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The Perils of Ramming Products Down IT's Throat
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Paul Venezia takes issue with the all-too-familiar practice of management dictating IT solutions to admins savvy enough to know the fiat revolves around far inferior products, in this case Nissan North America's embracing of Microsoft's Hyper-V. 'Very rarely do unilateral decisions by CIOs make for solid IT infrastructures, and they are generally at odds with what the admins on the ground are communicating,' Venezia writes, noting that upper managers who succumb to vendor tricks face a far worse fate than an infrastructure based on inferior technology — one devoid of the kind of expertise necessary to make the best of their flawed purchasing decisions. 'If continuously faced with the specter of having to implement and support clearly inferior products due to baffling, uneducated management decisions, top-flight admins will simply head elsewhere.'"
This sounds suspiciously like a whining threat, rather than a fact. How does the author know what fraction of admins leave in a situation like this?
Sure, many admins probably consider leaving when crap like this happens. Heck, I consider leaving my job whenever a purchase takes too long to go through.
But this summary sounds like a barely veiled threat to upper management: a claim that if you do this, your good admins will leave. I want evidence for such a claim before I believe it.
Exactly. My entire attitude has changed. I still provide my input at work, do what I can to guide the decision makers toward what I think are the right decisions. But then if they make the wrong decision, I move on and keep doing my job. Maybe they could have done things better, but who cares? I'm still working.
Whale
Just like every other industry that has to buy products, rarely do the experts have much say in which products would work the best.
How can you hold authority when you have to get the workers to make the decisions for you? Today it's which widget to buy, tomorrow it's how many hours they have to work, and next week, they'll be supervising themselves!
So here, employees, make the best of this Z-brand Widget that doesn't fit your needs at all. We bought 10,000 of them, and so help you if you don't use every single one of them.
Did I mention that Z-brand sent us managers to Vegas for a few days? Of course I didn't, because workers shouldn't know what goes on elsewhere in the company!
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
'If continuously faced with the specter of having to implement and support clearly inferior products due to baffling, uneducated management decisions, top-flight admins will simply head elsewhere.'
Yeah, because the job market is just that good right now.
If you are "top-flight" the market has no control over you. Your job security is your knowledge and skills, not the salary you get every month.
If you can't mod them join them.
It's like being a contractor, using a pneumatic hammer, and having the foreman come up to you and insist you use a carrot to perform your nailing. Then the boss expresses discontent at your declining performance, especially since he made an executive decision he thought would make things works better.
Yeah, it sounds like a dumb analogy, but human civilizations have been building structures much longer than your boss has had exposure to IT concepts. I'll be happy to stand by my carrot analogy and relate real-world examples.
Admins are there for their expertise. If you show blatant contempt for that, don't be surprised if they flee. They will do so because of the expectation that they will be blamed when you ignore their advice and things go wrong.
Admins have to clean up after your poo.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Personally, I wouldn't work for ANY company that dictated IT solutions to its IT people.
You either trust your engineers, or you don't. It's as simple as that. You went to school, learned, practiced, gained experience, and work doing what you do for a living so you CAN be trusted. An employer that doesn't understand this is probably doomed to fail anyway. Thats what happens when people don't trust engineers. Bridges fail, cars catch on fire, foam falls off of solid rocket boosters, and yup, IT solutions fail to solve problems.
The headaches your job provides may end up being too much for the benefit. It may be worth it to people.
Even if you don't judge it worth leaving, are you telling me that if management was constantly saying "use X" when it's not even in the right class, you wouldn't prepare to leave when the opportunity came? You don't want to have to fix problems that you predicted and warned against ahead of time forever.
Remember, you don't have to leave until you have a new job. You could slowly look on the sly for 6 months or a year.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
here at my work, management makes 'plug and play' purchasing decisions; they just want to but something and plug it in. It doesn't matter that their are open source alternatives that can save them thousands of dollars a year. It doesn't matter that these may be better or better tested. They feel like they will have to rely upon internal staff to support these tools and they would rather be able to contract out support.
