I do not want to comment much about the credit crunch except as it influences technology. I wanted to bring a warning to people who use Vonage about something from my personal experience with VoIP. SunRocket went out of business suddenly and without warning leaving me and thosands of other people without service including 911. They managed to keep some people’s lines going from what I understand, but mine was immediately cut off. Vonage’s most recent 10Q talks about their debt and gives some warnings. If you have Vonage I encourage you to take a look at their investor relations pages and read this information for yourself. I’m not suggesting that they won’t secure the financing that they need to stay in business, I’m just giving a warning that you may want to do some research now on what you would do should your phone suddenly stop working. It was a mad rush to other VoIP providers when that happened, and I was already testing Packet 8 on the 30 day free trial, so I had it relatively easy.
Just at a minimum make sure you have a cell phone handy – even one without a service plan will work fine for 911 calls and won’t cost you a penny except to keep it charged.
On the same subject, you may want to look at other publicly traded companies that you do business with to see what their financials look like. I’m not suggesting you break off with Vonage or anyone else, because that will only increase the problem, just that you make the most of the resources that you have and make smart buying decisions. It is my opinion that this thing will blow over more quickly than most people expect, but more companies will go under before it is over.
I receive so many eWeek emails that it isn’t funny, and most of the time I have to just delete them because I don’t have time to even open them let alone read them. Recently however a headline What Is the Nature of an IT Worker? caught my eye. The article discusses, very briefly, a few of the common problems for IT workers and the things that cause those issues. For example, overworked, constant interruption, and a perception from others that they don’t understand the business. I can only speak definitively on my own experience, since I don’t want to repeat sentiment I’ve heard on the net, so here are my two cents.
Overworked
IT workers are the most consistently overworked individuals where I work. There are other groups of people who have projects or deadlines where they may work 50 hour weeks, but on average their numbers are much lower. I know of several individuals outside of IT who have claimed to work much more than they actually do, and I know people in IT who claim to work a lot more than they actually do. They are looking for the “sorry me” pitty that accompanies it, often to get out of doing something else. The cold numbers state that IT workers on average consistently work more than any other department. But not by much. So what is the real problem here? I have this posted on my name plate outside my cube:
The real problem is that IT workers are not properly validated for their work. When validation comes it comes in the form of more work. The harder an IT worker works, the more tasks and projects are given to him, which up to a point is a great thing and validates his career, but after a certain point causes burnout and a crash. I was in two meetings this past week with groups of individuals who had a specific job function. One was for UNIX administrators and one was for something dealing with security. In both groups I described my activities and breadth of work and was asked who was helping me. “I am the only one here who does this,” was my answer, which is completely true, “and these are only one part of the many things that I do.” I realized that a few of the people on the line had less work to do than I did, had help or a backup for that work, and that for all of them that single focus area was all they were expected to do. This is what I get for being good at the many things I do, and is also pretty much the only thing that validates me at work. That is the problem.
I called a co-worker at another office location this week as well and gave him a problem that I was having with something under his jurisdiction and he thanked me saying something to the effect that he was glad I called him and gave him a challenge. He was feeling like he needed a reason to be there for that day. In effect I validated him by giving him that task. Crazy! Yes, we IT workers are validated when you overwork us, which is probably why you do, but if that is the only thing you do then we will turn into the type of people who take baseball bats to computer equipment. Hint: Money is always good. Occasional comp time when projects are at a low point is also good. Emails to the entire organization about the next problem (keep reading) are also well received and is cheap.
Constant Interruption
IT workers are unique in this, and I don’t mean that no one else gets interrupted, but there is no other group who get less respect than IT. Just yesterday I was having a training meeting with the IT group to bring everyone else up to speed on an encryption project. Half the group got pulled away for “more important things” because apparently IT things aren’t important. While in the hour long meeting I was twice interrupted by an engineer who just had to pop in and have a question answered right that second. The non-work related questions also need to be taken outside of work hours. Just because I can fix your home computer does not mean that I want to, or that I want to hear about it and give you free advice.
