9 ms·

The Bastard Operator From Hell (1999)

196 points by iudqnolq 7y ago

iudqnolq 7y ago
From the site: > Warning: This site contains adult themes, violence, profanities, and other such fun stuff. If it bothers you, just don't read it.
ddingus 7y ago
Great. Makes for an excellent bit of early Internet humor study. I like BOFH. I and my co workers used to look forward to them.
- iudqnolq 7y ago
  I just learned today that he's published some recent updates in the Register. Latest is from four days ago! https://www.theregister.co.uk/data_centre/bofh/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/data_centre/bofh/ Sadly, I don't think they're as good as the older ones.
  - ddingus 7y ago
    Well cool. Pity they might not be as good. But, I will read anyway. Get a little nostalgia fix. Thanks!
  - jlgaddis 7y ago
    A new one comes out on El Reg once a week or so but, yeah, there's less death and destruction than there was back in the good ol' days.
  - bearbin 7y ago
    I have compiled an index of the new stories arranged by year of publication on my website, which is a bit easier to navigate than scrolling through the (incomplete) list on the Register website: https://bearbin.net/bofh https://bearbin.net/bofh
    - EamonnMR 7y ago
      Links to the official archive and author bio are dead.
      - bearbin 7y ago
        Thanks for letting me know, I've replaced them with archived versions.
oaiey 7y ago
The first BOFH was there right at the time I learned Unix in an apprenticeship school. It got me into the right vibe. Damn programming and architecture stole me from system administration :)
- Zenst 7y ago
  Yip, earliest I recall seeing it was mid 80's, unsure if it was in the industry magazine "Computer Weekly - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Weekly" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Weekly" (the one you got for free and was impossible to cancel) or UNIX World. But certainly fun times. EDIT - wrong magazine
  - oaiey 7y ago
    For me it was end 90s. It was "classic" at that time already. When I remember right, I learned the concept of quotas at the same time and the practical usage from BOFH.
pmoriarty 7y ago
Something along similar lines that I really enjoyed was the "Website is Down" series of videos, starting with "Sales Guy vs Web Dude": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRGljemfwUE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRGljemfwUE
- ceph_ 7y ago
  Wow, what a flashback. I had forgotten about this classic.
  - perlpimp 7y ago
    just like alt.sysadmin.recovery
- malux85 7y ago
  Big fan of BOFH but I’d never heard this, very funny, thanks for sharing
- BiteCode_dev 7y ago
  I know it's supposed to be a parody, but it hits very close to home.
- HighTraffic 7y ago
  thank you for this masterpiece.
hestefisk 7y ago
This is a hacker culture classic.
- marcus_holmes 7y ago
  for both good and bad
peteforde 7y ago
My friends and I still make jokes about suggesting people get to the bottom of their problems with a "power test"; that is, flicking the main power switch on and off as fast as possible for about 30 seconds.
j-pb 7y ago
I know that it's parody, but I think the whole sysadmin culture is incredibly toxic and glorifies toxicity. I've never met more socially inept yet condescending people in computer science. The whole "loser", "not my job", "automating your job away thing" totally clashes with the real-world requirements that the profession entails. Unless you work at google in a datacenter in the arctic you'll have to help people, and you'll have to do it over and over and over again, because frankly most sysadmins don't make the money, the people they support do. Yet, they look down on the people they run the systems for. To them they are just cogs in a machine doing non intellectual work. They see it as an insult that their "losers" won't learn and stop to appreciate and marvel at their beautiful systems, ignoring the fact that most ops positions at a non IT company are a lot less stressful, yet much better paid than all other jobs. /rant
- doctor_eval 7y ago
  I agree. I mean I’ve got my war stories from when I was a sysadm, and I laugh about them, but at the end of the day I knew that computers were (are) really arcane, and the people I was hired to support had jobs to do that didn’t include the words “computer science” (but did include words like “histopathologist”) BOFH to me was always the epitome of those few people who liked to lord it over others who they considered to be less smart than them - “lusers”. I knew a few admins and programmers like this and they weren’t ever half as smart as they thought they were. BOFH always felt to me like a celebration of stupidity, which is never something I find entertaining, and I was never quite convinced that it was the victims who were stupid.
- paranoidrobot 7y ago
  Like much dark humour, it's inappropriate and often viewed in poor taste outside of those communities. I'm not sure how else to describe BOFH except as revenge-fantasy porn. It's a vent/release for people who are often stuck between a rock and a hard place. In most organisations, IT is seen a as a cost-centre, rather than a business enabler. So on one hand, you have management often wanting to cut costs to the bone - on the other, you have the very same people complaining that you're implementing certain policies and being a hard-ass about equipment/software/etc. Then when things go down and it's due to the business cutting costs - well, it's still IT's fault. Then there's the often poorly thought through and inane requests, where people refuse to listen to reason. And then you have a lot of people who have no awareness of anything outside of themselves - Their issues are always the most important, they shouldn't be required to learn basic IT skills, and anything that goes wrong it's IT's fault, even if they've been provided ample training and education opportunities. I see similarly dark humour and in-jokes in other high-stress professions.
IIAOPSW 7y ago
Maybe I'm in the minority here but I don't think this is clever at all. BOFH isn't some Dr. House character who's insufferable personality is the price you pay for genius. BOFH isn't doing some sort of vigilantism, correcting injustices in the world. He acts like all the people he screws deserve it for being dumb, but the "dumb" decision being punished is not expecting to be sabotaged for no reason. That's not dumb of them, that's a necessary assumption to make civilization work. He phrases these stories as if he's some clever trickster that hasn't found a worthy opponent, but where's the cleverness in "HAHA deleted your thesis using my admin priv"? I can't even respect that in the technically talented hacker sense. He didn't hack or do anything intelligent as part of his cruelness. He just abused his normal work credentials. Don't let the tone fool you, as far as sophistication goes this stuff is on the level of a shirtless parking lot fist fight. This isn't even funny in the harmless prank sense because it flat out isn't harmless. BOFH is nothing more than an asshole who is actively counterproductive at his job. Why does anyone here aspire or relate to BOFH? Why are so many finding this to be a funny and agreeable part of "hacker culture".
- philjackson 7y ago
  People enjoy watching a fictitious, narcissistic psychopath from afar. I think you're reading too much into it. It reminds me of Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
  - IIAOPSW 7y ago
    See I like Always Sunny but the joke in Always Sunny isn't about narcissistic psychopaths from afar. There's many layers of joke in that show. Sometimes the joke is that the apparent voice of reason has just as poor reasoning as the rest and they only got it right by coincidence. Sometimes the joke is that every time you think there's a genuine moment the rug gets pulled out and its revealed to be a scam or setup. Sometimes the joke is in the way they don't react to any tragedy going on around them. Almost always the joke is to subvert the tropes of the "20-somethings urbanite sitcom" genre (cheers/friends/HIMYM).
  - macintux 7y ago
    Sounds like Seinfeld, which I hate.
ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
I’ve been reading the BOFH since the BBS days. He’s still at it, for The Register.
- iso947 7y ago
  I gave up following the ref about 15 years ago - originally body was every Friday if I recall, but it dropped to irregularly a few times a year. The plots also went from short circuiting machines and deleting files to mass murder for no reason.
Accacin 7y ago
Ahh, for the life of me I can't rememeber another site that was similar but not a parody. It was tales from a Tech Support worker, which were pretty funny but he wasn't being malicious. I've search my pinboard for it and I can't find it anywhere! If anyone knows of it I'd be grateful.
- unpixer 7y ago
  Are you thinking of 'Chronicles of George' (https://www.chroniclesofgeorge.com/ https://www.chroniclesofgeorge.com/)?
  - Accacin 7y ago
    That's exactly it! Thanks so much.
mikece 7y ago
I never encountered a BOFH in my career but can certainly understand their frustration with users. Maybe I haven’t worked for the “wrong” companies but the first BOFH moment would be a sysadmins last where I’ve worked. If it became a pattern then the IT manager and the sysadmin would have been fired. Then again, I’ve worked in Microsoft shops and never had to deal with a crusty, silver pony tailed Unix sysadmins so maybe the stack plays a part.
- tuldia 7y ago
  Indeed! $ curl http://bofh.bjash.com/ -I HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-Length: 22100 Content-Type: text/html Last-Modified: Mon, 09 Sep 2019 18:36:39 GMT Accept-Ranges: bytes ETag: "916293843d67d51:0" Server: Microsoft-IIS/10.0 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET Date: Mon, 30 Dec 2019 18:53:47 GMT
busterarm 7y ago
There's a typical amount of seething involved in any field where someone has a minor input or touch-point with your job and they can do something you absolutely cannot or would not do. Typically it's regular folks against the office IT people, but for the Hacker News crowd the bogeymen have to be in either Sales or Infrastructure. Nowadays it's not as fashionable to bash the sales people, because the famous tech entrepreneurs and VCs have beaten into our heads how important sales folks are and you don't piss off the income stream. So instead "we enlightened few" take it out on the other one. They're a cost center anyway, right? And as much as most of us think we can productionize some distributed data service serving mega-high volume traffic, we either just can't, can't afford to spend the time to, or would rather not. And we definitely don't want to be paged about it at 3 in the morning on a Sunday either.thank.you.very.much. I can say this confidently because I work on both sides of this fence. So rather than shitting on one of the only "shared jokes" that the people doing that thankless sysadmin job get to enjoy, maybe have a little empathy towards them instead.
- tomrod 7y ago
  > There's a typical amount of seething involved in any field where someone has a minor input or touch-point with your job and they can do something you absolutely cannot or would not do. I'm not sure I buy into this theory. I think most people have no idea what goes on behind the scenes, and so ascribe slowdowns, missed SLA, or other failing metrics to amorphous "others" rather than individuals. Under such a system they certainly don't work to identify frictions along touch-points.
  - busterarm 7y ago
    just read all of the sysadmin-hate in this thread.
  - paranoidrobot 7y ago
    > I think most people have no idea what goes on behind the scenes, I agree with this. > and so ascribe slowdowns, missed SLA, or other failing metrics to amorphous "others" rather than individuals. The amorphous "other" is generally "IT" when it comes to anything computer related. IT are the 'big evil' and the cause of most people being unable to do work, if you follow the common narrative. For example, it's IT's fault that this machine is so slow...Not finance's for restricting budgets and using the cheapest RAM/drive configuration they can get away with. It's IT's fault that I can't install this super important Outlook/Chrome/whatever extension that I saw on a blog somewhere. It's also IT's fault if Outlook/Chrome/whatever crashes or is slow because I've installed all these extensions. It's IT's fault that I can't just use wordpress and put custom themes and unvetted PHP code on our main domain so I can do some promotion. It's also IT's fault if that Wordpress install gets hijacked and is used to phish/whatever customers/staff/etc. It's IT's fault that I can't send 500MB attachments and cc 250 people at other companies. It's also IT's fault that the network (and my computer) is so slow when I'm trying to open an email. It's IT's fault that the printers are locked down to only print in B&W, even though they have that colour option - and not because finance is sick of paying for me to print 500 full page colour birthday/soccer/wedding invitations every other month. It's IT's fault that I got phished, even though I ignored the IT security warnings, and slept/skipped through the mandatory online training. It's also IT's fault for letting phishing emails come through, even though it was detected and put in my spam folder with a header clearly saying that it was a suspicious email. It's IT's fault that I can't use an unencrypted USB drive to move files between computers, even thouh it's because we have had too many colleagues leave USB drives full of customer data in taxis or lost in the mail. Don't you understand? IT just makes everyone's life more difficult. I'm playing this up a bit, but these things happen, and people do blame IT for these things.
MichaelMoser123 7y ago
that is in needs of an update: something like 'the cloud setup from beyond hell'
- dsr_ 7y ago
  Here's the real world version: https://freethoughtblogs.com/stderr/2019/12/28/its-still-about-the-applications/ https://freethoughtblogs.com/stderr/2019/12/28/its-still-abo...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
superflit 7y ago
I think people are missing the whole context of BOFH. In the '90s there was no prestige in working in IT maybe as a developer but not as a Sysadmin. Sysadmin and Support (the guy who fixes your e-mail or set up Netscape) usually were the same guy. The prestige positions were in Marketing, Law and executive/finance. The assistant on HR?Finance? They usually earned more than the Sysadmin. People used to tell me: "People who work on computers will never grow in the company. They stay there working and nobody notices them then. If you want to grow and climb de ladder go to Finance or Marketing." So then who were the people who worked on computers? The ones that really liked it and the ones socially inept. Sometimes Both. It was the "misfits" people dept. Data Centers? Basement or an ugly off-site. Location of Dept? The worst possible. (Check the IT CROWD series). But it was very rare someone that Did not like computers and did not have a hacker mentality to work on the field. Because of low pay and prestige. Then BOFH represents the "Dr. Evil" that makes all right. Punishes the people that earn 2-3x times more and still can't do anything in IT. It is dark humor like "Nick burns, your computer guy" from SNL. The big difference is the people who started at 00 and later got a Very different market and with other people went after looking for prestige. Take Bezos, Gates, Stallman, Linus and any other big tech guy before 00. They were "NERDS". Nerds only became cool after bringing billions to the table. What a young, socially inept, smart guy and nerd will do in his 20's? 1) Have a lot of girlfriends? Party like crazy? 2) Fail miserably in #1 and code? I remember on dates saying that I work with "IT" and the face of frustration in my dates. One of my date father saying to her "He will not be able to support you... If he was a Lawyer yes.." There was no "diversity" need because the requiremnt was: be smart and crazy to work in IT. Last comment: Once in a HR meeting they asked what traits they need to fill an position without thinking too much I said: 1. Low self-esteem; 2. Smart; 3. Desesperate. My coworker was there agreeing. The HR said that we can't put it. So we change the words a little.
- aperrien 7y ago
  I agree with you about IT careers. Back in the late 80s when I was starting college, it was exactly the way you describe. It is really interesting how things changed in the late 90's regarding this. I remember it falling back for a while after the dot com boom, only to pick back up in late 2000. A lot of people really don't realize that the prestige that comes from IT is only a recent thing, I think because having grown up around it, it's all that they know.
erikpukinskis 7y ago
Could add 1999 to the title.
- dang 7y ago
  Ok, added. Is that the correct year?
  - erikpukinskis 7y ago
    I had a hard time figuring it out but my sense was these posts were happening over time starting in 1999.
dang 7y ago
A small but good thread from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17160902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17160902
newnewpdro 7y ago
clickety clickety
moron4hire 7y ago
The problem with these stories, and pretty much any that use shock as there source of humor, is that they just aren't that funny. "It's just a joke" only works if the content actually develops a punchline. But instead, it's the same story, over and over again. The only change is that the BOFH goes from fighting with incompetent vendors foisted on him by management to just being the same, exact kind of dick to the people he's supposed to be supporting, making him exactly the same, frustratingly useless "help" he complains about with the vendors. Even with a reading that these are projections of what he sees as how other people see him (he doesn't actually want to watch cartoons all day and delete peoples files intentionally, that's just what people think he does), the joke runs tired after the 3rd iteration, and then continues ad nauseum.
fencepost 7y ago
The BOFH is a response to the kinds of things that still happen, for a nice little modern-day horror story take a look at https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/eaphr8/a_dropbox_account_gave_me_stomach_ulcers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/eaphr8/a_dropbox_... The meat buried in there: [...]"it wasn't just the database it was the entire app and website. The app was actually just a server instance in Heroku that was spun up whenever there was an update and would make crazy api calls to the drop box account read information from hardcoded database files. He immediately called drop box support to figure out what in god's name was going on and to his horror after several escalations gained access to the account and found that the account had 497 TB of 500 TB space used up and the team was on the verge of running out." also "This single drop box account was also their version control."
yalogin 7y ago
I used to read it initially and some of it was funny because it was harmless but overtime it became more and more illegal, mean, vindictive just to hurt. I could not read it anymore.

