Month: October 2013

It’s something with which I am not terribly familiar, thankfully, when it comes to someone’s health.  When it comes to technology, on the other hand….

As I said before, in the event that I’m still around in my current position by the end of the year, I’m expected to buy some more letters to go after my name.  They’ll signify that I can pick out keywords, and click through a multiple choice test.

Awesome

How can anyone argue with those credentials?

Unfortunately for me, I do pay attention to the material, and understand that there’s an assumption that using any of these latest and greatest methods assumes your organization has complete latitude in the decision-making process.

In reality, in many circumstances, outside the private sector, you do not have full latitude.  The decisions are made at higher levels, and your struggle is trying to accommodate those decisions made elsewhere.

(I think it’d be slick to have a cluestick certification.  Joe Engineer, BWTFCS…)

How do you play the hand you’re dealt?  You might be an expert at how you’d deal with an ideal situation, but I think how you deal with adversity speaks more to your talent.

But, then, I’m naive, and don’t have unlimited time or resources to buy extra letters after my name.

And, I’m also half-blind, which makes me hate those perfect Skillsoft courses all the more.

Follow-up to this.

Since I’ve basically been told I need to buy the letters, “ITIL” to go after my name to keep my job, one of the concepts there is doing analysis to determine whether it makes sense to keep a service in-house versus outsourcing it.

But what happens when you’re compelled to outsource something, even something that wouldn’t pass the analysis?  Do you need to still do the analysis?

tic-toc tic-toc tic-toc…..

Wouldn’t the time spent on figuring out whether you should outsource, and sketching out a potential in-house replacement be better spent figuring out the transition plan?

I shouldn’t ask these sorts of questions;  I’m not a team player.

Background music.  Please refrain from vomiting.

I will try to do the same, myself.

I’ve been working through, since late last week, something rather significant that’ll forever change the way people do IS design.

Enterprise-grade services don’t have to be hosted locally, anymore.

Linus Torvalds once said something along the lines of everything-is-a-stream-of-bytes.  What’s the compelling reason those streams of bytes have to go to ::1 (or 127.0.0.1, for those of you stuck in the 1970s with your networks), or shmem?  Someone please give me four compelling reasons why that stream of bytes can’t have its datastore somewhere else.

Or, maybe, the datastore is in “the cloud,” and there’s periodic replication….?

My blog, which sucks (as does yours, if you have one), uses a rather ubiquitous database as its backend.  What’s to stop me from using something somewhere else?

The same could be said for lots of things.

And it’d all probably be more reliable than my ham-handed  sekurity measures.

Yes, I’d be completely unaccustomed to operating that way.  But it wasn’t too long ago that I was completely unaccustomed to operating the way I have been for the past decade or so.

Big deal.  Technology changes.  Get over it.

I understand this is easier said than done for the graying middle managers who’ve artfully crafted the business argument that places the utmost emphasis on schedule adherence.  You may be doing the wrong thing, but, goddamnit, you met the schedule.

I want to deliver quality products.  If that makes me a bad person, so be it.

I really don’t like rehashing the stuff I’ve written before.  (Some people revel in it;  I’m not one of those people.)

That said, the last few weeks really reinforce what I wrote in #2 here.

Whether or not your behavior is ethical (since morality doesn’t matter to people in modern business….) doesn’t matter much if ultimately what you’re delivering is shoddy work.

What the stick-to-the-schedule people need to understand is that sometimes things do need significant rework to approach adequacy.

There is no shame in starting from scratch when what you’ve put together really sucks.  Yes, it takes time.  Yes, this might blow a schedule written by someone with no familiarly with what the tasks actually entail.

If that makes me a problem, so be it.  I value my time too much to spend it producing nothing but bad, wrong, work.