That's it, I'm never going to be a rich consultant working for one of the big 5.
While trying to come up with new acronyms to show value on pretty plain and old stuff, I though in using AaaS or, Administration as a Service.
In the talk that took place inside my head, that was an immediate hit. But, when my practical side asked "in what is that different from outsourcing", I simply told me to STFU and go read about what is "The Cloud". That, obviously triggered the term "Cloud Administrator" wish, it's just another way to put - a Rainman and, since I have zero chance of being mistaken for Tom Cruise (or Valeria Golino for that matter), I'm stuck at being the mental handicapped one.
So, my brain just made me never to be able to use the term cloud administrator without thinking on someone with his chin on the side, drooling and saying in repeat "you asked for it, you've got it; Toyota".
I'm looking for a job, quickly, with some degree of stress, before the unemployment hammer hits me square in the face but, to be able to wow some manager at my deep insight of everything technical, it would be a lot easier if I could actually have anything of a common bases of understanding with that class.
All this was triggered by a recent new thread started in the Sun Solaris Experts linkedin group. the question was "what is RPC".
I know nothing of the guy who made this question so, I'm taking this at it's face value but, someone, somewhere must have decided to give him a job in System Administration.
Juniors have a place in employment structures, sure, but, whoever things that any given number of juniours can replace a seniour is just stupid.
Back at my divorced times, I had a cleaning lady working for me. A very nice lady would go to my house twice per week and keep it a place that would not trigger much attention by the environmental organizations and nuclear byproducts handling companies. She did a fine job, or at least I thought so. Of course that, at that time I was working most of the time anyway and would crash in my house for a few hours per day to sleep before heading of to work again.
My main requirement when I hired her was that she was unexpensive. I didn't require many qualifications except for not to put a huge dent on a single income household but, when Luz moved in with me, we soon discovered that she would break an amazing number of glasses, and knew less than I did about cleaning houses (tip: Bleach is not the proper thing to clean a blue couch; I knew that)
If I was a manager in some modern company (or a consultant), I'm sure my reactions would be, in order:
- Make her full time
- Hire 2 more helpers
- Give money to consultants to tell me I had poor processes and I would need to engage in an ISO9000/ITIL v4 certification
Instead I just got someone who knew how to keep an house clean (actually, she quit since she was moving with her family to some other country but, this is processes we're talking about, not my guts).
The worst part, of course, is that if I was asked, I would never even dream to answer that your problem was that you weren't ITIL certified. Yep, I'll never became a rich consultant, ...
Monday, October 17, 2011
Thursday, October 13, 2011
JaimeC - Automating stupidity
It was in the 90's that I became Netscape's Product Specialist for Portugal. It was a marvelous and crazy time and I ditched my course since the appeal of Mathematics couldn't really compete with creating this new thing called "The Internet".
It was a time when people still bothered with creating value instead of giving their money to Anderseen Consultants and Project managers to help you take advantage of your company's business and engage in high quality initiatives, backed by due process while maximizing shareholder's value, ... (now try saying this 3 times in a roll without breathing).
Over the years, I've been doing support, installations, pre-sales, ws one of the creators of an Hierarquical Storage Management product still in Oracle's price list, did hardware, O.Ses, Applications, routers and Databases, managed people, was managed and, even if I do flatter myself, I think I did OK in all those tasks. But, the bubble, when it bursts, bursts for all and, instead of hanging on to some delusions of power, I went back in the progression ladder, back into system's administration and, managed to keep my pay increasing with inflation instead of some massive cuts (or unemployment) some friends had to take.
Irony of the world, I'm now in a 3 people team that's changing all the I.T. of one of the biggest Portuguese Media groups into something less 90's and, since the management is now realizing that 1 person to manage 2 Virtualization farms with about 300 hosts, 1 person to manage about 100 Weblogic servers (with SOA, UCM, IBR, BI, well, basically most of the fusion Middleware suite - that's me by the way) and 1 person for all the Databases that support all this isn't enough so, we three will probably be out of a job soon with our jobs outsourced.
Having worked a lot with authentication technologies, starting with LDAP and, as the years gone by, going up the services ladder as it was being built, with concepts like SSO, Federation and interoperability with privacy, I also became a strong critic of what's being done to issues like consumer privacy and to the laws that are supposed to protect us.
So, welcome to this blog. I know a blog is out of style, last year's fashion but, I miss writing and, it also helps me to put my ideas in order. I'm not yet sure if this blog is going to be about privacy problems, something more technical filled with how-to's or simply some fotos of David, my almost 5 yo son. Perhaps all of the above.
One thing I hope is that next time I write here I'll be a bit more cheerfull. Till there, feel free to grab a drink and, ... cheers
It was a time when people still bothered with creating value instead of giving their money to Anderseen Consultants and Project managers to help you take advantage of your company's business and engage in high quality initiatives, backed by due process while maximizing shareholder's value, ... (now try saying this 3 times in a roll without breathing).
Over the years, I've been doing support, installations, pre-sales, ws one of the creators of an Hierarquical Storage Management product still in Oracle's price list, did hardware, O.Ses, Applications, routers and Databases, managed people, was managed and, even if I do flatter myself, I think I did OK in all those tasks. But, the bubble, when it bursts, bursts for all and, instead of hanging on to some delusions of power, I went back in the progression ladder, back into system's administration and, managed to keep my pay increasing with inflation instead of some massive cuts (or unemployment) some friends had to take.
Irony of the world, I'm now in a 3 people team that's changing all the I.T. of one of the biggest Portuguese Media groups into something less 90's and, since the management is now realizing that 1 person to manage 2 Virtualization farms with about 300 hosts, 1 person to manage about 100 Weblogic servers (with SOA, UCM, IBR, BI, well, basically most of the fusion Middleware suite - that's me by the way) and 1 person for all the Databases that support all this isn't enough so, we three will probably be out of a job soon with our jobs outsourced.
Having worked a lot with authentication technologies, starting with LDAP and, as the years gone by, going up the services ladder as it was being built, with concepts like SSO, Federation and interoperability with privacy, I also became a strong critic of what's being done to issues like consumer privacy and to the laws that are supposed to protect us.
So, welcome to this blog. I know a blog is out of style, last year's fashion but, I miss writing and, it also helps me to put my ideas in order. I'm not yet sure if this blog is going to be about privacy problems, something more technical filled with how-to's or simply some fotos of David, my almost 5 yo son. Perhaps all of the above.
One thing I hope is that next time I write here I'll be a bit more cheerfull. Till there, feel free to grab a drink and, ... cheers
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Hosting my company's Infrastructure
Move to an hosting company.
That line was my answer every time a small company would come to me asking for a recomendation for deploying thir mail, calendar or whatever service they wanted.
The logic behind it is pretty simple, if you build your own email server, you're not going to be able to spend enough to match a good hosting service uptime, redudancy and management tools.
So, when the time came to create my own company (and I promise my second post will be my introduction), I decided to eat my own dog food and host everything and, google's offer of free (and being google) was hard to beat.
As with most things in I.T. the cheap comes out to bite you when you least expect it and, the experience I'm having so far it's been so bad that I'm not recommending google's services to anyone and I in fact, stopped recomending a shared infrastructure solution to anyone who asks me.
I hope this blog starts to be the first step into changing my view on google's work. I trully like the company and I want them to have sucess but, not at the expense of one of my precious comodities - time.
So, this is the inaugurating post of this weblog. more than a rant, an statement of hope that things get changed to better serve users.
That line was my answer every time a small company would come to me asking for a recomendation for deploying thir mail, calendar or whatever service they wanted.
The logic behind it is pretty simple, if you build your own email server, you're not going to be able to spend enough to match a good hosting service uptime, redudancy and management tools.
So, when the time came to create my own company (and I promise my second post will be my introduction), I decided to eat my own dog food and host everything and, google's offer of free (and being google) was hard to beat.
As with most things in I.T. the cheap comes out to bite you when you least expect it and, the experience I'm having so far it's been so bad that I'm not recommending google's services to anyone and I in fact, stopped recomending a shared infrastructure solution to anyone who asks me.
I hope this blog starts to be the first step into changing my view on google's work. I trully like the company and I want them to have sucess but, not at the expense of one of my precious comodities - time.
So, this is the inaugurating post of this weblog. more than a rant, an statement of hope that things get changed to better serve users.
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