I see the gig economy as an opportunity for older tech workers like me. Most companies don't want to hire a near-60-something as a permanent employee, but have no problems with signing me to a contract. I'm not ready to retire yet, but I do have, to quote a movie, "...are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career."
Most companies need my particular skills for a big project maybe up to a year, two at the outside. At the end, I train a lower-paid permanent employee to manage things, then I move on having added whatever new skills I picked up during the gig to my resume. Since it's always a short-term gig with a deadline, I can charge extortionate hourly rates and work lots of overtime and everybody's happy. Then I can add another blurb to my resume "Implemented widget sorting system at BigCo" and add another 5 bucks an hour to my rate. Win-win.
I do work for a staffing firm. It's sort of a pimp-hooker-john relationship. They're my pimp and do a good job of finding me another john (job) when I'm done with the current contract.
I learned coding using the unholy duo of COBOL and FORTRAN, written out by hand on coding forms and then hand-punched on an IBM 029 card punch machine from hell. It was goddamn hard and we liked it that way! Now, get the fuck off my lawn.
Programming is an abstract concept. It's not like hammering nails into a board, it's all done in your head. You have to visualize, organize and convert all those bytes flowing around in your head into cognizable, workable code. It takes a certain type of person with a fair degree of mental discipline to do that. Debugging is an even more abstract mental exercise.
It's hard to produce complex code. If coding were easy, a 2nd grader could write a payroll system in Logo. Watch Johnny move the turtle to calculate FICA!
We're still running COBOL code from the 70's. Probably 600k lines of it all told, which is down from over a million lines around Y2K. It's all boring financial stuff, but utterly essential.
I'm a greyhair now, but I was in junior high school when this system first went online. The names at the top of the change log have been dead and buried for 20+ years. The names in the middle retired right after Y2k. The names at the bottom are all 55+ years old. COBOL coders are worth their weight in gold these days, but getting any to stick around for more than a year has been difficult. COBOL contractors can ALWAYS make substantially more money somewhere else.
The cost to analyze the codebase and build a replacement will cost a frikkin' huge fortune. Thus, I suspect the company will continue to run this same code long after my name has moved to the top of the change log and I've been archived on that big DASD in the sky.
I have legacy green-screen skills that are valuable only because the people that have my skill are retired and/or rapidly dying off, yet these systems are still in common use all over the world. Why should my skills be valued the same as some dime-a-dozen Java union hack when I can pull down extortionate wages on my own?
I'd be happy to get right on migrating chop chop just like MS wants. Our MS TAM keeps pushing pushing pushing, but the problem is that I have 30k+ workstations to manage. Just the act of physically upgrading the OS on each of those workstations takes plenty of time as it is. Plus, there's the matter of keeping the business going while I upgrade all those workstations.
First, however, I have to create a Win7 OS build that works on all the one-off situations I have. That a work in progress. Then I have to test the OS build on all those one-off situations. Then I have to test the bajillion apps I have and figure out what works and what doesn't. Then I have to determine what can be remediated and what has to be replaced. Then I have to get the budget for both remediation and replacement of those apps. Then I have to test, certify and package what's been remediated and replaced. Then I have to determine what will need to be certified by the various government agencies that we operate under. (We have to get governmental blessings in some cases to change hardware and/or software). Then I have to buy replacement hardware for those workstations that are below the waterline for the new OS. Then I have to schedule (and pay for) end user training on the new OS in various languages in cities all over the globe. Then I have to plan the overwhelming logistics of putting a new OS on all these workstations all over the globe in a manner that doesn't disrupt the business. In addition, I have to deliver replacement hardware to the right place at the right time with very limited resources (that is, not enough people to install so many boxen). Then I have to have the support infrastructure in place to support the inevitable issues that will come roaring in. Then I have to have procedures in place to investigate these issues on the new OS and do whatever is required to unbreak whatever is broken, whether it be sending the software back for fixes or unforeseen hardware replacements.
So, yeah, pardon me if I'm running a bit behind. I've got a lot of work to do with too few staff, too little time and not enough money. But, what else is new?
I work at a fairly large international outfit, with data feeds coming and going to the far ends of the Earth. Everything we do is time-sensitive. Processing messages that depend on prior messages already being processed means we can't gracefully handle things coming in out of order.
We spent lots of time and money studying this problem, hired a high-priced consulting outfit to advise us and spun up lots of projects to mitigate the "risk" of the leap second. There were far too many meetings and conference calls with vendors, VARS and other people that wanted us to pay them for their time. What was determined was that we couldn't guarantee that nothing would crash or (gasp!) messages might be discarded or processed incorrectly, which was a risk we weren't willing to take. We run a full gamut of OSes, from HP/UX, Solaris, Linux, z/TPF, z/OS, DB2 etc etc.. You get the idea. Too many variables and too many systems to update and test with the limited funds and limited timeframe given.
In the end, we avoided the problem by shutting down all (and I do mean ALL) processing and flushing all the transactional systems to disk and suspending EVERYTHING from a minute before until a minute after the leap second. (Was that two minutes or two minutes PLUS one second? Clock math has always eluded me.) Shutting down all these interconnected systems in the correct order was a precision dance that, in the end, we didn't perform very well. Messages did end up being discarded. At precisely:20 seconds after the leap second, we began syncing all our systems with our internal NTP server and then at precisely one minute after, we slowly started everything back up. There were some systems that required a restart. We manually reprocessed those earlier discarded messages just as fast as our little fingers could type. In all it took us about 15 minutes to get everything spun back up, and all that time is getting charged to our SLA, which affects ALL our evaluations and year-end bonuses.
Lots of work was done, overtime was paid and buckets of money were given to lots of high-priced consultants and I personally will take a hit to my paycheck, all over ONE GODDAMNED SECOND.
I wanted to see for myself what government agents or advertisers would find when they went sifting through my web history, so I took a close a look through several years of my own web history.
I have scientifically determined that I am an amazingly dull person. I bore myself to tears. I'd rather read the phone book than go through my own web history again.
I'm in one of these "critical" industries that will be most likely be included under the benevolent government security umbrella provided by this bill. I've gotten pretty good at predicting how our loving, caring government is likely to respond to this type of challenge, to wit:
After a competitive bid involving only Cisco, Oracle and Microsoft, they will likely hire Cisco, Oracle and Microsoft to tell them what's needed. Unsurprisingly, the solution will include the requirement to purchase lots of expensive products from Cisco, Oracle and Microsoft.
This new regulatory function will obviously need oversight by the government. The government will expand (bloat?) the bureacracy by hiring an excessivly large number of underqualified, overpaid people to monitor compliance with their byzantine rules, which will constantly change to suit their whims. There will be minor incidents, which will be blamed on laziness and non-compliance by the industry. More regulations will be drafted, new equipment will be purchased and the bureacracy will expand even further.
At that point, we commence the never-ending circle of more regulation, more money paid to a select group of "certified" vendors and the unceasing growth of the bureacracy.
IT shops have to do what their users want, within the regulatory and financial framework laid down by government, corporate counsel, shareholders, lenders, legal privacy requirements, and all with an adoring eye focused on our fiduciary duty to our employees, customers and suppliers.
Just because a user wants to be able to have a neat toy doesn't mean we throw all those requirements to the wind. Trade secrets that leak out into the public domain through insecure devices means those secrets aren't, well... secret. Credit card numbers, social security numbers, private medical information and such all require a certain standard of care in handling, and if the device can't meet that standard, which means that we as a corporation can't CONTROL how that device is used, then we can't allow our users to have those devices, regardless of their heartfelt desires. The legal liability alone dictates what we can and can't do.
I really do like Apple products. I own far too many myself. However, we won't allow those devices on our internal network because of all the reasons I listed.
Leap seconds are a tiny bit of problem when you have to time-stamp transactions coming in from all over the globe and keep them in date/time order. Some OSes don't support leap seconds, which complicates matters. We have the procedures documented from the last time this happened in 2008, but, of course, we've changed OS, DB and message queue vendors since then, so nothing applies anymore.
Time to spin up a new project and pay some high-priced consultants a lot of money to rewrite the procedures documentation yet again. I suspect we'll take the coward's way out and shut down processing for a minute before until a minute after and resync the clocks in the interim.
That will, of course, be charged to our SLA downtime, which will affect everyone's performance reviews at the end of the year. All this for a single goddamn second.
You totally missed the point. The actual deployment takes a few mouse clicks and the application is on its way to the enterprise. It's everything you have to coordinate beforehand that takes all the time. You have to test plugins, internal and external webapps and a zillion different things that users use a web browser for. You'd be surprised at what all has to be tested.
The actual deployment has to be planned. Migrate user settings, GPO updates, cleaning up previous versions, making sure you save and restore every little stupid thing. You have to create help desk and field services documentation (sometimes in multiple languages) and then train the helldesk idiots.
You have to coordinate back end webapp server changes. You have to test those changes.
You have to plan and schedule your pilot test. You have to gather feedback from your pilot users and possibly make changes and re-pilot.
THEN you can go production, and watch in amazement when the excrement hits the fan and a million-and-one things you never though of crop up.
I could press a button right now and have FF5 on 40k desktops by midnight. I'd lose my job, but I could do it.
Testing isn't hard, it just takes a lot of time and money. We have to CERTIFY exactly which of the several hundred internal and external webapps FireFox works with, and which it doesn't, and then create copious documentation in several languages for help desk and field personnel. We have to plan and manage GPO settings for dozens of different groups. If code changes have to be made on servers to support the new browser, that has to be coordinated across the enterprise.
There's more to it than browsing to a few websites and then letting the code fly.
Honestly, the history wasn't even considered. We had a big enough pile of user requests for FireFox, so we started the process for bringing new software into the enterprise. You assume management researched the matter and used their keen intellect to thoroughly evaluate the feasibility of supporting FireFox.
Management just nodded their head a lot and sent a 1-line email to the appropriate geek.
Short answer: We'll stick with IE, like we have since the dark ages.
tl;dr: FF and Chrome were being looked at as 'alternative' browsers, to give our users some choice. FF testing got off the ground, Chrome was still in the 'being-talked-about' stage. Testing monthly security patches is something we're intimately familiar with, and can knock out in a couple of days. There's a HUGE difference between testing patches and acceptance testing. With M$ patches, we have a pretty good idea what to test for, and we have our own pet M$ rep on-site to get us the info we need.
Simple: FF4 is the version that finally got management's attention and thus the testing cycle was started. Even with FF5 coming out, the testing would have continued on FF4, but with the cessation of security patches, that effort has been cancelled. We'd have to start over from scratch, and, right now, I just don't see that happening. Mozilla is no longer 'trusted' by management.
Yes, we do go through a montly patch testing cycle . It's not the same gruesome process as the thorough acceptance testing that goes into introducing a -brand new- browser into a corporate environment, but the important stuff does get tested.
This move just crushed any chance of Firefox being approved as an 'alternate' browser at the large faceless corporation I toil for, and I'm one of those Firefox 'fanbois' that was pushing for this, and I'm going to look like an idiot now. I'm not real happy with Mozilla right now.
I'm guessing somebody at Mozilla just doesn't understand the size of the testing effort that was underway to get Firefox 4 approved for enterprise distribution. Let me scale it for you: 40,000 workstations in several dozen countries running several hundred 'critical' webapps. We have to certify exactly what works and what doesn't, in each and every language we support for each specific VERSION that is published. Testing is EXPENSIVE, and every dime we put into this effort is now wasted. That leaves Chrome as the only other "corporate-friendly" choice, and now management is going to ask "Well, what if Google decides to pull the same stunt?".
Microsoft gives us written guarantees as to how long they will support previous versions of IE. That means a lot to my corporate overlords. Mozilla might want to consider doing the same thing. It's called "being a reliable business partner".
I work for a passenger airline, and a big part of my job is making the migration from IE6 to IE8 happen smoothly. It's going slow as molasses, to be honest. With 50k+ workstations scattered all around the globe and many thousands of apps to test and remediate, the transition to IE8 isn't going to happen as fast as we, our suppliers and our customers want it to happen.
Honestly, I'd love nothing more than to be free of that craptastic piece of shit browser, but the reality of keeping the planes in the air gets in the way. Plus, there's this annoying shortage of freely available money, so we can't just throw buckets of green at the problem like we used to. We have to pay for remediation as the budget allows.
We've had a few vendors come to us and say "We're not going to support your browser anymore, we don't like coding for it". Our usual response is "We're not going to support giving you any more money, we don't like paying you for it". They grumble, whine and cry, but 9 times out of 10, they cave. Being able to say that we're a major customer is a big thing to some vendors. Some even point it out on their website. Partner airlines are often required to buy a given product just because we use it and it's compatible with our way of doing things. Losing us as a customer means they stand to lose all these other airlines as customers when we choose a replacement vendor.
We've had a (very) few purists walk away from the money. As annoying as that is, I have to respect these few vendors that stick to their guns. Then again, replacement vendors willing to prostitute themselves by doing IE6 'hacking' are cheap and plentiful.
I swear, we must work for the same faceless corporate overlords.
The huge, supposedly tech-savvy corporation I slave away for has reacted to the mass abandonment of IE6 with outright fear and panic. The upper management of our Data Security division came straight out of the mainframe era, and act like the word 'Firefox' is a horribly offensive expletive. It's just not an option.
As could be expected, we have some rather important corporate systems that were developed back in the big-budget heyday of the prior decade and, of course, only work on IE6. There's no money to pay for a rework, and the original vendor has long since gone bust. We have Citrix in-house, but, again, there's mass fear and panic going on there about having a mass influx of users for these outdated corporate systems, when there's no money for new servers.
We're testing IE8 for 'select' users (i.e. upper management, sales and marketing), but most of those users are poor choices for testing, as most of the important work they do seems to involve ESPN, Facebook and Craigslist.
Let's compare buying a CD from a retail store versus downloading, shall we? Let's say you hear this rad Britney tune on some awesome Youtube mashup and you just have to have it, right freaking now.
Retail:
1) Get out of bed. Not something I do willingly.
2) Shower. Or not. Depends on how offensive your personal aroma is. After 2 days without a shower, I smell like roses and candy.
3) Get dressed. Okay, so I don't have any clean underwear. I'll just flip these inside out, nobody can see the skidmarks.
4) Find car keys. For me, it's usually a 5 minute desperate search until I realize that they're already in my pocket.
5) Drive to store. Traffic sucks, gas costs money and if I get another moving violation, I lose my license. No, Officer Friendly, I have no idea how fast I was going. Why don't you let me in on the secret?
6) Park in big box store parking lot. It's a long freaking walk in direct sunlight, and my basement-dwelling geek-pale skin might just burst into flame. Lean against door to rest. Wheeze loudly.
7) Go into store and find desired CD. Lookit that, they're out of stock and I came all this way. Shucks.
8) Stand in long-ass checkout line behind Welfare Queen and her brood. Screaming kids are always a pleasure, the little darlings.
9) Pay uncaring, minimum-wage clerk $14 for your purchase. For 6 bucks an hour, you KNOW she cares what you think.
10) Drive back home. More gas, more traffic, more chances for that moving violation.
11) Open CD. Break out Sawzall to cut through multiple layers of plastic and security tape. Cut finger open. Curse loudly.
12) Rip CD to disc. Can't browse porn while it's ripping or it might mess up. Hunt through 433 cable channels for something to watch while CD rips.
13) Upload to mp3 player. Rock out to Britney's latest. FINALLY!
Elapsed time: 90 minutes, $14 plus gas, plus cost of speeding ticket (if any).
Download:
1) Roll over in bed, open laptop, brush Cheetos dust off sausage-like fingers, click on Amazon.
2) Pay 99 cents for the one track you want.
3) Browse porn for the 60 seconds or so it takes to download.
3) Upload to MP3 player. Rock out.
Elapsed time: 3 minutes tops, 99 cents. No clothing, no shower, no speeding ticket.
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I see the gig economy as an opportunity for older tech workers like me. Most companies don't want to hire a near-60-something as a permanent employee, but have no problems with signing me to a contract. I'm not ready to retire yet, but I do have, to quote a movie, "...are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career."
Most companies need my particular skills for a big project maybe up to a year, two at the outside. At the end, I train a lower-paid permanent employee to manage things, then I move on having added whatever new skills I picked up during the gig to my resume. Since it's always a short-term gig with a deadline, I can charge extortionate hourly rates and work lots of overtime and everybody's happy. Then I can add another blurb to my resume "Implemented widget sorting system at BigCo" and add another 5 bucks an hour to my rate. Win-win.
I do work for a staffing firm. It's sort of a pimp-hooker-john relationship. They're my pimp and do a good job of finding me another john (job) when I'm done with the current contract.
These robots and their minders will be the first against the wall when the Butlerian Jihad comes.
Straight from the Orange Catholic bible: "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
I learned coding using the unholy duo of COBOL and FORTRAN, written out by hand on coding forms and then hand-punched on an IBM 029 card punch machine from hell. It was goddamn hard and we liked it that way! Now, get the fuck off my lawn.
Programming is an abstract concept. It's not like hammering nails into a board, it's all done in your head. You have to visualize, organize and convert all those bytes flowing around in your head into cognizable, workable code. It takes a certain type of person with a fair degree of mental discipline to do that. Debugging is an even more abstract mental exercise.
It's hard to produce complex code. If coding were easy, a 2nd grader could write a payroll system in Logo. Watch Johnny move the turtle to calculate FICA!
Radio will end up being an endless replay of the same 20 pop hits by the same mega-artists.
Oh, wait. It already is.
We're still running COBOL code from the 70's. Probably 600k lines of it all told, which is down from over a million lines around Y2K. It's all boring financial stuff, but utterly essential.
I'm a greyhair now, but I was in junior high school when this system first went online. The names at the top of the change log have been dead and buried for 20+ years. The names in the middle retired right after Y2k. The names at the bottom are all 55+ years old. COBOL coders are worth their weight in gold these days, but getting any to stick around for more than a year has been difficult. COBOL contractors can ALWAYS make substantially more money somewhere else.
The cost to analyze the codebase and build a replacement will cost a frikkin' huge fortune. Thus, I suspect the company will continue to run this same code long after my name has moved to the top of the change log and I've been archived on that big DASD in the sky.
I have legacy green-screen skills that are valuable only because the people that have my skill are retired and/or rapidly dying off, yet these systems are still in common use all over the world. Why should my skills be valued the same as some dime-a-dozen Java union hack when I can pull down extortionate wages on my own?
I'd be happy to get right on migrating chop chop just like MS wants. Our MS TAM keeps pushing pushing pushing, but the problem is that I have 30k+ workstations to manage. Just the act of physically upgrading the OS on each of those workstations takes plenty of time as it is. Plus, there's the matter of keeping the business going while I upgrade all those workstations.
First, however, I have to create a Win7 OS build that works on all the one-off situations I have. That a work in progress. Then I have to test the OS build on all those one-off situations. Then I have to test the bajillion apps I have and figure out what works and what doesn't. Then I have to determine what can be remediated and what has to be replaced. Then I have to get the budget for both remediation and replacement of those apps. Then I have to test, certify and package what's been remediated and replaced. Then I have to determine what will need to be certified by the various government agencies that we operate under. (We have to get governmental blessings in some cases to change hardware and/or software). Then I have to buy replacement hardware for those workstations that are below the waterline for the new OS. Then I have to schedule (and pay for) end user training on the new OS in various languages in cities all over the globe. Then I have to plan the overwhelming logistics of putting a new OS on all these workstations all over the globe in a manner that doesn't disrupt the business. In addition, I have to deliver replacement hardware to the right place at the right time with very limited resources (that is, not enough people to install so many boxen). Then I have to have the support infrastructure in place to support the inevitable issues that will come roaring in. Then I have to have procedures in place to investigate these issues on the new OS and do whatever is required to unbreak whatever is broken, whether it be sending the software back for fixes or unforeseen hardware replacements.
So, yeah, pardon me if I'm running a bit behind. I've got a lot of work to do with too few staff, too little time and not enough money. But, what else is new?
I work at a fairly large international outfit, with data feeds coming and going to the far ends of the Earth. Everything we do is time-sensitive. Processing messages that depend on prior messages already being processed means we can't gracefully handle things coming in out of order.
We spent lots of time and money studying this problem, hired a high-priced consulting outfit to advise us and spun up lots of projects to mitigate the "risk" of the leap second. There were far too many meetings and conference calls with vendors, VARS and other people that wanted us to pay them for their time. What was determined was that we couldn't guarantee that nothing would crash or (gasp!) messages might be discarded or processed incorrectly, which was a risk we weren't willing to take. We run a full gamut of OSes, from HP/UX, Solaris, Linux, z/TPF, z/OS, DB2 etc etc.. You get the idea. Too many variables and too many systems to update and test with the limited funds and limited timeframe given.
In the end, we avoided the problem by shutting down all (and I do mean ALL) processing and flushing all the transactional systems to disk and suspending EVERYTHING from a minute before until a minute after the leap second. (Was that two minutes or two minutes PLUS one second? Clock math has always eluded me.) Shutting down all these interconnected systems in the correct order was a precision dance that, in the end, we didn't perform very well. Messages did end up being discarded. At precisely :20 seconds after the leap second, we began syncing all our systems with our internal NTP server and then at precisely one minute after, we slowly started everything back up. There were some systems that required a restart. We manually reprocessed those earlier discarded messages just as fast as our little fingers could type. In all it took us about 15 minutes to get everything spun back up, and all that time is getting charged to our SLA, which affects ALL our evaluations and year-end bonuses.
Lots of work was done, overtime was paid and buckets of money were given to lots of high-priced consultants and I personally will take a hit to my paycheck, all over ONE GODDAMNED SECOND.
Let's not do that again, okay?
I wanted to see for myself what government agents or advertisers would find when they went sifting through my web history, so I took a close a look through several years of my own web history.
I have scientifically determined that I am an amazingly dull person. I bore myself to tears. I'd rather read the phone book than go through my own web history again.
I'm in one of these "critical" industries that will be most likely be included under the benevolent government security umbrella provided by this bill. I've gotten pretty good at predicting how our loving, caring government is likely to respond to this type of challenge, to wit:
After a competitive bid involving only Cisco, Oracle and Microsoft, they will likely hire Cisco, Oracle and Microsoft to tell them what's needed. Unsurprisingly, the solution will include the requirement to purchase lots of expensive products from Cisco, Oracle and Microsoft.
This new regulatory function will obviously need oversight by the government. The government will expand (bloat?) the bureacracy by hiring an excessivly large number of underqualified, overpaid people to monitor compliance with their byzantine rules, which will constantly change to suit their whims. There will be minor incidents, which will be blamed on laziness and non-compliance by the industry. More regulations will be drafted, new equipment will be purchased and the bureacracy will expand even further.
At that point, we commence the never-ending circle of more regulation, more money paid to a select group of "certified" vendors and the unceasing growth of the bureacracy.
IT shops have to do what their users want, within the regulatory and financial framework laid down by government, corporate counsel, shareholders, lenders, legal privacy requirements, and all with an adoring eye focused on our fiduciary duty to our employees, customers and suppliers.
Just because a user wants to be able to have a neat toy doesn't mean we throw all those requirements to the wind. Trade secrets that leak out into the public domain through insecure devices means those secrets aren't, well... secret. Credit card numbers, social security numbers, private medical information and such all require a certain standard of care in handling, and if the device can't meet that standard, which means that we as a corporation can't CONTROL how that device is used, then we can't allow our users to have those devices, regardless of their heartfelt desires. The legal liability alone dictates what we can and can't do.
I really do like Apple products. I own far too many myself. However, we won't allow those devices on our internal network because of all the reasons I listed.
Leap seconds are a tiny bit of problem when you have to time-stamp transactions coming in from all over the globe and keep them in date/time order. Some OSes don't support leap seconds, which complicates matters. We have the procedures documented from the last time this happened in 2008, but, of course, we've changed OS, DB and message queue vendors since then, so nothing applies anymore.
Time to spin up a new project and pay some high-priced consultants a lot of money to rewrite the procedures documentation yet again. I suspect we'll take the coward's way out and shut down processing for a minute before until a minute after and resync the clocks in the interim.
That will, of course, be charged to our SLA downtime, which will affect everyone's performance reviews at the end of the year. All this for a single goddamn second.
If M$ released Windows 8 and simultaneously dropped support for Windows 7, that's probably exactly what would happen.
You totally missed the point. The actual deployment takes a few mouse clicks and the application is on its way to the enterprise. It's everything you have to coordinate beforehand that takes all the time. You have to test plugins, internal and external webapps and a zillion different things that users use a web browser for. You'd be surprised at what all has to be tested.
The actual deployment has to be planned. Migrate user settings, GPO updates, cleaning up previous versions, making sure you save and restore every little stupid thing. You have to create help desk and field services documentation (sometimes in multiple languages) and then train the helldesk idiots.
You have to coordinate back end webapp server changes. You have to test those changes.
You have to plan and schedule your pilot test. You have to gather feedback from your pilot users and possibly make changes and re-pilot.
THEN you can go production, and watch in amazement when the excrement hits the fan and a million-and-one things you never though of crop up.
I could press a button right now and have FF5 on 40k desktops by midnight. I'd lose my job, but I could do it.
Testing isn't hard, it just takes a lot of time and money. We have to CERTIFY exactly which of the several hundred internal and external webapps FireFox works with, and which it doesn't, and then create copious documentation in several languages for help desk and field personnel. We have to plan and manage GPO settings for dozens of different groups. If code changes have to be made on servers to support the new browser, that has to be coordinated across the enterprise.
There's more to it than browsing to a few websites and then letting the code fly.
Honestly, the history wasn't even considered. We had a big enough pile of user requests for FireFox, so we started the process for bringing new software into the enterprise. You assume management researched the matter and used their keen intellect to thoroughly evaluate the feasibility of supporting FireFox.
Management just nodded their head a lot and sent a 1-line email to the appropriate geek.
Short answer: We'll stick with IE, like we have since the dark ages.
tl;dr: FF and Chrome were being looked at as 'alternative' browsers, to give our users some choice. FF testing got off the ground, Chrome was still in the 'being-talked-about' stage. Testing monthly security patches is something we're intimately familiar with, and can knock out in a couple of days. There's a HUGE difference between testing patches and acceptance testing. With M$ patches, we have a pretty good idea what to test for, and we have our own pet M$ rep on-site to get us the info we need.
Simple: FF4 is the version that finally got management's attention and thus the testing cycle was started. Even with FF5 coming out, the testing would have continued on FF4, but with the cessation of security patches, that effort has been cancelled. We'd have to start over from scratch, and, right now, I just don't see that happening. Mozilla is no longer 'trusted' by management.
Yes, we do go through a montly patch testing cycle . It's not the same gruesome process as the thorough acceptance testing that goes into introducing a -brand new- browser into a corporate environment, but the important stuff does get tested.
This move just crushed any chance of Firefox being approved as an 'alternate' browser at the large faceless corporation I toil for, and I'm one of those Firefox 'fanbois' that was pushing for this, and I'm going to look like an idiot now. I'm not real happy with Mozilla right now.
I'm guessing somebody at Mozilla just doesn't understand the size of the testing effort that was underway to get Firefox 4 approved for enterprise distribution. Let me scale it for you: 40,000 workstations in several dozen countries running several hundred 'critical' webapps. We have to certify exactly what works and what doesn't, in each and every language we support for each specific VERSION that is published. Testing is EXPENSIVE, and every dime we put into this effort is now wasted. That leaves Chrome as the only other "corporate-friendly" choice, and now management is going to ask "Well, what if Google decides to pull the same stunt?".
Microsoft gives us written guarantees as to how long they will support previous versions of IE. That means a lot to my corporate overlords. Mozilla might want to consider doing the same thing. It's called "being a reliable business partner".
If I did my maths right (and that's always doubtful), it's 3.14(+/-) million years away at warp 9.9.
You might want to pack some extra snacks for that trip.
I work for a passenger airline, and a big part of my job is making the migration from IE6 to IE8 happen smoothly. It's going slow as molasses, to be honest. With 50k+ workstations scattered all around the globe and many thousands of apps to test and remediate, the transition to IE8 isn't going to happen as fast as we, our suppliers and our customers want it to happen.
