Submitted by 7666 on

Today I find inspiration to write not about infrastructure or servers or Proxmox, but instead on musings about corporate IT.

I like this contemplative fellow above. He looks like me, trying to find a way not to write "Fuck off" in an email where I really want the person to fuck off.

Computers and technology surround us all, and have provided gainful employment for millions in the US and millions more across the globe. Whether you're a pencil pushing analyst, a spreadsheet slinging accountant, an avocado toast munching web developer, or a cranky sysadmin with an uptime fetish, technology has a job for everyone. However, the environment in which we all operate feels as though it is souring, or already soured beyond repair. Relentless pressure on deadlines and deliverables without a focus on quality and substance erodes the very foundation of this technology we use on a daily basis. Emphasis on the corporate bottom line and shareholder value strips away any of the nice parts of the things you are working on, leaving only things that "make money". Corporate initiatives based around buzzwords (e.g. Cloud) funnel millions of dollars away from the business that could have been spent on tangible assets and improvements. Companies continue to be afraid to innovate, instead sectioning off entire portions of their systems to third party consultants for outrageous fees. All of these things and so much more have stripped the life out of corporate IT, leaving the tech-focused companies as the only ones actually investing in technology in any meaningful way. The rest are just pretending.

Warning: My musings very loosely pertain to my current employment and past experiences, and may not be representative of the landscape as a whole. There are probably some VERY good companies out there forging their own path, free from the strangleholds of MBAs and Gartner Quadrants, and I encourage you to seek them out and find them if you can. Alternatively, work for a charity or other meaningful enterprise to find fulfillment in your employment, but be warned that most fulfilling jobs operate outside of the mainstream flow of capital, e.g. expect low pay, hot heads, and a shoestring budget. Maybe an attitude change is a cheaper option?

I want to dive into a few major talking points here to get my quiet rage out into an orderly fashion.

  • The Erosion of Responsibility
  • What Makes a Job Fulfilling?
  • Risk or Value as an Enabler for Shitty Practices

Section 1: The Erosion of Responsibility

This will be my hardest hitting section, the rest are fluffy and thinner compared to this. This is the core of my argument as to what ruins businesses today, and I call it the erosion of responsibility.

Back in the day, engineering and innovating solutions was looked upon positively. Building a new widget was a very cool prospect indeed, and everyone went home smiling and happy afterwards. Make a neat new script that provisions something automatically? Great! Pats on the back. Well done. Build a new system that tracks all your assets? Well done! What a great idea! And I'll bet all of it was supported from in-house engineers who enjoyed what they worked on. I think fondly on Sun Microsystem's Fishworks department, and Mr. Brendan Gregg yelling at servers to demonstrate some neat things he built. You can see that here (What happened to Sun Microsystems? Bought by Oracle and stripped for parts, naturally). Of course, you need good engineers to make these lovely new things into useful innovations for your business and not dreaded technical debt, but even if it's technical debt, it's your technical debt at least. Bill yourself!

Nowadays? "Let's get some vendors to PoC their latest solutions to us." "I'll call up some consultants to handle implementation." "Let's buy something off the shelf and install that." To this litany of disappointing sentences, one would be apt to add "Let's get fucked in the ass on licensing and not be able to change a damn thing ourselves if we find a problem, and then let's fire Jimmy because this software will make him obsolete, even though we pay $700,000 a year for it and can't get anything better than offshore tech support in our contract.". That one helps outline the outcomes of such thinking.

The above (biased) statements can be easily separated into two major camps of thought: N.I.H. (Not Invented Here), and P.F.E. (Proudly Found Elsewhere). Both are extremes, but I will always find myself siding with the NIH's, because it's good to feel like the work you are doing means something, and not just you pretending to be an implementation engineer for a third party company without the commensurate pay. The problem is, executives move further and further to the PFE model for a few major reasons:

  • They get to finger point at the third party when something goes wrong.
  • They get to have less staff.
  • They usually get to move to operational expenditure models which can be more favorable in the eyes of the market.
  • They get to insulate themselves from the potential negative outcomes of their decisions.
  • They can sleep soundly at night knowing they have a support contract in play in case anything goes wrong.

We're gonna extrapolate these benefits into what they mean a little:

  • They get to have next to no responsibility for their actions whatsoever because they've farmed it out to people outside the business. If something does go wrong and they so graciously take the fall for it, they'll just golden parachute to their next fuck-up anyway.
  • They get to look good by lowering their spend for the year, possibly in return for some fancy bonuses.
  • They get to bleed the company dry instead of asking for capital allocations, which are scrutinized more heavily in most businesses, so that the bloodsucking leech known as the investor can look at the balance sheets more favorably and raise the stock price.
  • They can do nothing wrong because they actually do nothing, and therefore it becomes extremely difficult to fire them for cause.
  • They get yet another way to finger point at the vendor when that support contract ends up netting them no support whatsoever, and it's their remaining employees who have to put up with it, not them.

Section 2: What Makes a Job Fulfilling?

To be quite honest, I can't answer that question for you specifically, but I can throw some general things below that make you go "Yeah, I wish!" and you can go from there. Consider it your homework or something.

