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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."
So bad executive behavior, which has been immortalized in dilbert for *decades*, is now worthy of an essay?
There's a certain sense of irony here.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
... get chosen based on buzzword appeal by non-technical executives. And even if they seek technical advise chances are it will be from those who have been made fully buzzword compliant by past employment, education, and the media.
Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
Agile Project management methodology has a lot of good features.
Cloud based processing can help the organization.
You can get a lot of useful information from Big Data (Previously Business Intelligence, Previously Decision Support System)
And they are still hanging on to Enterprise Class software.
But they jump headfirst without realizing what their main plan or problems they will use it to solve.
But what normally happens they just replace their existing technology and try to rig the new one to do what they did before and hope magically they will get a benefit from it.
These types of technology require you to change your full organization culture, and workflow to gain the advantage of the new technology. Just saying you got a big data project by joining all your DB tables in some big views and giving you a few reports isn't really big data.
Hosting your email on gmail isn't going to the cloud. Or even just remotely hosting you stuff on cloud systems, isn't embracing the cloud it is just offshoring your data.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I'll have you know im very well versed in that which is fad, and that which is function, you insensitive clod. I attend my scrum stand-ups daily to make sure I get updates about our Cloud. once thats taken care of, I write the most functional devops scripts in nothing less than the latest ruby code to ensure our SAAS, PAAS, DAAS, and GAAS are all ITSG A OK. Now if you'll excuse me, I believe my Zune is finished charging.
Good people go to bed earlier.
So over my nearly 20 years in IT/CS, I've seen a few:
I worked for a large retailer. We migrated from an old frame-relay leased-line network to a much more capable multihomed IP-over-VPN configuration to connect all of our retail locations around the country back to HQ. This new system worked well. Our CIO retired, and a new one was brought in. CIO Magazine a year or so later had an article about "Satellite Internet, The Future?" Our CIO then "spontaneously" started lobbying to get us to scrap our efficient, inexpensive, high-bandwidth network for a satellite system.
I can't tell you how many projects I saw rewritten in Ruby on Rails just because that was the new hotness, only to be abandoned later when everyone realized that Ruby is awful.
I myself wrote a bunch of stuff in Erlang not because it was the best language but because that was the new hotness.
Two unchanging things I've noticed are:
A lot of time, the new hotness makes common problems go away or common tasks easier, but ends up making more complex things harder. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but people tend to get stuck in the model of thinking that the new technology has to be used for everything, and they end up shoehorning their complex projects into frameworks that aren't the best choice.
No matter what the new technology is, and no matter how fantastic it is, it's not going to replace C/C++ for systems-level work, and Python and Perl aren't going anywhere. Truly successful technologies have long tails.
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
If Sven Gerjets is such a critic of buzzwords, perhaps it would have been pertinent to speak about useful/meaningful/appropriate outcome; qualitative measures to ensure so.
Rather than "add value", itself such a buzz-word.
Nonsense... high level IT people (IT directors, CTO, etc) aren't worried about whether it really 'adds value' for the company or not, they probably won't be around (at least in my last few jobs) to have to deal with the consequences - the only consideration for them is that it 'adds value' to their resume/CV, so they can move on to that next job with "Successfully transitioned company 'Z' to a cloud based architecture cutting datacenter and hardware costs to virtually nothing" (ignoring, of course, the fact that it's all falling apart slowly after them).
Not meaning to put down "the cloud" there, there are instances where it can be a benefit, but in general the decisions aren't made on that kind of 'case by case' basis, they come down from "on-high" by executives who have no real idea about the technology beyond what they've read in "CIO magazine", and are 'mandated' on an all-or-nothing basis. Rarely does said executive actually wind up sticking around to deal with the outcome of their 'sweeping change'. And, of course, by then the next exec comes in with some brand new thing being touted ("now we'll focus on 'big data', and 'flattening out the organization') and even as the last thing is maybe just barely starting to become stable it's time to move in some new direction.
A lot of times, what it comes down to is that a fad is simply a popularization of a particular approach to a problem "x". Solving "x" has value to the company. If you can reasonably get buy in to solving "x" (i.e. scalability, richness of user experience, flexibility of deployment), then you can use misplaced faith in the fad (respectively: cloud, Web 2.0, virtualization) to get the executive buy-in to solve that problem, whether the implementation makes use of the fad or not.
Because technology changes much more quickly than real world analogs, and sometimes everyone suddenly decides "OMG, if we don't have teh new stuff we're gonna die".
I've seen a lot of money thrown at fads which took resources away from things which actually add business value or generated revenue.
A brick and mortar business doesn't have the huge shifts which happen in tech, where all of a sudden completely unproven stuff becomes perceived as completely mandatory.
I've seen entire development teams pulled off core products which generated money in order to implement some crap buzzword technology which, in the end, nobody ever actually wanted and which didn't add business value. And by the time anybody realized that, the core technology which generated money had been left to rot for a period of time.
And, of course, unlike other industries .. management in tech frequently have no clue about tech, and therefore have no way of understanding the consequences of their stupid choices. They just think it's all interchangeable and subject to whatever idiotic whims they come up with.
Back when companies used to have roadmaps (do they still have those?), it was not uncommon for a bunch of tech people to be rolling their eyes saying "yeah, right, like we'll be making those in a year" as management told them about the wonderful (and completely meaningless) future of the company, only to be told something completely different in six months.
The people in the concrete business? They don't suddenly get told they'll be making stuffed talking animals in a few months.
I consider it a sad fact of reality that most tech execs are completely delusional, and truly believe that just because they say something based on whatever crap Gartner is selling, that in six months time it will be reality. And they're often too short sighted to realize that the crap we abandoned from six months ago isn't any more true than the stuff we'll abandon six months from now.
Because tech execs consider themselves visionaries, and visionaries aren't constrained by pesky things like reality.
Me, I'm betting anybody who has worked in tech long enough has a whole litany of stories about how the "exciting new future" turned out to be "yet another dud championed by idiots".
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
And yet, the functionality is still more important than a fad in (almost) all walks of life — with the exception of clothing styles, perhaps — not just in Information Technology...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I'd love to comment but I have to finish up my hadoop task on AWS before the end of this sprint.
A developer in my group was asked to provide code from our system to another group for inclusion in their system. The code implements a complex algorithm that nobody quite understands (a PHD student at the time was trying to be impressive, and wrote up a 20+ page tech document to describe it). In any case, the code works, and they want to copy it.
So my boss comes back and says "the developer wants to know why this was written in C and not C#". Okay, I guess they're going for an all Microsoft solution, and I won't comment on whether or not that's a good, bad or indifferent choice (though you folks can...). My point is that the code in question was written before C# even existed, and while the offshore kid in the other group might not have known that, my boss certainly should have. So maybe what's left of .NET is a viable toolset to use to build "apps in the cloud" (did I mention that the other project is a complete rewrite of an existing system to be in the cloud - which i don't think is a particularly bad idea, btw). But maybe it's not. And obviously, the people deciding to use it probably have no idea even what .NET is (partially due to the Microsoft PR machine's history of not knowing what .NET was...).
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
There's a hell of a lot more fad in life than most people want to admit. For our cars, if we wanted function we'd all be driving minivans with stow-n-go seats.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I worked at one place that bought the hype during the NT3.5 years that NT was headed in the embedded systems direction, where the GUI was not going to be important or even necessary for the system. That company bet the farm on that, and by the time NT4.0 and Windows 2000 came along it was clear that this was very much in error, and the product suffered greatly as the backend things that had been promised were never developed for the NT product line. It's only in the last few years that this idea has made a resurgence. That company is long gone because of their choices.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
doubt it, a lot of it is chosen by developers buying into the hype of the coolest new technology or language or framework... which invariably turn out to be a pile of shit.
For example, a few years back all the talk was of Biztalk and some people developed their "this time it'll be great" tech products using it, and now some poor sods are lumbered with a steaming piece of legacy poo that they have to maintain and that costs them a fortune. Before that there was so much talk of functional languages (which are ok in themselves) that would be a silver bullet that solved all problems, and Ruby after that, and .NET before that, and ... well I could go on but its depressing.
I think sharepoint is the main technology chosen by non-techies but the techies are way worse for jumping on the du jour bandwagon.
Our industry embraces technology churn far too easily. Change might be good, but only in evolutionary steps, making things better. I think a lot of it is driven by people who either don't have the experience or simply can't handle the current tech and so see anything different as a chance to avoid being found out.
