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Being Enron's SysAdmin
CowboyRobot writes "FreeBSD's Kirk McKusick has a long interview with Enron's former SysAdmin, Jarod Jenson, where he describes the nuts and bolts of working in and managing such a large-scale operation." From the article: "EnronOnline was a Web-based trading application. We had several hundred, even thousands of commodities that we would price in realtime, the same way that equities are priced. We were trying to push realtime pricing information out to clients who could do instantaneous transactions on them. People who are familiar with financial markets--the commodity markets--would recognize EnronOnline as sort of the same thing. We had a lot of the same issues that the markets had trying to push out realtime data--not only within our local network but also to the customers--as quickly as we could globally, and trying to make sure that what every trader saw on the screen matched what every company in the world had on theirs."
I wonder if EnronOnline had realtime showing of the stockholders assets flying out the window.
"rm -rf /" on everyone's machines.
Very interesting discussion about the relationship between developers and admins in TFA. My own take is that it's basically the only useful thing that team leads or managers can do anything about by setting the incentive structure for both to be somewhat similar.
Essentially, if a developer's job relies on the same thing that an admin's job relies on (that is, stable, secure and reliable operations) then you have the foundation for harmony. If a developer's job relies on features and new functionality at the expense of stability, security and reliability, you have a recipe for hostility.
You can tell the priorities at a company by how cranky its admins are.
On the other hand, admins need to be open and available to developers, offering advice on OS, hardware, infrastructure, etc. and be able to clearly define the requirements for SSR so that any new designs or requirements can be supported from day 1.
Oh, and a great way to get documentation from developers: give all their cell#s to the admins, so when something breaks at 3am on a sunday and there's no documentation, the admin has a little company. A few calls like that and developers can write some pretty handy documentation!
This was modded insightful? Bah. You statement shows a complete lack of understanding of the impact of the Enron collapse on many of its employees. The fact that he got another job is a simplistic, and quite frankly juvenile view of a major financial event in many peoples lives. Almost everyone who worked for Enron got another job. The Houston job market is pretty good, and particularly good for people with solid IT credentials. There was very little stigma associated with having Enron on your resume unless you were in the inner circle of Lay/Skilling/Fastauw.
The real impact was that many people at Enron had the vast majority of their personal savings in Enron stock or other Enron securities. The company management strongly pushed employees to do that, and there was significant corporate cultural pressure to invest ALL of your 401K in Enron stock. When the company tanked, people who had worked for years for Enron or one of the companies Enron had acquired suddenly went from having accumulated enough wealth to be close to retirement to having to start over. Plenty of stories of folks who at age 50 suddenly found themselves going from being worth millions on paper to having no life savings and no fiscal security. This happened to folks in a matter of weeks, and while it was happening compnay management was encouraging those employees to stay the course - hold the stock - as it would come back. It changed the lives of tens of thousands of people. I have one acquaintance who went from having 85,000 in a 401K, who got a settlement check for 43.00 from the bankruptcy court. Fourtunately he had other monies and the Enron investments really didn't change much for him long term, but I mention it to give you a sense of the scale of the collapse for folks.
The 'he got a job' comment may resonate with you folks who are young, have no long term obligations like a family, and are living paycheck to paycheck with no view of your future beyond how fast can I save up for a new Athlon dual core, but for those of us whose lives are a bit more established, it stinks.
Disclaimer - don't work for Enron, never did, no one in my family or close circle of friends did/does. But I do live in Houston and have seen what its done to good, honest people who did nothing wrong but believe the propaganda delivered by the people for which they worked.
"Would you, could you, with a goat?" Dr Seuss
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
I also worked at Enron, and we were trying to get money and hardware resources pumped into several open source projects, namely the OpenBSD project, because we were one of the companies trying to use it in our production environment. Unfortunately my layoff came before we could get anything signed, at which point there was nothing left to give.
Enron and its subsidiaries had a lot of great people working for them, and it was one of the few places where bright minds/tech people could get promoted for being great at what they did, and it didn't matter if you were some fresh-faced college graduate recruited for our analyst program or a guy who dropped out of high school but was brilliant at programming. It also left a lot of those bright people in a financial and professional lurch. What was worse than the sudden loss of employment was the loss of professional stature. I had prospective employers, even those in the energy trading business, actually deny me employment because I worked at Enron, as if I had something to do with their downfall as an upper level tech person. A lot of people thought we were part of some vast conspiracy, when many of us were the ones who got screwed in the process of Enron's downfall just like the other stock shareholders. The only difference between us and them is it was significantly more perseonal.
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