Slashdot Mirror
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."
The hardest part of Andrew Bonar's job is convincing the world he's not a spammer. It's not easy. Just having "email deliverability consultant" on his business cards is enough to start the Viagra jokes.
Somehow I don't think Andrew Bonar's job title is the reason for the Viagra jokes.
I fix the horribly shitty code written by offshore Indian "developers".
The crap and stupidity I encounter from them daily is far worse than dealing with rodents, or cramped spaces, or spending months on the high seas.
If anybody thinks their IT job is dirty, they are sorely in need of a reality check.
I have relatives that run pig farms.
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's amusing that these guys are sometimes lumped in with actual programmers under the terribly wide "IT" catchall. I'd liken it to calling garbagemen "sanitation engineers", but that's probably a bit mean.
With a name like that. But ...
Dude, if your clients are going to "bend the rules" then they are spammers.
Deal with it.
Can someone please call an ambulance? I think these sentences may have caused my head to explode.
Dislike the Electoral College? Lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
So, is it cheaper to hire idiots to write most of the code and then hire someone smart later to fix it?
"The geek personality is very different," says Bectel. "I've worked in a lot of different markets, and techies have much higher expectations for coverage than virtually any one else. It's because they're so passionate about what they do, and they expect everyone else to be equally passionate about it."
The one line explanation of /.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Starting as a peon in I.T., I saw my share of giant spiders and rats in . Harrowing work of a cable runner. Good motivation to get that career moving, though!
> So, is it cheaper to hire idiots to write most of the code and then hire someone smart later to fix it?
Doesn't the question answer itself? What's cheaper in the long run - install plumbing and wiring *while* the house is being built or afterwards?
Leave the gun, take the cannolis.
No, it's generally not, although you will usually get a product of some sort quickly. It's best to think of it as 'disposable software', which I suppose os fine in a few rare situations.
"As a computer science teacher at an East Coast high school, Smith became concerned when the district bought single-user licenses of Adobe Creative Suite and Microsoft Office, then installed them on network servers where 5,000 users could access them.
Smith says he approached his superiors and the district's IT department and explained why that was wrong, but to no avail. So one day he called the Business Software Alliance and reported them...a few months after he contacted the BSA, his employers purchased legal licenses for its software."
With what money, you self-righteous scumbag? This is a SCHOOL, and they're making do with what they have. It's not a for-profit corporation that's making money at the expense of another corporation's loss.
To be sure, the school isn't in the right. But sinking to an even lower level of wrong isn't the solution. There's the letter of the law, and then there's doing the right thing. Looks like someone missed that chapter in ethics class.
...you're asked to throw a 'TM' after a product name, only to find out later it's not really trademarked
Slapping that TM after a product name does trademark it, unless some direct competitor has already trademarked that same name first.
Only the (R) (for Registered trademark) has to be...well, registered.
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).
If, as the article relates, Jennifer Hoffman had to call the data center and walk them through the process of manually restarting the one, single, solitary payroll server, a few items come to mind:
1) The people doing the upgrades without considering their impact should be shot on sight. Anyone who has worked more than a week in a network environment knows, or should know, that when you are considering an upgrade to anything, you have to find out who else is impacted by the upgrade.
2) Relying on said single, solitary server for payroll is just begging for disaster. For a highly critical task such as payroll, having one point of failure is beyond stupid. One deserves what one gets if the server dies.
3) The person who was fired but was still able to log time so they got paid was smart, the people who administered user accounts and security were not. Basic rule when someone is fired/let go/whatever is you disable their account. Immediately. Whomever in IT let this little gem get by should also be shot.
4) Having only one person who knew how to run the payroll software was, like issue 2 above, beyond stupid. Does no one use the bus principle any more? For the uninitiated, if someone gets run over by a bus, can they be replaced by someone else with minimal downtime? Are their tasks documented? What about quirky procedures that need to be done?
These are just basic questions I had when I read that job. My other question was, what company did she work for so I can introduce myself to them as a "Risk Mitigation Specialist"?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I doubt this person is in the position to change that policy.
Remember, it isn't always about the techs or the technology.
Marketing operates on their own logic/ideology.
Management operates on a logic/ideology completely different from marketing OR the techs.
Ideally, you'll have a manager who can handle all three modes of "logic" and explain what they want you to do and why in a way that you can understand and handle.
No, but it all-too-often cheaper to hire idiots, then send it back to them for correction until they get it right.
If you can re-write what they spit out as a support function, you are working too cheap. And of course the company's accounting system is worse than the State of Arizona's. Which is bad.
What you just said was also 'I can do it as well as they can, all by myself, within a support timeline'. So you and/or your boss are not selling your abilities either. But that's another topic - how do you sell to management what they aready have? Imagine the hilarity when they realize they paid twice for the project, and one of the costs is already in the house...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Mike Rowe would laugh at every last one of them.
a coupel of years we had a spate of Bats living in my companies roof void we used to find them dead and some times alive I had bat removeal duties - not a problem its the ones in scotland that sometimes have rabies :-)
I fix the horribly shitty code written by offshore Indian "developers".
