Tag: work

I’ve always believed that the IT department’s objective is primarily to enable and enhance business operations primarily and ensuring compliance is secondary to this. Not saying that I’ve always been successful but in my previous jobs, I’ve always tried to align the objectives of my IT departments accordingly whether the end-users are accountants or software engineers. But now, I’m in operations and I’m seeing a lot of incongruence between IT and business.

For example, one initiative being undertaken at work is virtualization. But with a twist: they’re utilizing virtual machines supposedly for security. What the heck do they mean by that? Virtual machines are great for efficient provisioning (setup/configuration of machines) and efficient and effective use of hardware (e.g. consolidating servers, consolidating multiple desktops, shared desktops, etc). But there is not much additional security benefits. A virtual machine is practically the same as a physical machine sitting on your desk. Okay, maybe they’re just poor at communications and really want the provisioning, efficiency, and effectiveness benefits of virtualization.

But now they’re testing out virtual machines by deploying them to old machines whose hardware specification did not factor in virtual machines. Or did but have since been left behind by increasing requirements of newer software. There is always a performance hit from virtualization and using hardware not designed for it compounds the issue. And that has a direct performance hit on day-to-day operations.

And exactly what are they testing anyway? I was informed performance is not their concern. That it’s security. Do they have specific and measurable objectives with respect to this testing? What are the security parameters? Is this testing going to be scientific at all? Do they really believe in the supposed security benefits? I suspect that all they’re concerned about is really the provisioning benefits of virtualization. Saves them a lot of work but, again, that’s not the primary objective of IT.

 

This morning, I was awakened at 2AM by a call from Nino. He was on standby providing support to the deployment team and it seems there’s a problem. I quickly dialed-in to the conference call and got the log report. I saw, as Nino already did, that there’s a communication problem between two components, the CWS and the PIS.

However, due to the configuration of the production environment, it is hard to confirm. There is a staging environment but the configuration is different (bad) so it’s pretty much useless. Eventually, the deployment team did manage to isolate one production server and we tested on it.

Same conclusion: there is a communication problem between CWS and PIS. I asked if PIS is available on the port the CWS is trying to connect to. That probably switched the light bulbs in the deployment team’s collective heads because they instead of responding, they configured something, and voila, it worked!

UPDATE: I found out that the port our system has been configured to use is not compatible in production because they had decided to keep the old application server up (good) on that port and have the new application server on a different port (but they hadn’t informed us, bad).

I was browsing through the Forbes when I read these two articles about the ten worst jobs and ten happiest jobs. The ten worst jobs are:

1. Director of Information Technology
2. Director of Sales and Marketing
3. Product Manager
4. Senior Web Developer
5. Technical Specialist
6. Electronics Technician
7. Law Clerk
8. Technical Support Analyst
9. CNC Machinist
10. Marketing Manager

Director of Information Technology, a job on my current career plan, is at the top. Not good.

And the ten happiest jobs are:

1. Clergy
2. Firefighters
3. Physical therapists
4. Authors
5. Special education teachers
6. Teachers
7. Artists
8. Psychologists
9. Financial services sales agents
10. Operating engineers

It may be too late for me to become clergy but author or teacher (I’ve actually taught before) seem feasible. Hmmm.

I’ve always been interested in having my own business, manage my own time, and thus have more time with the family. Which is why I found this article particularly interesting. How to be your own boss—and have more time with the family. What’s not to like? One of the observations on the benefits of managing your own time contains a nugget of wisdom:

“This was a big plus when I became a mom because I was able to stay home and be hands-on with my boys (and squeeze in work whenever I have the chance, usually when they’re sleeping). I get to bring them to school every day, spend time with them at home.”

That is how it should be: Squeeze in work (and workplace related activities) into your schedule. It shouldn’t be the other way around where you squeeze in family into your schedule. I resolve to do that… even while I’m still a cubicle denizen.

It’s ironic when some companies try to espouse supposed work-life balance when the best thing a company can do for work-life balance would be to make you work 8 hours tops.

Consider a company where you end up spending 10 hours per day for work and work-related stuff (including team-building activities):

6 hours – sleep
1 hour – prepare for work
1 hour – go to work
10 hours – work
1 coffee breaks + lunch
1 hour – go home
4 hours – remainder

4 hours, 4 measly hours for your family, your kids, your friends, yourself. How is that balance?