data center

Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory. - W. Edwards Deming

I respect one law over all others…the law of unintended consequences.

I can’t think of a better example than government boondoggles, after the fanfare of a new program or regulation when all hell breaks loose over something unexpected. In the public world of the public trust, what looks like a benevolent hidden hand running things eventually turns out to be just another guy pulling levers and spinning dials without a clue.

My personal favorite lately: A couple of Governors ago we started outsourcing all state IT work to a gigantic computer contracting company. With eyes apparently shut tight, a contract was signed and delivered. The plan was to save money, create jobs, improve services and make everyone look good. The result has been lost money, a screwed up job market, disappointed customers and yards of of bad press for both sides. Throw in a broken economy, and we have a train wreck. Something hard to watch but too macabre to turn away from.

This whole public-private arrangement is so massive that it’s warping the IT job market as if an HR darkstar is hovering in orbit, bending the space/time continuum. Projects that are priorties tend to create weeks of employment ads, recruiter calls and interviews. But when there’s bad press and or an argument over state fundng, the interviews disappear and cutbacks start. Reminds me of old movies where the workers file in and out of the factory gates, working one day, locked out the next. At least they had snappy Hollywood dialogue to fall back on.

All that sturm and drang has created some cynical workers. Recently, a veteran of the contract wars showed up on my team. She’d been in big data center projects, then jumped to the state, the got rebadged, downsized, rehired, and finally hit the two-year limit. We all know about the two-year limit for non-employees, created by. . . wait for it . . .The Government.

(hint: Microsoft sued by Feds gets ruling that anyone contracted more than 24 months is really an employee)

What the state provides, the Federales can take away. Our new friend lands back on the street again, due to the arbitrary 2-year limit, arrives in our midst for the requisite number of months, and then will cycle back out again. Like the rest of us, she’s lost the social contract of work-for-security that our parents enjoyed. We now have built-in clocks counting down the 730 days until we have to leave, even before we get our first paycheck.

Which creates another odd consequence, the two-tier society. Itinerant workers don’t have the same status as full time employees. We temps often outnumber the permanent fully-employed by a wide margin, but they get the benefits, time off, parties, free flu shots and career paths. We get a check and a slap on the butt (not that there’s anything wrong with that) as we head out the door when our time is up.

IT and tech aside, are we headed back to our agrarian past, with every worker an independent business like the family farm with a modern twist? Or will we swing toward the Big Contractor model where we become worker bees for one entity while really working for another. The third option, companies hiring people on their own payroll, is sounding out of touch…old-school.

(hint: European courts have found that many countries - Spain was cited recently - as having well over 50% of workers actually contractors, mostly due to the EU employment laws that make it impossible to fire deadbeats after they’re on the payroll)

On this side of the pond, we still hold up individual liberty and responsibility as the model, but the IT market is global. Examples like this state-private IT contract show that we need better leadership here at home to avoid the disintegration of stable employment that the grey-beards in Europe have caused. We still have a shot at building careers in technology, and avoid just job-hopping, if we can upgrade the talent pool at the top.

At minimum, we should elect leaders who keep at least one eye open when they sign on the dotted line.

Dont. Stop. Swimming.

“Well, we might as well get this out of the way now. The employment numbers were uniformly horrible.”

At times like these, I turn to my kid’s video library for inspiration.
I give you: Dory, the blue-tang fish, who’s helping a clown fish search for Nemo, his son.

Just keep swimming…

“This was a very ugly labor market report, and there is no amount of lipstick that can improve its image.”

Just keep Swimming

When Dory realizes that they’re never going to make it without a change of plan, she adapts by repeating their goal over and over. To her surpise, it works and they keep heading in the right direction.

Just keep Swimming

“Restructuring at the Lloyds Banking Group could lead to 700 IT jobs being lost, it has been revealed.”

Just keep Swimming

“Newly minted American engineers are going into finance because tech jobs have beenoffshored.”