The crap and stupidity I encounter from them daily is far worse than dealing with rodents, or cramped spaces, or spending months on the high seas.
I am an Indian developer in USA. The stupidity of general American developers around me is astounding. I guess I can generalize and say American developers are just stupid and incompetent.
Quick, somebody call MIke Rowe!
And how many of those bosses would think to call him for his services PRIOR to sending that email?
http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/that-which-we-dont.html
Yep. The question still comes back to who hires him.
If Corporation X (not an ISP or email provider) is blocking email sent by Company A ... why would Company A hire this guy to talk to Corporation X?
Wouldn't the person at Company A who is trying to email someone at Corporation X call that person and tell them about the blocked email?
Well if the original DVD was actually stolen, that makes installing it on 100 computers about 97.3 times worse.
My last place, I was asked to, out of hours, go and setup the home network and VPN setup of the director of something or other. It was implied that it would be part of my normal course of duties. I absolutely refuse to do things of that sort, so I replied that my next available evening would be approximately 19 months from that day, and I could do it then. But I could expedite the process and clear some time to do the work for my "normal" contract billing hours - $200/hr, minimum three hours, plus travel expense of $4/km. (Hey, Mustangs aren't cheap to run).
I was never asked for home support after that.
Karma: Can only be portioned out by the Cosmos.
I avoid this at all costs. Many moons ago (read: 8-10 yrs) I would head out to the client's house for easy money. Turns out the same pennypinching tactics the client uses at work invariably show up at the house. "What do you mean, you're charging me X? I thought we were friends!?!?"
What I wanted to say: "You entered into a verbal contract with a professional and requested services. Sir, we don't hang out, party, or write in each other's yearbook. I came here on my own time and expect to get paid. What I ended up saying, because I didn't want to get reported for doing side work (even though I didn't have any clause in my employment contract): "Oh, okay, my bad. Can I get a glass of water or something before I go?"
Now, I politely refer them to the nearest homegrown tech shop, Geek Squad or whatever. If they insist, I quote them a stupid rate with a multi-hour minimum, plus gas and expenses. When they realize it will cost them $400 to "look at their PC, that just ain't actin rite", they head over to Best Buy and purchase a new one.
You ask that question as if the metaphor speaks for itself, but it doesn't. I'm not a business mogul, but people who are business moguls are pretty good at doing math and finding the cheapest solutions. It strains credulity to say that all the people hiring Indian developers are making unwise business decisions. The only way that could be true is if you personally have superior knowledge and reasoning to all of those business people. That's possible, but unlikely.
I get what you're saying but a lot of these things are beginner mistakes.. *face palm* learn the right way and move on.
A decent explaination about the mistake and the correct way to do it goes a long way to further their knowledge and understanding. If they refuse to learn.. to hell with em and treat their work like lepers, no need to fixate on it. Keep them out of core dev and give them little side projects to learn from.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
My observations: There are some very good Indian developers. There are some very cheap Indian developers. My observations do not include any overlap between the two.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
"penny-pinching clients"
You mean "clients"
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."
but people who are business moguls are pretty good at doing math and finding the cheapest solutions.
They are pretty good at math and spreadsheets, but they fail at predicting the future. I doubt wholesale recoding was in the original plan. The original plan looked like "Hire twice the number of Indian programmers at 1/4 the cost, get done in half the time! Beat the competition and pocket the savings! Yay!"
"Fix the code in a hurry" is added as an addendum after the truth bites them in the ass.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
>I don't know: I'm not a plumber. Sure as hell works well a treat if you offshore the bulk of dev. work and get a local specialist to fix it as required.
If you are satisfied with the construction and quality assurance of that sentence I have no doubt you will find similarly constructed software acceptable.
Leave the gun, take the cannolis.
> Right now with software you need to put it in the market as soon as possible to start generate profit and then fix the problems with support contracts.
Oh, the Microsoft model. Yes, customers love that. Especially when they have to acceptance test the same crap 5 times before meeting minimum functionality.
Leave the gun, take the cannolis.
My observations show roughly the same thing. My observations also show that roughly the same pattern applies to American developers, a fact that most (not necessarily you) tend to forget.
They are missing a fairly dirty job in IT... Help Desk / Service Desk / Catch All Desk / fix it its not working desk..... Spend a year here and see what you think of your sanity and cleanliness after. Most of these people wouldn't know about network problems or pr0n infesting spyware unless the Help Desk dealt with it first.
"i lost my dignity on a slippery wiener"
You'd be surprised at how little some municipalities look at. The plans, and ... the plans. Once the fee is paid and the permit issued, they're not going to come by every day to make sure everything is up to code. That's why you can end up digging up sewer pipe and copper plumbing a few years after its been installed because it doesn't conform to code and nobody checked.
