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!
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.
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.
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.
I recommend the paper, "Bootstrapping an infrastructure."
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
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.
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.
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
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!!"
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
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.
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?
"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."
The "paper tiger" MCSE/CNE, I object to. Not the H1-B. He was hired 3 months before the boss let my friend go (who was my mentor, and largely respobsible for why I'm as good as I am). The H1B in question is bloody brilliant. One of the hardest working and smartest people I've ever met. He remembers anything I teach him after showing it to him ONCE... I can only WISH I were that smart.
I object to H1-B more because it VICTIMIZES those who come here on that kind of visa more than I object to skilled immigration. The USA is better off letting people like him into this country, especially when it deprives an opressive country (Iran) of a brilliant mind. But scumbags like my employer shouldn't be allowed to bring him in on a H1-B "slave" visa...
Corporatism != Free Market
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'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.
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."
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?
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
(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.
- 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.
Does 10 times the work of his or her boss.
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
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.
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 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!
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.
It's not kissing ass, it's self-preservation. You're a more valuable employee to the company if you understand more about the company. It's also about being better at proposing things, arguing for or against them, and communicating with people outside your department.
If you don't want to be a manager, then don't accept the promotion when it's offered. Though with your attitude, I doubt it will.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.