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Used to be there was "the guy" that knew the "secret formula." Like the guy that knew the Coke secret formula, or the guy that used to maintain Lay's potato ch

Used to be there was "the guy" that knew the "secret formula." Like the guy that knew the Coke secret formula, or the guy that used to maintain Lay's potato chip fryers. Most everyone else was just a cog in a big machine with very little power individually. What this guy - and Snowden - show is that today's IT professionals have tremendous power that generally they never choose to exercise. If an IT shop in a major corporation decided to unionize and turn on its management, they would have the company totally by the balls. So many people in an IT shop are positioned to control so much, and management often treats its IT staff like disposable widgets. It would take two+ hands to count the number of major multinationals that I could have seriously damaged singlehandedly in a matter of hours if I had ever gone rogue back in the day. Few non-IT rank-and-file employees have such power. Of course the fact that I never did such a thing is one of the reasons I remain a well-paid consultant (trustworthiness and honesty is a consultant's #1 asset), but the fact is that many corporations are quite blind to the level of risk they undertake when they mistreat their IT staff.

Retric 10y ago
The critical difference is factory workers can shut everything down by not showing up. IT needs active sabotage which is a very different situation.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > The critical difference is factory workers can shut everything down by not showing up. IT needs active sabotage which is a very different situation. If you have achieved a genuinely 100% ops-free setup, sure. Otherwise, an IT walkout will shut things down just as surely as a factory walkout.
  - Retric 10y ago
    You are assuming they can't get anyone in the doors. Strike breakers at an iron factory don't really work unless they get close to the old workforce. In IT 10% of the staff can often keep the bare bones systems operating.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      > In IT 10% of the staff can often keep the bare bones systems operating. I don't think that's really true in any meaningful sense: In a growth company (e.g., a VC-funded startup), where most of the technical staff is focused on new development, a substantially reduced skeleton crew can keep the lights on, but "keeping the lights on" isn't going to keep such a company a going concern. In a software company (mature or otherwise), the technical staff (other than internal IT support) are "factory workers", with the same situation as you describe for an iron factory. In a mature, non-software company, a very large portion of the IT staff resources are devoted to just keeping the existing systems running; if they could do that with 10% of the staff, they'd already have cut the staff down so that was no longer true.
      - Retric 10y ago
        Growing service company's like Uber or Grubhub don't need new software in they way your thinking. Once your on the takeoff directory your product is already useful, no updates for a while is not going to kill you when your burn rate just fell though the floor. The same is true of a software company without developers has a vastly lowered burn rate. They need people for critical bug fixes, but a <90 day strike is recoverable and people are replaceable on longer time scales. Microsoft on a 90 day strike may actually be more profitable that year. It would be bad long term, but they don't need to keep pumping oil to pay for loans. A mature company tends to spend a lot of time dealing with software rot. Using an older phone system for another 3 months is just not a major issue. Not having email is huge problem but that's the kind of thing a tiny staff can keep running. Unless they are at the point where they are already operating like this, but replacing a tiny team that walks out is not a strike it's a cost of doing business.
  - joezydeco 10y ago
    Or worse, if management decides "any monkey can do this! Let's get Carl from engineering and put him on the job."
    - tachion 10y ago
      Or worse, if management says about 'Java Build Engineer' (who's main task was setting up extremely poorly written Jenkins jobs) 'He is a Build Engineer, I think he can build stuff' and puts him in charge of designing and building new infrastructure for a multi million dollar product, because you know, these pesky, nerdy, grumpy devops guys are overpriced, I mean, look at devs, they build their own stuff in AWS. This is madness, who needs infrastructure people anyway?!
- foxylion 10y ago
  I would say the more matching phrase would be "can a single iron worker shutdown the whole factory?" Most IT guys can do that.
- flukus 10y ago
  Not necessarily. There's always that server that doesn't have enough disk space that you have to run a cleanup script on every week, or something like it. If you "accidentally" forget to document that...
kovrik 10y ago
Totally agree. I think that happens because: 1) Nowadays almost everything depends on IT. 2) Majority of people still perceive IT as a "black magic". Arcane knowledge, something they don't understand, but depend on.
shalmanese 10y ago
Eh, pretty much any employee can cause an almost arbitrarily large amount of damage if they choose to be actively malicious. Drop a box of rat poison into the cookie dough mixer on the day you leave and watch a hundred million dollar recall roll into place. The reason why this doesn't happen is because it's an exceedingly dumb crime and most people are not sociopaths. Plenty of people like to fantasize about scenarios like this but it basically takes a terrorist mindset to actually go through with it.

