Posts by Admiral Grace Hopper 776 posts • joined 7 Oct 2008
We've been joking about this since the '80s. It may have been going on before that, but at that point computing was something I did for pleasure rather than financial reward so I wouldn't have noticed.No matter when a technology was announced, as soon as a job advert went out for it the starting point was always 5 years. It was ever thus and always will be. HR aren't actually people and you can't expect them to behave like people.
I always put it down to our user base at the time being used to having a terminal and a keyboard on their desk while the processing was done in a building somewhere "over there" in an air-conditioned room filled with magical boxes, spinning tape reels and the happy band of skilled acolytes servicing their every need. I could understand the assumption that all the user had to do was switch on the screen, log in and start typing. That understanding faded and lapsed into frustration by the time we got to Windows 3.11 and folk really should have started to get it without me reaching for the Clue Hammer.
It was a few months after we were sold to a Big American Corporation that I saw a picture of Pearl Harbour used as wallpaper on a colleague's PC. When asked why, I was told that it reminded him of his current project, which largely consisted of Yanks running round putting out fires and scooping up the dead and injured having actively ignored all warnings for several months.
A Large Government Department doesn't get to pick and choose its customers. That's why they aren't customers. Service has to be delivered to all, no matter how much of a custard they might be. We were a third party supplier so we had to play the same game. If the Department were so minded I am sure that they could have made this person's life uncomfortably complicated, but that, fortunately for this guy, was not how they rolled.
I was immensely proud of a junior member of my team when we were third line support for an early web application for a Large Government Department. Things that reached us had been through two lines of support and were deemed to be Technical Issues, rather than user or process problems.
I could hear his side of the conversation going circular with the punter obviously losing it from the sounds like Dick Dastardly's boss in Stop That Pigeon that leaked out of his headset. This young lad kept his calm, was clear and direct and gave simple, good instructions until I heard him say, "Well, I'm surprised that you can't configure a printer then". The call ended fairly quickly and he turned to me and told me there was a complaint on the way. I was surprised, but sure that he'd done the right thing.
When I and three layers of management listened back to the call (recorded for training purposes) we heard our man calmly trying to guide an increasingly irate and frankly stupid man through the process of printing from the browser. He took him to the point where the problem was local to his machine and went the extra mile to fix his local setup. Having got to the point where there was nothing left that it could be apart from the printer itself, which was so far beyond our remit we couldn't see it from where we were standing, matey on the other end explodes in foul mouthed fury and shouts that he is the IT director for [NATIONAL NEWSPAPER] and that he will be shouting at the minister personally.
Our young hero was exonerated and bought beers, by me and others, at the next available opportunity.
Printers are the Devil's work, but the General F*cking Public is far, far worse.
[0] is an excellent question.
I believe the last time was during a heated discussion with Human Remains when an agitated colleague informed the HR droid that if they said, "reach out", once more that they would reach out and give them a "touching point" that would probably raise a weal.
I've supported systems that stank like Maroilles.
Rather like durian fruit, the sublime flavour of Maroilles can only be enjoyed by those who can endure the proximity of something that smells so strongly. For those who can't quite get near to the cheese itself, a tarte au Maroilles is a less hard core way to enjoy this delicious cheese.
"Right, so the look we're going for is 'hollowed out volcano'. I want the server racks over there, the perimeter monorail is going there, the wall-mounted armoury over there, we can have the stone-walled confinement cells over there and I'd like a narrow bridge with no handrails over a shark pool here, leading to a podium with a big desk, large enough to sit behind stroking a white cat. For the general feel, think stainless steel, natural rock and I need a siren system. That's architecture sorted out, now to design the boilersuits for the men and the minidresses for the women. Busy, busy, busy!"
We used to treasure our colleague Gordon who was born to be a UAT specialist. Our software would pass unit testing and integration testing, then we'd give it to Gordon. It was only a matter of time before he'd wander round to our desk.
"If I select this, then this and press this, is does that. Is that right".
"Why would you even try to do that?".
"Because the software lets me".
