Why are Sys Admins given such power?

Following on from corporate IT infrastructures it got me thinking. In companies where its not about the IT and they don't do their own IT delivery then its perfectly reasonable for the Sys Admins to have control over everyone.

But in an IT company or an IT department? How does that make sense? People are Sys Admins for a reason, and its not because they are technical geniuses. If you've got people building systems for the business and probably even installing the server versions of the desktop operating systems then how does it make sense for those people in IT support to have any sort of control at all? Its like putting the guy who mixed the paint in charge of what Michaelangelo was doing.

System Administrators are a support function and they should be treated as such and behave as such. Rather than assuming that every user is stupid and needs to be protected they should look in the mirror. So fair enough bang down the desktop on the accounts people and HR, but 99% of the IT departments I know would love to be given full control over their environments and cope with the "pain" of occasionally doing a full reinstall (after all that is why God invented Norton Ghost).

Rather than bitch and moan about the users why don't Sys Admins realise that their job is to help people not to create an environment where nothing happens so they have to do bugger all.

Corporate Infrastructure is Useless

Those who work for large corporates will be familiar with the uselessness of the corporate LAN. Only the mediocrity that is the 'Internal IT Department' could take the most powerful information sharing tool that humankind has ever created; The Internet and make it completely fucking useless.

Here are some anacedotes from friends working at some major blue chips. Anacedotes told in first person to protect the guilty.

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I arrive at work every day at 8:45 and after logging in 6 times, yes six times, I can eventually read my email. What adds insult to injury here is the morons call this 'solution' single sign on.

So now that I'm in my email I have a massive 20MB of storage for my mail, calendar, to do list and address book. 20MB! My fucking phone has more CMOS memory than this. If Google can offer every person in the world 2.5GB of storage, for free, why can my big rich employer only afford to supply me with 0.8% of this space?

OK so I've logged in 6 times (with the same damn password) and check my 20MB of email. Fine so why can't I find an email that a client has sent to me? Now this client is important to us, he is listed in my address book he works for an other major blue chip who publish SPF records and he has cryptographically signed his message with a his verisign signed certificate. So how the fuck does my message end up marked as spam? I now have to log into our spam 'solution' portal and release this message. I have to do this everytime he sends me an email although I have requested that the clients domain be whitelisted. Ahhh

Another piece of pure genious from out corporate infrastructure team is the policy of blocking collaboration tools such as Skype, MSN Messenger, Y!, AIM, Google Talk and the like. When probed on why they do this they say security, they always said security when their reasons are indefensible, when we laugh in their face and point out the ridiculousness of this they are forced to admit that it was done to stop people spending time talking to each. I mean god forbid we actually engage in dialogue with people to carry out our jobs... fuckwits!

That's enough for now I need to go take some deep breaths.

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Hand me the shotgun, I'm going on a course

 
Okay its time for another rant about morons, this time training courses.  There is an old adage "those who can't... teach", and damn me in IT if that doesn't appear to be the case.  You know the bit where you realise on day 1 that not only do you know more about the instructor about his chosen specialised subject but that what he knows is actually bollocks anyway.

Like prats teaching C# (or Java) who say that "multiple inheritance isn't in the language because it isn't something that matches to real world objects". Really? ohhhh so you've only got ONE fucking parent have you?  And what about that CLOCK fucking RADIO that got your sloth ridden arse out of bed?

The problem is if you don't take the courses then you get HR quizzing you about it, so you pick the course, making sure its offsite in a decent hotel and start praying that it will be better than last time.  So you go on an "advanced" product course, and spend the first two days installing the product on the bloody desktop machines when you've already done it on 20 production servers.  It turns out the person giving the course doesn't know the right sodding patch levels but the good news is that the nice people in the bar are happy to put down the massive bar bill as "food".

Then you get the assessment and the smug git always makes sure he is there so the worst he will get is medium marks.  Not from me sunny Jim you are getting a big fat zero and an email of complaint to the course providers threatening to grass their quality up to the HR department, which is a great way to get on one of those corporate jolly things BTW.

Occasionally you get someone who really knows their onions, but then you either get complete losers in the course wasting everyones time with inane questions and having a tough time breathing and thinking at the same time.  

Why is it that I can't just say "give me the 2 grand in cash, and I'll stay at home for a week and learn this stuff myself", hell I'd even settle for 500 quid and the hotel bill.

Hitting delivery dates the Microsoft way

With Office 2007 slipping, Vista slipping and Longhorn server fast disappearing I can't wait to see the next set of Microsoft adverts that talk about realising my potential and making everything easier.  And as for Microsoft Project, its not exactly the greatest example in the world is it?  "Use our project management tools, maybe you're input will help us get better".

