The IT Cowboy
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Are you an IT Cowboy? What are you going to do as more business skills are required, systems get more standardized and there's less room for an individual to stand out as a store of knowledge that just fixes things?
This article is interesting in that it talks about things changing over the next ten years. I'm not sure that I buy it. It's a similar argument I've heard in the past that we'll have more and more automated, less managed systems.
Systems get better, but they keep breaking. They keep requiring little tips and tricks. They keep requiring these little stores of knowledge because as humans we keep forgetting things. Or adding them or something else. I just can't ever see that there won't be those IT cowboys around forever that know the ins and outs of systems. In some ways it reminds me of the early SQL Server 7 campaigns where it "didn't need a DBA."
That worked out well, huh?
Are lots of my URLs going to be obsolete? Is Microsoft going to create its own domain: .ms?
I stumbled upon Popfly at MSDN, a new mashup from Microsoft to let people build web applications without programming. The thing that caught my eye was this wasn't popfly.microsoft.com but rather popfly.ms!
For a second I thought, Wow, what a powerful company to get their own domain. Then I searched and found that the .ms domain is for Montserrat. So I had to check and be sure that Microsoft hadn't bought the island. I haven't seen a release yet, just the purchase of aQuantive.
No news yet, but you never know. Wouldn't be a bad investment and with a GDP of $29million, they could probably afford it. Plus it might be a nice investment as a retreat for their employees.
Steve's Pick of the Week : Motion Sensing Tablet PCs
Cancel the query? Shake your laptop! Need to ? Tip the laptop forward.
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I thought the cowboy column was simplistic at best. If the article is saying that companies cannot afford to have experts operating outside of the company procedures, that I would agree with. If the author wants us to believe there will be less need for experts in the future, then he is being silly. The evolution of the automobile is an instructive model. In the early days of the car, they were unreliable and every owner had to be a mechanic. Nowadays, they are much more reliable but we still need an army of mechanics and these mechanics have to be ever more skilled.
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Yeah, yeah, I can't type. I'm sure Phil has a few of those in his past as well
. I got notified yesterday that I'm not that swift and it's been corrected above. And it's http://www.popfly.ms.I agree it's simplistic, but what amazes me is how many people think this way. I've had people get out of IT because they were worried about automation. I still see people worried about their jobs and tremendously worried about offshoring because they think what they do is very simple.
The reality is that many people are cowboys in some way and there's a lot of us that are necessary to keeping things going. And we're not easily replaced. I still think if you have strong skills, you're likely to always have a job.
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I remember the very first time I felt those waves of panic about offshoring and automation. It was in the late seventies. Surprisingly, there still seems to be plenty of work around.
Yes, my spelling is abominable, execrable, sometimes indecypherable; but for some reason, we dyslexics get a special thrill in pointing out the spelling mistakes in others, though.
Best wishes,
Phil Factor -
Steve
Monserrat is one of the most active volcanoes in the World in recent years, why would Microsoft employees want to vacation there?
http://volcano.und.edu/vwdocs/current_volcs/montserrat/montserrat.html
Kind regards,
Gift Peddie -
Warm, sunny, and cheap liquor
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Whatever the arguments in the editorial, no IT worker in the UK would want to be known as an 'IT cowboy' - a cowboy over here is someone who does a bad job, albeit cheaply, and then does a runner before you notice.
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"Forrester said that CEOs will now be less clueless about technology because this changing dynamic will demand from them a fighting level of technology know-how."
What evidence does he have that top management won't remain clueless? Every place I have worked the top management has proven Forrester wrong.
The article needs more facts and less wild guesses.
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My completely anecdotally based guess is that it will be at least a generation (20-30 years) before anything like real 100% automation exists for an entire company's IT infrastructure - least of all with enterprise databases.
What I do see happening as the next great challenge is that IT people will no longer be able to get by only on technical knowledge. Given the competition for the web and for customers, IT will increasingly need to become more like automobile production lines:
1. Maximal but not totally complete automation (I know times are tough for the auto industry, but there are still people who need to carefully align and link car parts, things that robots presumably can't do yet).
2. More process-oriented development and quality control, something closer to production-line testing and operations.
3. Desire for employees who not only know programming syntax but who can also talk to customers in their language about the real priorities driving a project.
4. Reliability - this is the big tough one, since reliability is much more subjective with software than it is with auto performance - but clearly the joke of "What if the highways were like Microsoft products" has more than a grain of truth in it. I am not a knee-jerk MS-basher but I have to admit that they (and other software companies) are still missing something about how to make software and computers run reliably for people who aren't willing or able to edit the Registry. Most computer users want something like the reputation Japanese cars have for lasting a long time and getting good mileage, etc.
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webrunner
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A SQL query walks into a bar and sees two tables. He walks up to them and asks, "Can I join you?"
Ref.: http://tkyte.blogspot.com/2009/02/sql-joke.html -
Jon, I believe we call them 'Contractors'
I know I have picked up the remains of 'in-out' coders before and I'm sure I will again.As far as the japanese cars go... Don't Apple have that kind of reputation amongst users? Deserving or not most people assume they don't crash like Windows PCs.
Rich
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That's a good point about Apple. They certainly have that reputation, and it has been furthered by a jealously loyal user base.
How much of that reputation is based on a stable production method that relies more on automation and less on IT cowboys, I can't say. But if Windows PCs had that reputation in addition to the market share, then Apple would be out of business. The fact that Apple is still around would make an interesting research project -- is it due to a far superior product or due to a somewhat better product plus a cult following? I'm not trying to knock Apple, since I haven't used a Mac in years, and I have no reason to doubt that they deserve their reputation for stable computers -- but I am curious if an attempt to be objective might show what is really going on.
Thanks,
webrunner
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webrunner
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A SQL query walks into a bar and sees two tables. He walks up to them and asks, "Can I join you?"
Ref.: http://tkyte.blogspot.com/2009/02/sql-joke.html -
I haven't used an Apple computer in years - last time was back in the 90's; one of those little 9 or 10-inch screen models. At the time we had mostly PC-clones running IBM's OS2 operating system, but there were still a bunch of Macs around. I remember having to re-boot the OS/2 box several times a day (I think my worst day was 9 or 10 re-boots). I don't recall booting the Mac more than once a week, if that. Even when we moved to Windows 3.1, the need to re-boot occurred more often than it did with the Macs. So while some may see it as a "cult following", my experience was that the Mac had a more stable operating system. Having trained a few users, I can also say that most non-computer people picked up the Mac much faster than the PCs.
Unfortunately I only work with Windows these days, so I can't comment on the current generation of Apple operating systems.
As to the "Cowboy" (or Cowgirl!) philosophy, I think you're still going to need the competent techies, but we're definitely seeing a shift towards "soft" skills in addition to the technical skills. But you'd best define just what technical skills means. To someone who is unfamiliar with Excel, the ability to do graphs with it is indistinguishable from magic!
Here there be dragons...,Steph Brown
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The problem with the term 'Cowboy' is the context in which it's used.
To some it may mean someone who can think for themselves and take charge when there are issues that need to be handled. To others, particularly micro-managers, it means someone over whom they cannot exert their full authoritative control.
So... when a problem occurs: who sits back and waits for a decision from a micro-manager about the best way to deal with said problem or do they get in their and fix it in such a way that reduces downtime (to the best of their ability)?
The other comment I saw about skills and we, as DBAs, saying that it's not hard to do what we do, makes it easy for managers to outsource us because there are DBAs out there who make what we do look easy.
So do professional ice-skaters - but only a dedicated fool would believe that it doesn't take years of practice and a lot of commitment to get to that level and that the job can be pawned off to anyone just to save money.
I've been called a Cowboy on many an occasion but I've never been referred to as "Passion Fingers" (thankfully
)A lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
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