In IT, Beware of Fad Versus Functional 153
Lemeowski writes: Cloud, big data, and agile were three of the technology terms that were brandished the most by IT leaders in 2014. Yet, there could be a real danger in buying into the hype without understanding the implications of the technologies, writes Pearson CTO Sven Gerjets. In this essay, Gerjets warns that many IT executives drop the ball when it comes to "defining how a new technology approach will add value" to their organization. He says: "Yes, you can dive into an IT fad without thinking about it, but I can promise you'll look back and be horrified someday. The only time you can fully adopt some of these new methods is when you are starting from scratch. Most of us don't have that luxury because we are working with legacy architectures and technical debt so you have to play hand you've been dealt, communicate well, set clear and measurable outcomes, and use these fads to thoughtfully supplement the environment you are working in to benefit the ecosystem."
In IT, remember to wash your hands (Score:1)
What's so IT-specific about this maxim, that it warrants being on Slashdot? A slow news day?
Re:In IT, remember to wash your hands (Score:5, Insightful)
Because technology changes much more quickly than real world analogs, and sometimes everyone suddenly decides "OMG, if we don't have teh new stuff we're gonna die".
I've seen a lot of money thrown at fads which took resources away from things which actually add business value or generated revenue.
A brick and mortar business doesn't have the huge shifts which happen in tech, where all of a sudden completely unproven stuff becomes perceived as completely mandatory.
I've seen entire development teams pulled off core products which generated money in order to implement some crap buzzword technology which, in the end, nobody ever actually wanted and which didn't add business value. And by the time anybody realized that, the core technology which generated money had been left to rot for a period of time.
And, of course, unlike other industries .. management in tech frequently have no clue about tech, and therefore have no way of understanding the consequences of their stupid choices. They just think it's all interchangeable and subject to whatever idiotic whims they come up with.
Back when companies used to have roadmaps (do they still have those?), it was not uncommon for a bunch of tech people to be rolling their eyes saying "yeah, right, like we'll be making those in a year" as management told them about the wonderful (and completely meaningless) future of the company, only to be told something completely different in six months.
The people in the concrete business? They don't suddenly get told they'll be making stuffed talking animals in a few months.
I consider it a sad fact of reality that most tech execs are completely delusional, and truly believe that just because they say something based on whatever crap Gartner is selling, that in six months time it will be reality. And they're often too short sighted to realize that the crap we abandoned from six months ago isn't any more true than the stuff we'll abandon six months from now.
Because tech execs consider themselves visionaries, and visionaries aren't constrained by pesky things like reality.
Me, I'm betting anybody who has worked in tech long enough has a whole litany of stories about how the "exciting new future" turned out to be "yet another dud championed by idiots".
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And yet, the functionality is still more important than a fad in (almost) all walks of life — with the exception of clothing styles, perhaps — not just in Information Technology...
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Not at all. Minivans — and even most SUVs — drive like crap. And I don't mean engine — the suspension is nowhere near where it needs to be, to make driving enjoyable. None of them come with a manual transmission either — the command-line of driving — so, no...
There are people, who might choose a different model, because it comes in a particular color, but that falls into the "clothes style" category, which I alrea
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"None of them come with a manual transmission either"
Excuse me, my Suburban 4x4 most certainly came with manual transission.
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A minivan is not a sports-car. A minivan is
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And my point was, that people, who do choose a sports(ier)-car and/or a 4x4, do so for reasons other than mere fad.
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Minivans are dying. They have turned out to be a fad. They are being replaced by CUVs. It turns out almost nobody actually wanted to carry cargo and a lot of passengers, and a minivan is half-assed at both. The only exception went out of production because buyers decided it was too old — the Chevy Astro. Only one engine but since 2000 it was awesome, and available in short or long versions and AWD or RWD. RWD with 3.23s gets up to 26 mpg on the freeway at speed, I wouldn't lie to you. We would have go
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Minivans are dying. They have turned out to be a fad. They are being replaced by CUVs. It turns out almost nobody actually wanted to carry cargo and a lot of passengers, and a minivan is half-assed at both.
huh? minivans are excellent at both. The only things better at hauling cargo are vans, and perhaps trucks and both suck at hauling people.
