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Today I learned that the government needs to start operating a bit more like a corporation in the sense of removing paper pushers. Automation, some of the comm

Today I learned that the government needs to start operating a bit more like a corporation in the sense of removing paper pushers. Automation, some of the comments are linking to TLS renewals. It is 2019, how is there still an individual manually doing this kind of work?

tsumnia 8y ago
> Today I learned that the government needs to start operating a bit more like a corporation in the sense of removing paper pushers. Not to stir the political pot, but this is one of the reasons my father says he voted Trump - an "outsider from corporate lands" would cut the fat of government and start running it like a company. The government is slow because OF the paper pushers, and the often used cliche "you have to really do a bad job to get fired as a government worker".
- Spacemolte 8y ago
  I really like the idea. We recently got a new minister of education, who is a successful entrepreneur, and so far he has done a great job. But I guess it all depends on who you pick for the position..
- lern_too_spel 8y ago
  So you elect a cokehead. Not that we're any better in Silicon Valley. We elected a cokehead to the board of the Santa Clara Valley Water District just because he outspent his opponent ten to one.
Spacemolte 8y ago
My guess is like other people are saying, awareness, and having a short expire time on certificates should also make it less usable if someone gets access to the certificate by them having less time to use it. Same reason why passwords should be rotated often.
pwg 8y ago
You'd be amazed. One example: Deployment of updated software to 15+ VM's by the method of: 1) Development team creates lengthy MSWord document describing steps, including Bash command lines to perform each step interspersed among narrative paragraphs; 2) Operations team performs deployment by copy-pasting the Bash command lines from MSWord doc. into terminals (repeat copy-paste for the 15+ VM's that are being updated).
- feistypharit 8y ago
  This is in fact how a lot of places still function. Or worse, developers telling the ops guys on the 2am conference call what to type. Then waiting for them to type it...very slowly.
- drdeadringer 8y ago
  What is the preferable method against copy-pasting the commands? "Fat-finger" errors aren't a myth in my experience. The only problem here I'm seeing is MSWord due to its auto-formatting on certain things [e.g. quotation marks].
  - pwg 8y ago
    Write a proper Bash (or other scripting language of one's choice) script to perform the deployment start to finish, with proper checking of results from each step [1]. I.e., the deployment equivalent to: make make install The copy-paste method from MSWord doc prevents fat finger typo errors, but does nothing for an ops. person skipping step 18 of 34 because step 17 took 47 minutes to complete and they forgot exactly where they were in the word doc in the interim. [1] This, of course requires the individual steps be created such that they can be monitored and output captured by the Bash (or other script language) to determine 'next steps' at each stage. Sadly, several of the steps in the word doc amount to "run this command" - note the output number from the command, give that value to the command in step 35 (where step 35 is some number of additional steps ahead in the word doc).
    - drdeadringer 8y ago

tsumnia 8y ago

> Today I learned that the government needs to start operating a bit more like a corporation in the sense of removing paper pushers. Not to stir the political pot, but this is one of the reasons my father says he voted Trump - an "outsider from corporate lands" would cut the fat of government and start running it like a company. The government is slow because OF the paper pushers, and the often used cliche "you have to really do a bad job to get fired as a government worker".

Spacemolte 8y ago
I really like the idea. We recently got a new minister of education, who is a successful entrepreneur, and so far he has done a great job. But I guess it all depends on who you pick for the position..
lern_too_spel 8y ago
So you elect a cokehead. Not that we're any better in Silicon Valley. We elected a cokehead to the board of the Santa Clara Valley Water District just because he outspent his opponent ten to one.

Spacemolte 8y ago

My guess is like other people are saying, awareness, and having a short expire time on certificates should also make it less usable if someone gets access to the certificate by them having less time to use it. Same reason why passwords should be rotated often.

pwg 8y ago

You'd be amazed. One example: Deployment of updated software to 15+ VM's by the method of: 1) Development team creates lengthy MSWord document describing steps, including Bash command lines to perform each step interspersed among narrative paragraphs; 2) Operations team performs deployment by copy-pasting the Bash command lines from MSWord doc. into terminals (repeat copy-paste for the 15+ VM's that are being updated).

feistypharit 8y ago
This is in fact how a lot of places still function. Or worse, developers telling the ops guys on the 2am conference call what to type. Then waiting for them to type it...very slowly.
drdeadringer 8y ago
What is the preferable method against copy-pasting the commands? "Fat-finger" errors aren't a myth in my experience. The only problem here I'm seeing is MSWord due to its auto-formatting on certain things [e.g. quotation marks].
- pwg 8y ago
  Write a proper Bash (or other scripting language of one's choice) script to perform the deployment start to finish, with proper checking of results from each step [1]. I.e., the deployment equivalent to: make make install The copy-paste method from MSWord doc prevents fat finger typo errors, but does nothing for an ops. person skipping step 18 of 34 because step 17 took 47 minutes to complete and they forgot exactly where they were in the word doc in the interim. [1] This, of course requires the individual steps be created such that they can be monitored and output captured by the Bash (or other script language) to determine 'next steps' at each stage. Sadly, several of the steps in the word doc amount to "run this command" - note the output number from the command, give that value to the command in step 35 (where step 35 is some number of additional steps ahead in the word doc).
  - drdeadringer 8y ago