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Walzmyn writes:
"The company I work for is not a tech company. We are, however, a multi-national, multi-billion dollar company that claims to be the largest of our kind in three industries (and second largest in a 4th). And yet, our company network sucks. There is a mishmash of Citrix and SAP, multiple web-portals, and none of them work with each other. The several thousand non-technical people that work for this company are routinely asked to interface with this system and end up spending time with the helpdesk or with a supervisor looking over the shoulder for something that was supposed to be private.
I've heard of similar situations with other companies, so I wanted to ask the folks that live and breathe the tech sector this: Why can't a company this size get something so fundamental done right? Why can't they at least hire a third party to do it right for them?"
(Score: 1) by dave562 on Thursday February 20 2014, @07:31PM
I work for a company that does tech. We provide SaaS solutions to the Fortune 50 and the Federal government. We do not have the struggle of being viewed as a cost center as many IT shops do because we generate revenue. We are in a highly competitive marketplace, so we have to stay up to date on the current trends, and in many situations, have to develop our own apps to fill specific needs.
Our biggest challenge is finding qualified people, and despite the common refrain of "Pay more!" that is not the issue. We have great compensation packages. Our HR team does yearly salary reviews to make sure that our compensation stays competitive and often times adjusts them upwards because the company understands that in the long run it is less expensive to retain talent than it is to train new employees.
Despite all of that, we still have a hard time finding qualified candidates. We had a storage administrator position open for close to a year, and the guy we found is average at best. We hired him directly from EMC. The people out there in the market were even worse. It takes about a year to break in a new developer. By that I mean, getting them up to speed on secure coding practices, SDLC practices (change management, dev vs prod, UAT, etc)
The really good IT people are very, very expensive because their skills are in such high demand that they can command ridiculous salaries. Most of them are in consulting because that is where the money is. Often times the "best case" scenario is to have talented consultants deploy systems, and then pray to God that the transition to the in house guys works out (it rarely does).
It is hard to do tech well. It is even harder to do it at scale. While a corporation might have a decent team that runs the primary LOB application (SAP, PeopleSoft, whatever), their help desk might suck. Or they might have decent administrators who can keep Exchange running well, but they know next to nothing about Oracle and SQL Server.
The final challenge comes in with retaining good people. As hard as it is to do IT well, it is possible to execute individual projects successfully. The people who are good at bringing systems online, or tuning poor running systems, are not going to want to deal with the boredom that comes from running those systems day in, day out. I spent 10 years consulting because I never ran out of things to do. By the time we got one client completely dialed in, there were new clients who needed similar help. Before that, I spent over a year twiddling my thumbs at a small business (~200 employees) because I literally ran out of things to do and the company was not going to invest any more money in IT.
Now where I work, I spend a lot of time fixing other people's mistakes. I see a lot of them. The company does a lot of M&A work, so we are constantly acquiring new companies and having to integrated their systems and operations with ours. 80% of the time we just migrate their data out of whatever platform they have, standardize it with our own, and scrap the rest of the stack. On any given team of 10 IT people, you might have one guy who is a rock star, and two or three who are competent enough to be trusted on their own. The rest of the team will need close supervision and very explicitly defined tasks.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday February 24 2014, @03:51PM
"we have to stay up to date on the current trends, and in many situations, have to develop our own apps to fill specific needs."
Internally its all "see this cover of PC magazine, do that by next week, don't care if you've never heard about it before." And frankly it usually works out OK.
So that's how new tech is handled internally.
"we still have a hard time finding qualified candidates."
Right outta the HR job posting:
- Must have minimum 20 years experience in new technology that was just announced on PC Magazine front cover last month and/or Nobel prize and/or Turing award.
- Must have expert level experience in (insert list of keywords generated by selecting 20 random wikipedia articles, none of which are actually used on the job). Also mandatory that this list was from 2004 and has not been updated since the previous guy being replaced was hired.
- Must survive two day interview gauntlet consisting proving Fermats last theorem, inventing 3 new sorting algorithms in IBM 360 basic assembly language, implementing a quantum factoring algorithm using Radio Shack parts and an old TI-81 calculator, all for an ungodly stereotypical CRUD app dev position.
- Must be under 28 years of age, thirtysomethings are too expensive as employees and willing to relocate to outer Elbonia.
And this is how new tech is handled externally.
Spot any little difference?