Category: Technology

Bad Men with Personal Agendas

I recently finished a permanent position after taking too much abuse. It was a toxic environment where my team was constantly overburdened without regard for anything but covering the boss’s incompetence, lack of honesty, rudeness, egocentric behavior, over commitment of our time, technological incompetence, and misuse of the corporate human resource process.

I cussed the man vigorously to his face. He was a liar and he only sought to eliminate my efforts to repair long standing technological missteps. In the guise of the pursuit of perfection, all team and individual efforts were regarded as insufficient or incompetent. I have lived too long and done too much to accept that assessment.

The really bad news is that this boss rides herd on the systems that take care of the collection and distribution of the blood supply. He is uneducated and only has the experience of that business and a limited previous work life.
The idea of work life balance is lost on that individual as they have no family, spouse, children, or significant other to care for in this life.
The same individual appears to not have any social skills related to mixing with people and having sensitivity or compassion for others.
A nerd run amok.

Undefined Expectations

The process of building IT infrastructure is particularly difficult when the managers you’re working for do not express specifications or expectations. To exacerbate this the method of tasking one to perform work and then roundly chastising them for not fulfilling the manager’s every expectation is somewhat of a manic behavior.

This behavior is common in the middle management of organizations today.The managers are ill-trained and ill-prepared to deliver the demands of their superiors. The demands or expectations exceed reason in that they do not have adequate specification nor do they contain the fundamental information necessary to produce the outcomes desired and expected by those managers and their superiors. This is largely caused by their ignorance of the technology.

The worst offenders in this case are those that once had their hands and minds in the work but now, in order to make the better paycheck, have been promoted to oversight and do not maintain a daily “hands-on” knowledge. They will spew things like “it must be perfect” without expressing any specifications whatsoever.

This all begs the question of how does one work in an environment like that? You would have to be able to take a beating on a regular basis without complaining nor being bothered by the fact that you are not appreciated. You would have to accept the fact that your skills would be deemed inadequate in the eyes of those managers. Lastly, your future paycheck is at risk.

Does this seem to be a reasonable observation?

Testing Without Touching

PSYCHIC SHOE REPAIR

That is a real sign on Thomas Road in Phoenix Arizona.  It is also the summary of what some enterprise managers want in terms of obtaining telemetry for performance measurement in data networks.

One cannot use the network to measure the network.  One cannot have access to capture data packets.  Existing enterprise tools, that they provide, do not have any capacity to give one critical performance data.  How then is one to do performance engineering?

The answer was there on the sign all the time!

Core Competency?

I was engaged recently in a project to identify the traffic on a global network to solve slowdowns in the work being performed by engineers on high performance workstations.

The most difficult part of the work was the total lack of tools.  The second most difficult thing was the failure of the management to be concerned about that.

The mission was to gather requirements to be submitted to enterprise network plan, build, and run teams so that the slowdown problems could be remediated.

As I began, the requests went in for basic information like a global network map, monitoring tools, and access to machines in order to place probes.

Network maps, either physical or logical, were non- existent or badly outdated.

The monitoring tool was a well known more than adequate management and performance monitoring system that I had used for many years.  It was not set up properly, it could not retain much information for analysis, and custom reporting access was refused.  It was installed in three regions without any joining together of the database backends.

Requests to get access to the machines to place probes was refused.

While this is going on I learn that the purchase of undersized, out of specification, equipment for a remediation of a site that was a decade overdue was being done so that a schedule was met and the money spent before the end of a fiscal cycle. The kind of work to be done on the site had no bearing on the decision.

One other interesting thing was that all datacenters were to be consolidated by collapsing them into fewer and fewer sites all colocated off-site from existing corporate sites.

Everyone in every technical discipline was concerned that the plan was inadequate and that given past practices the future was not going to be good.

The corporation was grown by acquisition.  It was not grown by innovation.  Decades old talent that had worked at the acquired organizations left in droves.  Those that remained were waiting for their retirement.

When asked about why the organization would place their data centers into another organization’s hands the reply was “It is not our core competency”.

Given the experience one wonders what is their core competency?  I know! Pass the buck.

 

 

Controlled Obsolescence

One of the promises of the new electronic age was that reliability and product life would be improved.  While a transistor can live longer than an electromechanical relay for the purposes of switching or controlling, it may not meet the promise of reliability purported years ago.

The enemies of all electronic devices are heat and uncontrolled currents and voltages.  Modern electronics run on five and twelve volts.  All devices used in the home and business desktop tend to use this by way of power supplies which convert the power from the outlets in the wall to something usable by the electronics of the device.

Troubleshooting those devices requires a complete set of documents that detail the schematic design as well as the expected outputs from large scale integrated devices used within the device.  In some instances test points are available and documented well by the manufacturer so technicians can service the device once it is in use.

Because the actual cost to manufacture these devices is so incredibly cheap compared to the old methods, things like the radio, phone, television, and home appliance are only made today using this new technology.

Unfortunately the economies in manufacture are not always passed along. While it is true that a modern smart phone can run circles around the supercomputers of yore, they burn up on the dash of your car in Arizona and cannot survive a short fall unless somehow “armored” with an accessory surround.

To make matters worse manufacturers and marketeers have prevented the distribution of complete manuals for owners as a nuisance and unnecessary cost for the products.  Citing that users are not concerned with such minutia, the obfuscation of operation, care, and maintenance information is lost and or unavailable.  The Internet forums are testament to how rampant that is.

What is really unsettling is the engineered death of the device.  An example I love to cite is how the microcontroller on your self-cleaning oven, which approaches one thousand degrees Fahrenheit, is located immediately above the oven and in the exhaust stream from the oven.  It stands little chance of survival in the long run.

Then there is the abuse of the customer by way of grossly overpricing the replacement parts and service technician costs.   Electronic controls on that same oven cost half of the price of a new oven for an electronic controller that was manufactured for a few dollars.

Early unexpected device death is easily taken care of by replacing the device.  That is why people buy new products. They want a warranty to cover defects in materials and workmanship.  The entire package is replaced.  The defective device is then often returned to the manufacturer and shredded for recycling or refurbished for discounted resale.

So what the oven example shows is that twenty dollars of decorated sheet metal with exotic features provided by a microcontroller and a few switches plus a few fans and heating elements will sell new for six hundred to several thousand dollars and become unusable or unreliable within a designed period of time.

To further the need to replace the oven, the cost of problem diagnostics and replacement of the parts becomes prohibitively expensive.  A fresh customer is born.

What do you think about the “Kleenex” age of modern technology?

Unacceptable Behaviors

About Trumpery..all Donny Two Dolls Can Be

Originally published November 12, 2016..nothings changed

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