I am defeated
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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.
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@cakeis_not_alie said:
My render farms don't corner cut. We just use a lot of opencompute.
But then, why do you consider it a shoe string budget?
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@Dashrender "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."
Thanks, I'll go out of business now. Cheers.
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@cakeis_not_alie said:
@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.
This describes every IT job I've ever had.
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@cakeis_not_alie said:
@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.
A lot of them are, I see that a bit. Quite a bit, actually. The IT person is trying to make backups work while the business doesn't see value in it.
And many are not on communities but are customers. We actually have customers running on budgets like that.
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@scottalanmiller "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?"
I wouldn't work with a company where the owner wasn't taking risks too. Typically you don't get loans from a bank for an SMB here. You have to take loans out against the assets of hte shareholders. So I have been in situations where the shareholders have taken out loans against their houses/cars/etc in order to keep the company going. The 2009 financial crisis being one example. Half my stable had to do that.
"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."
And I view what your'e saying as "close you heart to people you know because there is the remote possibility that if you allow them to go unemployed the magical hand of the market may create new jobs for people you don't know somewhere else. Maybe."
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@cakeis_not_alie said:
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.
Ah, I think that you hit on a key ideological difference between us. You see there as being a "way to do things right" that has a cost associated with it. I do not. I see all IT as being in a business context. So for any business there is always enough money to do things right, if the business chooses to do so. In my way of thinking a business cannot have so little money to not do things right because what is "right" is determined by the money!
What you call a show string, I call "doing IT right". We should always juggle priorities and try to get the most from our IT investment. That's just the basics of IT. Home users can spend without regard to ROI. Business cannot. The "right" way is the way that best supports the business. Therefore, there is always the possibility of enough money to do it. It's self defining.
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@scottalanmiller "But then, why do you consider it a shoe string budget?"
Because we're able to fit that sort of hardware into that budget only because I start the negotiations for the next refresh immediately after the last one. It's lobbying, favour trading and a lot of "not IT related chicanery" that makes getting hardware on those budgets possible. It's not off the shelf. Not all companies could do it. I manage to make those outfits an exception to the general cost rules every time.
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@cakeis_not_alie said:
@scottalanmiller "But then, why do you consider it a shoe string budget?"
Because we're able to fit that sort of hardware into that budget only because I start the negotiations for the next refresh immediately after the last one. It's lobbying, favour trading and a lot of "not IT related chicanery" that makes getting hardware on those budgets possible. It's not off the shelf. Not all companies could do it. I manage to make those outfits an exception to the general cost rules every time.
But that's part of good IT. This is a very different situation from what you made it sound like at first. This is doing IT well, not cutting corners or on a lean budget.
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Look at my desktop example a few pages back. That's not NTG running on a shoe string, that's simply us not wasting money because there is no reason to do so. It's just wise spending. That's all I see you describing.
I don't call "not wasting money" the same as "being on a shoestring."
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@cakeis_not_alie said:
And I view what your'e saying as "close you heart to people you know because there is the remote possibility that if you allow them to go unemployed the magical hand of the market may create new jobs for people you don't know somewhere else. Maybe."
You say that but you overlook that part of my goal was to do the thing most likely to protect the existing jobs as well. I see anything that isn't the best thing for the people as "not the best thing for the people.* There are always risks and bad decisions, but if the intention is truly to do the best thing you can't really call that cold hearted. Going out of business because of bad spending would be the most cold hearted thing to do.
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@Nic said:
I wonder if the non-profit world might be a good place to connect with other shoe-string IT folks. I know techsoup has some forums, although I don't know how active they are.
I work for a non-profit and helped other non-profits and I really can't relate to this rant at all.
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@scottalanmiller said:
"You say that but you overlook that part of my goal was to do the thing most likely to protect the existing jobs as well. I see anything that isn't the best thing for the people as "not the best thing for the people.* There are always risks and bad decisions, but if the intention is truly to do the best thing you can't really call that cold hearted. Going out of business because of bad spending would be the most cold hearted thing to do."
But nowhere in my descriptions of things did I talk about "going out of business because of bad IT". It's our buddy @Dashrender there who is assuming that I'm talking about tightfisted types that won't spend on necessary IT. I am talking about companies that do the best they can with what they got, but where "the best they can with what they got" usually means breaking rules.
