Slashdot Mirror
The New IT Crisis
Matey-O writes "You've succeeded in delivering 5 9's, your server farm is a well oiled machine, the helpdesk lines lie dormant. No? Well then how do you get credit for the work you do, when all that's noticed is the downtime? When the IT budget has to be justified, and you're overworked, undermanned, and you have to apply three patches to 100 servers before Close of Business, what has to change in IT before we melt down? Marc Andreessen has an interesting article on what has to happen to IT next."
Well then how do you get credit for the work you do, when all that's noticed is the downtime?
I feel that if I work hard (and smart enough), then I deserve free time every once in awhile. After all, I earned it.
But, managers don't understand this. So, I relax by reading The Onion or Freshmeat at work, but always make sure my hand can quickly hit ALT+TAB to get back into my work window (usually Emacs).
capitalize on other's work!
It's the easiest way to success.
Details here.
Quote: it's not as if he needs to sit down in front of his screen and busy himself with the notoriously arduous task of hacking out a few lines of software, which, astonishingly, is something he has never done in the short but spectacular history of Netscape Communications Corporation [...] Not a single line of computer code. Never.
A message from the system administrator: 'I've upped my priority. Now up yours.'
Blame it on management. If that fails, then blame it on the budget. If that fails, then blame it on HR. If, by that time, everything comes back to your fault, then you should have had enough time to land a new job.
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
and you have to apply three patches to 100 servers before Close of Business
Not flaming, but a fact.. Microsoft SMS will get that done for you with a couple of clicks.. literally..
And we're expecting to receive a beta copy of SMS 2003 (incl. Active Directory, the big feature).. so i'm kind of looking forward to that..
I have to say.. even though we run 2000 on our servers.. SMS is a dam good product and a timesaver!
"The ones who dont do anything are always the ones who try to pull you down" -- Henry Rollins
Create presentations, monitoring
systems with a lot of 3d and 2d diagrams
and histograms.
Bosses love that.
Since when do telephone systems maintain themselves? Last I heard, my voice was still running along wires and branching about in switching stations. Unless I'm mistaken, they still require maintenance. Granted that the operating costs have been reduced (fewer operators = fewer wages), but you could take a similar stance on IT. What about self-help forums where you can search a knowledge base to find answers? These can replace a lot of man hours of technical support work. There's always going to be some kind of human element to whatever equation. We're never going to find empty power plants that can generate their own electricity indefinitely, because there's always going to have to be human intervention.
Some businesses demand complex solutions, and I fail to see how these complex solutions are going to be met by turnkey solutions -- where a manager can go out, purchase a server, turn it on, and have it run his business for a year without any kind of customization whatsoever.
Ok. Just becuase it Marc Andreessen doens't mean that it's news.
This is an editorial, not an article.
How about talking about Grid computing. Or Organic IT. Developing systems and monitoring capabilities that go beyond telling you things are down, or when they're too busy. They actually add capacity on the fly through virtualization, taking from inactive systems to cover for the active system.
I think Marc once had a vision, but I'm not sure how strong of a visionary he is these days...
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
Ok seriously, does anyone RTFA anymore? How about the comments? This is a clear PR stunt aimed at producing more leads for Marc's new company. And ZDnet, that fine bastion of even-handed IT reporting, has once again saved us all by printing only the relevant facts. Just once I'd liek to believe that one of my old IT heroes didn't sell out and become a corporate whore (can you say RMS anyone?).
-- People who think they know it all, really annoy those of us who do!
Because my wife and I can't stand the little rugrats :)
It was a free advertisement for his company, OpsWare...
Then maybe it is high time to hire Counterpane Internet Security, Inc. or similar company. (Disclaimer: I don't have anything in common with Counterpane, other than I have read few books and lots of papers written by Bruce Schneier.) I think we should start thinking about hiring experts on Internet security to watch out networks, just like we hire experts for any other kind of security. That way our own emploees can focus on their work, not on the new exploit or on the new kind of lockpick and the new burgler gang in town.
~Christopher Doopov
since when do you expect the *vice president of technology* to sit down and write code?
do you think gates writes code? do you think ellison does?
From the article you linked to, Anderseen wrote the original program. who gives a shit if he never wrote code for subsequent versions, he had a different fucntion at the time.
what has to change in IT before we melt down ? Lots
What WILL change? nothing
for every burnt out admin thats going to quit theres 5 more waiting to take his place
good companies keep good employees
eather your not a good employee
or your not working at a good company
The More Knowledge you have the Luckier you Get- J.R. Ewing
I've worked in a few large outfits and in my own small business, and I can testify there is almost zero correlation in a large office between the work that you do and people's perception of what you do.
The people who have the most problems, the ones who have a terrible catastrophe which just always seems to happen to them, are seen as the problem solvers. Despite the fact that their own lack of organization, incompetence, or laziness often brings these things upon them. No matter, they can proudly trumpet how they once again "saved the company" and worked 30 hours straight. The ones like me who prevent the problems, who organize their day so that nothing exciting happens if it can be avoided, and quietly solve problems on their own without assistance before people notice them, are seen as either invisible or lazy.
And no, I don't work a 30 hour day. Ever. I don't need to. I'm not bitter... gak!
The baby's fine -- please stop sending business cards.
Last time I checked, I couldn't install a couple of hundred different applications made by even more vendors and expect them to work together in the phone system.
If the guy is talking of increasing reliability for enterprise servers, companies are already along that path- e.g. IBM. If he is referring to day to day tasks of administration, automation in that aspect would be slow to come by. Is it just me or does anyone else think that the comparing IT administration to telephone lines is to over simplify the former ? The interface for one is more complex. The goals of IT admins going around trouble shooting application related problems cannot be narrowed down to distinct goals that telephone systems might have i.e:
1) Provide a Dial tone
2) Allow user to make a connection
3) Allow user to disconnect
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
Well, I agree, patching is time consuming. :)
Let's get rid of MS
Computers are becoming ubiqutious in our lives! CPU power is amazing! You can pick up for around $100 what would of been only avalible to supercomputers in the 1980's!
Computers are now becoming a way of life! Nearly everyone I know has an email adress and mobile phone number!
We should be researching new future technologies, such as 512 bit computing, biocomputing and clustering human brain power.
Well then how do you get credit for the work you do, when all that's noticed is the downtime?
:)
The very reason I left. When something crashes, who gets blamed? When users forget their passwords (which are usually something as simple like their friggin' username), who gets hasseled? When admin lays down an impossible time table with ridiculous performance expectations, who gets told "make this work or else?" When the company starts loosing money due to poor business decisions and/or the economy being in the toilet, who's the first dept to get cut?
Not as appealing as those tech school commercials make it out to be, huh?
You've got to be kidding me. This problem is as old as IT itself.
f u
i can tell you're a whore, for men...
Seriously though, so the author apparently had the need to express how IT isn't working at 100% efficiency?
There was not one concrete piece of useful data about the problem or the solution in that entire article... What tough issues will he tackle next?
using System.Awesome;
Did anyone else find this article tired, void of invention, and totally lacking in anything inspiring whatsoever.
Andreson - Talk about a dry well.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Some habits of an average IT worker:
Usage of company bandwidth for activities which are not related to work. This is called personal bandwidth piracy. On the same token, they carry out personal bandwidth piracy and are paid to do the task by hapless managerial staffers.
Terrible hygiene. System administrators and PC technicians are often so unkept that passers-by would prefer a homeless man's asscheeks on their face to the reeking stench of this sub-species. Most of the time, the males will sport greasy and filthy beards which contribute significantly to an overwhelming total stench. Make no mistake, the females stink probably as badly, since they never douche.
Terrible manners. They're never reprimanded for breaking company dress code. Birkenstocks, shorts and t-shirt are the standard uniform of the IT 'Professional'. The IT 'Professional' considers himself mentally superior to members in every other working caste. Because the natural 'skill' of manipulating user interfaces is clearly beyond the capability of even physicists, their services are required everywhere the PC is present. They prefer to chew with their mouths open when they talk; smacking their lips and spewing particles of food all over their own keyboards makes the food taste better. They become pissy when asked by management to 'work' ( yeah, whatever that means). Blessed by a still-emerging field, they recieve substantial salaries for what minimal work they actually do.
So, the main point of this informal chat is to discuss what is quite simply a phrase which describes the pure opposite of a boon: The IT 'Professional'
I think a better point to critique on his phone analogy is the implied point that the phone system isn't held together with "bailing wire" or "chewing gum." Nope, it's all pretty standardized, well-integrated equipment. Why is the phone service so much more "professional" than IT services?
;^)
Because phone service is a relatively well-defined, consistent, limited problem domain. Internet servers, dynamic web sites, and local security are loosely-defined, constantly shifting, open-ended problem domains. They're very different, and you can't compare one to the other.
However, for certain applications, there are well-defined standards, and well-defined practices. Still, for a lot of IT, it's a matter of custom engineering and architecture. For example, online content management: you can buy one of the management engines off-the-shelf, which will probably do most of what you need in a structured manner. For CRM, well, there's about a dozen of those. These packages are well-behaved in that it provides a well-defined interface, but that's not always an option (i know, i used to do data migration for small- to medium-sized businesses. at the low end, when you change systems, you'd better damned well know perl or some other text processing language to massage the data--that is, you need to be good with your bailing wire).
In the future, this situation will hopefully be better with standardization (mostly using XML it seems, even though the actual encoding doesn't really matter.. we could have standardized years ago, but nobody saw any benefit then). Having done data migration in the past, i'm all for keeping things disparate and non-standard, but that's because the work pays well and is fun
A better analogy might be a pool of corporate autos. Except that you don't have to interconnect the cars to get them to share load dynamically, or access content generated on one to form a report on the other, etc. A lot of IT is like trying to drop a big old hemi into a metro, or getting a suburban to go anywhere with just metros to provide power (two in front and one in back, it might go up a hill!).
Overall, I was not impressed with this article, but I'm afraid it's going to carry more clout than it should. oh well.
IAWTP. iawtp. iawtp. iawtp.