Just keep Swimming

“ Hey Mr Grumpy Gills
You know what you gotta do
when life gets you down?
Just keep swimming “

U.S. high-technology job losses are slowing.

Finally

As things get better and the destination is in sight, they still keep moving, and never stop reminding themselves to:

“ Just keep swimming swimming swimming
What do we do we swim, swim, swim… “

The Emperors New Clothes, or how to Dress Less for Success

Has there ever been a time in world history when dressing for work has been so bass-ackward?

In the grand pecking order of the IT workplace, the bottom spot has always belonged to the interviewee. Yet we show up wearing our finest, dressed like Cinderella going the ball. No matter that the rest of the office is in their Casual Fridays and Flip Flops mode.

At the top of the food chain, the Top Dog, the Cock of the Walk – to push the metaphor way too far - is sitting in the corner office wearing gym clothes. The one with the power and influence doesn’t even stop by the house to pull on some slacks. It’s the modern law of inverse proportion to the layers of clothing; The Less You Wear the More Influence You Have.

The irony seems lost on the HR folks, who soldier on with their advice to dress for the job you want, but would be shocked and dismayed if you applied in an outfit with a Nike swoosh on it.

So the job seeker, with no power or influence, is expected to fill out employment forms dressed like a Boston banker. All this while the assistants, receptionists, interns dress like Boston Legal, to make the office look professional. Of course, technical managers dress for what the job demands -no ties or heels or other impairments to occasionally crawl under the desk or behind a rack and poke about. Although they prefer the interns do most of the crawling.

And so it goes up the ladder…each rung dressing to show more importance by wearing less, until the person at the top is clad only in his or her pajamas, sucking on a sports bottle.

There was a time when being in charge meant looking like it. The emperor really did have clothes. Now the master and commander can only be spotted by the blinking, borg-like Bluetooth headset glued to his ear.

Maybe it’s an American cultural thing. . . Lessons of Vietnam and all . . . more stars showing on the collar makes us a target. Perhaps there’s security in blending in with the troops.

In any case, my dark blue suits gather dust when I’m fully employed and in charge. But when the paychecks stop coming, the jackets come back out and the ties windsor-knotted, until a new job is found. Then the process reverses and I’m back to khakis and golf shirts.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s just a mystery how we got here, is all.

Onward Through The Fog…of Support Calls

“Mark! “

“You still there?”

My eyes snapped open.

The floor was sideways in my view, the phone lying a foot away, voices coming from the speaker. It was 2 am; I’d fallen asleep at home, on the floor, while the tech team was hard at work debugging a server problem.

Gad!

I held up the phone, clearing my throat to show I was awake and fell back into the chair. No one reacted. Their snarky comments continued without pause…”wish I could check out”…”guess he’s not a snorer”.

I said something pithy, trying to sound awake. They kept talking. I squinted at my phone.

The Mute was on.

The mute button is hard to spot at that hour. Scowling, I pressed it. The phone started dialing… “beep, boop, beepbeep, boop” …I could see the conference number marching across the LCD screen.

I’d hit redial.

Is someone playing ‘Mary had a little lamb’ on their phone?” a loud irritated voice said. I waited an eternity for the dialing to stop to punch mute, and started to apologize. My dry throat croaked out a useless syllable. I coughed, and gamely checked in.

“There’s our sleeping beauty. We were looking for you earlier,” someone said, “have a nice nap?” I blamed my silence on the mute button, but stayed mute about my impromptu phone-number concert. In the pregnant pause that followed, no one challenged my dodgy answer - the unspoken consensus was clear - they all knew.

My reputation had preceded me. In the silence they were remembering the time I tried to switch phones at midnight, and killed the entire conference call.

