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Ask Slashdot: Biggest IT Management Mistakes?
snydeq writes: Sure, nobody's perfect. But for those in charge of enterprise technology, the fallout from a strategic gaffe, bad hire, or weak spine can be disastrous, writes Dan Tynan, in an article on the biggest management mistakes in IT. "Some of the most common IT gaffes include becoming trapped in a relationship with a vendor you can't shake loose, hiring or promoting the wrong people, and hiding problems from top management until it's too late to recover." What are some other career- and company-destroyers you've witnessed in your years in IT?
The big one I've seen with my current employer is that they've failed to expand their IT staff as the organization as a whole has expanded. The predictable result is that nothing but the most urgent requests gets handled promptly, and minor problems fester indefinitely.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
I recently worked for a startup with a real big asshole brogrammer who never was in the office and always was misunderstanding what was going on. Eventually I caught on to these charades. He was also lying to investors about our startup actually containing AI when it couldn't have been farther from the truth. To cover my own ass I sent a text message to the CEO warning him that we were committing fraud. After that the mark was on my head. Our "brogrammer" calls me into a room and says that I'm toxic. I counter by asking him his working hours and if he understands what fraud is. Over the next few weeks regardless of what happened I was ripped into a room and told how toxic I was.
Of course I was let go shortly after because the dumb CEO who always called me "his brother" was well aware of the sham and apparently didn't care. The crazy sociopath actually thought that I would still be friends with him after being fired. He also thinks it's some point I will come back to work for him, likely whenever that brogrammer finally leaves. I wonder if he knows that I'm planning on telling the FTC and his investors about this "AI" company. It's a bunch of regex matching natural language to appear as if you are speaking to a digital assistant. They're actually telling customers that this is a real AI system.
I would call this a serious mistake because their entire future is essentially in my hands. Since this Psychopathic CEO thinks I'm his friend and going to keep the lid on this, he's just plodding along blowing his money on other endeavors. I'll just let him build a little bit more of a paper trail for me before I strike. That's what you get for listening to the brogrammer.
I've seen them all, but "buying products or services from Oracle" ranks pretty high up. Or more generally, putting faith in a vendor because of a glossy ad in "CIO Magazine" or somebody in management getting kickbacks. Nontechnical managers are incapable of making these decisions, but want to feel like they're in control, so they try anyway.
... it was actually just RDP to a remote server.
At the first management/vendor meeting, I got to ask the first question: "How will response time compare to what we have now, with our servers in-house?"
"Oh, it will be much faster!"
It got worse from there.
I asked the owner if he knew that light slowed down in a medium and he said he did.
We already used RDP to the desktop and he KNEW about the latency.
Management ignored the red flags I threw on the play and put everything on the cloud against my recommendation.
We were a law firm and a time came when an elderly couple traveled from far away to sign some wills and the goddam cloud was down.
The family law practitioner blew her fucking top and confronted me and told me to implement Plan B.
I told her, "Ma'am, Plan B is Plan A."
It cost a fortune, but they paid termination fees and put everything back the way I had it before they went nuts.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
We were on Linux for our file server for a decade and ended up needing to switch to Windows. We were tired of not having a good consultant and Windows consultants were easy to find.
The mistake incidentally was not in switching to Windows per se; it can easily do the added tasks we need of it and Linux could not. The mistake was in thinking the issue was in finding good Linux consultants-- the issue was simply in finding good consultants period.
A month or so after I was "promoted" from lowly developer to "Systems Infrastructure Manager" during a whole-scale move from an old green screen AIX based system to a brand new in house custom rewrite in modern tech, we had some of the new replacement hardware onsite and being built up (although the replacement applications werent ready to go, but thats not important to this story).
One friday, the UPS support contractor came in to do his servicing of the UPS - that went well, he finished up and switched it back from "bypass" to "protected". That triggered a surge on the electrical supply to both server rooms, which took the AIX box off line. Due to the nature of the green screen application, there was no way for it to be high availability - the data couldnt be replicated in real time, it didnt even talk to anything other than its own binary database files...
A few hours later, the corrupted AIX box was restored and ready to go - by this time, the company (a busy call centre) had been on manual processes for the entire afternoon. On the advice of the UPS contractor, who said the surge was probably the result of too much load on the UPS at the time, we decided to do a full shut down of the entire system, switch the UPS back over into "protected" and bring everything back up - so we waited until 6pm and did just that...
At 6pm, I threw the switch - and promptly looked over my shoulder at the comms racks behind me in the server room. The comms racks were billowing smoke. The comms equipment was burning. Before I could react, I heard loads of loud pops and bangs - both inside the server room and outside it.
Another surge. This one did real damage - a dozen network switches dead, over 40 PSUs in the servers dead, one server dead outright, and loads of call centre desktops went (loudly) pop.
Panic time. UPS contractor called back in - they gave the UPS a clean bill of health and promptly left, disavowing any responsibility.
The board of directors shat themselves - at that point we didnt know the ultimate damage count, but suffice to say the company was dead in the water to any observer.
Cue a desperate night of testing servers, pulling dead PSUs and swapping redundant PSUs between servers so that each server had at least one good PSU. Comms equipment was harder to solve, having to get some expensive switches from our local shop to tide us over. Desktops were bought from the local consumer PC store to give us enough desktops to run the company.
Ultimately, we were back up and running for 8am Saturday - it wasn't pretty, but it was up and running. 3 of us in the IT tech team worked through the night scraping the bare minimum together.
My predecessors DR plan was fleshed out to the point of "we have a DR site" (a commercial site a town over that we had a contract to use - no equipment there, no plans for how to fail over to it etc etc).
So, on to the management failure....
It just so happens that one of my things "to do" on the following Monday was to submit my DR plan for the "new world infrastructure" to the board, who were having their quarterly board meeting the following week (10 days after the company almost died). It was a modest one, but required some equipment outlay to make any DR event as smooth as possible - kept the same contract with the off site unit etc etc.
They turned it down, said it wasn't needed.
I quit the following week.
And some of the things I hate most about Acrobats are these unnecessary additions to PDF files. It should be a read-only format, impossible to turn into a vector for malware. But no, Adobe screwed that pooch. I cannot open a PDF now, with Acrobat or Preview, without it thinking I have just modified the document and so it will ask me when I close it if I want to save my changes. I don't want encryption, if I wanted encryption I would encrypt the file. I hate vendors that send me "secure" documents and then require me to check in every 6 months to get new certificates so that I can continue to read it. I just want to read the document and I don't need the heavy weight Acrobat with it's strange UI doing this.
There was a story a few years ago about how google banned the use of windows desktops on security grounds. If you needed a windows desktop as a specific requirement of your job (testing, dev etc) you had to be able to justify it.
But it does make quite a statement, the more technically oriented a company is the less likely they are to be using windows.
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A friend makes bank now after his CEO got pissed at sales and marketing doing this shit. His sole job is to go to sales meetings and keep sales honest. He knows the business well, and studies up on the customer to understand who they are and what they seem to need. Then he shoots down sales during the meeting when they start promising too much or trying to sell something that the customer doesn't really seem to want or need.
The marketing folks hate him, but the CEO, developers, and the customers love him.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor