BOFH: This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back "Ok James, I think it's time we released you into the wild," I say. "What?!" James gasps, no doubt thinking window, brief scream, distant thud, car alarm. "Into the wild," The PFY says. "We can teach you no more. From now on it's all practical experience." "What?" "We've found you a job, faked some credentials and you have …
Excellent - a large dose of truth in there. I particularly liked the bit about reinventing new terms for the same thing. Up to now I haven't seen a single thing that hadn't been done earlier on a mainframe and certainly not with the same respect for the capabilities of the machines running the code.
I remember when the 'cloud' first became a thing - I thought I knew a thing or two at the time, but here was a bunch of numpties sales droids selling something that I knew nothing about.
It actually took me a while (I was young then) to work out what they meant - at which point I was like "Fuck me - you ignorant arseholes have just re-branded the hosting services" (which even back then included a web page where you could order the server of your specification and have it rolled out within the day).
As stated in TFA (many a true word, etc), just wait until they're selling you a "synergy leveraging existing competencies to bring unparalleled flexibility" to cloud storage, which basically means a pass-through NAS box near the edge router with a couple of hard drives in it intercepting calls to your cloud provider if pings fail and rsync running as a daemon. The rest is all semantics. Or Symantec, probably.
To El Reg: Why is there no grumpy, cynical old misanthrope icon? Most of us are, regardless of gender or age. The windows user comes close but he looks too harmless.
"... - you ignorant arseholes have just re-branded the hosting services..."
And that ignores the even earlier days of "time sharing" where you could walk into a Radio Shack and buy time at a terminal to run your BASIC code, then save it to wherever the terminal liked to. Right before PCs appeared with exotic names like Osborne and Kaypro.
New? The term "cloud" was used by the fellow that taught me about the workings of the internet. As nearly as I can tell, the allusion was to the nebulous nature of the user's knowledge about where his files really were. The trainer used a diagram that showed a PC linked to a LAN, in turn linked to a WAN, which in turn was linked to a "cloud" representing the internet.
With the BOFH there no, so I assume some sort of Star Trek fight to the death scene needs to take place before the PFY replaces the BOFH.
Stephen: Did you ever hear the tragedy of BOFH The Wise?
James: No?
Stephen: I thought not. It’s not a story the HR would tell you. It’s an IT legend. BOFH was a Dark Lord of IT, so powerful and so wise he could influence management to increase budgets… He had such a knowledge of the dark side, he could even keep the ones he cared about from being sacked for gross misconduct.
James: He could actually save people from summary termination?
Stephen: The dark side is a pathway to many defenestrative abilities some consider to be... unethical.
James: What happened to him?
Stephen: He became so powerful… the only thing he was afraid of was losing his power, which eventually, of course, he did. Unfortunately, he taught his apprentice everything he knew, then his apprentice had him sacked for embezzlement and use of a cattle-prod without completing the necessary risk assessment paperwork. Ironic. He could save others, but not himself.
Did you miss the part at the beginning about James' job interview across town? I am assuming the current PFY is as safe as he ever is. The BOFH is just, as they say, "paying it forward" by training up a young, future BOFH to send out into the world to spread the joys of slippery stairwells, cattle prods, and quicklime.
"Maybe it ends up with a, "this town ain't big enough for the both of us," kind of scenario?"
Could well be. Although...whatever became of Simon's girlfriend Gina from a few years ago? She was Simon's equal, perhaps his better. Then she just sort of disappeared. Perhaps he is planning to use James as a pawn in some war with her.
Yeah, years...
If you wanna feel REALLY old, go read some of the ones from before 2005 and think "OMG? It's been 10+ years but I still remember this story line..."
Somewhere, way back in the early days, I remember the story where Simon was at some sort of training, and said something that I printed out and stuck to my wall:
"But root IS my account!"
"we stuffed the red pill into your mouth and held your nose weeks ago." The Duo are getting soft - Not all that long ago it would have been duct tape OVER the mouth and holding the nose for anyone prying into the secrets of the sanctum.
