a wheel and don't have the brains that they got hired to use. Fire them all and hire a services company to do your IT work. Your geeks will still play, but you'll feel better because a middleman takes his cut out of your money before it gets to them. It doesn't make sense to me.
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
eat shit and die, Bambi!
The majority of IT geeks love their toys, however I've seen many companies who've went under for financial reasons, and one can wonder how many of those companies went under from the overspending on 'toys`.
Hell yea we want our toys, whether its a Clariion storage device, SunBlade, etc., but in reality little thought is given by the typical geeks when ordering equipment, so blame both the geeks for not settling for your average based equipment to get the job done, then blame management for not watching the geek, and while your at it, blame those idiots in purchasing who couldn't get a better deal buying things.
Want root? (unf Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider!@)
360 degrees of Karma
However, markets tend to correct themselves. They route around high costs the same way the Internet routes around net damage. I see a couple of trends converging, and the IT worker is unfortunately right at Ground Zero:
- Smarter software. Application packages like SAP and Baan that were historically labor intensive to implement are coming out in newer, friendlier, "fast track" implementations. The most recent releases of both Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases have as a design goal reducing DBA effort.
- The shift to Application Service Providers and services on the web (Microsoft's
.NET for example) means that there will be fewer, higher paid deep specialists working for megacorps and a lot of us generalists on the streets.
- Globalization. I'm not competing with Chicago and New York any more, but with Singapore and Bangalore. It's just as easy to cut code and FTP it around the world as it is across town.
So on the one hand, the task is getting easier and becoming centralized so demand is going down. At the same time, supply is dramatically going up. It doesn't take a Milton Friedman to see the equations on the wall.How many people employ a full-time driver/mechanic for their cars?
Very poor analogy, I'm afraid. How many People have a full time PC Tech guy for their home PC? You should be comparing the sysadmin to the fleet mechanic, which are employed full time by any sizable fleet operator.
Carpe Cerevisi - Seize the Beer
So you know everything about networking, and years ago to boot? Tell me how to upgrade a Manhattan office building to a unified voice/data network with VoIP, voice mail, live video streaming, and remote access capabilities. This is what we are designing for one of clients.
Ever set up a network with 20k nodes? Ever distribute software remotely to 90k nodes? Networking at the corporate level is a bit different from your home's LAN.
You may want to be in the industry for a bit before you start spouting how easy IT jobs are, even the "easy" ones like designing Microsoft's web site, setting up AT&T's WAN, and administering Sprint's Internet backbones.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
I've worked at dot-coms, I've worked in a college IT department doing Y2K work, and I've worked in a traditional company, so I've met a lot of fellow programmers in the past few years. So, here's what I've noticed about the play-vs-work issue:
;)
Generally, the people who see their work as play are the people who went to college for computer science, and are approaching it as their one true career, their calling if you will. They'd program whether they got paid or not; they might choose different projects (rather than archiving news articles, for instance, they might want to code a game, or write a special purpose web crawler) but they'd be programming even if they had to pay to do it (I know I would, but don't tell my boss, ha ha). These are the people who actually like reading up on newer technologies when they get home; they're the people who are aware of the direction the industry is going in, because they live and breathe it. Because they love it, they're good at it.
I've met a number of these people, and it's always been a joy to work with them. You can tell them about a cool technology you're dying to work with, and they "get" it, they understand. You can come up with something innovative with coworkers like this; they're not just punching a clock.
Workers who don't see their work as play, who see it as just a job and who aren't really into it (other than to pick up a paycheck, that is) don't love the work, and won't put the extra time in that results in not only a working project, but an elegant, beautiful piece of code. Their work isn't going to be as maintainable, for one thing, and it probably isn't going to work as well. It sure isn't going to be innovative -- it'll likely be more along the lines of the recipe-based programming advocated by all the java workshops that are springing up around the country: "Do A, then do B, then do C, and run this check". Duh. Why not just build an expert system to write the code and be done with it? But I digress...
Basically, I think the difference is this: people who love programming, who do it for the fun of it, generally are more fun to work with and do better work, not to mention that they tend to stay late a heck of a lot more often (not because the boss told them to, but because they got wrapped up in something and needed just a few more minutes...), so they get done with a project faster.