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Deep Nights and Weekends

Working the midnight-to-zero-five-hundred maintenance window is a world apart. Those who live in that sleepless domain: the Firewall Engineers, Server Admins, Network techs and Data Center 3rd shift - they all accept this eerie existence as the price paid to keep systems running.
They act and behave apart from the rest of society, made unique by living at odd hours and their knowledge of things unspoken and mysterious. They’re the Deadheads of this generation.

I don’t see myself as a poser - the one guy always trying to fit in without really being part of the crowd. But truth is, my assignment is not to do actual work, so to speak. I manage and coordinate across hard working and expert groups, each living in the unending fog of jet-lag symptoms that are part of snatching short naps between Sev3 calls, and running on empty after 30-hour continuous support “issues”.

Has anyone studied the effect of waking up to a phone call at 23:55, heart racing, to a voice asking if you’re ready to apply changes a 00:01? There must be an astronaut study or survival training guide that explains how sleep deprivation and irate IT managers can break a body down.

They’ve found funding for stuff like studying the impact of booze on fish

I’d like to see a few bucks tossed in to determine the health of this Army of Darkness, working deep nights and weekends on critical systems.

They are, after all, the sleep-deprived few who keep the lights on for the rest of us.

The Tsunami of Data Keeps Rolling In

The IT world is losing its soul.

Or at least its buried in a avalanche of files and folders.

The game just a few years ago was Paradigm-Shifting and World-Changing. But that was then. These days new IT solutions have all the pizzazz of my dad’s ‘66 AMC Classic sedan. Apparently things are so mediocre that, when cool new ideas DO show up in the data center, they get a certain designed-by-committee look before the first update can even come out. The result. . .

Bland as a Suit From Sears.

Can anyone name anything that’s delivering what was promised?

The nadir of lost dreams is data…Irrational, unstructured, tiered or virtualized, we’re hoarding it like demented ants. Storing the junk we just can’t throw away is invading everyone’s job description. Vendors aren’t keeping pace, leaving us squeezing and parsing the bits until they’re packed together like teens at a Harry Potter book release. Desperate times.

Here’s my personal rogues gallery of recent disappointments:

Cloud Computing
Where’s the infinite bit-bucket? Sold as the soon-to-be home of all our stuff, to be replicated and available anytime & anywhere. Turns out the high cost (surprise!) of perpetually storing our photos and PDFs doesn’t make for a good business plan. Where’s the bandwidth? What with pasty guys in headphones and joysticks clogging the pipes with multi-player war games at all hours, we push hard to get the data through what narrow spaces are left.

Cheap Storage
We know there’s no rhyme or reason for tiers and backups of data that we “may” need. We even buy systems to explain why we have the stuff we have, when we don’t really know WHY we have it (SARBOX, to be blunt, sucks).
More drives mean more power needs (irrational data is not Green), which is why we have “power committees” to decide if we can plug in yet another NAS box. Even the big Internet players are so starved for juice to keep the drives spinning that they build data centers in Appalachia, just to be close to the belching power plants.

Shared File Formats
Does this bug anyone else? We were supposed to arrive at a file-sharing standard, but today there are dozens of file types are still bashing around the Ethernet like angry bees, and the file-endings are a spaghetti bowl of choices: .CSV, .TXT or .XML for data exchange; TIFF, JPG and creaky old BMP for posting or printing; .DOC, like comfort food, is ubiquitous but getting old - it’s time for DOCX. A flood of data and we still can’t just digest it, we have to chew first, converting, filtering and exporting back and forth until something gets corrupted and we’re back to the beginning.

Anti-Malware
Antivirus/Anti spam/anti-this/anti-that. Either they’re all defending our files from cyber evil, or (my opinion) the industry creates a hall of mirrors, where vendors and crooks are locked in mutual dependency.
We’re left paying protection money, adding firewalls on top of firewalls and spending zillions supporting fat-client installs to guard the integrity of that morass of data. Then, after all that effort, one valued employee clicks OK in an email link and it’s moot. The barbarians aren’t at the gate, suddenly they’re coming through un-patched Windows. And somehow we’re to blame for their behavior.

