Sun's CIO Talks Internal Experiences

daria42 writes "This is an interesting interview with Sun's chief information officer Bill Vass, about his experiences as the CIO of one of the world's best-known high-tech company. In particular, Vass talks about corporate blogging (and frustrated lawyers), problems providing IT support to finicky Sun engineers (who sometimes demand Indian help desk support knows kernel details), Sun's programs testing its software internally on employees before it goes out, and how ultimately, his job is like any other CIO's...just with some cool toys."

Sun is buying Novell!

[AKAImBatman]

For example, he said Sun president Jonathan Schwartz -- who keeps a public blog -- was frustrated when April Fool's day came around, because he couldn't use his blog to play a practical joke.

"A few times, he's said things like 'maybe we should acquire Novell', and it changed the stock price," Vass said of Schwartz's blog. "You have to be careful ... if ever he's writing anything controversial he has to get the lawyers to look at it."

Sun is buying Novell? Ack! I need to go call my stock broker!

Give em a break, talk about over worked under paid

[WarmNoodles]

>However, some unusual problems did surface sometimes, he said, citing the example of a Solaris engineer who contacted Sun's IT help desk in India and subsequently sent Vass a note complaining the help desk member who assisted him didn't know intricate kernel settings for the operating system he needed help on.

Can you imagine that call, "I am so happy to be helping you, however, I am sorry to be informing you that... pause...I am not being the Dammed premier kernel support line! " SLAM!

lol

Engineers

[mfloy]

"problems providing IT support to finicky Sun engineers (who sometimes demand Indian help desk support knows kernel details)"
Engineers making outlandish requests is as common as Microsoft making buggy products. Good enginners and famous rock stars both need to be a little weird to be succesful.

Grammar...

[Hugonz]

...who sometimes demand Indian help desk support knows kernel details

I, for one, welcome our new Indian poor grammar kernel hacker overloards...

Re:Herding Cats

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was talking to the architect, it turns out the whole thing was running off a computer under his desk!

Posting anon to avoid any affiliations...

But one of my co-workers (we're an ISP) was running an aggregation router for about 10000 xDSL users - in his room. It was quite hot in there, but he preferred it that way because he could access the console (via serial port) with just a simple cable from his laptop. Suggestion to move the router to a rack with a terminal server was not accepted because it would take too much time (like about 3 minutes, during maintenance window).

Re:Herding Cats

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah, that's nothing. I know a guy who was fired by an IT director because the poor guy accidentally kicked loose the wall-wart transformer for an ISDN router under his desk.

Turns out the router was supplying a free ISP service to the IT director's wife, who was running a recruiting firm and web site at the company's expense over the ISDN line!

The transformer kicker asked something like "is that really ethical?" and was fired the next day for some completly trumped up crap. But we all *know* why he was really fired. LOL.

Re:Sun lost its Sparc.

[frodo from middle ea]

I remember a few years back when we had problems with one of our 0r@c13 Database. One of the tables had about 10 million records, and we had to run a complicated query that required a range scan.

The query was quite complicated, but analyzed and tuned to the best of our DBAs ability.

THe query would hang the listener every once in a while and then no connections could be made to the DB over that listner, the only solution was to bounce the DB all together.

When we called them for this problem, instead of looking at our query /db schema, all they said was try running the query with a few 100 records.

This was the response when we were paying them for a level 1 support and the problem was rated severe.

Re:Sun lost its Sparc.

[AnalogBoy]

This is my newest pet peeve. Tech support, outsourced, gets a crash course it seems in provinding support. They never do it well. I've had the fortune of calling Microsoft's professional line several times, and i always get someone who is 1) difficult to understand, and 2) not any more knowledgable in the app than i am. I don't call tech support for the "Two heads are better than one" approach, i call tech support to hear "Yes, we've seen that before, here's how to fix it." Unfortunately i haven't heard something like that since my Sun days. And another thing - when they start troubleshooting at a step you tried 3 hours ago and say "we have to try this sir"... grrr.. i get angry *instantly* at that. 0 to pissed in one processor tick.

Disclaimer: I have nothing at all against Indians - however, i do believe if i call tech support i should be able to clearly understand you. I've worked in a call center before and clarity was an important benchmark - i guess if you can get people to work for small wages your standards go down a bit too. Unfortunately it looks like Outsorcing for tech support is here to stay, as unappealing as that may be. Sprint, Dell, Microsoft... grr. I call upon Shiva to bitch slap them all!