Good job, dumbass troll....You just had to post this drivel twice, didn't you?
Guess somebody's feeling inadequate today....
Some habits of an average IT worker:
Usage of company bandwidth for activities which are not related to work. This is called personal bandwidth piracy. On the same token, they carry out personal bandwidth piracy and are paid to do the task by hapless managerial staffers.
Terrible hygiene. System administrators and PC technicians are often so unkept that passers-by would prefer a homeless man's asscheeks on their face to the reeking stench of this sub-species. Most of the time, the males will sport greasy and filthy beards which contribute significantly to an overwhelming total stench. Make no mistake, the females stink probably as badly, since they never douche.
Terrible manners. They're never reprimanded for breaking company dress code. Birkenstocks, shorts and t-shirt are the standard uniform of the IT 'Professional'. The IT 'Professional' considers himself mentally superior to members in every other working caste. Because the natural 'skill' of manipulating user interfaces is clearly beyond the capability of even physicists, their services are required everywhere the PC is present. They prefer to chew with their mouths open when they talk; smacking their lips and spewing particles of food all over their own keyboards makes the food taste better. They become pissy when asked by management to 'work' ( yeah, whatever that means). Blessed by a still-emerging field, they recieve substantial salaries for what minimal work they actually do.
So, the main point of this informal chat is to discuss what is quite simply a phrase which describes the pure opposite of a boon: The IT 'Professional'
And not even a very good one at that.
Have a nice day.
I recommend the paper, "Bootstrapping an infrastructure."
But the article doesn't say exactly what has to be improved. Some keywords that spring into my mind are standards and extensive error checking. But even that doesn't guarantee a problem-free life. Everything in this world breaks down, you know! And most likely when you need it most (cfr. Murphy's law).
:)).
Aren't it the people who expect things to work flawlessly who are irrealistic? We don't tolerate failure, although those are the moments we learn the most.
(sorry if this sounded a bit mellow, but I just found a bug in one of my programs that requires some 200 units to be reflashed, the management isn't too pleased with it - don't worry, I still have my job
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
a) The phone industry had one task to do - get data over wires from point A to B, and however they did that was fine - users wouldn't have to be retrained if you replace old cables with fiber optic. That task is relatively simple, compared to the complexity of what is running and being distributed over the internet today. Automation works best when the target is static and clearly definable. I'm not sure either applies with servers/IT/internet.
b) A significant amount of trouble with maintaining systems comes from having to figure out lots of different pieces of hardware. Lots of random equipment makes IT support a great deal more difficult. There are two solutions:
1. Standardize all company hardware on a small number of systems/components, say one type of desktop, one type of server, and a few special purpose machines, and then only support those. Tools like VASystemImager then can make tasks like upgrading and bug fixing vastly simpler.
2. Use inexpensive thin clients interfacing to some powerful central server, ala Largo, and only have to maintain that central machine and swap out cheap, dumb clients. Also simplifies things tremendously.
People will no doubt point out that you have to run different types of OSs for different jobs and so on, but you can still use the central server/thin client approach and just make the connection to whichever OS you need transparent. It takes thought to set up, but once it is working you don't have 4000 individual support headaches to deal with. Only a few machines to upgrade, support, etc.
Unfortunately, this won't happen. First, you would have to have a truly MASSIVE infastructure upgrade, which replaces a working system. Riiight. Second, you need to have management willing to try something new and be patient to wait for the long term results. That's not how they think - they think next quarter profits. There is also sheer mental inertia to contend with.
It would be much easier for new companies to adopt this idea from the get go, than for older companies to adopt it. That may be where new, useful IT principles get applied.
The only way current companies will do something is if the system BREAKS, and I mean just totally stops functioning. Thats when they will wake up to the fact that significant changes are needed.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Everyone knows it's 47 ! How did you ge past first grade ?
My company does IT outsourcing for several local companies, inluding one that has several remote divisions.
We are NEVER allowed enough time to do more than barely keep things running. Which always leads to things breaking that could easily have been prevented had someone been there to do routine maitenance.
New deployments (like a Linux server that does remote access for terminal emulation) that I do are compromised by the fact that I'm never given more time than is needed to barely get it working. I never truly get to finish a job to my own high standards.
My employer views this service contract as "nonbillable hours" despite the fact that they pay us $9K a month for it. The boss wants myself and our other engineers working on other "billable" projects that bring in far less than that $9K. That money doesn't get this company a SINGLE dedicated contract employee (despite the fact that our whole tech staff's monthly salaries don't equal $9K)
Not only that, our company recently fired our most talented engineer without cause (the week before Thanksgiving) becuase he could hire a "paper tiger" (ie: MCSE) for $5K a year less, and a H1-B who he brought in and treats like a slave.
It's definately the dark side of IT oursourcing, and something that companies considering doing this should think about.
If I were going to outsource an IT department for a company with multiple locations and servers, I'd keep at least ONE in-house guy and use the outsource company soley for the "it's broken" crises which need more manpower.
Corporatism != Free Market
Ok, I read through the article and came away with absolutely no information. He says some things we already know: data centers are expensive, IT people are overworked, and the rest of an organization only notices the technology folks when something breaks. So, what should we do about it?
.NET environment. It's basically the same as Java applets, but they call it "Smart Clients" to give you the impression that it's something they invented. Sounds a lot like Network Computing to me -- which simply means that Network Computing is a good idea after all! And now that Microsoft has "invented" it, the idiots who make up most of the world may finally start to adopt the idea. Make the desktop a stateless device like it was 20 years ago when we all had dumb terminals on our desks, and IT overhead will drop like a rock.
Well, here's where you expect an innovator like Andreesen to come up with a brilliant idea that's going to begin the next IT paradigm shift, but all he says is that we need to find some revolutionary way to automate our own stuff -- basically, to automate the act of automating things. And how? Well, he doesn't really know. He makes some vague reference to sending out automatic updates to hundreds of servers at a time, and that's it.
Real bright there, Marc. Automatic patches and updates. As if that's the answer. In the real world, you don't have a huge farm of servers that all run the same patchlevel of the same operating system. I've got a few hundred boxen behind the glass, for example, that are a mix of Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Windows 2000, and Windows NT. And I'd guess that at least 50 percent of them would experience some sort of problem if we were to just push updates out to them unattended -- different applications require different patchlevels and break on others.
Let's not forget the fact that there's more than just servers. There's infrastructure such as routers, firewalls, and switches. And of course there is the dreaded desktop, which is probably the source of 90+ percent of IT headaches. Until the IT world wakes up and gets the hell off local desktops, the maintenance nightmare will continue. Seen what Microsoft is doing lately? Their vision of the future is one in which applications are loaded through a browser and executed in a local
The other trend you're going to start to see is outsourcing. People are realizing that it's expensive to build and run a data center. Fortunately, you don't have to. All you have to do is run your servers at a hosting center that knows how to do outsourced IT (as opposed to just hosting web sites, like the first generation of centers like Exodus did).
There are ways of streamlining IT after all. Unfortunately, Marc Andreesen didn't touch on any of them. I give this article a "C minus."
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
An accross the board problem in business these days, not just in IT, is that bosses refuse to spend money on anything that does not have a direct effect on the bottom line. Things like IT cost money, but don't directly add revenues to anything. IT is an overhead cost.
The financial rewards of having a good IT department cannot be expresed in real numbers. The cost of a downtime that didn't happen is impossible to accurately measure, while it's easy to measure the cost of having a quality IT team working to prevent downtimes rather than to fix them.
Managers need to understand that cutting their IT department will cause lost productivity in other departments in small units. Those 10 minutes of work time Sally loses while trying to find an admin to remind her what her password is, the lost sales that result when e-mail goes down and customers instead turn to your competitor, the custom product that has to be thrown out because a wrong quanity made it on the paperwork that went down the production floor, etc.
In the end, the business that "don't get it" will slowly become victims of natural selection and close their doors.
I am not typically supportive of
Going Postal?
Yes, going Postal. It's hot, it's new, it's... Satisfying.
"Cool and smooth, I don't know how I dealt with those bastards that kept asking 'this mouse?' without going Postal" -- Satisfied customer.
And now you too can try it, for the low low price of a single aluminum hardball bat. Spun aluminum with a non-slip rubber grip means never having to say "For all that is good and holy it does not optimize your connection!"
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
Wow, that was insightful. So you mean IT is overworked and that the it'd be nice if IT could become a more automated process? Wow Marc, you've really stunned me with your insights!
DUH! I mean c'mon, the reason why IT is such a mess is because all the IT staff are being expected to do more with less and do it faster. They are overworked fighting fires which means they aren't given the resources to do advanced planning and put together systems that would really get things right. He makes it sound like this is the responsibility of the IT people, but it's really the responsibility fo the business as a whole to have some foresight and help these IT people out.
Overworked sysadmins do what has to be done to keep something working RIGHT NOW. Sysadmins with some free time will spend their efforts writing scripts, automating tedious tasks, and making sure fires don't happen. When fires do happen, they have the time to deal with them effectively because they've had a chance to automate a lot of the other tasks.
I have known many a sysadmin and I have never met a one who wasn't constantly pissed off because he lacked resources. A friend of mine was sysadmin for a company that wanted to have 24 hour uptime for their systems. He was the ONLY sysadmin. That sort of crap happens constantly in the IT world because the other members of the company have the wrong atttitude about IT, that it's an expense. If they looked at it like they look at factories and buildings, as an infrastructure investment, then you'd probably see a lot more happy IT managers out there.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Marc Andreessen has an interesting article on what has to happen to IT next.
I'm going to hazard a guess that this will forecast the overworked, underpaid endgame of IT gruntwork and usher in a new era where companies with CUSTOMIZED SERVICES and NEXT GENERATION TECHNOLOGY come in and automate IT and drastically reduce every admin's workload. He happens to run just a company that provides these services.
I will now read the article and be amazed if that isn't exactly what he says.
Bosses don't know what you've been doing the whole time is BTO, "Business Technology Optimization".
Bosses love acronyms... Bosses LOVE acronyms with the words "Business", "Technology" and "Optimization" in them.