It was called "Time sharing".
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.
In my experience, many IT execs are not involved in developing or do not understand their company's strategy and thus have no idea what the technology needs to accomplish. they respond to requests, or develop technology solutions without input from the actual users and thus deliver solutions that don't really do what is needed. Even worse, some are promoted techies who are enamored with technology and want what is cool without regard to weather or not it is actually useful.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Cloud.
Fog
It's like the could, but at ground level, so you can actually SEE it.
Imagine being surrounded in a fog of data.
(okay, it's just servers in a closet somewhere on the premises, but now that so many have moved to the cloud, it's a way to sell them back their old servers at a premium price, BOfH-style)
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Beware of Toys vs Tools
-- kjh
And he makes a FUNDAMENTAL mistake by focusing on "defining how a new technology approach will add value".
At the CxO level that is easy to do. It will allow the company to synergize your core with blah blah buzzword blah buzzword.
But the reality is that it is about adding more achievements and buzzwords to someone's resume so that they can move on before their choices bite them.
These are the questions I end up asking when someone runs into the I.T. department shouting that we need to upload all of our code to the cloud and power down our data center.
1. Does this technology put our companies assets at risk?
2. Does this technology significantly improve the performance/security/reliability without violating rule #1?
3. Does this technology put us in a situation where a single vendor/point of failure/attacker can road block us?
4. What are the long term costs of this technology compared to our existing infrastructure?
5. How disruptive is this technology and do it's benefits outweigh the disruption?
In many cases once we get into the conversation and the person has a better understanding of what's going on behind the scenes, suddenly "cheapass-hosting-services.com" stops looking like such a great deal.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Beware the IT fad words like 'ecosystem'...
I art more snarky, and terse than thou. I art Slashdot!
na, it'll be because they just aren't good enough to understand the C code. Tell the developer to grow a pair and start using the right tools rather than the only thing he understands. (and frankly, I doubt he'd be able to understand the complex algorithm anyway).
But the fads change faster still, and this has been obvious to informed people in IT for decades.
Everything web-based since the original HTML has been more about hype than technological substance.
Not at all. Minivans — and even most SUVs — drive like crap. And I don't mean engine — the suspension is nowhere near where it needs to be, to make driving enjoyable. None of them come with a manual transmission either — the command-line of driving — so, no...
There are people, who might choose a different model, because it comes in a particular color, but that falls into the "clothes style" category, which I already mentioned, anyway.
This is an important consideration — and people do consider it. For example, I always preferred Volkswagens (and now that I've grown up — Audis) because their rear seats can be laid flat. A standard feature, whereas in BMW and Mercedes you have to pay extra for it (if it is available in the first place).
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
"None of them come with a manual transmission either"
Excuse me, my Suburban 4x4 most certainly came with manual transission.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
My point is, minivans are perfectly adequate for getting several people, some people plus cargo, or a fairly large amount of cargo from one place to another, reasonably efficiently on fuel, with only a single vehicle to do all of it. For cargo a minivan has the lowest floor of a wagon-type vehicle short of a sedan-based station wagon, has a high roof making large things fit easily, and has three large doors making accessing cargo or seating space fairly easy.
A minivan is not a sports-car. A minivan is not a 4x4. A minivan, however, is probably more efficient than either in the primary use for a vehicle, which is typically on the road. It has a lower load-height than a pickup truck, and can hold a 4x8 sheet of plywood while most pickup trucks can't without leaving the tailgate down.
I don't own a minivan either, but right now I don't need one, as I have a beater truck in addition to my other vehicles. I, like most people, have chosen style in my vehicles over raw utility.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
While this particular bug is endemic to IT, let's be honest: over the centuries, how many non-IT companies have decided that DIVERSIFICATION was the latest fad and abandoned doing their one thing well and crashed and burned doing lots of things not-so-great?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
And the cloud / cloud services aren't going away anytime soon. I have a hard time thinking of those as "Fads" though they might be supplanted or the terminology might change in a few years.
"Big Data" for me is still a buzzword that I'm not sure I understand the value of for most IT shops.
I've seen a lot of money thrown at fads which took resources away from things which actually add business value or generated revenue.
This is not unique to tech. Ask any public school teacher about the educational methodology fads they have to deal with.
I consider it a sad fact of reality that most tech execs are completely delusional
Any sufficient level of incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
Are you sure they are incompetent? My guess, is that they don't care about what functions, just as long as they get their toys.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
What's so IT-specific about this maxim, that it warrants being on Slashdot? A slow news day?
Probably the fact that tons of us have tried to tell people this in our jobs in the past, but few have been able to put it as clearly and as succinctly as this, while still stating all the factors that play into it.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Fads in IT? Unheard of.
This is why I still use DOS.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Not true; auto-transmission cannot yet know that there is a hill coming up and "pre-load" the gear ratio. I have driven some really good autos and mostly really bad autos. I currently have a Toyota 86, the auto box in that is amazing...the only time it has been it the "wrong" gear was either on the track going round a long sweeping corner where I wanted to stay in 3rd but it changed down to 2nd and when changing from being on the flat then up a steep hill.
Where as when I drive my manual Subaru Outback; I am always in the "correct" gear.
Yes the computer can calculate faster then I can; but it cannot (yet) perceive the upcoming road.
@Random_Adam
Sometimes a sig doesn't have to be funny!!
And my point was, that people, who do choose a sports(ier)-car and/or a 4x4, do so for reasons other than mere fad.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Whenever "bringing joy" is among the functions, more enjoyable means more functional.
Only if the objectives programmed in its algorithm(s) match mine. I'm yet to encounter a car, that is so programmed...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
And this, in your opinion, is a problem unique to IT? Seriously?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
There's a hell of a lot more fad in life than most people want to admit. For our cars, if we wanted function we'd all be driving minivans with stow-n-go seats.
Those of us who consider fuel efficiency or handling to be part of the functionality wouldn't be driving minivans.
Sure, we had Java at the time, but for some reason Visual Basic caught on big time in the late 90s. After going to school for software engineering, I had to completely remember how to program in subs. Subs are just like functions, except you need to remember to never use the same loop variable you used in the parent subs :P
God spoke to me
This reminds me of my mechanic's old Snap-On MODIS II OBD2 diagnostics machine. The thing is literally a handheld computer (heavy and bulky) except instead of a keyboard and mouse it has 6 buttons. When you plug it in, it takes 5-10 minutes to boot up Windows 98, then eventually the front end software starts up. It's a terrible hack of a machine.
.
Readability appears to be taking a back seat.
Because technology changes much more quickly than real world analogs, and sometimes everyone suddenly decides "OMG, if we don't have teh new stuff we're gonna die".
Yes, but.
Agile, for example, is hardly a "fad". It is a proven methodology that had its roots back in the 1950s or earlier. That means many of the primary elements of agile development have been around for over 50 years. Some "fad".
I don't have a problem with the general point of OP, but I strongly question OP's judgement of what constitutes a fad.
That's unfortunately not the exception.
I have an OTDR from EXFO that's effectively a Windows 2000 machine with some special controllers, drivers, and software. Most of the CNC machines that I've supported run Windows 95 or 98, and it's becoming a problem, getting project files on to them to have machined.
It's a lot easier when one doesn't have the write the OS, but unfortunately using a general-purpose OS means that the equipment becomes unsupportable before the job the machine was purchased to do is no longer necessary and before everything wears out.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Perhaps it isn't specific to IT but for whatever reason, fads run rampant in IT.
Minivans are dying. They have turned out to be a fad. They are being replaced by CUVs. It turns out almost nobody actually wanted to carry cargo and a lot of passengers, and a minivan is half-assed at both. The only exception went out of production because buyers decided it was too old — the Chevy Astro. Only one engine but since 2000 it was awesome, and available in short or long versions and AWD or RWD. RWD with 3.23s gets up to 26 mpg on the freeway at speed, I wouldn't lie to you. We would have got rid of it already otherwise. This is on an engine rebuild and a trans rebuild and an axle rebuild and a brake rebuild, though, I'm not claiming it's great in all ways. But have you seen the kind of mileage minivans get? Mostly it's no better than that, and they don't behave like a truck when you want them to. The only one I ever wanted to drive was the mid-engined Previa S/C, and it gets like 22 on the freeway.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Doesn't everybody learn from experience about jumping into fads at some point?
