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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.'"
'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 had read the entire article, you would find that they are going to run vmware inside the hyper-v instances, so everything will work out in the end.
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.
In other words, don't be an incompetent manager. Incompetent managers hire people whose expertise they distrust so they can waste time and effort second-guessing their motives and use their authority to undermine technical decisions that should instead be made with facts and logic. This behavior is a bit like paying a doctor to diagnose a disease and then calling him a liar when he makes the diagnosis - if you honestly believe you know medicine better than the doctor does, why would you hire him? It should surprise no one that this behavior, especially when it occurs in a top-down environment where calling bullshit could get you fired rather than respected for your honesty, can only alienate your staff. It's also no great leap of logic to conclude that the brightest and most talented workers (IT or any other) don't wish to be alienated and don't want the neurotic load caused by regular reminders that the person who hired them for their expertise does not trust their expertise.
Some of the best managers are delegators who do not micromanage more than what is necessary for business or legal reasons. They hire good people whose decisions can be trusted and then they let those people make good decisions with minimal interference. They're also open to suggestions for how processes and methods can be improved and whether it would be economical to replace existing tools with superior ones, with "superior" being defined by the needs of the business and how well they can be met with a particular solution. The control freaks and the ones who want to deemphasize the contributions of subordinates so they can look good just don't understand these things, to the cost of everyone who has to work under them. In fact, I wish a dollar figure could be calculated that would show how costly this type of manager really is.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Why would you want something else indeed.
Because we IT folk are not trustworthy with money. If left to our own devices, we tend to geek out on cool new tech that is untested and has not proven its stability in any meaningful markets. Unless we are kept on a tight leash, we will start many projects in parallel, never finishing any, just because we want to do fun things instead of work.
At least that's the vibes my management gives off. Frankly, I don't know where this comes from. I mean it's not like I'd want to constantly work around annoying bugs. One would think it would be in my interest first and foremost to have infrastructures that works. Me being the storage and backup guy, it would fall to me to restore lost data so you can bet your ass, your family and your eternal soul that I'll stay away from the cool stuff as far away as possible. I want the reliable stuff.
See, in my company we've had to increase our budget estimates because we knew that management would cut them to shreds anyway. We had to make sure what would be left would be enough to do anything at all. It's basically a self-fullfilling prophecy: They don't trust us and tie our hands in so many ways that we have to start to lie to them to get anything done.
It's frustrating and I, for one, am fed up with it, because on top of it all, when something eventually breaks, it suddenly becomes your fault again. That and the meagre salary I get make me wish I had done something worthwhile. Being a carpenter sounds really neat compared.
Sorry for the rant.
"... 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.
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.
Once when I was leaving a job (because my family was moving) I had plenty of lead time to give notice, and, among other things, I was asked to draft the job description for my replacement. One of the things that I put in that was, "never leave the boss alone with a salesman." My boss chuckled at this, but somehow that bit did get cut from the final version.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky