Leave it to a politician to explain how the IT field is going to disappear. "As we move toward the cloud and technology gets easier to use", and who supports these technologies Mr. Mayor?
He's not saying it will disappear, but that it's changing. IT jobs will continue to exist, but they'll be moving to service providers rather than being kept in-house.
And, frankly, this makes sense - if you pay provider X to host your mail server, you're paying them for both the hardware needs (which they can buy in bulk because they're bigger than you) and their expertise (as they're spending their days exclusively maintaining mail servers, while you may be building a webserver one day and fixing a printer
That's great. Trade people who work for you for people who don't work for you at all. They have their own boss and interests that completely conflict with yours. Unless you're really good a negotiating contracts with companies much larger than your own, you are likely just going to get screwed over.
Trade your IT department for one which is much larger and even less responsive that has a contractual firewall and a corporate air gap separating it from you.
You don't have to trade the whole department. But instead of hiring 5 administrators with various levels of expertise, you can hire 2 or 3 and let the experts deal with their systems.
As for those other people? Of course they're not working for you. But they're working for their bosses who are working for your business. Believe it or not, there are companies out there whose sole purpose in life is not to screw you over. Trust is earned - let them earn yours.
They are working for your business and 10 others. They have no incentive to treat you any better, nor do they have any need to do better than the 4 hour response time or whatever the SLA says. The moment supporting you costs more than you pay forget about it.
Not only do they have those employees but they also need to make a profit on them. So it will not be cheaper either.
Not only do they have those employees but they also need to make a profit on them. So it will not be cheaper either.
Believe it or not, when you get to the scale of, say, Google, you can make money off the employees and still offer service more cheaply than an in-house team. There are privacy issues to consider, but the economies of scale are definitely there that it can be cheaper.
And those service providers also don't hold the passwords for all the routers and servers hostage because of a dispute with their superiors and agree to give the passwords directly to the mayor only after being arrested. Isolated incident? Perh
The city was intentionally creating a problem in that case, moreso than the admin. The city had a policy and a means to get the passwords. The admin was more than willing to give up the passwords through official policy dictated channels. The city had him arrested because they decided that they wanted to prove they could force him to give them up outside of the official policy. Sure, you could say that the admin was being an ass by refusing to let the rules slide. (After all, we all let rules slide now and then) But, any claim that the servers were held hostage is a complete fabrication.
No it wouldn't have. If the outsourced IT had a contract with the city that said only certain individuals had access to the systems, the same situation would have occurred.
I think it all really boils down to him making a manager's bit on the side cry when he asked what she was doing poking though somebody else's computer in the middle of the night - then reasons to "teach him a lesson" were found later. Office politics sucks in corrupt local governments and gets as primal as chimpanzees flinging shit.
"Don't discount flying pigs before you have good air defense."
-- jvh@clinet.FI
Hah (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
He's not saying it will disappear, but that it's changing. IT jobs will continue to exist, but they'll be moving to service providers rather than being kept in-house.
And, frankly, this makes sense - if you pay provider X to host your mail server, you're paying them for both the hardware needs (which they can buy in bulk because they're bigger than you) and their expertise (as they're spending their days exclusively maintaining mail servers, while you may be building a webserver one day and fixing a printer
Re: (Score:5, Informative)
That's great. Trade people who work for you for people who don't work for you at all. They have their own boss and interests that completely conflict with yours. Unless you're really good a negotiating contracts with companies much larger than your own, you are likely just going to get screwed over.
Trade your IT department for one which is much larger and even less responsive that has a contractual firewall and a corporate air gap separating it from you.
Re: (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't have to trade the whole department. But instead of hiring 5 administrators with various levels of expertise, you can hire 2 or 3 and let the experts deal with their systems.
As for those other people? Of course they're not working for you. But they're working for their bosses who are working for your business. Believe it or not, there are companies out there whose sole purpose in life is not to screw you over. Trust is earned - let them earn yours.
Re: (Score:5, Insightful)
They are working for your business and 10 others. They have no incentive to treat you any better, nor do they have any need to do better than the 4 hour response time or whatever the SLA says. The moment supporting you costs more than you pay forget about it.
Not only do they have those employees but they also need to make a profit on them. So it will not be cheaper either.
Re: (Score:2)
Not only do they have those employees but they also need to make a profit on them. So it will not be cheaper either.
Believe it or not, when you get to the scale of, say, Google, you can make money off the employees and still offer service more cheaply than an in-house team. There are privacy issues to consider, but the economies of scale are definitely there that it can be cheaper.
And those service providers also don't hold the passwords for all the routers and servers hostage because of a dispute with their superiors and agree to give the passwords directly to the mayor only after being arrested. Isolated incident? Perh
Re:Hah (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)