A perfectly reasonable response. He always found things to do that none of us could imagine. I loved him and I loved his work. Once Gordon couldn't break it, it was ready for the great unwashed.
Not in this case, I’m afraid. Boss man thought that the sales droid had shown them Satellite applying hardening rules. What he had been shown, without realising, was Satellite coordinating OpenSCAP to do the job. Cue two days of, “But it was Satellite, we don’t need anything else”, “No, it was SCAP”, on a loop for two days, because it wasn’t the simple fix-and-forget he wanted. Unless the next version of Satellite incorporates the functionality of SCAP then it won’t fix that issue.
He’s generally a smart guy, but he’s a sucker for a sales pitch.
Which means that I have to be good at disabusing senior managers of the false notions that they picked up at demos from the likes of IBM and RedHat. Our latest battle was persuading them that Satellite didn't work they way that they thought it did and while it could be used to coordinate and schedule what they wanted to do, it was a different suite of software altogether that did the actual job. That was two days of wasted life I'll never get back.
"However most COBOL is dependent on the unique and complex mainframe environment."
That's why ICL (then Fujitsu, after they bought them, but the people were largely the same) made sure that the emulated versions of VME running on Linux look to the code exactly like a VME box soldered together in Manchester in 1974.
My career has happened mostly by accident. I was brought up next to a mixed arable farm and for many years I could imagine no finer ambition than to be a mixed arable farmer - I like cows plus you get to drive a combine harvester and how cool is that? If I hadn't fallen into IT I might have been a mixed arable farmer after all. One thing would be different is I had. I'd have to deal with a hell of lot less bullshit.
Back in the early days of internet connectivity being delivered to the desktop I was part of the internet police for a Large Government Department. We had a visit from the headest of honchos who was interested in all things internet, as part of which we were to demonstrate the tools we were using as Marshals of the Wild West Web. After giving the broad outline of the principles and process and assuring that the money they were spending with us was worth every penny and more, I gave him a quick practical demo of how we could capture what the users were browsing, how we worked out whether it was a Bad Thing, how we tied this in with a machine and the user logged into it and how we reported it the Powers That Be.
<Click>
<Click>
<Click>
"So you can see that this user thinks that it's a good idea to look at chickswithdicks.com over lunchtime".
"Who is that?".
"XXXX XXXXXX based in XXXXXXXXX".
"Ah. I know who that is. Before you start the rest of the process, let me have a word with him at tomorrow's board meeting".
We heard about a sideways career move a couple of months later.
We've set up an email support network for the women in the company I work for where we get a random name of someone to whom we send an inspiring or uplifting message. I'm running out of things to send, so I'm using that last speech as my text for tomorrow. Thank you for the pointer.
As someone who will be working from a small room next to my bedroom and not being able to step outside my front door for 12 weeks, for once I'm in a situation where Julian Assange (tm) might have some useful advice to offer. If only I'd got some embassy staff on hand to pop out to the shops for me.
I feel the same every time our apprentice, blessed with endless energy, enthusiasm and keenness, comes bouncing over seeking enlightenment. I don't want to kill or even temper his enthusiasm, I just can't bear to be around when life rips it from him and shreds it in front of his eyes, then pisses all over it.
I love this coinage. Succinct, descriptive, complete and coherent.
In the early part of the century a Major Government Department launched its online services with a major advertising blitz and much hoopla. What they didn't tell anyone was that due to a lining up of the holes in the requirement/development/delivery swiss cheese, one part of the processing relied on a trusty operative copying a bunch of data onto a floppy disk, walking down two flight of stairs to the data hall, sticking the floppy into the drive on the message queue server then stoofing it manually into the SQL server database. This happened daily until I left the team as it was cheaper than the political cost of fixing it. We called it our "Sneaker Net" application. I wonder if it's still running?
There's a uniquely horrifying feeling to the heat in a data centre when the AHUs have gone down, accented by the screaming of the fans as the server struggle to cope with an environment for which they weren't designed. That's when you discover which of your machines are truly mission critical as you frantically switch off everything that isn't.
Anyone pulling this sort of stroke needs some firm corrective action. Don't fuck with my servers.
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