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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.'"
There's a lot to be said for product familiarity. A lot of IT shops would rather live with a product's shortcomings than use unfamiliar technology,
VMWare is not ready for the desktop^M^M^M^M^M^M^M virtualized server!
The CIO is not "the boss" and those mandating sub-par tools are a liability to their employer.
At my work the sysadmin refuses to upgrade from SQL Server 2000 Standard Edition (which had its support discontinued several years ago, though he still hasn't installed the latest service pack from 2004 or so), despite the fact that we have a budget (and need) for a high end clustered system with a nice pretty SAN. 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.
Pity the poor admins - having to actually [shudder] do what their boss wants rather than having the boss catering to their whims and biases.
Right now, I'm in the process of implementing several projects that came down via fiat. In the process I've discovered that the products we bought don't work together. They don't do everything we expected they would do. And they are implemented on platform choices that the CIO, who purchased all this, has specifically stated we would not implement in our environment. I will be expected to make it all work now and in the future.
This isn't about simple whim. This is about people doing their jobs. 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 while everyone affects each other, we all have our little piece of the puzzle to hash out.
Maybe it's because Hyper-V isn't a mature product and VMWare is the best out there for virtualization.
You're being dishonest about your numbers anyway. For $50 million dollars, that's enough licensing to get Enterprise level support from VMWare for over 16,500 processors.
But the problem is that if Hyper-V doesn't work well, doesn't fit the needs of the company, why spend your hypothetical $10 million for a solution that doesn't work? That's the problem with clueless CIOs who look at the financial cost of something and balks rather than looks at what the goals they want to achieve and get the best solution for it. The cheaper option will always end up costing more money than the right solution.
It's a good attitude and would mod you up.
I'm the same way. In the past I've been given some bizarre direction. Sometimes it's the fault of IT management, but often the direction may come from the business side. There may be incentives to use a particular product. In some cases, the voodoo of corporate financing may dictate that they lease a product and a vendor may not have that option available so the company goes with a different and lesser product. I've even seen cases where a vendor gives huge incentives for buying a product suite that using a better product is difficult to justify.
But the attitude that you will work with what's given (up to a point :D ) I think is worthwhile.
I don't know anyone using the term "top-flight" for sysadmins either. Mostly they're just bad-ass motherfuckers. :)
But while we're using the term, all the "top-flight" "systems analysts" I've met couldn't sysadmin their way out of a wet paper bag. From what I can tell "analyst" is another word for "failing upwards".
I know many "top-flight" sysadmins and systems-focused software engineers. None of them call themselves "analysts".
Here's the best/worst example I've ever seen.
I used to work for a company that had a huge managed information infrastructure built up of a number of XML feeds from various business units that went through a custom, in-house, processing system, were categorized, databased, and aggregated out to various parties. The in house system was huge and idiosyncratic, but it worked. There were a number of people (2) who maintained it, and were well paid.
So the old company gets bought by the new company, and the new company derides the old system as worthless, fires all the developers, and discontinues the use of the code. The developers ask for, and are granted, the right to open source the code (who's going to want it, right?)
So the new company shops around to a bunch of third party people, and finds someone who is willing to take on the whole infrastructure for a nice low price. Managers are patting themselves on the back so hard they're getting shoulder problems, "This is so much better than that old crap system HA HA HA!"
Well, as I "migrate" all my information stuff it quickly becomes clear that no one at the new 3rd party company understands their processing software, but that all our old codes, all our weird categorizations...All that stuff still works. Well, that's damn peculiar.
The old processing system used to send back an acknowledgement if you sent it a certain series of codes, telling you receipt time, process time, etc, etc. So I sent up the codes, and got back a response, complete with software version information. Fuckers had taken our OWN CODE and SOLD IT BACK TO US, and like a bunch of morons, the goddamn PHBs had PAID for it!
There is a tendency to trust a 3rd party just because you don't know the problems they're having. Be wary, however, that they don't just turn around and make you pay for what you already had for free.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
As someone who currently uses VMWare products along side Hyper-V, if you are willing to walk out of your job because of this, you either are in an extremely specific situation that is so tailored to VMWare that it should take you all of 30 seconds to prove why only VMWare is an option ... or ... you're just a whiney little bitch.
VMware and Hyper-V while certainly different, they aren't so much so that there is any reason to walk out other than throwing a temper tantrum cause you didn't get your way. They both work, they both do the job they are supposed to do. They both have stengths and weaknesses, but neither of them has any strength that can't be accomplished indirectly with the other, and no weakness that can't be overcome indirectly.
