Posts made by cakeis_not_alie

@scottalanmiller "Maybe, but by and large it is cold hearted pragmatism that pays the bills and keeps people employed."

Well, I guess that's an ideological difference. Maybe what I need is an IT community without such a Dickensian approach to HR.

@scottalanmiller "Okay, we definitely don't define shoe string the same. You are dealing with much larger firms in that space with much larger budgets. That's a huge budget for the SMB market where I come from."

It's all about what you have to do with that budget. $250K across 6 years may seem like a lot, but it's for a 22 man company and they have to keep 200 VMs and 100TB of data (churn of 10TB/month) going across that. And the IT spend is already a huge part of the company budget, there isn't a lot of wiggle room.

And htat's just one example.

@scottalanmiller "For a company that has a regular ebb and flow of profits, you save when you have profits and spend when you don't. That's how it works. If people have to be fired to do the right thing, it's not IT causing that, it is failing management."

Maybe. And maybe it's factors beyond their control. Or maybe they made the decision to help an employee pay for cancer drugs and everyone has to suck it up to get through. These small family-owned shops don't run on the sorts of coldhearted pragmatism that is so commonplace in larger shops.

@scottalanmiller Outside of the individual they have doing IT, the midsized companies in my stable will have maybe $250K for 6 years to spend on hardware and software. This has to run about 200 VMs and handle about 100TB of data.

The smaller ones have budgets of about $5k to $10K a year for IT and that usually includes a $1k to $2.5K rider for my services (or one of my fellows).

The larger ones in my stable can have $2.5M budgets. But those guys are (for example) a 5 man shop that does mostly video work. Their budgets get blown on 5000 node render farms. Even there, when you think about cost of cooling/facilities...they run close to the bone.

@scottalanmiller "That's partly my point. You are way senior to normal IT people. You can make enough to pay the mortgage on the side! You can pay your bills doing high end IT things that most people can't dream of doing."

I disagree. I don't pay my bills on the side. I was a full time sysadmin until Dec 24th and I wrote on the side. Now I'm a full time writer doing systems administration on the side. I don't yet know if the latter configuration will pay the mortgage. I frakking hope so.

"And then, of course, you can earn money the normal way doing traditional IT (being a normal sys admin or whatever role.) I'm not saying that you can't, I'm saying that you are in a position to chose to support whomever you wish and to do so however you wish. That makes you unique."

I don't know. There's plenty of people way smarter than me. There is absolutely nothing special or unique about me except my overwhelming fatness. Anything I do anyone else can do. I've trained a few to do it, too.

If I have a talent it's charisma. The ability to talk the talk and walk the walk that makes people like you and I able to go forth and be talking heads. But that's not needed to make the blinkenlights go bing. That kid A.J. could do what I do, I think, if he cared to.

I don't know man, I'm not really capable of thinking of myself as anything special at all.

@scottalanmiller Most of them get paid about $50k-$70K, depending on the dude. That's fairly typical for a small business sysadmin keeping a shoestring outfit going. Usually they also do something else for the company. One I know is, for example, also a developer. So he's half sysadmin, half dev. Another has accounting training, so he mostly spends his time working out esoteric bugs in the accounting package, or helping write scripts that (for example) parse JSON from a vendor into something the accounting system can comprehend.

@scottalanmiller "So the big question for @cakeis_not_alie .... why do you choose the types of clients that you do? This is an honest question. One that I think you need a solid answer for."

Because the people who own these companies and - more than that - the people who work for these companies are good people. They don't deserve to be unemployed. They don't deserve to have their businesses fail. They spend when they can, during booms. They tighen the belts during busts. The owners look afer their staff, and the staff come first.

Who are you going to fire in order to buy that SAN? Peter, whose kid has just gone into kindergarten? Or how about Jessica, who just found out she's pregnant? Do you fire Sandy, two years away from retirement? Or how about Jacob, who has worked at the company for 35 years, can still barely speak a word of English, but makes the most amazing woodwork known to man?

"Do you do it because you love that particular type of challenge?"

Nope.

"Do you do it because it makes tons of money (I suspect not.)"

Keeps a roof overhead. How much more do you need?

"Do you do it because you love getting to help companies that otherwise could not get IT services, at least not at your level?"

There's some of these, but mostly I help companies that are friends of friends, or which are customers of other companies I work with, all of whom have needs that can't be filled by the whitepaper swordsman.

"Something makes you work with these particular customers when you don't have to. You choose to. Define that and I think that you will have some of your answers."