In a way, I think the difference is between what the old timers called a "Real Programmer" and a "Quiche Eater". If you think about it, you'll see what I mean (check out the article "Real Programmers Don't Eat Quiche", available at sites with archives of computer humor, for a good laugh). Or at least -- the programmers among you will. Suits may not get the joke.
crazyphilman@programmer.net
crazyphilman@programmer.net
Sort of fat, good looking in a disheveled sort of way.
It's all about creativity. Some got it and some just don't. Creative people usually like what they "do" because what they do has been chosen because it's a good outlet or tool for expressing that creativity. While associated with a small part of the Genome Project at a local university we underwent a system glitch which threatened to corrupt years of data. We had to find the cause and the exact time the corruption of data began to be able to correct it and to notify others who use our data. We hired an "enginneer" who didn't seem to particularly like his profession. Nothing happened. It took a creative student with a Sherlock Holmes attitude to find the problem. You should have seen his eyes light up as he approached the solution. He was playing. He was getting "spiritually" and intellectually off while doing this. Today his "solution" to the problem is used by research departments of universities around the world who use Unix-based systems (BSD) and to him, it wasn't a "big deal"... He simply couldn't understand why anyone with a little training couldn't have done the same thing.
Rien n'est plus beau que le creux du 0.
Another important thing to remember is that an IT job is not soley concerned with technology. In many, if not most, IT jobs there is an important human interaction element (understanding your users, requirements gathering, teamworking, effective communication with those for whom setting up a network etc is not a piece of cake....). From your post I recon you'd last about 5 seconds before they sacked you and got someone with a bit more empathy. Remember, one ant cannot build a nest.
"If Stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?" - Will Rogers
Hate computers? Then why read /.?
MrHate ------ http://www.ihateamericans.net/
The news has been full of stories about people graduating from education schools who can barely read and write, let alone do what they're supposedly trained to do. These are people who are supposed to educate our kids, for crying out loud. Making entrants pass an aptitude test to get into ed schools is an idea which is long overdue. If we have to pay signing bonuses, decent salaries, scholarships and stipends to get enough qualified applicants, it's almost certainly cheaper than having people graduate from schools where they learned nothing because the "teachers" knew nothing.
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spam spam spam spam spam spam
No one expects the Spammish Repetition!
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
To some degree that's true of IT workers as well. Many of the best advances in technology have been made by hackers who just enjoyed late nights banging away at stuff in a very unstructured manner.
Of course, there's a time and place for it -- you can't have playtime at the expense of doing regular backups, or necessary system maintance. However, I'm a firm believer in hiring people who are excited about technology and who WANT to spend their lunch hours and quiet time playing with stuff, looking up crazy programming techniques and debating the best way to bum 3 more lines out of some routine we have.
-Coach-
Perhaps the world's greatest tragedy is that ignorance is not impotence.
Interesting. I've seen the same thing in the EE program at my university; quite a number of kids go into engineering because they think it will get them a decent job, with little real aptitude for the technical nature of the work. Perhaps, much like the {MC, GM, LS}AT in other professional programs, there should be an aptitude test for technologically-oriented programs as a condition of admission.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
I understand this topic very well...We enjoyed it and couldn't get enough of it. We learned more from ourselves than we did from the instructors...Now I work as a sys analyst/programmer under the very same conditions...People complain because I get to come... ... with a big toy will be far more productive than some one who does it just for a job.
Trust me, someone
Does this have something to do with that recent story on people moving from IT to porn?
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I'm 21, I work in a school, I have almost nothing as a budget.
In the last 2 years we've managed to take our selves from mainly 486's (About 30 or so) running DOS and maybe Windows with 10mbT hubs (Know the 5-4-3 rule anybody? [sigh]) to something a little more usable, mainly, 200 dekstop machines running WindowsNT, every single desktop machine has 'net access for the students.
It's been a huge hurdle for some one who's so inexperienced in a workplace. It's a given that a school environment is a little easier than corporate ones, but even so, it was a steep learning curve.
The reason I'm posting this is because the previous Techs, while very good at what they did, weren't interested in what the students got out of the current resources (we did have a 28k dialup for a net connection). During my time here, I've played with aggregated links, video conferancing, print charging, code hacking (scripts). The list just goes on.
When ever they got a budget, they'd use it, but they never showed any enthusiasm towards new "stuff".
