This article is more than 1 year old
I cannae dae it, cap'n! Why I had to quit the madness of frontline IT
With accountibility comes decent budget
Resources, give me resources!
Outside of a few big names (like Facebook or Google), there is no such thing as an "adequately resourced" network. I'm not saying you have to be Facebook or Google in size to secure a network, but that those companies have cultures where cost-cutting is separate and distinct from operations.
In a Facebook or Google corporate culture IT operations is given the budget to do what they need with the technologies that they have. Separately, IT engages in research and development to drive costs down, but those are experiments. They are not an arbitrary resource cut by the powers that be accompanied by a demand to "adapt".
"Efficiencies" are rarely ground out of empire builders like procurement (read the comments thread, it's enlightening). Money to satisfy the baying masses is found by crippling operations, rejecting every single recommendation security brings to the table and cutting development and QA staff to the point that there is no money to test for any but the most basic flaws.
When my wife asks me why I want to buy a Google car, it's because I'm absolutely terrified of a self-driving anything made by almost any other company. Do you trust Ford's software QA? GM's? Do you trust them to have a corporate culture appropriate to building software for machines into whose steely hands we'll place our very lives? Are you sure about that?
We, the people, scream for corporations to lower their margins or governments to cut their budgets but we don't have the attention span to follow up and ask where in the budget the money was found.
Starship captains are like children
A scene from the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Relics has stuck with me my whole life. In this scene, Scotty explains his engineering principles to LaForge thusly: "Starship captains are like children. They want everything right now and they want it their way. The secret is to give them what they need, not what they want."
My problem is that I am a lot more like LaForge than I am Scotty. If I say it's going to take $10m to do something, it's going to take $10m do it. I don't have the Scotty instinct to build in additional time, money and so forth into my estimates.
I'm too honest for own good. Despite more than a decade of attempting to change that, when pressed, I crumble and cough up the real number. Business types, thinking they're being clever, will then tell me to go forth and make do with half the amount I need.
I've spent 20 years never having enough resources and I just can't take it anymore. I need to sleep without the nightmares. I need to be able to go to work every day without having legitimate, clinical panic attacks during my morning commute. And if I never see another printer again it will be too soon.
I can build you a network everyone can be proud of, but I won't. I refuse to work in a role where I have crushing responsibility but inadequate resources and no authority to implement change.
If you want me to be Katherine Archuleta, responsible for the failures of others both above and below me in the corporate hierarchy, then you're going to have to pay me a truly spectacular amount of money. Enough that I'll not have to worry about working ever again.
In some professions it is customary for a potential employee to vet the company they are going to work for just as thoroughly as they are being vetted. This is viewed as due diligence on the part of the employee. This is not the case in IT.
For anyone but the very top recruits in IT to ask probing questions and investigate the company they are being hired by is viewed as arrogance. We treat the people we put in charge of some of the infrastructure upon which lives rely – or in which our nation's deepest secrets reside – as nothing more than disposable wage slaves.
Corporations, governments and special interest groups bemoan a "skills shortage" in IT. There is no skills shortage in IT. There are plenty of people with the relevant skills, they simply don't want to work under the asinine conditions that have become the accepted "normal" in our industry.
You want a deeper skills pool? More women in IT? Stop treating your IT staff like garbage. Give them the resources and authority they need to do the jobs to hand.
Otherwise, you'll find that there are plenty of adjacent industries in which we can make use of our skills. Industries that don't cause PTSD and where a good night's sleep is the norm, not the exception. ®