Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Are Companies Under-Investing in IT?
Long-time Slashdot reader johnpagenola writes:
In the middle 1970's I had to choose between focusing on programming or accounting. I chose accounting because organizations were willing to pay for good accounting but not for good IT.
Forty years later the situation does not appear to have changed. Target, Equifax, ransomware, etc. show pathetically bad IT design and operation. Why does this pattern of underinvestment in and under-appreciation of IT continue?
Long-time Slashdot reader dheltzel argues that the problem is actually bad hiring practices, which over time leads to lower-quality employees. But it seems like Slashdot's readership should have their own perspective on the current state of the modern workplace.
So share your own thoughts and experiences in the comments. Are companies under-investing in IT?
Forty years later the situation does not appear to have changed. Target, Equifax, ransomware, etc. show pathetically bad IT design and operation. Why does this pattern of underinvestment in and under-appreciation of IT continue?
Long-time Slashdot reader dheltzel argues that the problem is actually bad hiring practices, which over time leads to lower-quality employees. But it seems like Slashdot's readership should have their own perspective on the current state of the modern workplace.
So share your own thoughts and experiences in the comments. Are companies under-investing in IT?
If you skimp on accounting, there is a lot of case law where you end up in jail.
When you have an IT disaster you never go to jail so far. Target, Equifax, etc. certainly haven't.
With both, if you skimp too much you might end up bankrupt. E.g. if you don't know your invoices and who owes what to whom, you go bankrupt. If that ransomware disrupts your business too long you also go bankrupt. So there is a certain needed minimum standard in both, but thanks to centuries of experience with it, accounting has much better laws, standards and especially case law than IT, raising the needed minimum bar much higher.
Security is hard, and there is no one who knows how to have perfect security. That's an unsolved problem.
There are a lot of things you can do, easy things, but there aren't enough people who know how to do them. For example, not letting someone log in with an empty password. That is a solved problem, it should never happen. But even if every company tried to hire good people, there aren't enough good people to fill every company. So they hire not good people. Unfortunate.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
As someone that owns a software company, I am constantly attempting to push my customers towards proactive, forward thinking maintenance. It's not like CTOs, executives, and decision makes are dumb. Many times organizations are aware of systemic problems, and they would prefer to be in a break-fix model than a preventative maintenance model. Decision makers have to balance allocation of resources to different projects, and if something is presently working, why spend the resources to ensure that it continues to work? This is one approach. Additionally, I've seen IT professionals scoff at anyone with technical skills AND an ability to get their ideas into motion, and move money towards their ideas ("sales" / "suits.")
Another approach is taken by companies with successful products, big teams, very cheap costs of capital, that are sitting on tons of cash. Those companies are able to invest tremendously into forward thinking projects, and have redundancy at all levels of their organization, and can afford to fail proactively rather than reactively. My friend at Google said for every code change he makes, two other engineers have to sign off on his code, and it has to run through a battery of automated tests before it is (carefully, and reversibly) integrated into production. I think this is the other extreme from my experience in developing, and supporting, software in New Mexico.
I don't think it makes sense to sit on an armchair, and discuss what "companies" should, and shouldn't do - unless you are employed by such a company either as a contractor, an employee, or own a fraction of that company and you have voting rights. I'm often times able to convince people to invest more into proactive solutions, especially after a predicted disaster that has been warned about repeatedly. Even without such a motivating disaster, I'm usually able to convince people to take some proactive steps, even if they're not willing to spend as much as I'd like to convince them to, or move as fast as I'd like.
Try convincing someone, (or yourself!) to go to the gym and you'll see what I mean with the difficulties in convincing organizations to spend money maintenance.
I had to give up a career in IT in favor of the military for a while and then legal practice. That's because IT is an unlicensed profession and employers can say they cannot find American talent, and can apply for far cheaper foreign IT workers.
Why spend money on something which provides no value?
30 years ago, I was in charge of IT for a medium company (150-200 employees). We had some PCs running 1-2-3 in the planning departments and a UNIX box with about 12 users on serial terminals.
Back them, 1-2-3 skills were not prevalent as Excel skils are expected to be, and upper management was always glad I could pull out “complex” reports in a few hours. What was impressive was the complete trust upper management had in my young squirtness of the time. They litterally gave me the keys to their company (I could have brought it down anytime) without any questions asked.
Familiarity breeds contempt, and as computers became more and more widespread, it only got downhill from there, to the point I got out of IT as a primary carreer goal and pursued work in other directions, only to come back to IT once in a while and getting more and more disgusted each time.
Then I pause to think that, had I had gone to work for the railroad as I had seriously envisioned 35 years ago, I would have had my pension for a long time now. Not so with IT.
How to pay "the minimum amount for labor and supplies."
Yes, but it appears to me that is not the main problem. The main problem is the EXTREME lack of knowledge and lack of interest in technology by most people in upper levels of management. They didn't have computers in their childhoods. They don't want to learn now, partly because they are overly busy, working 50 hours a week and having 4 children.
That will change. Recently I was in a library when a man approached the checkout desk with his son. His little girl went to the self-checkout computer, pulled a stool from underneath the counter, stood on the stool, and started the computer checkout process. I laughed and asked the man about that. He said his little girl is 2 years old and his children are "almost like a different species".
Dilbert cartoons often show a lack of knowledge of technology by top management. The cartoons are somewhat exaggerated but usually have a strong element of truth.
For example, "We have only bad data...."
I teach CS 428 ("Software Engineering") at BYU. The three texts my students read are:
-- The Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks (originally published in 1975, anniversary edition in 1995)
-- Peopleware by DeMarco and Lister (first published in 1987, currently in its 3rd edition)
-- Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering by Robert Glass (published in 2002)
I also recommend to them (but don't require) The Psychology of Computer Programming by Gerry Weinberg (first published in 1971)
I tell my students if they read those first three books, they will be in the 1% (or less) of people in the IT industry who have. Yet they clearly lay out all of the foundational issues in IT, including bad hiring, bad management, bad environments, lack of understanding (by management) of how to build teams and nurture talent, and so on. They explain why we have such crappy software and why we lose $50B or so each year in failed IT projects.
My other work is as an expert witness in litigation involving IT. About 50% of my cases are failed/disputed IT projects. My job is made easy -- though I am often depressed -- by how common and well-documented the root causes are. You'd think we'd learn. You'd be wrong. ..bruce..
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
Warren Buffet (IIRC) had an excellent suggestion to encourage long-term thinking in companies: tax the C-levels 100% on their stocks if they sell them while they're in the company or their first year out. It then goes down 10-20% every year afterwards. It would eliminate pump & dump, might even kill off vultures like Bain.
It'll never happen, but I think it's a lovely thought.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.