Is Most IT Really Corrupt?
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@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@dashrender The fix would have run us some 10s of thousands of dollars, because the Host was setup on RAID5 with four drives prior to my arrival. We had a triple-drive failure on that Host, and the backups they were supposedly managing never actually happened off-site, and the on-site backups it turned out were scrambled so badly by the box they were being sent to on-site, that they were completely un-readable, meaning that the only fix they could offer was essentially a complete software-side environment rebuild from the ground with an on-site exchange orphaned from it's domain in that case.
What's great about this story is it has nothing to do with a MSP, or a MSP model. In house IT can not pay attention to backups, or setup everything in RAID 0 (Working at a MSP we had to clean this up a lot, when onboarding clients).
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@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@dashrender In my mind, a bench tech actually does tech work. Like troubleshooting issues that can't be done remotely, like a workstation that won't boot. You're not troubleshooting that from a few hundred miles away very well lol, someone has to put hands on that to do anything with it. It's difficult to maintain cost effectiveness except in particularly good SMBs with multiple spares sitting on site, and it takes more time to do a workstation swap managed by a clueless user versus a legitimate technician of just about any level. If they have any issues at all, it's burning vastly more expensive MSP time at over $100/hour minimum for direct support that isn't covered in a contract.
We did VDI a lot for service delivery. Thin clients REALLY don't die much. Eliminated the need for bench entirely, and spares were cheap to have sitting in each branch office.
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@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
For me, benefits don't cost us anywhere remotely close to 25K/yr, it's more like 15K/yr.
There's a lot of costs to carrying an employee. Unemployment insurance/tax, the other 1/2 of FICA, corporate insurance and liability often is a per head charge and then others that could be sunk costs, or not (Real estate for office, air con/power for employee, parking spots that can be anything from a free dirt pad, to a $150 a month contract garage). Throw in software licensing (CAL's, 365/office) and general software licensing for IT specific tools (License for Fusion, a Secret server for password management) and the stuff adds up. MSP's get to amortize this stuff across multiple customers and their RMM and other tools get to take advantage of licensing at scale. We paid maybe $2 per device per month we were doing log analytics against, where a comparable onsite license for the same product was $250 per device. (We didn't even have much scale).
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@dashrender said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
One of the things here is not to simply look at cost savings, but cost parity. If the company gets all the same work done at a higher quality at the same cost, that's a win.
When I worked for a MSP, no one came to us to save money. (and I mean no one).
They came to us over money but it boiled down to...
- They wanted to get more value for the same spend.
- They wanted to spend more, but know where it was going.
I'd argue SaaS business have the same model. I can keep using my 12-year-old copy of ACT for CRM, and it's a TON cheaper than SalesForce (Sunk cost) but I see a hell of a lot of companies going to SalesForce.
If you think your primary job in IT is to control cost (and not to increase agility for the business, or mitigate risk) then at best you're going to be stuck at 30% below market rate for someone with your number of years in IT, and at worse you'll get pushed out by further automation, SaaS/Cloud/Simplification.
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@dashrender said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
As far as job sharing, that's precisely why I said that SMBs require generalists. There will likely never be a time or place where SMBs don't need generalists (not just in IT), and an IT generalist is a cost-saving factor that no one who has posted here has seemed to enter into their calculations. If you try and consider SMBs in Enterprise terms, you're quite likely doing it wrong, because SMBs aren't generally like that until they reach a certain size. They're entirely different types of entities whose similarities largely end at the point where you acknowledge that they are businesses of different scale. You can't run an SMB like an Enterprise, because SMBs don't possess the scale to staff like an Enterprise. It's extremely rare in most fields that it is cheaper to hire a contractor than it is to utilize your own staff. The cost-savings only ever comes when expertise is required, or regulation requires typically. The on-staff IT in an SMB is probably not only doing IT, you're correct. That is precisely why the MSP saves money argument is wonky, because it fails to account for the other tasks that that in-house IT staff does in addition to the basic management and maintenance of the environment. Sure, one can make the argument that the IT staff may not be adequately managing the environment... but it's a may, not a will or a must. It's also entirely possible that they're bringing lots of added value over an MSP by doing other tasks that an MSP won't do at all, or will only do for added, cumulative costs that simply don't exist with on-site staff.