And you get some more cool hardware to play with in cause of 'saving money'...
Is it you?
I thought that the entire article was fluff. He points out a problem, says things must change, but doesn't give us an answer, doesn't offer a solution, and just prooved that if someone yells fire people will flock around the building to watch.
Vendor applications rarely work without issue and most companies want to find a way to link every system to every system. They then pay large sums of money out to have someone integrate the applications for them. In the process they create something which is very hard to manage.
Saying that the bubble is over doesn't mean anything in IT. Your competition is still alive and you still need to be doing that one extra thing that makes you the better buy. If anything this means at the moment that you need to be pushing more not less.
You can't grep a dead tree.
and start sticking up for your rights. and stop shitting on blue collar workers who do the same.
The article was engaging in that he first told the unsung truth about our IT in this (down) economy; things have basically gotten overly-complex, and IT admins/programmers have been laid off in droves, while the requirements continue to expand on existing infrastructure.
HOWEVER, the rest is drivel, IMHO. We cannot 'recreate' and 'reinvent' things overnight (listen up InfoWorld, ComputerWorld, et al.). Most companies don't get into IT spending because they love it; it's a means to an end, and many times an expense they'd rather do without (including our labor to keep the things running).
Furthermore, you certainly can't get ahead by duct-taping old technology and cutting labor in order to reduce spending, while at the same time singing the praise of newer technology; foisting in infrastructure which is sometimes a quantum leap ahead of what is already in place!
I've been in this industry for many years now, and the one constant I have observed is that the vendors continually push and croon about 'new' things (i.e. mostly fluff on top of the old) while grossly ignoring the true pain of the enterprise - which is how to make smooth, incremental changes in technology platforms and tools over time.
I believe that IT is constantly in a cycle of premature death and rebirth in the infrastructure and coding arena; just about the time something becomes stable, it's considered outdated and old. Scott, there are no "new" paradigms out there. Managers are mezmerized by vendors which teach that that the next perfect thing is just over the horizon - forgetting the thousands of man hours that went into figuring out exactly what they have in place already.
&J
Remember the September story on how IBM, Sun, etc. wants servers to administer themselves? Remember how sysadmins had either lukewarm or negative reactions to it across the net?
So how do you soften people up to the idea? Wait a couple of months, release a low key but suggestive "article" to get the concept back in peoples' heads, then launch the offending software/hardware/schema again about a year later onto a public, now resigned to seeing the new 'feature' as inevitable. It's a standard pr tactic.
We saw it with Intel's P3 PSN fiasco, numerous webmail service privacy policy changes, and the XP activation scheme. And I'm not saying that all this is the work of evildoers, just that this is what it is.
Telephony is a mature technology that doesn't completely change the way it works every five years. For 80 or so years the way the signals got routed didn't change much at all. Then exchanges went digital, and, for the transition period, it was all bailing wire like the article says, except that the telephone companies had - dare I say it - telephone number budgets to pay for the changeover.
By comparison, the rate of change in IT is still very high. We've gone from mainframe to micro, from thin client through peer networking and back to thin client, from standalone to the Internet, we've done dial-up, ADSL, wireless...
... and one of the main reasons for all the bailing wire is that no company can afford to throw away all it's infrastructure every 24 months. If telephone systems stored data, and if handsets ran bespoke software, there would still be a few manual exchanges in use for backward compatibility.
Virtually serving coffee
/add Schwarzenegger voice
/remove Schwarzenegger voice
I'VE BEEN TERMINATED
What the fuck is wrong with my user account??
Not only that, our company recently fired our most talented engineer without cause (the week before Thanksgiving) becuase he could hire a "paper tiger" (ie: MCSE) for $5K a year less, and a H1-B who he brought in and treats like a slave.
Don't get me started about this H-1B thing. You will get my britches in knots again.
One of the biggest problems as I see it is that management dont appreciate how important IT has become in their company. Looking at my company, I think they still relate the IT department to the same IT department of five years ago when to be fair the technology was a little easier to grasp and there were much less computers in offices.
Take networking for example - it used to be in our place BNC and the occasional run of UTP cable - all attached to relatively unintelligent devices. Now its all Cisco switches, fiber and cat5e - and it really is a full time job in itself managing a large network with so many 'intelligent' devices.
Also taking into account the addition of so many more servers (SQL, Mail, Finance stuff, Student Records, DNS, Proxy..) - the list is endless. Again, these systems have really bloomed in the past 4 or so years, at least for where I work.
I guess they dont see how much goes on behind doors when it comes to this business..
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
Stuff like this shouldn't be posted. Andreesen whines about the problems in IT, then provides no solutions. (Though he'll probably follow up with some whiz-bang magic band-aid his company provides.)
:)
Everyone knows most IT shops are overworked and underappreciated.
Can we be more constructive about coming up with solutions for these types of things?
such as:
a) creating trade organizations of IT professionals - increases clout & sharing of ideas with each other; causes management to sit up and take notice.
b) forcing the hands of management to pick products that are actually _known_ to give a high ROI (i.e. Anything But Exchange, for instance. If it's known that Exchange is the most expensive & time-consuming E-mail system on the planet, why do organizations continue to buy into it when there _are_ good alternatives? Management needs educating!
c) training ourselves to DO BETTER.
I don't think most systems software (these days, anyhow) is necessarily that unreliable. Even Microsoft has caught up. What's lacking is broad-based inter-platform skill sets and the meticulous planning needed to integrate systems properly the FIRST time, rather than constantly tinkering with things. Magic software band-aids that "automate" these things will only add to the complexity of these systems and could prove counterproductive.
Well, I work as a sysadmin at a hosting co, and the farm of FreeBSD and Red Hat machines I administer is running beautifully. Automatic upgrades, email notifications of all the important stuff, distributed shell program to run commands on all machines at once, Tripwire and firewalls to keep an eye on the hackers. If I'm not working on any projects, I only actually "work" maybe 4 hours a day.
How do I justify my existence? Easy, the colo machines that I don't administer get hacked or broken almost once a month. Each time, I send a report and I also tell my boss "by the way, I already took care of this, we won't have this problem".
(Maybe I should send a report each month: "security holes that DIDN'T affect us this month".)
After a while he realized that I'm like an insurance policy (as well as my Windows counterpart who does basically the same thing).
Now I just hope that all these colo customers don't sign up for our monitoring service, that will really make me invisible.
Another less ethical option is to leave a few unsolved but safe problems in the machines so that you have a small fire to put out each week, to make yourself look busy.
The issue is this: Upper management and end users only see the end product. I is either there or it is not. It works, or it does not. They look at that product as the end of the line for IT costs. It is out the door, gone gold -- end of story. What they don't see is the process behind the scenes that makes everything "appear" to be working as promised. It takes (surprise) people!!! Funny how an ROI on any given system may reduce 5 jobs of monkeys at the end of the line making $30K a year...However, to do it right will require (to do it right) 3 high end IT people and maybe a help desk jocky or two. And guess what -- that ROI that cut 5 jobs and $150K per year, take $200K and 3 or 4 people from IT to keep it going and maintained. Now roll forward a few years -- upper level management wonders why 7 or 8 percent of the companies investments are going into the IT "black box" costs. And now look what is happening -- they are starting to take the same chainsaw to the people who have made it possible to chainsaw through the monkeys the last 10 years.....Sad really.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
I'm really not trying to troll here, and even though he makes some interesting points, it's very difficult to trust the business opinions of a man that has one major dropped ball in his experience and is now trying to push his automation software as the Next Big Thing in IT. I don't honestly think he has any clue what the NBT is, but neither does anybody else.
LoudCloud sold all of the data center hosting business to EDS. His company now develops software to 'manage more efficiently' those datacenters they couldn't make any money on. Obviously, the business model is 'if I couldn't do it and make $$$, then no other company in the world can either and they must be willing to pay me lots of $$$$ to allow them to'.
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is just a marketing spiel for OpsWare, the product that his company develops in support of their old LoudCloud business and that they're trying to sell to whoever will listen.
Way to go ZDNet.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I was the sole member of the IT shop for many years at a small company. Over the years, I ordered systems, software, services, did all of the installs and maintenance, wrote glue code, etc. Basically, I did it all. My philosophy was to prevent problems, rather than have to fix them.
When we brought in a new CEO, she began looking for ways to cut costs. I was slated to be on the chopping block because she "never saw me fixing anything". Luckily, I was saved by the management who realized that I was the only one who held things together (of course, they still didn't pay me squat since I was the only person who didn't have a degree and they were mostly PhDs and Masters of whatever). Once I ended up moved on to a higher paying job, they pretty much fell apart.
The lesson I suppose is that even if you've prevented all of the problems and the organization runs smoothly because of your efforts, you need to make your efforts visible. Sometimes, bragging isn't a bad thing.
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
You compare your IT spending to other companies.
You point out that, though perhaps your IT guys are paid a relatively high salary compared to the rest of the company, your time between failures, and your overall spending are much less than that of similar companies. THAT is what the suits understand.
If your IT guy is some kind of stinky zen monk who does nothing all day but medidate or work in the zen garden he build in his office, the suits will be happy if they are spending 1/10th as much as the competition, and everything just plain works.
Believe me... every manager out there, ever CEO, gets to hear from every company he deals with, in the news, and his mother in law about how computers don't work, the network screwed up, etcetera. When he sits back and thinks "Man, mine works fine..." he will have better faith in his IT guys.
Don't forget duct tape!
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
i could've sworn that cmdrtaco said i wouldn't have to look at ads if i subscribed to slashdot...
Founder, Americans Allied Against Alliteration
Marc Andreessen sounds an awful lot like a lot of IT managers these days. You know, the people who say lots and know nothing. Boardrooms are filled with the notion that IT people are an automaton army that needs to be micromanaged right to the last char and nanosecond. Andreessen sounds like the propogator of this notion.
In two paragraphs he pronounced to the world the basically all IT infrastructure and paradigms are broken. He later suggests that in order to keep up and succeed, things will have to change.
Duh.
