Being Enron's SysAdmin

CowboyRobot writes "FreeBSD's Kirk McKusick has a long interview with Enron's former SysAdmin, Jarod Jenson, where he describes the nuts and bolts of working in and managing such a large-scale operation." From the article: "EnronOnline was a Web-based trading application. We had several hundred, even thousands of commodities that we would price in realtime, the same way that equities are priced. We were trying to push realtime pricing information out to clients who could do instantaneous transactions on them. People who are familiar with financial markets--the commodity markets--would recognize EnronOnline as sort of the same thing. We had a lot of the same issues that the markets had trying to push out realtime data--not only within our local network but also to the customers--as quickly as we could globally, and trying to make sure that what every trader saw on the screen matched what every company in the world had on theirs."

Email

[Helios1182]

There is a large collection of email from Enron vailable online. It has been usefull for research in natural language processing, text classification, and data mining. Check it out here: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~enron/.http://www-2.cs.cm u.edu/~enron/ [cmu.edu]

Re:Enron didn't hurt him- Insightful???

[ralf1]

This was modded insightful? Bah. You statement shows a complete lack of understanding of the impact of the Enron collapse on many of its employees. The fact that he got another job is a simplistic, and quite frankly juvenile view of a major financial event in many peoples lives. Almost everyone who worked for Enron got another job. The Houston job market is pretty good, and particularly good for people with solid IT credentials. There was very little stigma associated with having Enron on your resume unless you were in the inner circle of Lay/Skilling/Fastauw.

The real impact was that many people at Enron had the vast majority of their personal savings in Enron stock or other Enron securities. The company management strongly pushed employees to do that, and there was significant corporate cultural pressure to invest ALL of your 401K in Enron stock. When the company tanked, people who had worked for years for Enron or one of the companies Enron had acquired suddenly went from having accumulated enough wealth to be close to retirement to having to start over. Plenty of stories of folks who at age 50 suddenly found themselves going from being worth millions on paper to having no life savings and no fiscal security. This happened to folks in a matter of weeks, and while it was happening compnay management was encouraging those employees to stay the course - hold the stock - as it would come back. It changed the lives of tens of thousands of people. I have one acquaintance who went from having 85,000 in a 401K, who got a settlement check for 43.00 from the bankruptcy court. Fourtunately he had other monies and the Enron investments really didn't change much for him long term, but I mention it to give you a sense of the scale of the collapse for folks.

The 'he got a job' comment may resonate with you folks who are young, have no long term obligations like a family, and are living paycheck to paycheck with no view of your future beyond how fast can I save up for a new Athlon dual core, but for those of us whose lives are a bit more established, it stinks.

Disclaimer - don't work for Enron, never did, no one in my family or close circle of friends did/does. But I do live in Houston and have seen what its done to good, honest people who did nothing wrong but believe the propaganda delivered by the people for which they worked.

Re:Enron - lessons in what NOT to do

[Anonymous Coward]

Very ignorant comment...

As an SA for a very large telecom -- we support such a wide variety of systems that I couldn't even begin to tell you what the data on the systems actually holds.

The guy was an SA for a VERY large company, and their IT systems were NOT their downfall...