The Nine Circles of IT Hell 126
snydeq writes "Dan Tynan takes us on a tour of the nine circles of IT hell, a place 'not unlike the underworld described by Dante in his Divine Comedy.' 'But here, in the data centers, conference rooms, and cubicles, the IT version of this inferno is no allegory. It is a very real test of every IT pro's sanity and soul,' Tynan writes. From IT limbo, to tech lust, to stakeholder gluttony, to tech-pro treachery, the IT inferno is not buried deep within the earth, it's just down the hall. 'Thankfully, as in Dante's poetic universe, there are ways to escape the nine circles of IT hell. But IT pros beware: You may have to face your own devils to do it. Shall we descend?'"
E caddi, come corpo morto cade (Score:3)
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Well his escape tips might not work 100%. For example:
That means making sure you have the tech expertise in house to solve your own problems, going with open source to avoid vendor lock-in
The last I checked, Reiserfs had vendor lock-in ;).
Seriously though, not everyone can afford to have sufficient tech expertise in-house to fix say xorg or the linux sound system. Or network performance issues when you have 1000 vlan interfaces (issues which the kernel devs may not bother fixing since they don't run environments which need 1000 different VLANs).
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The last I checked, Reiserfs had vendor lock-in ;).
I know you're being funny here, but just remember how fast the reiserfs users escaped to ext3/ext4 when the "vendor" was locked in.
Layer 1 (Score:2)
Layer 2 (Score:1)
Re:Layer 3 (Score:1)
Re:Layer 4 (Score:2)
Layer 5 (Score:2)
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???
Is everyone where you're at running laptops or something?
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As if that weren't the standard setting for desktop these days...
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Not any any place I've worked..or at home.
I mean, no need to turn a desktop off...no need to conserve battery, just usually a screen saver that locks when you go away.
But never heard of turning a monitor off before on a desktop....? Can't see a good reason for doing it...the inconvenience I'd think would outweigh any slight perceived savings in energy cost...
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I'm a little surprised it wasn't used anywhere you worked. It's Computer Security 101 stuff.
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Why the tautology?
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You might want to take a refresher course on OSI layers.
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You forgot the most important layers:
8) friends
9) money
10) politics
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Is it plugged in is totally part of physical.
It's the first check on the physical layer.
Plugging in (Score:2)
I once did a really intense, really satisfying six-month stint supporting about 2500 new hires and instructors in a hotel environment. We didn't have a help desk to dispatch so we made it up as we went along. We gave the instructors balloons to hang outside their classrooms when they had a problem then practiced "support by walking around."
Upper management, however, wanted at least a cursory measure of what sorts of problems we were handling. We had no time. We were running our asses off.
I put up a grid
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Hush! I don't want my users to know I'm insulting them if I tell them there's an OSI-layer 8 problem with their computer and that that part needs to be thrown out and replaced!
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Are you talking PEBKAC errors? Those require proper LART techniques.
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I know, but my lawyer said I am no longer allowed to solve problems with LARTs.
Stupid worker protection laws...
Not painful enough! (Score:3)
That's a per user problem. There's an "Oh! Yeah!" moment at the end of it.
For REAL Hell, from TFA:
Here, spend YEARS supporting something you didn't write.
I wish IT management would understand that part of their job is PRUNING systems. If it is unsupported / undocumented, then put together a plan to either remove it or further isolate it
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The key here is communication, I find the more of my day I devot to communication at the cost of getting less stuff done, the better my position becomes. As a coder you can spend a week fixing a part of the system of your own initiative and good will, my point is... propose your project, document it, explain the scope to the best of your ability, as a side-effect its a lot easier to ask for longer time lines when you follow all these steps. The disconnect between IT and senior management is communication,
There's one big problem with that. (Score:2)
The problem with that is that all it takes to ruin it is someone claiming to be able to do more, better, flashier, etc.
Particularly if they have access to a nice golf course.
There will always be someone who devote even less time than you to getting something accomplished ... so that they can spend that additional time selling management on the latest fad.
An
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Simple.
When you make unreasonable demands and threaten to fire people for not giving you what they want, you give the cheaters a head start and put honest folks at a disadvantage.
The honest folks get crowded out, and cheating becomes the standard course, and from there it's a race to the bottom as management gets more and more demanding.
When you care only about results and don't give a damn about the methods, don't be surprised if social darwinism kills the ethical side of things and lets the nastiest playe
and salvation is in da cloud (Score:2)
if IT only put everything in da cloud they would spend days with their 72 virgins
Re:and salvation is in da cloud (Score:4, Insightful)
if IT only put everything in da cloud they would spend days with their 72 virgins
Well that's a pretty large IT group, but from what I see around here, it seems that most IT staffs are largely comprised of virgins...