The article is so short on details of the failure and possible solutions, I don't know why he wasted the space and bandwidth to deliver this most elegant piece of fluff.
Fortune 2000 and enterprise in general has been raping its IT payroll for well over a year, probably close to two years. In that space, technology has changed, service delivery ramped up to top up the cuts-enhanced bottom line, media reinvented itself 4 or 5 times, and customers got a whole lot pickier and smarter.
So the one piece of non-fluff in the article was the mention that a lot of data centers are being held together with spit and string. Well, this is what happens when you whip 5 people to do the work of 20. Seems like thats ok to do as long as the victoms have ballpoint pens in their shirt pockets and hornrimmed glasses perched on the noses.
The biggest problem in the IT field these days is entrenched in the problems Tim Perdue experienced at SF. Every time an achievement is approached, 45000 know-it-alls with 6 digit incomes glom on, take credit, and micromanage at the DNA level. The suits, blissful in their ignorance and trusting of middlemanagement, believe the stuff that spews out of these ninnies mouths. The solution is for upper management and grassroots IT people, the folks in the trenches, to get together.
Upper management, in order to be able to do this, needs to be sensitized to the machinations of IT people. They need to know what makes us tick, or they risk finding out what makes us ticked off. They best be doing this quick too. The downturn will end, business will pick up, and a lot of these companies will be up a creek with their infrastructure decay and miniscule overmanaged IT budgets.
Revenge of the nerds indeed.
-- Karma whore? You betcha. --
That's really what it's all about. Building systems and procedures to watch your business critical systems and respond as best they can without human intervention. It's not hard, really, it just takes a few iterations to get to where you need to be.
The two most important things I took away from my time in the dot com boom are these. If you're not monitoring from the customer's perspective your monitoring is worthless. Significant digits determine uptime measurements.
That is to say, if the web is how your customers place orders they don't care if the database took a lunch break. If you're the web admin, the DBAs make you look bad. Being the admin that takes care of the public face of the business sucks. You depend on everyone behind you. How many of your customers care if you can execute a query in under a second if they have to navigate 13 screens to place an order? Who cares if your Apache server is up 100% of the time if the database behind it that takes orders was down for hours at a time over the month?
THe significant digits thing is an excellent way to throw the 5 9's back in the face of management. If you measure your systems for availability less than once/minute you can never compute uptime to 99.999. It just won't come out. You can get to 100%, or something in the high 90's but to achive comutationa accuracy in the ten thousandths you either need to compute for the year, or increase your polling frequency. While increasing polling frequency may sound good, it increases system load, and requires a more robust monitoring architecture. It's not something that most CIO's, let alone other executives give a second thought (unless say you work for GE, or any other 6 sigma company they know the signifigance of that last 9.)
Getting to a point where monitoring and responce systems are automated is a noble goal. We're a long ways off from that. I've worked with CA:Unicenter, and other automation/monitoring tools and even interviewed with Freshwater Software during the boom (makers of SiteScope). No one has a good paradigm for monitoring and automation. They just don't. The only people that have worried about these issues to date have been System Administrators and Engineers. We're good tool builders, but you need a real wrench, not something that is welded together from bits of scrap metal. That's what the monitoring and automation industry is today, a wrench created by some welder with bits of scrap they found lying around. Granted perl is a pretty damned good welding tool, but we need to cast these systems and standardize on how to actually do these things.
Until everyone's monitoring/automation system speaks the same language and can work interchangably, we're stuck in the pre-browser internet.
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
Well, here's where you expect an innovator like Andreesen to come up with a brilliant idea that's going to begin the next IT paradigm shift, but all he says is that we need to find some revolutionary way to automate our own stuff -- basically, to automate the act of automating things.
What exactly has he done that was truly innovative? He happened to be at NCSA when they happened to be writing the first graphical web browser. To the best of my knowledge, he's just been somebody who was at the right place at the right time.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Here is what needs to happen. My relief from the 12 hour shift is still not here, so here I sit after 14 hours. With my luck I will be saying the same thing about my 38th hour 24 hours from now. Although it will probably sound something like Big monkey powder fucker by the power of greyskull I have the pudding.
Where am I going and why am I in this handbasket?
I always thought this was a really interesting article about Marc Andreessen (author of the ZDNet article, founder of Netscape, now big kahuna at Loudcloud): GQ Article
Basically, it accuses him of being a fraud... none of his ideas are/were ever his own. Take it with a grain of salt (it's written by someone who's rather bitter about Marc's success), but it is an interesting read...
--here's a wild thought, IT admins get paid until something breaks, then they go off the clock until it's fixed. Anytime the system is running smoothly, it's no big deal, that's the results the companies are paying for. Companies don't really want broken stuff or barely running stuff, they want it functional all the time and not have to fork around with it. The admins then get to be the judge of how they spend their time, goofing off surfing or learning more things, keeping up with the industry. The way it is now, they get paid no matter what, so there's no real incentive to make things better, just maintain a low end status quo. You explain it to the bean counters that way, and write that maintenance contract precisely, so there's no wiggle room for either party. You as an admin ask them what results they want, then YOU tell THEM what combi8nation of hardware and software will give them those results. This is the basis for the contract. Tell them it's cheaper in the long run, as they only pay for what they want, that it's YOUR job to make sure they get the results they want, and they don't have to worry about doing two jobs, the bean counters and managers shouldn't be concerned with the precise minutiae of how IT works, they ned to build and sell widgets, that's their primary job. overlap don't work, the concept of differnt specialised jobs came about because that's the only way to have a complex org run efficiently. Look at it like a car, how sane would it be for a car exec to tell his engineers "ya know, make the carb do the starters job as well". That's nuts obviously, and there's no reason for the engineers to have to even consider that. Same with IT.
I've had bosses try to micromanage me before, it NEVER works.
--different tangent----
Another thing is, and this is NOT going to sink in until it's too late (IMO), is that IT people need to stop being predators on each other and be a more collective force. In case anyone hasn't noticed, jobs are going off shore (speaking as a US person) and they will continue to go offshore until society demands the "boss class" to stop that. That's going to require banding together in an organization that has CLOUT, and also abandoning thinking that either of the two major political "parties" are going to help you keep your job. They aren't, this is obvious, that coffee pot has been steaming away for many years now, it's very easy to smell it. Speaking as a blue collar guy, I'll tell the white collar guys to WAKE UP to this reality, it's knocking on your door. Just because you are "smart" doesn't mean you still can't get screwed.
The small office where I work (30 hosts), had a series of problems a while ago, mainly due to bad quality cabling, and a tree of hubs were replaced by a large switch. We had netbios storms, and the constant netbios elections made browsing almost impossible(some worms from win2k systems also blasted their stuff in broadcast). For about a week, we had daily problems, till all browsing was replaced by static lmhosts in each system, static IPs and better cables.
After the ordeal, the management asked me which ystems were the bottleneck, and all pentium1 hosts were replaced by DELL P3s, plus money was spent on other improvements like a dedicated Linux server for printing/files and a host of other things.
The bottom line is network problems DO contribut to the appreciation of tech workers, although causing deliberate troubles is VERY unethical. This is ironic and unfortunate. Theres no standard on how to measure the productivity and efficiency of IT workers, mainly due to the young age of this field of work.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
This is what feeds Andreeson's IT crisis today: the fact that technology professionals took their apparent suffering and feelings of being not understood, and used it to isolate themselves. They refused to act like businesspeople in an organization that lives and dies by its profit and loss statement. They complain about how management doesn't appreciate them, but how many learn to do a cost analysis that will show the business reasons for buying software X or hardware Y? In other words, the glorification of the geek in the 90s gave a lot of geeks the idea that they didn't have to learn the language of business to survive there. That's why they're underfunded, underappreciated, and harassed.
I've had the benefit of a boss who demanded a business analysis for any significant technology initiative at the company. He doesn't get computers, but he understands ROI. He understands a well-presented business case for anti-virus software. We have a wireless network in our new facility in Texas for a real-time inventory management system for one reason: my cost analysis showed that the implementation costs would be recovered within a year because of labor saved from eliminating batch-mode downloading, and that the cost over five years of our wireless system was ~15% of the batch-mode system.
When geeks figure out that they have to speak the language of the business, then the IT department gets properly funded, properly respected, and properly treated.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
If you haven't checked into nagios yet, you owe it to yourself to do so. Now. It's a monitoring application that can take action on problems. That's the first step to automating things in the datacenter. It's open-source, and it's highly useful, if a little tricky to get working.
I moved out of a group running a lot of big Sun machines (I set up an E10K for them) because of managerial issues. Before I left, we had a budget item for about $250,000 to set up a monitoring and job-scheduling application. It was going to take *another* Sun box to run, and we were being told that it would take 3 months to get it all set up and configured.
With Nagios, I can do everything we they were talking about implementing. I spent 3 weeks, and it cost me nothing. I employed a dual PII 266 that was collecting dust. (I also used an old P166 as a dedicated kiosk for showing the web page.) My boss and my co-workers think it's great. I'm dying to show it to my old group...
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
Please moderate this up. I didn't mean to be offtopic. I thought it was ontopic when I posted it. Please, I don't want a negative score.
-- SteweyGriffin
http://www.ltsp.org/
Combine with the latest wine server bit to allow serving winders apps for even more consolidation.
Get together with that layed off employee and a few other hot shots in your company, then approach your clients behind your boss' back with a proposal to do more work on their systems for the same cost if they'd contract with you guys directly.
You have the skills, not your boss. You're what's up for sale. You don't have to put up with any shit if you don't really want to.
your server farm is a well oiled machine
Pretty weak-ass server farm, if you ask me..
It's not the up-front cost of the machine, it's the ongoing support costs. Thin client has a much longer working life, and takes much less time to support.
Furthermore, the same people who would be interested in these solutions are the ones who are going to balk when they are told that in order to implement these solutions, they have to rip out all their Cobol code and replace it with something else, replace any EDI they are doing with XML, and ditch any old tech they have in use like their modems, dot-matrix printers, etc. I'm not holding my breath.