BOFH has been a good reader of character, though - he did spare the over-eager youngster who became PFY, and became, in the man's own words, "a fiend with a scarcely human face." Though the PFY did have to demonstrate his chops by checkmating the BOFH's attempt to get him fired, invoking the "Uncle Brian" defense, he wasn't just accepted into the sanctum as James has been....
...or has he been? That engagement the lined up for him could still prove to be a tragic, carefully planned accident...
So the BOFH-ness doesn't work on the same principle as the Sith Lords? Neat!
Instead, if James makes it to his job interview, he will be appointed junior BOFH at a new company, where, with time he will select a PFY and with time create new BOFHs to conquer other enterprises.
So the shadow league of the BOFHs slowly but surely creeps in the underbelly of the IT community, taking it over for the greater good (of themselves)
"This the real world – a world where IT Managers are often dumber than the cleaners, the cleaners far smarter than the users and processor speed being almost entirely irrelevant....
"It's a world where you get paid to make up new words for the same old crap simply by changing the access method of one of the layers, where literally anyone can be a visionary and the beauty and elegance of bespoke craftsperson code is undermined by a user who demands a flashing font so that other users will know that the box marked 'warning' is important."
Spot bloody on. May these words be laser etched on the inside of your eyelid. Of the remaining eye.
...you mean the only people able to positively identify members are... beancounters? When tabulating the membership fees?!? *gasp, shock, horror* I see monumental potential here for a brewing "class war" of epic proportions (poor beancounters... of course...)!
So I assume it is operated somewhat like a classic MLM pyramid scheme, with the original BOFH (the BOFH's mentor's mentor's mentor, perhaps?) sitting at the top of the pyramid collecting most of the money until he retires, and everyone below moves up a level.
The only output it needs to produce are whitepapers custom tailored to "get the Boss/Director to go along with the strategy I want, rather than what Gartner tells them to want", so almost all the dues should go purely to profit of the BOFHs in the pyramid.
They are not murders, they are accidents, after all, if the dispatch manager in one of my old jobs managed to strangle himself with his own tie getting caught in the industrial cardboard shredder*, I'm sure its easy to for someone to fall out of a window during a meeting........
* PS he did survive.... curse that attentive admin drone and that easy access e-stop button.....
While there is often only one murder, there are certain episodes where people are dropping like flies.
Admittedly, the impact of the 4th, then 5th cadaver is all the greater when it's generally one or two bodies per episode.
Have you seen the list of counties though ?
If this series goes on much longer, they're going to have to edit a special atlas just for Midsomer.
Sometime, someone should start a BUFH. Not about the normal dead from the neck up type of user, but the ones that built the network computers, wired it up, and then had the "Boss" hire a would-be BOFH to administer the system - badly. Since our - the systems builders - job was really nothing to do with computing except writing reports, data entry and analysis, etc., hiring an administrator made sense. The Boss could not have administered his way out of a wet paper bag. But, the first candidate, big into Goth looks, but neither the right gender or correct attitude to deal with the system builders, was a disaster. He threw our "real" job schedules out of the window because he "needed" to "administer" the print server. That was just the start. It didn't take more than three days to decide we had to be rid of him. Initially we resorted to the tactic of crashing the print server, moving the CAT5 connection and then rebooting it, restored to its rightful domain. The WBBOFH complained to the Boss and threatened us - the system builders! He was gone in a month.
Looking back on some of their verrrry old exploits I started seriously fretting about BOFH & PFY's future especially after reading this: https://qz.com/985808/your-it-job-is-at-risk-if-you-currently-do-these-things-for-a-living/ and then I thought, G̶o̶d̶,̶ ̶I̶'̶m̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶r̶s̶t̶y̶...W̶h̶a̶t̶'̶s̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶L̶u̶n̶c̶h̶ "Nah! They wrote the manual" Plus, it says: “Strategic senior level jobs such as CIO or CTO roles won’t vanish, but with the organisation pyramid getting leaner, companies would require fewer managers to manage different teams,” ... Managers vanishing? Well, if that isn't Business As Usual with our favourite IT team...
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
