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Dirty Duty On the Front Lines of IT
snydeq writes "Jobs may be scarce in today's economy, but there's no shortage of nasty IT work — as the third annual installment of InfoWorld's Dirty IT Jobs series demonstrates. From the payroll cop to the coolant jockey to the network sherpa who has to squeeze into rodent-filled spaces and deal with penny-pinching clients, these seven jobs provide further proof that dirty duty abounds on the front lines of IT."
I've gone through my share of cluttered closets, dusty vents, underneath dirty desks, and cleaned the fluff off of old computers.
However, nothing makes me feel dirtier than installing Windows Genuine Advantage, as part of the new computer deployment checklist.
It depends on the accounting method you use.
If you use the one typically used by non-technical MBA managers when making technical decisions, it is cheaper. But that's only because they're concerned with quarterly results, and most software projects take at least a year.
Furthermore, these guys typically don't last more than a couple of years at any given place. Between when a project starts and when it's finally delivered (usually one or two years late, and very broken) we have a three to five year gap. So while they're still with the company, they can talk about all these great "initiatives" they've started, and how this software developed in India will be cheap and boost productivity. But by the time the shit hits the fan, the management who pushed for the software in the first place are long gone, pulling the same stunt at some new employer.
Usually, I end up throwing out what the Indians have shit out, and redo it all myself. It takes me longer to sort though their crap and try to fix their work than it takes me just to redo it all from scratch.
So considering the cost over the entire development lifetime of the project, the client ends up paying a large amount of money to the offshore Indian team (say, $X), and then they end up paying me some amount of fix it. I usually do it for far less than the Indian team, because unlike them, I know what I'm doing and I don't fuck around.
Just paying for good work in the first place would save these companies huge amounts of money. But the MBAs just can't figure this out (or don't want to).
"IT" is, as you say, a very broad term, so there is nothing at all unusual or problematic about having Real Serious Software Engineers, PhDed computer scientists, and basic server screwdriver monkeys under that heading.
Take the analogy of "Public health": Public health means MDs, and PhD epidemiologists, and biochemists and stuff; but it also means the sweaty guy with the pipe wrench who makes sure that your water comes up your water pipe, your sewage goes down your sewage pipe, and the two don't get confused on their way to your mouth. Same goes for the dubiously literate kid at McDonalds who checks the core temperature of the "beef" patty because the pictograms in the employee handbook told him to.
Obviously, any screwdriver jockey who calls himself a "hardware engineer" just because he replaces dead hard drives when the SAN LEDs change color to tell him to needs a smacking. As does any ITT Tech Java monkey who calls himself a "software engineer". However, the idea that "IT" consists exclusively of upper-echelon engineering experts is transparently silly. A huge percentage of the labor involved in making a real-world IT system run basically has little or no relationship with hardware or software engineering at all.
I am in IT because I grew up on a farm on the Great Plains.
I farmed, ranched and knew folks with pig farms, all of that motivated me to get a job where I didn't have to smell those things or get covered in hydraulic fluid on a regular basis.
Yep, so remember, folks: if you make lingerie, you can't call it "very sexy" because Victoria's Secret has trademarked it (no, really), and if you make baked goods, you can't say they're "fresh from scratch" because Schlotzky's has trademarked it (no, really).
I don't know how well these trademark claims have stood up, but know for a fact I felt brain cells dying away when I saw these companies actually trying to claim IP rights in these terms for their product lines. Not just the outrageousness of trying to own these terms, but the fact that their marketing drones couldn't think of something more original!
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
Bus Principal is only employed after it actually happens. We had this very same discussion years ago, then one day, one of the techs woke up dead.
Took the rest of the team better part of a month to get things all torn down and put back together because nobody had the keys to anything.
It will not happen again. Once was enough
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
It's amazing how utterly disgusting office workers can be.
Absolutely. As one who has had the "pleasure" of moving/removing equipment, it is amazing at how disgusting some people are. I distinctly remember one case where I had to go to some machines and do a manual update. As I leaned over to put my fingers on the keys of a keyboard, I paused as I looked down and saw, as Tyr is my witness, that there was fungus or something growing from between the keys.
If you saw the movie Apollo 13 as they were preparing to fire up the command module for reentry and Kevin Bacon paused before asking about what the effect of the condensation would be on the electronics, yeah, that was me too when I saw this keyboard.
There are several people in the building where I work where I swear they eat their crackers directly over the keyboard. How they can possibly think that is hygienic or that the keyboard will function properly is beyond me.
And let's not forget the people who have to stack twenty pounds of pictures, in frames, Beanie Babies (remember those?), lotion bottles and other goodies all over their desks.
If a fire were to break out and clear out a few of these rooms, that would only be a good thing.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Imagine the hilarity when they realize they paid twice for the project, and one of the costs is already in the house...
Judging by how most workplaces function, his employer would immediately source the in-house cost. Then they'd end up with one offshore code house fixing another offshore code house's mistake. They'd still pay twice for the work, but now it would be "aligned to strategy."
We went through this just a few months ago, as a tiny coder shop. We needed an Asterisk IVR built, had never done it before and didn't have time to learn, so we contracted out to an offshore company who were supposedly experts with Asterisk, as referred to us by a business acquaintance. We actually ended up with a working product, but it took so much hand-holding and error checking that by the time they delivered the final version, I knew more about Asterisk than they did, mostly because I read the PHPAGI docs a bit more thoroughly. And it was about 6 weeks late on a 2 week timeline. Face, meet egg.
The 10-hour timezone shift was a massive PITA. The communication hurdles led to poor quality output, because instead of asking us proper questions, they'd "play dumb" and do it wrong, seemingly on purpose hoping we wouldn't notice I guess. Every time they'd jiggle some code, we had to retest our entire flowchart and bark at them for every failure. Maybe I'm a hopeless idealist, but I like to think of contractors as a black box: work order goes in, completed work comes out. In my mind, that includes testing, especially since we had crystal clear pass/fail scenarios.
I'm sure there are some Indian shops that are worth the money (bell curve), but this one clearly wasn't. Sure, they were cheap, but I ended up doing more work to support them than had I done it all from scratch, so it ended up costing more. On the upside, I am now modestly self-sufficient in writing PHP scripts to drive Asterisk; another random skill I never wanted in the first place.
-Billco, Fnarg.com