Retric 10y ago

The critical difference is factory workers can shut everything down by not showing up. IT needs active sabotage which is a very different situation.

dragonwriter 10y ago
> The critical difference is factory workers can shut everything down by not showing up. IT needs active sabotage which is a very different situation. If you have achieved a genuinely 100% ops-free setup, sure. Otherwise, an IT walkout will shut things down just as surely as a factory walkout.
- Retric 10y ago
  You are assuming they can't get anyone in the doors. Strike breakers at an iron factory don't really work unless they get close to the old workforce. In IT 10% of the staff can often keep the bare bones systems operating.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > In IT 10% of the staff can often keep the bare bones systems operating. I don't think that's really true in any meaningful sense: In a growth company (e.g., a VC-funded startup), where most of the technical staff is focused on new development, a substantially reduced skeleton crew can keep the lights on, but "keeping the lights on" isn't going to keep such a company a going concern. In a software company (mature or otherwise), the technical staff (other than internal IT support) are "factory workers", with the same situation as you describe for an iron factory. In a mature, non-software company, a very large portion of the IT staff resources are devoted to just keeping the existing systems running; if they could do that with 10% of the staff, they'd already have cut the staff down so that was no longer true.
    - Retric 10y ago
      Growing service company's like Uber or Grubhub don't need new software in they way your thinking. Once your on the takeoff directory your product is already useful, no updates for a while is not going to kill you when your burn rate just fell though the floor. The same is true of a software company without developers has a vastly lowered burn rate. They need people for critical bug fixes, but a <90 day strike is recoverable and people are replaceable on longer time scales. Microsoft on a 90 day strike may actually be more profitable that year. It would be bad long term, but they don't need to keep pumping oil to pay for loans. A mature company tends to spend a lot of time dealing with software rot. Using an older phone system for another 3 months is just not a major issue. Not having email is huge problem but that's the kind of thing a tiny staff can keep running. Unless they are at the point where they are already operating like this, but replacing a tiny team that walks out is not a strike it's a cost of doing business.
- joezydeco 10y ago
  Or worse, if management decides "any monkey can do this! Let's get Carl from engineering and put him on the job."
  - tachion 10y ago
    Or worse, if management says about 'Java Build Engineer' (who's main task was setting up extremely poorly written Jenkins jobs) 'He is a Build Engineer, I think he can build stuff' and puts him in charge of designing and building new infrastructure for a multi million dollar product, because you know, these pesky, nerdy, grumpy devops guys are overpriced, I mean, look at devs, they build their own stuff in AWS. This is madness, who needs infrastructure people anyway?!
foxylion 10y ago
I would say the more matching phrase would be "can a single iron worker shutdown the whole factory?" Most IT guys can do that.
flukus 10y ago
Not necessarily. There's always that server that doesn't have enough disk space that you have to run a cleanup script on every week, or something like it. If you "accidentally" forget to document that...

kovrik 10y ago

Totally agree. I think that happens because: 1) Nowadays almost everything depends on IT. 2) Majority of people still perceive IT as a "black magic". Arcane knowledge, something they don't understand, but depend on.

shalmanese 10y ago

Eh, pretty much any employee can cause an almost arbitrarily large amount of damage if they choose to be actively malicious. Drop a box of rat poison into the cookie dough mixer on the day you leave and watch a hundred million dollar recall roll into place. The reason why this doesn't happen is because it's an exceedingly dumb crime and most people are not sociopaths. Plenty of people like to fantasize about scenarios like this but it basically takes a terrorist mindset to actually go through with it.