It probably means running unsupported configurations of some (sometimes all) things. It might mean using a Samba 3 AD instead of a Windows one or using KVM instead of VMware. It could mean trying to beat Starwind into running storage heavy, even though Anton will turn purple if you try. It can mean running production on ESXi free and even not using "the cloud" for everything, despite all the vendors and forum whores telling you that's what SMBs just need to do.
It means buying looking up at Supermicro as "nice gear" and then building your "server" out of an Asus workstation motherboard and some spent Adaptec cards you pilfered from the local university.
It means not having 4 hour enterprise support because uptime matters, so you instead buy thre of your whitebox Asus wonders, run two in HA and put he third on the shelf for spare parts.
It means a 8 node cluster of AMD Shanghai dual CPU servers in production in 2015 because "they still work" and the cluster can theoreticlaly tolerate a two node outage...and you still have enough s[pares to rebuild one node.
It means an HP laserjet 2 still in service because it's pantsing unkillable and you can get toners for the thing for a song.
Any or all of these things will get some condescending twunt on the forums telling me how that's a horrible, spectacular risk that puts everyone's jobs on the line and how that company should go out of business for not being able to afford better.
But at one time those Asus Workstation wonder Shanghai servers were new. It was expensive. And they were designed to last 10 years. With enough spares to make it there. That's making do with what you have, even if it breaks the rules. It's not putting jobs at risk.
It's making sure you can employ the maximum people with the minimum expenditure. It's making sure that the IT budget can go towards application development that streamlines some aspect of the business that frees up an entire person's worth of work, so that person can be retrained and reassigned and the company can produce a new product or enter a new market and hopefully grow and be better able to protect those jobs.
But it's protecting those jobs without obeying whitepapers. And with things being out of support. And then being OLD.
THAT is shoestring computing. At least to me. It's budgets that are tight and resources that are constrained but they are so because everyone is trying to grow the company even through a recession.
And yet, this is what I constantly see people getting crapped on for. And wild assumptions being made about the business owners being tightfisted twats, or the IT staff being incompetent because they didn't beg money that doesn't exist.
"Shoestring" is replacement cycles that take 6 years, and require planning to make those happen. They don't just appear out of the company budget, you work to make sure that money is there six years before the refresh happens. You work to evolve your IT in such a way that it can fit within that budget when the time comes, you don't go to the business and tell them how much you need.
It's a different way of thinking from how the forum regulars are used to. It's backwards, in fact. "This is what we can afford, make the most of it, because there isn't any more to give."
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@lance "I work for a non-profit and helped other non-profits and I really can't relate to this rant at all."
Yeah, you know, the non-profit guys I work with never seem to have much in the way of problems. They get hardware and software they need pretty easily. The biggest issue they have is typically that they get a bunch of stuff they can't use/don't need and then have to reach out to their network of non=profit sysadmins to redistribute.
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@cakeis_not_alie said:
But nowhere in my descriptions of things did I talk about "going out of business because of bad IT". It's our buddy @Dashrender there who is assuming that I'm talking about tightfisted types that won't spend on necessary IT. I am talking about companies that do the best they can with what they got, but where "the best they can with what they got" usually means breaking rules.
I guess that that is the big question. Whose rules or what rules are being broken? Can you give an example?
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@cakeis_not_alie said:
"Shoestring" is replacement cycles that take 6 years, and require planning to make those happen. They don't just appear out of the company budget, you work to make sure that money is there six years before the refresh happens. You work to evolve your IT in such a way that it can fit within that budget when the time comes, you don't go to the business and tell them how much you need.
Wall St., in my experience, is eight year cycles. Budgeting is easier, but you get less of it. NTG does longer than six years.
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@cakeis_not_alie said:
@lance "I work for a non-profit and helped other non-profits and I really can't relate to this rant at all."
Yeah, you know, the non-profit guys I work with never seem to have much in the way of problems. They get hardware and software they need pretty easily. The biggest issue they have is typically that they get a bunch of stuff they can't use/don't need and then have to reach out to their network of non=profit sysadmins to redistribute.
It's true we get software really cheap, but hardware is another story. I'm not going to accept hardware that costs more to maintain that it is worth, which is the instance in most cases.
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@cakeis_not_alie said:
@lance "I work for a non-profit and helped other non-profits and I really can't relate to this rant at all."
Yeah, you know, the non-profit guys I work with never seem to have much in the way of problems.
The biggest issue I have seen in non-profit IT is the issue of having enough staff. I think almost any non-profit or for profit IT guy that you work with could relate to this.
