I am defeated
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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.
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@cakeis_not_alie said:
@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.
Are these really shoe-string budgets? Just having one person (or one halftime person) doing IT is way bigger than the budgets of many SMBs that I work with. What are you defining as show-string?
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@scottalanmiller "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."
I disagree. I don't pay my bills on the side. I was a full time sysadmin until Dec 24th and I wrote on the side. Now I'm a full time writer doing systems administration on the side. I don't yet know if the latter configuration will pay the mortgage. I frakking hope so.
"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."
I don't know. There's plenty of people way smarter than me. There is absolutely nothing special or unique about me except my overwhelming fatness. Anything I do anyone else can do. I've trained a few to do it, too.
If I have a talent it's charisma. The ability to talk the talk and walk the walk that makes people like you and I able to go forth and be talking heads. But that's not needed to make the blinkenlights go bing. That kid A.J. could do what I do, I think, if he cared to.
I don't know man, I'm not really capable of thinking of myself as anything special at all.
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@cakeis_not_alie said:
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?
If the SAN is the best business decision and keeping those people employed is valuable, then buying the SAN should not result in firing anyone. If anything, it should help to ensure employment by making the business as profitable as possible. It's not "right spending" that results in the largest number of lost jobs. Now I understand that the company may have a lack of available funds at the moment, but this is where a bank loan comes in for some companies and where good planning comes in for others.
For a company that has a regular ebb and flow of profits, you save when you have profits and spend when you don't. That's how it works. If people have to be fired to do the right thing, it's not IT causing that, it is failing management.
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@scottalanmiller Outside of the individual they have doing IT, the midsized companies in my stable will have maybe $250K for 6 years to spend on hardware and software. This has to run about 200 VMs and handle about 100TB of data.
The smaller ones have budgets of about $5k to $10K a year for IT and that usually includes a $1k to $2.5K rider for my services (or one of my fellows).
The larger ones in my stable can have $2.5M budgets. But those guys are (for example) a 5 man shop that does mostly video work. Their budgets get blown on 5000 node render farms. Even there, when you think about cost of cooling/facilities...they run close to the bone.
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@cakeis_not_alie said:
I don't know man, I'm not really capable of thinking of myself as anything special at all.
And that misleads you. You are a very talented IT pro, you couldn't write what you do otherwise. Writing is hard, IT writing at least (novels seem even harder, but I have no idea how those get made.) You are not in the normal scope of SMB IT. Companies on a shoe string budget should not even be able to think about having someone like you giving recommendations. You could be making big money with a big firm or via many non-shoe string SMBs via consulting if that was what you wanted.
If you are pricing yourself down to the point where shoe stringers are hiring you, you are subsidizing them (and think of all the people you are not employing in the process) and if you are not pricing yourself down to do so then I think we have different concepts of show string budgets.