Of course this is true - but it's now likely that you are over or under paying that person for these other non IT jobs. It's extremely unlikely that a person is clocking out when done with IT work at wage X and then clocking in at wage y when they are doing non IT things.
This is where the company can either come out ahead or behind.
So we have two situations, the over and the under paid - there's always the potential for parity pay, but that really seems pretty unlikely based on skill sets.You either end up with someone who's bad at IT and the right price for taking apart printers or mopping the floors, or you get someone who's amazing at IT and completely over priced.
In reality, you get the former until they leave, get replaced by the latter, suffer from thisuntil they become the former, they leave and the cycle starts all over again.
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@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
40 people vs 2 printers (not all of the employees need to print like that) = a lot of not able to print at the same time, or a lot of standing around with not so trustworthy clients in their offices where their purses, phones, etc. are. I don't know if any of you deal with the public a lot or not, but our clientele are not to be trusted, as they have stolen from many of our employees before. Also, the cost for laser prints isn't remotely $0.25/print (we do use laser printers), though it's absolutely more than a big multifunction, I concur. We tried consolidating printers, it wasted a lot of time and money, because wasting 2 minutes a person per day X 40 X 5 X 52 = a lot of money wasted in useless labor. Only a little shy of 350 hours a year in wasted labor money. Not even remotely worth considering worth it in any way, because that's thousands of dollars in labor in a year that is 100% wasted.
Where are you working that you have the public directly having that type of access? and if that's really the case, why not have a lockable drawer in every office, problem solved.
That time 350 hours, they make what, $20/hr? = $7000 How much is spent supporting those 40 printers vs 3 or 4 printers? what's the cost difference between 40 laser printers vs 3-4 large ones? waiting around? get faster printing printers.
There are places and reasons to deploy individual printers, but I haven't heard them in this case yet.
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@dashrender said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
or a lot of standing around with not so trustworthy clients in their offices where their purses, phones, etc. are. I don't know if any of you deal with the public a lot or not, but our clientele are not to be trusted, as they have stolen from many of our employees before
I like central print servers where you walk up, enter your code, then it dumps the print queue for what you had queued (on some crazy fast printer). You can do secure printing in a central manner this way while still maintaining compliance. It also has the benefit of they can pick up their print jobs from ANY office.
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@storageninja said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@dashrender said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
or a lot of standing around with not so trustworthy clients in their offices where their purses, phones, etc. are. I don't know if any of you deal with the public a lot or not, but our clientele are not to be trusted, as they have stolen from many of our employees before
I like central print servers where you walk up, enter your code, then it dumps the print queue for what you had queued (on some crazy fast printer). You can do secure printing in a central manner this way while still maintaining compliance. It also has the benefit of they can pick up their print jobs from ANY office.
your quote is broken again, I didn't say that.
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@storageninja said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@scottalanmiller Totally agree it's often really obvious in SMB, but to them it's not a question of whether there is theft or not even when they notice it, but whether the individual is worth losing over it. Enterprise minded people have this mistaken idea oftentimes that everyone is replaceable or interchangeable. SMBs don't have the luxury of such a silly notion, so when they detect theft they must weigh relative value where Enterprises often simply don't bother because they seem to think they don't have to.
SMBs definitely have that option. It's an illusion that the do not. SMBs need fewer resources and at a lower level so actually have more ability to replace. What's often approaching impossible for an enterprise might be trivial for an SMB. SMB needs are so often generic and interchangeable compared to enterprise. They have a big advantage here.
Wait, is he saying people in SMBs are not easy to replace? The MSP and SaaS industry continue to make that a less defendnable position.
I think so. But SMB is so easy to replace. There is a waiting line of out of work or looking for different work SMB people (all with experience) for every available position out there. No one lacks someone for an SMB position. And nearly anyone from the enterprise can do SMB work, might be a small learning curve, but most SMB is much easier than most enterprise work (always exceptions) so there is a pretty big pool available there, too. And if SMBs were willing to pay market rates, they could hire people out of MSPs, too.