I'd say CUVs are a fad. They're for people who need a minivan but feel emasculated by not owning some ludicrous SUV.
I drove a minivan (Nissan Serena) for a few years wh
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I'd say CUVs are a fad. They're for people who need a minivan but feel emasculated by not owning some ludicrous SUV.
Minivans are what happens when you take a car and stretch it into another vehicle. CUVs are what happens when you purpose-build a vehicle to do a job.
What's not to like?
Minivans get crap mileage and have crap handling.
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I have one that handles like a car and one that handles more like a small truck, with an incredibly tight turn radius.
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The Town and Country we last rented got around 27 miles per gallon. It handled just fine.
CUVs are often based on the mid or full-sized sedan from the company, with a mostly-same floor pan with he
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Minivans are what happens when you take a car and stretch it into another vehicle.
Nope. The Nissan Serena was about the same size as a saloon car on the ground. It was nothing at all like a stretched car. In fact it looked more like a van adapted to partial passenger use.
Minivans get crap mileage
I looked at a few CUVs online. They get similar mileage to minivans at the penalty of being able to hold fewer passengers in confort and haul less cargo.
and have crap handling.
Neither of them are race cars. My exper
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Where as when I drive my manual Subaru Outback; I
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Whenever "bringing joy" is among the functions, more enjoyable means more functional.
Only if the objectives programmed in its algorithm(s) match mine. I'm yet to encounter a car, that is so programmed...
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There's a hell of a lot more fad in life than most people want to admit. For our cars, if we wanted function we'd all be driving minivans with stow-n-go seats.
Those of us who consider fuel efficiency or handling to be part of the functionality wouldn't be driving minivans.
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And nobody would willingly buy a vehicle new unless/until they dropped the price enough to not lose a quarter to nearly half of their value the moment they drive off the lot.
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My wife drives a minivan, partly for function. It's versatile and reasonably economical.
I, on the other hand, drive something cheaper with better gas mileage, which is functionally better than having two minivans in the family.
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I worked at one place that bought the hype during the NT3.5 years that NT was headed in the embedded systems direction, where the GUI was not going to be important or even necessary for the system. That company bet the farm on that, and by the time NT4.0 and Windows 2000 came along it was clear that this was very much in error,
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This reminds me of my mechanic's old Snap-On MODIS II OBD2 diagnostics machine. The thing is literally a handheld computer (heavy and bulky) except instead of a keyboard and mouse it has 6 buttons. When you plug it in, it takes 5-10 minutes to boot up Windows 98, then eventually the front end software starts up. It's a terrible hack of a machine.
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I have an OTDR from EXFO that's effectively a Windows 2000 machine with some special controllers, drivers, and software. Most of the CNC machines that I've supported run Windows 95 or 98, and it's becoming a problem, getting project files on to them to have machined.
It's a lot easier when one doesn't have the write the OS, but unfortunately using a general-purpose OS means that the equipment becomes unsupportable before the job the machine was purchased to do is
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It's also likely that it won't be updated, and if on the network w
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On the upside, you won't have to deal with licensing issues for the operating system. I'm running into this with XP - Microsoft will not license new copies of XP and you can't downgrade a current version of Windows either. This makes replacing hardware difficult - even if the new hardware would work, if you can't get XP on it and the control software requires XP, you're kind of stuck.
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Then you'd be stuck on some linux 2.0.x shit with veryimportantlibraryfoo at version 1.x whereas the current one is at 4.x?
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But the fads change faster still, and this has been obvious to informed people in IT for decades.
Everything web-based since the original HTML has been more about hype than technological substance.
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While this particular bug is endemic to IT, let's be honest: over the centuries, how many non-IT companies have decided that DIVERSIFICATION was the latest fad and abandoned doing their one thing well and crashed and burned doing lots of things not-so-great?