If you're willing to walk out because of this choice, you probably don't have the skills to just walk into another job right now. Neither of them have a feature you can't do with a (sometimes hefty) script on the other.
So go ahead, walk out, they probably won't be that upset. Perhaps you should just accept that you don't always get your way, and its called 'work' for a reason.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
How much demand is there for top-flight buggy whip makers? Longbowmen? Flint-knappers?
As a sibling poster said, some. You're generalising on the basis of no data. Even in those areas "top-flight" people can -- and will, if they go independent rather than rely on someone else to employ them -- have a career. Here's one longbow manufacturer in China that employs 58 people; here's a buggy whip specialist in the US. (Flint-knapping was never really commercial, but there are still amateur associations, and some people even manage to make a living out of it.)
While this article correctly points out the problems with implementing an IT solution without significant and valued IT input; the same is true for IT driving a solution without significant user input hat is actually understood and included in the decision making process.
Too often, IT comes up with a solution that the think is cool, meets their needs, and is an abomination in the eyes of the end users. Yes, it has a cool underlying infrastructure, is easy to maintain, and has plenty of bells and whistles but unless it solves a problem, who (beyond IT) cares?
All too often, end users find ways around it and you wind up with a mess of one off apps taht IT is expected to support; leading to much whining about end users and the stupid things they are doing.
Unfortunately for IT, it usually comes down to "How much revenue did you generate?" and "Oh, you're a cost center. Let's see if out sourcing is cheaper." As one boss of mine put it, once our IT department brings in 30 mill a year in revenue they can have a say in how we conduct business. Unfortunately, the real problem - lack of communication and coordination - is never solved.
I have worked in places where IT and end users actually talked - usually smaller shops - and surprise surprise - it wasn't an adversarial relationship. They wouldn't always do what I asked, or would set something up with the understanding I was basically on my own from there out, or suggest a different supported solution - resulting in an environment where we simply got stuff done.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Contract workers don't have rights.
That clarifies the scenario. I suspect that your PHB-of-the-moment got this fecal matter dropped on him from on high. If you'd been listening at his door you probably would have heard him muttering to himself: "Get out that circuit board design by when?...oh noes...what to do? Ah! This calls for a human sacrifice!"
See, your PHB had to have an excuse to cover his butt. So he handed the brown mess to a contractor—i.e., somebody who doesn't even work for the company, and whom nobody cares about. Then he told his boss: "Man, that contractor from Dead Body Shops really screwed us over! What a totally incompetent idiot! But you know how those body shops are...man I certainly would never actually hire anybody like this!" At this point, all the upper-middle managers in the meeting are nodding sympathetically, because this is a well-known and efficacious ritual. They work themselves into a state of sincerely believing that it really wasn't your boss's fault, that you were a lazy, incompetent, crack-smoking moron (people will believe anything about a contractor once he ceases to exist in the local frame of reference). They will then absolve your ex-PHB of his sins, "cut him some slack", and "give him time to get the new guy (and future sacrifice) up to speed".
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
I left a job with nothing lined up. I even relocated with no firm leads. Worked out great. I picked the new location based on proximity of friends and family. That gave me three general areas. Then I narrowed it down to places with healthy job markets. That gave me two areas. Then I narrowed it down by climate which left me with one place. I was picking out furniture for my new office less than two weeks after I moved.
I don't think there was anything foolish about it. My job sucked ass. It was so bad that I was severely depressed towards the end. My boss even asked, "How much longer can you put up with this." I gave him a date and that was that. I spent a few weeks training the poor soul who replaced me then decompressed for a month. Nobody in their right mind would have hired me if they'd interviewed me towards the end of that job and I knew it. I needed to get out of there and get my head straight before trying to make a good first impression on a new potential employer.
Sound about rights. When I received the email from my manager (who also happened to be a contractor) which said, "Where's that circuit card design? If you can't do it, I'll find somebody who can," I knew for certain my time was up. I finished the design on Sunday morning and then sat-around surfing the net and watching my paycheck climb at $75 each hour. The axe fell two days later.
And I don't blame my manager, although that email threat was uncalled for. I blame the manager-of-the-manager-of-the-manager that made the idiotic promise to the U.S. government, "We'll have this whole crane design done by February 1." They were just trying to win themselves a 1 million dollar bonus, which I'm sure they never got. You simply can't do the impossible and even if you could, would YOU want to sit inside a crane that was designed in less than two months?
Not me.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
"sold"? More like bundled, i.e., buyers had no choice. When an XP upgrade was available, quite a number of people took it, enough so that MS had to extend XP's lifecycle and more hardware manufacturers started offering the upgrade.
Excuse me, wtf r u doin?