Corporate IT phrase: “Babysitting”

Posted on by Mark Myers Leave a comment

Definition:

To sit and watch an automatic or long process, so you are on hand to instantly fix or restart it, should there be an issue.

Explanation:

‘Babysitting’ has been a term that has been around for ages and ages, I remember doing it with backups, back when tape drives would fail randomly for no reason. With the growth of serious remote working, it has taken on a slightly double edged meaning, traditionally, if you were babysitting something that meant that you sat with it, what ever it was, praying for it to not fail and watching it like a hawk to make sure that it completed and if there was any issues you were there to fix them. It was vitally important when you simply couldn’t afford for an unattended process to go wrong.

In modern times, particularly with a lot of the remote working there is a new use of the term babysitting.. and that’s if you’re babysitting a process that shouldn’t really be ‘babysat’, so you can skip work. The most common one now is sitting and watching a job run on your laptop when it should be running on a server, such jobs need 100% of your laptops effort so you can’t do anything else, its this decades version of “its compiling” but smarter, as all the monitoring software that is jammed on remote workers machines show that they’re active users who’s computers are going flat out.

Ultimately when people are doing this kind of thing, its rare that they are actually deliberately slacking off, and more likely they are suffering from “being managed” and are just pushing back to try and give them self some breathing room or deal with an infrastructure issue, so investigate first before having a melt down.

 

Disclaimer: As always these posts are not aimed at anyone client or employer and are just my personal observations over a lifetime of dealing with both management and frontline associates.

 

Real life moving tech from On-premise to Cloud

Posted on by Mark Myers Leave a comment

For a lot of the major companies, the quick wins of moving to the cloud, which really translates to making it easy to vertically scale some existing servers is over.

We are now getting into the area of integrating serious existing systems with cloud services and having to match the expectations of cloud services to everything else that exists in the company.

One of the big things I’ve seen now multiple times is that we are trying to match the “everything is instant” “everything is real-time” expectations of consumer level products that are built totally in the cloud with existing on premise infrastructure and platforms. “What is the problem?” I hear you cry, just upgrade everything, but it doesn’t quite work like that. Now you have a cloud system that has an expectation of receiving data from internal systems, and indeed can pull data from said systems at real time, but the source systems just can’t take that load, everything from database servers, to internal network, to app servers are not designed for such a load. Not only are they not designed for this stress in general terms, but they have not had to work out the capacitance planning for it. A perfect example of this is transactional logging. When you enable transactional logging on source systems so that they can feed these monster cloud systems, that introduces an additional load across the board and these have not been planned for, not only are these not being catered to at an IT level , but they are often ultimately driven from other business areas and the normal slow business growth planning of humans.

The points to be learned from such problems are:

  1. Communication, communication, communication: With all of your existing people. You will find you will have communication issues, but this is not down to them not wanting to grow or change. This is simply down to the speed that the internal systems is set to grow is not aligning with the cloud systems expectation. You have to work with people from all areas. You have to get them involved from the minute you’re starting to do this. Try and give them a heads up on what you’re going to do. They often have to plan their budget and how much they spend on infrastructure change and people hiring a year in advance, suddenly turning on your AWS servers and cranking them up to 11 does not help them.
  2. Expectations: Most of your customers for your systems are now expecting consumer level speeds. All of your social media plans are nearly real time. Now, all of a sudden you are expecting that from human and IT Systems that are buried deep under a whole raft of procedures that you have not changed for decades. You cannot provide real time updates to such things with only changes to IT systems, you need to bring along the business systems that are supporting them. Explain this to your cloud system consumers so they can set their expectations along real human lines.
  3. Fear: A little bit dramatic, but its a real statement, people fear change, if you do not work with people on this they will fear these changes. To gain proper improvements from cloud systems you have to work with everybody, introduce them to the advantages and their place in such a changed world, help them grow as you are helping the IT systems grow.

The best analogy I can think of to explain all this is from the image that is headlining this post, from “Appleseed” a famous comic by Masamune Shirow which confronts a lot of the issues of change in the world. One of the doctors in the comic states “You can’t give someone a Cyborg Leg Just like THAT, It’d tear out when they try to run”. Think of your move to cloud in thoese terms.

Admins and Manholes

Posted on by Mark Myers Leave a comment

This is something that I’m seeing more and more in business but historically has always been a problem in IT,

It is the little known and little appreciated individual doing a sterling job and no one noticing them.

Now before I get started on this, I’m going to differentiate between them, and the rest of us, We all consider ourselves underappreciated, and we could all do with a pay rise or a promotion or whatever. but if your boss knows that you consider yourself underappreciated or you complain about it, then you are not one of these people. I’m talking about the database admin that does their job each and every day without a complaint. I’m talking about the firewall person who makes sure all of the tables and all of the structures are working for all projects without being chased, so that a working network is taken for granted, the person that manages something buried deep that everybody uses but is unaware is vital for the state of the nation.

https://xkcd.com/2347/

XKCD did this excellent drawing which visualises the issue from an IT perspective, but I personally prefer the term: ‘manhole admin’, which harks back to the old Nintendo game and watch. It was an awful game, I hated playing it, but in it, you control a person leaping around trying to cover up every one else’s problem. No one notices anything when he does a successful job they just go on their way with no thanks, but when he screws up Ohhhh does he get blamed. Such people exist all over the place. Often they are dismissed with a ‘no one is irreplaceable’, and while it is true, such people deserve recognition. and if they got such recognition on a regular basis, the roles they play would be revealed to be vital.

However there is a slight twist to this lesson, when you acknowledge such work don’t do the knee jerk reaction of “oh this is suddenly important, we better outsource it to a team and thus if it fails it wont be my fault; it will be someone else’s”, keep that person in charge of the deliverable and acknowledge their value, yes put in contingency, and backup people, But don’t take this persons work that they take pride in away from them.

Cool Corporate Phrase: “Swift Tansley Effect”

Posted on by Mark Myers 2 Comments

Definition:

“The cumulative outputs from a group of highly skilled, disciplined professionals all studying the same problem, and routinely sharing their findings. Each new independent finding becomes a common input into everyone else’s process. The Tansley Effect is an endless positive feedback loop. How quickly the solution would reveal itself against such an onslaught!” – Alex McClung

Explanation:

This is a phrase I first read in appendix B on the original Dune book, some 20 years ago, and I’ve never had a chance to use it in real life, but I’ve just done so. And I’m so happy about it!!, So I’m actually just sharing. It’s the world’s coolest sounding phrase. And it applies to when you’ve got to be absolutely perfect in a corporate environment.

Enjoy