For the employees that still hold an engineering title and try to keep the ship afloat with all these third party variables in play? It can be incredibly frustrating to continue on each day. Idiots with no skin in the game (because they don't work at your company) will trample over your hard work. You might as well not bother building anything nice, because it will be obsoleted or be subject to political shenanigans. Some VP will write a $250,000 check that makes what you just did irrelevant, even though whatever they just bought might not work as well, or maybe it does work better but the price tag was nowhere near worth it and now you're locked into their vendor for the foreseeable future. "At least it's supported!", they'll cry out. You won't have enough time to make those nice things anyway, because you'll be too busy fixing those people's mistakes and putting out fires. It's all very demoralizing, and makes you want to work just hard enough not to get fired instead of giving a damn about the things you put your blood, sweat, and tears into.

Being an engineer on software, hardware, whatever should insulate you from these awful things. You should be allowed to roam free and build to your heart's content. You shouldn't have to put up with daily standups where you just want to strangle the scrum master because you told him four times now the director of sales promised a unicorn, and didn't allocate a unicorn's worth of resources to make it happen. Or, perhaps you're waiting on the vendor to respond to your seventh email you sent about a tiny issue that's probably just a config change in Nginx. You shouldn't have to deal with your VP being afraid of anything that doesn't say "Cisco" on the side of the box. You shouldn't have to deal with a manager who asks you to submit what you plan to work on in the next quarter (as if you have a crystal ball or even have a say to begin with) and then refuses to tell you what got struck off the budget by the big committee on the 32nd floor. You shouldn't have to twist the arms of other departments to cooperate with initiatives that will help them do their job.

All of these things make a job unfulfilling. It makes you resent management. It makes you resent your fellow worker who also stopped giving a shit. It stifles innovation, and before you know it, you're just a glorified Adobe Reader installation expert. Doing all of the above is the fastest way to crush someone who cared and turn them into yet another mindless zombie who just phones it in and shows up for a paycheck. We don't have a shortage of IT personnel in the US. We have a shortage of people who still have a passion for this profession, and you can point the finger at your nearest dullard CIO, because it's their fucking fault.

Section 3: Risk or Value as an Enabler for Shitty Practices

Let's talk risk! A security person's favorite word. A lot of the disenfranchisement that a person working in IT or Security can feel is around things that they know are wrong, but management doesn't care because they don't see the risk being worth fixing it, so they let it simmer until it finally does explode and bite them in the ass, and you get a sweet moment of going "I told you so!" (which promptly fades away because now you have to go fix it for them).

A lot of the things that also end up getting axed on the cutting room floor when it comes to software or hardware or whatever are nice things. Things that make you want to use the software more because it makes your life better. Things that don't really have revenue value outside of whatever intrinsic value you can squeeze into a user story or deftly written email. Like having a search function on a program, or maybe a sorting feature for some list. Just, nice things to have.

Fuck this guy above.

I aligned both risk and value into the same section simply because the motivations for doing something about a risk or doing something that doesn't have immediate money-making value come from the same place: A responsibility to the user or business that is NOT just making money. Unfortunately, Capitalism rewards value generation - capital. It does not reward (in a tangible way) making things nice to work with or preventing disaster (How do you put "prevented disasters" on a balance sheet?). It only rewards doing just enough to ensure your users aren't unhappy, and just enough to ensure a risk doesn't impact revenue enough to outweigh the cost of mitigating it.

I find these facts intolerable. I understand why they exist, but I vigorously disagree with them. You should not classify risks simply by their chance and value. If you keep passwords in plaintext, should it not be your duty to prevent that, no matter how unlikely it is a breach will occur, or how deeply embedded, or how inconsequential that system is? Should it not be your duty to make things that other people would want to use? Do you not want to have any smidgen of self-respect whatsoever when building things? Or have you been so thoroughly crushed by the corporate machinations we have built around technology, that everything is reduced to simply a dollar value?

You're allowed to say yes to that last statement. I won't blame you.

Some Semblance of a Conclusion

I work on Lain.la because it is fulfilling, even when it tires me out. I do so at any expense (time or money) because I feel I am contributing something to users of my service that helps them without trying to extract a fee from them. I do so because it is a protest against the modus operandi of modern corporations. The mere existence of Lain.la alone flies in the face of the concept of profit because I make no money whatsoever from offering my services, and furthermore I don't want to. It wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to have my expenses subsidized, but that's it. Nothing more. I have held this position for over four years and counting.

I maintain an iron fist on how it is run and allow essentially no one else to work on it because it is a reflection of my values and my values alone, and it is also my cross to bear. I see the tech industry and gaze upon it disappointed in the directions they are moving, and come back to Lain.la because I get to steer that ship myself, and therefore it will never disappoint me in that manner. While I am not at the nirvana of being completely independent from any third parties or corporations (I will excise Broadcom out of my stack, and Lain.la will be reborn free), I am closer than most, and the only thing limiting me from getting there is me (as in, my abilities, willpower, and resources). That's a good place to be. I can fix that.

I can't fix the world, but I can fix that.

-7666