They fail to understand how IT works and how the people who work for them work on a day to day basis. In their world's, everything would be perfect if everything ran under a GUI, was automated and supported outside the company. These are the things that define 98% of managers buying decisions.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Indeed... which is funny, because no where in the actual article does Nissan say they regretted the decision.
And that guys opinion misses the point; when people say they are an MS shop, they're talking servers / workstations.. nobody cares AT ALL what OS the switch or router is running..
The only non-computer device where I wish there was a different OS is my cable box, which runs linux. The reason I wish it ran something else? It locks up quite a bit, and takes forever to reboot.
Yeah its funny how hiring employers require tons of experience, yet ignore it once you get the job.
How much demand is there for top-flight buggy whip makers? Longbowmen? Flint-knappers?
Of course the market has an effect.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
His whole rant is based on the "fact" (assumed) that Hyper-V doesn't meet Nissan's needs. He has no idea what Nissan needs. He has no idea if Hyper-V does or does not meet those needs.
VMWare is indeed very mature and full of features, some of which are missing from Hyper-V. Now let's pretend we aren't snide little commentators and dig in more. What does Hyper-V have that VMWare doesn't? Like... an affordable price? Like...being built into and integrated with Windows Server 2008 very well?
Worthless article picked for SlashDot solely because the author makes nonsensical rants against a Microsoft product.
A more insightful article might have been about IT and IT pundits sometimes like to pretend _they_ are the business. Your boss will set certain parameters for you to do your job. Now sometimes they may just seem TOTALLY CRAZY, I mean like "don't spend $50 million on a virtualization solution, instead spend $10 million on this other product we've got a deal for with Microsoft to get much more cheaply". Crazy to save money though, I know. It's all about the admins and their expertise, right
"top-flight" admins exist? I mean, I'm sure that "top-flight" systems analysts and what not exist, but admins?
I know some very good admins, but I don't think the job field for those folks allows as much mobility as, say, a "top-flight" developer
As an aside, "top-flight"? I think this is the first half-dozen times I've ever used that term. Is this some sort of recent linguistic import to the IT field?
What is really unfortunate is that IT disasters that the rest of us could really learn from, seldom see the light of day for fear of legal action, career blight, or the taint of guilt by association. Every once in a while I think about what I'd put in an "anti-case-study", the stories we admiins could tell.....
There are a million "Hyper-V versus VMware versus Xen" articles on the web, take 10 minutes and read 4 or 5 of them, hell, take half an hour and do some in-depth surfing :-) First out of Google for me was this little gem from the 360 blog:
VMware versus Xen versus Hyper-V.
"You either trust your engineers, or you don't. It's as simple as that."
When it comes to IT, "Engineers" (forgive the quotes if you are actually an honest-to-goodness Engineer) sometimes CAN'T be completely trusted because they suffer from any of the following:
- AIHIAH syndrome - pronounced "eye-eye-ah" ("All I have is a hammer" - java/visual basic come to mind)
- "I've Seen The Light!" (religious worship of open source to the exclusion of everything else)
- "Sure I tried it, it don't work." Failure to actually test alternatives to his/her "preferred" solution.
So while you might be comfortable having somebody like this maintain the existing environment, they probably shouldn't be entrusted with decisions about the future.
Of course some IT folks are talented, open-minded, and diligent about testing alternatives. Treasure these. But don't automatically grant this kind of trust to every IT person.
Except that often the manager has no clue what he's talking about.
Bottom line is that managers know about the business side of things - how the numbers work (even that's deabatable, but I'll give them as a group the benefit of the doubt). However, IT's exepertise is in the technology side of things. When either starts trying to assert authority outside of their area you get crap results.
