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The Nine Circles of IT Hell
snydeq writes "Dan Tynan takes us on a tour of the nine circles of IT hell, a place 'not unlike the underworld described by Dante in his Divine Comedy.' 'But here, in the data centers, conference rooms, and cubicles, the IT version of this inferno is no allegory. It is a very real test of every IT pro's sanity and soul,' Tynan writes. From IT limbo, to tech lust, to stakeholder gluttony, to tech-pro treachery, the IT inferno is not buried deep within the earth, it's just down the hall. 'Thankfully, as in Dante's poetic universe, there are ways to escape the nine circles of IT hell. But IT pros beware: You may have to face your own devils to do it. Shall we descend?'"
If he adds a "how to escape" for each circle, then he did not read it. Virgil had to convince Charon to let them in...
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
Users who can't find the any key.
Users who cannot find the power button
The Ninth is the guy who always breaks the scanner with his ass.
if IT only put everything in da cloud they would spend days with their 72 virgins
me: Bad password? I don't give away bad passwords. Not unintentionally, that is. What password are you using?
user:I'm using the password you sent me! is: generic2011
me: what? Are you sure? It starts with an 'i' and an 's' and it has a ':'?
user: yeah.
me: So when I wrote down "Your password is: generic2011" you decided that "is: " was part of the password?
user: Well, Isn't it?
"If I have been able to see so far, It is because I went out and bought a damn binoculars" - Ze da Esquina
Every IT shop needs a sign with this written on it.
Users who are managers.
The 10th Circle of Hell is when upper management believes that outsourcing everything will save them money and time.
The 11th circle of Hell is when someone in a high place reads a magazine and decides that the entire company needs to head off in some "new" direction.
The 12th circle of Hell is partnering with Microsoft.
The 13th circle of Hell is partnering with Microsoft.
The 14 circle of Hell is replacing the guy who partnered with Microsoft.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
The Tenth Circle of IT Hell: Reading infoworld articles.
Description An abomination of words that seem profound from a distance, but on closer inspection aren't
The People you meet there Innocent people sucked into the morass of a less than worthy /. story
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Users who are afraid they broke their monitor because it powered off after 15 minutes.
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
Regretting saying "yeah, we can make that happen" every day since.
Something witty.
That's a per user problem. There's an "Oh! Yeah!" moment at the end of it.
For REAL Hell, from TFA:
Here, spend YEARS supporting something you didn't write.
I wish IT management would understand that part of their job is PRUNING systems. If it is unsupported / undocumented, then put together a plan to either remove it or further isolate it so it can be removed in the future.
"We need to balance our capitalistic nature with some form of societal responsibility."
with the above .... in a system in which only the most ruthless ones can survive and undo others, you cannot talk about social responsibility. at the point you become socially responsible, the shareholders, who have no obligation to morality, will pull their money from your company and invest it in socially irresponsible ones to make money.
this is the fault of capitalism. it cannot be fixed without totally changing capitalism to something that is not capitalism anymore.
Read radical news here
And that's "Accreditation hell". Where policy prevents you from fielding systems that aren't certified to certain levels of robustness / security, but management hasn't (or won't) budget the time or money to actually secure a system.
"Just stand it up now", they say. "We'll put the security money in next year's budget."
Of course, it doesn't show up in next year's budget, and pretty soon, you're the next Sony (in the getting hacked repeatedly sense).
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
Have a chatty phone conversation or a drinking lunch with a consultant who's between gigs. Let him tell war stories. Organize according to some metaphor drawn from a widely known but poorly understood work of literature. Beat deadline, knock off early.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
At least he's using the Layer Model, even if they are circles.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
and it even worse when management is hired on Business degrees / MBA's they may know a lot about management but not much on IT but they are running the it department.
Also when they take people from top tear school where CS is far from the job that needed and far from what you pick up at a tech school and where people who have done IT work for years are looked down on as they did not go to a top tear school but when to a tech school.
Kudos to the guy that wrote the summary. He gave us an infoworld link that wasn't dumb by giving us the printer version.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
tour of the nine circles of IT hell
I thought this was some kind of "Google+ in the Enterprise" story for a few seconds.
In my experience, a G+ circle of hell is where some dude in the "Ham Radio" circle insists on a fox news headline post every thirty minutes, or religious crusader clutters up my "Linux" circle with daily bible quotes. Ugh.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Tech's understand technology.
Other people understand "magic".
You say the right mystic words and make the right arcane gestures and the things that tech said could not be done get done.
That's powerful magic. It gets things done NOW.
Other spells are:
"I think you're over-analyzing this."
"There won't be any problems."
and
"My nephew says he can do it this weekend." This is a particularly dangerous spell because it releases destructive imps into the systems.
