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The Rise and Rise of IT Administrators
maffstephens writes "Have you noticed how difficult it's become to develop software? Not because software is more complex, but because there seems to be an army of administrators standing in your way - sys admins, network admins, database admins, runtime admins - the list is endless. They should be there to help us, to make our lives easier, but the reality is often very different. This thought-provoking article from Software Reality is all about the emerging culture of spiteful, dog-in-the-manger prevention amongst corporate IT administrators. Software development has become so inefficient as a result, it's no wonder so many companies are outsourcing."
Because these "adminstrators" know little to nothing about development, I spend hours in meetings working on stifling buzz-word compliant "Enterprise Architecture" plans. If we all just sat down and coded first, our productivity would soar.
In the time it takes to argue about how we might want to do something, I could literally have implemented betas of each ideas considered.
The high school I attend is completely saturated with technology, but only half of it works half the time. We suffer from horrible ineffiency due for the most part to our ITs/admins who got put in a job they have no idea how to do. They can't contend with all they have before them and thus adopt a horrible attitude. Nobody wants to talk to them or be around them, and nothing gets done.
I work for a government agency in the U.S., and as you can imagine, it's saturated with sysadmins who watch over security, resource allocations, etc. Our solution was to build our own network infrastructure. We purchased two servers, cross-trained about six of us to work as admins on those servers, and completely bypassed the regular admins. The result is that we're one of the most productive organizations in our industry, because we were willing to put in a little extra effort to get around the problem.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
A common misconception amoung admins is that your responsibility is to the system or that the system is your customer. Unfortunately that isn't correct, you need to take a step back. Your customer is the "availability of the application/utility provided by the system".
With that said, many programmers have no idea what is really involved with keeping up highly available large scale apps across entire corporations. As an admin you are responsible for tons of applications and functions being readily accessible, in many cases 24 hours a day. Just like you don't argue with the way they implement low level aspects of their code they should respect your decisions and choices when it comes to systems, networks and security.
The linked article sounds like a case of having inept admins and assuming the rest of the world works like that. It was also typical in someone assuming they know what is best across every strata of a corporation.
--- I do not moderate.
What I often see is the people who least understand the big picture when it comes to technology are the ones who feel held back.
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The people I see getting mad just don't understand the impact or implications their "simple requests" may have on others.
"Can't you just open up ports 135-139 in the firewall for everybody"?
"It works fine on my system, something must be wrong with the server"
and my all time favorite when people don't have a clue why their system isn't working
"It must be the network"
They really don't understand how their system works.
As an admin (LAN, WAN, firewall, server, email, etc... you get the idea) for a med size (3000 users) organization I often have to learn other peoples jobs just to figure out what the heck they are really trying to accomplish. It usually goes something like....
Customer: "We need
Me: "Why?"
Customer: Pick one:
1) Vendor says so
2) We tried everything else
3) Thats what someone else said
4) ?
Me: "What are you really trying to do?"
Customer: "What do you mean?"
Me: "Don't tell me what you think you need, tell me what you are trying to do?"
Once I understand what someone is trying to accomplish then I can often work somethign out for them.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
He believes the Database admin should allow him to make any changes whenever he wants them.... who cares if theres a REASON there are naming conventions.... never mind that someone actualy took the time to think about the possibilities of portability, or that there may be software already developed elsewhere that is dependant on those conventions and may need to be portable or cross-aplicable.... never mind how your changes may one day end up going live with a horrid architecture that you "evolved"
He percieves security and network admins as simply being in his way, and that having his rights restricted is not only an insult, but an offense to his craft. Not minding that security holes can and WILL bring a network to it's knees... expecialy if your a target.... not thinking about the huge potential for corporate espionage, or employee sabatage. Maybe i should just give you full rights to the entire domain?
He thinks that having the "right" to install whatever he wants whenever he wants without respect to the company policies or threat assesment is a given. That the potential for harm in HIS case is somehow different than from the secrataries.
Well to you sir i say this..... get your head out of your ass. Unless your specificly developing an application that uses communications systems outside of standard FW blocking.... there is no reason on gods green earth that FW shouldnt be locked down as much as is possible. Have you ever seen what a virus can do to a network? What Blaster or sobig did last summer? while blaster is preventative by those "pesky" vigilant admins, sobig can bring a company to it's knees without even getting infected. My T1 maxed out on incoming sobig eails sent from the web..... because some jack-asses in other companies and home users werent so "strict" about their own security measures. I almost lost my job because management coudltn understand that the problem wasnt even ON our network.
