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A struggle within MIT’s IT department over its future

102 points by chei0aiV 11y ago

hga 11y ago
Very good Reddit discussion on this article: https://www.reddit.com/r/mit/comments/458xli/feature_a_struggle_within_mits_it_department_over/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mit/comments/458xli/feature_a_strug... I suppose one good piece of news is that it's now possible to fire people working for MIT (this wasn't particularly true prior to the end of the Cold War, about the time I left the community as a result of leaving the Boston area).
- hackuser 11y ago
  > it's now possible to fire people working for MIT (this wasn't particularly true prior to the end of the Cold War ... The Cold War ended 25 years ago, before current MIT undergrads and many grad students were born. Apparently firings weren't a problem during the prior reorganization: During IS&T’s last reorganization in 2010, 19 IS&T staff were laid off. While the number of “involuntary separations” during this restructuring was similar — 17 between February and August according to an IS&T document — many others also chose to resign or take an early retirement.
  - hga 11y ago
    Sounds like those were layoffs, that's what they were described as, and of course those happened at MIT as circumstances demanded. I'm talking about outright firing for, example, no longer being able to do their job. Back then, such people were sidelined until they retired or otherwise left on their own accord, or at least that was the case in all examples I knew about.
- coleca 11y ago
  One of the comments that stuck out to me from the Reddit thread was this: >> The problem with this transformation is that we lost some of our best and brightest and might lose more. The good ones who remain are the ones who are in a life situation that makes a job change at this time difficult. This says to me that going forward it is going to be a mess. It sounds like this change was, while maybe good intentioned, will continue to be met with tremendous resistance. The people with career options saw this as a good chance to jump ship before things got bad. The people that felt that they were "stuck" thought they have no other option. The comments and the article make the whole org sound pretty toxic, but unfortunately not dissimilar to many other enterprises IT shops. My advice to the folks that think they don't have an option, is to really think again. Your skills are probably a lot more valuable than you think. I've been in similar situations in my career and thought the same thing, but actually the grass can really be better in other places. You will probably be shocked and surprised at how valuable what you know and what you have done is when you are in other organizations. Likely, the senior management isn't going to give up and admit defeat too easily. How long will it be before they decide their best option is to outsource the dept to HP, Wipro, Cognizant, Dell, IBM, etc.?
  - concernedforall 11y ago
    Coleca, sorry to say, outsourcing for IS&T's service desk has already been decided and is underway...
zbjornson 11y ago
Sad to hear this happening. MIT IST was unparalleled when I was there. Everyone was knowledgeable, they would go out of their way to help regardless of whether or not it was within their job description, and they delivered a strong product that reliably powered the institute. Hopefully this isn't too disruptive, ultimately, although it sounds like a lot of damage is already done.
op00to 11y ago
That article is way too long with barely a mention of what's actually pissing people off. Hard for me to get up in arms over this when you bury exactly what it is that's happening. I've been through reorgs like this in two different research university IT groups. It's natural to evolve from the free-wheeling pre-IT-as-a-utility days to the current structures of today. There are huge liabilities that were just not important when the entire university didn't rely on IT for EVERYTHING. MIT has some cool stuff going on in IT, but you can't claw back the changes of time, especially with how IT has matured. If I was at MIT, I'd try to find that new field where I could make a mark rather than try to retain the spoils of the past.
- hga 11y ago
  free-wheeling pre-IT-as-a-utility days If IS&T didn't do that, it was because they'd stopped after, when I showed up in 1979, running a 370 mainframe and a Multics, the latter explicitly designed to run as a utility. Or while I was there, moving a lot of education to the Athena service (something that part of MIT eventually took over). Or, I think after I left in the early '90s, converting the university to run on SAP. The article and comments are quite explicit on what happened, new top dog comes in with a new vision, his most powerful direct reports sandbag the initiative while using it as an excuse to execute a massive purge. A story we've seen many times before in all sorts of contexts.
noname123 11y ago
>Another former employee said that he decided to leave IS&T when he realized “the organization would never truly be able to adopt agile practices such as Scrum.” I am curious if anyone in software/IT has successfully lobbied management for a "rollback" of agile development methodology? Anecdote: Last year, I was put on as a tech lead for a project; my boss asked me to use Agile to track and manage the project. I tracked the project's tasks as JIRA tickets, but I did not do morning standup's because I did not think I was going to get buy-in from the rest of my team (my workplace has a 2 day work-from-home policy, common hatred on team for meetings, so it's impossible to have everyone meet in person every weekday consistently due to flex-time). I did not do Sprint planning meeting and ticket estimation (Agile poker cards) because people on my team loved to argue over minutiae's and I strongly suspected half of the team didn't know the details of what the other half is working on; So instead, we had a weekly "flowchart" meeting on a large whiteboard where we