Its pathetic, after all its not like they can make the normal excuses

1. Didn't have the budget - hardly likely
   
2. Requirements weren't clear - when have they bothered asking?
3. Pressured into setting a delivery date - errr 2003 for Vista?  And Office 2007 was already called 2007 when they said it would release in 2006

Which leaves us with only one stalwart that they can fall back on

• The technology was new, buggy and didn't work properly
  

Which is hardly going to be used as they wrote all of it anyway!

Its a frigging Office suite, if you make it ridiculously complex its your own damned fault.

Human Remains destroys Software Projects

Human Remains, HR, Human Resources, personnel or whatever they are called in your company are the biggest waste of space around. Mostly they are laughed off with their review processes and touchy feel crap but actually they are worse than a joke its actually making software development harder.

Why? Well its pretty simple: All of the rules that they (and some governments) put in place make everything harder for anyone who actually knows what they are doing.

Back when men were men, women were women and your place in the organisation had nothing to do with your sex and everything to do with your ability. Actually there seemed to be more women developing back then, or was that just my projects? Since then the numbers of people in IT has risen, but the number of smart people in IT has remained constant at best.

Back when IT was about C, assembler and knowing how the computer worked you knew your stuff or just got put in the development creche (testing , documentation or just colouring in designs). If someone checked in code that broke the build (something that could take a while) you ritually humiliated them you made sure that everyone knew that it was a bad thing. Write stupid code that core dumps? Get ritually humiliated, be told that you are a crap idiotic prat who has just wasted everyone's time with your pea brained coding. Produce a design that is just rubbish, get told that its rubbish to your face. Change the config on the dev or test servers without telling anyone, be prepared for physical intimidation by the people who you've just wasted hours of their time. And lets be clear here this wasn't a macho thing, I've seen top female coders threatening to turn someone into a eunuch using only a mouse cable. If someone was truly awful then you bulleted them, no poncing around and worrying about their motivation, if you were crap, judged crap by a jury of your peers then you had no right to be on the project. Sure sometimes these people survived by being dumped into testing or admin, but they weren't allowed out into the wild again. The point was simple, don't fuck it up for other people and if you can't cope fuck off.


Now however we've got to worry about how people are feeling about development, we've got to worry about their training needs. If someone breaks a build we're allowed to discuss it with them one on one with them (hell I've even been told off for setting up an email system that broadcast who broke the build). And if they repeat this over and over again then its obviously an issue with the training and frigging communication that this bloody muppet has received. If the prat in question can't even follow a bloody stack trace to find the line that caused the exception then clearly they need more mentoring... DOES THIS PERSON GET PAID TO DO THIS OR NOT? They can't produce a decent OO model (despite having been in IT for several years) then again they need training, their code breaks every decent coding rule and DESPITE SEEING THE WARNINGS IN ECLIPSE THEY STILL CHECK IT IN. And when you ball the prat out for wasting everyone's time with their complete and utter turd of a development you get dragged in front of some HR pillock who talks about "brokering" a discussion between you to resolve the issues, and saying "X is crap at his job and I want him off my project" is apparently "not constructive", fuck me sideways with a steam train this pillock has wasted DAYS even WEEKS of time, costing tens of THOUSANDS of dollars or pounds and calling him out on it isn't frigging constructive?

For fucks sake IT projects are hard enough places without putting cotton wool around the shit developers and trying to put forward some laughable notion that everyone's opinion is equal. Well that might be true in the content free arena of HR but its certainly not fucking true in IT. My opinion on threading models is worth jack in comparison with Doug Lea, my opinion on processor design is worth spit next to Bill Joy and I'm not going to take on Stephen Hawking around physics either. So why the hell do I have to listen to fuckwits with shit ideas and have to convince them of the right way? When I'm dealing with people as equals and we disagree we have an argument, try and kick down each others approaches, work out the best approach and go for that, or most often we break it down to the principles and realise we're talking the same stuff. When I'm talking to the frigging stuffed toy brigade its like discussing with cheese, how do you talk to people who don't even know what encapsulation is? Why is it that HR and their brain dead allocation policy assigns developers to projects like pieces of meat treating everyone as equal, so one project its brilliant, the next your working with pond life and every single time you are cleaning up the shit that the muppet brigade left behind.

HR and its policies screw IT up more effectively than anything else out there. IT needs to get back some honesty and stop claiming that anyone can code or that everyone is just as good as each other, and HR needs to fuck off and get back to their coloured charts and policy documents.

Oh and hint of the day: If PMD and Checkstyle both say your code is a pile of shit and you've been coding with PMD and Checkstyle Plugins in your frigging IDE highlighting your inadequacies at every fucking step then you should do us all a favour and apply for a job in HR.