196 points by iudqnolq 7y ago

From the site: > Warning: This site contains adult themes, violence, profanities, and other such fun stuff. If it bothers you, just don't read it.

ddingus 7y ago

Great. Makes for an excellent bit of early Internet humor study. I like BOFH. I and my co workers used to look forward to them.

iudqnolq 7y ago
I just learned today that he's published some recent updates in the Register. Latest is from four days ago! https://www.theregister.co.uk/data_centre/bofh/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/data_centre/bofh/ Sadly, I don't think they're as good as the older ones.
- ddingus 7y ago
  Well cool. Pity they might not be as good. But, I will read anyway. Get a little nostalgia fix. Thanks!
- jlgaddis 7y ago
  A new one comes out on El Reg once a week or so but, yeah, there's less death and destruction than there was back in the good ol' days.
- bearbin 7y ago
  I have compiled an index of the new stories arranged by year of publication on my website, which is a bit easier to navigate than scrolling through the (incomplete) list on the Register website: https://bearbin.net/bofh https://bearbin.net/bofh
  - EamonnMR 7y ago
    Links to the official archive and author bio are dead.
    - bearbin 7y ago
      Thanks for letting me know, I've replaced them with archived versions.

oaiey 7y ago

The first BOFH was there right at the time I learned Unix in an apprenticeship school. It got me into the right vibe. Damn programming and architecture stole me from system administration :)

Zenst 7y ago
Yip, earliest I recall seeing it was mid 80's, unsure if it was in the industry magazine "Computer Weekly - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Weekly" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Weekly" (the one you got for free and was impossible to cancel) or UNIX World. But certainly fun times. EDIT - wrong magazine
- oaiey 7y ago
  For me it was end 90s. It was "classic" at that time already. When I remember right, I learned the concept of quotas at the same time and the practical usage from BOFH.

pmoriarty 7y ago

Something along similar lines that I really enjoyed was the "Website is Down" series of videos, starting with "Sales Guy vs Web Dude": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRGljemfwUE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRGljemfwUE

ceph_ 7y ago
Wow, what a flashback. I had forgotten about this classic.
- perlpimp 7y ago
  just like alt.sysadmin.recovery
malux85 7y ago
Big fan of BOFH but I’d never heard this, very funny, thanks for sharing
BiteCode_dev 7y ago
I know it's supposed to be a parody, but it hits very close to home.
HighTraffic 7y ago
thank you for this masterpiece.

hestefisk 7y ago

This is a hacker culture classic.

marcus_holmes 7y ago
for both good and bad

peteforde 7y ago

My friends and I still make jokes about suggesting people get to the bottom of their problems with a "power test"; that is, flicking the main power switch on and off as fast as possible for about 30 seconds.

j-pb 7y ago

I know that it's parody, but I think the whole sysadmin culture is incredibly toxic and glorifies toxicity. I've never met more socially inept yet condescending people in computer science. The whole "loser", "not my job", "automating your job away thing" totally clashes with the real-world requirements that the profession entails. Unless you work at google in a datacenter in the arctic you'll have to help people, and you'll have to do it over and over and over again, because frankly most sysadmins don't make the money, the people they support do. Yet, they look down on the people they run the systems for. To them they are just cogs in a machine doing non intellectual work. They see it as an insult that their "losers" won't learn and stop to appreciate and marvel at their beautiful systems, ignoring the fact that most ops positions at a non IT company are a lot less stressful, yet much better paid than all other jobs. /rant