Yet we carry on fighting the digital Battle of the Bulge; while the pin heads back at HQ keep dreaming up ways to buy half-baked solutions.
As we’ve said for 40 years, if we can put a man on the moon, we should be able to [fill in the blank], that is to say, store the important stuff and toss the junk.

This isn’t new, this idea of integrity. I was there decades ago when a promise was made, and with focus and leadership it got done. Granted, it was on the moon, but even through the 60s with all the chaos and bad hair, a promise made was a promise delivered. No spin, no agenda, no ambiguity.

Today, whoever can execute and deliver on a promise to clean up our mess-o-data may not be in the headlines, but we’ll know they have the right stuff.

Liftoff of Apollo 11 (”Eagle”) From the Moon’s Surface, July 21, 1969

Ten things to NEVER put in your resume if you want to work in IT

Avoid the derisive laughter!
Remove these 10 unsightly blemishes from your file and get back on the job!

No, I didn’t make all of them up. . . just ask the HR folks.

1. URL to your “Timesheets: Copy-and-Paste tips” blog

2. College Diploma from a .biz domain address
Caveat Emptor

3. Current Certifications in any of these:
- PONG
- Luggable Computers
- CB Radio
- Windows ME
Actually I have that last cert, but like a certain birthmark, not many people know about it

3. Karaoke awards (Vegas gigs not withstanding)

Spock started it all, ca ‘68, but that’s no excuse. His song wasn’t as good as Data’s ODE TO SPOT, also a trend setter for impromtu performances of a geek nature.

5. Quotes from Jobs, Gates, or Ellison (unless it’s Harlan Ellison)
Which would be way cool

6. The words “Enron” “Madoff” or “PC jr.”
There are plenty of other great failures, not the fault of IT, but does that matter?

7. That firewall change you did during your (former) CIO’s conference call with Mumbai last year
Yes, this really was confessed during a job interview.

8. Former Webmaster of DotCom bubble corpses Yadayada, GovWorks, Flooz, or Peapod
And of course Pets-dot-com, birth of the billion dollar sock puppet

9. Job titles “Junior Interruptor” and “Non-resident Futurist“
I have no words for this nonsense

10. Salary requirements - before the 2008 crash
2007 seems like a lifetime ago, doesn’t it?

Dad’s Guest Blogger

I asked my college-age daughter Lindsay, to post her Father’s Day thoughts on having a dad who does IT. Here’s her response.

Greetings, blogosphere! Wow, this is great, you guys are really great. It’s so nice of you to come out and read this stuff. You’re beautiful.

I know you’re all here to check out my dad’s newest inspiring, intriguing, or simply witty commentary on the world of Information Technology. I understand he’s the star here, but guess what? It’s Father’s Day Weekend. As my father, I’d say he deserves a break. For better or worse, he’s left the task of entertaining you all to me, his eldest daughter, Lindsay. Nice to meet you.

My dad has quite a job on his hands. I’m not talking about the work he’s getting paid for; I’m talking about his role in our household as the go-to computer guru, our very own cyberspace superhero. Faster than a speeding modem! Able to conquer hours-long Google searches in a single click! And I don’t care what you say about Apple vs. Microsoft: whatever system you’ve got, no malware is safe under his bespectacled scrutiny!

I have been severely spoiled in this way; I have the knowledge and research skills of an entire IT department on the family phone plan. All my life, trouble-shooting consisted merely of calling my father over, and poof! Things work again. Now, I myself am fairly technologically illiterate. I don’t know UNIX from Linux. Still, I do know enough from watching my dad to understand what those my age who are “in the know” are capable of. In an age where hacking is a hobby my generation pursues when there’s nothing on TV, this information is key to my survival in the silicon jungle.