Hopefully some time soon I'll be able to make myself look hyperactive over getting a fibre/gigabit back bone installed into our current setup. I'm also looking at providing dialup access for the students. The new pricipal knows what technology can do, lets just hope she comes along for what has been a darn good time for myself.
[moo]
...seem to be the fresh-from-Heald-college-paper MCSE drones. The type that read the MCSE cram session books. The one that doesn't know squat about any other OS but Windows. The type that would never go to a trade show or Fry's just to look at the toys.
Yes, that type is the one that doesn't care. They got into computers because they heard it paid well and all they care about is the paycheck. It most definitely affects the quality of the work because they're usually the types to do the bare minimum on the job, just enough to get the job done. Just enough to make sure they keep getting paid.
What scares me more is when one of these drone type IT guys becomes a manager.....
They hated me when I went to Tech School (in 1982-84). The whole curriculum was structured around a 100 point Multiple choice (5 choices) test that was given every Friday. The instructor would try each week to get through that week's material. I had been a hardware freak since childhood and was into the electronics. So I'd ask questions where I really wanted to know the answer. Inevitably after asking one of my questions one of the other people in the class would ask 'will this be on the test on Friday?'
I went into the 'Biomedical/Instrumentation' elective thinking we would actually talk about Metrology and Instrumentation (we memorized anatomy and medical terminlogy so we'd understand the doctors when wheeling around the carts of equipment at the hospital.)
I went into the 'Communications' elective thinking we would be talking about RF Theory (we learned how to pass the multiple choice FCC test and trivia about troubleshooting CB Radios).
For the ComputerII elective one of our projects was to statically display a word on the Hex-display bar on the 6802 based 'trainer' boards in the lab. I was bored, so my display instead scrolled 'Eat at Joe's Bar and Grill.'
Tech school was hell.
What is that? The Batmobile? Industrial Goatse.cx? Velvet-lined trumpet? You lost me. Alex
A winner is you!
/.ed means : Windows NT error number 2 occurred.
heh.
here's a mirror.
For me it was Physical Chemistry. I have to say though that today I refuse to do work that I hate. It is too costly to my emotional well-being.
Money isn't everything. Good thing programming pays so well!
Stop Continental Drift! Reunite Gondwanaland!
So "making web sites" is easy, but what about maintaining them? Even the most basic sites require occasional updates if you want them to stay relevant and interesting.
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
WOW, and I thought I was the only one with a BIG TOYS. But aren't those illegal?
Previewing comments are for sissies!
Doesn't maintain code?
80% of my job (when I started) was writing code to maintain NT (the linux side was already taken care of).
It's not the programmer whose line lights up when a customer/employee has a problem with th program, it's mine.
I walk them through the problem and review (read LINE by LINE) the code which caused the problem, and then fix it. Or, I detail the fix, and ask the programmer to fix it... IF we are lucky it's an internal fix (config&&make&&make install), otherwise, guess who's job it is to distribute the new program to our customers AROUND THE WORLD, that's right, it's mine!
I wish I coulda' gotten hired as a programmer, but, with multiple OS/programming skills, and a lot of knowledge about security (yep, I read such greats as BUGTRAQ EVERY MORNING!) I got hired as the sys admin...
Anyway, before you decide to make us sys admins "obsolete" and have the secretary take over her job (thank the gods for that voice mail system), think about (and try learning about) what a sys admin really does (if you really wanna see a sys admin at work, try stopping by at 3 in the morning, when he's recovering the PDC and a web server, because a "programmer" like yourself {that is M$ programmer, probably VB} writes this "cool" automation program that decides to take the servers down!
One great thing about engineering and computer science jobs is that they are filled with people who love it so much. I am having a lot more fun now working as an EE with people who love there jobs then I did in non-engineering jobs with people who hated their work.
How many companies have suffered because they can't afford the luxury of a wasteful, lazy, disruptive IT department?
How much money is squandered every year coddling overgrown kids who couldn't accept responsibility or do their jobs right?
Too busy playing with toys.
Sad, really.
Ironically, the death of the "dot com economy" -- another, much larger and more amusing manifestation of the same mindset -- has put a sufficient hurtin' on the economy that a) nobody can afford to humor these numbskulls any more, and b) nobody even has to worry about it, because all the numbskulls are suddenly pounding the pavement looking for jobs.
