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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.
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.
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
"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.
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.
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.
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.
Did you not understand at the outset that you were being set up for failure?
"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
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.
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
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.