doctor_eval 7y ago
I agree. I mean I’ve got my war stories from when I was a sysadm, and I laugh about them, but at the end of the day I knew that computers were (are) really arcane, and the people I was hired to support had jobs to do that didn’t include the words “computer science” (but did include words like “histopathologist”) BOFH to me was always the epitome of those few people who liked to lord it over others who they considered to be less smart than them - “lusers”. I knew a few admins and programmers like this and they weren’t ever half as smart as they thought they were. BOFH always felt to me like a celebration of stupidity, which is never something I find entertaining, and I was never quite convinced that it was the victims who were stupid.
paranoidrobot 7y ago
Like much dark humour, it's inappropriate and often viewed in poor taste outside of those communities. I'm not sure how else to describe BOFH except as revenge-fantasy porn. It's a vent/release for people who are often stuck between a rock and a hard place. In most organisations, IT is seen a as a cost-centre, rather than a business enabler. So on one hand, you have management often wanting to cut costs to the bone - on the other, you have the very same people complaining that you're implementing certain policies and being a hard-ass about equipment/software/etc. Then when things go down and it's due to the business cutting costs - well, it's still IT's fault. Then there's the often poorly thought through and inane requests, where people refuse to listen to reason. And then you have a lot of people who have no awareness of anything outside of themselves - Their issues are always the most important, they shouldn't be required to learn basic IT skills, and anything that goes wrong it's IT's fault, even if they've been provided ample training and education opportunities. I see similarly dark humour and in-jokes in other high-stress professions.

IIAOPSW 7y ago

Maybe I'm in the minority here but I don't think this is clever at all. BOFH isn't some Dr. House character who's insufferable personality is the price you pay for genius. BOFH isn't doing some sort of vigilantism, correcting injustices in the world. He acts like all the people he screws deserve it for being dumb, but the "dumb" decision being punished is not expecting to be sabotaged for no reason. That's not dumb of them, that's a necessary assumption to make civilization work. He phrases these stories as if he's some clever trickster that hasn't found a worthy opponent, but where's the cleverness in "HAHA deleted your thesis using my admin priv"? I can't even respect that in the technically talented hacker sense. He didn't hack or do anything intelligent as part of his cruelness. He just abused his normal work credentials. Don't let the tone fool you, as far as sophistication goes this stuff is on the level of a shirtless parking lot fist fight. This isn't even funny in the harmless prank sense because it flat out isn't harmless. BOFH is nothing more than an asshole who is actively counterproductive at his job. Why does anyone here aspire or relate to BOFH? Why are so many finding this to be a funny and agreeable part of "hacker culture".

philjackson 7y ago
People enjoy watching a fictitious, narcissistic psychopath from afar. I think you're reading too much into it. It reminds me of Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
- IIAOPSW 7y ago
  See I like Always Sunny but the joke in Always Sunny isn't about narcissistic psychopaths from afar. There's many layers of joke in that show. Sometimes the joke is that the apparent voice of reason has just as poor reasoning as the rest and they only got it right by coincidence. Sometimes the joke is that every time you think there's a genuine moment the rug gets pulled out and its revealed to be a scam or setup. Sometimes the joke is in the way they don't react to any tragedy going on around them. Almost always the joke is to subvert the tropes of the "20-somethings urbanite sitcom" genre (cheers/friends/HIMYM).
- macintux 7y ago
  Sounds like Seinfeld, which I hate.

ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago

I’ve been reading the BOFH since the BBS days. He’s still at it, for The Register.

iso947 7y ago
I gave up following the ref about 15 years ago - originally body was every Friday if I recall, but it dropped to irregularly a few times a year. The plots also went from short circuiting machines and deleting files to mass murder for no reason.

Accacin 7y ago

Ahh, for the life of me I can't rememeber another site that was similar but not a parody. It was tales from a Tech Support worker, which were pretty funny but he wasn't being malicious. I've search my pinboard for it and I can't find it anywhere! If anyone knows of it I'd be grateful.

unpixer 7y ago
Are you thinking of 'Chronicles of George' (https://www.chroniclesofgeorge.com/ https://www.chroniclesofgeorge.com/)?
- Accacin 7y ago
  That's exactly it! Thanks so much.

mikece 7y ago

I never encountered a BOFH in my career but can certainly understand their frustration with users. Maybe I haven’t worked for the “wrong” companies but the first BOFH moment would be a sysadmins last where I’ve worked. If it became a pattern then the IT manager and the sysadmin would have been fired. Then again, I’ve worked in Microsoft shops and never had to deal with a crusty, silver pony tailed Unix sysadmins so maybe the stack plays a part.