His love of all things analytical has rubbed off on me, too. Our shared adoration for the limitless possibilities of science fiction (I grew up on Star Trek shows – resistance was futile) has led to my own unhealthy obsessions with things like Mythbusters and Joss Wheddon’s Firefly series, not to mention a compulsion to keep Wikipedia open and ready on the screen at all times. Other genetic maladies include a severe lack of melanin and the itch to press “Ctrl+F” every time I’ve misplaced my car keys.

Stereotypes and generalities aside, having a tech-savvy dad has been a blessing. It’s not just having an efficient, dependable help desk on hand (which, let’s be honest, is a phenomenon defying all precedent). It is true intelligence. It’s having a father who understands a much bigger world than most even try to see, and isn’t afraid to explore and share it with the family he loves, who love him right back.

Hats off to you, Dad. Happy Father’s Day.

And happy Father’s day to all the 24/7, in-demand tech guys who still find time to nurture a child.

Did I Wear a Dress Today?

It is remarkable how easily we…fall into a particular route and make a beaten track for ourselves. Thoreau, Walden Pond

People are like cats. I know dog is man’s best friend, but people (meaning me) aren’t like dogs, even though we like to think we are…all “jump right in”, eager to sniff whatever comes through the door, “bring it on”-ish. But we really don’t like surprises. Change jolts our senses.

Cat’s hate change. If you move the furniture they pee on it. They sleep in the same place every day, eat the same food, and repeatedly hack up hair balls on the nicest rug in the house. So how is that different than those of us (me) who get cranky every time the cable channels are rearranged? It’s our inner cat coming out. We love routine: Our hair is combed the same every day; we have a favorite chair at the table; Need a grande-skinny-double-shot-latte-extra-hot-no-whip every morning, timed so precisely at 7:25 AM that the barista already has it hovering at eye level when we stumble in the door.

This is proof that working contract jobs isn’t natural for humans. It goes against our highly evolved cat sense, which is the sense to sleep 17 hours, eat our kibble, and stare out the window all afternoon. And although that may be my career goal it doesn’t play well in the modern IT workplace. Today it’s all about mobility and movement, like Sniff and Scurry trying to find out who moved the cheese.

My latest gig is clearly designed to screw with my cat senses. There are several buildings, nicely arranged with similar layout inside. When the meeting in building A is over, it’s a quick hike to building H, which lets me stop in…building C, to pick up an afternoon version of a double-shot latte. But on my way, the morning coffee comes calling, usually about when I hit…building D, where I look for the water closet (euro-speak for toilet, which is French for bathroom, which is nicer than saying “john”, especially around my brother-in-law John).

But if I’m not in building D, then the john, which is on the left in almost every building, may instead be on the right for no apparent reason, which means I have to stop my routine long enough to inspect the sign for the picture of the guy with the pants, not the other guy in a dress. The dress is for females. I know this because I don’t have a dress on, I checked.

Sure it’s just a cryptic restroom sign, but the steady drip-drip-drip of little changes are what make IT work so unnatural. In fact, not only do we deal with constant change, we are harbingers of change. We continually to plan to disrupt and disorient the very people we are there to empower. At first we automate all that drudgery right out of user’s jobs so they can be “knowledge workers”. Then we “upgrade” (code for rearranging the icons, changing the menus and generally moving all the digital furniture). Fortunately users don’t react like cats to change, but metaphorically speaking, getting sprayed by user anger can leave a stain.

So even in the middle of this chaotic economy, where the old promise of job stability in return for loyalty seems as outdated as a down payment on a mortgage, we look for routine. Maybe that’s the reason for the proliferation of coffee and food chains. They offer the comfort food and drink that keeps our inner cat satisfied.

One thing is for sure. No matter where we go, people, like cats, want familiar things around them. Like men in pants.

Quirky and Difficult People Are Worth Keeping

One of the challenges of job hunting, maybe the hardest one, is to stay motivated. Not the motivation that comes from sales calls during dinner, which provides the motivation to flush the phone down the toilet. True motivation comes from something more personal. It’s the feeling we get from looking back at our accomplishments, including the ones we left off the resume on purpose, and our sometimes less-than-perfect coworkers.