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I've seen a lot of money thrown at fads which took resources away from things which actually add business value or generated revenue.
This is not unique to tech. Ask any public school teacher about the educational methodology fads they have to deal with.
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I consider it a sad fact of reality that most tech execs are completely delusional
Any sufficient level of incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
Are you sure they are incompetent? My guess, is that they don't care about what functions, just as long as they get their toys.
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Because technology changes much more quickly than real world analogs, and sometimes everyone suddenly decides "OMG, if we don't have teh new stuff we're gonna die".
Yes, but.
Agile, for example, is hardly a "fad". It is a proven methodology that had its roots back in the 1950s or earlier. That means many of the primary elements of agile development have been around for over 50 years. Some "fad".
I don't have a problem with the general point of OP, but I strongly question OP's judgement of what constitutes a fad.
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Because technology changes much more quickly than real world analogs
lovely digital/analog pun, but i think you meant analogues.
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Sometimes there are benefits to a fad that we don't really see as developers. In my industry we call them "press release features". They may feel useless or even degrading to be developing, but they can have actual monetary value. For example a bank in the US just made a big splash by announcing that they will "support iBeacons". How will they be supporting iBeacons? I have no idea. I'm not sure that even they know.
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A friend of mine had a job with a company dealing with student loans, running COBOL on some sort of IBM mainframe, and everything was working fine. Then the new CIO decided he wanted to convert to Java on workstations (my friend thought it was likely resume-padding). The conversion of course took longer and was much more expensive than expected, and it turned out that the workstations couldn't handle the workload. (IBM mainframes are superb at reliably running large numbers of simple transactions, like
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What's so IT-specific about this maxim, that it warrants being on Slashdot? A slow news day?
Probably the fact that tons of us have tried to tell people this in our jobs in the past, but few have been able to put it as clearly and as succinctly as this, while still stating all the factors that play into it.
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And this, in your opinion, is a problem unique to IT? Seriously?
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Perhaps it isn't specific to IT but for whatever reason, fads run rampant in IT.
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What's so IT-specific about this maxim, that it warrants being on Slashdot? A slow news day?
Not a damn thing. As a matter of fact, the original HBR story referenced in the TFA is not about IT at all. And TFA could have been written by Captain Obvious, except it's not nearly as clear.
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What's so IT-specific about this maxim, that it warrants being on Slashdot? A slow news day?
I think the news is that it is being told to the IT Managers, which is news all by it's self!
The problem seems to be worse in IT, since the managers often know less about the work than in other fields.
Duh? (Score:4, Insightful)
So bad executive behavior, which has been immortalized in dilbert for *decades*, is now worthy of an essay?
There's a certain sense of irony here.
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Remember all those "ask slashdot" posts that go something like "I was laid off at my job/have a crappy degree in $WHATEVER and I'm thinking about getting into software/mobile/web development.?"
We should at least give the poor sods a hint as to what lies ahead in their work environment.
Mod parent up. (Score:4, Insightful)
And he makes a FUNDAMENTAL mistake by focusing on "defining how a new technology approach will add value".
At the CxO level that is easy to do. It will allow the company to synergize your core with blah blah buzzword blah buzzword.
But the reality is that it is about adding more achievements and buzzwords to someone's resume so that they can move on before their choices bite them.
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It is you that is making a fundamental mistake. Adding value is wat technology is for, technology is not an end in it self.
We, meaning IT, are here to automate processes. By automating business processes, we make more efficient business possible, thus adding value.
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Following Best Practice (ie. ITIL), you would start questioning at the organizational and process-level, before even beginning to consider technology.
That way is also not a guarantee of success. If management is implementing their imagined-perfect new organization structure, they are often blind to the problems they are creating, believing the problem lies with the underlings who "aren't trying hard enough", or "don't believe in the vision."
I'm guessing that a lot of enterprise technologies (Score:1)
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A developer in my group was asked to provide code from our system to another group for inclusion in their system. The code implements a complex algorithm that nobody quite understands (a PHD student at the time was trying to be impressive, and wrote up a 20+ page tech document to describe it). In any case, the code works, and they want to copy it.