I am also constantly doing projects – long term ones that can require a good 15 minutes of focus before becoming efficient. With the cube world being as it is I am constantly interrupted by a person walking up to my cube and stomping or scuffing his feet right at the end to announce his presence. Pretending to not hear the stomping and scuffing does not work. The questions are as often non-work related as they are work related, and rarely are they things that I will help them with immediately anyway. Between Wednesday and Thursday I was interrupted by one individual four times for a petty problem a computer illiterate contractor was having while trying to get on our contractor VLAN. That probably set me back an hour between those two days, and it is nothing that I should be doing – we have a help desk for that sort of thing, but they were out running about doing their jobs, so I got bugged. I won’t even mention the phone calls, or the constant meetings about having other meetings. You know what I’m talking about.
Perception from others as not knowing the business
This one gets IT people frequently although it is probably not as widely understood by those outside the industry. I saw it mentioned in the eWeek article which is why I mention it. IT people, especially ones that graduated with Computer Science degrees, often get artificially devalued for not understanding the business reasons for doing something. The thing is, it is often the exact opposite problem. IT people are forced to live to strict standards in large business IT and to provide a balance between many different forces. We live by Sarbanes-Oxley rules, legal rules, security standards, business needs, efficiency requirements, deadlines, budgets, equipment and software limitations, and quality standards just to name a few. IT people know better than most about the real reasons for doing things the way they are done. It is the non-IT worker who just ran out of hard drive space who wants to run to staples to buy another hard drive for $150 to fix our storage problems. They are the ones that don’t understand the business reasons for doing things. (Hint for those of you not in IT, a SAN is frequently used for anything mission critical, and it costs way more than $150.)
I speak from a biased standpoint since both of my degrees are Business degrees. I felt that it would be a waste of my time and money to focus solely on computer classes when I can just open a book up and figure something out. IT comes naturally to me. The Business is where IT really provides its worth. I do not have contempt for my CS brothers even if they tend to have contempt for me. I do believe that more IT workers should be business trained than CS trained, but most IT workers with Business or Science degrees who work in any decent size business environment figure out the business quickly, and usually know more about that business than most any one else there.
Saw this article over on Engadget where HP thinks that changing the interface on Linux is equivalent to writing an OS. Original article with more details is at Businesweek.
Just want to clarify something here. RedHat is not an operating system. SuSE is not an operating system. Linux is an operating system. BSD is an operating system. Microsoft Windows is an operating system. If I skin Windows and add in some freeware applications it doesn’t make it a new operating system. I think Microsoft would have an issue with that. The only way people get away with saying things like this is that there is no one who controls Linux from a commercial standpoint.
It is intersting that they think they want to undertake the maintenance duties of developing their own flavor of Linux. I think they would be much better served by using SuSE or RedHat, or even Ubuntu. The major PC vendors have displayed many times that they can’t get open source right. In fact, one of the biggest gripes I have with Dell is that they charge more for their hardware if you buy Linux than if you buy Windows, and they don’t offer their higher end hardware with Linux. I’m the kind of person who always wipes a PC clean and reinstalls the operating system after I get a system, so it doesn’t matter much to me whether or not it comes with Linux, but I think there should be some kind of price break for not having to pay for Windows. Unfortunately it seems that the actual value to the big name PC makers is diminished by having Linux on the box. Apparently they get so many kickbacks from Microsoft that they subsidize the hardware. Right.
Anyway, this rant brought to you because an Operating System is different than a Theme and set of installed applications.
Since the other day was talk like a pirate day, I thought I would write about a different kind of pirate – one that uses and trades unlicensed software. When I was in college I always vowed that I would pay for the software that I used once I had a job and the means to afford it, and I have kept with that promise. I understand that there are many people without the means to purchase software, and that piracy can help them get a leg up in their education to be able to afford to purchase that software in the future. I personally don’t want to ever have to go there again. Everything on my computer is either Freeware/GPL or paid for commercial software.
I’m not sure there is a good solution for piracy though, because some people will perpetually steal software with no sense of moral grounding. I was speaking with an individual who is a recent graduate from College who was in my same boat – couldn’t afford the software, but wanted to have it so he could learn how to use it an make himself marketable. He was also of the same mindset, and while he probably isn’t making a super huge salary, he is starting to purchase the software that he previously downloaded and removing the software that he no longer has need of.
On the other hand, I know of a few individuals who make many times my salary yet feel that they shouldn’t have to pay for the software on their computers. I know this because I have cleaned up their computers from some of the garbage that they downloaded that had backdoors and spyware associated with it. I have been asked many times to reload unlicensed versions of Windows, which I refuse to do, and one time I was told by someone I work for to do it for his boss on company time. I don’t want to get started about how many levels deep that ethical issue went.
The system is broken.
Software Copyright holders attempt to use activation procedures to protect their content, however this is like putting a lock on a screened-in porch door. It only keeps the good people out. Media copyright holders such as the RIAA and MPAA are attempting to go after those who share their content, however this misses the people with hard drives full of movies and music who are collectors. They seem to target the small players too – individuals who have an album or two on a share because they installed some software and didn’t read enough to realize that they were going to be sharing the music on their computers with the world. Broken enforcement.
Software and media needs to be priced at a reasonable level for its utility. The average home user probably rarely uses their office package, so charging $600 is unreasonable. The average web developer who is handed some psd files is probably going to use photoshop all of ten minutes to modify those files and convert them into something he can use. Is that worth $700? I can’t justify spending $700 for photoshop, so I use the GIMP, which is more than adequate to fill my needs. On the other hand, a graphics artist who uses Photoshop for 7 hours a day to make his livlihood should be paying that much for the software. As a computer geek I would prefer to use Photoshop so that I could help those graphics designers when they run into problems, but again that’s not worth $700 to me so that I can hand out free advice to people. Broken cost.
The solution is not easy.
The solution is multi-faceted and must be targeted specifically at the broken issues in the system currently. First of all, activation either doesn’t go far enough or goes too far. When transferring software from one computer to another becomes illegal, or requires repurchasing, that takes activation too far. Activation procedures are also too easy to break. Within hours of a commercial software package’s launch, someone will have figured out how to crack or bypass the activation and those who look for the means to get around it will be able to find it. Again, the good guy suffers here.
For software licensing, I propose a system similar to FlexLM where a user has to check out a key and remain in constant contact with the license server or the software will cease to function. For offline use a key could be checked out for a duration of time just like in FlexLM. Now why should we submit to such a model? Pay per usage. If an application such as Microsoft Office cost $0.50/day to use it, just for example, then I would have it installed on my Wife’s computer instead of Open Office. She uses the software once or twice a week, and ~$52/year is easier to swallow than paying retail prices. Continually updated software is another reason. In such a licensing model, users could always download the latest version of the software and not be stuck in an older version. It breaks down the barrier to entry for most people for a software package like Office. For $0.10/hour I would also have the more powerful Photoshop installed on my computer instead of GIMP. Pricing could then easily be tiered based on commercial or non-commercial use, and upon support levels.
The second part of the solution is enforcement. Instead of targeting the small time sharers such as the MPAA does, they need to target the big-time criminals who are actively cracking and making this software and media available for general use. An end user shouldn’t have to fear that their copy of software might not be genuine and that their list of MP3s downloaded and paid for from Amazon might become a target of the RIAA if they get some kind of malware on their computer that decides to start sharing those to the world.
The third part of the solutin is reporting. I know some of the software alliances have reporting tools on their websites, and I have actually visited them in the past in an attempt to report a violation. The last time I did so, the form was so complex and required so much information that I was not willing to put my own self on the line to report someone else’s infraction. For example, how do I report my boss’s boss, etc. Where are the anonymous tip lines. They didn’t exist backt hen, but today I did find one site that has this, but I don’t know how effective reporting will be.
That’s my solution in a nutshell. Not really much to it – mainly an enforcable and practical subscription model, reasonable prices to remove impetus for theft, and appropriate enforcement. There are a few holes I haven’t covered, but feel free to point them out.
This will probably end up being a typical day in the office story for most of you, but I just need to let it out a little. If you didn’t read my posts about “One Project” the summary is that I was working on just one project last week at work because it was something critical that had to be done and because my boss’s boss told me to. I was told to concentrate on fixing that problem while all my other projects would have to be put on hold and be adjusted to accommodate it. I fixed the problem and returned to work this week to find out that I have no such luck. I had to complete not only last week’s projects but this week’s as well, oh and a new project that came up during the week while I was concentrating on that single task. So I have been putting in a good deal of unpaid overtime which is why posts here have slowed. In spite of my efforts, not everything that had to get done this week will be completed. On top of all this work I’m going to get a nice big red mark on my performance record that will haunt me for the rest of the fiscal year. They sure know how to motivate people.
Here’s a good one. How many of us at one point in our lives said, “When I grow up I want to be an astronaut!” I know I did, and surprisingly it seems that NASA needs kids to start thinking that way again. I saw a news article about this problem and found it quite interesting. NASA apparently has had this problem before during the transition time between the Apollo missions and the Space Shuttle. I guess it should come as no surprise that it is happening again as NASA plans to retire the shuttle without having anything ready to take its place.
That whole thing concerns me a bit. I know we have other launch vehicles, but nothing is as versatile as the shuttle, and we have nothing that takes humans besides the shuttle. With tensions between Russia and the United States growing, it just seems like the wrong time to abandon the shuttle. Beyond that, however, it appears that children are not as interested as they used to be in these sorts of things. Either that or they no longer believe in the American dream – that they can become whatever they want to.
There are other countries dreaming this way. Here are a list of countries that I know are planning to put people on the moon:
Russia
England
Germany (unmanned)
China
Japan
India
Italy
If there is someone I’ve missed, let me know. It is exciting that so much interest exists in the moon still, however it seems to me that little mention is made of this in the media anymore, and Sci-Fi and real technology is taking a back seat to fantasy and video games for our children.
For at least a year I’ve been running around with multiple projects on my plate, all of which have deadlines that are either in the past or too soon to be completed properly. It is an understatement to say that we are understaffed. If we aren’t understaffed then we’ve just got too many people going in irrelevant directions. I may be one of them. Today, for the first time in what feels like a year I got a clear concise directive from the director of technology at my site to drop everything I was doing and work on a single project that was causing production downtime. I sent an email out to cancel my appointments for the rest of the day and tomorrow, knowing that the project would take at least a second full day, and went and focused on that one singular project. Email was turned off, the blackberry was put aside, and I just worked. It was refreshing.
I know I’m not the only person who has a job like this – I always have things on my plate and there is rarely anyone willing to step up and tell me that their project has to displace all others. Instead they just tell me that I “might” have to work some overtime in order to get everything done that I need to do. Like I don’t do that already. If an extra few hours of work every week would get my job done then it would have been done a long time ago.
I’m not complaining, just saying that a change in pace is nice every once in a while. I wish I’d been home with more that 20 minutes with my kids before their bedtime. I wish I had more time to spend with my wife. I wish for one day every week or two that I could spend a regular 9 hour day working on a single project without any interruptions. That would be great.
Saw this fire your boss article over on PBS. It looks like it got slashdotted as well and probably has been discussed to death there. One thing I’m quite glad for in my current job is a good chain of command that understands IT – especially my more immediate ones, and I can’t say one way or the other for many of the ones at other locations because I don’t know them well enough.
I remember working for a manager at a previous company that didn’t have any IT experience at all. In fact she was just a plain manager. Their philosophy was that a person didn’t have to know the field to manage it. To some extent I believe that is true. If your manager is really good (she was) they will be able to foster a team environment to make decisions even amidst IT people who can have thick heads when it comes to picking someone else’s decision over their own. Because of this I disagree with the premise that a manager should know how to code. After all, not every IT department codes, and not every coder deals with C, PHP, and MySQL all at the same time, or at all. In fact, having a manager that is technical can be detrimental if that manager feels his ideas are more important than those under him.