brainstormed and added more details to our software project (a big data pipeline lends itself to a flowchart); I found it to be a better visualization of the project than a post-it covered poster. Fortunately for me, I had a much senior technical person in my org also lobby also against Agile. The crux of the argument was Agile wasn't well suited for our team; the sprint model of Agile easily lends itself to arbitrary deadlines and building for the "demo" of the story/epic of that sprint and build-up of tech-debt (e.g., build a demo for one sprint, spent next 3 sprints fixing bugs for the features of the first sprint). In the end, management relented and we ended our Agile experiment. Project tracking is done in Google Doc's with milestones instead. I am curious to hear if there are pushbacks in other places against Agile since it is now the de-facto "industry best-practice" (which means consulting should soon come up with newer set of workshops/manifesto's for a "new best-practice).
- JabavuAdams 11y ago
  The first place I was introduced to Scrum was at Transgaming. They managed to have a daily scrum across two locations, using only speakerphone. So ... the meeting itself is doable. Not sure about the rest.
- RandallBrown 11y ago
  Just because you weren't doing SCRUM™ doesn't mean you aren't being agile. The whole point of Agile is to be able to respond to change and make better software. It's good to read the agile manifesto every once in awhile to remind you of what agile really means. http://agilemanifesto.org http://agilemanifesto.org
gaius 11y ago
Many managers were demoted from their supervisor roles, likely as part of the changes to make IS&T a flatter organization. However, in several cases, new managers were put in place as soon as their predecessors left. Friends of the newly appointed boss, I'd not be surprised. Jobs for the boys.
dunkelheit 11y ago
"Reorganize everything to adopt Agile practices" is the managerial equivalent of "rewrite everything using Object-Oriented technologies." Never works as advertised. Also I feel the article really tries hard to paint this John Charles in a negative light but if he indeed spews so many PHB cliches that's scary.
la6470 11y ago
CIOs are always running after the latest fad to justify their next bonus and links to new suppliers. 5 years ago it was virtualization and converged network, now it is Agile and automation, 5 years from now it will be some new bullshit. But in most cases they will just try to paint the whole organization red instead of selectively applying where it makes more sense, and thereby destroying whole organizations.
Spooky23 11y ago
Usually when you see the word "transformation" bandied about, particularly in a functioning organization, that means that McKinsey, Deloitte and their ilk have been around. Adding some magical methodology change in the mix is just a way to negatively impact the performance of the unit and justify headcount reductions. I'll bet $0.05 there will be a big push to achieve ITIL v3 compliance to fix whatever was broken. Once that happens, outsourcing is pretty easy.
- Pxtl 11y ago
  How does ITIL enable outsourcing?
  - jjoonathan 11y ago
    My guess: by diverting attention from the fact that they are hiring an outsourcing firm. "We chose an ITIL-compliant contractor" sounds a lot better than "we chose the lowest bidder," doesn't it?
  - gaius 11y ago
    It's about packaging your IT operation so it's a "black box", certain workflows go in, certain changes come out. All your users see is a ticket, they don't know where it's being routed to, could be the next floor, could be Bangalore. The problem is you know your IT department is doing jobs A, B and C because that's what you're paying them for. You don't see them doing jobs D-Z which they just get on with because they need doing, or because they have informal relationships with end users that don't show up on the formal org chart. Then when you want your "trusted outsourcing partner" to do them too, they smile and say well that's not in our contract for A, B, C, so will be charged at our bespoke rate, and at that point you're fucked, because you've gotten rid of your own people and are now utterly reliant on them. See: every IT project ever attempted by the UK govt.
pmoriarty 11y ago
Someone needs to watch "The Death of Agile"[1] by one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto. [1] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpGGRAhes2k http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpGGRAhes2k
- ScottBurson 11y ago
  I am watching, and this guy is hilarious!
kough 11y ago
Just another sign of the continuing corporatization of MIT (and the rest of academia). Our Dean of Students is now a Vice President, in line with our "peer institutions." At the end of the day, MIT is a corporation, and exists to make money, but it's incredibly irritating when administrators refuse to admit this to students, and frame all debates without that context. "These changes are to make us more similar to our peer institutions" = "we want to make more money". If anyone here is an MIT alum (or boardmember!), please considering getting in touch with current students and seeing how you can help. At this point it's pretty clear we have no voice on campus.
- cinjon 11y ago
  Can you give more detail? I'm an alum ('10) who was majorly involved in student government but now have little insight into what's going on.
  - kough 11y ago
    I'm not that plugged in myself, but send me an email (username @ mit) and I can put you in touch with someone in the know.
- x5n1 11y ago
  The criticism should be directed at the concept of a corporation itself, then at making more money. It's not just the profit motive, it's the discourse and the tools that go around it that are even more of a problem. For instance short term thinking, price cutting, the management and employee hierarchy. Focus on form rather than function in terms of concepts like professionalism (or better labeled as a psychological disorder of forcing people to act like machines). The whole way that we think about these things needs reform. Corporations are machines for distributing power to a certain group of people who are in touch with the capital owners, the shareholders rather than the stakeholders. This is usually at the detriment of everyone involved, other than the shareholders and their managers. The ultimate goal of such arrangement is for the reduction of the power, well-being, happiness, and contentment of the stakeholders for the financial benefit of the shareholders.