So my boss comes back and says "the developer wants to know why this was written in C and not C#". Okay, I guess they're going for an all Microsoft solution, an
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na, it'll be because they just aren't good enough to understand the C code. Tell the developer to grow a pair and start using the right tools rather than the only thing he understands. (and frankly, I doubt he'd be able to understand the complex algorithm anyway).
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doubt it, a lot of it is chosen by developers buying into the hype of the coolest new technology or language or framework... which invariably turn out to be a pile of shit.
For example, a few years back all the talk was of Biztalk and some people developed their "this time it'll be great" tech products using it, and now some poor sods are lumbered with a steaming piece of legacy poo that they have to maintain and that costs them a fortune. Before that there was so much talk of functional languages (which are
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... I think a lot of it is driven by people who either don't have the experience or simply can't handle the current tech and so see anything different as a chance to avoid being found out.
Actually, that's probably a lot of the reason for problems, in techs -or- management.
People entering a situation where they know little have a tendency to do things to invalidate the existing knowledge, so that they are on the same level as everyone else. This can be particularly bad with new managers and can destroy companies. Beware, you might not even be aware that you are doing this! 8-P
Also, an appalling number of people only know one thing, and have no idea that they could learn other things. In the
Implementation not the technology. (Score:5, Insightful)
Agile Project management methodology has a lot of good features.
Cloud based processing can help the organization.
You can get a lot of useful information from Big Data (Previously Business Intelligence, Previously Decision Support System)
And they are still hanging on to Enterprise Class software.
But they jump headfirst without realizing what their main plan or problems they will use it to solve.
But what normally happens they just replace their existing technology and try to rig the new one to do what they did before and hope magically they will get a benefit from it.
These types of technology require you to change your full organization culture, and workflow to gain the advantage of the new technology. Just saying you got a big data project by joining all your DB tables in some big views and giving you a few reports isn't really big data.
Hosting your email on gmail isn't going to the cloud. Or even just remotely hosting you stuff on cloud systems, isn't embracing the cloud it is just offshoring your data.
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Agile Project management methodology has a lot of good features.
Cloud based processing can help the organization.
You can get a lot of useful information from Big Data (Previously Business Intelligence, Previously Decision Support System)
Heck, none of these are very new, other than perhaps the scale of Bug Data. Agile was new around 2000. "Cloud" was all the hype around 2007. These are proven ideas now, though as you say you have to understand them, you can't just move your systems and hope fore the best.
Hosting your email on gmail isn't going to the cloud. Or even just remotely hosting you stuff on cloud systems, isn't embracing the cloud it is just offshoring your data.
A lot of people don't get this yet, though moving all your back-end systems to be cloud-hosted is as good as you can often get with legacy systems. Though the DB servers are often the sticking point (even if you can get cloud-hosted ser
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I'm going to assume that "Bug Data" was intentional. I'm using that one.
Ha! ... Me, too! 8-)
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I would say that it's not just the implementation, but choosing which thing to implement in the first place. A lot of these fads, whether it's "big data" or "cloud computing" or "agile development", have become popular because they're extremely useful in some cases. The mistake, sometimes, is in thinking that you've found a single solution to solve all problems, and applying it everywhere will fix everything.
Someone else here used the example of the language "Ruby" as a fad that was useless because Ruby
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Well, there's your problem - you don't understand the term, or why the concept is so powerful. Cloud is a lot more than "store my shit on someone else's server."
"Cloud" encompasses horizontal scale-out, application redundancy (for HA and disaster recovery events), load-balancing optimization, operational flexibility (often using Software Defined servers, storage, networks, etc.), and I'm s
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The defining characteristic of "cloud" is "on someone else's stuff that you get a monthly bill for", sold to management as a way to be rid of those pesky IT types who insist on actually taking more than a minute and a half to do something complicated.
