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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?
The problem is always the same: how to scrape by paying the minimum amount for labor and supplies. It's literally called cutting corners. It's not a new problem and it only really gets solved through the application of regulation.
This isn't rocket science, people!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
To the average person, the only reason IT people exist is to make sure they can check in on Facebook every 30 seconds while at work and replace their keyboard when they spill coffee or soda on it.
Aside from that, IT has no useful purpose and thus is seen as a debilitating cost. Why spend money on something which provides no value?
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.
Its because students get out of college and think they're the shit and know it all which comes down to Dunning Kruger syndrome. Companies and Corporations aren't willing to invest in self taught life long IT professionals and hackers who have dedicated their entire life to learning security and technologies, but instead want the unskilled grads who have the paper without the experience!
My experience reflects a very reactionary industry;
- Don't buy disks till current storage is redlining.
- Don't buy LAN till the current one is swamped.
- Don't patch till someone else (if you're lucky) gets raped.
- Don't train till you you get bitten by a big knowledge gap, likely a result of the aforementioned rape.
- Don't spend till someone bigger than you tells you to, even if a condition exists that leaves you vulnerable to any of the above points.
If accounting operated like the IT industry, accounting as we know it would not exist. A server is recoverable, an empty ban account due to negligent or facetious handling, is not.
I would however suggest the problem is not poor quality employee's but, as it turns out, poor quality accounting by the broader organisation. Time and time again I have seen projects and upgrades get bumped from capex to cpex till something happens that resonates high enough up the food chain for someone to open the loot box, no matter how hard the guys on the ground are petitioning for it. Perhaps it is accounting that has the poor quality employees?
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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.
There is a simple solution: randomly promote people to arbitrary jobs each year. It cannot possibly be worse than the present situation. And look: we can solve inequality and "pay gaps" by paying people arbitrary salaries too.
OK, its true, I need another coffee.
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Because people don't like the stinky nerds, and don't care about "nerd things".
The reference is hilarious, but the irony of this mentality in the real world is a shitload of people are employed by some of the richest nerds in the universe, who started their multi-billion dollar mega-corps doing "nerd things".
Nobody intentionally hires crap people... I'll agree there. We just came off a situation where a 6 person team was reduced to 2 because IT was "too expensive" in the CEOs eyes. We got approval to fill 1 of those lost positions but were only given funding to get an entry level person. We hired the best candidate we could find in a reasonable time in the price range, but that "savings" came with a lot of training , hand-holding,and slow delivery. Some would call that a crap hire because we couldn't replace with equivalent skill of the person they replaced. The hiring practice was fine but the constraints imposed led to ineffective hiring for the real needs of the company.
Funny ending... that person lasted under 90 days. We get to do it all again.
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...."
It is underinvested, poorly organized with focus on maximizing income streams for health care systems rather than improving health care outcome.
I've seen enough at this point in my career in several organizations - some are hospital systems, some a health IT vendors - to be confident about this. Much of the developed systems were overseen by people with little to no real world healthcare experience. They made decisions directed to satisfy hospital system leadership which has had no serious vested interest in improving outcomes until the last few years. Most hospital systems leader have no background taking care of patients or whatever experience they have is seriously limited.
Because I've practiced medicine (and still do) it is been appalling to me to see who is making the decisions and why.
Now that I work for a large healthcare IT vendor and I have quite a bit of autonomy directing our resources to create content and tools that are more useful to the actual health care providers, the problem is we are understaffed to provide these products as thoroughly with as high a quality as they should be. One reason is because we have to undo much of the legacy crap - 20+ years of having non-clinical people doing this has led to frankly incorrect data and logic. If we could start with a fresh plate it would be much easier. Another is, no one wants to pay for clinically experienced people who know how to review scientific data to actually research the problems or the clinical literature to make fully informed decisions.
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)
Broadly speaking, business leaders are largely unable to discern the difference in effectiveness of half-assed IT and good IT. Except for two facets:
-You become the next equifax
-Good IT costs more
Of course, even if they want good IT, they can't tell the difference, so they my try to invest to get "good IT" and still get bad IT and have expectations calibrated that there is no good or bad IT, only cheap and expensive.
One sign of bad IT is your employees complaining about how bad the systems are. From a business perspective the answer is to tell your employees to suck it up, perceive them as whiners. They can't imagine better. The tools selected come from big reputable companies with reassuring salespeople talking it up and how it has improved other customers, while the pitiable users are comparatively less well equipped to precisely explain how or why the system sucks. In the meantime, often this phenomenon is offset by the users by "shadow IT", peer support to give each other what they need to get their jobs, without telling official IT about it (because the relationship between IT and people gets adversarial). This is a strong indication IT has picked the wrong tools for the job, but it also tends to create invisible business critical systems with 'admin' as the password.
Note that sometimes it's what bad IT does to otherwise well made software, imposing maddening workflows that make no sense on software that was designed for a sane world.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I have rarely met an MBA who had the time of day for an Engineering type. You tell MBAs that such and such needs to be encrypted moved, backed up, or whatever critical thing for $10,000 and you won't get the budget. Then an interior designer comes in and redoes the front lobby for the 3rd time in 5 years for a cost of $250k.
Then there are the pay scales. In any large not obviously IT company (many of which delude themselves into thinking they aren't nearly all IT like banks) you get an MBA with 5 years in getting $120k and the Engineers getting $70k. Then they wonder why they can't keep the talent.
The MBAs even treat the accountants like trash.
What I see are people of near zero talent who are genuinely scared of those with it. The more talent you have outside of their MBA world the more scared they are. You realize that you can save the company $10 million a year through something you found in the data and you get a pat on the back. Some MBA does a stupid deal worth $10 million (worth, not makes) and they get a rockin' bonus larger than the Engineer's salary.
Then, hidden among the corporate world are the companies that are pretty much just Engineering people some of whom are good at sales and business. Those companies attract the top talent and often run circles around the old guard. An old guard who realize that they need to up their IT game so they outsource to India and lay off half of their employees.
I have a simple formula. If a company has a large number of H1Bs in its staff then it will gain a short term advantage as it reduces costs and rides on its earlier momentum. In the long term it will start to find the ride bumpy, and then it will sink into oblivion. Think Yahoo, SUN, Compaq, etc. These companies were taken over by their MBAs who thought that Engineering was a commodity business.
So to answer the original question. Crappy companies that are not going to be competitive in the long term are not investing in IT. The companies that are kicking ass and taking names are.