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Ask Slashdot: What Are Some Hard Truths IT Must Learn To Accept? (cio.com)
snydeq writes: "The rise of shadow IT, shortcomings in the cloud, security breaches -- IT leadership is all about navigating hurdles and deficiencies, and learning to adapt to inevitable setbacks," writes Dan Tynan in an article on six hard truths IT must learn to accept. "It can be hard to admit that you've lost control over how your organization deploys technology, or that your network is porous and your code poorly written. Or no matter how much bandwidth you've budgeted for, it never quite seems to be enough, and that despite its bright promise, the cloud isn't the best solution for everything." What are some hard truths your organization has been dealing with? Tynan writes about how the idea of engineering teams sticking a server in a closet and using it to run their own skunkworks has become more open; how an organization can't do everything in the cloud, contrasting the 40 percent of CIOs surveyed by Gartner six years ago who believed they'd be running most of their IT operations in the cloud by now; and how your organization should assume from the get-go that your environment has already been compromised and design a security plan around that. Can you think of any other hard truths IT must learn to accept?
The Cloud is your enemy. Fire anyone who offers a "cloud" solution before offering an in-house solution, because I can guarantee you that "cloud" services are only half as efficient as running the hardware in-house. The question really is where do you want your data to be.
If you have privacy concerns (eg credit cards), then machines dealing with credit cards should be co-located in a high-security data center that you know who has physical access to it. If you are simply serving cat videos, then cloud-away, because nobody is going to care if a cat video is slow due to bad provisioning.
But every time, it seems like I have to fight someone as to why it's cheaper to own or lease the hardware in-house rather than "cloud it", because cloud services are not as scalable as you believe it to be. The "cloud" only scales two things efficiently. CPU "TIME" and "Storage Capacity". If your IT is not concerned about these, then it doesn't belong in the cloud. If you are concerned about security or latency, those must never go into the cloud.
If you are crunching numbers, it is cheaper to borrow the CPU power of 500 computers for one day than it is to buy two computers and have them take one year. That is where "cloud" computing is supposed to be used.
Instead we have the morons of IT management trying to put everything into the cloud so they can eliminate IT staff, and the cost of doing this is that when mistakes are made (eg equifax) , nobody knows how to fix it, and it costs substantially more to fix by hiring new staff just to solve one problem.
>> What Are Some Hard Truths IT Must Learn To Accept? ...that IT is not engineering, and that engineering is not IT.
Software engineering cannot be squeezed into formulas for plugging and chugging.
I have to disagree. You have to move with the technology, if you don't then you'll be caught when support ends.
Support always ends.
Products change. Companies change focus. Executives decide to leave markets that aren't profitable anymore.
Any one of those and you're SOL if all you care about is "ain't broke".
What needs to change? That attitude. The world is always coming up with new fools and new ways to break things. If you aren't on the lookout for ways to keep protected and to keep pace with how and why things have changed then you're fucked. All the way fucked.
Learn. Unlearn. Relearn.
Learn what's out there. See what it can do that yours already doesn't. See if you need that or if it's a nice-to-have.
Unlearn the old ways of doing things. Mainframes were good for their day but their day has passed. Keep your people in training. Keep them vital with new things to learn.
Which is what relearning is all about. Never let yourself stagnate. Get tired of doing one thing, learn how to do another. Refresh your knowledge.
And fuck that nonsense about "Ain't broke". It'll be broke soon enough. Better to know what to replace it rather than sitting around with your hands open.
If you don't work for a tech company, you are a blue collar worker not a white collar worker.
Even if you do work for a tech company, if you are not a manager or a high level designer, you are a blue collar worker.
Basically, we are more like plumbers than doctors.
We really should unionize.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
1) Agile is bullshit
2) You do not need to have meetings every day
3) Standing up for a meeting is utterly ridiculous
4) Iteration Managers are a very poor replacement for Project Managers
5) Scrum Masters are a crock. You should not hire these people
6) Kanban is a bullshit methodology
7) Hotdesking sucks. Treat your staff well and give them their own desk.
"Working" doesn't mean it's secure and maintained. E.g. Equifax didn't replace one of their ad tracking scripts and as a result were delivering malware when the company serving it went bust and forfeited their domains.
You mean convert all your API's into JSON calls and spin up gajillion web services? Why? That increases complexity. Native-app-language-to-native-app-language is much easier than app-language-to-JSON-back-to-native-app-language.
Can't cloud do monolith? If not, what's stopping it? The performance bottleneck usually is and should be the database anyhow for must CRUD apps. Kajillion web services won't solve that. The CAP Theorem (Eric Brewer) limits your options and probably shouldn't be an app-side concern anyhow, but mostly a database side issue.
This kind of hype created a bloated stack in our org that requires dealing with 4x more code than a normal stack would. Nobody can give practical examples of the use of such splitting: they just spit out vague buzzwords stolen from Dilbert's boss, or dreamy shit like "what if we grow to Amazon.com size"? -- Yeah Right. We are more likely to get hit by a meteor while buying a lottery ticket on a unicycle.
Plus, these extra web layers seem a security risk: more doors for hackers to pick the locks of. Who is spreading this microservice rumor/hype? Russians? Microsoft marketers? Wrox? Knock-it-off!
Martin Fowler said:
As far as general IT advice:
1. Data tends to outlive application software, so focus on good data.
2. Be wary of wasteful hype. Let somebody else be the guinea pig. When that somebody else has it running well, THEN borrow the idea.
3. Books are judged by the cover for good or bad, so throw the executives a pretty bone for a few high-visibility parts of a system, but keep most of the regular stuff (grunt screens) in something easy to create and maintain. Don't drag down the entire system chasing eye-candy and UI fads. By the time you're finished, it'll be obsolete anyhow.
4. "Separation of Concerns" is a myth. Most non-trivial concerns inherently inter-weave among each other. You want to manage concerns well, not outright separate them with thick Trump Walls.
Table-ized A.I.
I'm 42, so I'm officially an old fart when it comes to my IT job. I'm in a senior engineering/systems architect job and one of my favorite aspects of it is my unofficial duty to impart wisdom on the newbies. My "hard truth" about IT that surprisingly few people truly grasp is that you can't get comfortable being the expert at one particular thing and coast. Even 10 years ago you could do that...I know so many people who make more than I do jumping from contract to contract doing CCNP-level router work or being the "EMC/HPE/IBM storage wizard." The formula for success used to be to pick a vendor, steep yourself in the technology, then get and keep certifications while learning what's new every few years. This is rapidly going away...regardless of what you think of cloud, CIOs hear the magic word "OpEx" and suddenly all that on-premises hardware and knowledge is out the window. For years, I did a combination of Windows Server, Citrix XenApp and System Center as my core skills, while trying to learn as much as I could about other areas. Even that has changed so much in the past couple of years...desktop apps are being replaced with web apps, containers, APIs, anything that abstracts the client layer and makes it look and act like a smartphone.
These days, one of my jobs is to do the systems design for a huge project in Azure. Anyone thinking they can just pick up a cloud provider's stack of tools overnight is in for a bit of a shock. Couple that with the fact that all the cloud vendors are releasing whole new features every week and existing features change almost as often. Part of my job has been trying to get as many of our engineering staff on board for learning cloud stuff, and it's been a challenge with a couple of people.
Keeping up with all the knowledge needed to be the guy they keep on staff when all the routine work is offshore is hard. I have had to dedicate a lot of off-work time to it, because no company trains their staff anymore...one of the things I hate about IT not being recognized as a real profession. The reward for doing this is a very interesting job and, not surprisingly, a higher-pressure firehose to learn from. :-) Being a dad on top of this is tough also...it requires lots of time management, late night reading and watching videos at 2x speed to do this and be a functioning parent.
So yeah...if you want to keep an IT job, especially as things get more and more abstract, broaden your skill set and learn as much as you can get your brain around.
IT is a support function - it's job is to keep the rest of the company moving.
Everything is broken. The fact that you have not noticed it yet doesn't change this.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB