I am defeated
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Scott, you've mentioned that posters need to be more responsible with their postings before - though I have no clue how we as a community can help encourage that.
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@cakeis_not_alie said:
I do get the natural instinct on behalf of others to say "look, your job is to convince management to spend money". But the problem here is that it presumes that management has money, and are just cheap. Or that just because they are spending money over time they have the ability to make a big up front capital purchase to stem the bleeding. (If that were the case, cloud computing wouldn't exist in it's current form.)
Like the other constraints that I mentioned, those things are important factors in a projected solution. Include those with posts to give a context for the question. Knowing that opex is possible but capex is not, knowing that spend can be X, knowing what the value of the investment could be - those are all factors that we need to know.
Like most post where people are asking "design" questions versus "break / fix" questions... I tell the OP that we need the business goals up front. Without the business context, nearly anything that we propose is meaningless. It might "work" if you define work by some arbitrary IT guideline but whether or not it meets the goals of the business we would have no idea. And often neither would the person asking the question.
IT commonly forgets that it exists within a business context. ALL IT decisions need to be made with a view towards what makes sense for the company. Even a company loaded with cash should not spend it foolishly.
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@cakeis_not_alie said:
So what you're saying is that I'm basically it. Alone. Everyone else just "tries to get out". Nobody else loves the thrill of doing the impossible, or feels that the "little guy" needs some expertise too.
Mostly, yes. Other IT people can't pay their mortgages with journalism and content generation. I do a bit of that and couldn't possibly keep the lights on with it. You are at the extreme high end of IT, you are very much alone, sadly. IT people, normally, do IT both because they love it but also because they want to earn a living, generally a decent one.
You are basically volunteering your time to companies to provide IT that they can't afford otherwise, it sounds like. You are subsidizing them. If you were charging what you were worth, would anyone on a shoestring budget be able to afford you? If you aren't charging what you are worth, you are at least partially giving your services away.
If that's what you like to do, that's great. Nothing wrong with that. But yes, that makes you very unique. I've done that, given my services away, but only to non-profits and only local ones. I don't do it for "for profit" companies.
Normal IT people don't have that kind of option like you do. They need their IT careers to pay the bills.
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@Dashrender said:
I know my response doesn't have polish of Scott's, but I'm guessing this is why a lot of IT admins want out of those situations - they want to work for people/companies that care about the business and the employees stability.
That's a factor. But so is the IT that they get to do. If a company can't afford good equipment then they probably aren't doing interesting IT either. I say probably, it's not hard and fast. But think about this... if the company you work for can't afford AD, are they going to spend time doing other cool IT projects? Or will you likely spend your time fixing dying hard drives on old desktops? Even for the same pay, nearly all IT folks will opt for a job that provides them more opportunities and more growth. We choose IT because we like doing IT. Companies without budgets for IT do very little IT.
If you were a car mechanic and did it because you love working on cars and got offered two jobs, same town, same pay and one was working on five old Chevy trucks that they keep making run with used parts because they won't invest in new ones and you know there will never be anything but fixing those five old trucks and the other is a big auto shop where you get to work on lots of different cars and trucks every day, see the latest stuff, work with other mechanics that you will learn from, etc. Which would you choose? The love of being a mechanic would drive (ha ha) you to choose the exciting, second shop.
Remember, we are in IT because we love IT, not because we love helping out businesses that aren't making it. If a business is struggling but has really interesting IT, that's an exception and a very rare one.
Also there is income. If I'm working for a company that can't afford gear, that means that they can't afford me either. Computers are cheap, even top ends SANs are cheap, compared to employees. If a company is paying for people rather than products things are messed up.
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Don't get me wrong, there is a reason that I work for "cheap" doing SMB tasks, because there are challenges in that space that are really fun and interesting. It's great working for a place and actually making an impact, making real peoples' lives better, making a business far better than it was before, doing a great job with very few resources, being creative and not just buying your way out of a problem. I love that stuff. But I need to be paid for it.
When I do high level consulting, I average something like $20K USD per hour in reduced cost for the customer. I literally ask them to drop their budgets by numbers like that (after analysis of needs, of course.) Most businesses that bring me in are, in my opinion, over spending dramatically for their needs. Their money could better be spent elsewhere.
But that still leaves me with plenty of IT challenges to tackle. Just not "as many" per customer. And I can't just tell people not to buy things and to pay me to do the work instead, I have to balance buying solutions versus paying consulting hours. I can do some pretty amazing stuff with no capex budget, but there needs to be a lot of consulting budget (which amounts to the same thing) to offset it in most cases. That's not what businesses need. They need something that costs neither, and that is what I strive to provide.
