7 ms·

They were not transforming any enterprises, they were selling working software. That is a much simpler problem. Most companies do not care about your internal m

by nahname 14y ago

They were not transforming any enterprises, they were selling working software. That is a much simpler problem. Most companies do not care about your internal methodologies, they only care about delivering what they need. This does raise an interesting point. Maybe this is just me, but have others been noticing a great disillusionment with IT? I can universally bash IT to anyone I know and no one ever defends them. If what the people I am talking to is true, IT departments everywhere are focused on preventing change and delivering things without value.

meaty 14y ago
Regarding your latter point, I think this comes from the exposure of technology increasing every day. I've built and operated a helpdesk for a 150,000 employee organisation with a high security requirement. People bash the IT guys because they think they understand it, but they don't. Users really are absolute fucking criminals most of the time purely due to either ignorance or arrogance. IT departments are primarily focussed on protecting people from each other, the internet and from making massive fuck ups. Every user who comes whinging to the helpdesk over a trivial issue or a brick wall is usually unaware that it's there for their own protection. It is the thing that is probably stopping that secure document pissing off out of the building on a USB stick. The 150k member organisation in question eventually had to lock their PCs into custom built frames with a hole for a finger to turn them on, all USB ports epoxied up, MAC address locking on all switches and oodles and oodles of cable ties and body search on entry and exit to stop USB sticks, phones etc being taken in. That's the front line for you. They need defending and I stand up for them regularly.
- parasubvert 14y ago
  The above dystopia is in fact why most people hate IT. It's not the front line, it is the policies such as expoxying USB ports for data loss prevention that are reviled. Some organizations really do require high levels of DLP - national security for one, production support for secure managed services is another. Others are utterly draconian for questionable cost/benefit reasons. It should not be considered criminal to use documents on multiple devices. Thankfully saner heads are prevailing as bring-your-own-device policy management and app containerization becomes mandatory now that the CEO and VP of marketing insists on using their iPad.
  - oz 14y ago
    The incentive structure of an IT worker is similar to that of a government bureaucrat: When in doubt, ban. Because the one time something happens, you're gonna hear that the systems were 'improperly secured.' Then they'll call in external auditors fresh out of school working from an over-photocopied checklist to tell you how incompetent you are. Personally, I'm happy with trends like BYOD etc. If the CEO loses data because he wanted email on his iPad (and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that), then IT won't be blamed for it.
    - jacques_chester 14y ago
      > Personally, I'm happy with trends like BYOD etc. If the CEO loses data because he wanted email on his iPad (and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that), then IT won't be blamed for it. Yes, it will. For the same reason "the government" is blamed when someone eats a lump of poison out of a can labelled "poison". "Why didn't you stop me?"
      - oz 14y ago
        You're quite right :)
- oz 14y ago
  I'm a former Big-4 sysadmin. I wrote a comment sometime ago explaining things from 'our' side. I'll go see if I can dig it up. Edit: Found it. A thread called "Why everyone hates the IT department." I'll copy and paste to save y'all the trouble. ----------------------------------------- I was a sysadmin for a financial services firm, and then for a Big-4 accounting firm, so I may have some perspective: 1. "For starters, I was not allowed to use my own equipment. They rattled off some gibberish about security and support even though my mail client supports SMTP and I can read Office files just fine. Also, for an agency focused on security their insistence on using Windows XP was baffling." The first rule of System Administration [0] is to start every host in a known state. The reason for this is predictability - as the sysadmin, you know what to expect - certain software is installed, certain settings are configured, etc. You simply CANNOT manage systems at scale without this approach. Without it, testing, upgrades etc. are a shots in the dark. Another issue is ownership. Let's say you get company email on your personal BlackBerry. You're mugged, and the device is stolen. A competent administrator will immediately issue a WIPE command from the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, so that all data is erased. But wait! Those picture of your daughter's recital were on the phone. They're gone, and you're gonna be pissed. With a company-owned device, the expectations are different. A friend of mine once had to re-image the laptop of a senior executive. Turns out, the only pictures of her daughter's high-school graduation were on it. A year later, he's still having to feed her stories about ongoing efforts to retrieve the data... Regarding Windows XP, OS upgrades are not to be done lightly. It requires very extensive regression testing for all Line-of-Business apps. Believe me, there isn't an IT guy there who doesn't want the upgrade to Win 7, but after a time in this business, you learn to tread carefully, as information systems can break in all sorts of subtle ways and management doesn't want to hear it. 2. "Secondly, I was told I could only use a certain browser because of another incoherent argument relying on "security." Interestingly, nothing was done to keep me from putting a pocket version of Firefox on a flash drive and connect to my own secure proxy. This is because the IT guys had no idea such wizardry was even possible." Again, standards. When their enterprise web-based ERP system that's been tested in IE6 and works fine breaks when you're using Chrome 15.0.874.121 m, who's gonna get the call? Oh that's right. IT. Multiply that by a few hundred machines, and your network is unmanageable. There exists technology to control USB drives, but in most organizations, it won't fly - they're simply too convenient. Besides, how do you expect the VP of Sales to load his iPod? Definitely shame on your IT guys for not blocking outbound connections to your own proxy at the firewall. 