The real problem for IT is that our management and coworkers don't understand what we do. My solution is to offer to educate these people as much as possible. I'm lucky enough to have a manager who has dabbled in Perl enough to know how hard it is(relatively speaking) to program. You might not have the same situation, but surely you can teach your boss the value of 100 lines of clean well-commented code. Rather than be secretive about what I do, I attempt to teach my coworkers as much about computing as I possibly can. Its not like they are going to learn your job - you've spent years studying and training to get where you are. So the effect of teaching your bosses and coworkers is that they respect what you do rather than view your job suspiciously.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Marc Andresseen is a one-trick pony. He got lucky with Netscape, then very stupidly decided to go toe-to-toe with Lord Bill. Sure, LoudCloud was a star during the dot-com era. Now that reality has set in, delisting/shareholder lawsuits/bankruptcy loom big on the horizon. This is his last gasp - "hire me and I'll 'reinvent' your IT department!"
Marc, may I suggest getting a job? I hear McDonalds is hiring. "Would you like fries with that, Mr. Gates?"
Karma: Sucky (mosty affected by saying things people know to be true but don't want to hear)
If Linux and the "completely" (i.e. GPL) open source community wants to thrive in the business world, they've got a lot of work to do. Though a more than fair argument can be made for Linux in terms of stablity and speed, Linux does still lag Win2k in terms of ease of maintanence and use (this goes right back to the TCO article on Slashdot a while back).
Most of the work I do is for companies that have a small or nonexistant IT department. Though patches for our clients running Win2k might be more frequent, they rarely require us to visit the site. In fact, we've never had to visit a client in order to help them update Win2k servers or workstations. The ease-of-use of the graphical environment makes system updates fairly idiot-proof. This simply isn't true (most of the time) on Linux -- it would be great if it were, but it isn't (hint to developers).
On the other hand, Linux does have a sizeable advantage at the web applications end. We often partner with another company that designs accounting and web-order systems (our firm is strictly hardware and sysadmin/sysint). If they need to do an update to web-end software, it's much easier for them to SSH into a server and upload the necessary changes. For desktop applications (in particular the non-web front end to an SQL database), however, Win2k still has the advantage -- when updating the front end, it's easy to create a single executable, burn to CD, and mail to client. All of the updating can be done by the user and not by IT, which ultimately reduces the problem that Andreeson discusses.
Even given the SSH advantage in Linux, commercial, closed source software has the advantage in that it is completely and totally standardized -- even if that standard is proprietary. The marketplace itself has shown that, at the moment, Win2k (and OS X, for that matter) reduce the total amount of sysadmin time required per machine. Applying a major service pack to 100 Win2k machine requires little or no expertise -- just download, double-click, and repeat. Applying an update that requires a kernel recompilation, on the other hand, takes somebody with substantially more expertise.
Statistically speaking, there's a 99.998% chance that my IQ is higher than yours. Get over it.
I do quality control in a Reno brothel...beat that!
If one of my co-workers had been fired for that reason, I'd have quit on the spot. And so would most of my colleagues. Why? Because of loss of faith in the leadership (boss not understanding morale concept, and not knowing who'd be next, leads me to prefer to dictate my own future).
The boss would be left with an empty department to explain to his VP and justify his bad decisions. Not that it would happen - I have the total faith in my boss and the morale is good, people help each other out.
You Americans need to learn to fuck people back and not take shit from nobody. The SINGLE reason managers (in IT and elsewhere) can treat people like this, is that the people being screwed react with bending over and asking for more.
I know three companies who in the last week have laid off their entire IT departments. They see that their servers are pretty much always up, and whatever IT is doing, the people managing do not see the impact. They canned everyone, and I'm just waiting to see the horrible mess that results.
As to the automation issue, it is pretty much already very easily possible, but is hard to get in place most places, because of managers making technical decisions they shouldn't be. They read papers and get enthralled with buzzwords and insist that the technology be used, despite how it will not fit in nicely with the existing configuration. Good equipment has great monitoring capabilities. On software, even Windows has decent capabilities for widespread automated and remote maintenance. I have had the experience of seeing a need, pointing out the problem and strongly recommend a solution, have management flat out go a different direction that I said would be a bad idea, and then be complained to that the solution was not working as well as it should be...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Thanks for the dream, pal, but the phone system is just a little bit different than the entire IT industry. As a matter of fact, computers are what made the automation of the telecom industry possible. Going by this burnout's metaphor, we would need an entirely new technology to take care of the automation of computers. And then what's going to automate that?
Please, pal, think before you speak. We do the best we can to make sure that the things run themselves, but somebody's got to push the button somewhere.
A true geek's greatest asset is his || her willingness to go to any lengths necessassary to be able to be lazy... someday. The fact that we're still working just means we aren't done yet. What this dimwit is saying is exactly what we computer geeks have been trying to do since the Atansoff-Berry Computer.
Move along folks, nothing to see here, just some jackass parroting what we've all known all along like it was his goddamn idea.
"Verbing weirds language." -- Calvin
I don't mean this to sound cruel, but with all the leniency employers give parents, and all the tax breaks parents get, the question is why don't you have kids?! :-)
Let's face it - why do most people have kids? Not because they want to. Often it's an accident, idiot women with "baby lust" or their "biological clock," or to stop the incessant "I want grandkids" caterwauling from the inlaws. I would submit that relatively few people have children because they truly want to.
Parents think that whatever their little fuckpuppy monsters do is cute. When Cody or Tanner or Cheyenne or Dakota or Tyler or Wyoming or insert-yuppie-childname-here screams bloody murder and throw drink glasses in a restaurant, it's not cute, it's fucking obnoxious! "Oh, I don't know why my kids won't listen." Well, keep your FUCKING LEGS TOGETHER NEXT TIME, BREEDER BITCH!
Besides, with what real wages have done over the last 20 years, who can afford kids anymore?
That's why I got fixed.
Karma: Sucky (mosty affected by saying things people know to be true but don't want to hear)
B I O T C H.... I am an IT Specialist
Did you really need to post this POS comment 3 times?
While he seemed to hint at it, I didn't see very clear mention of the fact that ITs main problems in a lot of companies is the huge scaleback of IT employees vs. a much less proportionate drop of infrastructure to maintain. Obviously this results in the all too common scenario of one person taking over the work of his 5 laid-off coworkers, who is expected to do so happily because he's allowed to keep his job. Yes, times are tough and it's not unreasonable to be expected to do more than was asked previously, but I'm sure everyone has at least known someone that has been overworked beyond the limits of labor laws and humane treatment by a company that knows it can replace him with someone with 3 phDs for half the salary. While the issues of finding better technical solutions to manage IT more efficiently is an important topic, it will never alleviate what I feel to be a severe labor crisis. I'm far more curious as to where IT is headed along THOSE lines.
Wise enough to win the world, fool enough to lose it
Back in the early 80s (when Marc was in what grade?) the business press ran articles about how software was getting so good that soon we wouldn't need programmers, because writing software would itself be handled by software.
I predict that we'll have software that can write major software at just the same time as we have software that can write convincing novels. In both cases you have the task of putting together language that respresents a broad swath of messy reality.
Now, systems administration may be more like writing a good technical manual than writing a good novel. Ever notice how many good tech handbooks there are out there? You haven't? Maybe it's because novels are easier. Good systems administration is about leveraging people strengths with machine strengths, and vice versa. Automation without the human element is as uncompetitive as, well, the human element without automation these days.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Stop Being a Snatch Master!!
Why?
Well because the software we use today doesnt lend itself volontarily to extencive automation. You can automate patch installations, users added to all relevant systems at one click of a button, backup and all such things. The problem that some people seems to have a hard time grasping is that software sucks mostly. It is ridden with faults that make any automation fail randomly no matter how well it is implemented. Thats where most IT staff is doing their job, straighten out faults in the software and installing it. Support is also very hard to automate.
Before any automation can be used on a daily basis software must get much better and have much less bugs at shipping date than today. Its a very wrong approach to go backwards and automate fixing of faults related to bugs. Fix the bugs instead.
HTTP/1.1 400
That's another oft-neglated area of IT. I specialized in that at my last job, running servers for the noc to use to ensure server and site health. I was more than a little diligent about the work I did, and managed to maintain a state where most problems were able to be fixed, or at least noticed almost immediately, without management ever needing to get involved; what IT views as a job well done is viewed by people who choose who to lay off as an unnecesary expense, at least for a little while, until the systems become obsolete and downtime starts cutting into profits again. That cycle seems to have repeated itself any number of times over the last several years in the IT trade at many companies, but it hasn't come to a head until recently, when there is no way to hire anyone new to fix weeks or months of neglect, and then the developers are asked to take time off from their own projects to do IT work...
Wise enough to win the world, fool enough to lose it
I work at the University Of Michigan. I'm a Computer Systems Specialist, a fancy term for PC tech. My colleagues and I (7 people) support a University building by ourselves (about 600 users). And still,I only take about 2 work orders per day, and they're usually easy (like some idiot who couldn't figure out how to turn on the printer). The rest of the time I play around online, read books, play the occasional game of Quake 3 (we upgrade enough to have Geforce 4 MX's in most of our machines :), and spend about one hour working. I LOVE MY JOB!!!!!!!!
Listen to my experimental-industrial-techno!
The way I usually see a Citrix deployment handled, the laptops are all configured with modem dial-in access to the Citrix server (via VPN). They also have a full installation of the most-used applications (MS Office, for example?) that they'd want to work with "offline".
Then, it's just a matter of training for people to understand that they need to copy their completed work up to their shared disk space on the server when they get a chance. If you keep the versions of software on the server and on the laptops the same, all should go pretty smoothly.
(Of course, this also undermines some of the supposed cost-benefit of Citrix, because you're still buying full software licenses for each laptop, plus all your user licenses for everyone potentially connecting to the Citrix servers.)
Your Loudcloud was supposed to do this for us and it failed.
Why did it fail?
