or that the ones with high testosterone were the ones sent out to fight other tribes or hunt where there was a higher chance of dying/being hurt in such way that you died later by diseases and if the community is small enough them dying of would have made a great impact on passing of the higher testosterone gene
A benevolent dictatorship is still a dictatorship. And the effects on the populace can turn on a dime with a change in administration.
In the US, an argument not made often enough (in my opinion) regarding government surveillance powers is that "this may be good for us now, but it's gonna really suck when the other party gets back in power".
I have trouble with pronouncements like these, because it's so easy to jump to conclusions about correlation and causation.
It seems like their conclusion might have a Politically Correct component. Could it be instead that civilization caused a general lowering of testosterone, because high testosterone levels were no longer vital to survival?
Some people are in sensitive positions due to the nature of their jobs. Janitors have keys for every office, including the CEO. Security personnel are in the position to spy on the entire plant. Sysadmins potentially have access to all communications, data, perhaps even HR records. What you do or don't do with this access is a test of your character. And should, in a perfect world, have bearing on whether your career continues. (Example: TSA personnel saving naked photos for later viewing.)
These are traditional issues for the corporate sysadmin. Perhaps less now as corporations are segmenting services more.
Early on, I realized that as an admin I had access to everything, and I had to adopt some sort of moral code in order to function. So things I inadvertently learned I kept to myself, and tried to forget, and even under pressure, consistently refused to use my access to, for instance, allow a manger to spy on another manager (a real example).
It takes a long time to build trust, and only a single incident to blow it. After awhile, employees would come to me with serious private issues, like a potentially damaging email inadvertently sent to the wrong person, secure in the knowledge that if the need was legitimate I would fix it and not talk about it afterwards.
> In the future, if people hate the version they're on, they'll be much more likely to buy a new version in the hopes that it's better. Brilliant!
That's the way it used to be, until Windows 2000/XP. You grabbed the next release like a drowning swimmer grabs a flotation device. Then XP became available and we could concentrate less on OS deficiencies and more on what to use a PC for. To go back to the old business model, Microsoft is in the unenviable position of needing to somehow entice people onto a broken OS, so they can be made to pay for the fix later.
You essentially are required to install cygwin on all windows computers before they become marginally useful.
You have a point. I wrote a menu system in Windows Shell once, just for the experience. Had a headache for days afterwards. That is one twisted language. I've heard about powershell, but never bothered with it. If you're going to do any reasonable amount of scripting, cygwin is invaluable.
Sorry if this is stating the obvious, but if you're a programmer who does lots of editing on a few machines, then pick the editor that best fits the job.
However, as an admin, I have long ago standardized on VI for the simple reason that it's included by default on every single *nix variant out there. (At least, in my experience.)
My cunning strategy breaks down with Windows, though. Notepad is so nasty to use that I find myself installing textpad or cygwin on the machines where I do most of my work.
I think cutting their access and adding it back on a case by case basis is a brilliant idea. But I fear we as a company have lost control of the environment. We don't have root anymore, except for the service accounts, and sudo lists that they've forgotten to, or don't know how to, plug. And we can't seem to convince upper management that even the developers who used to be admins could do a better job than the people we have now.
It is only simple because you speak English. You need to widen your cultural perspectives. In other languages, and other cultures, it is not so simple. For instance, Chinese does not even have the words "yes" and "no". If you ask a Chinese speaker if they have a pen, they will answer "have" or "not have". If you ask them if they are going to lunch, they will answer "going" or "not going". There is no such thing as a "yes or no question" in Chinese, and culturally, Chinese are much more direct than Indians or Japanese.
I think you're playing with words. The original stipulation, to which many of us are objecting, is the inability to answer a direct question in a direct manner. If you ask a Chinese speaker if he has a backout plan, and he answers "have" and actually means it, and isn't just faking it because he doesn't understand the question then he has answered the question. Language quirks are irrelevant.
"Some of our computers are more important for our business than the others. For example, every hour that kremvax is not running costs us roughly half a million dollars because people worldwide then buy somewhere else.
It often happens that new firmware from the vendor does not work properly. So suppose you make a firmware update on kremvax, reboot it, and it does not start. What will you do in that case?"...
"That's probably the best thing you can do in this situation, though I would ask you to also... so that... . Unfortunately, if this happens, it can take days to resolve the situation. Two days at half a million dollars each, that would make, um,... How much is that, help me out please..."...