In general my approach is that I'll do anything they want if they push the issue (keeping full documentation of just WHO called what shots in those cases), but I'll flat out tell them as nicely as possible: "Look, you hired me based on my expertise. If you're trusting that decision, then you're also trusting that I wouldn't steer your wrong when it comes to something like this. Your idea will not work because ________.". If they still want to try a dumb thing then so be it, but I'll also remind them (nicely) when the SHTF that it was their decision.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Not really. The market always has an effect. Regardless of your skills and knowledge, if there is no demand for those skills, you won't have employment. Once you have a job, your job security *should* be based on your skills and knowledge. (I say should because there are other factors out of your control, some of which are artificial due to government regulation) But the market always has an influence on your employment, regardless of what you know.
At my work the sysadmin refuses to upgrade from SQL Server 2000 Standard Edition...despite the fact that we have a budget (and need)... The execs are now pushing it because we're getting deadlocks constantly, but the admin insists that if everyone would stop using the database to do anything, we'd be fine, and refuses to upgrade.
Re-apply the budget. Upgrade the admin instead.
Cheers,
Ian
This is happening because your "admin" is an inexperienced idiot. He is refusing the upgrade because he is afraid that it is going to make him look foolish when he doesn't "know" the new system.
This doesn't solve your problem, but at least now you know what is going on.
This is not the same as what the article is addressing. What TFA is talking about is when admins know more about the topic at hand than their bosses, but their bosses power-trip their way into failure.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
It's fun to watch a coin land on its edge, and about as likely.
On my planet, it works more like this: the CIO and your manager were frat buddies (whether that's a coincidence is left as an exercise for the reader) and one day when they're playing golf the subject of you, and what a disobedient little asshat you are[1], comes up. Your job goes to India, and by Newton's laws you go out the door.
[1] HR would express it as having a weakness in interpersonal skills, an inabilty to see the big picture, and reluctance to be a team player. No matter, you're fired anyway.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
How much demand is there for top-flight buggy whip makers? Longbowmen? Flint-knappers?
Some. More importantly, if you're a top-flight longbowman, surely you are versatile and can translate those skills into using a recurve bow. Why then, you can compete in archery events and endorse products and make a good living.
Likewise if you're a top-flight sys-admin then surely your skills are not completely in one product, but in the ability to learn products quickly and well and in overall knowledge of procedures and organization. Likewise part of being a top-flight sys-admin is staying current with technology, just as being a top-flight archer is keeping up with the latest bows and techniques. The market might affect how much money and what benefits you are likely to get moving to a new job, but the top-flight people I know in every field are smart enough to know money isn't everything and it's better to take a lower paying job playing with cool toys and enjoying yourself all day, rather than the best paying job dealing with idiots and broken junk that is frustrating and unrewarding.
Incidentally, this is why $100 worth of beer on the company expense account provided in the fridge at work is going to be worth a lot more than $100 divided up as higher salary among your workers.
There probably do exist "top-flight" admins. But, like most professions, even "top-flight" personel can be replaced, even if sometimes you need to hire an entire department to replace a single employee.
The only time you can't be replaced is if your skillset is unique AND your job can only be done by one single person.
An employee that can think or perform in a unique way cannot be replaced because no matter how many others you hire, they won't think the same way.
An employee that is 10x better than others CAN be replaced; by 10 others.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
The thing is, the contractors have already established what the best tools are to use. If a contractor changes their tools from eg. DeWalt to Ridgid (or whatever cheap/underpowered manufacturer you can find at Home Depot and Lowe's) because the salesman took them out to lunch and went golfing with them then the contracting business won't last very long since the thing will keep breaking every day/week or so. Eventually the people working will either walk out before the business is bankrupt or the boss will change back to the original brands.
The issue with IT is that nobody can really measure how well something new (or old) is doing. And thanks to Microsoft, people have gotten used to servers restarting and people being unable to work for computer-related issues for minutes or even hours. It also depends on your admins. A good admin will hardly have to restart a server while a rookie will always do it since that's for him the easiest way to restart a particular service. Also, a lot of products that are good are expensive and a lot of products that are bad can be kept together somewhat by a good admin. The boss-man doesn't really care whether the whole system is teetering on a small string, as long as it works somewhat they will be happy. Software usually works initially and under certain specifications it will always work but it will become unstable over time or under specific conditions and then the admin will get the blame. With the advances in remote capabilities and the ubiquity of the Internet it's like a contractor always having a technician available with all backup tools and spare parts available in less than 5 minutes. If that were the case, the contractor might not worry about having tools break in the middle of work, they just give it to the technician that will be able to fix it.
