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Admin
So, everything went smoothly ?
Admin
BTTDBTJ.
I scent a possible occurrence of the "never say no" culture.
"Can you do such-and-such a job?" "Oh yes, most certainly." (means "actually no, but, well, how hard can it be?")
"Have you finished such-and-such a job? " "Oh yes, most certainly, 90% completed." (means: "Oh yes, that job, um, no, I completely forgot about it till now. Never mind, I'm on the case, I'm just reading the online manuals now, oh look someone's just sent me a cat / monkey / tiger video.")
"Can you deliver by today like you promised yesterday?" "Oh yes, most certainly, close of play today." (means: "Hang on, oh yes, I remember now, I was going to read the manual then someone distracted me with a cat / monkey / tiger video.")
And so on, round and round in circles.
Admin
Sorry, that's BTDTBTJ.
Admin
Sounds like a pretty routine migration to me
Admin
Not going to lie, I expected the ending to be the client saying we went with a different provider and got everything set up within a few days.
Admin
Not a WTF. More like a SOP, sadly.
Admin
Sadly familiar.
Admin
And there were no further emails as all subsequent communication was from the lawyers for The Company eviscerating The Service Provider for breach of contract, yes?
Admin
More likely Eric would all be blamed for all of it and the Service Provider would raise their fees because of the non-standard requests.
Other than that: isn't 60 days completely normal for providing working enterprise network configurations?
Admin
That sound like the last time I sat in on a call where British Telecom was to add a new connection between two customer sites. Three spiritual brethren of Mehul had to try five times before they managed to poke the appropriate holes in the firewall, the operation of this was outsourced to BT in that companies aspect of "Network specialists".
Admin
Penny wise, pound foolish.
And this is why outsourcing is Not Always A Good Idea. Sure, there are some things you can outsource, like cleaning bathrooms or vehicle deliveries... but if something is part of your core IT (such as configuring web servers) then keep it in-house as you have better control over quality and delivery...
Admin
"isn't 60 days completely normal for providing working enterprise network configurations?" .... Been working with some large enterprises (banks, insurance, etc.) many of them have truly adopted the cloud mindset and can provisions these things in working fashion within hours.
Admin
For those wondering, the connect-the-dots puzzle is a pair or penguins: https://i.imgur.com/Db6uuql.png
Admin
Wow, web servers sound like tough things that only serious businesses can do. I bet no one runs one in their basement.
Admin
Surprised that following Day 8, there was no Day 59 stating "Someone in The Company now wants a GUI"... (Nice penguins BTW)
Admin
So Eric solves the original issue on day 57, despite being told to let Another Service Provider do it? Sounds fireable.
Admin
Is this the Mega Bureaucracy from the outside?
Admin
Same here. These big companies saw some migrations to cloud providers ten years ago and worried about how IT would ensure compliance when they didn't know what servers the company was using. To get a handle on things, they asked everyone "what are your top reasons for considering the cloud?". Very few said price, most said reducing hassle and improving delivery time. The smart companies then reduced hassle and improved delivery time.
It's really easy to install the self-provisioning module of your virtualization infrastructure and not impossible to figure out how to charge for it. Any company of size would already be building from templates anyways. Some of these same companies might already have been building servers at AWS.
Admin
At the other end of the spectrum, I was working as a sysadmin in a cloud-heavy startup. Management came to me with an urgent request for storing our auto-generated documentation somewhere securely. Our cloud team had quoted two days to put SSO on top of a bucket and they couldn't prioritise it for weeks. I had been recommending we keep some infrastructure in-house. I quoted an hour to spin up an internal Linux VM with Apache, SSL and LDAP auth. Exactly 60 minutes later I posted the link to the new host in the Slack channel. Had that building the documentation every 15 minutes for 2 months until the other team could get round to cloudifying it.
Admin
Sounds like The Service Provider is a bunch of guys "experimenting" with Linux in their garage.
Admin
What with the number of people from The Service Provider appearing here, I'm quite curious about the size of the aforementioned garage.
Admin
It's not "The Benny Hill Theme" : Its name is "Yakkity Sax."
Admin
Yes, everyone had done the needful!
Admin
sounds just like my last job, except that i was trying to get Service Provider to add four aggregation columns to a SQL table. oh and i quit around day 50. oh, and Service Provider was another unit of the same company, a SaaS firm that at least 50% of software engineers use on a daily basis...
Admin
The Company sounds very much like my company
Admin
This is what has happened in every company I've been in where Management brillantly decided to outsource to India (three times).
India sells Management a truckload of lies, which Management happily laps up. They declare this will save time and money and make our jobs easier.
Things seem to be going well. They promise they can do anything we need. Then finally... there is a deliverable, any deliverable. Suddenly all hell seems to break loose. Oh no, we were definitely on schedule but everything is going wrong because of external (totally not our fault) problems. I think we need more money from you to solve these problems. Two weeks later, Management usually capitulates and gives them more money (sunk cost).
