Tag: Corporate IT

The Crushing Weight of Knowing What You’re Doing

“Who are you and why are you here?” –Dave Cutler (DaveC)

Source: 012. I Shipped, Therefore I Am

Steven Sinofsky, once a huge wheel at Microsoft, for a very long time, is writing a series of articles chronicling the halcyon days of the early PC business at Substack. I can’t quite bring myself to subscribe, because most of it is free already. Plus, there aren’t many surprises for me, since I was living it during that time.

When Windows NT was introduced, I was quick to jump on board. I was already experimenting with Linux towards the end of ’94. But then I saw a disc of NT 3.5 (not even 3.51 yet) on someone’s bookshelf. He said he wasn’t using it, so I snapped it up and installed it. For the next 20 years, I would dual boot my PC’s between Windows NT and Linux. I only used Windows for gaming, but for that use, it was obstinate. I tried every incarnation of Wine and Crossover and PlayOnLinux and everything else. Nothing ever let me run Windows games on Linux well enough to warrant getting rid of a native partition.

The content of the slide above is of no consequence, as is pretty much the case with all presentation slides. What’s interesting to me is the little toolbar on the top, left side. It’s from the early Office XP days, back when Microsoft was new and cool. “Before the dark times. Before the empire.” Seeing it evoked a visceral response. As a computer nerd, those really were interesting and exciting times to live through. From the article, that screencap is from 1992. Competing against giants like IBM, HP, and Sun, Microsoft’s eventual dominance was anything but sure at that time. And that’s what’s prompted me to write this anecdote.

In 1995, my Fortune 250 company didn’t even have an internet connection yet. I was using a phone line, and a modem that I conned my boss into letting me get. It was over this modem that I downloaded all 54 floppy drive images of Slackware Linux, on a computer running Windows 3.11 with Trumpet Winsock, connecting to a free SLIP dialup bank in California.

At first, I was much more into NT than Linux. I skipped Windows 95 entirely. I don’t think I ever had a computer that ran it.

I remember how easy it was to setup a dialup connection in NT. By 1996, I was running a dual Pentium Pro with 384 MB of RAM, SCSI hard drives, and a $2,500 video card to do FEA work. The total cost was about $10,000. A coworker got a SGI Indy to do the same sort of work, to the tune of $80,000. The company still didn’t have an internet connection, so he also got an external modem, and hired a local ISP to come set it up. The guy came and screwed around with the connection for 4 hours. I kind of razzed him, by pointing out that it took me all of 15 minutes to configure the same thing on NT. That’s how smug I was about NT versus Unix at the time.

The best part was still to come.

For the next week, the ISP guy still couldn’t get that Indy on the internet. Every time it would connect, the kernel would segfault, and the machine would crash.

But that’s not the best part.

The ISP guy worked with SGI to patch IRIX to fix the modem driver, and finally got it working. My coworker left it connected to the internet all the time to get his email. Things worked fine for a few weeks.

Then the company got a T1 internet connection, and then connected our facility to the main office via a SONET ring. I was really looking forward to not needing my dialup connection any more. But, the first morning, no one could access the internet. Complaints were made. Investigations were performed. Our internal IT would fix the problem, and the next day, it would come back.

Here comes the best part.

Finally, someone realized that computers inside our facility were getting the wrong gateway address to get to the internet. They realized that they were picking up the IP address of my workmate’s Indy, which was advertising itself as a route to the internet, and since the number of hops from computers in the office to the Indy were less than skipping over to the central office, they were preferring its modem, and the Indy’s phone line would choke from the load.

I recall very clearly that there was a simple checkbox in the dialog for setting up a dialup connection in Windows NT for advertising the connection to the LAN as a route to wherever you were connecting. It was on by default, but when I was running through the process, I quickly realized that this was NOT what I wanted, and un-ticked it.

And I felt pretty smug about being serious about NT at the time.

I stuck with NT as my primary interest until some time around 1998 or so. Then Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza released Ximian Desktop for Linux, which made Linux on the desktop really pleasant to use. I wasn’t doing analysis work any more. I had transferred to become the system admin of all the Unix machines in the advanced engineering group, so running Linux was a perfect fit. After that, it was pretty much all Linux, all the time, until switching to Macs just a few years ago.

