IT Underwire

What is the fixation with search engines fearing to return empty results?  They seem to think that this isn't user friendly or something.

Make no mistake, it is great to suggest alternatives should the search turn up nothing. That is a favor and can help when typos are made.

But take the example I encountered today on MyFaceInATube. (That's YouTube's alter ego from a show called The Middleman.)

I was searching for videos about a plugin to OpenBVE (a train driving simulation) called BVEC_ATS. I know about the plugin and where to find it. I was hoping to find videos of trains running in OpenBVE with that plugin enabled.

So I searched for the string "bvec_ats". Freakin' MFIAT came back with "Searching instead for bobcats" and returned a long list of videos about bobcats.

What it didn't say was that my search returned no results. It did offer me the chance to search for the exact thing that I asked. Which is what I thought I'd done in the first place!

I'm sorry, guys, replacing my search with something else is the opposite of friendly. It's what I call user hostile. 

In my opinion, the proper way is to show the empty search, in case that is what I wanted, and offer the alternative search in case I had really misspelled "bobcats" so horribly that my typing teacher would retract my "A." (That'll date me. I'd bet real money that high schools don't have typing class anymore.)

I am beginning to see signs that Open Source is losing its way.

Here is the red flag for me: I have seen a number of software projects decide to radically change their entire design, but keep the same name. Version 2.0 ends up being a completely different program, not just completely different code.

I understand the need to refactor code. Long history of development accumulates cruft and eventually you are trapped in a spaghetti code nightmare. Sometimes rewriting from scratch is the only hope of making the code supportable again.

But when you do that, you should make it your plan to recreate the existing functionality. That is what DEFINES your software. You shouldn't call it 2.0 if it isn't at least as functional as 1.9.

I've been trying to express this without calling out any names. Here I am failing: KDE4.

KDE is a window manager system on Linux. It runs your desktop. Applications ask it to place their windows. Users configure its look-and-feel. It controls most of what you see and how you work when you are doing stuff before, after and between multiple applications. And it had long history and spaghetti code and design decisions that limited the developers' ability to add new functionality and fix old functionality. Slash and burn rewrite was probably the only hope.

But KDE 4.0, the first result of slash and burn, was bad. It wasn't stable enough to support users. It probably didn't implement 50% of what KDE 3.x could do. I say "probably" because I couldn't use it for long enough to find out whether my problems were due to broken code or just missing functionality.

And yet they managed to convince Linux distributions to not only include KDE 4.0, but make it the default after an upgrade.

They needed this hugely, because they really needed people to test it in order to iron out the copious bugs.

I don't know about you, but I route around impediments to my work. I'm not a software test engineer. I never signed up to be a beta tester for KDE 4.0. I DIDN'T WANT THAT CRAP ON MY COMPUTER!

KDE 4.1 was better. It only seemed to crash every few days instead of every few hours. Now I CAN tell that it didn't implement a lot of what KDE 3.x had. I downgraded again.

KDE 4.2 was required. "It's good enough now that we won't even include that nasty old KDE 3.x." Well, you were wrong. It still crashed at least once per week. That's unacceptable. I found my way back again.

KDE 4.3 actually got to the point where I could use it. Now I really began to miss my old friend features from KDE 3.x.

You know what? I still miss them. KDE decided that they would never reimplement some of them, I guess because they had their hands full just making the dang thing stay up for long enough to be useful.

KDE 4 was only the first package that I saw do this.

Here's the big hint for any software package that decides to completely change their interface during a major release:

If I have to learn how to use your new version from scratch again, then there is NO ADVANTAGE to learning your new version over learning SOMEONE ELSE'S software.

Every time one of my favorite packages has done this to me, I have ended up using a different program. Every time. And advertisers? I have no brand loyalty either.

All I want is for an updated package today to be at least as good as yesterday. If you are going to make me run as hard as I can just to remain in the same place, I'm going to call you the Red Queen and go off looking for the White Queen. So what if she's just as eccentric as the Red Queen? At least I'm not out of breath just trying to do the same thing today.

Systems Administrators in Information Technology (IT) are so misunderstood.

I know. Poor little me. And what about the artists and bankers and short-order cooks and politicians and custodians and lawyers ...? I'm aware of the fundamental fact that any idea that we have chosen to identify ourselves with is going to be misunderstood by the vast majority of “the others,” which are the people who haven't chosen to identify themselves with our idea.

And in point of fact, most of the generalities that anybody complains about are simply not true. I'll stick close to home so that there is some chance that I'll know what I'm talking about.

SysAdmins (who tend to abbreviate things for convenience and because a lot of us are not touch typists -- See? I can't even get through the first generality without abusing you with another) are under valued.

There are several possible aspects to “under valued.” The first is the obvious aspect of being underpaid. I don't have any recent facts about this. I know that I'm not under paid. I am comfortably in the middle of the middle class. I won't be retiring on the proceeds of my previous decades, and probably won't be on those of my next decade. As far as value versus pay, I'd place myself comfortably in the middle of the field. I am skilled and reasonably talented and do a good job keeping my department working. The pay is pretty well aligned with my guess of my worth to the department.

So if my personal experience is a guide than I would have to say that there is probably a broad spectrum in pay. I know SysAdmins that are definitely not being paid what they are worth and I've met some that are overpaid for the little skill and effort they bring to their jobs.

Value versus pay swings about according to fashion. I was a SysAdmin when tech companies were booming, when all it took to dot your com was the ability to use three words of technical jargon correctly in a sentence. Nobody had made a company using this new technology and every idea was fresh, new, untried, and possibly connected via the Internet to the pot at the end of the rainbow. There was a lot of imagination in the pay scales for everyone associated with IT and people who never imagined it were getting rich.