silentmars 11y ago
This article describes some seriously clueless agile practices. A massive reorg and restructuring dictated from the top to enable agile, a bottom-up methodology. They dictate that everyone must do Scrum - even support departments for which it's laughably mismatched - rather than allowing any level of team-driven process selection, and then 9 months later they open it up to allowing teams to choose, including letting them choose waterfall. Their messaging was this was always the plan, which is either a lie as apparently many people at MIT believe, or evidence that of even deeper cluelessness. My opinion is that this Charles character has no business running a technology org.
- merpnderp 11y ago
  "Okay Bob, what are you working on today?" "Ah, I'm handling support tickets. Same as I did yesterday, the day before that, the week before that, and the month before that." "Any roadblocks?" "Nope, I'm tier one support. When I can't quickly handle an issue, I push it up the support ladder. I don't have any roadblocks today, and I won't have any roadblocks tomorrow or the day after, or even the week after that. Unless of course you mean the 4 missed support calls that just occurred because I was on the SCRUM call."
Yhippa 11y ago
Has forced Agile ever turned out well at an organization? I've seen this done many times before and I've never seen it work well. Organizations typically end up shoehorning waterfall into whatever stuff the consultants sold them. I think Agile can work with the right group of people but not getting buy-in from the ground-up is very dangerous and can really demoralize a shop.
- gherkin0 11y ago
  Also, the "forced" flavor of agile tends to be one that is disconnected from the trade offs that make agile work. I was in a shop that had a forced agile adoption. The development teams were all enthusiastic about it, went to training, etc. However, the very same managers that pushed it didn't understand it so we got: * hard delivery dates with fixed functionality (though we could drop small features at the margins) * lots of useless planning/status reporting ceremony (more than pre-agile) * pressure to "just start coding" instead of gathering requirements (since "we're agile now") * very litter tolerance for going back and fixing things that weren't done right (made more common by the above bullet) It didn't really work, and most of those managers are gone now.
tzs 11y ago
In the article comments there is a link to an org chart from 2014-09 with those who have departed or been demoted as of 2016-02 marked [1]. [1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/i4zp05qlvrgclzd/Color-CodedDepartures.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/i4zp05qlvrgclzd/Color-CodedDepartu...
chris_wot 11y ago
Uh, one if the employees said: "In the words of my people … offer me money … power too, promise me that. Offer me anything I want … I want my managers back, you son of a bitch." If that's what she said, I can't say I'm terribly sympathetic!
- albert_holm 11y ago
  It is an adapted quote from The Princess Bride.
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    Ah. In that case it's genius. But I'm still not surprised.
  - Tempest1981 11y ago
    Well quoted then: http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0003786/quotes http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0003786/quotes (search for "power")
- dmpk2k 11y ago
  While I kind of agree, I think it's a bit sad how socially sterile some work environments are. God forbid we occasionally say how we really feel.
- generj 11y ago
  To be fair, she said that as her final line whilst being fired. I certainly would have no sympathy for someone complaining about getting fired for saying that line, but if you are already on the way out and have been treated poorly...
BellsOnSunday 11y ago
TIL MIT graduates quite frequently (from the sound of it) go on to work in tech support. Does it pay well enough to make sense as the outcome of what must be the most expensive higher education in the world?
- hga 11y ago
  It's not so expensive for families with lower incomes due to an initiative started in 2008; the Institute has backed off on that a bit, here's the current generic figures: http://affordable.mit.edu/ http://affordable.mit.edu/
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
coldcode 11y ago
The Scrum methodology is about avoiding micromanagement of employees, he said, which is “completely at odds with the preferences and personalities of much of IS&T’s current leadership.” In my experience Scrum often winds up micromanaging everyone, like at my current large employer. Scrum is often the tool of people who want to say agile but still want full control of everything.
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  Scrum absolutely and unequivocally is all about micromanagement. It is a system, much like Six Sigma, intended to produce arbitrary metrics surface area for middle management to use in whatever way that changing political circumstances dictates. It is emphatically not about being lean or efficient with short iterations. It is emphatically not about informing the business about development velocity or anticipated missed deadlines. It is emphatically not about making customers happy. It is emphatically not about software quality or craftsmanship. For someone to say the phrase "The Scrum methodology is about avoiding micromanagement of employees" it would require such a frightening level of cognitive dissonance and a desire for violent, Panopticon-like micromanagement, that you absolutely should run the other way as fast as possible. This is by far the most upsetting thing I've read today. And I just read that other post about war being a racket ...