3. "Thirdly, for some reason print jobs were routed out of the office to a data center in San Angelo and then routed back to the printer down the hall. Printing a single page was non-deterministic and painful, never mind my final reports. This was a result of some state mandate about consolidating IT." This sounds like the state's fault. They were probably sold a solution that promised centralized tracking / routing of print jobs, based on parameters such as job submitter, color vs monochrome, time of day, printer availability etc. Not IT's fault. 4. "And then there was the time I tried to install Notepad++ to do some minor dev work (they hired a CS undergrad to do financial work so I thought I'd do more than estimate results). 2 weeks later I was approved to use a similar text editor on the grounds that I already have a task bar to manage multiple documents - a tab bar is completely unnecessary and Notepad++ requires further scrutiny. 3 weeks later I had a Perl interpreter." I was a sysadmin, and I had to get written and signed approval from my Manager, the Security Manager and the CIO to install any non-standard application. Pleasant? No. Necessary? Yes - everything needs to documented; otherwise these things spiral out of control quickly. 5. "At my current job they forced me to let them change the root password on my issued machine to something they knew and I didn't. I get why you do this: because you cannot fully trust people and I dealt with sensitive data; fine. Afterward I re-installed my OS and set my root password back. I don't understand why they don't think these things through." Don't take this personally, but sysadmins hate people like you - you make unauthorized changes and make our lives difficult. Your IT guys sound incompetent though - why weren't BIOS passwords in place to prevent booting from CD? And since you say root password, sounds like you were in a UNIX / Linux shop. If you were in an AD environment, after reinstalling, you wouldn't have been able to join your computer to the domain without domain administrator credentials. I understand that the situation sucks, but there are good (at least for a particular meaning of good) reasons why it is so. There is room for improvement on both sides. Whew. Felt good to get all that off my chest. No hard feelings? [0] Tom Limoncelli - The Practice of System & Network Administration. -------------------------------------------- To a comment he made further downthread: "I can't imagine it would take more than a cursory look at Notepad++ to vet it." This, right here, is the issue. You simply don't know what is involved. "I can't imagine why you need to draw blood to see if I have AIDS, Doctor." The specific program is not the issue. IT in the enterprise is all about centralized/standardized management and configuration. Every deviation from the standard is gonna increase the burden of maintenance. How it normally works is that there is a single base OS / apps specification, and defined optional applications. EVERYTHING is tested against these, and guaranteed to work. This allows deployment against a global fleet to go smoothly. It's all about known quantities, which allows them to quantify everything. Please remember that no IT guy wakes up in the morning and says "Yay! How can I make gatlin's life suck today???" It's more like, "Oh shit, last months patches are not being installed on those PCs in accounting. I wonder if it's the SCCM [0] client?" You find out 8 hours later that there's a conflict between $NON-STANDARD APPLICATION and the SCCM client. Have fun scouring Technet and forums to find a solution. These are the things that fill us with dread. I'm not saying it's right. Just want you to see the other side. [0]- Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager
parasubvert 14y ago
IT is mostly rewarded with preserving what is and fighting politics... not delivering new value. This varies from place to place of course, but it's effectively due to the knowledge gap between "the business" and "IT" that leads to a misunderstanding of the vast spectrum (10x or more!) of how well IT organizations perform. The closest analogy is with auto manufacturing in the 70s having to face the Toyota product development and production system. It was utterly foreign and took decades for the top companies to figure it out. Now look at IT, which is at most organizations only one of many contributing departments like marketing or operations. Is it any wonder CEOs have no idea they could do things differently? Especially when you have hundreds of thousands of people whose salary DEPENDS on the CEO not figuring this out (I'm looking at the big system integrators, enterprise software vendors, and managed service providers here). True story - If you try to (say) fire IBM out of a data centre, are you prepared for the president of IBM to call the chairman of your board of directors to subtly question the competence of your CIO? Who does your board trust more, a brand with 100+ years of exposure, or John Smith the CIO? You had better have prepped the CEO, CIO, and CFO on your plans and get them on-side, so they understand. Could you imagine doing this with a complex specialized topic like Agile/Lean, Cloud, Open Source, etc? It is like convincing your grandmother to drop AT&T or Bell South for VOIP, or convincing them that AOL actually isn't the internet. Not impossible but requires a lot of patience and trust.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  As a Chairman or CEO I would straight up sack someone who, of their own initiative and with warning began a "big bang" change to the company's IT entire DNA without some sort of consultation. Progressive rollout over 5 years? Local trial programs? Experimental work? All fine. Go ahead. Report back. Bet-the-company without so much as a peep? Please leave.
  - parasubvert 14y ago
    That wasn't my point. Of course the board and CEO should be consulted. That's a far cry from having to prepare them from snipers. Vendor politics is poison.