There is a right balance for every business, but at some point the business has to attract the IT talent to be willing to tackle their problems. The IT market, at least in the US, is so short of people that there is no need to give away work. There are lots of tough problems for companies willing to pay moderately well out there to be tackled.
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So the big question for @cakeis_not_alie .... why do you choose the types of clients that you do? This is an honest question. One that I think you need a solid answer for.
Do you do it because you love that particular type of challenge?
Do you do it because it makes tons of money (I suspect not.)
Do you do it because you love getting to help companies that otherwise could not get IT services, at least not at your level?
Something makes you work with these particular customers when you don't have to. You choose to. Define that and I think that you will have some of your answers.
Sure, that doesn't solve the fact that IT communities will always have a bunch of people that want to buy their way out of problems, want to force their decisions on your to reverse justify their own decision making processes or simply will refuse to take into account your specific business requirements. That will never change, that's humanity. We can maybe improve it, but the problem will always remain to some degree.
But, I feel, that if you do some soul searching and define why you choose a lower income, harder struggle rather than a the same set of paths that most IT practitioners choose that maybe you would not feel so bad about the struggles and appreciate them for what they are - just part of the challenge.
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I should also point out, a TON of the people pushing specific brand solutions in any community are almost always either with vendors or, far more often, with resellers. Many do not announce this, but it is very common.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Keep in mind that while much of my time is spent with ten digit IT budgets,
$1,000,000,000? That's some IT budget
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Keep in mind that while much of my time is spent with ten digit IT budgets,
$1,000,000,000? That's some IT budget
Yup, it is. I've been at at least two firms with IT into that range.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Keep in mind that while much of my time is spent with ten digit IT budgets,
$1,000,000,000? That's some IT budget
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I can't even imagine what a company could spend a billion dollars just on IT on?
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I can't even imagine what a company could spend a billion dollars just on IT on?
I can... pretty much all in OpEx too.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I can't even imagine what a company could spend a billion dollars just on IT on?
Staff for one thing. Staff eats up IT budget like crazy. If you area big enterprise and your average IT staffer makes six figures in payroll costs and the average real estate costs per staffer are about the same as the payroll costs you can end up with a quarter million to a half million per year per person in those costs a lone.
Have a few thousand people in IT and even a quarter million per head count adds up really quickly.
If you think about some of the world's bigger companies that actually starts to sound like a small budget.
If you are one of the 100K employee firms, a billion dollar budget is only $10,000 per person per year. High, but not really high if you consider that that is all IT costs from payroll of staff, to desktops, to networking, to WAN links, to servers, to storage, to backup, to finance, to audit, to Iron Mountain storage, to bespoke software development, to externally facing projects. It's actually pretty cheap. In line with a lot of SMBs.
Now look at a bigger company like Walmart, that would be only $454 per person! That's not enough to do anything.
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@Dashrender "why do YOU want to help them continue to make life so hard for those around them when they are not willing to do what it takes to make the business run better?why do YOU want to help them continue to make life so hard for those around them when they are not willing to do what it takes to make the business run better?"
This is kind of exactly what I was talking about. So here we have the implicit assumption that helping a company make do with what they have is “helping them continue to make life hard for those around them.” Coupled with the assumption that they are “not willing to do what it takes.”
Clearly they have the money, right? They’re just not willing to spend. Or maybe they just need to…what? Mortgage their houses for IT? Fire everyone? Close up shop because they can’t do IT by whitepaper?
Right there. RIGHT THERE. Every iota of dripping condescension I was talking about in one quote. -
@scottalanmiller "Other IT people can't pay their mortgages with journalism and content generation. I do a bit of that and couldn't possibly keep the lights on with it. You are at the extreme high end of IT, you are very much alone, sadly."
Except I did pay my mortgage as a full time sysadmin doing this sort of IT for 11.5 years. I can still introduce you to dozens of others in the Edmonton area alone, and there have been hundreds over the years that have contacted me through Spiceworks or Twitter.
I seriously doubt all of them are trying to "get out of that world." Quite a few of them rather like being the company man and like the challenges. It's no different, in some ways, to the non-profit IT that someone mentionned above.
With the exception, of course, that non-profits get massive discounts from the likes of Microsoft.
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@cakeis_not_alie said:
@scottalanmiller "Other IT people can't pay their mortgages with journalism and content generation. I do a bit of that and couldn't possibly keep the lights on with it. You are at the extreme high end of IT, you are very much alone, sadly."
Except I did pay my mortgage as a full time sysadmin doing this sort of IT for 11.5 years. I can still introduce you to dozens of others in the Edmonton area alone, and there have been hundreds over the years that have contacted me through Spiceworks or Twitter.
That's partly my point. You are way senior to normal IT people. You can make enough to pay the mortgage on the side! You can pay your bills doing high end IT things that most people can't dream of doing.