"Yes, exactly, 24 million. That's why our last system administrator was always very scared. He wouldn't have lost his job if this happened once, but some people would have been very angry. So he was always reading those books about anticipatory system administration [I just made this term up; use a proper, searchable technical term if there is one] to minimize the danger. He always came up with new tricks. For example, there is this server called deepthought that is not doing anything really important most of the time. We call this a development server. Now when he wanted to do a firmwareupdate, what do you think: which of the servers did he do first, kremvax or deepthought?"
And you realize, by doing this you are training up a very very junior person, because experienced sysadmins should already know all of this.
And this is the point. We are told that we are paying for experienced sysadmins. What we get are people who need to be taught that you do a firmware upgrade on a test system first before you do it in production.
Incidentally, once you get that admin trained up and things running smoothly, he will find a job elsewhere for more money and you will have to start over. Because for the business model to work, first line admins have to be paid starvation wages.
This is not an ethnic cultural issue. It's a business cultural issue.
The question is that exactly because of that culture, they seem able to complicate the most simple of the problems looking through the eyes of our culture. It also does no help that they say they know everything, their CV looks like far better than a Linus Torvalds, lots of IT certifications, but when your start asking them the simplest of the questions, they fall apart.
Given that there's only about a billion of them, I would say it is safe to assume that they all fall apart and that there isn't a single Indian how actually knows anything.
It's almost a miracle that they've managed to come this far.
That's a bit disingenuous. We're talking specifically about the people hired by companies in the business of outsourcing IT. That has to be a pretty small subset of a billion.
And as I said in another article, it's not that way because some entire race of people are stupid, but because of the way the business model is set up. In order to offer IT labor at an attractive price while including overhead and profit margin, it becomes necessary to buy the cheapest labor possible. This tends to present to the customer workers that are, shall we say, less than capable. And inflated resumes seems to be a real thing.
Sounds like your IT has been outsourced to India, who as a culture, literally does not know how to say "no".
It takes two to fail to communicate. You should not be asking questions that require a direct "yes or no" answer. In many cultures, that is considered rude.
Um, ok.... this is IT. Sometimes yes or no questions are required. If the outsourced IT company can't culturally or by whatever reason answer a yes or no question, should we be doing business with them?
I mean, if this is a cultural problem throughout India (and I don't really believe that's true) how do they have, for instance, a space program? How can anything that requires precise communication be made to work?
Is it possible that the real reason why they always answer "yes" even when they clearly don't understand the question (we've seen many many examples of this) because we are dealing with people who have been hired to do a job that they are unqualifed to do but are required to keep up appearances with the customer?
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I've heard that sales pitch before. I agree, HP has some truly brilliant admins, as evidenced by the "demo". The day to day reality is very much different.
Exactly. Consider the business model -- A company tells you that you can outsource your IT department, buy it as a service, and pay the outsourcing company's overhead and significant profit margin, *and* save money. And the only way this could possibly work is if the outsourcing company goes to the LCC (least cost country) and hires the cheapest labor possible. This is justified in that all that IT stuff, it's all just following procedures, and anyone can do that.
And of course, this is a blatant falsehood, but executives of the victim company either (a) don't know that, (b) *want* to believe the scam, (like any good scam) or (c) don't care, because they intend to take their bonus and get the hell out of dodge.
So, outsourcing companies go into contracts *knowing* that cutover is going to be a Big Fail, and they have excuses prepared for when it happens. And a strategy (a brilliant strategy, really, executed by brilliant if unethical people) to string the con along as long as possible.
And just incidentally, the victim's attempts to train the workers that they are stuck with also fails in the long run, due to the nature of the business model. The business model breaks down if the workers are paid more than starvation wages, and workers with a bit of experience can easily get a higher paid job elsewhere (perhaps as a second or third level admin for a different outsourcing company) and they quit. And then you have a new person who doesn't know what a kernel is, and you have to train them up. And all you're doing is giving out free training. How noble of you.
...so not only is the system *designed* to fail, the system is very specifically designed to fail continuously.
Oh man, don't get me started. It's not even clear that one would need to pay more -- we have not saved money so far by outsourcing, although the outsource company keeps telling us that savings are just around the corner. The first year, the excuse was that there is always startup issues, the second year, the excuse was that the outgoing employees did not document their jobs well enough, (probably true -- who would?) the third year the excuse was that the scope was bigger than we said it was. And so forth. Each year a new excuse and each year the total cost is more than what we were paying when we had our own IT department.
So yeah, insourcing, or at least selective insourcing, (let them keep doing what they do well, if anything) makes tremendous sense to me.
But I don't make the decisions.
