Being Enron's SysAdmin 94
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."
Re:Email (Score:3, Interesting)
Developers vs Admins... (Score:5, Interesting)
Essentially, if a developer's job relies on the same thing that an admin's job relies on (that is, stable, secure and reliable operations) then you have the foundation for harmony. If a developer's job relies on features and new functionality at the expense of stability, security and reliability, you have a recipe for hostility.
You can tell the priorities at a company by how cranky its admins are.
On the other hand, admins need to be open and available to developers, offering advice on OS, hardware, infrastructure, etc. and be able to clearly define the requirements for SSR so that any new designs or requirements can be supported from day 1.
Oh, and a great way to get documentation from developers: give all their cell#s to the admins, so when something breaks at 3am on a sunday and there's no documentation, the admin has a little company. A few calls like that and developers can write some pretty handy documentation!
Enron Wasn't Innovative In IT (Score:3, Interesting)
IT Job Offer From Enron:In the first I was offered a trading systems developer position. They used PowerBuilder on Windows for their trading systems - nothing wrong with that. But the IT Director kept talking about how quickly the laws changed that concerned their energy trading. I enquired as to how they maintained their business rules. He replied roughly that "it's all in code; when the laws change we rewrite the code." I asked what they would do if there were an audit say, 6 months later after they'd gone through 4 versions of code. He replied that they would set up a standalone network, load the old software and restore snapshots of the database and rerun the old data.
Naturally I asked if he had heard of rule-based systems and hinted that, if they had a dynamic rulebase architecture, they could avoid the recoding and versioning. Instead they could have a much simpler system and better controls. He said he had never heard of such a thing and couldn't see how it could be done in their environment. But he was interested.
Seeing that their viewpoint was extremely short-term and unenlightened, I turned down Enron's offer. Many of my cohorts at the time said I was a fool, but the IT situation at Enron seemed to be impoverished in thought although rich in resources. In time I realized my hunches were correct.
Encounter With Enron Broadband:Flash forward to 2 years later. I've gone completely over to WWW development and to FOSS. I'm attending a Microsoft event on IIS mostly out of curiosity. Next to me is an outspoken individual who works for Enron Broadband. He speaks endlessly of the benefits of IE and ActiveX. I ask if Enron uses ActiveX much; he replies that they are tied to IE and that ActiveX is a necessary part of their architecture. I ask about Apache, Netscape, and FOSS; he replies that they have no capability in those areas to his knowledge. I once again decide that Enron has somehow missed the boat.
Enron never carried significant loads on their web servers. Their limit was the number of energy traders in the U.S., which is a relatively small number. Today, small sites do much more than Enron did with fewere resources. There are few useful lessons to be learned from Enron's IT group or their BroadBand division fiascoes.
Re:Enron didn't hurt him (Score:5, Interesting)
Enron and its subsidiaries had a lot of great people working for them, and it was one of the few places where bright minds/tech people could get promoted for being great at what they did, and it didn't matter if you were some fresh-faced college graduate recruited for our analyst program or a guy who dropped out of high school but was brilliant at programming. It also left a lot of those bright people in a financial and professional lurch. What was worse than the sudden loss of employment was the loss of professional stature. I had prospective employers, even those in the energy trading business, actually deny me employment because I worked at Enron, as if I had something to do with their downfall as an upper level tech person. A lot of people thought we were part of some vast conspiracy, when many of us were the ones who got screwed in the process of Enron's downfall just like the other stock shareholders. The only difference between us and them is it was significantly more perseonal.