I think the Level 7 Escape comment says enough to either prove complete naivete or complete ignorance:
How to escape: Exiting the circle of company-on-company violence may only be possible via collective action, says O'Berry. "When you squeeze the ecosystem only to your advantage, not caring about the companies you've killed along the way, eventually people will say enough is enough," says O'Berry. "We need to balance our capitalistic nature with some form of societal responsibility."
In the last thirty years the only people saying "enough is enough" have have been everything from summarily ignored to blackballed for being an "Evil socialist who hates capitalism, job creators, and prosperity and wants to punish all the John Galts of the world who are smart enough to be granted their Austrian-school due; If they can't keep up with the invisible hand, then they should be content for the perfect theory of 'Trickle Down Economics' to provide for them".
The world is facing the global recession it is because these monstrosities have taken every opportunity to exploit more and more while convincing more than half the working poor that any regulations will keep them from being able to be rich "on their own merits" too, one day. Country-wide prosperity is at its highest (as it its HDI) when the political system shifts towards a parliamentary democracy and the economic system is mixed strongly dominated by modern socialist principles.
Unfortunately it seems that the high standards of living these systems evolve will undoubtedly create some myopic, avaricious individuals that have the intellect, skills, and stability (who conveniently forget that society directly and indirectly helped them attain these attributes) to work towards taking as much as they can, no matter how much damage it does to everyone else. To date, most modern developed nations are not fault tolerant against greed and it will take massive changes to implement systems that are, but it is of paramount importance that we do so immediately to stave off calamity.
There is a much larger percentage of the educated populace who feel that enough is never enough and their sophomoric narcissism ensures they feel entitled to make decisions that have immediate and direct negative consequences to their subordinates, the business, or the world at large, so long as it leads to their short term financial gain. The sooner we can, from the ground up, build our systems of business and governance to limit the amount of damage greed can do, the better.
This guy got caught up in his metaphor and the article doesn't impart much useful information. There's probably a few nuggets of worthwhile advice there about documenting or specifications or vendor lock in. Next time, focus on the IT part and less on the "Dante's Inferno" part.
As a developer myself, i have found that the larger the corporation is, the larger the lock-in is. I am not sure whether a bigger corporation seems to feel that everything has to be the same across the board in all its departments or what. I have mentioned this in another post and i will mention it here. There is NO REASON...NONE..NADA for companies to still produce products in MFC(espeically since MS dumped it LONG ago). If a company has a vision to move on to something like QT or at least WPF then fine but when you see job ads for new software products and needing people familiar with MFC(that isnt related to specific porting to another environment) it really makes my skin crawl and it is really holding the developers there hostage.
On more general company lock-ins i wonder how much money a large company would save if all (lets say 70,000) employees including the CEO were using openoffice versus buying a license for every single microsoft office suite. That to me in INSANE.
when the customer hires consultants so that they (the customer) can have someone to blame when things go wrong, and then spends all of their time ensuring that blame is affixed for anything and everything (including "doing exactly as directed after warning of this specific consequence") rather than spending any time trying to make things better?
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU for linking to the "printer friendly" version as opposed to the "50 words at a time so we maximize our page views" version!
Alas, as I read through the 9, I couldn't avoid the glaring truth. It was happening all around me. Software upgrades...New iphone, iPad! ...Dual Hex-core 1U w/ 48G Ram.... OK, that one we needed!
Fiscal Year was at an end and I kept asking why. Why must we spend this money? WHY? We didn't need the latest Acrobat, which we just upgraded 7 months ago. We only have 5 people using it anyways but the lic. is for 10! WTF...?
And as I slowly combed over realization after realization, every monetary nit-pick that was glaringly obvious, it hit might like the PLAGUE! The cold seeped into every fiber of my body. It was numbing. My soul was being drained in a matter of seconds. The painful realization that you are no longer a mere IT sophisticant was in tow. A denizen of the shell... When asked which OS? Why all 3 of course! And that's when it hit me. I was no longer a wrangler of the bit. I was no longer 'The Fixer'! Complete strangers new me by my tech. prowess. But it was all fading. My world was crashing around me. It was so obvious!
I was THINKING LIKE MANAGEMENT!!!!!!!
Eighth circle, second bolgia for operating system fanboys, phone/computer platform fanboys, operating system haters, and phone/computer platform haters. Regardless of which platform and operating system the fanboys and haters hold forth upon, it's all lies and shit.
Double depth for falsely accusing anyone who disagrees with you of being a fanboy. Though there's certainly applicability of the sixth, eighth, ninth (especially forum trolls) and tenth.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
Users who are shocked to learn their mouse has a second button.
The problem with that is that all it takes to ruin it is someone claiming to be able to do more, better, flashier, etc.