Re:and salvation is in da cloud (Score:5, Funny)
For large companies, their IT department *is* 72 virgins
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Re:and salvation is in da cloud (Score:4, Insightful)
No. The only salvation is professionalism.
I realise that I will be shot for saying this, but how come that the only thing that's running horribly in an entire company, is the IT department?
There is a way to just make near-bug-free software on time and the evidence for that rediculous claim is NASA.
I took the liberty of finding the answer to everyone's horror. But before you click on it, you do have to realise that your playground will be over once implementing the solution.
All text-only print-format before your head realy explodes out of anger (ofcourse): http://www.fastcompany.com/node/28121/print [fastcompany.com]
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You don't have to do it exactly like Nasa; there's always boss over boss, so to speak.
What you can do is plan, write your entire program in UML first, with carefull thinking.
If your boss sais: "I want this right now!", then you give your planning to your boss and you say "Go write it, then" and he'll be all like "WTF... That amount of paperwork?!". "100 times more complexity than your sportscar, boss. What... You thought we were alien?".
Go make 9-5 days in casual, but corporate fancy clothes. If your boss c
user: You gave me a bad password!!! (Score:5, Funny)
me: Bad password? I don't give away bad passwords. Not unintentionally, that is. What password are you using?
user:I'm using the password you sent me! is: generic2011
me: what? Are you sure? It starts with an 'i' and an 's' and it has a ':'?
user: yeah.
me: So when I wrote down "Your password is: generic2011" you decided that "is: " was part of the password?
user: Well, Isn't it?
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Better yet, color code it.
"Your password is the text in red: MyDogLovesPeas42"
(Obviously, then you'd get calls about "how do I enter my password in red", but at least they'd have the right characters.... ?)
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Your password is:
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This is why I often write passwords on completely separate lines. Even so: if I put a period at the end, people still don't realize it's part of the password..
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I have to agree especially as you get some complex password rules now days and some folk think you are cleverly using punctuation to meet that complexity. Usually I say something like:
Your password is "generic2011" all lower case. It starts with a "g" and ends with "1". Do not include the quotation marks.
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Had to be a russian guy, they got no word for 'be' really. They would say something like: You smart. Your password generic2011. :)
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I usually set it to "$nameisadork". When I started doing that, I had a LOT fewer people forgetting their passwords, oddly.
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I usually set it to "$nameisadork". When I started doing that, I had a LOT fewer people forgetting their passwords, oddly.
If it was at my company, you'd also get a smack in the face. Plus, as I control payroll, for a laugh I wouldn't pay you on time. Oh, sorry, I forgot, no I wouldn't do any of that because I'm a fucking professional.
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No problem there, my contract states I get 1% interest for every day they pay too late, you may delay it for as long as you please.
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Right next to "Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on our part."
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10+ Circles (Score:5, Insightful)
The 10th Circle of Hell is when upper management believes that outsourcing everything will save them money and time.
The 11th circle of Hell is when someone in a high place reads a magazine and decides that the entire company needs to head off in some "new" direction.
The 12th circle of Hell is partnering with Microsoft.
The 13th circle of Hell is partnering with Microsoft.
The 14 circle of Hell is replacing the guy who partnered with Microsoft.
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10a. The circle where a few managers have gotten to the vendors first, entered into financial arrangements with them and now have a vested interest in seeing that vendor's solution selected.
People you meet there: The manager with the photo of him(her)self on his office wall shaking hands with the vendor's rep. The product is sitting prominently on the table in front of them. Next to that photo is one of the boss' new 42 foot fishing boat.
How to escape: Leave the company. Such a blatant disregard for co
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To an extent. There are many propagandist newsrags circularing in the manufacturing industry aimed at management level readership, and many CAD/CAM packages that are total garbage promote themselves quite heavily therein.
If your manager has been brainwashed by a well trained industry evangeist, there can be simillarly nasty circumstances for everyone involved excepting said evangelist.
Good companies ask their engineers what does and does not work for them, and buy accordingly, but good companies are becomi
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The 16th circle of Hell is partnering with Accenture.
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11 isn't really hell until that magazine article is actually an advertisement 8*(
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Then 15th circle has to be IT-Security. No matter if you're in it or just suffering from it.
If you're in IT-Sec, you're the loneliest person in the company, because nobody even wants to talk to you, fearing they might say something that could "incriminate" them and constitute a security breach, so they avoid you altogether.