Yes, I would like fries with that. Thank you.
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Dear Slashdot: Why, yes, I would like fries with that.
"Some level" != "absolutely any level".
Any competent professional enjoys his work. That's the difference between us and a burger flipper -- but it's not the same as doing nothing useful at all, which is what most IT people do.
Get it? Being hired to do fun, valuable work is fine. Being hired to do valuable work and then fucking off all day is not fine.
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Dear Slashdot: Why, yes, I would like fries with that.
I have to say that I admire your tenacity, but let's face it: The day will come when somebody realizes that there's a lot of money going into your cube (office, whatever) and not a whole lot coming back out.
The future of IT is as a part-time hassle for non-specialists. Soon enough, the secretary will be able to handle 90% of the sysadmin's job, and the rest will be farmed out. At the cost of a few hours of overtime for the secretary every month, things will run just as smoothly as they do now.
Look at it this way: How many people employ a full-time driver/mechanic for their cars?
Not many. You have to have a lot of cars before hiring your own mechanic is cheaper than taking them to the garage.
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Dear Slashdot: Why, yes, I would like fries with that.
A little bit sensitive, aren't we?
Okay, fine, you nap all week and then show up for an hour on Saturday. My heart bleeds for you, it really does -- but how much are you paid for this?! More than it's worth.
The simple fact is that any idiot can fix a printer. If there weren't an IT guy to handle that crap, people could do it for themselves. I'm not saying that you're an idiot or a bad person. I'm just saying that you're redundant and useless.
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Dear Slashdot: Why, yes, I would like fries with that.
. . . uptight adults who've forgotten how to have a little fun each and every day. You need to lighten the hell up!
Uh, right, right. "Lighten up". Sorry, guy, but what the venture capitalists learned last year is a funny little fact that a lot of people have known for a long time:
I know how mean it seems when Mommy and Daddy are tired after working all day and they don't have the energy to play cowboys and indians with you, but guess what?
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Dear Slashdot: Why, yes, I would like fries with that.
Calling it a "troll" won't make it go away, Sparky. Sorry 'bout that.
There's nothing you're doing to that thing that can't be done by a good setup program.
The "custom kernel" falls under "good setup program", and as for firewalls . . .
Firewalls! SECURITY!
Anybody ever notice how obsessed sysadmins are with security? Right. And here's why: It's the setup programs. They make things too easy. Any secretary can install her own copy of Word now, so the admins have to put a stop to that nonsense if they want to keep their jobs. Therefore they restrict installs to the admin user, and they stay on the payroll.
Sooner or later, of course, the people who have to pay the bills are going to figure that one out. In the meantime, hey -- I admire a good scam as much as anybody. :)
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Dear Slashdot: Why, yes, I would like fries with that.
You must've been one of those IT kids who dropped out of college to get rich on stock options at a company that went belly-up last year. Therefore, you missed out on . . .
Logic 101:
"Creativity" and "technical expertise" are the things I'm advocating, not the things I'm questioning. Your gibberish to the contrary is a cheap attempt to muddy the waters: You're attempting to claim that "creativity" and "technical expertise" are the same thing as laziness. And that's nonsense.
I approve very much of creativity and technical expertise, nor did I say a single word against them. I write C++ code for a living, and that requires more of both qualities than you'll ever have.
Playing video games instead of working does not demonstrate "creativity" or "technical expertise". It demonstrates laziness and irresponsibility. If you were creative -- and trust me, I've known a lot of creative people -- you'd feel a need to do create something. Get it?
Calling yourself "creative" because you can't hold a real job is pretty sad, you know that? If you spent half as much time learning a useful trade as you now spend excusing your shortcomings, you wouldn't have any shortcomings to excuse. And you'd be a lot happier.
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Dear Slashdot: Why, yes, I would like fries with that.
True. But they can only stem the tide as long as management takes their word as gospel on all technical issues, and you can't fool all the people all the time.
They'll be fighting rearguard actions for years after the writing is on the wall, but their day will come, just like it did for the brontosaurus.
BTW, I'm not KTB. :) I've got eighty muddy doorstops all over my damn office . . .
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Dear Slashdot: Why, yes, I would like fries with that.