Well, we've removed a cost center for the company and only increased our risk by an unknowable percent. It's working so well that we're planning on outsourcing our middle management to cloud intelligent systems from the same company. Since our whole company relies on the success of this cloud provider, maybe we'll by it to reduce our risk then do the same thing with their IT cost center. We'll double the savings!
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Why the hell would I want to tell an organization that is more focused on their actual business that they need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to build up a datacenter over weeks / months worth of time when I can literally do it myself using Chef / Puppet and Amazon EC2 in a few days, and we're not on the hook for any hardware maintenance or replacement in the future?
The business gets to keep focus on the business without the overhead of running a whole datacenter including power, cooling, wiring,
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One of the ideas of the Cloud is that you don't need your own servers and big Internet connection. There's lots of things that can go wrong with those, and the cloud provider has competent people running them. They're not perfect, and obviously no cloud provider is going to be as interested in keeping your business up and running than you are, but it's a way of avoiding a whole class of mistakes. Whether this (and horizontal scaling etc.) is worth it is a decision that is best made by the individual ent
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When will it be learned that choosing the right methodology for a given project is the best way to go.
It comes to understanding the methodologies. What makes each effective? What are their weaknesses? Do you have enough good people who can execute them?
Waterfall is often appropriate, especially when it comes to physical world engineering, or for software products that cannot and will not be changed. Agile is great when you are committed to fully automated testing, have a committed stakeholder who is an active participant, and can deploy on demand for low cost.
But many clients now expect instant updates like
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Applying one methodology rigidly to every single project is also not Agile. The Agile manifesto [agilemanifesto.org] says "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools".
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Some practical examples (Score:5, Informative)
So over my nearly 20 years in IT/CS, I've seen a few:
I worked for a large retailer. We migrated from an old frame-relay leased-line network to a much more capable multihomed IP-over-VPN configuration to connect all of our retail locations around the country back to HQ. This new system worked well. Our CIO retired, and a new one was brought in. CIO Magazine a year or so later had an article about "Satellite Internet, The Future?" Our CIO then "spontaneously" started lobbying to get us to scrap our efficient, inexpensive, high-bandwidth network for a satellite system.
I can't tell you how many projects I saw rewritten in Ruby on Rails just because that was the new hotness, only to be abandoned later when everyone realized that Ruby is awful.
I myself wrote a bunch of stuff in Erlang not because it was the best language but because that was the new hotness.
Two unchanging things I've noticed are:
A lot of time, the new hotness makes common problems go away or common tasks easier, but ends up making more complex things harder. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but people tend to get stuck in the model of thinking that the new technology has to be used for everything, and they end up shoehorning their complex projects into frameworks that aren't the best choice.
No matter what the new technology is, and no matter how fantastic it is, it's not going to replace C/C++ for systems-level work, and Python and Perl aren't going anywhere. Truly successful technologies have long tails.
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Your history sounds much like my own. Get job with company with rock-solid infrastructure that just plain works. Smart leaders leave for more money. People that replace them are not so smart, they feel the need to have their names on the decisions and infrastructure, so everything is scrapped and done anew -- much to the chagrin of the very capable people who put the old systems together. We went from Solaris to Windows in one year. In other words, we went from heaven to hell in one year. Malware hit the se
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No matter what the new technology is, and no matter how fantastic it is, it's not going to replace C/C++ for systems-level work, and Python and Perl aren't going anywhere. Truly successful technologies have long tails.
Why not mention Fortran and Cobol why'll you're at it? Python and Perl were the newest hotness decades after Fortran and Cobol were no longer newsworthy.
Re:Some practical examples (Score:5, Interesting)
everyone realized that Ruby is awful
I'm tired of hearing this. Ruby is not awful. It's a wonderful language, and Rails is a wonderful framework. The problem is that Rails is designed for a very particular niche (small, fairly CRUD-oriented web applications), and people keep trying to stupidly shoehorn it into places where it doesn't work well (large, enterprise applications that need to do lots of heavy number crunching or querying of enormous databases in the background). Predictably, such projects end in a trainwreck and then people blame Rails, but Rails wasn't the problem.