If you just suffer from IT-Sec, you may rest assured that when you have everything planned out for your project that sec-idiot will butt in and tell you that whatever you wanted to do vio
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SAP is waaaay further down. Personally, I think that for learning ABAP you not only have to sell your soul but also have to accept wearing that teflon-coated suit that all SAP-hellspawn seems to wear.
The Tenth Circle Of IT Hell (Score:3)
The Tenth Circle of IT Hell: Reading infoworld articles.
Description An abomination of words that seem profound from a distance, but on closer inspection aren't
The People you meet there Innocent people sucked into the morass of a less than worthy /. story
Currently in Circle 3 (Score:2)
Regretting saying "yeah, we can make that happen" every day since.
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I have found that the best way to respond when someone suggests 'we' need to do something is, "Sure, go ahead. Knock yer-self out!" Keep telling them, "Sure, go ahead. Knock yer-self out!" ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times if necessary. Eventually they will come out of denial and realize you are not thier thrall. Really, it works.
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Even better, document a time estimate for each major feature, and ask them to prioritize them.
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And be prepared to bail when they return it to you prioritizing them ALL.
Hahahaha good luck (Score:1, Interesting)
"We need to balance our capitalistic nature with some form of societal responsibility."
with the above .... in a system in which only the most ruthless ones can survive and undo others, you cannot talk about social responsibility. at the point you become socially responsible, the shareholders, who have no obligation to morality, will pull their money from your company and invest it in socially irresponsible ones to make money.
this is the fault of capitalism. it cannot be fixed without totally changing capitalism to something that is not capitalism anymore.
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Or just put tax on socially irresponsible things.
Every optimization problem has a fitness value, that you must maximize. In capitalism we call it money. We have to create the constraints where maximizing money leads to socially desirable things. Otherwise we will just reinvent the centrally planned economy that was practiced in the Soviet Union.
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It's too bad people today have conflicting and insane ideas of what constitutes "socially irresponsible".
And is it really the fault of everyone else that a planned economy in the Soviet Union didn't take off like a jet plane and so enjoy the grand successes of all the other planned economies of the world? No and hehe.
Maybe it was just removing the decision making process, and the personal freedom required, far away from those that would directly benefit from making "good" decisions. Maybe.
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So, are you the 99% or not?
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Capitalistic nature? I didn't known that capitalism was part of our genes. I think we were merely brainwashed into it by society.
And by the way there's this strange place called Europe. Maybe you heard of it. In many of its countries they are acutally practising a cult called "social market economy". Market driven economies and capitalism exclude social responsibility only if you are an asshole, as a matter of fact.
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Sorry to pop your bubble, but we've abandoned that whole "social market" hogwash for the much more efficient and successful bail-out driven capitalist market system.
A missing circle... (Score:3)
And that's "Accreditation hell". Where policy prevents you from fielding systems that aren't certified to certain levels of robustness / security, but management hasn't (or won't) budget the time or money to actually secure a system.
"Just stand it up now", they say. "We'll put the security money in next year's budget."
Of course, it doesn't show up in next year's budget, and pretty soon, you're the next Sony (in the getting hacked repeatedly sense).
It's "magic". (Score:2)
Tech's understand technology.
Other people understand "magic".
You say the right mystic words and make the right arcane gestures and the things that tech said could not be done get done.
That's powerful magic. It gets things done NOW.
Other spells are:
"I think you're over-analyzing this."
"There won't be any problems."
and
"My nephew says he can do it this weekend." This is a particularly dangerous spell because it releases dest
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Accreditation Hell has another room wherein you have managers who push for a technology because it has attained Common Criteria EAL5 certification and even budget for it, but then refuse to allow it to be configured even remotely close to it.
How to write one of these articles (Score:4, Insightful)
Have a chatty phone conversation or a drinking lunch with a consultant who's between gigs. Let him tell war stories. Organize according to some metaphor drawn from a widely known but poorly understood work of literature. Beat deadline, knock off early.
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Seriously. The most awful part of this article were the solutions. For example, the solution to the problem of different vendors blaming each other (aka: limbo?) is...
"When you're digging a hole in hell, the first thing to do is stop digging and climb your way out," says Roth. That means making sure you have the tech expertise in house to solve your own problems, going with open source to avoid vendor lock-in, and taking the time to refactor your code so you can be more efficient the next time around.
...to not have the problem in the first place? How utterly useless is it to advise someone that the solution to a problem is to not have the problem in the first place. Gee, thanks brother, I never thought of that.
Instead, the real solution to this is to get out of the middle of the two vendors and insist they work together to fix the problem.
