Slashdot Mirror
How Do You Keep Up with Enterprise-level Tech?
E1ven asks: "I'm curious how the Slashdot gang chooses to keep up with the performance of high-level equipment for servers, routers, loadbalancing, and the like? For PC-type specs it's easy, every guy and his dog has a review website, and magazines stuff themselves in every window. However, the higher-end equipment is far more difficult to find trustworthy analysis of.
I'm curious how other people have solved this problem, and what resources they use to keep on top of the game?"
Get a tech job at a major enterprise and let them educate you on the subject. It worked for me...
Sounds like you work at the same company I work at.. Except you are missing one thing:
We have to go with this option because it is the absolute cheapest.
In companies where the tech team drives the tech, I have seen a group of computers set aside for experimentation. They won't spend too much time on it, but from time to time, they'll try something out to see if it is promising.
If you can find a company where mangement listens to tech, it is usually pretty easy to justify this experimentation lab environment. You still have to show how having it is better than not having it, and how much it will cost over the next three years. But that's no different than any other project in techland.
Companies where the upper management drives tech decisions are generally not the best places to work. I tend to avoid them. I guess I've been lucky because of my particular micro-field (e-commerce perl programmer), while others I know always end up in top-down organizations (java programmers).
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Aren't a few of those companies on the "don't have a clue"/"will parrot any opinion for a price" list?
I make no claims about the quality of opinions. And they may even have opinions that you disagree with! But if you're looking for opinions, forecasts, comparisons and analysis, it's there. Sure, some may be biased, but how could it be worse than just going straight to vendors?
Besides, most of them just repeat what other users are doing... so if you ask what OS to use, they just tell you what everyone else uses. Lame perhaps, but usually not outright corrupt.
I like Gartner, for example. All those magic quadrants and hype cycle curves may be lame, but there's usually a lot of information condensed in there.