Because SMBs have the lowest requirements for staff, they have the easiest time hiring. It just makes the least sense to do so.
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@storageninja said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
As far as underhanded or shady purchasing deals with kickbacks, I would agree that IT are pretty uniquely situated to participate in such practices far more so than the vast majority of fields. I'll also agree that SMBs get the short end of things in terms of quality personnel of course, because they don't have the scope of reach for talent recruitment, nor the vast resources that Enterprises typically do, so oftentimes the Enterprises will scoop up much of the best talent before SMBs ever get a chance. Such scenarios obviously would leave the SMBs with far less comparable or adequately capable talent to choose from, forcing them to have to make due with what they have left to select from. Ironically, the biggest issue with SMBs may well be Enterprises gobbling up much of the best talent, perhaps as much as the fact that SMBs may not be great businesses.
A huge issue with SMB's is they have far less robust hiring practices. SMB's tend to cheap out on background checks for criminal actions (and in some cases even hilariously waste money on drug tests for IT staff, while using the "budget" background check).
I saw an IT director wiretap a board meeting at a SMB once. The guy was a little off, but honestly, I blame management. They wanted to have an IT director slash custom software developer who worked 70 hour weeks with 1 week of vacation a year and they paid a farcical 100K with no variable comp. If you have such unrealistic compensation requirements, your only option is going to be getting someone who's an idiot or worse, has some "fun" quirks like ethics or mental health.
Or, quite often, is totally unqualified AND has some quirks. The two often go together.
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@storageninja said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
This was an interesting read. I had never really given any thought to corruption in IT beyond the faking it idea. I sure as heck wouldn't feel comfortable working somewhere and not knowing what I'm doing and not even making an effort to learn.
And yet, it's so common that people no longer even realize it is something to question!
As long as you know how to learn quickly this one is often over-rated. It's the guys who NEVER learn what their job is (20 years in, having the SE come in once a week and make changes to network for them in exchange for buying enterysys switches) where it's out of hand.
That's what we see so much of. People doing the same job for a decade and not knowing even the most basic things about their specific jobs or environments. Outsourcing everything to the point where their own job has no point - a secretary could do it in 30 minutes a week without needing any training. We find this a lot. People just cashing a paycheck when they've actually outsourced themselves but told no one.
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@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@storageninja I'm saying that if there were enough good MSPs, I would agree with you. But there simply aren't enough of them...
That's the thing about MSPs. It only takes one. Unlike employees where you need to find a miracle employee for every individual SMB, all SMBs can go to the same MSP. There are absolutely enough MSPs to more than fill any demand from customers. I know good MSPs, I know none that don't take on more work. In theory some might refuse, but in practice, it's not a problem.
This is a market flushed with good MSPs and essentially no SMBs looking for them.
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@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
SMBs can't replace people as easily as Enterprises, because most of the best talent is gone before they can get to them.
The market doesn't agree. SMB people are everywhere. I can find you many decent ones at any given moment. Enterprise people no such luck. Enterprises cannot hire for anything. That's why they pay more and more stealing people from each other.
Enterprises go years without being able to fill positions. SMBs never need to go over a week. Any delay for an SMB hiring taking more than a week is a process problem on the SMB side. And, of course, SMBs have those problems in spades - total lack of how to hire talented people goes part and parcel with other SMB management problems. But that has nothing to do with SMBs lacking options, it's just them not taking them.
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@dashrender said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@storageninja said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@dashrender said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
or a lot of standing around with not so trustworthy clients in their offices where their purses, phones, etc. are. I don't know if any of you deal with the public a lot or not, but our clientele are not to be trusted, as they have stolen from many of our employees before
I like central print servers where you walk up, enter your code, then it dumps the print queue for what you had queued (on some crazy fast printer). You can do secure printing in a central manner this way while still maintaining compliance. It also has the benefit of they can pick up their print jobs from ANY office.
your quote is broken again, I didn't say that.
This better?
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https://i.imgur.com/ddT4ywV.png
I'm not sure what's happening to your quotes, this as shown, this indicates that I said this, and I didn't, That was tirendir.
