</rant>
Longest. E-mail. Ever. 26 KB in size actually. I'm impressed.
That's my only contribution to this thread. All that I have time for really, especially after reading this in its entirety! Interesting topic overall, I must say.
..ch
-----Original Message-----
From: MSU Network Administrators Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Joseph Michael Scott
Sent: Thursday, September 18, 2008 1:39 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [MSUNAG] Some thoughts about a new email system for MSU
To the entire NAG community;
First off, I would like to apologize for my comments yesterday directed at
certain individuals, and for my speech used in my posts as a whole. I freely
admit I am a hothead, which unfortunately means that a lot of times I end up
doing just what I am now; apologizing. I will warn you up front, this post
is long, and preachy, and perhaps hard to follow at times. I apologize for
those of you whom disagree with what I have written down here. I also wish
to apologize for my spelling and grammar yesterday, I was going to tell
whomever it was that pointed it out, that an automatic spell check would
have been nice, but as pointed out to me earlier, I was using the older
system and making judgements I should not have been making.
What set me off yesterday was yet again it looked like MSU was given a
golden opportunity to replace an older system with a product that is
deserving of the universities needs. And yet again it seemed that an
opportunity had been squandered, and that the current solution had once more
been chosen “from a variety of solutions as being the best, cost effective
solution that we could deploy this year”. This same attitude, the one that
the current solution is the best, was the attitude I saw when I worked for
MSU, and according to the NAG postings I have read since continues to be the
norm, rather than the exception. This is what, in my opinion, is the number
one problem with the university’s IT community.
‘If it ain’t busted, don’t mess with it’
There are very few companies, universities, private organizations, and even
government facilities that like change. Change requires people to do things
in a different way, and truth be told, the vast majority of the American
workforce is convinced they are overworked, and have no time to learn new
things. However, this is simply not the case, and in fact is one of the
reasons why the worker feels that way in the first place. If a newer system
comes along that halves the amount of time needed for that employee to get a
certain task done, then the time spent on training for that newer system is
just a drop in the bucket of the time that would be saved. The problem is
that until a company is willing to actually make the change, they never
truly understand that concept.
I have seen businesses run themselves into the ground by not changing, or
updating themselves to compete in their marketplace. I have seen nightmares
(well, for IT folk at least) that I was convinced would finally wake up the
business to their problems and FORCE them to change, only to be shrugged off
after the disaster with an “S%it Happens” explanation. I continue to
this day to get the willies walking in the door of some of our customers,
telling their IT staff ‘This could be the day’ (The City of Lansing was
on Netware 4.11 the last time I was there).
Change is an essential part of life, and for any company it has to be part
of their very core.
‘Learn from your mistakes’
When I interviewed with MSU, I had almost no knowledge about the university.
Our family had just recently moved to Lansing from Ohio, and the only thing
I knew about MSU was that apparently the students got a ‘little’ out of
hand when their basketball team won. It wasn’t until my first week that I
truly got my mind wrapped around the potential this university had. The
sheer fact that MSU had a full class A IP subnet was amazing. The history
behind the university, the diversity, the cyclotron; anything seemed
possible, the future looked wide open. I was ready to have what I thought
would be the time of my life. Then I found out the hard truth. It started
small; ‘You can’t do that because it is a union member’s job, and
you’re not in that union”. Then it was “Yes, I know that the people
in the division are yelling for a calendaring solution, but we are not ready
to provide that to them”. And as I looked around, I started to see the
cracks in the walls. Having a full class A is wonderful, physically
assigning routable IP addresses to not only desktops but production servers
is risky and stupid. Not having those servers behind any kind of firewall
(especially the Windows 2000 one being used at the time) was going way
beyond risky and heading into complete insanity. Telling your network
administrators that any data placed by a user into the divisions servers was
considered private property of the user and NOT the division was
questionable and unheard of by me at the time. Telling your network
administrators that when the before mentioned server’s disk space is being
consumed at a pace that will shortly bring the servers down, and they cannot
delete the useless data being placed there to fill that server up, but must
send out a written REQUEST for the users to remove or at least look into
removing the junk they had placed on the servers, went against all common
sense. AND when the users failed to actually do anything about the
situation, and the servers crashed bringing down the division, the solution
was to throw money at the problem by buying another server, took the cake. I
had heard over and over again about how MSU was financially in a rocky
situation, and we had no spare money, and we should be HAPPY with our just
over 1% raises we were getting yearly. Yet here I was spending money on a
solution that needed to be corrected by having the users (Oh and by the way
I worked for a business division on campus, so the actual users were
employees of MSU) delete their hundreds of MB’s of music , movies, and
games they had placed in their personal directories. Having thrown a full
blown hissy fit about this, I was introduced the AUP. As I read this
document, I couldn’t believe my eyes. According to these rules, then if my
machines had been attacked by a hacker or zombie bot worm and were being
used to store IRQ crap, then they had the same rights as the users in the
division did and I had to REQUEST THEM TO STOP HACKING MY SERVERS! Thinking
this had to be a joke, or that I had misread the entire document, I
requested, and was reluctantly taken to my first and only NCC meeting. I
brought up my questions to those learned gentlemen, explained my disbelief,
asked for a clarification on this nonsense, and was given my answer in the
form of an hour long lecture of freedom of speech, and freedom of
information. When at the end of this lecture, I asked how that could be
translated into a business unit’s solution; I was told that since I came
from a corporate environment I ‘just didn’t get it’. Period. My boss
(whom took me) has to ask me to leave before I blew up at them.