I have also developed... majoring in computer science and working on several large projects. And box control is somewhat necesary for programmers.... but in the long run.... really isnt. you set up and request a bunch of tools, install them and should be through on that machine. If you want full out control.. your not gonna be on my network, no fucking way... cause salespeople, secrataries and smart-assed "developers" catch nasty viruses and cause serious problems. sometimes i hate laptops.
He does mention some very solid points, all of them relating to BAD administrators. Admins who dont evaluate the potential benefits of suggestions by their co-workers, admins who fear for their job fruitlessly, admins who think they are god of their systems and allow no flexibility, or admins who arent willing to do something as simple as setting up test-bed networks DMZ'd away.... or on a seperete network entirely. These guys suck, which is why i have three pipelines to the net... so when users need to do things i feel are in-secure, or when we recieve visiting salespeople and/or outside computers.... i can safely give them web access without it touching my network.
It's called team-work. And the biggest problem with this guy is is he obviously thinks he is the most important part of the company... like everyone should be catering to him.... well guess what? your not that important. And in 90% of buisnesses out there, you barely exist. Most comapnies have a primary need to maintain their systems, and to improve them safely and incrmentaly, because any failure, even one day of outage... will cost far more than your extra time spent dealing with the granted quite annoying delays of a secure and well-managed infrastructure. the day to day cost of my companies development team (fairly large) verses the cost of having any sort of network failing on any particular si
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
Many of the posters who disagree with the author, wrap themselves in the flag of "looking after the company's interests" - well who the hell do you think the developers are working for? - they aren't just making shit up on their own - Its the managerial idiots in the company who want you to roll out "Project I Pulled Out of My Ass So I Can Feel Important # 15" and no I would give you business requirement because this project is too overdue already just back fill them from the tech spec you guys make up and oh, yeah its important you follow all the processes and work nice with the poor "we're only trying to do our job" Operations Dept. And by the way if its late or wrong (because you read my mind incorrectly) then its your ass, not anyone else's.
:) I think they (IT management) think that things like wget is an example of what they would term "shareware".
He is right, admins have too much power and too little responsibility for being on the line for projects getting rolled out.
Here are some tidbits from one of my jobs at a Fortune 100 Co:
When I first started working at CoX there were no UNIX tools on any of the UNIX servers prod or dev. I had to compile gzip, top, wget, perl and all the other tools needed for a normal system. Why didn't they need top or ntop, because if there were problems on the system they would throw up their hands and say it was because of the developers processes and called them/us.
The network admins would refuse to participate in troubleshooting and no one else was allowed to use the sniffers. They would also do network work including taking switches and routers down during the nightly batch processing without notifying the "developers" who then got called at 4 AM to troubleshoot why "their" overnight processing failed.
The Oracle DBA said that it was not possible for the same query to take different lengths of time to run(at different times).
PC admins - no FTP GUI clients were on the list of approved software since the business users didn't need that type of product. No "shareware" allowed. They were starting to talk about no "shareware" for the UNIX servers around the time I was leaving
The security admins ruled that the r* commands are a "security risk" [period, blanket, no appeals] and the developers were give three weeks to change all the production processes - never mind that getting approval for a change request (from the tribunal of these idiots that run the change control "process") takes longer than that and all the code needs to be changed and tested before submitting the change request (into the IIS/VB million dollar change management system that could keep even the CIA from pulling any usable information from it). You will need to be prepared to justify any and all aspects of your project before the tribunal, even though they are the ones who are forcing you to make the changes.
The list goes on and on. My experience across many jobs (20 years) being both an admin and a developers, is that generally admins are less competent and more useless than developers. The order in terms of least knowledgeable and most "preventative":
1. Project Managers (completely and utterly useless)
2. Security Admin (most seem obsessed with think that make the least difference for true security - ie patching iPlanet so that it doesn't do HTTP TRACE) Their job usually also involves the slimy, salacious task of monitoring people's email and looking through http server logs for who's downloading porn)
2. (tied with security) Network Admins, won't help troubleshoot; nothing is wrong with the network; I can ping that machine from this one so its not the network; no you can't have any performance data about the net/router/switches its "confidential"; no you can't have the snmp password for the machines that you end up having to support because all the admins are useless, its "confidential"; no you can't use the sniffer, but its not the network so you don't need the sniffer anyway;
3. DBAs (The