And even where upper management has considered terminating our outsourcing contracts, it's only to give the contract to a different outsourcing company, which only means we're now calling a building across the street from the original building in Hyderabad. Who knows, we might even be dealing with some of the same people.
...in case my other article did not make it clear, we always ask if they have a backout plan, and they always say they do.
...and then, when the system does not reboot after an update, we find out that the backout plan is to call Dell and say "the system, it is not being working. What are we to be doing?"
It's the wave of the future. A typical contract with offshore IT is for "current minus one", which means that each new firmware, OS or driver release causes a flurry of "maintenance" by remote "admins" who follow written procedures to update the systems with no real understanding of what they're doing, in what order they should do it, or what to do if something goes wrong. A typical list of systems to update may randomly contain a haphazard collection of prod and development machines, and may include some but not all members of a cluster. Systems are patched in Asset Management order, with no thought to rolling through dev and QA first before doing prod.
The backout plan is to engage the vendor.
Our outsourced IT bricks a few servers a year. We try to take it in stride. We've argued hysterically that if they really have to do firmware updates, to at least do dev servers first for God's Sake. They seem to not understand this.
So yeah, I could definitely see this happening. We will be seeing more of same. You get what you pay for.
> Development is a global market, and the work can be done anywhere. Best get used to that fact, as it won't change.
I understand that, and I have no problems competing on merit. But I'm still here (at this time) seeing the quality of the people we are hiring, and there is a definite trend to go on price rather than capabilities. We are hiring programmers that have zero experience with the tools they have been hired to use. I'm having to baby them, not through our work environment, methods and procedures, but basic things like how to log into the tool and how to open a project.
There seems to be a school of thought that ten offshore programmers at $5/hour are better than one local programmer at $50/hour. There are rare cases where this is true, but it generally isn't for long -- true expertise will move on as soon as a better offer becomes available. What often happens (what's happening right now) is that the $5/hour programmers not only aren't productive, they drag down the productivity of the remaining personnel who actually know what they're doing.
But managers can show that development costs are down, so the trend continues.
Slashdot Mirror
or that the ones with high testosterone were the ones sent out to fight other tribes or hunt where there was a higher chance of dying/being hurt in such way that you died later by diseases and if the community is small enough them dying of would have made a great impact on passing of the higher testosterone gene
Which still seems to be going on, by the way.
> Then you don't have the improvements that Windows 8 delivered including kernel optimizations.
I don't care. I'm not an OS geek. I have a PC to do work unrelated to configuring operating systems.
A benevolent dictatorship is still a dictatorship. And the effects on the populace can turn on a dime with a change in administration.
In the US, an argument not made often enough (in my opinion) regarding government surveillance powers is that "this may be good for us now, but it's gonna really suck when the other party gets back in power".
I have trouble with pronouncements like these, because it's so easy to jump to conclusions about correlation and causation.
It seems like their conclusion might have a Politically Correct component. Could it be instead that civilization caused a general lowering of testosterone, because high testosterone levels were no longer vital to survival?
Some people are in sensitive positions due to the nature of their jobs. Janitors have keys for every office, including the CEO. Security personnel are in the position to spy on the entire plant. Sysadmins potentially have access to all communications, data, perhaps even HR records. What you do or don't do with this access is a test of your character. And should, in a perfect world, have bearing on whether your career continues. (Example: TSA personnel saving naked photos for later viewing.)
These are traditional issues for the corporate sysadmin. Perhaps less now as corporations are segmenting services more.
Early on, I realized that as an admin I had access to everything, and I had to adopt some sort of moral code in order to function. So things I inadvertently learned I kept to myself, and tried to forget, and even under pressure, consistently refused to use my access to, for instance, allow a manger to spy on another manager (a real example).
It takes a long time to build trust, and only a single incident to blow it. After awhile, employees would come to me with serious private issues, like a potentially damaging email inadvertently sent to the wrong person, secure in the knowledge that if the need was legitimate I would fix it and not talk about it afterwards.
Thanks, that's good to know. For us, the solution was as follows:
1: System Restore to Windows 7
Done.
> In the future, if people hate the version they're on, they'll be much more likely to buy a new version in the hopes that it's better. Brilliant!
That's the way it used to be, until Windows 2000/XP. You grabbed the next release like a drowning swimmer grabs a flotation device. Then XP became available and we could concentrate less on OS deficiencies and more on what to use a PC for. To go back to the old business model, Microsoft is in the unenviable position of needing to somehow entice people onto a broken OS, so they can be made to pay for the fix later.
