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Confessions of a SysAdmin
Mr.Fork writes "Scott Merrill from CrunchGear has a confession. He really, really hates computers. He writes: 'No, really, I hate them. I love the communications they facilitate, I love the conveniences they provide to my life, and I love the escapism they sometimes afford; but I actually hate the computers themselves. Computers are fragile, unintuitive things — a hodge-podge of brittle hardware and opaque, restrictive software.' Does his editorial speak to all of us in similar IT-related fields? Do we all silently hate the complexities and idiosyncrasies computers have, like error messages and UI designs that make no sense to the common user, which make our tech professions miserable?"
So, ever since family and friends found out I could help with arcane errors and problems with their Apple ][+ computers (did I mention I'm old? That was back in the early 80s) I've been standing between computers and users and trying to reconcile both to each other.
Eventually, this turned in to a great opportunity for me to help people with their use of current technology. Are computers and software packages irritating? You bet! But being in the middle position between the user and CPU has been something I've enjoyed for more than a decade.
Sure, I've been a developer and struggled directly with computers on one hand and produced software that unintentionally frustrated users on the other. But it's standing in the gap between the technology and humanity that I find myself the most valuable.
As long as computers and software suck there will be a need for people like me. And, as it turns out, people prefer to turn their problems over to other people -- not wizards, FAQs, etc. -- for assistance.
The trick is not considering users as the problem but oneself as a key to the solution.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
There's some bullshit in modern computer hardware design too though. Consider X86. It's inferior to man architectures, but it still exists because the install base for it is so huge it can't be stopped. BIOS seriously sucks, they are all different, love to use arcane terms, often vary wildly even in models form the same vendor in the same product line, and the process to upgrade them is often fraught with danger. Printers need drivers, that are generally platform specific, even on basic models. Hard drives can fail (and fail often) in ways that silently corrupt data with no indication to the user or the OS. ECC has existed for decades yet consumer machines never have it, leading to memory problems causing seemingly random, unrelated issues, that only an in depth low level memory analysis can solve ( requiring you to know the problem before you know the cause). Hardware RAID is often arcane, and a simple mistake can destroy your entire array. Manufacturers save pennies on parts like capacitors by using parts with ratings lower then the design required, resulting in expensive repairs. OEM's release equipment using draft or early revisions of specs that cause weird, hard to diagnose compatibility problems. SSD's could be the single largest performance increase for your average office user in 5-10 years, but they are severely limited because we do not have a good technology to interface with them, and shoehorn them into the tech used for mechanical drives for compatibility reasons. If you were to design the PC platform from scratch today, there's a lot of arcane, outdated cruft you could remove that's only there for backwards compatibility reasons.