  - julie1 11y ago
    Because both articles are talking about the same. Thieves. For me agile is embezzlement. Waterfall has a reason to be: taking enough precautions to make sure costing and feasibility of a feature would fit the (internal or external) customers' needs and budget (as specified per contract). Without obligation of results you have an obligation of means (it is what professionalism is supposed to be : to be liable). After Agile, project are ALWAYS delivered on time. Not 100%, but they are "built to budget". Sometimes the 10% missing are like not possible and the heart of the feature. But who cares? Product are not tested anymore, and defects are just now in the support budget. The application has a nice reactive angular interface and a mobile declination. And the customers like in a marketing trick are "empowered". The IT department always look busy with a constant pipeline of activity that is so successful it requires even more headcount. The fact the software was delivered with constant modification on which the customers was spammed with more or less relevant remarks that made him loose focus on his initial goal is irrelevant. Staging, delivering is now part of the past with meaningful version numbers. It is just constant delivery. It is for the customers' own goods. The company also loses track of its costing pricing and investment. Too much information kills the information. That what agile is : a smoke screen for embezzling a budget in a politically and acceptable way. I wonder if there are still any accountant in modern IT companies or if everyone decided to stop counting how much companies lose and win every months. It is as if IT is totally living on another economical planet where investments are not required to be justified, and products don't need to be fool proofed against contractual penalties applied to non conformities. If so, it means we don't have any customers paying. And of course, in the turmoil of micromanagement, new "new techs from the 70s" are micro introduced during the scrum making part of the management pushers of the products they have been nicely solicited to use by nice vendors inviting them to superb conferences and formation that are not called bribing but social networking. This result in making developers gain as much values in "specialized tools" as they are losing global knowledge of the chain of value and disorganizing most of the profession. You never noticed Scrum and scam sounded the same?
losvedir 11y ago
MIT '07 here. Interesting read, and speaking from my own experience I can kind of see both sides of the issue. (Also, to be clear, this is about the department that provides the IT infrastructure and tech support to MIT, not the EECS department at MIT.) I always thought the IT setup at MIT was a little weird. As an MIT student you chose a campus-wide Athena account name. I liked that you could choose anything (mine was the same as my user name here, not just gdurazo or something like that). There were Athena clusters (computer labs) all over campus that you could log into, but it seemed like it ran an old version of some Linux distro, I forget which. You could also ssh in via `athena.dialup.mit.edu`. But you didn't really need to use it all that often. If a class required Matlab, or something, you would log in to use it, but I don't really remember using it for much more than that. I can certainly see the argument that IS&T should do more programming - MIT didn't have that great of a scheduling system or framework for classes to host their assignments and lecture notes, etc. So more custom development could definitely help the student and professor experience. On the other hand, the underlying infrastructure worked great. The internet was fast everywhere, WiFi was fast and open and free, and you could request static IPs and host stuff. It's definitely what you'd expect from MIT. In addition, the tech support was wonderful. A few years after I graduated I remembered a blog I had kept from my athena account, and emailed in to ask if they happened to still have it. They kind of did; they sent me a SQL dump of its contents, which was enough for me. I hope the outcome of this is MIT provides more web services for students for class registration, scheduling, submitting assignments, etc. But I hope it doesn't gut the fast and free infrastructure that was there and the great and friendly tech support.
- achernya 11y ago
  > In addition, the tech support was wonderful. A few years after I graduated I remembered a blog I had kept from my athena account, and emailed in to ask if they happened to still have it. They kind of did; they sent me a SQL dump of its contents, which was enough for me. While it's true that helpdesk at IS&T was all sorts of wonderful prior to the transformation, that particular example wasn't handled by them, but rather by the student volunteers running Scripts (scripts.mit.edu), part of SIPB (sipb.mit.edu). SIPB does get its funding from IS&T, and worked pretty closely with many people there on initiatives ranging from the Scripts platform to the whole Athena operating system. I don't know if the "fast and free infrastructure" and "friendly tech support" will continue, as it requires the new IS&T to continue supporting the student volunteers.
ChristianMarks 11y ago
Unfortunate. University IT departments are susceptible to neoliberal evangelical insanity. When it happened to my department, I decided that I was unworthy to clean the digital bedpans of a destructively competitive, rank and pedigree conscious faculty and took off, never to support faculty again. Here's a rebuke to the smug, platitudinous know-nothings who insist that the university is a business. http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2016/02/proofs-that-universities-are-not-businesses-look-who-the-richest-ones-are.html http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2016/02/proofs-that-un...

