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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

#21

Post by m3rc »

kenko wrote: post #6
nasalgoat wrote: post #5

Although 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?

Until you're running systems that are actually too old to find anyone who will maintain them, or repair them when they inevitably break.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#22

Post by dexterdog »

nasalgoat wrote: post #19
GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK you're gonna save $X / year, how many person-hours is it going to cost you to do the move?

I don't know, a couple of 8-hour days? Just to make a backup alone is worth it. Did I forget to mention none of it is documented or backed up properly?

But touching it could break it. Sometimes it's best to let it run its course.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#23

Post by webjprgm »

ethbro wrote: post #10
Sanddancer wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There was one time (2006 at a company of less than 50 people) where I absolutely refused to build the new pricing features in a billing system (which would have been a big hack on a long series of smaller hacks) unless they let me refactor it (meaning rebuild it from scratch). After waiting for a few months without their new pricing features they finally gave in. That's at a young, nimble company where the co-CEO had a programming background. I can only imagine how hard a fight that would be at a larger, slower company.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#24

Post by raverbashing »

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #14
nasalgoat wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OK you're gonna save $X / year, how many person-hours is it going to cost you to do the move?

How many person-hours is it going to cost you to do the move from a broken box, a faulty hard-drive and/or there's a non-updateable security vulnerability on the system running on the boxes?

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#25

Post by ddoscampaign »

Reminds me of a contract gig I passed on to support Microsoft's creaky inheritance of Danger's Hiptop/Sidekick stuck in cheapest maintenance mode. Everyone associated were trying to rotate out and it seemed like morale was less than zero.

Also never work for slave-driving shops like Taos (aka Tause Mountain) unless you really need the money because it will crush your soul. (eg master cool techs and be awesomely personable to get cooler gigs/referrals.)

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#26

Post by Theodores »

I supported booking systems that could have bookings stretching far into the future, this made switching systems tricky as a lot of quite complex bookings would need recreating with each taking proper time to do. The scope for automation was there but that wasn't possible.

With the software we supported there was no expertise in the company as the original developers left a long time ago. Therefore there was no way to understand why something broke or to write a patch. Instead everything was fixed by rote, if this went wrong then you did this. If that went wrong then you did whatever was needed for that. All of these fixes were handed down in the oral tradition and you took your own notes - there was no manual.

We further out sourced to India so there was no trace of the people responsible for the code, just us clueless idiots.

Some of these systems were MS DOS based and this was about a decade ago. What I did manage though was a means of getting on to any computer anywhere in the world even if it was totally air gapped and owned by someone that did not speak English. Even better, in most cases this would take seconds from a standing start. If I needed to access a computer that was on a remote network but turned off, I could usually Magic Packet it on and be fixing it as soon as it booted. This was a golden era for my remote access skills, nowadays I have difficulties getting my own computer online!

There is another way of looking at this, from the perspective of what will be out there for you to do in 25 years time, I am optimistic that there will be legacy work for us if we cannot keep up with the new stuff.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#27

Post by emidln »

nasalgoat wrote: post #5

Although 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.

I remember upgrading a bunch of this stuff in the mid to late 00s. Likely nothing that I upgraded to then modern standards using Python 2.6 and PHP 5.x has seen an update. At the time, it was actually hard to upgrade to PHP 5 or anything other than PHP 4 or Perl 5 because so many sites were using shared hosting that only support PHP4/Perl5 + MySQL.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#28

Post by Killswitch »

dexterdog wrote: post #22
nasalgoat wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, a couple of 8-hour days? Just to make a backup alone is worth it. Did I forget to mention none of it is documented or backed up properly?

But touching it could break it. Sometimes it's best to let it run its course.

Until it dies and you start over from scratch.

I am from the adult industry. They are notorious for having that "welp, server harddrive failed, need to rebuild from scratch" mentality.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#29

Post by untothebreach »

PaulHoule wrote: post #4

The 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.

You get this with Autonomy/Interwoven/HP Teamsite experience too. I just want to write back, "IT WAS MY FIRST JOB NO NO NO 1000x NO"

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#30

Post by Nano2rad »

PaulHoule wrote: post #4

The 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.

Outsource!?
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