Particularly if they have access to a nice golf course.
There will always be someone who devote even less time than you to getting something accomplished ... so that they can spend that additional time selling management on the latest fad.
And blaming you for any problems.
The only way around this is for management to have SOME understanding of the levels below them. Isn't that why they're paid the management salaries and bonuses in the first place?
???
Is everyone where you're at running laptops or something?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
genious!! :D
:D
i recently had a project going that i can surely say that i meat ALL of these circles... one by one..
how to escape?? is the project delivered?? abandon the project...
//LIFE WOULD BE EASIER IF I HAD THE SOURCE CODE!
Why the tautology?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
As if that weren't the standard setting for desktop these days...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Couldn't help but read on the separate story about rogue admins, and my first impression is... All the cases used in the article features some truly stupid admins.
They're not just stupid from what they did, but also how they did it. I mean logging on to systems directly from your home IP, not deleting incriminating logs and so on. But maybe the more clever rogue admins are clever enough not to have been found out?
In any case, I'm nothing special but I can easily devise methods of accessing systems completely without leaving any trace, provided I have time to prepare before losing legitimate access. Creating a custom rootkit for some central gateway server is one way. Custom in order not to be detected by standard tools. If the server can be configured to not log your access, not show your files and to lie to tripwire and similar IDS about file checksums, you can use it freely. Have two separate watchdog systems running, one better hidden than the other. If one sees the other go away, wipe the system completely. This will prevent them from using your own system to trap you. Oh, and always access indirectly, never from anything that can be linked to your person.
Most system monitoring is designed to watch for intrusions from the outside or elsewhere in the company. They're not designed to monitor the very admins running it, nor could they. Take logging for instance. We send syslogs to a special syslog server so even if a hacker deletes the local logs on the server, we have a copy of everything elsewhere. But if an admin want to remove logs, he can easily remove them from the syslog server as well, thus covering his tracks.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
The article starts with an invitation to "Find out which of our eight classic IT personality types best suit your temperament by taking the InfoWorld IT personality type quiz."
With my curiosity piqued I tried the quiz; turns out many questions are missing a sensible answer like:
5. When presented with a choice between competing products:
- You select the one you can most safely ignore
- Buy whatever your boss uses
- Point out that your product selections were pre-ordained at birth
- Flip a coin, because users are too stupid to make either one work
and it all leads to bad personality types, namely "The Empty Suit", "The Scary Sys Admin", "The Human Roadblock", "The Angry Support Drone", "The Übergeek", "The OS Fanboy", "The Promiser" and "The Shadow".
I don't know if this is seriously lame humor or plain offensive stupidity, in any case I'm not reading anything from InfoWorld anymore.
Not any any place I've worked..or at home.
I mean, no need to turn a desktop off...no need to conserve battery, just usually a screen saver that locks when you go away.
But never heard of turning a monitor off before on a desktop....? Can't see a good reason for doing it...the inconvenience I'd think would outweigh any slight perceived savings in energy cost...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
+1, Funny.
Country-wide prosperity is at its highest (as it its HDI) when the political system shifts towards a parliamentary democracy and the economic system is mixed strongly dominated by modern socialist principles.
Yes, we can see how well that's working right now in Europe. Those "modern socialist principles" (tax lots, spend even more, borrow or print the difference) are about to deliver us a financial crisis that'll make the 2007-era banks look like rank amateurs.
Unfortunately it seems that the high standards of living these systems evolve will undoubtedly create some myopic, avaricious individuals that [...] work towards taking as much as they can, no matter how much damage it does to everyone else.
I assume that by this you mean the unions? Particularly the "public service" ones?
I once did a really intense, really satisfying six-month stint supporting about 2500 new hires and instructors in a hotel environment. We didn't have a help desk to dispatch so we made it up as we went along. We gave the instructors balloons to hang outside their classrooms when they had a problem then practiced "support by walking around."
Upper management, however, wanted at least a cursory measure of what sorts of problems we were handling. We had no time. We were running our asses off.
I put up a grid on a chalkboard in the "war room" and everybody put a check mark in the appropriate block whenever they stopped by.
At the end of the six weeks, just over half of all calls were in the "not plugged in, not turned on" category.
There's slightly more to it than that. Some of the most widely-distributed equipment was problematic in that it had a funky turn-on/warm-up sequence that was easy to misinterpret. Still, I just wanted to agree with you in the strongest possible terms. Checking to see if the non-functioning device is plugged in and turned on is basic, mandatory, and all-too-often overlooked.
I'm a little surprised it wasn't used anywhere you worked. It's Computer Security 101 stuff.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
See: http://www.kmoser.com/oracle_a.htm#hell