You essentially are required to install cygwin on all windows computers before they become marginally useful.
You have a point. I wrote a menu system in Windows Shell once, just for the experience. Had a headache for days afterwards. That is one twisted language. I've heard about powershell, but never bothered with it. If you're going to do any reasonable amount of scripting, cygwin is invaluable.
And gvim is much lighter weight than a full cygwin solution. Good suggestion.
Sorry if this is stating the obvious, but if you're a programmer who does lots of editing on a few machines, then pick the editor that best fits the job.
However, as an admin, I have long ago standardized on VI for the simple reason that it's included by default on every single *nix variant out there. (At least, in my experience.)
My cunning strategy breaks down with Windows, though. Notepad is so nasty to use that I find myself installing textpad or cygwin on the machines where I do most of my work.
I think cutting their access and adding it back on a case by case basis is a brilliant idea. But I fear we as a company have lost control of the environment. We don't have root anymore, except for the service accounts, and sudo lists that they've forgotten to, or don't know how to, plug. And we can't seem to convince upper management that even the developers who used to be admins could do a better job than the people we have now.
simple yes or no questions
It is only simple because you speak English. You need to widen your cultural perspectives. In other languages, and other cultures, it is not so simple. For instance, Chinese does not even have the words "yes" and "no". If you ask a Chinese speaker if they have a pen, they will answer "have" or "not have". If you ask them if they are going to lunch, they will answer "going" or "not going". There is no such thing as a "yes or no question" in Chinese, and culturally, Chinese are much more direct than Indians or Japanese.
I think you're playing with words. The original stipulation, to which many of us are objecting, is the inability to answer a direct question in a direct manner. If you ask a Chinese speaker if he has a backout plan, and he answers "have" and actually means it, and isn't just faking it because he doesn't understand the question then he has answered the question. Language quirks are irrelevant.
I don't think it's so hard. Extreme example:
"Some of our computers are more important for our business than the others. For example, every hour that kremvax is not running costs us roughly half a million dollars because people worldwide then buy somewhere else.
It often happens that new firmware from the vendor does not work properly. So suppose you make a firmware update on kremvax, reboot it, and it does not start. What will you do in that case?" ...
"That's probably the best thing you can do in this situation, though I would ask you to also ... so that ... . Unfortunately, if this happens, it can take days to resolve the situation. Two days at half a million dollars each, that would make, um, ... How much is that, help me out please..." ...
"Yes, exactly, 24 million. That's why our last system administrator was always very scared. He wouldn't have lost his job if this happened once, but some people would have been very angry. So he was always reading those books about anticipatory system administration [I just made this term up; use a proper, searchable technical term if there is one] to minimize the danger. He always came up with new tricks. For example, there is this server called deepthought that is not doing anything really important most of the time. We call this a development server. Now when he wanted to do a firmwareupdate, what do you think: which of the servers did he do first, kremvax or deepthought?"
And you realize, by doing this you are training up a very very junior person, because experienced sysadmins should already know all of this.
And this is the point. We are told that we are paying for experienced sysadmins. What we get are people who need to be taught that you do a firmware upgrade on a test system first before you do it in production.
Incidentally, once you get that admin trained up and things running smoothly, he will find a job elsewhere for more money and you will have to start over. Because for the business model to work, first line admins have to be paid starvation wages.
This is not an ethnic cultural issue. It's a business cultural issue.
The question is that exactly because of that culture, they seem able to complicate the most simple of the problems looking through the eyes of our culture. It also does no help that they say they know everything, their CV looks like far better than a Linus Torvalds, lots of IT certifications, but when your start asking them the simplest of the questions, they fall apart.
Given that there's only about a billion of them, I would say it is safe to assume that they all fall apart and that there isn't a single Indian how actually knows anything.
It's almost a miracle that they've managed to come this far.
That's a bit disingenuous. We're talking specifically about the people hired by companies in the business of outsourcing IT. That has to be a pretty small subset of a billion.
And as I said in another article, it's not that way because some entire race of people are stupid, but because of the way the business model is set up. In order to offer IT labor at an attractive price while including overhead and profit margin, it becomes necessary to buy the cheapest labor possible. This tends to present to the customer workers that are, shall we say, less than capable. And inflated resumes seems to be a real thing.
Sounds like your IT has been outsourced to India, who as a culture, literally does not know how to say "no".
It takes two to fail to communicate. You should not be asking questions that require a direct "yes or no" answer. In many cultures, that is considered rude.