Is this just a problem for new IT being given power too soon or am I wrong and we have a lot of IT people who never learn?
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Not if its linux.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
That's a load of crap. If a CNC is too old, it's very likely that the CNC-specific software will have problems running on newer distributions because the libraries don't behave the way the old application needs anymore. Dependencies will fail and the program will crash, or even if the application's source is available it will fail to compile and be a huge pain in the ass to fix, if it's possible for the average user of a CNC mill at all.
It's also likely that it won't be updated, and if on the network will pose a security vulnerability.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Then you'd be stuck on some linux 2.0.x shit with veryimportantlibraryfoo at version 1.x whereas the current one is at 4.x?
And nobody would willingly buy a vehicle new unless/until they dropped the price enough to not lose a quarter to nearly half of their value the moment they drive off the lot.
What's so IT-specific about this maxim, that it warrants being on Slashdot? A slow news day?
Not a damn thing. As a matter of fact, the original HBR story referenced in the TFA is not about IT at all. And TFA could have been written by Captain Obvious, except it's not nearly as clear.
John
Your passage between quotes is exactly the same as the television ads for diapers I remember. Diapers Y was a lot better than Diapers X, but a couple years later Diapers Y now makes the baby cry and wet itself. Diapers Z is now required to make baby and mom happy and laugh in saturated colors.
One brand of laundry detergent even had a "Vista" in their upgrade cycle. It was so good at eating the stains that it was leaving holes in the clothes too.
On the upside, you won't have to deal with licensing issues for the operating system. I'm running into this with XP - Microsoft will not license new copies of XP and you can't downgrade a current version of Windows either. This makes replacing hardware difficult - even if the new hardware would work, if you can't get XP on it and the control software requires XP, you're kind of stuck.
Minivans are dying. They have turned out to be a fad. They are being replaced by CUVs. It turns out almost nobody actually wanted to carry cargo and a lot of passengers, and a minivan is half-assed at both.
huh? minivans are excellent at both. The only things better at hauling cargo are vans, and perhaps trucks and both suck at hauling people.
I'd say CUVs are a fad. They're for people who need a minivan but feel emasculated by not owning some ludicrous SUV.
I drove a minivan (Nissan Serena) for a few years when I was a kid. Was an excellent vehicle. I enjoued driving it (nice high driving position, huge mirrors), held 6 adults in comfort or could carry a crapload of stuff.
And fitted into the same size parking space as a mid size saloon car.
What's not to like?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Nor do many people who profess to use it.
In 25 years, I have yet to see a type of project that couldn't benefit from an agile approach...done correctly, of course. At its core, Agile is about breaking down a big project into manageable pieces. This process can be done logically, and it can be done nonsensically.
In IT there rarely are any hard problems. Few people operate Google scale data centres, few people do automatic voice recognition or video codecs.
This somehow seems to cause a desire for solving simple problems in difficult ways. You suddenly have complex frameworks to do more or less trivial things because you are trying to abuse something that's never meant to be used in a certain way. More and more non essential features get crammed into projects.
If you want to stay ahead in IT, avoid complexity. Simple ideas seem to persist in the long run. A typical example is the Unix philosophy. It's an attempt to make everything as simple as possible, so simple that a single person can write a cut down implementation in just a few months. Another example is the Internet. IP is a wonderful simple protocol. You just throw in a packet and it may or may not arrive on the other end. Compare that to ATM or ISDN and you will see how much simpler it is.
As a rule of thumb, if someone tells you about a new technology or trend, ask them to explain it to you in 1-2 sentences, no more than 20 words. Either they will fail, in this case you'll know that it's either just a buzzword or far to complex, or they will actually say what it is.
no "command line", honestly that;s the only thing stopping me from getting one. Now I have a Mazda 5, not as big -6 adults but no cargo space, or crap load of cargo space no passengers, and yeah manual transmission :-).
Because technology changes much more quickly than real world analogs
lovely digital/analog pun, but i think you meant analogues.
A blinding flash of the obvious!
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
I'd say CUVs are a fad. They're for people who need a minivan but feel emasculated by not owning some ludicrous SUV.
Minivans are what happens when you take a car and stretch it into another vehicle. CUVs are what happens when you purpose-build a vehicle to do a job.