102 points by chei0aiV 11y ago

hga 11y ago

Very good Reddit discussion on this article: https://www.reddit.com/r/mit/comments/458xli/feature_a_struggle_within_mits_it_department_over/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mit/comments/458xli/feature_a_strug... I suppose one good piece of news is that it's now possible to fire people working for MIT (this wasn't particularly true prior to the end of the Cold War, about the time I left the community as a result of leaving the Boston area).

hackuser 11y ago
> it's now possible to fire people working for MIT (this wasn't particularly true prior to the end of the Cold War ... The Cold War ended 25 years ago, before current MIT undergrads and many grad students were born. Apparently firings weren't a problem during the prior reorganization: During IS&T’s last reorganization in 2010, 19 IS&T staff were laid off. While the number of “involuntary separations” during this restructuring was similar — 17 between February and August according to an IS&T document — many others also chose to resign or take an early retirement.
- hga 11y ago
  Sounds like those were layoffs, that's what they were described as, and of course those happened at MIT as circumstances demanded. I'm talking about outright firing for, example, no longer being able to do their job. Back then, such people were sidelined until they retired or otherwise left on their own accord, or at least that was the case in all examples I knew about.
coleca 11y ago
One of the comments that stuck out to me from the Reddit thread was this: >> The problem with this transformation is that we lost some of our best and brightest and might lose more. The good ones who remain are the ones who are in a life situation that makes a job change at this time difficult. This says to me that going forward it is going to be a mess. It sounds like this change was, while maybe good intentioned, will continue to be met with tremendous resistance. The people with career options saw this as a good chance to jump ship before things got bad. The people that felt that they were "stuck" thought they have no other option. The comments and the article make the whole org sound pretty toxic, but unfortunately not dissimilar to many other enterprises IT shops. My advice to the folks that think they don't have an option, is to really think again. Your skills are probably a lot more valuable than you think. I've been in similar situations in my career and thought the same thing, but actually the grass can really be better in other places. You will probably be shocked and surprised at how valuable what you know and what you have done is when you are in other organizations. Likely, the senior management isn't going to give up and admit defeat too easily. How long will it be before they decide their best option is to outsource the dept to HP, Wipro, Cognizant, Dell, IBM, etc.?
- concernedforall 11y ago
  Coleca, sorry to say, outsourcing for IS&T's service desk has already been decided and is underway...

zbjornson 11y ago

Sad to hear this happening. MIT IST was unparalleled when I was there. Everyone was knowledgeable, they would go out of their way to help regardless of whether or not it was within their job description, and they delivered a strong product that reliably powered the institute. Hopefully this isn't too disruptive, ultimately, although it sounds like a lot of damage is already done.

op00to 11y ago

That article is way too long with barely a mention of what's actually pissing people off. Hard for me to get up in arms over this when you bury exactly what it is that's happening. I've been through reorgs like this in two different research university IT groups. It's natural to evolve from the free-wheeling pre-IT-as-a-utility days to the current structures of today. There are huge liabilities that were just not important when the entire university didn't rely on IT for EVERYTHING. MIT has some cool stuff going on in IT, but you can't claw back the changes of time, especially with how IT has matured. If I was at MIT, I'd try to find that new field where I could make a mark rather than try to retain the spoils of the past.

hga 11y ago
free-wheeling pre-IT-as-a-utility days If IS&T didn't do that, it was because they'd stopped after, when I showed up in 1979, running a 370 mainframe and a Multics, the latter explicitly designed to run as a utility. Or while I was there, moving a lot of education to the Athena service (something that part of MIT eventually took over). Or, I think after I left in the early '90s, converting the university to run on SAP. The article and comments are quite explicit on what happened, new top dog comes in with a new vision, his most powerful direct reports sandbag the initiative while using it as an excuse to execute a massive purge. A story we've seen many times before in all sorts of contexts.

noname123 11y ago

>Another former employee said that he decided to leave IS&T when he realized “the organization would never truly be able to adopt agile practices such as Scrum.” I am curious if anyone in software/IT has successfully lobbied management for a "rollback" of agile development methodology? Anecdote: Last year, I was put on as a tech lead for a project; my boss asked me to use Agile to track and manage the project. I tracked the project's tasks as JIRA tickets, but I did not do morning standup's because I did not think I was going to get buy-in from the rest of my team (my workplace has a 2 day work-from-home policy, common hatred on team for meetings, so it's impossible to have everyone meet in person every weekday consistently due to flex-time). I did not do Sprint planning meeting and ticket estimation (Agile poker cards) because people on my team loved to argue over minutiae's and I strongly suspected half of the team didn't know the details of what the other half is working on; So instead, we had a weekly "flowchart" meeting on a large whiteboard where we brainstormed and added more details to our software project (a big data pipeline lends itself to a flowchart); I found it to be a better visualization of the project than a post-it covered poster. Fortunately for me, I had a much senior technical person in my org also lobby also against Agile. The crux of the argument was Agile wasn't well suited for our team; the sprint model of Agile easily lends itself to arbitrary deadlines and building for the "demo" of the story/epic of that sprint and build-up of tech-debt (e.g., build a demo for one sprint, spent next 3 sprints fixing bugs for the features of the first sprint). In the end, management relented and we ended our Agile experiment. Project tracking is done in Google Doc's with milestones instead. I am curious to hear if there are pushbacks in other places against Agile since it is now the de-facto "industry best-practice" (which means consulting should soon come up with newer set of workshops/manifesto's for a "new best-practice).