by nahname 14y ago

meaty 14y ago

Regarding your latter point, I think this comes from the exposure of technology increasing every day. I've built and operated a helpdesk for a 150,000 employee organisation with a high security requirement. People bash the IT guys because they think they understand it, but they don't. Users really are absolute fucking criminals most of the time purely due to either ignorance or arrogance. IT departments are primarily focussed on protecting people from each other, the internet and from making massive fuck ups. Every user who comes whinging to the helpdesk over a trivial issue or a brick wall is usually unaware that it's there for their own protection. It is the thing that is probably stopping that secure document pissing off out of the building on a USB stick. The 150k member organisation in question eventually had to lock their PCs into custom built frames with a hole for a finger to turn them on, all USB ports epoxied up, MAC address locking on all switches and oodles and oodles of cable ties and body search on entry and exit to stop USB sticks, phones etc being taken in. That's the front line for you. They need defending and I stand up for them regularly.

parasubvert 14y ago
The above dystopia is in fact why most people hate IT. It's not the front line, it is the policies such as expoxying USB ports for data loss prevention that are reviled. Some organizations really do require high levels of DLP - national security for one, production support for secure managed services is another. Others are utterly draconian for questionable cost/benefit reasons. It should not be considered criminal to use documents on multiple devices. Thankfully saner heads are prevailing as bring-your-own-device policy management and app containerization becomes mandatory now that the CEO and VP of marketing insists on using their iPad.
- oz 14y ago
  The incentive structure of an IT worker is similar to that of a government bureaucrat: When in doubt, ban. Because the one time something happens, you're gonna hear that the systems were 'improperly secured.' Then they'll call in external auditors fresh out of school working from an over-photocopied checklist to tell you how incompetent you are. Personally, I'm happy with trends like BYOD etc. If the CEO loses data because he wanted email on his iPad (and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that), then IT won't be blamed for it.
  - jacques_chester 14y ago
    > Personally, I'm happy with trends like BYOD etc. If the CEO loses data because he wanted email on his iPad (and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that), then IT won't be blamed for it. Yes, it will. For the same reason "the government" is blamed when someone eats a lump of poison out of a can labelled "poison". "Why didn't you stop me?"
    - oz 14y ago
      You're quite right :)
oz 14y ago
I'm a former Big-4 sysadmin. I wrote a comment sometime ago explaining things from 'our' side. I'll go see if I can dig it up. Edit: Found it. A thread called "Why everyone hates the IT department." I'll copy and paste to save y'all the trouble. ----------------------------------------- I was a sysadmin for a financial services firm, and then for a Big-4 accounting firm, so I may have some perspective: 1. "For starters, I was not allowed to use my own equipment. They rattled off some gibberish about security and support even though my mail client supports SMTP and I can read Office files just fine. Also, for an agency focused on security their insistence on using Windows XP was baffling." The first rule of System Administration [0] is to start every host in a known state. The reason for this is predictability - as the sysadmin, you know what to expect - certain software is installed, certain settings are configured, etc. You simply CANNOT manage systems at scale without this approach. Without it, testing, upgrades etc. are a shots in the dark. Another issue is ownership. Let's say you get company email on your personal BlackBerry. You're mugged, and the device is stolen. A competent administrator will immediately issue a WIPE command from the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, so that all data is erased. But wait! Those picture of your daughter's recital were on the phone. They're gone, and you're gonna be pissed. With a company-owned device, the expectations are different. A friend of mine once had to re-image the laptop of a senior executive. Turns out, the only pictures of her daughter's high-school graduation were on it. A year later, he's still having to feed her stories about ongoing efforts to retrieve the data... Regarding Windows XP, OS upgrades are not to be done lightly. It requires very extensive regression testing for all Line-of-Business apps. Believe me, there isn't an IT guy there who doesn't want the upgrade to