That's nothing compared to selling houses that were built on a non-existent street ("the city is behind schedule for laying the sidewalks and asphalt - they promised it will be done by July, though" with no water or sewer connections. Happened in Montreal (I guess they got the idea from watching Les Bougon).
And there's now this - cities allowing - or even requiring - the use of cast iron pipe for the sewer pipe between the house and city connection, even though that's been obsolete for 30 years. SDR-26 and SDR-35 pvc sewer pipe is cheaper, lighter, and better (you can force the rubber gasket joints together with some grease and a sledge hammer, or use a backhoe bucket to push them together),
<shrug> It's sad because at each step of the process, some PHB was absolutely certain they were doing The Right Thing (tm). Hopefully, they will figure it out eventually...
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
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
You could, but then you wouldn't be echoing what the original poster said. He said that he fixes code written by Indian "developers", and that the ones _he works with_ give him "crap and stupidity". Meanwhile, you said that "American developers are stupid," proving that you are a pathetic, hateful person with a thin skin. By the way, you refer to this country as "the USA", not "USA".
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Except they will never get it 100% right. Both parties will eventually settle for something that mostly-works and kinda-sucks, when the pressure from the client for fixes equals the backpressure from the idiots for "we have spent enough time on you" (sometimes written as "fuck off and die").
Hire a good coder from the start (or leverage the ones you already have), and you'll have less of this back-and-forth, where all you're really doing is reiterating the specs you gave them in the first place. The issue of code quality is subjective, but when the guy writing it knows he'll probably still be here in 6 months when it needs updates, he just might try to keep his work clean and manageable. When you're just another wealthy american sucker to a faraway sweatshop, all bets are off.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
True, but the American developer is much easier to rein in and/or terminate. If a contractor is awful, you'll ditch him and he'll find ten more suckers around the corner. If you fire your own awful coder, that sonofabitch is out of a job, and when he has the gall to give your name as a reference to his future employers, you'll have the opportunity to keep him out of THAT job too.
The issue here is not one of race, but purely geographic / organisational. A local contractor that does a poor job, gets poor reviews, no recommendations and their income dries up. A remote contractor has a much wider audience, any bad rep gets lost in the background noise of the interweb.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
You ask that question as if the metaphor speaks for itself, but it doesn't. I'm not a business mogul, but people who are business moguls are pretty good at doing math and finding the cheapest solutions. It strains credulity to say that all the people hiring Indian developers are making unwise business decisions. The only way that could be true is if you personally have superior knowledge and reasoning to all of those business people. That's possible, but unlikely.
The people hiring offshore developers might not be making unwise business decisions, but their clients almost certainly are.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Except that crappy American developers are more expensive than crappy Indian developers.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
An AC calling another AC a moron (or perhaps the same AC).
What is this, Digg ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com
So while they're still with the company, they can talk about all these great "initiatives" they've started,
You are talking about an increase in Power Word ( or more accurately, brown matter ) density within Curriculum Vitae space. The problem is that past a certain density, Curriculum Vitae space can collapse in on itself. Then you have brown matter entering the accretion disk.
e.g. "Facilitated & enhanced a balanced, agile solution in a collaborated, multi-national project that simplified and incorporated a streamlined production model transforming & modernizing the development process... ( this section omitted to avoid critical mass ) ...increasing & improving communication between departments while aligning the developer & marketing goals netting an increase in quarterly projections."
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
I can resonate with #3 a bit. A company that I have been providing leased accounting software and support to for years is about to switch to something entirely new (and in the process, no longer require my services). Now, while the loss of monthly income (when they pay on time) is certainly cause for concern, I also won't have to answer phone calls while I'm sleeping, and it will free up my more conventional work schedule so I can consider other job opportunities.
The problem here, is that just today I got an email from the guys who are involved in the process of converting the company over to the new software. We are once again, for the third time now, starting from scratch with someone new who has no idea of what work has been done before. I'm getting emails with a bunch of specs and "can you do this for us" when I already did all of it months ago.
And I know, for a fact, that there will be extensive resistance to the change. The software they're using now they've been using for 20+ years. The girls who work with it know it so well that they can crank out orders in literally a few seconds. No need to look up part numbers, or customer numbers, or do a lot of mouse manipulation, and they can do it without even looking at the screen for the most part. This allows them to have 1 office manager and one secretary handle a workload that involves taking phone orders at a rate of about one per minute. Each.
When... if.. this switchover happens, they'll probably need to hire several new people just to handle it, at least for a little while. Not to mention, I provide nearly all of their computer services. I maintain their network, I handle their backups, both onsite and offline. When the printer stops working or a computer won't boot, they call me, and if necessary, I jump in my car, go down there, and fix the problem. I suspect they don't realize everything that I actually do, so they'll plop in a bunch of windows boxes (they currently use all linux right now), get the software set up, wish them well, and leave. Sure, the new provider will support the software package, but I'm sure the first time they get a virus they're going to be SOL.
And the best part of it is, I WON'T HAVE TO DEAL WITH IT!!!! :)
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here