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jducoeurFascinating article in Ars Technica today, about the network administration soap opera going on in San Francisco. It's worth a read: it's not terribly long, and a good cautionary tale about how to screw up the running of a network. Lots of he-said / they-said, with the city essentially claiming that their network architect is a devious criminal and him countering that their bureaucracy is really the cause of the problems.
But what really strikes me is that the defense seems to partly rest on the notion that the city's information architecture is so complex and elegant that only the guy who built it can maintain it -- that's why he has needed to centralize so much power in his own hands. And I'm sorry, but that just replaces malicious intent with incompetence in my book. If he's managed to build a system that *only* he can maintain, then he is *not* "very, very good at what he does". Maintainability is one of the most important aspects of any computing environment; if you miss that, you haven't done your job.
Or to put it another way: if your company / client / family / whatever is going to have insuperable problems when you get hit by a bus, you've done it wrong...
But what really strikes me is that the defense seems to partly rest on the notion that the city's information architecture is so complex and elegant that only the guy who built it can maintain it -- that's why he has needed to centralize so much power in his own hands. And I'm sorry, but that just replaces malicious intent with incompetence in my book. If he's managed to build a system that *only* he can maintain, then he is *not* "very, very good at what he does". Maintainability is one of the most important aspects of any computing environment; if you miss that, you haven't done your job.
Or to put it another way: if your company / client / family / whatever is going to have insuperable problems when you get hit by a bus, you've done it wrong...