I care about human beings? About the real world impacts of how everyday descisions affect them? I don't merely view them as "users" or "commodities"?

"Sure, that doesn't solve the fact that IT communities will always have a bunch of people that want to buy their way out of problems, want to force their decisions on your to reverse justify their own decision making processes or simply will refuse to take into account your specific business requirements. That will never change, that's humanity. We can maybe improve it, but the problem will always remain to some degree."

Well, I guess it sure isn't going to be something that's found here.

"But, I feel, that if you do some soul searching and define why you choose a lower income, harder struggle rather than a the same set of paths that most IT practitioners choose that maybe you would not feel so bad about the struggles and appreciate them for what they are - just part of the challenge."

It's not the struggles, SAM. It's the denigration, condescension and outright wasting of my time with stuff that isn’t helpful under the circumstances. You know, if you’re pimping your product before I say “yeah, the budget is X and it isn’t changing”, then groovy. I can respect that. But those who launch into the tirade of how it’s your moral duty to get the budget changed and just pry those dollars from the tight-fisted asshats…yeah, you know what? No.

Just no. I don’t want to spend time with those people. I don’t want to buy them beers or treat them as equals or play nice. We’ve all heard that crap before. But I just don’t have time for people who are going to tell me how my world is. I help most of these companies build their budgets. I know exactly how much money there is. To the dollar.

The budget is the budget and changing it isn’t always an option.
But you know what is an option? Getting better at IT. Doing more with less. I know because I’VE F[moderated]ING DONE IT FOR OVER A DECADE.

You know, when I was a kid, nerds could go to the comic book shop. There were no bullies there. We were all just nerds. Nobody hassled us. We could just be who we were. We helped each other. We didn't try to make the others feel like unpeople.

I guess what I wanted was a comic book store for the IT industry. A place for poor people to hang out and talk about their problems without having to constantly be on guard for bullies.

What I want is a place to talk about these sorts of things without the condescension and derision of the wealthy. And I’m now very sorry that I brought it up at all.

@scottalanmiller "Other IT people can't pay their mortgages with journalism and content generation. I do a bit of that and couldn't possibly keep the lights on with it. You are at the extreme high end of IT, you are very much alone, sadly."

Except I did pay my mortgage as a full time sysadmin doing this sort of IT for 11.5 years. I can still introduce you to dozens of others in the Edmonton area alone, and there have been hundreds over the years that have contacted me through Spiceworks or Twitter.

I seriously doubt all of them are trying to "get out of that world." Quite a few of them rather like being the company man and like the challenges. It's no different, in some ways, to the non-profit IT that someone mentionned above.

With the exception, of course, that non-profits get massive discounts from the likes of Microsoft.

@Dashrender "why do YOU want to help them continue to make life so hard for those around them when they are not willing to do what it takes to make the business run better?why do YOU want to help them continue to make life so hard for those around them when they are not willing to do what it takes to make the business run better?"

This is kind of exactly what I was talking about. So here we have the implicit assumption that helping a company make do with what they have is “helping them continue to make life hard for those around them.” Coupled with the assumption that they are “not willing to do what it takes.”

Clearly they have the money, right? They’re just not willing to spend. Or maybe they just need to…what? Mortgage their houses for IT? Fire everyone? Close up shop because they can’t do IT by whitepaper?
Right there. RIGHT THERE. Every iota of dripping condescension I was talking about in one quote.

@scottalanmiller I just spent 11.5 years as the systems administrator for a shoestring company. I run a consultancy that helps companies that need this kind of IT. I pay for my mortgage with tech journalism and commercial content generation.

So what you're saying is that I'm basically it. Alone. Everyone else just "tries to get out". Nobody else loves the thrill of doing the impossible, or feels that the "little guy" needs some expertise too.

So I am a freak. Or broken. Or just plain odd...and the chances of finding a place with people who are like me so that I can just feel like I don't have to walk around with sheilds up all the time is nil.

Lovely. I think I'm going to go do this next briefing and then drunk out of my mind.

HURRAY INTERNETS!

You ask "what is it that I am looking for"? That's a really fair question, I think.

I guess the reality of it is that I ma hoping there's a place to go with our issues where the default solution isn't "spend money you don't have". Where the people assume that new stuf cannot be bought. That the solutions have to be found with what's to hand. Now, the OP may say "hey, I'm looking to buy a solution"...but I get a lot of people messaging me looking for help with what they have.

Other sysadmins seem to have come to the conclusion that I am all about working with what's to hand. That's cool. But the demand for help is more than I can handle on my own. And hey, sometimes I need help too!