1 No one really knows how to do it
2 The infrastructure is too expensive
3 Customer requirements are too dissimilar from one another
4 No one has the balls to tell customers their requirements are crazy and impossible
5 Transition costs are poorly understood
6 Exeutives are measured by overhead and customer satisfaction and not doing the right job the best way
7 People are not a resource they are an overhead item
This is just more PR for his product OpsWare. Get rid of expensive IT people, use our software instead. Why should an IT professional be excited about this? Maybe if we all plan on becoming OpsWare certified.
My team runs just under 6 dozen web and database servers ( Solaris and Linux ) for the University of Michigan using an open source system management suite called 'radmind' and I can't say enough good things about it ( I'm not one of its developers, so I can get away with this ): fast, secure, stable, standards based, and makes a little thing like patching several dozen servers a breeze ( though ... what kind of freak patches in the middle of the day? ).
Incidentally, the CTO of loudcloud ( a.k.a. opsware ) is Tim Howes, of LDAP fame and formerly of the UMich RSUG ( the same group that has since developed radmind ). small world.
"People only notice telephone operators when their calls don't go through. How can we get people to recognize the importance of phone ops?"
But, that's not what the article is about. The article is about replacing tech-monkies with lots of automated IT infestructure.
IE, once you figure out how you want your network to be running, IT should simply be an issue of bots going out and figuring out how to scale things and the like, and a few people going around replacing defective hardware.
Unfortunately, and I think this is true in a lot of companies, they have their own, amazingly poorly written software that no automated tool is going to be able to handle or figure out for a *long* time.
Corps with good software engineering people (or don't need to write much of their own code) are going to be able get their technology to do a lot of their work for 'em. Other companies are not.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It might be worth noting that, sucky article or not, it could be something to pay attention to. As Shorti9 noted, the article may garner far more attention than it should. That means this half-baked article may be germinating ideas in an IT manager near you.
With this in mind, those in the IT industry trenches should welcome the chance to discuss this article, define the problems with its line of thinking and stated points, and be prepared to flog down the stupidity that'll spawn from it in our collective workplaces.
is the one you never see. That idiot running desk to desk doesn't have any idea what they are doing. The one that shows up at 8 and leaves at 6 and appears to be reading screen after screen of pr0n. That SA is the bomb.
Worship the SA, do not replace the SA with a small shell script.
This
Seriously, I don't get the money to buy redundent Cisco routers. I don't get to buy extra switches and motherboards.
And the little internal web addy, that has been in place for 2 years? Some tool of a manager who is having a hissy fit, just walked into my office and asked why I haven't fixed his problem that he never told anyone about.
Please......
Whenever you are dealing with people who have almost as many deadlines as you do are involved. Things are never that easy.
Now where I will agree with you are scripts. Learn them. Use them. Love them. But do you have an IDS system? Who verfiys those alerts? Who checks your server logs for descrepencies? Admining is rarely easy.
I'm not drunk, I just have a speech impediment. And a stomach virus. And an inner ear infection.
They're being banned on sidewalks!
And I want a pony.
It's called that because it's used to tie things into bales. You do not bail water with it.
As much as I like PC's, somehow the guy seems right. It could be not too hard to set up an organization with a centralized system that uses PC's, but with no hard drive and a centralized storage system where the OS is managed by IT staff. A PC with a graphics card/NIC and a monitor could be set up as a intelligent graphical terminal, and with the advances in clustering like OpenMOSIX you could have all those "smart terminals" load balance CPU among themselves, so that upgrades to individual users benefit everybody.
The interesting thing is that you could deploy a prototype system like this one without destroying an organizations current LAN. You could build it and then just give a floppy to a test user to "try out" without ever hurting their system. So, its one step beyond just graphical XTerminals, its clustered computing but with centralized management of the OS.
Then companies noticed that operators wanted to get paid.
"Welcome to tech support.
If you have forgotton your password, click here.
If there is smoke coming out of the server room, click here.
If your mouse is broken, click here."
This is what we want?
Email: slashdot3@FreeMars.org (Address will be abandoned when it gets spam.)
Maybe I'm on crack, but...
WTF is this? What is he trying to say? Where's the paradigm?
The piece (it isn't even really an article) says we (IT) aren't staying on top of our workloads, but doesn't even begin to suggest what to do to change that.
This isn't news, this is flaimbait.
On the other hand, it was nice to see one or two paragraphs pandering to my IT-ego, telling me its ok, someone undertsands my pain.
On the gripping hand, everyone I come into contact with at my company (and even a lot that I don't) know that I do my job well. I am consistantly complimented on my performance, my eagerness & abilty to help others, etc. As an added bonus, because my users are well informed, they're able to give me good error reports if something goes wrong. Because they are able to effectively report problems, those problems are solved quickly. Because of that, I have very little downtime.
Perhaps Marc is thinking about the BOFHs, and how to allow them to keep up with the rest of us?
It all sounds a lot like what IBM's Sam Palmisano was preaching back in October, about "eBusiness on demand".
The idea that impressed me then was the thought that nobody would seriously consider generating their own electricity now that it's a utility. But back in the early days companies and communities did just that. Same thing today with computing, but tomorrow...
It strikes me there's a shade more to IBM's vision than there is to Andreessen's, though. Check out the IBM version here, with links to some more in-depth material.
How do you get credit for the work you do when all that's noticed is the downtime?
Have 0 downtime.
Works for me.
I sit at home watching TV and get paid for doing so. My job is to keep the servers happy. The servers are happy. I get paid for doing my job.
Simple.
The long term result is a drastic decrease in quality products and service yet at higher cost. Higher price for lower reliability is not good business. Many companies are now asking, "What am I getting for my IT budget?" and the answer has not yet been provided except in marketing spew, thus further entrenching the cycle of waste and inefficiency. Ask any sucessful small business owner (except for those that are on some welfare tit, like with many government contracts) and what they tell you is that trust is the key to long term business relationships. Marketing is supposed to be about advertising your existence and what you offer, then giving facts on why it is worth their effort. Cute bullshit is funny, but is not professional except to those mindless sheep that let such superficial bungwipe actually overpower any business sense or logic and reason. Get rid of the bloat and focus on giving the customer what they want. If you have an IT department then ask what it is there for. If it is to fascilitate the rest of the business exchanges and dealings then it is wise to ensure that such an infrastructure is well placed. After all, would a Car dealership ever hope to stay in business if the customers had to deal with being rained on (leaky roof), smelling open/malfunctioning sewers, or being assaulted by biting dogs or other critters? Then why would a company allow its infrastructure to be underfunded? Problems in that department will undoubtedly affect the rest of the company.
I find it hard to take anyone seriously that would scoff at an underfunded and undermanned IT departments lack of efficiency, yet then turn around and use mickey mouse hardware and software for said IT departments. The fact that the IT industry pumps out such crap is a direct result of poor business leadership in which idiots are put in charge of purchase and deployment and whom are sold on "cutsey" adds and FUD. Personally I go for what works and I could care less how charming the sales staff is or what the actual commercials are currently using as their limirick of the month.
Then, it's just a matter of training for people to understand that they need to copy their completed work up to their shared disk space on the server when they get a chance. If you keep the versions of software on the server and on the laptops the same, all should go pretty smoothly.
If you're doing this as a company-wide thing, it shouldn't be too hard to setup a "briefcase" or "iFolder" style system, where the "documents" folder on the laptop is synced on a regular basis with a document server.
I know exactly what he's writing about. I was just fired from my job of two and a half years. The reason? Check my sig. That's right, we started a personal website in our own time, with our own reasources, and because the CEO didn't like it, we were out. "Decreasing company morale" was the reason we were given. They fired me, who was the Sysadmin, the webmaster, and the only PC technician.
Forget the fact that for the last two and a half years, I haven't had a real vacation, because I got a call EVERY FREAKIN' DAY about some minor issue.
Forget the fact that I worked a minimum of 2-3 hours every night on company stuff, 'cause I wasn't allowed to make ANY changes during the day. (The night before I was fired, I spent 3 hours writing a script to fix a problem that was affecting only 1% of the users. No real problem, but I didn't want them to have to deal with ANY issues.)
Forget all of that, just get the fuck out. I take some solace in the fact that two days after they fired us they sent out a global e-mail of "Please bear with us, it'll take up to five days for your calls to be answered." And, e-mail was down for almost a week because no one but us knew how it was setup!
IT needs to get the respect it deserves. In this era of decreasing budgets, the only way companies will be able to make any money is to increase efficiency, and that means automation.
Which is more painful? Going to work or gouging your eye out with a spoon? Find out!
http://www.workorspoon.com
It's a well known fact that working in an IT job is a thankless one. The only time you're noticed is when things screw up. That's the nature of the job (well at least for a WAN admin (which I was) and a sysadmin (which I am now). You accept it and move on. When you do get recognition, it's a bonus, but it's certainly not expected.
It's better to burn out than to fade away
Seems to me that a bored techie is a good techie.
Well, not a bored techie, a techie actively doing something totally unrelated to work.
Take a little effort to do the job properly and patching and upgrading take five mins a week.
But the suits, they want 24x7 cover, so they need quite a lot of techies. When someone notices the techies seem to spend their time looking for MP3 and copying VCDs, or spending vast amounts of time re-installing their desktop, they start to micro-manage.
Of course, they don't count the hours spent at home trying to resolve some non-trivial issue.
So the techies adopt an attitude of "good-enough, will-do". Out goes the monthly trawl through the logs looking for stuff to fix before it goes wrong. No, just setup the service, don't worry about using standards, or writing docs. Let someone else worry about security, and reinstalling MySQL is going to give someone a laugh for a week.
And if you do take your time and try to do stuff properly, some pencil-neck will chide you for wasting time.
So if they really want a 100% reliable service the suits are going to have to realise that techies, and the way they work, are truly of secondary importance.
Never going to happen.
(Marc Andreesen)
I'm an egotistical, talentless hack who's latest
stupid idea, loudcloud, failed, so I sold off half
of the company to a bunch of Unsuspecting, good old boy rubes, since my status as "Internet Goldenboy" is in question.