Win 7, but after a time in this business, you learn to tread carefully, as information systems can break in all sorts of subtle ways and management doesn't want to hear it. 2. "Secondly, I was told I could only use a certain browser because of another incoherent argument relying on "security." Interestingly, nothing was done to keep me from putting a pocket version of Firefox on a flash drive and connect to my own secure proxy. This is because the IT guys had no idea such wizardry was even possible." Again, standards. When their enterprise web-based ERP system that's been tested in IE6 and works fine breaks when you're using Chrome 15.0.874.121 m, who's gonna get the call? Oh that's right. IT. Multiply that by a few hundred machines, and your network is unmanageable. There exists technology to control USB drives, but in most organizations, it won't fly - they're simply too convenient. Besides, how do you expect the VP of Sales to load his iPod? Definitely shame on your IT guys for not blocking outbound connections to your own proxy at the firewall. 3. "Thirdly, for some reason print jobs were routed out of the office to a data center in San Angelo and then routed back to the printer down the hall. Printing a single page was non-deterministic and painful, never mind my final reports. This was a result of some state mandate about consolidating IT." This sounds like the state's fault. They were probably sold a solution that promised centralized tracking / routing of print jobs, based on parameters such as job submitter, color vs monochrome, time of day, printer availability etc. Not IT's fault. 4. "And then there was the time I tried to install Notepad++ to do some minor dev work (they hired a CS undergrad to do financial work so I thought I'd do more than estimate results). 2 weeks later I was approved to use a similar text editor on the grounds that I already have a task bar to manage multiple documents - a tab bar is completely unnecessary and Notepad++ requires further scrutiny. 3 weeks later I had a Perl interpreter." I was a sysadmin, and I had to get written and signed approval from my Manager, the Security Manager and the CIO to install any non-standard application. Pleasant? No. Necessary? Yes - everything needs to documented; otherwise these things spiral out of control quickly. 5. "At my current job they forced me to let them change the root password on my issued machine to something they knew and I didn't. I get why you do this: because you cannot fully trust people and I dealt with sensitive data; fine. Afterward I re-installed my OS and set my root password back. I don't understand why they don't think these things through." Don't take this personally, but sysadmins hate people like you - you make unauthorized changes and make our lives difficult. Your IT guys sound incompetent though - why weren't BIOS passwords in place to prevent booting from CD? And since you say root password, sounds like you were in a UNIX / Linux shop. If you were in an AD environment, after reinstalling, you wouldn't have been able to join your computer to the domain without domain administrator credentials. I understand that the situation sucks, but there are good (at least for a particular meaning of good) reasons why it is so. There is room for improvement on both sides. Whew. Felt good to get all that off my chest. No hard feelings? [0] Tom Limoncelli - The Practice of System & Network Administration. -------------------------------------------- To a comment he made further downthread: "I can't imagine it would take more than a cursory look at Notepad++ to vet it." This, right here, is the issue. You simply don't know what is involved. "I can't imagine why you need to draw blood to see if I have AIDS, Doctor." The specific program is not the issue. IT in the enterprise is all about centralized/standardized management and configuration. Every deviation from the standard is gonna increase the burden of maintenance. How it normally works is that there is a single base OS / apps specification, and defined optional applications. EVERYTHING is tested against these, and guaranteed to work. This allows deployment against a global fleet to go smoothly. It's all about known quantities, which allows them to quantify everything. Please remember that no IT guy wakes up in the morning and says "Yay! How can I make gatlin's life suck today???" It's more like, "Oh shit, last months patches are not being installed on those PCs in accounting. I wonder if it's the SCCM [0] client?" You find out 8 hours later that there's a conflict between $NON-STANDARD APPLICATION and the SCCM client. Have fun scouring Technet and forums to find a solution. These are the things that fill us with dread. I'm not saying it's right. Just want you to see the other side. [0]- Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager

parasubvert 14y ago

IT is mostly rewarded with preserving what is and fighting politics... not delivering new value. This varies from place to place of course, but it's effectively due to the knowledge gap between "the business" and "IT" that leads to a misunderstanding of the vast spectrum (10x or more!) of how well IT organizations perform. The closest analogy is with auto manufacturing in the 70s having to face the Toyota product development and production system. It was utterly foreign and took decades for the top companies to figure it out. Now look at IT, which is at most organizations only one of many contributing departments like marketing or operations. Is it any wonder CEOs have no idea they could do things differently? Especially when you have hundreds of thousands of people whose salary DEPENDS on the CEO not figuring this out (I'm looking at the big system integrators, enterprise software vendors, and managed service providers here). True story - If you try to (say) fire IBM out of a data centre, are you prepared for the president of IBM to call the chairman of your board of directors to subtly question the competence of your CIO? Who does your board trust more, a brand with 100+ years of exposure, or John Smith the CIO? You had better have prepped the CEO, CIO, and CFO on your plans and get them on-side, so they understand. Could you imagine doing this with a complex specialized topic like Agile/Lean, Cloud, Open Source, etc? It is like convincing your grandmother to drop AT&T or Bell South for VOIP, or convincing them that AOL actually isn't the internet. Not impossible but requires a lot of patience and trust.

jacques_chester 14y ago
As a Chairman or CEO I would straight up sack someone who, of their own initiative and with warning began a "big bang" change to the company's IT entire DNA without some sort of consultation. Progressive rollout over 5 years? Local trial programs? Experimental work? All fine. Go ahead. Report back. Bet-the-company without so much as a peep? Please leave.
- parasubvert 14y ago
  That wasn't my point. Of course the board and CEO should be consulted. That's a far cry from having to prepare them from snipers. Vendor politics is poison.