Re:Some practical examples (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep. I've used nothing but Ruby/Rails for 8 years now and it has increased my productivity to a level that wouldn't have been possible 15 years ago. But I just spent a weekend writing a C program, my first in 10+ years. Why?
Because I need to be able to analyze wav/aif files and create a fancy "waveform" like soundcloud. I have a great little Ruby gem for doing it and it takes 3-4 minutes to generate a PNG of the wave form for each audio file. My C program takes .05 seconds to do the same. Yes, I got a speed up of about 3000-4000 times by using my own hand-written C that takes into account everything that I know about optimizing code. I started out doing assembly and machine code (I'm serious) 25+ years ago so I know what makes a modern CPU fast. Ruby ain't it :)
But that's one little piece. Most of my applications are pulling data from databases and putting it on the internet - speed like that would be of little value and it would take me 5 times as long to write the code in order to get a minimal speedup.
Use each tool where it's appropriate. But don't claim that "_____ sucks" just because it doesn't fit your needs.
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How the general programmer thinks:
-> It doesn't mather how fast my program is, what mathers is how fast I can develop it.
How the user thinks:
-> I want to run 100 programs on the same computer.
I happen to be both a programmer and a user, and for me it mathers that my programs aren't bloated.
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everyone realized that Ruby is awful
I'm tired of hearing this. Ruby is not awful. It's a wonderful language, and Rails is a wonderful framework. The problem is that Rails is designed for a very particular niche (small, fairly CRUD-oriented web applications), and people keep trying to stupidly shoehorn it into places where it doesn't work well (large, enterprise applications that need to do lots of heavy number crunching or querying of enormous databases in the background). Predictably, such projects end in a trainwreck and then people blame Rails, but Rails wasn't the problem.
Pretty much any "instant gratification" framework suffers from the same problem. To get a gee-whiz demo app up and running these tools are marvellous. 5 minutes and you're done!
The problem, is, once people see the basic app, they want all sorts of bells and whistles added, and the IG frameworks get their productivity by basically pre-writing a simple boilerplate app and using it over and over. Extending it requires a lot more expertise and frequently a lot more pain as well.
And that's even BEFORE you consid
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Ugh. Never played with Rails, but I've had to convert a lot of bash / python cluster management work into Chef / Ruby and it's been awful. I easily spend 10x longer doing trivial tasks, and in the end, I have to write a bash ssh job to verify that chef did the right thing anyway.
To be fair, there's a lot in the framework that I do like... the somewhat built-in unit and integration testing (which, for some reason, is surprisingly absent in production where you'd most want it). I sort of like the RuboCop
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This is very true. While new ideas can be useful (or even great - everything was new at one point), the hype of the fad leads to tunnel vision where we only talk about how they will revolutionize everything.
The problem I have seen with the power of the fads is that they often become vague and redefined by everyone to fit what they are doing. "Cloud" is a great example: is it a common execution dialect, a remote storage system, or a flexible infrastructure virtualization system? "Agile" had the same prob
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A lot of time, the new hotness makes common problems go away or common tasks easier, but ends up making more complex things harder.
Well said.
Useful != Add Value (Score:1)
If Sven Gerjets is such a critic of buzzwords, perhaps it would have been pertinent to speak about useful/meaningful/appropriate outcome; qualitative measures to ensure so.
Rather than "add value", itself such a buzz-word.
Nonsense... (Score:2, Insightful)
Nonsense... high level IT people (IT directors, CTO, etc) aren't worried about whether it really 'adds value' for the company or not, they probably won't be around (at least in my last few jobs) to have to deal with the consequences - the only consideration for them is that it 'adds value' to their resume/CV, so they can move on to that next job with "Successfully transitioned company 'Z' to a cloud based architecture cutting datacenter and hardware costs to virtually nothing" (ignoring, of course, the fact
What the fad is perceived to deliver is good. (Score:2)
yeah don't just jump into that modern technology (Score:5, Funny)
We had "cloud computing" back in the 70s (Score:2, Insightful)
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Many IT execs do not even know what ball to drop.. (Score:2)
In this essay, Gerjets warns that many IT executives drop the ball when it comes to "defining how a new technology approach will add value" to their organization.