JabavuAdams 11y ago
The first place I was introduced to Scrum was at Transgaming. They managed to have a daily scrum across two locations, using only speakerphone. So ... the meeting itself is doable. Not sure about the rest.
RandallBrown 11y ago
Just because you weren't doing SCRUM™ doesn't mean you aren't being agile. The whole point of Agile is to be able to respond to change and make better software. It's good to read the agile manifesto every once in awhile to remind you of what agile really means. http://agilemanifesto.org http://agilemanifesto.org

gaius 11y ago

Many managers were demoted from their supervisor roles, likely as part of the changes to make IS&T a flatter organization. However, in several cases, new managers were put in place as soon as their predecessors left. Friends of the newly appointed boss, I'd not be surprised. Jobs for the boys.

dunkelheit 11y ago

"Reorganize everything to adopt Agile practices" is the managerial equivalent of "rewrite everything using Object-Oriented technologies." Never works as advertised. Also I feel the article really tries hard to paint this John Charles in a negative light but if he indeed spews so many PHB cliches that's scary.

la6470 11y ago

CIOs are always running after the latest fad to justify their next bonus and links to new suppliers. 5 years ago it was virtualization and converged network, now it is Agile and automation, 5 years from now it will be some new bullshit. But in most cases they will just try to paint the whole organization red instead of selectively applying where it makes more sense, and thereby destroying whole organizations.

Spooky23 11y ago

Usually when you see the word "transformation" bandied about, particularly in a functioning organization, that means that McKinsey, Deloitte and their ilk have been around. Adding some magical methodology change in the mix is just a way to negatively impact the performance of the unit and justify headcount reductions. I'll bet $0.05 there will be a big push to achieve ITIL v3 compliance to fix whatever was broken. Once that happens, outsourcing is pretty easy.

Pxtl 11y ago
How does ITIL enable outsourcing?
- jjoonathan 11y ago
  My guess: by diverting attention from the fact that they are hiring an outsourcing firm. "We chose an ITIL-compliant contractor" sounds a lot better than "we chose the lowest bidder," doesn't it?
- gaius 11y ago
  It's about packaging your IT operation so it's a "black box", certain workflows go in, certain changes come out. All your users see is a ticket, they don't know where it's being routed to, could be the next floor, could be Bangalore. The problem is you know your IT department is doing jobs A, B and C because that's what you're paying them for. You don't see them doing jobs D-Z which they just get on with because they need doing, or because they have informal relationships with end users that don't show up on the formal org chart. Then when you want your "trusted outsourcing partner" to do them too, they smile and say well that's not in our contract for A, B, C, so will be charged at our bespoke rate, and at that point you're fucked, because you've gotten rid of your own people and are now utterly reliant on them. See: every IT project ever attempted by the UK govt.

pmoriarty 11y ago

Someone needs to watch "The Death of Agile"[1] by one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto. [1] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpGGRAhes2k http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpGGRAhes2k

ScottBurson 11y ago
I am watching, and this guy is hilarious!

kough 11y ago

Just another sign of the continuing corporatization of MIT (and the rest of academia). Our Dean of Students is now a Vice President, in line with our "peer institutions." At the end of the day, MIT is a corporation, and exists to make money, but it's incredibly irritating when administrators refuse to admit this to students, and frame all debates without that context. "These changes are to make us more similar to our peer institutions" = "we want to make more money". If anyone here is an MIT alum (or boardmember!), please considering getting in touch with current students and seeing how you can help. At this point it's pretty clear we have no voice on campus.

cinjon 11y ago
Can you give more detail? I'm an alum ('10) who was majorly involved in student government but now have little insight into what's going on.
- kough 11y ago
  I'm not that plugged in myself, but send me an email (username @ mit) and I can put you in touch with someone in the know.
x5n1 11y ago
The criticism should be directed at the concept of a corporation itself, then at making more money. It's not just the profit motive, it's the discourse and the tools that go around it that are even more of a problem. For instance short term thinking, price cutting, the management and employee hierarchy. Focus on form rather than function in terms of concepts like professionalism (or better labeled as a psychological disorder of forcing people to act like machines). The whole way that we think about these things needs reform. Corporations are machines for distributing power to a certain group of people who are in touch with the capital owners, the shareholders rather than the stakeholders. This is usually at the detriment of everyone involved, other than the shareholders and their managers. The ultimate goal of such arrangement is for the reduction of the power, well-being, happiness, and contentment of the stakeholders for the financial benefit of the shareholders.