In the nearly four years I worked for the university, I learned to live with
the insanity. I stopped fighting the useless fights, and became as
complacent as the next worker. Sure, I complained at times about union
workers whom had been there so long they comfortably sat and played
solitaire all day long, while complaining they were overworked, and making
my job twice as difficult because we had to pick up their slack. But all in
all, I decided that what happened would happen, and who was I to fight for
change no one else wanted.
When I left the university, it wasn’t because I was mad or upset with the
insanity. It was simply because I could no longer afford to keep working at
the current pay rate, and lack of raises, and expect to be able to support
my family. I had to change. I will freely admit I cried when I left the
university. The individuals I worked with are to this day the finest I have
ever met, both professionally and as a person, and I thank God I was blessed
with the time I spent with them. However, I had no choice, I had to move on.
‘There is a time for everything’
Working for the university, and especially working at the football games
still to this day, have made me a diehard Spartan fan. Like many of us out
there, we are constantly taking abuse for our team, and constantly being
told we are the second hand, little brother, college in Michigan. During one
of my many debates with others on why I disagree with those statements, I
began to see why we were viewed as such, and I remembered what I had seen
and done while I worked there. I remembered the fight against change, the
complacency with which things got done at times, the fact that no one
thought it was unusual to carry dead weight in the office and hear them
complain about their life bringing the few whom did actually work, down
until they too wanted to stop. I began to realize that until the university
woke up and decided to FIGHT for themselves, then the others whom talked
trash about MSU were correct. And I began to get mad, began to get angry
with MSU. I wanted to demand they fight for their rights, demand they fight
to live, demand they fight to become the top. It seemed so clear, the core
corruption that caused this decay, the lack of drive, the problems. The
solution was really a very simple one (at least for their IT); the needed to
STOP viewing themselves as academia’s, and start viewing themselves as
workers for a business. The fine folks at MSU whom hired a vast majority of
you all (including me), did not hire us as network administrators to teach
classes, they did not hire us to play sports, they did not hire us to debate
our rights as citizens, they hired us for one reason. They hired us, and
paid us, to ensure that the clients of our divisions, whether they are in
academics or business or athletics, can do their work smoothly and
efficiently. They pay us to be NETWORK ADMINISTRATORS. To keep their
servers, applications, and workstations up and running and to ensure that
the division would be prepared to tackle and future goals. It has been
posted here, and it is quite true, the without all the fanfare, and
trappings that people would still meet up to learn, to play sports. That
statement is absolutely correct, yet you all are getting paid to keep the
fanfare and the trappings up and running. One of the things I hated about
working at MSU was the fact that they lumped in IT with the support staff.
In essence they were correct; IT is nothing really more than support for an
organization. It is critical support now of days, but none the less still
support. There are very few ways for IT to shake off that nametag. The
easiest one is to present your customers, or business owners with an IT
solution that blows their socks off, saves a load of money, and improves the
companies name in the public. Sticking with the old, slapping on bandages
and new faceplates, telling the customer you hear their complaints and are
sure that the next version of the ‘new’ software will have that element
included, telling your customers and bosses at disaster times that as soon
as the vendor whom made the software you bought gets off their regular job,
or that the time difference is too great for you to get a response, or that
they have to develop a solution to the disaster, will NOT get you out of
that collar. IT is the first way a company looks when they want to change
themselves, to improve themselves, to get a better market share for
themselves. If you refuse to change, then you leave them with no choice but
to replace you so they can move on. However at MSU, thanks to the unions,
they don’t even have that option. You all in essence therefore are the
ones that are the determining factor in the universities success or failure.
If you continue to choose to ignore this fact, and continue to fail in your
duties, then this college will continue to fail as well. I am sorry I have
to even apologize for saying this, you should all be embracing this with a
passion and be honored that you have been granted that right. Yet you fight
with anyone whom tells you these facts. You are fighting for your rights to
do what? Prove that you are correct? That your way is the only way, and that
since you are positive your way is the only way, then the other division’s
network administrators must have the same passion that only they are
correct, so you CAN’T possibly join together as you both are so vastly
different and you both are so vastly correct?
Remember whom your clients are, who pays for your checks, who hired you. If
they are asking for change, are you so correct that you have the right to
deny them? Are they happy with barely having enough money to scrape by
budget wise?
I will write no more on this, I am done. I cannot force a change, or force
you to exam your views. Only you all can do that. I hope at least someone
stops and thinks, if not, then I know where I will not be sending my
children to college.
|