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@scottalanmiller I think what we're really pointing at is that SMBs settle when it comes to staffing, a LOT. Enterprises often don't settle until they feel they have to, because they can afford to do so while SMBs I believe more frequently cannot. It's much easier to leave a position unfilled because of a specialized need when you have 2000 employees and we're talking 0.05% of your staffing unfilled in comparison to an SMB with 20 or 50 employees who is leaving between 2%-5% of their entire staffing empty. Scale mitigates the issues of leaving 0.05% of your workforce unoccupied, specialized need or not. Also, Enterprises will typically have the resources to pay someone else to do the job until they can fill it the way they prefer, or even still they may not even need it badly enough to do anything about it at all in a very immediate sense.
Just because SMBs hire a lot of people quickly doesn't mean that's a good thing, and I think we both agree upon that. SMBs take a far greater hit for not doing so than Enterprises whose scale mitigates the issue dramatically in comparison. As we've brought up earlier in this thread, just because there are people doesn't mean but a very small handful of them are actually good people for IT roles. SMBs lack the resources and as you point out, and also frequently the understanding about the value of good IT to ultimately pay them what they could be worth. So the good ones often move on quickly unless they find an SMB that affords an abnormally good workplace.
I would argue that SMBs struggling to hire talent may or may not be due to a process problem, as I would point out that a great many SMBs have no HR or hiring department at all. They usually can't afford such a luxury unless they farm those things out to a contractor. Then once again, they are kind of at the mercy of the skill and talent of said contractor. I would posit that a big part of the problem is that it takes a talented individual to size up another talented individual well. Numerically, the odds are against SMBs having the personnel required to do such things well in most cases. Sure anyone can spot talent, but figuring out how much talent they have will likely require at least a similar level of talent. Would you agree?
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For the record, I'm not necessarily saying that SMBs are great and Enterprises are evil or anything absurd like that. I'm just more focused on the concept that operating SMBs well is difficult for a variety of reasons that are likely more complicated than just poor decision making (although that's definitely a much greater factor than in Enterprise, and probably the single biggest and easiest issue to point out). My take is essentially that everything about SMBs success or failure boils down to every decision having a far greater impact in SMB than it has in Enterprise, because the greater the scale, the more scale mitigates the impact of every decision. In my mind, it's a minor miracle when almost any SMB manages to successfully grow to Enterprise scale because it's immensely easier to fail as an SMB than it is to grow to out of the SMB space.
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@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@scottalanmiller I think what we're really pointing at is that SMBs settle when it comes to staffing, a LOT. Enterprises often don't settle until they feel they have to, because they can afford to do so while SMBs I believe more frequently cannot.
This is true to some degree. SMBs settle because they want to, however. SMBs have access to the MSP/ITSP market that Enterprises realistically do not. There are more resources available to the SMB market than the SMB market is willing to utilize - sure if all SMBs decided to hire well they'd be screwed, but they just don't bother leaving loads of good talent wasted whether individual or *SP oriented.
Enterprises rarely leave the good people on the market, someone snaps them up quickly. But SMBs decide to forego good hiring the majority of the time. Any SMB that wants good people can get them pretty easily. So while they might decide to settle, it's not because they have to.
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@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
It's much easier to leave a position unfilled because of a specialized need when you have 2000 employees and we're talking 0.05% of your staffing unfilled in comparison to an SMB with 20 or 50 employees who is leaving between 2%-5% of their entire staffing empty. Scale mitigates the issues of leaving 0.05% of your workforce unoccupied, specialized need or not. Also, Enterprises will typically have the resources to pay someone else to do the job until they can fill it the way they prefer, or even still they may not even need it badly enough to do anything about it at all in a very immediate sense.
True, which is just a good way of saying that MSPs / ITSPs are critical in the SMB because they fix this problem there.
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@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
I would argue that SMBs struggling to hire talent may or may not be due to a process problem, as I would point out that a great many SMBs have no HR or hiring department at all.
HR has no value in hiring processes. The CEO's job #1 is hiring good staff. No matter how many departments you have, you have a person whose role it is to hire the other people. No company is missing that. They might not do their job well, but there is no one to blame except for the CEO as that is their first and most critical job.
