I am defeated
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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.
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@scottalanmiller "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."
Maybe. And maybe it's factors beyond their control. Or maybe they made the decision to help an employee pay for cancer drugs and everyone has to suck it up to get through. These small family-owned shops don't run on the sorts of coldhearted pragmatism that is so commonplace in larger shops.
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@cakeis_not_alie said:
@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.
Okay, we definitely don't define shoe string the same. You are dealing with much larger firms in that space with much larger budgets. That's a huge budget for the SMB market where I come from.
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@cakeis_not_alie said:
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).
This more commonly what I see.
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@cakeis_not_alie said:
Maybe. And maybe it's factors beyond their control. Or maybe they made the decision to help an employee pay for cancer drugs and everyone has to suck it up to get through. These small family-owned shops don't run on the sorts of coldhearted pragmatism that is so commonplace in larger shops.
Maybe, but by and large it is cold hearted pragmatism that pays the bills and keeps people employed.
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@scottalanmiller "Okay, we definitely don't define shoe string the same. You are dealing with much larger firms in that space with much larger budgets. That's a huge budget for the SMB market where I come from."
It's all about what you have to do with that budget. $250K across 6 years may seem like a lot, but it's for a 22 man company and they have to keep 200 VMs and 100TB of data (churn of 10TB/month) going across that. And the IT spend is already a huge part of the company budget, there isn't a lot of wiggle room.
And htat's just one example.
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@cakeis_not_alie said:
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.
If you have that kind of money, and five pros utilizing it, yeah, you could call that close to the bone. But you could also call it "spending well." What would you define, in a situation like that, as corner cutting?
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@cakeis_not_alie said:
@scottalanmiller "Okay, we definitely don't define shoe string the same. You are dealing with much larger firms in that space with much larger budgets. That's a huge budget for the SMB market where I come from."
It's all about what you have to do with that budget. $250K across 6 years may seem like a lot, but it's for a 22 man company and they have to keep 200 VMs and 100TB of data (churn of 10TB/month) going across that. And the IT spend is already a huge part of the company budget, there isn't a lot of wiggle room.
And htat's just one example.
Oh it's lean, yes. But shoe-string, maybe, maybe not. That's a lot of money to maneuver within.
When I think shoe string, I am thinking companies running Windows XP and consumer class routers and not having backup because "they don't feel that it is valuable."
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@scottalanmiller "Maybe, but by and large it is cold hearted pragmatism that pays the bills and keeps people employed."
Well, I guess that's an ideological difference. Maybe what I need is an IT community without such a Dickensian approach to HR.
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@scottalanmiller said:
When I think shoe string, I am thinking companies running Windows XP and consumer class routers and not having backup because "they don't feel that it is valuable."
These are the hardest ones. Really small SOHO / just entering the need for office space. Really difficult to get them to understand the business case for IT.
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@scottalanmiller "If you have that kind of money, and five pros utilizing it, yeah, you could call that close to the bone. But you could also call it "spending well." What would you define, in a situation like that, as corner cutting?"
My render farms don't corner cut. We just use a lot of opencompute.
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@cakeis_not_alie said:
@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.
With the exception of the middle one ($5-10K) the other two you mentioned shouldn't have an issue doing what's needed to get the job done. But even the $5-10K clients probably have so little needs that you don't really have an issue there either.
You tore my earlier comment apart but you haven't actually given us an example of a situation where people aren't helping you solve a problem you have that qualifies for the Zero budget problem.
As far as I can see, a company that is doing so poorly that it can't acquire a bank loan to get through a lean time to get some needed IT equipment isn't a place where Peter, Jessica, Sandy or Jacob should want to work - why not, because it's clear that the company is so financially unstable that their job is actually already at risk every single day, from business closure.
It's definitely nice to want people to keep their jobs and not be unemployed, but who's to say that the next place they get a job might not be much better, and potentially more financially viable, putting their families in a better position.
If you would like to post a specific problem, I think you'd be surprised. This community, while possibly having a few of those comments you don't like, will actually probably be more helpful than you imagine.
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@scottalanmiller "When I think shoe string, I am thinking companies running Windows XP and consumer class routers and not having backup because "they don't feel that it is valuable.""
If they thought like that, they wouldn't be on Spiceworks asking for help making backups work even though they can't afford Unitrends/Veeam.
When I think of shoestring setups, I think of companies with competent sysadmins who know EVERY SINGLE FLAW in their designs and are perfectly aware of every hole that needs patching, every system that needs updating and who are constantly trying to find a cheaper, more efficient way to do something because resources are scarce.
For me, shoestring means that everything is about juggling priorities because there just ISN'T enough money to do it all properly, and there never will be. So you have to make a call about what to do "right" and what you band-aid and what you roll the dice on. And you play politics and you use trial versions and you do favours for others to get hardware, or software or services that you need.
You work with others in similiar situations to form alliances of SMBs that can exchange old parts. You work together so that you all have common builds, so that you can spread the load of keeping spare parts around between you. You audit eachother's setups and you sanity check eachother's builds.
THAT is the small business world I come from. And I was hoping that there would be something remotely like it on the wider web.
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@cakeis_not_alie said:
@scottalanmiller "Maybe, but by and large it is cold hearted pragmatism that pays the bills and keeps people employed."
Well, I guess that's an ideological difference. Maybe what I need is an IT community without such a Dickensian approach to HR.
I don't think of it that way. Think of it as replacing the term "cold heated pragmatism" with "able to make payroll and keep the company going." If your goal is to actually pay your employees, keep them employeed and employ more tomorrow then keeping your company going is the best way to do that.
You need to look at owner profits rather than company profits. Is there an owner taking home $5m while the company suffers? Or is the owner in neck deep with everyone? Is the owner taking risks too? Or just staff?
You have to consider lost opportunity which results in lost employment. If you are not pragmatic you might save one job today at the cost of ten jobs you didn't create tomorrow. You are viewing it as a name that you know that you want to protect, I'm looking at it as "doing the most good." And in doing the most good, hopefully not only employing the most people overall, but hopefully making every person who is already employed as protected as possible.