Um, ok.... this is IT. Sometimes yes or no questions are required. If the outsourced IT company can't culturally or by whatever reason answer a yes or no question, should we be doing business with them?
I mean, if this is a cultural problem throughout India (and I don't really believe that's true) how do they have, for instance, a space program? How can anything that requires precise communication be made to work?
Is it possible that the real reason why they always answer "yes" even when they clearly don't understand the question (we've seen many many examples of this) because we are dealing with people who have been hired to do a job that they are unqualifed to do but are required to keep up appearances with the customer?
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I've heard that sales pitch before. I agree, HP has some truly brilliant admins, as evidenced by the "demo". The day to day reality is very much different.
Sorry, I guess I deserved that. I meant, of course, that the plan would burst into flames.
I sometimes think that if I accidentally entered a church with an IT management plan in a back pocket, my pants would burst into flames.
Exactly. Consider the business model -- A company tells you that you can outsource your IT department, buy it as a service, and pay the outsourcing company's overhead and significant profit margin, *and* save money. And the only way this could possibly work is if the outsourcing company goes to the LCC (least cost country) and hires the cheapest labor possible. This is justified in that all that IT stuff, it's all just following procedures, and anyone can do that.
And of course, this is a blatant falsehood, but executives of the victim company either (a) don't know that, (b) *want* to believe the scam, (like any good scam) or (c) don't care, because they intend to take their bonus and get the hell out of dodge.
So, outsourcing companies go into contracts *knowing* that cutover is going to be a Big Fail, and they have excuses prepared for when it happens. And a strategy (a brilliant strategy, really, executed by brilliant if unethical people) to string the con along as long as possible.
And just incidentally, the victim's attempts to train the workers that they are stuck with also fails in the long run, due to the nature of the business model. The business model breaks down if the workers are paid more than starvation wages, and workers with a bit of experience can easily get a higher paid job elsewhere (perhaps as a second or third level admin for a different outsourcing company) and they quit. And then you have a new person who doesn't know what a kernel is, and you have to train them up. And all you're doing is giving out free training. How noble of you.
But at least it's cheap. Oh, wait...
The sooner the better. It couldn't possibly get worse.
Oh man, don't get me started. It's not even clear that one would need to pay more -- we have not saved money so far by outsourcing, although the outsource company keeps telling us that savings are just around the corner. The first year, the excuse was that there is always startup issues, the second year, the excuse was that the outgoing employees did not document their jobs well enough, (probably true -- who would?) the third year the excuse was that the scope was bigger than we said it was. And so forth. Each year a new excuse and each year the total cost is more than what we were paying when we had our own IT department.
So yeah, insourcing, or at least selective insourcing, (let them keep doing what they do well, if anything) makes tremendous sense to me.
But I don't make the decisions.
And even where upper management has considered terminating our outsourcing contracts, it's only to give the contract to a different outsourcing company, which only means we're now calling a building across the street from the original building in Hyderabad. Who knows, we might even be dealing with some of the same people.
It's the wave of the future. A typical contract with offshore IT is for "current minus one", which means that each new firmware, OS or driver release causes a flurry of "maintenance" by remote "admins" who follow written procedures to update the systems with no real understanding of what they're doing, in what order they should do it, or what to do if something goes wrong. A typical list of systems to update may randomly contain a haphazard collection of prod and development machines, and may include some but not all members of a cluster. Systems are patched in Asset Management order, with no thought to rolling through dev and QA first before doing prod.
The backout plan is to engage the vendor.
Our outsourced IT bricks a few servers a year. We try to take it in stride. We've argued hysterically that if they really have to do firmware updates, to at least do dev servers first for God's Sake. They seem to not understand this.
So yeah, I could definitely see this happening. We will be seeing more of same. You get what you pay for.
> Development is a global market, and the work can be done anywhere. Best get used to that fact, as it won't change.
I understand that, and I have no problems competing on merit. But I'm still here (at this time) seeing the quality of the people we are hiring, and there is a definite trend to go on price rather than capabilities. We are hiring programmers that have zero experience with the tools they have been hired to use. I'm having to baby them, not through our work environment, methods and procedures, but basic things like how to log into the tool and how to open a project.
There seems to be a school of thought that ten offshore programmers at $5/hour are better than one local programmer at $50/hour. There are rare cases where this is true, but it generally isn't for long -- true expertise will move on as soon as a better offer becomes available. What often happens (what's happening right now) is that the $5/hour programmers not only aren't productive, they drag down the productivity of the remaining personnel who actually know what they're doing.
But managers can show that development costs are down, so the trend continues.