Two weeks after that, a 'deliverable' arrives. And it is a pile of garbage. When you talk to India about why it complies but does nothing at all they will tell you that it's because you have a firewall. You must disable all firewalls in the company and run it as root in order for it to work properly - we know it works because we tested it exhaustively here, why certainly we did yes yes. In addition to their deadline being completely blown, now our time is wasted in dealing with their garbage. Unfortunately the person who did that deliverable is on another project now, but he might be convinced to come back if you sent us more money.
In every single time, outsourcing completely ballooned the costs and time spent. It was a disaster. Strangely, Management at various places seems to have actually learned something for once, and I hear almost nothing about outsourcing anything anymore, and certainly not to India.
Admin
That's not really the other end of the spectrum. The spectrum isn't from "on premise" to "in cloud", it's "silos" to "goal orientation". The cloud is a classic case of the difficulty of multivariate analysis. The business wants to get out from under the age-old slow process, so they jump to the cloud. They do it with their people who share their goals. It works. They see "cloud better", but they really should have seen that what gave them the win was that the resource doing the work was responsive to them. Your example shows how the same silos running the cloud builds are exactly as slow as they were doing on premise work.
The hard part is that the age-old slow process had a reason it got that way. Usually an early attempt at an alternative learns this the hard way by stepping in some PCI or Sarbanes-Oxley pile of crap. Suddenly, the old guard is floating the idea that the new guys are doing it faster and cheaper because they are creating mountains of toxic technical debt in the form of poor monitoring, bad security, and lack of compliance.
Admin
Wait, that wasn't one of those "how many combining accents can I stack in Unicode" Cthulu things?
Admin
For those familiar with Russell Peters' "Arab Men" monologue, imagine a heavy middle eastern accent and a sentence that begins "OK. First...".
Admin
If anyone wants to know, the connect the dots is penguins.
Admin
Day 128: Eric was fired and immediately escorted out of the building for not having done what he was told. Management does not accept insubordination. Or using your brain properly.
Admin
We used to say "on-site" until all these cloud "egg-spurts" appeared on the scene and thought they were the first ever people to deal with the dilemma between putting kit on the client's, umm, site or premises, or somewhere else.
But you are right, the location isn't relevant. You need a competent team either side or failure is pretty much guaranteed. My experience of out-sourcing is that it happens because management couldn't intelligently frame their request to IT, got frustrated, and decided to waste money sending stupid nonsense to some other bunch of confused techies. Even if those techies are good, they are doomed, but they usually come out better from the blame-storm.
Admin
Replace "cat / monkey / tiger video" with 3 people having called me in the last 5 minutes and now someone just walked through the door and wants to speak with me and you've got my life in a nutshell. Cue to 3 hours later and I still haven't finished the original task I set out to do. I hate my work sometimes.
I never, ever, ever promise anything anymore. I use estimates and phrases like "projected timeline" and "estimated ETA" and "best-case scenario" etc. I learned early on that when you promise something, people will expect it to be a reality with no room for error.
Admin
This is pretty much why I prefer service providers who have tools that allows me to do everything by myself without "bothering" their personnel.
Admin
The problem isn't outsourcing or Indian developers. The problem is expecting to get competent workers while paying 1/4 or less of the wage you'd have to pay a regular employee, and having an extra layer of profit margins to fill taking a portion of even that.
You want developers that are working for basically minimum wage? Well, you get the quality of developer that is willing to work for minimum wage. The outsourcing companies' main job seems to be convincing you that that makes any sort of sense.
Admin
Huh. that reminds me of when I moved and needed internet at the new place. Planned to switch to local_provider who assured me in at least 3 phone calls that "that's not going to be a problem, at all". I get sent the contract. I check which services I want to have, sign it, and send it back. A few days later, I get a phone call from local_provider that they "don't have the capacity right now" to accept new customers. I don't bother asking what that is even supposed to mean, and I am in the middle of renovating the new place, so I also forget to ask WTF they didn't check if they "have the capacity" for new customers in any of the previous phone calls or before they sent out the contract.
So, I get on the phone with previous_provider and fill out a form that enables me to take my previous contract to the new place. Two months later and there's still no real progress (various tickets have been opened and escalated during that time). It's now one month since I moved places and still have to access internet over LTE. Which... kind of works, but limits internet use, since I don't have unlimited data volume. One fateful day, current_provider calls (I also have my mobile contract at that company), since I am quite busy I schedule a phone call for the next day, thinking nothing much of it. Propably the current_provider won't call anyway. But they do, at the scheduled time (pleasant surprise No. 1). I set up a new contract over the phone, get the router etc via mail a few days later (pleasant surprise No 2), a technician shows up (15 minutes BEFORE the scheduled time slot!), sets up the connection (it's internet via TV cable, so another device installed, which I can't do myself), hooks up the router, and it works (pleasant surprise No. 3). All in all, this took less than a week, from their initial call until I finally had an internet connection at home.