tuldia 7y ago
Indeed! $ curl http://bofh.bjash.com/ -I HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-Length: 22100 Content-Type: text/html Last-Modified: Mon, 09 Sep 2019 18:36:39 GMT Accept-Ranges: bytes ETag: "916293843d67d51:0" Server: Microsoft-IIS/10.0 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET Date: Mon, 30 Dec 2019 18:53:47 GMT

busterarm 7y ago

There's a typical amount of seething involved in any field where someone has a minor input or touch-point with your job and they can do something you absolutely cannot or would not do. Typically it's regular folks against the office IT people, but for the Hacker News crowd the bogeymen have to be in either Sales or Infrastructure. Nowadays it's not as fashionable to bash the sales people, because the famous tech entrepreneurs and VCs have beaten into our heads how important sales folks are and you don't piss off the income stream. So instead "we enlightened few" take it out on the other one. They're a cost center anyway, right? And as much as most of us think we can productionize some distributed data service serving mega-high volume traffic, we either just can't, can't afford to spend the time to, or would rather not. And we definitely don't want to be paged about it at 3 in the morning on a Sunday either.thank.you.very.much. I can say this confidently because I work on both sides of this fence. So rather than shitting on one of the only "shared jokes" that the people doing that thankless sysadmin job get to enjoy, maybe have a little empathy towards them instead.

tomrod 7y ago
> There's a typical amount of seething involved in any field where someone has a minor input or touch-point with your job and they can do something you absolutely cannot or would not do. I'm not sure I buy into this theory. I think most people have no idea what goes on behind the scenes, and so ascribe slowdowns, missed SLA, or other failing metrics to amorphous "others" rather than individuals. Under such a system they certainly don't work to identify frictions along touch-points.
- busterarm 7y ago
  just read all of the sysadmin-hate in this thread.
- paranoidrobot 7y ago
  > I think most people have no idea what goes on behind the scenes, I agree with this. > and so ascribe slowdowns, missed SLA, or other failing metrics to amorphous "others" rather than individuals. The amorphous "other" is generally "IT" when it comes to anything computer related. IT are the 'big evil' and the cause of most people being unable to do work, if you follow the common narrative. For example, it's IT's fault that this machine is so slow...Not finance's for restricting budgets and using the cheapest RAM/drive configuration they can get away with. It's IT's fault that I can't install this super important Outlook/Chrome/whatever extension that I saw on a blog somewhere. It's also IT's fault if Outlook/Chrome/whatever crashes or is slow because I've installed all these extensions. It's IT's fault that I can't just use wordpress and put custom themes and unvetted PHP code on our main domain so I can do some promotion. It's also IT's fault if that Wordpress install gets hijacked and is used to phish/whatever customers/staff/etc. It's IT's fault that I can't send 500MB attachments and cc 250 people at other companies. It's also IT's fault that the network (and my computer) is so slow when I'm trying to open an email. It's IT's fault that the printers are locked down to only print in B&W, even though they have that colour option - and not because finance is sick of paying for me to print 500 full page colour birthday/soccer/wedding invitations every other month. It's IT's fault that I got phished, even though I ignored the IT security warnings, and slept/skipped through the mandatory online training. It's also IT's fault for letting phishing emails come through, even though it was detected and put in my spam folder with a header clearly saying that it was a suspicious email. It's IT's fault that I can't use an unencrypted USB drive to move files between computers, even thouh it's because we have had too many colleagues leave USB drives full of customer data in taxis or lost in the mail. Don't you understand? IT just makes everyone's life more difficult. I'm playing this up a bit, but these things happen, and people do blame IT for these things.