Then somebody shouted that the Emperor was naked. Suddenly, having an idea for something that could be done “on the Internet” was met with a firm introduction to the outside of the front door.

But business had changed in a subtle way. Computer technology hadn't been satisfied with firing the imaginations of a generation. So what if a thousand companies that had never had a physical product to to sell vanished in an eye blink? A thousand other companies who already had good brands and solid products had adopted computer technology because it made their products cheaper and more dependable and yes, with a little imagination, expanded the capabilities of those products beyond what anyone had thought possible.

In 2000, a local computer repair shop might have a web address in its phone book entry right next to its telephone number. But a few years later if your local lumber store didn't have a web address, the customers went looking for a store that did. The ones that did have a web address could show us with a few clicks that they were a better lumber store, because their computers taught us about their business.

Those few years were lean for people in IT. When the dotcom reset button got poked, there were a few extra applicants around for every position. As in roughly 20 to 1 if you were in a major metropolitan area. That number comes from my own experience looking for work between autumn of 2002 and summer 2003. One job I applied for had 25 applicants on the first day and they only intended to interview 3. And the salary on offer was about a 40% pay cut from what I'd had before.

That lean period was nearly the death of SysAdmins. We knew that nearly any company could be made better with the right amount of computer infusion because we had seen it. But companies that were outside the computer industry had been burnt too badly by wild optimism and over-investment. Or if they hadn't invested in computers at all, they were greatly satisified to have weathered the dotcom failure with no loss on the books. Convincing them that there was an amount of computerization that was appropriate for their industry was a challenge, particularly when you had come in the door, hat in hand, looking for work.

The fact that today everyone knows what a web address is shows that essentially every business has a computer aspect. It's like having a cash register. Or a telephone. Or an accountant. Do you buy or lease a cash register? Should you have a multi-line phone or is one enough? Can your business keep an accountant busy full time?

Business has more than a century of experience with accountants. It is pretty well established what they do for you and what they are worth to a business and roughly how their services work.

There are accountants that specialize in restaurants. They can speak restaurant lingo and they can ease a new owner into some understanding of how accounting works for them.

If you are running a restaurant, there is almost no one who can tell you accurately how much computer hardware and SysAdmin support you need.

And so far, SysAdmins mostly speak computer lingo and nothing else. That's partly because it takes so much lingo to speak accurately about computers and partly because we fear to get specialized in the part of our job that is outside of the computers. 10 years ago, if you were specialized in computers, you were nearly unemployable. If you were specialized in computers for, say, restaurant operations, you were going to night school to learn an employable skill, despite your higher degrees.

I started this talking about the “under paid” aspect of being under valued. Questions remain about the value of SysAdmins in general. And I can't give an answer to that. And I would contend that no one else can either. Most of the businesses that adopted computer technology in the last 10 years did so when computer hardware was plummeting in price and skyrocketing in capability and at the same time, the human beings capable of installing and supporting that hardware were desperate to feed themselves after looking for work for several years.

The amount that businesses spent on the people associated with computers was too high in the 1990's and it was too low in 2000's. We haven't seen Baby Bear's salary range yet.

There is also the fact that when computers are involved, the last five years counts as both a hard and fast tradition and also mostly obsolete practices.

How long did it take for touch-tone phones to completely replace rotary phones? Was it more than 20 years to tip the balance toward mostly touch-tone? That can never happen in an industry touched by computers. If you hold on to your 20 year old computer hardware, you risk seeing a brand new competitor do the same thing with a system that when brand-new costs 1/100th the amount you pay just to keep the old stuff running.

And if your own SysAdmins show you how you can replace that Jurassic computer equipment with modern stuff that requires less support and performs many times better, all you notice is that you don't need them to support your dinosaur, now that the mammals have taken over. So you let them go.

I feel emotionally certain that your bottom line is wrong. Your SysAdmin added all that value to your business--that's what they were hired to do. Credit them with it and encourage them to keep trying to add value.

Employees used to simply get more valuable the more experience they had in the field. You could often assign value simply based on years of experience. An employee in their fifties is at their peak in experience and maturity and they often see the company they are with as the place they will be until retirement, so they want to help make it successful so they can be successful with it.

In the IT world, a SysAdmin has to be able to support the latest tech and that tech has completely changed within the last 5 years. The first business thought is, just as the old computers are obsolete, so are the SysAdmins. “We have to hire new SysAdmins that know the new stuff.” Besides, the new guys are cheaper because we pay based on years of experience and they haven't got any.

The first generation of SysAdmins are those employees in their fifties. These are the ones that have survived at least 3 rounds of “the tech has completely changed within the last 5 years.” They learned the new tech and fit it into your business environment. Twice. Adding value each time. Business can and should see them exactly the way they see employees in other fields. Their value grows with their experience.

Businesses still remember how much had to change to integrate computers into industries that only computer geeks thought should be computerized 10 years ago. And they remember how many good people in their employ couldn't make the change.

But these 5-year tech shifts are not the same class of change. The job of the SysAdmin stays the same through these changes. You thought you hired them to support brand X, software Y, and computer Z, so you think you need new SysAdmins when you change X, Y, and Z. But you hired them to support your business on computers. They know your business and they know computers. They help you decide when to replace XYZ with ABC. They don't yet know ABC perfectly, but what they know about your business is what matters. Knowing computers helps them pickup ABC quickly.