In my experience, many IT execs are not involved in developing or do not understand their company's strategy and thus have no idea what the technology needs to accomplish. they respond to requests, or develop technology solutions without input from the actual users and thus deliver solutions that don't really do what is needed. Even worse, some are promoted techies who are enamored with technology and want what is cool without regard to weather or not it is actually useful.
In Other Words ... (Score:1)
Beware of Toys vs Tools
-- kjh
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definitely true, but also beware of buying a hammer and starting to see glass stuff as nails
Simple... (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Does this technology put our companies assets at risk?
2. Does this technology significantly improve the performance/security/reliability without violating rule #1?
3. Does this technology put us in a situation where a single vendor/point of failure/attacker can road block us?
4. What are the long term costs of this technology compared to our existing infrastructure?
5. How disruptive is this technology and do it's benefits outweigh the disruption?
In many cases once we get into the conversation and the person has a better understanding of what's going on behind the scenes, suddenly "cheapass-hosting-services.com" stops looking like such a great deal.
How about Experience? (Score:2)
Doesn't everybody learn from experience about jumping into fads at some point?
Is this just a problem for new IT being given power too soon or am I wrong and we have a lot of IT people who never learn?
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suddenly "cheapass-hosting-services.com" stops looking like such a great deal.
Move the first hyphen one word to the left.
http://xkcd.com/37/ [xkcd.com]
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If you're a start up and you have zero infrastructure, the cloud makes perfect sense, until you get to a certain size and then it suddenly stops making sense.
Yes... (Score:1)
Agile hasn't been "new" for a long time. (Score:2)
"Big Data" for me is still a buzzword that I'm not sure I understand the value of for most IT shops.
Fads? (Score:2)
In IT, Beware of Fad Versus Functional (Score:2)
This is why I still use DOS.
Anyone remember the Visual Basic fad? (Score:2)
Fad: low contrast web pages (Score:2)
.
Readability appears to be taking a back seat.
Author doesn't understand agile (Score:2)
Nor do many people who profess to use it.
In 25 years, I have yet to see a type of project that couldn't benefit from an agile approach...done correctly, of course. At its core, Agile is about breaking down a big project into manageable pieces. This process can be done logically, and it can be done nonsensically.
Solving simple problems in a difficult way (Score:2)
In IT there rarely are any hard problems. Few people operate Google scale data centres, few people do automatic voice recognition or video codecs.
This somehow seems to cause a desire for solving simple problems in difficult ways. You suddenly have complex frameworks to do more or less trivial things because you are trying to abuse something that's never meant to be used in a certain way. More and more non essential features get crammed into projects.
If you want to stay ahead in IT, avoid complexity. Simple
Oh No! (Score:2)
"technical debt" (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Technical debt is not THE great unsolved problem of software engineering, because people who know software engineering know things they can do about it. It's mostly a management issue, compounded by what is perhaps the largest problem, getting management to take the techies seriously when they're talking about what they know.
Re: (Score:2)
Cloud.
Fog
It's like the could, but at ground level, so you can actually SEE it.
Imagine being surrounded in a fog of data.
(okay, it's just servers in a closet somewhere on the premises, but now that so many have moved to the cloud, it's a way to sell them back their old servers at a premium price, BOfH-style)
Re: (Score:2)
Your passage between quotes is exactly the same as the television ads for diapers I remember. Diapers Y was a lot better than Diapers X, but a couple years later Diapers Y now makes the baby cry and wet itself. Diapers Z is now required to make baby and mom happy and laugh in saturated colors.
One brand of laundry detergent even had a "Vista" in their upgrade cycle. It was so good at eating the stains that it was leaving holes in the clothes too.