Off course the sh*t always hits the fan later on and it's usually when the decision makers have moved on or put themselves out of blame by a (or a series of) good quarterly report. Usually it's when the technician (to use the contractor example) is on vacation on a cruise for 2 weeks (that's a really great excuse/vacation if you're an always-on-call admin) or he has been hit by a bus.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
DREAM ON
Real talent, knowledge and skills are no defense. There are plenty of people in HR and other decision making positions who will underestimate and undervalue some while overestimating and overvaluing others. I have seen some truly good people go while some real dirt-bags stay employed and I'm sure others have seen this story played out a thousand times before. And when it starts affecting the longevity on the resume, it doesn't matter how good you are. Employers will see short-term job hopping and wonder if the reason isn't you.
"... who cares?"
You can always be philosophical:
Hyper-V R2 is the Zune of virtualization. Someone needs to write articles about how it isn't so bad, really, like they do for the Zune MP3 player. Vista is the Zune of operating systems. Steve Ballmer, who has little technical knowledge, is the Zune of CEOs. It's a company-wide concept at Microsoft: You don't have to be good to make money, just tricky. That's my opinion, but I'm not the only one.
Pity the poor admins - having to actually [shudder] do what their boss wants rather than having the boss catering to their whims and biases.
Part of being the admin is having a more integral understanding of what your boss wants than she does.
If you ARE just doing exactly as the boss thinks she wants, then your job is likely either obsolete, or your are a reset-button-specialist, not an admin.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
You have to be careful though.
Sometimes "they" will set you up such that, when failure happens, they blame you not themselves. This happened to me where I was suddenly shifted from my usual task of documentation to a board design. I've done board designs in the past, but usually I had several months to review the project, contact parts suppliers, et cetera. They only gave me 2 weeks to finish the task. I said this is an impossible schedule but they didn't want to hear it. Worse - I didn't have the necessary tools on my machine. Even though my manager immediately submitted the request for OrCad install on my PC, it took them a week to get it done.
So long story made short - I worked 100 hours over two pre-Christmas weekends (instead of shopping for my kids' presents) trying to finish a circuit card schematic, layout, and parts list in just *1* week. When I handed it over 1 day past their desired date, first they bitched at me because it had errors (well of course - that's what happens when you RUSH things) and then they blamed me for not meeting their unrealistic schedule. I didn't even get to defend myself and say, "The management was to blame with an unrealistic schedule." I was simply shown the door.
And no you can't sue. Contract workers don't have rights.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I think the thing people are missing here is that our stereotypical "top-flight" admin is not going to hear about the new Hyper-V deployment, throw up his hands and walk out onto the street. He's going to hear about it, argue against it, tell his boss it's a bad idea, and eventually, if the decision was particularly horrid or part of a pattern of bad decisions, start looking for a new job. After he finds a new job (which given the economy may take a bit longer than usual, but *will* happen if he really is that good), then he'll walk out.
Bad management decisions don't result in an immediate loss of talent (unless the bad decision is firing the talented people of course), they result in a gradual drain of talent. Whether you've lost all your good people in a single moment of terrible decision making, or lost them over the course of the last year as they got frustrated and left, you've still lost them.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
until you read the referenced Nissan article, and realise that maybe the "good relationship with Microsoft that we leverage and utilize" was worth more to them than filling the feature gaps in Hyper-V vs. VMWare/XenServer. It's even possible that the MS "good relationship" discounts they're most likely enjoying are what allowed them to move forward with the project in the first place. If either of those are the case, then how can you fault the CIO on this decision?
body massage!
...You don't want to have to fix problems that you predicted and warned against ahead of time forever.