Yeah, right. Next time I go on a long flight, I'll make sure the plane was designed and maintained by people who "played amongst beautiful things" instead of learning their jobs.
Non sequitur alert: "IT workers" != "hackers". C. R. Hoare wasn't a sysadmin. Neither were Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Linus Torvalds, or any other significant innovator you can name.
Not one.
Playing video games in your office isn't the same thing as inventing new languages, my friend. Of course it's necessary for creative technical people to play with ideas, but that's got nothing to do with printer repairmen.
Next?
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Dear Slashdot: Why, yes, I would like fries with that.
yes i am the certifiable idiot of the day. i should have thought 2 instead of 1 second before posting. i got it now, or is that the problem, i don't get it enough, or is that the problem, i don't give it to myself enough, or is that........
Now I work as a sys analyst/programmer under the very same conditions. I prefer to wander around and think when I am in a rut than sit in front of monitor and surf the net; however, I am viewed as the lazy one. (one other shares my same post, we are equal in title and pay alone - same situation as above) People complain because I get to come in whenever. They can't seem to understand that sometimes I do my best work at night so I sleep in and come to work a little later.
I can understand how the attitudes and behavioral differences can seem odd, different, or annoying. However, it is one of those things you have to deal with. Trust me, someone who acts like a kid with a big toy will be far more productive than some one who does it just for a job.
So yes, I would have to say that the "kids with big toys" mentality produces better work/affects work in certain arenas (definetly not those were imagination and creativity is stiffled, give me a stick in the mud for that).
My goodness, I sure do have some problems with this post. You've clearly been reading too much BOFH. Most admins are not malicious or immoral.
It's cute that you think setting up network (whatever that means) is simple plug-and-play. If you think it's just snapping Legos together, you'd better make sure you have a big IT staff ready to pick up the pices.
I don't really care if you love what you do in any profession. I think that it is a shame and a waste of a significant portion of your life if you don't. You will spend 50 years of your life working. Why anyone would want to spend it doing something they hate is mind boggling to me. You wouldn't spend that much time with a spouse you despised. You'd get a divorce.
If you check the top 15% of the people in almost any field, you will find that they do what they do not because of the pay check but because they love what they do. In fact, statiscally speaking, most of them were doing what they were doing long before it was cool. They did it because it was cool. If you do what you think is cool long enough, someone will come along who also thinks that its really cool and offer to pay you. Linus Torvald didn't write Linux to become famous. He wrote it because he likes writing code.
Loving what you do may not be a necessary job qualification, but if you want an employee who will be dedicated to the job, accomplish near-impossible feats of (fill in the blank with your area of need) then you need to look for someone who genuinely loves what they do.
The first question I ask on an interview is "What do you have on your network at home?". This is the quickest way to seperate out the wanna-bes from the real deals. I want to hire people whos heart is in what they do because I know that it will make them excell at what they do. In order for them to excell, they must keep up with current and emerging technologies. If your heart is in what you do, you understand this without needing to have it pointed out to you.
For the mouth breathers who seem to think that just reading the advertisement is sufficient, here goes. How do you know what is advertising hype and what is actually a good product? Even the best brands like Cisco, IBM, etc. have all produced a dud now and then. How do you find out how well that latest thingamabob from Thingys, Inc. really stacks up against the thingamajig from OtherThingys, Inc.? There is only one way to really find out. You have to get your hands dirty. You get them and play with them. You test them in your particular application.
This is how your IT people figure out that maybe the new Windows ought to be skipped, that you want to get the NEW router, or that you can rework some old machines into a new cluster. This is also how your IT people stay current and continue to add value to your department. It keeps you from having to fire them every time you change technology. It's much cheaper to keep an employee than to replace one.
Much of what I see regarding complaints about "playing" here are managment issues. What good is an IT staff that hides in the server room and won't be available? That's NOT an IT issue. That's an HR issue. HR issues in IT deparments typically aren't addressed. IT managers are normally promoted due to skill and usually lack the management experience necessary to properly handle staff. One of the best IT deparments I ever worked in was run by a PhD in Business, he wasn't a techie but if we could prove to him why we wanted to needed "X", we got "X". We also went through a fair amount of staff because he expected things to be "by the book". Instead of whining about it on slashdot, why don't you file a complaint with your management and then your HR department next time you see this kind of behaviour?
HDGary secures my bank