IT Project “Thermocline”

Source: https://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-themocline-of-truth

A thermocline is a distinct temperature barrier between a surface layer of warmer water and the colder, deeper water underneath. It can exist in both lakes and oceans. A thermocline can prevent dissolved oxygen from getting to the lower layer and vital nutrients from getting to the upper layer.

In many large or even medium-sized IT projects, there exists a thermocline of truth, a line drawn across the organizational chart that represents a barrier to accurate information regarding the project’s progress. Those below this level tend to know how well the project is actually going; those above it tend to have a more optimistic (if unrealistic) view.

This is all true, but the article assumes that everyone is acting rationally, in service to the stated goal(s) of the project, and that problems with the timeline are just honest mistakes. Unfortunately, in my 25 years, I’ve witnessed a nauseating amount of political infighting that sought to undermine projects in attempts to build and/or preserve personal power. This behavior employs the two things readily at-hand for ruining estimating: bad-faith technical decisions, and good, old-fashioned feet dragging. So the problem isn’t just people being wrong, there’s also a large component due to people actively sabotaging a project for their own purposes. 

I’ve spent most of my career in Fortune 250’s, but I’ve seen this happen in a couple of very small companies too. As someone with a personality that is honest to a fault, this has caused me a significant amount of distress in my career. More than once, I’ve been the lone voice in the wilderness crying about the forthcoming train wrecks, only to be ignored, and then ultimately blamed for the crash, because I was the only one that people could point to for having said anything about it at all.

The Gervais Principle II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk

Finally, Sociopaths and Losers speak rarely to each other at all. One of the functions of the Clueless, recall, is to provide a buffer in what would otherwise be a painfully raw master-slave dynamic in a pure Sociopath-Loser organization. But when they do talk, they actually speak an unadorned language you could call Straight Talk if it were worth naming. It is the ordinary (if rare) utilitarian language of the sane, with no ulterior motives flying around. The mean-what-you-say-and-say-what-you-mean stuff between two people in a fixed, asymmetric power relationship, who don’t want or need to play real or fake power games. This is the unmarked black triangle edge in the diagram.

Source: The Gervais Principle II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk

I am re-reading the whole series, because it came up as a response to something I said on HN. Basically, I had reinvented this 3-layer dynamic from first principles, based on my observations of the past few years of my career. Now that someone pointed me back to it, I remember reading it originally, but this was written twelve years ago now.

Anyway, this passage really resonates with me. Every time I’ve gotten face time with a serious power broker in a company, this has been true. No games. No BS. Just straight down to business. I have something to say that will help the organization, and they’re ready to hear it and incorporate it. It never accomplishes the full intention, but I understand that they have a lot more pressures that I can see from my vantage point.

… for Sociopaths, conditions of conflict of interest and moral hazard are not exceptional. They are normal, everyday situations.  To function effectively they must constantly maintain and improve their position in the ecosystem of other Sociopaths, protecting themselves, competing, forming alliances, trading favors and building trust. … They never lower their masks. In fact they are their masks. There is nothing beneath.

Though distant from our worlds, criminal worlds have the one advantage that they do not need to maintain the fiction that the organization is not pathological, so they are revealing to study.

For me, as a non-sociopath, this is a source of continual failing: to recognize that the the people pulling the levers of power in the organization are, in fact, sociopathic, and out for their interests, without regard for anyone else’s feelings or fortunes, not mine, or even necessarily the organization’s. Forgetting this base and simple fact has bitten me in the rear end more times than I can count.

So True, and So Wrong

This resonates with me. Spend millions on some new equipment to make widgets better? Sure! Spend thousands to improve the functionality of the lifeblood of the company? Well… I don’t know…

Seriously, though, there’s so much wrong with the way this movie treats this plot point. First, there’s the issue where the only other guy who can get in the system doesn’t have all the access. Second, there’s the issue where there are “a million” lines of code in a monolithic application which clearly covers lots of independent systems, and the other guy can’t even begin to track down where the problem might lie. Third, the little grade-school-aged girl says she knows Unix. Fourth, she then navigates a GUI-based filesystem browser — which no one has ever used in any serious capacity — to find and run an executable — starting from /usr, no less — that magically fixes everything.

I always wondered why I never liked the Jurassic movies very much. Maybe this was a large part of the reasoning.

