I was summoned to the New Prospects Office to see a new program not working.
“See? Pressing the F6 key should repeat the last operation. It does nothing! None of the F keys work!”
“We rewrote this program to make it transactional and prevent people doing certain things twice. You were at that meeting where we brought up multiple posting.” Read More
In the early days some startups did not believe in full time techs. They brought them in as needed. I answered an advert for a bloke to set up some SUN servers. It was one of the first ISPs in Wollongong starting up. I set up user accounts for people who signed up for internet access and they all connected via modem. I also set up some instances of apache server with many virtual hosts ready to be handed over to clients.
The company blossomed to 11 employees: salesmen, advertising, accounting, other office staff, but no IT people. Read More
My manager, Philip, hired a contractor to set up a RAID array. I pointed out to him we had several such arrays already set up and that it was routine. He was nonplused but went ahead with the contractor anyway. He stated something like “We have to consider the relative value of our data…” He had obviously been reading Tech for Suits again and was impressed with an article on outsourcing. Read More
Pie Charts
Reports are the lifeblood of management. If you can produce a good report of your failure with pie-charts and colours then the failure becomes secondary. We have such a situation now. My manager, Philip, had a new recruit, Cecil, begin monitoring the uptime of various services. The result was a summary of all the times each service was unavailable. Read More »