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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?'"

22 of 126 comments (clear)

  1. E caddi, come corpo morto cade by aBaldrich · · Score: 3

    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...

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    1. Re:E caddi, come corpo morto cade by TheLink · · Score: 2

      Well his escape tips might not work 100%. For example:

      That means making sure you have the tech expertise in house to solve your own problems, going with open source to avoid vendor lock-in

      The last I checked, Reiserfs had vendor lock-in ;).

      Seriously though, not everyone can afford to have sufficient tech expertise in-house to fix say xorg or the linux sound system. Or network performance issues when you have 1000 vlan interfaces (issues which the kernel devs may not bother fixing since they don't run environments which need 1000 different VLANs).

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  2. Layer 1 by Murdoch5 · · Score: 2

    Users who can't find the any key.

    1. Re:Layer 1 by BSAtHome · · Score: 2

      You forgot the most important layers:
      8) friends
      9) money
      10) politics

    2. Re:Layer 1 by AvitarX · · Score: 2

      Is it plugged in is totally part of physical.

      It's the first check on the physical layer.

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  3. Re:and salvation is in da cloud by ColdWetDog · · Score: 3, Insightful

    if IT only put everything in da cloud they would spend days with their 72 virgins

    Well that's a pretty large IT group, but from what I see around here, it seems that most IT staffs are largely comprised of virgins...

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  4. user: You gave me a bad password!!! by balbord · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?

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  5. Re:and salvation is in da cloud by SJHillman · · Score: 5, Funny

    For large companies, their IT department *is* 72 virgins

  6. 10+ Circles by FatherOfONe · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
  7. The Tenth Circle Of IT Hell by OzPeter · · Score: 2

    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

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  8. Not painful enough! by khasim · · Score: 2

    That's a per user problem. There's an "Oh! Yeah!" moment at the end of it.

    For REAL Hell, from TFA:

    How many of us have been abandoned by our vendors to IT limbo, only to find ourselves falling victim to app dev anger when in-house developers are asked to pick up the slack?

    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.

    1. Re:Not painful enough! by Synerg1y · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The key here is communication, I find the more of my day I devot to communication at the cost of getting less stuff done, the better my position becomes. As a coder you can spend a week fixing a part of the system of your own initiative and good will, my point is... propose your project, document it, explain the scope to the best of your ability, as a side-effect its a lot easier to ask for longer time lines when you follow all these steps. The disconnect between IT and senior management is communication, the managers want to manage and know what's going on, but IT is too complex for them so they hire you. Make sense? There is usually a very uneasy trust between IT and senior management that you have to compensate for as well....

  9. A missing circle... by NecroPuppy · · Score: 2

    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).

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  10. How to write one of these articles by jjohnson · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

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    Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
  11. circle 10 plces where they hire by degrees only by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 2

    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.

  12. Kudos by Talderas · · Score: 2

    Kudos to the guy that wrote the summary. He gave us an infoworld link that wasn't dumb by giving us the printer version.

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    "Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
  13. G+ by vlm · · Score: 2

    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.

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    "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
  14. Re:Abandon all hope, ye who enter here by schwit1 · · Score: 2

    Right next to "Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on our part."

  15. Corporate Software Lock-ins by Cutting_Crew · · Score: 2

    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.

  16. What circle is it... by medcalf · · Score: 2

    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?

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    -- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
  17. Layer 5 by PwnzerDragoon · · Score: 2

    Users who are shocked to learn their mouse has a second button.

  18. Re:and salvation is in da cloud by V!NCENT · · Score: 3, Insightful

    No. The only salvation is professionalism.

    I realise that I will be shot for saying this, but how come that the only thing that's running horribly in an entire company, is the IT department?

    There is a way to just make near-bug-free software on time and the evidence for that rediculous claim is NASA.

    I took the liberty of finding the answer to everyone's horror. But before you click on it, you do have to realise that your playground will be over once implementing the solution.

    All text-only print-format before your head realy explodes out of anger (ofcourse): http://www.fastcompany.com/node/28121/print

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