There is a whole array of jobs, where arrogance is a Good Thing (TM). Entrepreneurs, VPs, sales, marketing... all the jobs that techies have grown to loathe and distrust.
If these people didn't have the strength to just blindly KNOW that they are right, they would never get anywhere. Thus, the good ones (the ones who really were right) float up to the top of the barrel, while the bad ones either turn into Arthur Daleys ("dodgey deals are our speciality, mate!") or otherwise become DHBs (Decent Human Beings).
This works in these jobs, because they often just happen to make good leaders, and the promotion system means that they expect to move into management, so promotion is a smoother process for them.
Contrast this with the Prima Donna techo, who doesn't want management, and actively fights against moving away from the coal face. The bad thing from the company's perspective is that they don't want to help anyone else on the coal face either.
In programming, KPIs and reward schemes are poorly defined (if they exist at all), so the only way the Prima Donna techo can get the recognition he "deserves" is to be the squeaky wheel.
Sure, a Prima Donna is a great hit-and-run coder, but all companies really need programmers who are going to wait around at the crime scene, and share the experience with others.
Surely this is just a call for clone equipment manufacturers to just start producing hardware that identifies itself as "CD-ROM" or "DISK" for the registration process.
Then you can change whatever you like, whenever you like.
It is not just the kiddies or fresh sysadmins full of self-importance who are stressing over this stuff.
While working at an ISP, we received a demand from the Supreme Courts, complete with logs, that required us to stop "attempting to break in" to their network. Oddly, they were only concerned with our nameserver (thousands of customers, dozens of servers, and they're worried about our dedicated nameserver??)
Twice we threw their request back, pointing out that these were low-volume, and actually being BLOCKED by their firewall. Curiously, they were all UDP port 53, and coming from all over the Net.
When they (twice) refused to believe us, and then pointed out that it was still occurring (predominately late in the afternoon, especially Friday), we pointed out that that these were probably legitimate DNS requests, being blocked by an over-paranoid firewall.
In the end, the administrator told us he understood that it was not an attack, but was at a loss how to explain this to the manager who started all the grief in the first place. Eventually, at our gentle suggestion, he simply turned off logging of those particular packets.
The manager then saw that the logs were void of "attacks", and his reports to upper management were clear. Clue was redefined, and duly distributed.
So, do not be too quick to blame the poor sysadmin! Often, all they need is a little non-technical assistance.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a whole array of jobs, where arrogance is a Good Thing (TM). Entrepreneurs, VPs, sales, marketing... all the jobs that techies have grown to loathe and distrust.
If these people didn't have the strength to just blindly KNOW that they are right, they would never get anywhere. Thus, the good ones (the ones who really were right) float up to the top of the barrel, while the bad ones either turn into Arthur Daleys ("dodgey deals are our speciality, mate!") or otherwise become DHBs (Decent Human Beings).
This works in these jobs, because they often just happen to make good leaders, and the promotion system means that they expect to move into management, so promotion is a smoother process for them.
Contrast this with the Prima Donna techo, who doesn't want management, and actively fights against moving away from the coal face. The bad thing from the company's perspective is that they don't want to help anyone else on the coal face either.
In programming, KPIs and reward schemes are poorly defined (if they exist at all), so the only way the Prima Donna techo can get the recognition he "deserves" is to be the squeaky wheel.
Sure, a Prima Donna is a great hit-and-run coder, but all companies really need programmers who are going to wait around at the crime scene, and share the experience with others.
Surely this is just a call for clone equipment manufacturers to just start producing hardware that identifies itself as "CD-ROM" or "DISK" for the registration process.
Then you can change whatever you like, whenever you like.
It is not just the kiddies or fresh sysadmins full of self-importance who are stressing over this stuff.
While working at an ISP, we received a demand from the Supreme Courts, complete with logs, that required us to stop "attempting to break in" to their network. Oddly, they were only concerned with our nameserver (thousands of customers, dozens of servers, and they're worried about our dedicated nameserver??)
Twice we threw their request back, pointing out that these were low-volume, and actually being BLOCKED by their firewall. Curiously, they were all UDP port 53, and coming from all over the Net.
When they (twice) refused to believe us, and then pointed out that it was still occurring (predominately late in the afternoon, especially Friday), we pointed out that that these were probably legitimate DNS requests, being blocked by an over-paranoid firewall.
In the end, the administrator told us he understood that it was not an attack, but was at a loss how to explain this to the manager who started all the grief in the first place. Eventually, at our gentle suggestion, he simply turned off logging of those particular packets.
The manager then saw that the logs were void of "attacks", and his reports to upper management were clear. Clue was redefined, and duly distributed.
So, do not be too quick to blame the poor sysadmin! Often, all they need is a little non-technical assistance.