Working in IT just a short time can create plenty to look back on. I remember a PowerPoint our small team put together for company executives in the late 90s. It began with a picture of a single computer, and had the caption: “In the beginning there was one computer.”

We were quite creative really.

My coworker Don contributed, since he was there from the early days. He had come up from the computer room, became a friend of the CIO and ended up running the storage group. He smoked constantly, was often awkward around others at work, and was only really happy during happy hour. People liked him though, because he was a good guy; someone who could stay up all night on a migration task, drag himself in before lunch and still be amiable, if a little bleary and smoke-stained.

After 20 years at the company, he lost his job. I lost track of him, in part because I don’t hang out with the regulars at the bar, but I also didn’t want to get involved in his problems. Even with his skills in IT work, and being a dedicated father, he was a wreck. Nothing ever seemed to be quite right in his life.

Quirky and difficult people are easy to find in IT, of course. Being antisocial is accepted in a place where the machinery gets treated better than the workers, so having no life outside the data center can be seen as a badge of honor. In that sense both of us fit in pretty easily, if you catch my drift.

Over the years though, in spite of our close working relationship, I kept Don at arm’s length. Looking back, I was the one being difficult, pretending that not hanging with the same crowd meant there was no connection between life at the office and our lives outside. But there is life outside, real life, and it can hit hard.

Don was in touch last month for the first time in years, having lost a recent job in December. He wanted me to be a reference, which I cautiously agreed to do. My management skills kicked in, and I wrote careful prose that was a model of professionalism. The recommendation was fairly non-committal and was less supportive than a friend would expect so I felt a bit awkward, but I hit send and returned to my own concerns. I was busy trying to build my own future after all, so I figured we would catch up some time more convenient for me.

Monday morning I got a two word email: “Sad news.” was all it said, with a link to a newspaper obituary.

The obituary was for Don.

There is a lesson here. In spite of all the disruptions through job loss, company failures and economic churn, we have control. We can choose to stay connected with those we were lucky enough to have worked with. If we lose the 401k, the benefits, the paycheck, there is still something left. The community we create on the job can only be lost if we allow it to slip away.

The lesson is that there is not Life, and Work. There is only Life.

Please rate our interview process on a scale one to five

“Revenge is wicked, and unchristian and in every way unbecoming…(But it is powerful sweet, anyway)” Twain

All those recruiters, interviewers, HR personnel, team leads, managers, and evil receptionists we deal with in the job market are the ones standing between us and a regular paycheck. Let’s rate them!

If justice prevails in the world of the working stiff, then I’m looking for one of these in my inbox any day now:

Dear Mark,
We want to hear about your recent interview experience. Your feedback is valuable to us, as it will help us decide whether to continue talking to applicants, or simply post all future resumes on Twitter for us to Tweet.

Use the scale of One to Five, with “1” being the most degrading, and “5” being, well, Better:

Please Rate the comfort of the chairs in the conference room:
1) Stonehenge 3) Tire Swing 5) Aunt Bee’s lap

Please Rate the appeal of our workplace:
1) Bagdad 3) Scranton 5) Playboy Mansion

Please Rate our Job Website experience:
1) Spam 3) Blue Screen 5) Star Wars

Please Rate the sincerity of our employees:
1) Ryan Seacrest 3) Shoe Salesman 5) The IRS

Please describe your response to the interview in the following ways:

Expecting a follow up phone call ___Yes ___No ___I wasn’t born yesterday

Willing to work for bread and water ___Yes ___No ___Butter or Margarine?

Felt queasy on the drive home ___Yes ___No ___Bean Burrito not helpful

— Finally—
Please tell us about the interview process, sharing all your thoughts and feelings, and put it all in haiku form:

Um, OK

For thirty minutes
You held my life in your hand
While sipping coffee

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