And then, of course, you can earn money the normal way doing traditional IT (being a normal sys admin or whatever role.) I'm not saying that you can't, I'm saying that you are in a position to chose to support whomever you wish and to do so however you wish. That makes you unique.
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@cakeis_not_alie said:
I seriously doubt all of them are trying to "get out of that world." Quite a few of them rather like being the company man and like the challenges. It's no different, in some ways, to the non-profit IT that someone mentionned above.
I'm not sure what you are saying here. Are they not well paid? Are they being paid instead of the company having enough to pay for IT opex? I'm not sure what I'm supposed to take away from this clip.
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@cakeis_not_alie said:
With the exception, of course, that non-profits get massive discounts from the likes of Microsoft.
Which, in reality, matters little. It's nice that MS does that, but those non-profits could just run on non-Microsoft software even cheaper still and do just as much. That discount allows them to be lazy and just choose Microsoft without doing any further cost or functionality comparison but that is all that it does for them in the end. Sure, it gives them more choices, and that's great. But the reality is that non-profits use that as an excuse to not even let IT look into alternatives and let non-IT management push down IT decisions, in the real world.
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@scottalanmiller "So the big question for @cakeis_not_alie .... why do you choose the types of clients that you do? This is an honest question. One that I think you need a solid answer for."
Because the people who own these companies and - more than that - the people who work for these companies are good people. They don't deserve to be unemployed. They don't deserve to have their businesses fail. They spend when they can, during booms. They tighen the belts during busts. The owners look afer their staff, and the staff come first.
Who are you going to fire in order to buy that SAN? Peter, whose kid has just gone into kindergarten? Or how about Jessica, who just found out she's pregnant? Do you fire Sandy, two years away from retirement? Or how about Jacob, who has worked at the company for 35 years, can still barely speak a word of English, but makes the most amazing woodwork known to man?
"Do you do it because you love that particular type of challenge?"
Nope.
"Do you do it because it makes tons of money (I suspect not.)"
Keeps a roof overhead. How much more do you need?
"Do you do it because you love getting to help companies that otherwise could not get IT services, at least not at your level?"
There's some of these, but mostly I help companies that are friends of friends, or which are customers of other companies I work with, all of whom have needs that can't be filled by the whitepaper swordsman.
"Something makes you work with these particular customers when you don't have to. You choose to. Define that and I think that you will have some of your answers."
I care about human beings? About the real world impacts of how everyday descisions affect them? I don't merely view them as "users" or "commodities"?
"Sure, that doesn't solve the fact that IT communities will always have a bunch of people that want to buy their way out of problems, want to force their decisions on your to reverse justify their own decision making processes or simply will refuse to take into account your specific business requirements. That will never change, that's humanity. We can maybe improve it, but the problem will always remain to some degree."
Well, I guess it sure isn't going to be something that's found here.
"But, I feel, that if you do some soul searching and define why you choose a lower income, harder struggle rather than a the same set of paths that most IT practitioners choose that maybe you would not feel so bad about the struggles and appreciate them for what they are - just part of the challenge."
It's not the struggles, SAM. It's the denigration, condescension and outright wasting of my time with stuff that isn’t helpful under the circumstances. You know, if you’re pimping your product before I say “yeah, the budget is X and it isn’t changing”, then groovy. I can respect that. But those who launch into the tirade of how it’s your moral duty to get the budget changed and just pry those dollars from the tight-fisted asshats…yeah, you know what? No.
Just no. I don’t want to spend time with those people. I don’t want to buy them beers or treat them as equals or play nice. We’ve all heard that crap before. But I just don’t have time for people who are going to tell me how my world is. I help most of these companies build their budgets. I know exactly how much money there is. To the dollar.
The budget is the budget and changing it isn’t always an option.
But you know what is an option? Getting better at IT. Doing more with less. I know because I’VE F[moderated]ING DONE IT FOR OVER A DECADE.You know, when I was a kid, nerds could go to the comic book shop. There were no bullies there. We were all just nerds. Nobody hassled us. We could just be who we were. We helped each other. We didn't try to make the others feel like unpeople.
I guess what I wanted was a comic book store for the IT industry. A place for poor people to hang out and talk about their problems without having to constantly be on guard for bullies.
What I want is a place to talk about these sorts of things without the condescension and derision of the wealthy. And I’m now very sorry that I brought it up at all.
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@scottalanmiller Most of them get paid about $50k-$70K, depending on the dude. That's fairly typical for a small business sysadmin keeping a shoestring outfit going. Usually they also do something else for the company. One I know is, for example, also a developer. So he's half sysadmin, half dev. Another has accounting training, so he mostly spends his time working out esoteric bugs in the accounting package, or helping write scripts that (for example) parse JSON from a vendor into something the accounting system can comprehend.
