I’ve taken an informal poll around my cube area, and everyone agrees: We long for the olden days in IT, the outlaw days. The time when we got things done.
This was back before Enron and it’s accounting fraud debacle which ended with Sarbanes-Okley lockdowns. In a nutshell SOX is required for all public company in the US, and allows strict auditing of all procedures. It’s the bane of IT, as it means that systems under one groups control usually can’t actually do the work needed, but have to call an entirely different group. To simplify it, it’s basically this:
Person A: Opens door, enters room. “Hey, it’s dark in here.”
Person A feels around and finds the light switch. Via candlelight they write the number of the light switch down on a piece of paper.
Person A opens a service ticket and assigns it to the Lighting Control group requesting that light switch 309189 in room 204, building D, 11th floor, be moved from the current state of OFF to a new state of ON. To clarify, the ticket also includes the reason for this: To correct an ocular error.
Several hours later, after a few back and forth calls, Person B comes to the room and flips on the switch, then leaves.
That’s it. Honestly. Very few departments escape the clutches of SOX - monitoring is the exception. I can run my tools with complete authority and act as I need to. This has made me remarkably more efficient then my coworkers. Which means I end up getting bored a lot, waiting for them to have someone flip the switch they need, so I can do my thing.
Before Enron, the Dot Com bubble, and all that jazz, IT had a Wild West flair to it. It was, as I like to say, the pre-nuclear days.
You were assigned a job and you did it - no matter what needed to be done to accomplish it. You ordered the parts, you wrote the software, you decided which vendor, you created the infrastructure, the documentation was yours - you did it all. In short, it was a bit like before the first nuclear bomb was tested.
Before that initial nuke test, nations (in my example, nations are the departments within IT) basically went and created weapons as they pleased. Nothing was to crazy - the damage was all contained locally. People outside the defense departments didn’t really know nor did they care what the governments were spending their money on.
Then, we went and entered the atomic age. We created nuclear fission. Enron faked data in their electronic accounting books. The outcomes were the same.
After the nuke, nations really started to watch what each other was doing, with a finer degree of precision then they used to. Sure, Russia created an X ton bomb, so we can create an X+1 ton bomb and we’re better. But now, Russia created an X ton bomb of material X, and where did they get those materials? And how did they interface the prelaunch thrust vectors to the launch boosters and other things I don’t know.
After Enron, SOX came along and said we really need to know exactly how you do things, and we want to make sure that the people in accounting can’t manually change the data unless they file tickets with the SQL people and the SQL people can’t do anything unless they ask the SOX compliance people and the SOX compliance people refer to some extremely thick 3 ring binder that contains, in excruciating details, how thing A is supposed to be done.
And before, during, and after the nuke test we had a shit ton of activists sounding the alarm about this new technology. I’m not against activism, if you know me I’m about as activistic as you can get - but at least attempt to be knowledgeable about what you’re protesting. These pioneer anti-nuke activists had little more knowledge about nuclear physics then you could glean learning that Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider and then voila - he shoots webs. This was what they went on the airwaves and in the streets with, this tiny amount of knowledge that might be based on a bit of truth if you allow theoretical situations. They scared everyone and caused more harm then good.
In IT, we had the dot com bubble, which made the public aware of these ‘interwebs’, which made people see kids becoming millionaires overnight and people being paid $250,000/year to design web sites with AOL’s page designer. Well, as could be expected, droves of college kids with dollar signs in their eyes switched from History, English, and Mythology majors to CompSci and engineering. Man, they can’t wait to be 6 months into their degree then snapped up by a hot young startup for an easy 6 figures and a boardroom table that converts to a billiard table. These kids, with the tiny amount of knowledge that they gleaned from the 75 point font headlines in the World Weekly News about Batboy Creating Internet Startup thought this was the way for them to make a ton of cash. Almost all of them were wrong, and they did more harm to the industry then good.
Now, 8 years later, we can look back and laugh - those who were in before and are still in are seeing a spike for our skills. We’re getting in demand as the new school IT people switched back to their liberal art degrees, leaving us techies alone to bask in the electric sex that was the soft glow of our CRT screens.
But now we need to fill out 37 forms to do anything. We’re making more money, and doing less work.
I wish for an IT circa 1995. I want pre-nuclear technology.
or check them out over at Flickr.
