As someone that's bootstrapped for 3 years, I can say that working hard is imperative, but can also be incredibly detrimental to your business. I believe in the spirit of the blog post, as long as you don't get caught up in absolutes, because obviously burnout is counter-productive.
Most startups I see are weekend projects, or 3-6 month endeavors that really don't qualify as being a part of history and are dominated by goal of making money. However, considering the author it's safe to say that Arrington is assuming that you're actually trying to MAKE A DIFFERENCE, instead of building the next coupon loyalty program with game theory and achievements. It's probably also safe to say that someone with his universally accepted work ethic is probably seeing alot more 'whining' in his current role than previously exposed to.
CS/CE offer no discernable value to the IT scene, unfortunately. Define 'take care'. Not install spyware knowingly? Ok great. How about making sure that software you install don't conflict with regular updates that are made to all systems every month? Or what about making sure that you're not introducing problems in the areas of authentication or monitoring, by changing specific settings or services that are running for a purpose. Unless you have ever worked in IT, you likely have very little knowledge on the havoc you could cause for seemingly simple changes.
As for JRE vs. VLC, how do you JRE's status isn't simply a false negative? How many applications in your organization actually utilize the JRE? Is it a non-issue? Are you aware if there are any measures already taken to mitigate known JRE exploits? There is quite a large difference between exploits that exist in an environment vs. those that exist in an application that you actively execute.
Granted I'm not defending the specifics, I personally think VLC is likely fine. But that doesn't change the points made above. In IT, it's always better to go with the devil you know, than the devil you don't.
"Better to go with the devil you know, than the devil you don't." The devil you know. Better for you. Meanwhile I get sabotaged from doing my job well. And my job impacts the bottom line more than yours.
That couldn't be further from the truth. If I make mistakes, websites, phone systems, <insert service name here> become inaccessible for an unknown duration. That's best case. Worst case, data loss. Depending on the nature of the outage, it could ruin the company.
Try selling to a potential customer when their email domain continues to get bounced, or their voice mails never reach you and you'll find out very quickly who has a greater impact on the organization.
As someone that programs as well, giving admin access to programmers generally makes sense. In a perfect world however, I'd rather give you your own sandbox to mess up and not your desktop so that when the next wave of patches get pushed out, I don't have to worry about your box not being like everyone else's because you altered the 'expected' state of the desktop the patches / configs were designed for.
Sans perfect world, as long as set ground rules are in place, any reasonable IT person should be ok with this request.
I think you would find that to be simply not true depending on the nature of the organization. Work for the government, or any security conscious organization, and you'll see how little control you have (for good reason).
There are terrible IT people out there, that's for sure. Many don't go beyond the knowledge of someone from the Geek Squad. But then again, that goes for every profession.
Many times the nicest IT staff are those that are the most clueless and have to make up for their lack of knowledge with personality. The cranky IT people generally have too much to do, not enough time to do it, and are stuck dealing with trivial issues that stop them from getting to the critical ones their jobs (or the company's uptime) depend on.
I think your experience has been very unique (and fortunate) to come to the nice = smart conclusion.
Some excellent points I hadn't mentioned in my reply in this thread. People often forget that keeping things up is a constant battle.
Your opening paragraph says it all though. When developers talk about how difficult programming is, I always explain IT like this:
"Imagine you have N sections of code you have to support that someone else has written. They may/may not be documented, whatever documentation you have may not even be accurate, you can't change the, and somehow they have to work together even though they probably weren't designed to do that. Oh and there's a good chance there's no one to call for integration help, but you're responsible for tactfully explaining this all to executives & end users without ticking them off, even though they'll only call you when it's broken."
It's too bad that the perception around IT's role has only gotten worse now with the cloud.
"You know the 30-60 minute spin-up time it takes to get your head into coding? Well imagine someone interrupting you every 15 minutes to ask you how to insert a table into MS Word (I'm sorry, didn't your fucking CV say you had MS Office experience?). Now imagine how long your replies would remain welcoming and friendly."
I agree 100% with this statement, but as someone that's lived in IT all of my career, I believe there is one more point: education. The most successful organizations have an executive team that embraces IT as a necessary component of success (rather than evil) and communicates that to the organization. It's the purpose & perception of IT that causes bitterness and wrong expectations in the workplace, on both sides.
Just look at the fact that no one ever calls up IT thanking them for dial tone 364 days in a row without incident, but many will complain incredibly that ONE DAY it occurs for 10 minutes, it's no wonder there is such a disconnect.
While you might be able to link this situation/behavior to any support role, I would respectively disagree. Most support personnel are clearly disconnected from the activity requiring support, but with IT you often are interacting within 0-2 degrees of THE person responsible for your issue. This dramatically changes the dynamic of conversations.
IT people (just like anyone else) want to be appreciated for their work, in part because they typically sacrifice more personal time than any other department due to the nature of their job, without a reflection in compensation.
Assuming the IT staff are competent at their job, once people begin to embrace that department, and not talk to them like Dell tech support, then perhaps the stereotypes will start to change.
Incidentally, the reason that the IT staff may be so pleasant to deal with at Google may have less to do with IT, and more to do with the attitude & intellectual level of the user base.
It's interesting how the criticism of supporting those that serve usually come from people that have never enlisted.
Anyone that has served in a war deserves total respect for the sacrifices & suffering they endured every day, regardless of the ethics of the cause. All war is bad, not just those we think are 'worth it', so either give soldiers the respect they deserve every day or be quiet, because many of the liberties we personally enjoy (not just in US, but every country) have come through countless lives, right or wrong.
I realize it can make you uncomfortable, but I'll never stop thanking soldiers in uniform for standing in to defend our country so that I don't have to. Thank you.
Yes, many soldiers have given their lives to fight for the freedoms we enjoy and other soldiers have given their lives to take away those freedoms. That's exactly why I insist on making a distinction and pay respect only to some of them.
For instance, I do respect nhangen for defending Kabul against the Taliban. I do not respect the Taliban soldiers for trying to enforce some weird version of sharia law in Kabul even though they are also suffering and dying in a war.
Very interesting post. If a VC stepping in to save the ship is what's needed, I'd be all for it. I wonder how many Fred Wilsons there are out there though...
Most startups I see are weekend projects, or 3-6 month endeavors that really don't qualify as being a part of history and are dominated by goal of making money. However, considering the author it's safe to say that Arrington is assuming that you're actually trying to MAKE A DIFFERENCE, instead of building the next coupon loyalty program with game theory and achievements. It's probably also safe to say that someone with his universally accepted work ethic is probably seeing alot more 'whining' in his current role than previously exposed to.