(/Marc Andreesen)
I used to work for a rather lame start-up, which was run by a member of the aohell/nutscrape
cronie network of good old boys (that racist, ignorant, sexual harassing homophobic prick, The only person I know of to have a wired article about how much of a jerk he is. Opsware was
crap. It was slow, buggy, and caused us downtime
that wasn't really downtime according to loudcloud's incredible staff of marketing and law
employees. We were a startup with low funding, yet we spent $800k a month for service from them that we could have built ourselves at exodus or equinix for $200k a month.
If anybody wants information on a REAL movement
in automated systems administration, go to Infrastructures.org A movement based on Steve Traugott's Usenix presentation Bootstrapping the infrastructure.
"And how can this be? For he is the
Patching servers, fixing machines, crawling under desks. If you want a job with a fair bit of action, work at a school. If there's anyone who can find a way to screw something up, or do something unexpected, it's a 15-yr-old with a keyboard and mouse. That, or it's my 57-yr-old grandparents that somehow magically manage to screw things up that should be unscrewupable.
Combine that with archaic computers, underfunding, etc etc... and it's an exciting job.
The thing that I got noticed most for, was making sure the whole production network stayed up, and ran the help desk and coded the in-house apps that were used. I think that the fact I was able to Multitask like that was what got me the respect to run the network. I think if the users are used to a 45-50% uptime on the network and you bring that up to a 99.9% uptime you can get respect as well. I dont know where your working, but If all they notice is the downtime, I would be very bitter. But I guess being noticed for what you DONT do is only part of 2 Jobs -Network Systems Administration, and President of The United States of America :-) -
---
You need to look annoyed. Just like George Constanza.
- Ask your non-geek boss how to make a business presentation on the business merits of a technology initiative. Ask her about cost analysis. Ask her about justifying new software to her bosses (what they're looking for).
- Pick up a textbook on managerial accounting (which is different than what accoutants do): it'll go into great detail on how businesses analyse costs and plan with them.
- Look at your company's profit and loss statement and figure it out. I started at the company as a cost analyst, and now I know exactly how the business is financially structured.
- Try doing it yourself: start a spreadsheet. List all the costs of something, say, upgrading to the latest version of Office. Include every cost you can think of: retraining, troubleshooting, labor spent installing, licence fees, costs to convert all the documents on the server. Don't just list dollar figures, list your calculation: 30 hours at $20.00/hr (but don't forget to include the cost of benefits and other expenses: an employee paid $10/hr costs the business $12-14/hr). Then list all the monetary benefits: time saved with zippity feature X, etc. Compare the bottom line: will the business benefit financially from the upgrade?
At it's heart, understanding the internals of a business means understanding it's programming language: finance. You don't understand how a business works until you understand the flow of money through it. Figure that out, and you'll be a respected geek who can talk to managers on their own terms.Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
but it has a lousy editor.
Does 10 times the work of his or her boss.
You can install servers from scratch to your app from the net, no hands required. Takes some prep, but if you have 100 servers, well worth the investment.
Well I to feel under strain & all, but to be honest, why is this typical for IT? How about other non-IT companies?
Seriously, how many thoughts a day do you devote to say your local electrical company? Or police? Or fire department? Hospital? We think about subway only when it's late? Airports? IT was something new and cool 20 years ago, then we all worked for it to be part of everyday life, now that it is, we are complaining?
Even tho' I enjoyed feeling like I was doing something "VERY IMPORTANT" few years ago, it's time for IT personnel to stop being such rockstar-wannabe's and diva's and grow up.
And IT must start taking steps forward, if it wants to be an enabler of growth
Mr. Andreessen,
I must applaud the points you've made in your article: "Welcome to the new IT crisis". I agree completely with everything you've said.
I'm tired of working long hours, hand-holding my users with software they should already know, and applying countless service packs, patches, and firmware upgrades. My staff is over-worked and under paid...but we are happy to have jobs in this economy. I loved the article, but it left me with one question....
HOW THE HELL DO WE DO THIS?
-ted
Here's what it takes. For everyone to be made redundant and finally realise how fucked the IT industry is and move on (whether that means not taking anymore shit or getting out of the industry altogether.)
:-)
Since I have been made redundant, I've been much -happier- and have rediscovered what it is that I liked so much about computers in the first place.
I dread the thought of going back into the industry, quite honestly. In general, it tends to be run by people who have -no- fucking clue.
Why this is, I'm not sure. This is why I'm starting my own business! Frankly, I'm tired of making ignorant people rich.
Human Resources hires you because you have a few key words written on your resume that, according to the statistics, say you're good for what you do.
And accordingly, as management well knows, it is your complete responsibility to run the network. And yet, they don't seem to understand that, when they don't approve IT requests, stuff starts falling apart.
If you're into programming, marketing is partly to blame as well. You're a programmer, you can obviously make that newfangled operating system wipe the user's butt with their VGA card, right?
In short, the reason IT is considered a necessary evil is because management is trying to do IT's job for them.
Perhaps IT should unionize.
This sig no verb.
Isn't this the same Marc Andreessen who once responded to a criticism of all of the new bugs in Netscape with ``Hey, we don't have the time to do it right"?
And if you use software that is written to ``do it right", won't uptimes of 5 nines happen by itself?
I'm just one guy who spent a year trying to get Andreesen's software to work on hundreds of computers. I really don't have any opinion about this multi-millionaire.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
If you've achived 5 9's, then your budget is either just right, or too big. Either way, a small reduction is in order to see what happens.
If you haven't, then clearly your budget is too small. Tell your boss that if he wants 5 9's then he's going to have to spend more money, and the proof is that the current money only provides a level less than that.
The crisis is a mismatch between expectations of service and the service provided. What is needed is a framework for negotiation, specification and implementation of services that match the expectations of the client to what they can afford.
If a client can not afford 5 9's of availability they must be informed of the level of availability they are receiving.
This is a different kind of negotiation because it has to be done openly and in a spirit of cooperation.
Once again, Marc was unclear about the problem at hand. I believe it's a matter of setting expectations, not a matter of purchasing services from OpsWare/Loudcloud or anyone else.
Has it been done? Could it be done?
Aren't their easier ways to kiss ass that don't take so much time? What if I don't want to do something that's going to get me pushed in to becoming a manager? What if I don't want to be a manager because I think they are slime? Someone should mod the comment above down. It's highly overrated.
It might be worth noting that Andreessen's company, Opsware, sells software that "automates the complete lifecycle of managing servers and business applications." - essentially what he is pushing in this article. It's more than a little suspicious. That isn't to say that he doesn't truly believe what he's written; it's quite possible. But I would be more impressed if he was open about it; saying something like "... and that is why my company creates software that will help usher in this revolution..." His not mentioning it seems a little dishonest, its the kind of disclosure that really should be made.
The reason IT is considered a crutch is because management wants IT to do *their* job for them. "Why manage employees when you could make IT track their every move, and look like the ogre, while you play golf?"
Dear Middle Management:
A lack of occupational skill sufficient to 'free oneself from a paper bag' on your part does not constitute a desire to play babysitter on ours. Thank you.
nuclear presidential echelon assassination encryption virulent strain
Whizzmo
Managers don't want to keep up with IT. They want to pay $$$$ and then not deal with it anymore. They like geeks--geeks go in the corner and make everything work. The only problem is most geeks by nature are "DO-ers" not negotiators. Most companies are either: a. Every department gets their own pet software and expects IT to make it work. or b. All the computer decisons are left up to IT. You're left trying to make accounting decisions at the spurr of the moment. The main failure is to work with IT as a part of the team. Managers have been managing by throwing money at the problem for so long that they have stopped planning for IT problems. Worst yet, the probems have become so complex most managers don't want to do the homework to understand the issues. I tried several times to get the Bosses to look at MS licensing 6.0 with no luck. They didn't want to have to deal with or understand the problem-- "This is too much information. We need one or two sentences about what we should do." quote from manager. IT is no longer a simple thing--Just throwing money at the problem is no longer profitable. Unfortunately, Bosses haven't learned what IT does, how it works, and will simply expect to throw buzzwords around to "fix" those Lazy IT people.
And to think, the fuck who was usually playing at Candyland.com, other online gaming sites, or busy on some instant messanger, not to mention his father doing the same thing, while I was doing his job and my own...got promoted and highly praised after I left.
Not to sound demeaning, but I think you have learned a very valuable lesson. If you are working for the Man, your job security is in His hands. You may be the most productive employee in the company, but if your boss doesn't like you... Conversely, you can be a lazy bastard and never get fired cuz the boss likes you.
When you are the boss you can do the same. Maybe you would be a meritocratic boss or maybe you would practice cronyism. But even if you believed in meritocracy you would probably still favor those who are nice to you and fire those otherwise outstanding employees who told you to f*** yourself. Regardless, you aren't the boss, so you are subject to their whims.
When you recover from this injustice, I hope (no sarcasm here!) you remember that all your dedication is to the benefit of someone else, and they can screw you on a whim. You should still work hard, but when you go home...don't work.
peace
dood your stupid website is down again. where am I gonna get my friggin' porn?!?! ;)
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
There's just a few gotchas. These revolve around consistency.
Are your servers consistent? Are your OS's consistent? Are your applications deployed the same way in each of your remote offices? Do your users have the same applications on their computers?
Or is your IT infrastructure a giant ad hoc hairball resulting from IT decisions being made by non-IT personnel? Do you use anything because "that's what everyone else uses, so it must be good enough, therefore opinions to the contrary are wrong"?
Have you implemented things like network management and application/workstation management only to find that the investment is worthless because your organization cannot adhere to a set of standards long enough to make such systems effective, resulting in such an expanse of policy variance that the "management" systems themselves become a net drain on your management resources?
If so, then you've come to realize that the IT problem does not have a technical solution, rendering the entire premise of the article false.
The problem is cultural. IT people are not trusted to make IT decisions, such as meaningful policies with regard to how technology is implemented and what resources are required to deliver a given level of service.
What all of this means is that your Great Answer may not come from the vendor/consultant of the month, but by simply asking your people what is going on, listening to them, and giving them the leeway to make things right. And yes, this was written by a consultant.