I can think of many unemployed grads who would beg for that kind of job security. Keeping a CYA folder documenting your warnings and opinions and use it to deflect unfair blame, then beef up your troubleshooting skills and ingenuity cobbling together broken solutions. You'd be one of the valuable few who knows what the hell is going on when the house of cards begins to fall.
If the situation becomes hostile and/or abusive (as often happens when a single morsel of meat is thrown in a cage with starving dogs), it's lawsuit time. Those with medical insurance could go under the care of a shrink and tell him that the stress of the job is causing them to feel suicidal, then they could have a nervous breakdown and claim disability. Employers will think twice about using hard-working employees as whipping boys when they're paying for 'em to sip Mai Tais on the beach every day for a year.
"The issue with IT is that nobody can really measure... thanks to Microsoft..."
Preaching to the choir my man. Someone else once said "Failure is not an option! It comes standard with every Microsoft product."
Did you not understand at the outset that you were being set up for failure?
He's insisting on keeping databases on SQL Server 2000. He doesn't know what in the fuck he's doing.
Maybe they could have done things better, but who cares? I'm still working.
fair enough, and there is a lot to be said that inferior technology that works is good technology, even if you think you could do better with something else. (the collorary of that is that sometime the existing tech is fine, yet plenty of "hotshot" admins/coders/geeks think they know better)
However, in the cases where the technology is truly bad (like the "Enterprise-class" software we have to use at work) then you will only harm your self-confidence, your sense of self-worth and your overall satisfaction with yourself. After a while you'll start to not give a damn about other things too, and your skills will slowly fade, and the next thing you know - you're stuck in a crappy job you hate.
Sometimes you need to vote with your feet, there are plenty of jobs still out there - you may have to do well in the interview, 'cos they're not hiring any chimp who brings a copy of 'C# for dummies' with him, but good people will always be employed.
I'm there. I have the resume, and history to prove I know my job. It's been about 2 years of downhill slide, where things went from bad to worse to ... well ... I have all kinds of time to write on here now. I do odd jobs, look for real IT employment, and surf the web.
Nope, it's not about who you know, or what skills you have. It's not even about who drops dead any more. Back in the day, if someone died (or retired, whatever), that position would be filled by someone else. Now, if a position becomes empty, it's simply declared unneeded, and never filled. You'd be amazed how many IT guys I had to knock off to find that their positions weren't being filled by anyone. :)
(For the feds reading, I'm just kidding about that last part. Now please review my file again.)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
The high-up management deals with the big picture. The folks in the trenches deal with all the technical details that can make or break a project.
And in your scenario, management is not dealing with the big picture. Management needs to define the objectives (Email, filesharing, website), and the sysadmins work out the details (Exchange/Postfix/qmail, SMB/NFS, Apache/IIS). Probably the deepest they should meddle should be regarding third-party compatibility ("We need .doc support").
"The thing is, the contractors have already established what the best tools are to use."
Actually, at least in the house building market in NZ, there's been a rash of really poor new buildings built in the last 20 years, by developers making a quick buck. Houses that leak, that rot, that are just poorly designed and shoddily built in every way. Whereas the houses built 50 years ago from older tools and materials are still going strong.
And this is by registered builders who really ought to know better.
Moral: It's not just IT that sacrifices quality for speed or cost and gets away with it - because the market doesn't always react in time, and the penalties for poor performance don't always catch up with the people who make the bad decisions.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
the [London Stock] Exchange will replace its .NET trading platform with the acquisition of MilleniumIT, a company based on Sri Lanka with strong backgrounds on Solaris
London Stock Exchange to dump Microsoft-based trad...
Well, "Top-Flight" Admins may not necessarily exist but "Bottom of the Barrel" Admins sure do. It may not be easy initially to spot the difference. Garbage Admins may be able to answer some technical questions that you throw at them if they have dealt with the tech you are discussing. After you hire them on you'll see that they can perform some basic tasks, have no desire to learn anything new, have no idea how to handle problems they have never encountered, and are too lazy to do anything but the absolutely minimum amount of maintenance that they can get by with doing to keep the systems from bursting into flames. Their idea of a job well done will be calling in a consultant to fix a problem while they stand there slack jawed, helpless, and generally not bothering to find out how to fix it themselves if it happens again.
what should be a metric at least as good as LOC is for programmers,
You do know that LOC is a truly lousy metric for programmers, I hope?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Sometimes "they" will set you up such that, when failure happens, they blame you not themselves.
