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In IT, Beware of Fad Versus Functional
Lemeowski writes: Cloud, big data, and agile were three of the technology terms that were brandished the most by IT leaders in 2014. Yet, there could be a real danger in buying into the hype without understanding the implications of the technologies, writes Pearson CTO Sven Gerjets. In this essay, Gerjets warns that many IT executives drop the ball when it comes to "defining how a new technology approach will add value" to their organization. He says: "Yes, you can dive into an IT fad without thinking about it, but I can promise you'll look back and be horrified someday. The only time you can fully adopt some of these new methods is when you are starting from scratch. Most of us don't have that luxury because we are working with legacy architectures and technical debt so you have to play hand you've been dealt, communicate well, set clear and measurable outcomes, and use these fads to thoughtfully supplement the environment you are working in to benefit the ecosystem."
Your history sounds much like my own. Get job with company with rock-solid infrastructure that just plain works. Smart leaders leave for more money. People that replace them are not so smart, they feel the need to have their names on the decisions and infrastructure, so everything is scrapped and done anew -- much to the chagrin of the very capable people who put the old systems together. We went from Solaris to Windows in one year. In other words, we went from heaven to hell in one year. Malware hit the servers, the workstations, you name it. I was moved from being a BSD admin running the Web backend stuff to working with Windows. I was miserable and to this day, despise working with Windows in any regard. It's just not a very stable OS compared to FreeBSD and what was Solaris.
Now? I work for a non-profit that is slow to make decisions, and some of them are made poorly by people who think too much about the cloud and listen to the vendors who have swooned them with lunches and free support for a year.
If I ever run IT in its entirety, I would standardize on some form of UNIX-like OS, likely FreeBSD in the server room and Linux or Macs on the workstation front. Anything else has shown me to be unreliable. The scripting and devops stuff is easier in *NIX and always will be. Nothing wrong with old school. It works. It always will. Simple is always better.
everyone realized that Ruby is awful
I'm tired of hearing this. Ruby is not awful. It's a wonderful language, and Rails is a wonderful framework. The problem is that Rails is designed for a very particular niche (small, fairly CRUD-oriented web applications), and people keep trying to stupidly shoehorn it into places where it doesn't work well (large, enterprise applications that need to do lots of heavy number crunching or querying of enormous databases in the background). Predictably, such projects end in a trainwreck and then people blame Rails, but Rails wasn't the problem.