I'm called in because none of them know how to work a computer and have a REAL attitude problem towards men, some have a VD, and their inhibitors prohibit their lucidity.Alright I know what I'm getting into. The head forgets to tell me her budget and tells me "do what it takes don't wory about the mony".
Ok no problem?Wrong.Her acounet tells her 150 dollers in they have a total of 300 to work with
They return some stuff and are down to 50 dollers spent of 5 cables
They don't want to learn how to speak IT lingo
and have a extremely rudimentary understanding of computers
I spent a month woking with them
2 weeks of 12 hour days
1 week of 13 and one of 13.5
in that time:
The updated their os's with NO problems
Got a tutorial on working with multiple operating systems and learned how to talk IT
My thanks?
I now know a drop dead cute babe (who's a bit of a flake and tells me she has a evil boy friend)
And a controll freak who hates my guts
Problem here?
this was all done probonoNow they love/hate me
They like that i'm somewhat of an ok man.I didn't so much as flirt with the staffI worked my self out of a Job
That's good.
The IT computing world is full of BS
You'r a consultant, you come in do a task and leave You'll check in routinely beyoned that you've done your job when you don't have anything to do
If that's a problem these Hoy/Ploy middle managment types (You know the ones normally bald or buzz vut power everything hyper ventilate and wish they had a type a personality) Need to understand you work from task to task and 90% of your time should be doing well frankly nothing
Not a damn thing
You tell them tell me the task I'll do it
They should give you your' peramiters
No mass
Done done done
No fidgets
Once a week your only job is then to back up and archive
You should be done for at least 4 days
I was a systems administrator for about five years. Let me tell you why I think this article is wrong and most other people are wrong about cutting IT costs and increasing IT effectiveness.
The problem is not that IT people are doing it wrong. The problem is that the job of IT people isn't mostly the tedium of manually configuring software the way the vendor recommends. The problem is that the vendor has written software without understanding what the software's users need to accomplish. So, it needs to be glued together. Or, the problem is that the vendor has written software which is just plain broken, and they don't even understand that it's broken, so getting a patch for it is hopeless and the system admin is left to figure out what the devlopers didn't care to think about and come up with a solution on his own. Or, the problem is that nobody in your company even UNDERSTANDS that they need software for certain purposes (like firewalls, backups, etc.). Or they know they need to solve a problem (they want reliable e-mail) but they don't have the time to figure out how to make it happen.
Yes, IT folk spend some of their time applying that one patch to 100 systems, but anyone vaguely competent can automate that in a short period of time. The problem is not applying the patch. The problem is
Basically, most if not all software and hardware sucks. The vendor fundamentally doesn't care enough to build you a product that works, or maybe they don't know how. Usually it works well enough to use, but it just isn't perfect, and you have to learn its quirks to make it do what your company needs. And even if it were perfect, that wouldn't be good enough, because a perfect product, by itself, would just sit on a shelf and not be bought and later installed by someone who has determined that their company needs it.
In short, the IT guy's job is to be an advocate for his company, understanding what they need from their computers and what problems they are having, and then taking what's available and making a working system and helping the users be able to use it to do what the company needs done. NOBODY else is going to do that. Not vendors, and not consultants, and certainly not some company that automates away the part of the sysadmin's job that he does while he's thinking about the more important parts. :-)
I'm sorry what downtime are you talking about? :) That must be due to static electricity generated by the friction between your HDD motor and platters, it's all your fault. I think more money and funds are needed to further research this...inconvenience...after all you would'nt want to loose all your backups :) More info on BOFHhere.
Live for the present, learn from the past, and dream of the future!
You were making a site about how much your coworkers sucks, and how much you hate your job you'd rather poke out your eye with a spoon.
You are very lucky and blessed to be fired. Obviously, this was the best thing to do to both you and your coworkers. It should come to you as no surprise at all!!
Next time you make a post and hope someone will take you seriously and objectively, try including all the facts..
In your next job, learn to say NO instead of playing the martyr. Being a martyr only strengthen your ego, and keeps you away from taking action yourself.
Instead of taking charge and responsibility of your own life and get the job YOU WANT, you blame everyone else but yourself. All in all, you come out as pretentious, resentful, full of hatred and anger. This is obvious for those you see you, maybe you should take a look yourself one day?
Yes, isn't it amazing how those educated in one area can be absolute disasters in another. I've met a lot of math/art/etc teachers who can't spell, english teachers who can't count... and a great many among all groups who can't use a PC.
:-)
Combine that with, for some, the fact that since they are smart in one area... they think they can muddle their way through another...
Sometimes it's better if users are completely inept, so long as they realize it
Uh. Marc needs to live in the real world. Applying patches to servers in the "few minutes worldwide" that he talks about is the realm of fools. Far too many times on NT and various Unices, major patch tarballs or service packs still leave a significant fraction of the machines patched not working in some way. Unless it was a critical level security patch or an issue that caused work stoppage, I'd normally leave the patch set running on a backup system for a few days to verify it worked as advertised before applying it to my systems. You really expect me to apply a patch to all desktop systems before testing it? (again unless it's a critical security issue, and I have no other way of protecting them and the patch seems low risk) Sorry. I value my reputation and job too much. Applying patches automatically and simultaneously to systems across an enterprise without qualifying them with at least a rudimentary test is a recipe for disaster. Doing that for servers goes double. Even the best regression testing can't identify all problems with all the myriad system configurations out there. I'm all for windows update and other autopatch systems, but when it's high risk, such as updating several thousand machines, or business critical servers I want to be very sure before leaping off that cliff.
Tim
Use a 3 tiered system architecture instead.
As you suggest, cheap Windows/X terminals on the desktop.
A cluster of cheap, obsolete desktop PCs as the middle layer login servers.
Backend application servers running the applications and accessible from the login servers.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
What a joke. If a system has a specific purpose, this is already being done, such as financial software or data storage.
Those systems have specific functions, and it already performs the way this article states. The rest of IT is made up of thankless chores and requests, responding to user error, incompetence, low budgets trying to squeeze out more than it can handle, and most of all, the CTO or lead sysadmin who is still just a skillfull egotist who has no plan to create such an environment. Those who usually rise to the top in IT are just bigger dogs who intimidate management there way to the top, at the expense of the system.
My solution for an IT department in a Fortune 2000 company: I would send the employees back to the dark ages. No IM. No web. Internal email only unless they worked with vendors. I would lock it down, and make the users use dumb terminals and DOS. One printer for the whole building. Managers could have color systems if required.
IT is evolution, the OS design itself would be the revolution, and that hasn't been happening.
The thankless services everyone keeps mentioning provide one particular service apiece. These are unique services with only one state, on or off. IT is an umbrella used to cover a multitude of provided services, each with a on/off state. If any one of this multitude is experiencing a problem, IT itself is blamed.
Users do not screw up their "utility" services like phone, electricity, gas, water, or sewage by installing unapproved software on a daily basis. Those who do disrupt the utilities by their own actions cannot place the blame on the electric company, et. al. IT takes the blame when users screw up the system even due to installing software that is forbidden on their desktops.
When utility services go down, they are at least blamed on the central authority, being an external company unaffected by the whims of XYZ Company's new management. The electric company isn't going to have their budget cut because some odd number of do-it-yourselfer's knock down the powergrid for their whole neighborhood.
IT Departments have to take the rap when say 300 of the company employees install unapproved instant messaging systems and send so much worthless personal crap over company pipelines that the system cannot handle the load and business processes are being delayed.
There are a billion different ways to look at a situation. This is just another one.
Well then how do you get credit for the work you do, when all that's noticed is the downtime?
;-)
You guys could still learn smth from BOFH
(Ironically originally posted to feedback to the above-mentioned article but never showed up on ZDNet's listserver. Perhaps they have an I.T. crisis.)
Taking a dial tone for granted?!!!!
Sorry Marc but you obviously haven't had to make a tech support call to any phone company lately looking for someone who knows what they are doing.
The real IT crisis is what it has always been: Ridiculous expectations, impossible deadlines, everyone else's problems being your problem and little or no recognition for what's been accomplished.
Real I.T. people have actually chosen to work under these conditions and most, like myself, thrive under them. If you're going to be in I.T. you have to be prepared to only be recognized for your last failure.
I worked for Borland Int. when they had 6,800 end users world wide and 35 I.T. people in total (That's telecomm, network, help desk and programming). That was one impressive group of I.T. people. It was my honor and privilege to work with them.
I currently work for a 450 end user company that has 3 I.T. people, myself included. We bring projects in on time and under budget, and we don't have a backlog of unfulfilled help desk requests.
I guess my point is: No amount of automation or new technology is ever going to replace having skilled and knowledgeable I.T. people working for you.
I personally am getting very tired of seeing IBM, CA and Microsoft commercials suggesting to the corporate world that: "Your internal I.T. department is incompetent and we can provide you with software so simple a monkey could operate it and save you money."
Don't even get me started on all the "Industry Experts" that were spewing doom and gloom over y2k that are still considered industry experts. Thanks for the global vote of confidence in your engineers and I.T. people, we really appreciate it. I'm still waiting for an apology on that one.
I think the major problem is that I.T. jobs used to be filled by people that loved the work and the technology and knew what they were doing.
These days, folks that think certification equals big bucks are taking up the jobs. It doesn't help that the government is trying to manufacture I.T. people through incentive programs. You can't swing a dead cat in most I.T. departments these days without smacking someone who has no business being in the position their in.
If you have problems in your corporation's I.T. department stop looking for the magic bullet and start looking at the people doing the hiring and your hiring procedures. I would much rather bring in people that know less and have a desire to learn than someone with education and/or certification that's just looking for money.
This concludes this unscheduled rant. We now return you to your regular programming.
Ivan.
Die TeX-Artikel [..] aber doch inzwischen wohl nicht mehr an den
Fingern zweier Hände abzählbar (außer vielleicht von Informatikern,
die bekanntlich mit den Fingern bis 1023 zählen können.
-- Anselm Lingnau
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...