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In Favor of Homegrown IT Solutions
snydeq writes "Today's IT organizations turn too readily to vendors, eschewing homegrown solutions to their detriment, writes Deep End's Paul Venezia. 'Back when IT was "simple," several good programmers and support staff could run the whole show. Nowadays, [companies] buy hefty support contracts and shift the burden of maintaining and troubleshooting large parts of their IT infrastructure on to the vendors who may know their own product well, but have a hard time dealing with issues that may crop up during integration with other vendors' gear. ... Relying solely on support contracts and generic solutions is a good way to self-limit the agility and performance of any business. In short, more gurus equals less hand-wringing and stress all around.'"
And what does CS have to do with IT?
Exactly. This. This is part of the problem.
There's a disjunct between how academia sees Computer Science as nothing to do with IT and how business sees a CS degree as the basic starting point for a career in IT.
Can we please either have a Computers in Business degree that teaches useful skills, or a business culture that doesn't expect academic degrees to be vocational qualifications? I don't mind which, either is good.
Also, the reason your company doesn't have any gurus is that no-one is prepared to spend any time or money training their staff, or even giving them self-development time to train themselves. Companies that do decent training have gurus. It's pretty simple.
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
Although a union to say "You don't have to be forced to give up having a life, just so someone can get their spreadsheets at all times of day" would be nice.
Everyone wants a 24x7 IT system. There's a way to do that; lots of money on the hardware, and three complete teams of core staff who work shifts (with the commensurate shift salary augmentation).
But no, what business wants is a group of IT staff who work the same hours as everyone else, for the same kind of salary as the average pen pusher, who will then, at no notice, respond to a phone call at any time of day or night and get to site (or at least connect up remotely) and spend hours diagnosing network/server/PC/application problems (possibly calling up other IT staff), and then being in for work the next day as if nothing happened.