My immediate boss had the same position as I did up until a year and a half ago or so. He is senior to me by about a year with the company, really knows his stuff, and is willing to put in whatever amount of time it takes to get the job done. I remember once printing out a timesheet for him when we were on the same level because he just wanted to go home. My memory tells me it was over 90 hours for the week. It was a bad week though as I remember having fewer than 10 hours less than him. While that week might have been a fluke, his average is higher than mine and I’m no slacker, but I do have kids. Back to the story though – he has worked the trenches and knows how things go, and even though we disagree on things, we always seem to work things out the right way in the end.
His boss, who used to be the person I reported to before they created the intermediate position, also rose up from the trenches. In fact, when I first started working there about five years ago he was still working the trenches even though he was my boss. Like the article mentions, he does know coding and SQL and can still write queries. He likes to tell us that he’s become technically dumb since moving into a director position and taking his hands off the trench work, but I know better. He could pick it all back up in a heartbeat if he wanted to or had to.
Now I’m not writing this for them because I’m sure they don’t read this. In fact, I’m almost positive that no one I know reads what I write online except for my wife. I’m writing this for myself because things could be a lot worse somewhere else. I’ve been fortunate to have either excellent managers or qualified technical bosses throughout most of my career. There is a downside to that, however – when the people above you are so qualified, it makes moving up all the more difficult. I finished my MBA a little over a year ago and took the MBA over a technical degree because, as I tell people all the time, the technical stuff comes very naturally to me. I don’t need an instructor telling me how to do something new that is technical when I could just pick up a book or dive into it and learn much more quickly, and I don’t need a degree to prove that I’m qualified technically. On the other hand, management is not quite as natural to me. I believe that I would make a good manager based on my schooling, time in the military, and time managing projects since the beginning of my career. Again, the problem is that when you have such good people above you that you limit your chances to move up.
I get what the article is trying to say, and I believe that a technical manager can lack a good deal of management savvy and still do a good job if they are well qualified technically. However, I disagree with it in that I believe a manager who is not technical, but is an excellent manager, can do a good job leading an IT department. Teamwork is the key to large projects, and if that non-technical manager can get enough technical people working together as a team he or she can accomplish any project regardless of qualifications beyond management.
The past few days I went to work I managed to get right behind someone who thought they were important. Probably most of us in the techie community have some kind of security at the front gate where we work, assuming we work at a corporation. These gates are typically controlled by a proximity badge more commonly known as RFID. Everyone at the site is issued one. In fact, you need to have it to get in and out of certain places even within the facility. Swipe cards exist for the most secure areas, in combination with other protection. Anyway, my point is that everyone has one of these cards, and it doubles as your photo ID badge.
These too important people drive up to the entrance gate and just sit there waiting. I can almost hear their thoughts as they sit there. “Don’t they know who I am?” “Why aren’t they opening the gate for me?” So we sit and sit and finally a guard notices that someone is being an idiot and pushes the button. Hopefully the guard did know who the person was, although I wouldn’t be surprised if sometimes they just push the button without checking.
When it is my turn I have my window down, drive up to the sensor and almost without stopping swipe and up goes the gate. There’s even a nice structure built overhead to protect me if it happens to be raining.
The second part to this is speed limits. Where I work there is a network of roads where the speed limit varies from 5-15 MPH. Now 15 MPH is awfully slow in a car and 5 MPH feels like you could easily walk faster. Obviously there are very few people who follow these limits, however they were put there on purpose so that people would at least be reasonable. That and when you kill someone it is obviously your fault and not the company’s fault. The important people, of course, are the ones who break the speed limit constantly. I’m walking from one building to another, crossing a parking lot, with a computer or switch under my arm and nearly get run over. Or I’m driving around keeping my speed to a reasonable 20 MPH and I get someone riding my tail. What’s with these people?
A week or two ago someone rode my tail all the way up to my parking lot and then parked right across from me. After getting out of her vehicle I gave her a pretty hard look. “What?” she said. “I just expected you to start running after the way you were driving.” She didn’t say anything but just kept walking.
I’m sure I’m not the only person to work somewhere where there is an elite set of people who think they are above the system…
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