The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever
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Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever
#2Not nearly as bad, but this reminds me of some of the ridiculous requirements at the last program I worked at my previous employer.
One of those was that our code had to compile on a 32-bit SPARC pizza box running Solaris 2.6. This was in 2009. It was all about some stupid metric: our code portability was measured by how many different platforms we could compile and run on. It didn't matter how obsolete or inappropriate those platforms were; if we could compile and run it counted. Having that number go down was politically unacceptable.
Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever
#3More like Not Invented Here syndrome to the level of fatal pathology.
Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever
#4The only way to stop this madness is to go on strike against it, as you did.
I work very hard to never mention online that I've had anything to do with SharePoint or ColdFusion because it will bring recruiters with a job that will kill you.
Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever
#5Although nothing compared to what was in this story, you should see the level of obsolete crap in place at adult website providers. Systems that haven't changed since the 90's that still generate revenue, so they'll never be shut off until there's a flood or a 40MB hard drive finally dies.
Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever
#6Although nothing compared to what was in this story, you should see the level of obsolete crap in place at adult website providers. Systems that haven't changed since the 90's that still generate revenue, so they'll never be shut off until there's a flood or a 40MB hard drive finally dies.
Have to admit, that approach makes a lot of sense to me. It's still chugging along and bringing in $, so why not just have a policy of benevolent neglect?
Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever
#7I think the most interesting lessons of this story have to do with the following expectations.
First, the expectation of support timelines. It seems in tech that support is promised for products far beyond when the vendor should reasonably be expected to support them. Companies make large investments in technology that ultimately aren't long-term enough.
Lesson: Any company doing a major project where there is significant cost (as a percentage of the overall cost) in hardware or software, and that selected hardware or software is not commodity level or has low market penetration in their industry should seriously reconsider the projections of TCO, as long-term support will get increasingly expensive over the life of the project (Contrived example, supporting Windows XP via virtualization vs OS/2 Warp)
A second expectation is the timeline of viability for technologies. Non-technical business people of the past generally seemed to have an expectation of viability that was around 15-20 years. More recently, stated expectations seem shorter, but are actually not.
Lesson: Businesses that make serious investments in technology need to consider length of that investment, and technical people should probably take those estimates and double or triple them, because that's probably how long hardware/software will be in use. Companies providing technology or support need to have realistic timeframes of support.
As a corollary to this lesson, I have spent some of my career thus far doing IT support-type roles for small organizations, and while I haven't encountered quite the same level of obsolescence as the author, I have seen people using NT 4 for critical server infrastructure in 2012, I've set up DOSBOX[1] in Windows 7 for clients to continue to use that version of Lotus 1-2-3 they paid for and have been using since 1987 , and I've tried to figure out, in 2011, why Netscape Navigator on, I think System 7, ( using dial-up! ) wouldn't properly render a webpage. People keep tech a long time, and people in the tech world need to expect that, and plan accordingly.
The final expectation is one that technology companies have, which is that tech should be replaced. While there are many use cases where tech gets old, breaks, has to be replaced, there are lots of cases where it can be functional for almost indefinite periods of time, and industries that will expect such.
Lesson: Tech companies in should not neglect the future, but should also strive to design objects of technology that can last a very, very long time. Companies that do so will find a niche and make money because there will always[2] be enough customers to support them.
[1]It was going to get some use on an iPad via LogMeIn and there was some reason I've forgotten why DOSBOX was a better choice than the command prompt
[2] Subject to prevailing economic winds, of course. You can still buy buggies and buggy whips, but it's not a growth business.
Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever
#8Although nothing compared to what was in this story, you should see the level of obsolete crap in place at adult website providers. Systems that haven't changed since the 90's that still generate revenue, so they'll never be shut off until there's a flood or a 40MB hard drive finally dies.
Have to admit, that approach makes a lot of sense to me. It's still chugging along and bringing in $, so why not just have a policy of benevolent neglect?
That Pentium-90 is probably sucking a ton of power at this point, when it could be virtualized and you could run 50 of those boxes on an $800 Dell pizza box. I mean, they are literally running the same hardware from the 90s.
Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever
#9More like Not Invented Here syndrome to the level of fatal pathology.
It's its sibling, Already Invented Here. Every kludge makes sense in the context of the system state when it was implemented, but that leads to a system where /everything/ ends up a kludge. Management didn't want to invest any time in fixing a system that already "worked", so 30 years of temporary fixes turned it into an absolute monstrosity.
Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever
#10More like Not Invented Here syndrome to the level of fatal pathology.
It's its sibling, Already Invented Here. Every kludge makes sense in the context of the system state when it was implemented, but that leads to a system where /everything/ ends up a kludge. Management didn't want to invest any time in fixing a system that already "worked", so 30 years of temporary fixes turned it into an absolute monstrosity.
Both of these are important observations. And, as far as I can tell, both of them exist largely because of corporate politics.
If you could design a corporate culture that minimized the incentives towards both, I think you'd be a long way towards having a more sustainable company viz technology.