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If so, then even the offshore teams are vulnerable to the tsunami change coming with devops, SRE, elastic infrastructure, etc. It drives me a little crazy insi

If so, then even the offshore teams are vulnerable to the tsunami change coming with devops, SRE, elastic infrastructure, etc. It drives me a little crazy inside when I go to clients and see their system administrators have never developed automation for routine "small" events and are still after N years (where sometimes N>10!) responding to the same disk full alerts in exactly the same way, with absolutely zero automation of what they learned, cleaning up the same selection of files, and so on. And this is before I try to extol the virtues of devops over lunches, or go tactical and encourage them to try out Terraform, Pulumi, or the like (MEGO is my usual audience reaction). Fortunately my clients don't pay me to transform their IT, so it's no skin off my back. But make no mistake, that change is building a powerful head of steam, and I'm excited to work on automation solutions that embrace these principles, tooling, culture, etc., in my own service offerings for another part of my business. The folks who are resisting this change though, are not going to react well if/when the change starts seeping into their worlds.

packet_nerd 8y ago
My experience with these kinds of people is they react badly when anything new seeps into their worlds.
crispyambulance 8y ago
I think that many of these seemingly change-resistant folks actually would have loved to embrace new stuff. The problem, in many places, is that they're in departments like operations that value "convergent" work. This means they're stuck with their noses to the grindstone at all times and judged on volume and consistency of work. If they want to change something, they need to go through an onerous process designed to keep mistakes from happening at all costs. There is NO experimenting in such places and the workload is such that it's hard even to get some interstitial time to explore new ideas, of course forget about conferences and 20% time. The way they end-up canned or otherwise scattered to the wind is when someone way higher up in org see's that there's a better way and brings in someone from the outside to implement much needed change. It usually never occurs to these folks (the managers bringing in consultants) that they would not have had to do that in the first place if there was some value placed on innovation.
- president 8y ago
  So true. Always love it when a new hire comes in and trashes how everything is done inefficiently, tries to change things, and then ends up putting up with it after realizing the futility of it all. The only way it ever works out is if you have a supporting environment where not everybody is stressed out and overworked, which doesn't seem to exist in tech anymore.
  - oblio 8y ago
    Or the new hire just up and leaves: me, at 2 companies already. I've learned that life is too short to put up with so much bullshit. I generally give them about 6 months to decide if there's any chance of turning them around. But frequently it seems that they'd rather go down with the ship...
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
president 8y ago
> If so, then even the offshore teams are vulnerable to the tsunami change coming with devops, SRE, elastic infrastructure, etc. IT/DevOps/SRE/Testing are all commonly off-shored these days. These are the classic "cost-centers".

packet_nerd 8y ago

My experience with these kinds of people is they react badly when anything new seeps into their worlds.

crispyambulance 8y ago

I think that many of these seemingly change-resistant folks actually would have loved to embrace new stuff. The problem, in many places, is that they're in departments like operations that value "convergent" work. This means they're stuck with their noses to the grindstone at all times and judged on volume and consistency of work. If they want to change something, they need to go through an onerous process designed to keep mistakes from happening at all costs. There is NO experimenting in such places and the workload is such that it's hard even to get some interstitial time to explore new ideas, of course forget about conferences and 20% time. The way they end-up canned or otherwise scattered to the wind is when someone way higher up in org see's that there's a better way and brings in someone from the outside to implement much needed change. It usually never occurs to these folks (the managers bringing in consultants) that they would not have had to do that in the first place if there was some value placed on innovation.

president 8y ago
So true. Always love it when a new hire comes in and trashes how everything is done inefficiently, tries to change things, and then ends up putting up with it after realizing the futility of it all. The only way it ever works out is if you have a supporting environment where not everybody is stressed out and overworked, which doesn't seem to exist in tech anymore.
- oblio 8y ago
  Or the new hire just up and leaves: me, at 2 companies already. I've learned that life is too short to put up with so much bullshit. I generally give them about 6 months to decide if there's any chance of turning them around. But frequently it seems that they'd rather go down with the ship...
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]

president 8y ago

> If so, then even the offshore teams are vulnerable to the tsunami change coming with devops, SRE, elastic infrastructure, etc. IT/DevOps/SRE/Testing are all commonly off-shored these days. These are the classic "cost-centers".