Layer Model (Score:2)
circle 10 plces where they hire by degrees only (Score:3)
and it even worse when management is hired on Business degrees / MBA's they may know a lot about management but not much on IT but they are running the it department.
Also when they take people from top tear school where CS is far from the job that needed and far from what you pick up at a tech school and where people who have done IT work for years are looked down on as they did not go to a top tear school but when to a tech school.
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Perhaps the people with degrees can write coherent sentences.
Kudos (Score:3)
Kudos to the guy that wrote the summary. He gave us an infoworld link that wasn't dumb by giving us the printer version.
G+ (Score:3)
tour of the nine circles of IT hell
I thought this was some kind of "Google+ in the Enterprise" story for a few seconds.
In my experience, a G+ circle of hell is where some dude in the "Ham Radio" circle insists on a fox news headline post every thirty minutes, or religious crusader clutters up my "Linux" circle with daily bible quotes. Ugh.
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Funny you should mention that, as enterprises will typically have Google Apps, and us Apps folks can't have Google+.
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Which is amazingly annoying because those of us who just want Google to keep up the spam filters and ward off being blacklisted have Apps accounts for our personal domains. Google is so finicky about switching stuff later that I'm afraid to use/make an alternate vanilla gmail account and then find out in a year that I can't migrate it back to my "real" email when they activate Apps accounts on G+.
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You can't just copy the mail over with IMAP?
I don't think Google has squared away its policy of zero-tolerance account deletion for things that it doesn't like (e.g. false accusations of child porn) and your paying for their service. I've stopped using Google+ because I don't want all my Android contacts and my saved maps to disappear one day. Since there's no customer service, I don't feel the risk is warranted.
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This. It's exactly why I (a long-time gmail and general fan of their applications) haven't started using Google+ -- and have no intention of starting with it any time soon.
I've got paid Apps clients with them, I've used their mobile syncing, and plenty more...it's just too big a risk. And a shame they don't realize that's scaring you, me, and plenty of others. Or maybe they do, but don't care.
Thanks for putting it so well.
Lvl 7 Escape- Unrealistic in this world at present (Score:1, Insightful)
I think the Level 7 Escape comment says enough to either prove complete naivete or complete ignorance:
How to escape: Exiting the circle of company-on-company violence may only be possible via collective action, says O'Berry. "When you squeeze the ecosystem only to your advantage, not caring about the companies you've killed along the way, eventually people will say enough is enough," says O'Berry. "We need to balance our capitalistic nature with some form of societal responsibility."
In the last thirty years
Metaphor Error (Score:2)
This guy got caught up in his metaphor and the article doesn't impart much useful information. There's probably a few nuggets of worthwhile advice there about documenting or specifications or vendor lock in. Next time, focus on the IT part and less on the "Dante's Inferno" part.
Corporate Software Lock-ins (Score:3)
On more general company lock-ins i wonder how much money a large company would save if all (lets say 70,000) employees including the CEO were using openoffice versus buying a license for every single microsoft office suite. That to me in INSANE.
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At that point its not vendor lock-in, its manager lock-in. Someone in your company has decided "if it works, its good enough" and doesn't want to fork out the $$$ for Qt/VS licenses plus all of the time taken to re-write their entire software base. Especially if its in-house software and they don't have to worry about first impressions when trying to sell it to someone else.
Cobol programmers aren't even out of a job yet, and it was old news before MFC was a glint in MS's collective eye.
Switching from MSOf
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Print to PDF - send PDF to customer. Or in OO, export to PDF. Or however you like to generate the PDF.
What circle is it... (Score:3)
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Print version zOMG (Score:2)
Eighth circle, second bolgia (Score:2)
Eighth circle, second bolgia for operating system fanboys, phone/computer platform fanboys, operating system haters, and phone/computer platform haters. Regardless of which platform and operating system the fanboys and haters hold forth upon, it's all lies and shit.
Double depth for falsely accusing anyone who disagrees with you of being a fanboy. Though there's certainly applicability of the sixth, eighth, ninth (especially forum trolls) and tenth.
9 circles in on project (Score:1)
i recently had a project going that i can surely say that i meat ALL of these circles... one by one..
how to escape?? is the project delivered?? abandon the project...
Rogue System Administrators (Score:2)
Couldn't help but read on the separate story about rogue admins, and my first impression is... All the cases used in the article features some truly stupid admins.
They're not just stupid from what they did, but also how they did it. I mean logging on to systems directly from your home IP, not deleting incriminating logs and so on. But maybe the more clever rogue admins are clever enough not to have been found out?
In any case, I'm nothing special but I can easily devise methods of accessing systems completel
Already been done (Score:1)