IT: "But I TOLD you it wouldn't work!"
MGMT: "Yes. You told me. But you did not CONVINCE me."
Paraphrased from The Last King of Scotland.
People don't leave all at once like you say what you get is the Dead Sea Effect.http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/12/2241216
Most of these companies would rather have a cheap admin from India with poor communication skills and worse tech savvy.
The Indian would be on contract and would not add to head count. They will happily pay more for bad service because they really don't care if IT is done well. They do care about head count. If something goes really wrong they will change companies and get another admin who can't speak English or manage a system. Problem solved.
However, in the cases where the technology is truly bad (like the "Enterprise-class" software we have to use at work) then you will only harm your self-confidence, your sense of self-worth and your overall satisfaction with yourself. After a while you'll start to not give a damn about other things too, and your skills will slowly fade, and the next thing you know - you're stuck in a crappy job you hate.
Only if you base your self-esteem on your job. I got out of that rat-trap a long time ago. Work is work; it's not life nor your identity. Work is a lot more enjoyable now, and the challenges and assholes easier to surmount when my whole sense of self-worth does not hinge on the outcome.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
>>>Instead, immediately start looking for a new job.
Oh I did. But there's none out there. Literally. So I was basically trapped with nowhere to go. After all, how many jobs are hiring the week before Christmas?
>>>they have to pay you for all overtime.
I know. I earned $9,000 in just two weeks. I knew I was screwed, but I made sure to screw them back and take as many hours as I could squeeze-in before the firing happened. On the day of termination they left me "finish the day out" so I charged 13 hours instead of the usual 8. Fuck the bastards up the ass.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Perhaps you should have just spent that time getting a new job?
And don't say there aren't any, since last month offers have been great as far as I can tell.
I'll take that bet. I can beat 17k a year working at starbucks and so can the kid. But hell, maybe the kid is actually smart, works for a year, then demands back pay with documentation supporting the notion that the job is a 100hr/wk thing and the management damn well knew it going in. even at 9.61/hr, treble damages and 100hr/wk actual salary can make things very expensive for the employer
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Lets be honest here. How many of us are actually "top-flight"? I'd be willing to bet a whole lot less than the number of people who respond in the affirmative. Given that we're not likely to be top-flight, no matter what we think, your advice has relevance for only a vanishingly small number of admins, most of whom probably don't need to hear it anyway. As for the rest of us, we do need to worry about the job market. There are going to be fewer jobs, as companies find that they're able to limp along with two or three fewer developers and sysadmins than is optimal.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
An employee that is 10x better than others CAN be replaced; by 10 others.
Even if the employee can't be replaced by 10 others, management isn't going to fire the 10 people they just hired and rehire the old employee at his or her previous salary. Doing so would be a blatant admission of failure by whoever did the original firing and replacement.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
If you drink beer. My company has beer-30 on Friday afternoons. I hang out sometimes, but get no supposed benefit from the generosity. (The break from work isn't too bad, though.)
Upgrading to a new major revision of a core system component has non-trivial risks.
Running an unsupported release that hasn't been patched in 5 years is also a risk, and may be a SOX violation.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Sorry, but often putting 10 people on the same job one genius could do in a week results in a year long project that never reaches its goals. It's "The Mythical Man Month" at work.
--- It is not the things we do which we regret the most, but the things which we don't do.
Likewise if you're a top-flight sys-admin then surely your skills are not completely in one product, but in the ability to learn products quickly and well and in overall knowledge of procedures and organization.
And the human resources troll reading a paragraph like that doesn't see ACME-FOOLATOR 12.5 WITH MEGA-XML, and tosses your resume in the garbage.
Yeah, yeah, I know, networking and all that.