That's the sort of community I'm looking for. One where the default isn't about /selling/. Where it's not about making sure that everyone has the latest, greatest, most whitepapered install.

I do get the natural instinct on behalf of others to say "look, your job is to convince management to spend money". But the problem here is that it presumes that management has money, and are just cheap. Or that just because they are spending money over time they have the ability to make a big up front capital purchase to stem the bleeding. (If that were the case, cloud computing wouldn't exist in it's current form.)

@scottalanmiller Sir, you say "I don't see anyone looking down on IT practitioners who live without a good amount of resources". Then I submit that you are blind. Spiceworks is chok ablock full of this, and the VMware community is too. There's less of it here on MangoLassi...but the overwhelming majority of our industry not only looks down on these types, they actively persecute them.

There’s a lot more to doing IT for an SMB than finding technical perfection. Many of you don’t work in the smallest of the small SMB IT. SAM, for example, lives in what I would consider to be the cushy lap of luxury, floating on enormous budgets and working with companies who see value in three year refresh cycles.

SAM would tell me I’m crazy; he’s got plenty of SMB IT experience and I’m just a grouchy old git. John Frappier would tell us both we’re nuts, that he works in SMB IT and that IT for schools is small potatoes compared to “proper” IT.

Up and up and up the stack we go. I have a testlab that is worth the IT infrastructure of 20 of my clients put together. SAM has home IT that would trounce 85% of my clients, I am sure. Most of the people reading this have more up to date home PC towers than my clients have servers…and we all stopped buying PCs years ago.

Now, the above is filled with a bunch of generalisations. I know that. Allow me some artistic license here, I’m venting.

The point I’m trying to get across is that IT is diverse. It’s more diverse as you read this than when I wrote it. It’s more diverse when I wrote it than when I thought of it. And it’s certainly more diverse today than it was when we all started our technological escapades in the first place.

Yet we are all brand tribalists. We get in our heads that something is bad, or that something is good. We crusade for or against something. We champion brands, people, and even entire classes of solutions. I’m guilty of it. You, the reader, are guilty of it. Every single one of us is guilty of it.

What drives me mad is that we always seem unable to stop and remember that diversity thing. That what SAM thinks is “normal” and “small” is positively opulent to me. That what I think is “normal” and “small” would have seemed beyond opulent to 15 year old me.

We don’t all get the chance to do things by the book.

We don’t all get the chance to do things within support.

Hell, we don’t all even get the chance to buy new network cables when they’re needed.

So where do people like that go? Where is the discussion group for people who would consider the kinds of things SAM throws away to be upgrades? Where do the majority of the world’s sysadmins go, when Spiceworks drives these “leeches” out of the ecosystem, and MangoLassi is populated largely by people who have moved up the chain so long ago we don’t remember what it’s like to have your only UPS be 10 years old and running off of salvaged motorcycle batteries?

Where to the people running ESXi free in production and who are happy they managed to get hardware even capable of doing that congregate?

I don’t have answers. I am hoping you do. Because I am broken and I am defeated. I am tired of being told what a failure I am, and how worthless my clients are. I am tired of being told that thousands of people shouldn’t have jobs because we can’t afford to do things in a way that is beneficial to some commercial entity.

I am tired of trying to explain to someone the importance of “ease of use”, because it’s completely different when you have to be master of 200 different applications and all of the infrastructure to run them than it is when you get to be a specialist in just one class of (or even just one) application.

Most of all, I am sick unto death of this attitude that pervades out industry that any one solution is suitable for all people, or that the fact that a product is better in some (frankly irrelevant) technical way means that everyone should buy it, even when they don’t have the money to do so.

I got into IT to help people. Computers were supposed to make our lives better. I still believe that’s what they’re here to do. And I don’t believe “efficiency” means what most of these vendors think it does.

I’ve built an entire career out of making what other people call “impossible” work in the real world. I have built an entire career out of creating solutions that never should have worked work anyways, through sheer force of will.

It’s a young man’s game, but I know for a fact that I am not alone. There are hundreds of thousands of my fellow systems administrators who live that life. Hundreds of thousands of us who string by on the bleeding edge of nothing.

I’m sick of being told we’re worthless and that we should fade away. But I’m far too broken to fight to carve out a niche somewhere else.

So where do we go? Here? A look at the most frequent posters for MangoLassi shows a lot of the people I typically associate with being really down us “junk peddlers”. I don’t think we meet the minimum richness threshold for MangoLassi.

So are there other communities? Do I need to start impovrishednerds.com? I don’t have answers. I rather hope you lot do.