silentmars 11y ago

This article describes some seriously clueless agile practices. A massive reorg and restructuring dictated from the top to enable agile, a bottom-up methodology. They dictate that everyone must do Scrum - even support departments for which it's laughably mismatched - rather than allowing any level of team-driven process selection, and then 9 months later they open it up to allowing teams to choose, including letting them choose waterfall. Their messaging was this was always the plan, which is either a lie as apparently many people at MIT believe, or evidence that of even deeper cluelessness. My opinion is that this Charles character has no business running a technology org.

merpnderp 11y ago
"Okay Bob, what are you working on today?" "Ah, I'm handling support tickets. Same as I did yesterday, the day before that, the week before that, and the month before that." "Any roadblocks?" "Nope, I'm tier one support. When I can't quickly handle an issue, I push it up the support ladder. I don't have any roadblocks today, and I won't have any roadblocks tomorrow or the day after, or even the week after that. Unless of course you mean the 4 missed support calls that just occurred because I was on the SCRUM call."

Yhippa 11y ago

Has forced Agile ever turned out well at an organization? I've seen this done many times before and I've never seen it work well. Organizations typically end up shoehorning waterfall into whatever stuff the consultants sold them. I think Agile can work with the right group of people but not getting buy-in from the ground-up is very dangerous and can really demoralize a shop.

gherkin0 11y ago
Also, the "forced" flavor of agile tends to be one that is disconnected from the trade offs that make agile work. I was in a shop that had a forced agile adoption. The development teams were all enthusiastic about it, went to training, etc. However, the very same managers that pushed it didn't understand it so we got: * hard delivery dates with fixed functionality (though we could drop small features at the margins) * lots of useless planning/status reporting ceremony (more than pre-agile) * pressure to "just start coding" instead of gathering requirements (since "we're agile now") * very litter tolerance for going back and fixing things that weren't done right (made more common by the above bullet) It didn't really work, and most of those managers are gone now.

tzs 11y ago

In the article comments there is a link to an org chart from 2014-09 with those who have departed or been demoted as of 2016-02 marked [1]. [1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/i4zp05qlvrgclzd/Color-CodedDepartures.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/i4zp05qlvrgclzd/Color-CodedDepartu...

chris_wot 11y ago

Uh, one if the employees said: "In the words of my people … offer me money … power too, promise me that. Offer me anything I want … I want my managers back, you son of a bitch." If that's what she said, I can't say I'm terribly sympathetic!

albert_holm 11y ago
It is an adapted quote from The Princess Bride.
- chris_wot 11y ago
  Ah. In that case it's genius. But I'm still not surprised.
- Tempest1981 11y ago
  Well quoted then: http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0003786/quotes http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0003786/quotes (search for "power")
dmpk2k 11y ago
While I kind of agree, I think it's a bit sad how socially sterile some work environments are. God forbid we occasionally say how we really feel.
generj 11y ago
To be fair, she said that as her final line whilst being fired. I certainly would have no sympathy for someone complaining about getting fired for saying that line, but if you are already on the way out and have been treated poorly...

BellsOnSunday 11y ago

TIL MIT graduates quite frequently (from the sound of it) go on to work in tech support. Does it pay well enough to make sense as the outcome of what must be the most expensive higher education in the world?

hga 11y ago
It's not so expensive for families with lower incomes due to an initiative started in 2008; the Institute has backed off on that a bit, here's the current generic figures: http://affordable.mit.edu/ http://affordable.mit.edu/
deleted 11y ago
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coldcode 11y ago

The Scrum methodology is about avoiding micromanagement of employees, he said, which is “completely at odds with the preferences and personalities of much of IS&T’s current leadership.” In my experience Scrum often winds up micromanaging everyone, like at my current large employer. Scrum is often the tool of people who want to say agile but still want full control of everything.