Modern Recruiting, Thanks to LinkedIn

Big Company HR person 1: “Why aren’t we getting good candidates for our open positions? I know! Let’s buy a high-powered HR software to help us qualify applicants through a pipeline, and push them to it from LinkedIn.”

Big Company HR person 2: “That’s a great idea. Let’s take it to the CIO!”

Company spends a lot of money installing a huge system, and then base their entire hiring strategy on it. Candidates apply. System gets stuck. There is no way to contact the company from the application.

Big Company HR person 2: “Why isn’t our new, high-powered application system generating any promising leads?”

No one in HR is allowed to see metrics or logs. IT isn’t looking.

Me, mailing company rep: “Hey, guys, uh, your system is broken.”

Silence.

Me, mailing second company rep: “Guys, really, your system isn’t working.”

More silence. Big Company HR person 1: “Hmm, I guess we’ll never know.” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Thank you, LinkedIn, for reminding me that even here, in 2020 — where we’re all drowning in software, apps, devices, clouds, “things,” and services — more than ever before — it’s about who you know.

UPDATE: After writing this out of my frustration, I got another email bugging me about why I hadn’t finished going through the company’s four-hour application process after the first 15-minute IQ test, and I responded again that their system won’t let me proceed.

Treatment of Others Policy: Strictly Confidential

Just before the holiday break, I got 3 company-wide email missives. I didn’t know any of the people referenced, nor the people who had sent them, nor the people who they were sent on behalf of. Nothing they addressed affected me in any meaningful way, and I have literally no influence on anything they were referring to. I surmise that the vast majority of people who got those emails were in precisely the same situation as I was. I’ve already forgotten everything about them.

It occurs to me that these things might be important for a couple handfuls of people, and it would be better handled in their staff meetings. The company-wide email, talking about the moves of people you’ve never heard of, responsible for ineffable things, mired in our 5-dimensional cross-functional reporting matrix, just seems to me to be a way for senior execs at a big company to flex their muscles, and remind everyone just how terribly, terribly important they are.

At the same time, I got a notice that I had not completed some mandatory training, which was due before the end of the year. One of the modules was about The Company’s classification system, where the classification level determines who can view what documents. It’s very stringent. It reads like a governmental classification system, and I’m sure it was cribbed from one. Because it’s so formal and strict, I have a hard time taking it seriously. Oh, look, our internal memos are classified as confidential. But, really, who cares if a competitor gets one of our planning PowerPoints from the meeting last week. They’re going to be even more bored and unhelped by it than the people who were at the meeting.

As I’m working through the remaining modules, I notice that The Company’s policy on Treatment of Others is marked “Confidential,” and limited to people with a need to know, and who are under a non-disclosure agreement.

Hold the phone.

Isn’t this topic, like, one of the things they work most hard at, and are most proud of? What about it could be considered sensitive at all? Isn’t the point to brag about just how open and welcoming we are? Why would the policy on sensitivity be considered sensitive? Further, why would it be classified as most-sensitive, AND need-to-know, AND under NDA? I would expect them to put it on their public web portal, and point everyone in the world at it.

Is it just me, or does this situation make absolutely no sense whatsoever?

I suspect that The Policies have been created under the direction of The Managers who read some white papers, hired a consulting firm, and were told that they were supposed to do X, Y, and Z with regards to corporate policies. However, they were subsequently written with no critical thought given to the precedence, applicability, or consistency of X, Y, or Z. Nor were any of the procedures or policies tied in any way to actual benefits or protections specific to our company or its businesses. But these managers are very important people, and the decisions were made, and the policies are now Controlled Documents. And now, if I were to reprint the company’s corporate policy on the treatment of others — no matter how much they talk about it to the investing public — I could be subject to immediate dismissal, and possible criminal penalties.

And that’s just Human Resources. Don’t even get me started on the IT policies.

So, I hope people responsible for this forgive me for having a really hard time taking any of their classification seriously. It just seems to me that if you’re going to go to the expense and hassle of making a comprehensive set of policies, you could at least make some people read the stupid things, and make sure that they’re consistent, helpful, and appropriate.

This is a long-standing gripe with me. I’ve seen this in another Fortune 250 before. I complained about it to the right person, and managed to kickstart an effort to fix some of the conflicts, and relax some of the rules that were counterproductive. Unfortunately, the institutionalization runs deeper at my current place, and I’m not in a position to do anything about it this time.