MichaelMoser123 7y ago

that is in needs of an update: something like 'the cloud setup from beyond hell'

dsr_ 7y ago
Here's the real world version: https://freethoughtblogs.com/stderr/2019/12/28/its-still-about-the-applications/ https://freethoughtblogs.com/stderr/2019/12/28/its-still-abo...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

superflit 7y ago

I think people are missing the whole context of BOFH. In the '90s there was no prestige in working in IT maybe as a developer but not as a Sysadmin. Sysadmin and Support (the guy who fixes your e-mail or set up Netscape) usually were the same guy. The prestige positions were in Marketing, Law and executive/finance. The assistant on HR?Finance? They usually earned more than the Sysadmin. People used to tell me: "People who work on computers will never grow in the company. They stay there working and nobody notices them then. If you want to grow and climb de ladder go to Finance or Marketing." So then who were the people who worked on computers? The ones that really liked it and the ones socially inept. Sometimes Both. It was the "misfits" people dept. Data Centers? Basement or an ugly off-site. Location of Dept? The worst possible. (Check the IT CROWD series). But it was very rare someone that Did not like computers and did not have a hacker mentality to work on the field. Because of low pay and prestige. Then BOFH represents the "Dr. Evil" that makes all right. Punishes the people that earn 2-3x times more and still can't do anything in IT. It is dark humor like "Nick burns, your computer guy" from SNL. The big difference is the people who started at 00 and later got a Very different market and with other people went after looking for prestige. Take Bezos, Gates, Stallman, Linus and any other big tech guy before 00. They were "NERDS". Nerds only became cool after bringing billions to the table. What a young, socially inept, smart guy and nerd will do in his 20's? 1) Have a lot of girlfriends? Party like crazy? 2) Fail miserably in #1 and code? I remember on dates saying that I work with "IT" and the face of frustration in my dates. One of my date father saying to her "He will not be able to support you... If he was a Lawyer yes.." There was no "diversity" need because the requiremnt was: be smart and crazy to work in IT. Last comment: Once in a HR meeting they asked what traits they need to fill an position without thinking too much I said: 1. Low self-esteem; 2. Smart; 3. Desesperate. My coworker was there agreeing. The HR said that we can't put it. So we change the words a little.

aperrien 7y ago
I agree with you about IT careers. Back in the late 80s when I was starting college, it was exactly the way you describe. It is really interesting how things changed in the late 90's regarding this. I remember it falling back for a while after the dot com boom, only to pick back up in late 2000. A lot of people really don't realize that the prestige that comes from IT is only a recent thing, I think because having grown up around it, it's all that they know.

erikpukinskis 7y ago

Could add 1999 to the title.

dang 7y ago
Ok, added. Is that the correct year?
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  I had a hard time figuring it out but my sense was these posts were happening over time starting in 1999.

dang 7y ago

A small but good thread from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17160902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17160902

newnewpdro 7y ago

clickety clickety

moron4hire 7y ago

The problem with these stories, and pretty much any that use shock as there source of humor, is that they just aren't that funny. "It's just a joke" only works if the content actually develops a punchline. But instead, it's the same story, over and over again. The only change is that the BOFH goes from fighting with incompetent vendors foisted on him by management to just being the same, exact kind of dick to the people he's supposed to be supporting, making him exactly the same, frustratingly useless "help" he complains about with the vendors. Even with a reading that these are projections of what he sees as how other people see him (he doesn't actually want to watch cartoons all day and delete peoples files intentionally, that's just what people think he does), the joke runs tired after the 3rd iteration, and then continues ad nauseum.

fencepost 7y ago

The BOFH is a response to the kinds of things that still happen, for a nice little modern-day horror story take a look at https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/eaphr8/a_dropbox_account_gave_me_stomach_ulcers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/eaphr8/a_dropbox_... The meat buried in there: [...]"it wasn't just the database it was the entire app and website. The app was actually just a server instance in Heroku that was spun up whenever there was an update and would make crazy api calls to the drop box account read information from hardcoded database files. He immediately called drop box support to figure out what in god's name was going on and to his horror after several escalations gained access to the account and found that the account had 497 TB of 500 TB space used up and the team was on the verge of running out." also "This single drop box account was also their version control."

yalogin 7y ago

I used to read it initially and some of it was funny because it was harmless but overtime it became more and more illegal, mean, vindictive just to hurt. I could not read it anymore.