p4wnc6 11y ago
Scrum absolutely and unequivocally is all about micromanagement. It is a system, much like Six Sigma, intended to produce arbitrary metrics surface area for middle management to use in whatever way that changing political circumstances dictates. It is emphatically not about being lean or efficient with short iterations. It is emphatically not about informing the business about development velocity or anticipated missed deadlines. It is emphatically not about making customers happy. It is emphatically not about software quality or craftsmanship. For someone to say the phrase "The Scrum methodology is about avoiding micromanagement of employees" it would require such a frightening level of cognitive dissonance and a desire for violent, Panopticon-like micromanagement, that you absolutely should run the other way as fast as possible. This is by far the most upsetting thing I've read today. And I just read that other post about war being a racket ...
- julie1 11y ago
  Because both articles are talking about the same. Thieves. For me agile is embezzlement. Waterfall has a reason to be: taking enough precautions to make sure costing and feasibility of a feature would fit the (internal or external) customers' needs and budget (as specified per contract). Without obligation of results you have an obligation of means (it is what professionalism is supposed to be : to be liable). After Agile, project are ALWAYS delivered on time. Not 100%, but they are "built to budget". Sometimes the 10% missing are like not possible and the heart of the feature. But who cares? Product are not tested anymore, and defects are just now in the support budget. The application has a nice reactive angular interface and a mobile declination. And the customers like in a marketing trick are "empowered". The IT department always look busy with a constant pipeline of activity that is so successful it requires even more headcount. The fact the software was delivered with constant modification on which the customers was spammed with more or less relevant remarks that made him loose focus on his initial goal is irrelevant. Staging, delivering is now part of the past with meaningful version numbers. It is just constant delivery. It is for the customers' own goods. The company also loses track of its costing pricing and investment. Too much information kills the information. That what agile is : a smoke screen for embezzling a budget in a politically and acceptable way. I wonder if there are still any accountant in modern IT companies or if everyone decided to stop counting how much companies lose and win every months. It is as if IT is totally living on another economical planet where investments are not required to be justified, and products don't need to be fool proofed against contractual penalties applied to non conformities. If so, it means we don't have any customers paying. And of course, in the turmoil of micromanagement, new "new techs from the 70s" are micro introduced during the scrum making part of the management pushers of the products they have been nicely solicited to use by nice vendors inviting them to superb conferences and formation that are not called bribing but social networking. This result in making developers gain as much values in "specialized tools" as they are losing global knowledge of the chain of value and disorganizing most of the profession. You never noticed Scrum and scam sounded the same?

losvedir 11y ago

MIT '07 here. Interesting read, and speaking from my own experience I can kind of see both sides of the issue. (Also, to be clear, this is about the department that provides the IT infrastructure and tech support to MIT, not the EECS department at MIT.) I always thought the IT setup at MIT was a little weird. As an MIT student you chose a campus-wide Athena account name. I liked that you could choose anything (mine was the same as my user name here, not just gdurazo or something like that). There were Athena clusters (computer labs) all over campus that you could log into, but it seemed like it ran an old version of some Linux distro, I forget which. You could also ssh in via `athena.dialup.mit.edu`. But you didn't really need to use it all that often. If a class required Matlab, or something, you would log in to use it, but I don't really remember using it for much more than that. I can certainly see the argument that IS&T should do more programming - MIT didn't have that great of a scheduling system or framework for classes to host their assignments and lecture notes, etc. So more custom development could definitely help the student and professor experience. On the other hand, the underlying infrastructure worked great. The internet was fast everywhere, WiFi was fast and open and free, and you could request static IPs and host stuff. It's definitely what you'd expect from MIT. In addition, the tech support was wonderful. A few years after I graduated I remembered a blog I had kept from my athena account, and emailed in to ask if they happened to still have it. They kind of did; they sent me a SQL dump of its contents, which was enough for me. I hope the outcome of this is MIT provides more web services for students for class registration, scheduling, submitting assignments, etc. But I hope it doesn't gut the fast and free infrastructure that was there and the great and friendly tech support.

achernya 11y ago
> In addition, the tech support was wonderful. A few years after I graduated I remembered a blog I had kept from my athena account, and emailed in to ask if they happened to still have it. They kind of did; they sent me a SQL dump of its contents, which was enough for me. While it's true that helpdesk at IS&T was all sorts of wonderful prior to the transformation, that particular example wasn't handled by them, but rather by the student volunteers running Scripts (scripts.mit.edu), part of SIPB (sipb.mit.edu). SIPB does get its funding from IS&T, and worked pretty closely with many people there on initiatives ranging from the Scripts platform to the whole Athena operating system. I don't know if the "fast and free infrastructure" and "friendly tech support" will continue, as it requires the new IS&T to continue supporting the student volunteers.

ChristianMarks 11y ago

Unfortunate. University IT departments are susceptible to neoliberal evangelical insanity. When it happened to my department, I decided that I was unworthy to clean the digital bedpans of a destructively competitive, rank and pedigree conscious faculty and took off, never to support faculty again. Here's a rebuke to the smug, platitudinous know-nothings who insist that the university is a business. http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2016/02/proofs-that-universities-are-not-businesses-look-who-the-richest-ones-are.html http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2016/02/proofs-that-un...