What's not to like?
Minivans get crap mileage and have crap handling.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Depends on the minivan. Mileage is not worse then CUV's, it's better in most cases. The ones I've been i are much roomier internally and way easier to get in and out of when you have multiple people. CUV's seem like getting a bunch of people in and out is an afterthought, not purpose designed...
I have one that handles like a car and one that handles more like a small truck, with an incredibly tight turn radius.
Cheap storage VM.
In my experience, a huge fraction of the marketing surrounding any IT fad is the promise that it will magically erase or prevent technical debt. This is attractive because in many ways technical debt is THE great unsolved problem of software engineering. TL;DR there is no magic bullet; the only solutions are craftsmanship and paying the technical debt up front. Unless management understands this, no IT fad will ever solve the problem.
"The wisdom of the Patriarchs was that they *knew* they were fools." --Master Foo
Chrysler's minivans have been purpose-designed from the wheels-up, even when they shared drivetrain engineering with the K-cars. Having worked on, restored, and junked-out cars, I can state, definitively, that Chrysler's minivans share very little, outside of the drivetrain, with any of their other vehicles.
The Town and Country we last rented got around 27 miles per gallon. It handled just fine.
CUVs are often based on the mid or full-sized sedan from the company, with a mostly-same floor pan with height extended suspension to boost it up a bit.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Sometimes there are benefits to a fad that we don't really see as developers. In my industry we call them "press release features". They may feel useless or even degrading to be developing, but they can have actual monetary value. For example a bank in the US just made a big splash by announcing that they will "support iBeacons". How will they be supporting iBeacons? I have no idea. I'm not sure that even they know. It's not important. What's important is that they got a lot of media attention, and give themselves a veneer of progressiveness.
My wife drives a minivan, partly for function. It's versatile and reasonably economical.
I, on the other hand, drive something cheaper with better gas mileage, which is functionally better than having two minivans in the family.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
A friend of mine had a job with a company dealing with student loans, running COBOL on some sort of IBM mainframe, and everything was working fine. Then the new CIO decided he wanted to convert to Java on workstations (my friend thought it was likely resume-padding). The conversion of course took longer and was much more expensive than expected, and it turned out that the workstations couldn't handle the workload. (IBM mainframes are superb at reliably running large numbers of simple transactions, like the stuff you might write in COBOL.) I never heard about what happened later, since my friend was laid off about that time.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
What's so IT-specific about this maxim, that it warrants being on Slashdot? A slow news day?
I think the news is that it is being told to the IT Managers, which is news all by it's self!
The problem seems to be worse in IT, since the managers often know less about the work than in other fields.
... I think a lot of it is driven by people who either don't have the experience or simply can't handle the current tech and so see anything different as a chance to avoid being found out.
Actually, that's probably a lot of the reason for problems, in techs -or- management.
People entering a situation where they know little have a tendency to do things to invalidate the existing knowledge, so that they are on the same level as everyone else. This can be particularly bad with new managers and can destroy companies. Beware, you might not even be aware that you are doing this! 8-P
Also, an appalling number of people only know one thing, and have no idea that they could learn other things. In the software field, I am talking about the programmers that are "fanboys" for one language and don't know any other. Often this is a "new" language taught by a vendor, that is not useful for all (any?) jobs.
Real programmers know more than one language and more than one computer system. If you don't, it might be a good thing to "study up" on. Even if it is only one of the single-board "toys" you can get for around $35. 8-)
Minivans are what happens when you take a car and stretch it into another vehicle.
Nope. The Nissan Serena was about the same size as a saloon car on the ground. It was nothing at all like a stretched car. In fact it looked more like a van adapted to partial passenger use.
Minivans get crap mileage
I looked at a few CUVs online. They get similar mileage to minivans at the penalty of being able to hold fewer passengers in confort and haul less cargo.
and have crap handling.
Neither of them are race cars. My experience driving minivans is that they provide more than adequate handling for safe operation on normal roads when driven at an appropriate speed for the conditions.
Sure if you try to hammer round a tight curve well above the speed limit, you'll look like a fool at a much lower speed for a minivan than for a Bugatti.
If you like handling then nothing apart from a dedicated sports car will be adequate.
SJW n. One who posts facts.