Honestly, I'd love nothing more than to be free of that craptastic piece of shit browser, but the reality of keeping the planes in the air gets in the way. Plus, there's this annoying shortage of freely available money, so we can't just throw buckets of green at the problem like we used to. We have to pay for remediation as the budget allows.
We've had a few vendors come to us and say "We're not going to support your browser anymore, we don't like coding for it". Our usual response is "We're not going to support giving you any more money, we don't like paying you for it". They grumble, whine and cry, but 9 times out of 10, they cave. Being able to say that we're a major customer is a big thing to some vendors. Some even point it out on their website. Partner airlines are often required to buy a given product just because we use it and it's compatible with our way of doing things. Losing us as a customer means they stand to lose all these other airlines as customers when we choose a replacement vendor.
We've had a (very) few purists walk away from the money. As annoying as that is, I have to respect these few vendors that stick to their guns. Then again, replacement vendors willing to prostitute themselves by doing IE6 'hacking' are cheap and plentiful.
I swear, we must work for the same faceless corporate overlords.
The huge, supposedly tech-savvy corporation I slave away for has reacted to the mass abandonment of IE6 with outright fear and panic. The upper management of our Data Security division came straight out of the mainframe era, and act like the word 'Firefox' is a horribly offensive expletive. It's just not an option.
As could be expected, we have some rather important corporate systems that were developed back in the big-budget heyday of the prior decade and, of course, only work on IE6. There's no money to pay for a rework, and the original vendor has long since gone bust. We have Citrix in-house, but, again, there's mass fear and panic going on there about having a mass influx of users for these outdated corporate systems, when there's no money for new servers.
We're testing IE8 for 'select' users (i.e. upper management, sales and marketing), but most of those users are poor choices for testing, as most of the important work they do seems to involve ESPN, Facebook and Craigslist.
Let's compare buying a CD from a retail store versus downloading, shall we? Let's say you hear this rad Britney tune on some awesome Youtube mashup and you just have to have it, right freaking now.
Retail:
1) Get out of bed. Not something I do willingly.
2) Shower. Or not. Depends on how offensive your personal aroma is. After 2 days without a shower, I smell like roses and candy.
3) Get dressed. Okay, so I don't have any clean underwear. I'll just flip these inside out, nobody can see the skidmarks.
4) Find car keys. For me, it's usually a 5 minute desperate search until I realize that they're already in my pocket.
5) Drive to store. Traffic sucks, gas costs money and if I get another moving violation, I lose my license. No, Officer Friendly, I have no idea how fast I was going. Why don't you let me in on the secret?
6) Park in big box store parking lot. It's a long freaking walk in direct sunlight, and my basement-dwelling geek-pale skin might just burst into flame. Lean against door to rest. Wheeze loudly.
7) Go into store and find desired CD. Lookit that, they're out of stock and I came all this way. Shucks.
8) Stand in long-ass checkout line behind Welfare Queen and her brood. Screaming kids are always a pleasure, the little darlings.
9) Pay uncaring, minimum-wage clerk $14 for your purchase. For 6 bucks an hour, you KNOW she cares what you think.
10) Drive back home. More gas, more traffic, more chances for that moving violation.
11) Open CD. Break out Sawzall to cut through multiple layers of plastic and security tape. Cut finger open. Curse loudly.
12) Rip CD to disc. Can't browse porn while it's ripping or it might mess up. Hunt through 433 cable channels for something to watch while CD rips.
13) Upload to mp3 player. Rock out to Britney's latest. FINALLY!
Elapsed time: 90 minutes, $14 plus gas, plus cost of speeding ticket (if any).
Download:
1) Roll over in bed, open laptop, brush Cheetos dust off sausage-like fingers, click on Amazon.
2) Pay 99 cents for the one track you want.
3) Browse porn for the 60 seconds or so it takes to download.
3) Upload to MP3 player. Rock out.
Elapsed time: 3 minutes tops, 99 cents. No clothing, no shower, no speeding ticket.
I'd pay good money to get ambushed and critted by a lady, considering how long it's been since one got inside my armor.