Conventional wisdom that fails for IT - 0 views
-
Conventional wisdom that fails for IT
-
I’ve done several posts featuring what I call “Peterisms”, which are basically aphorisms I’ve adopted that encapsulate hard-earned IT lessons. Let’s turn it around this time, and talk about two sayings that sound equally folksy-sensible, and that I hear again and again, but which I feel are actually dangerous to apply to information technology work. And, of course, I’ll discuss why that’s so.
-
As with so many things, that situation represented a management failure too. It reflected a willingness, whether explicit or implicit, to live on borrowed time, hoping to stave off as long as possible the certain-to-come outage that would then take much longer to resolve. It showed a willingness to tolerate unnecessary inefficiency and risk. It embodied an ongoing refusal to insist on (and prioritize) the necessary hard work to keep the clutter out of the equation.
- ...3 more annotations...
-
I know of very few aphorisms that tend to be repeated as smugly as this one, particularly by scared people. The implication is that action is generally to be avoided, that the status quo is probably just fine, and that one should wait for a true crisis before intervening. And, of course, that it's your fault if you've ignored this sage advice and intervened anyway. It's ironic, then, how IT departments themselves end up complaining endlessly about how they're always in fire-fighting mode. This prevailing attitude evolves among (and is a telling symptom of) burned-out sysadmins and developers, especially those who are stuck maintaining systems they didn't themselves write or engineer. It can be equally summed up as a "don't touch it, don't breathe on it" kind of superstition. Or, perhaps, it's akin to the proud but defensive statement that "we've always done it that way."