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You know, I always love when someone quote mines a post of mine to make a dubious point, along with the invoking of strawmen et al. I love it even more when that person does so in a blog post that doesn't allow comments. I love it even FURTHER when a "researcher" is doing the quote mining, considering how much that crowd hates it when it's done to them.

Enter Rob Shearer, and his dramatic post: Our IT Overlords

Rob of course, doesn't waste any time. Here's his second paragraph:

My only real quibble with Manjoo’s article is that “modern” companies have already recognized this; it’s only the crusty behemoths whose IT departments have decades of legacy policy that continue to treat users like infants. Of course, such behemoths still represent a huge fraction of the economy and the work force, so his point stands. Some people don’t realize that IT has moved on since the 80s.

You know, I hear a lot about these remaining behemoths, but in almost every case where they bother to provide things like actual examples, it turns out to be a bit different. Note that Rob never bothers to provide any examples, just the usual canards about people not realizing that IT has moved on since the 80s.

Yes Rob. There are hosts of IT departments still handing out IBM PCs with 5.25" Floppy Drives that only run 33270 emulators. Oh wait, there aren't, at least not in the US, and I'll hazard, in the UK. But again, standard "I hate IT screed" pt. 345

Paragraph 3 leads into the massive quote-mining, (shame on you Rob, quote mining is for fundie creationist idiots, not someone trying to get a Ph.D in CompSci. You should know better):

What I did find interesting, however, was a direct response from John C. Welch which he emailed to Manjoo and also posted publicly on his web site. Mr. Welch has been in IT “for around 20 years, from $bigCorp to higher ed, to small companies”, and from what I can tell he intends to speak for the industry. Let’s see how he rebuts accusations of infantilizing workers:

I'm sorry, where did I claim to speak for the entire IT industry. For that matter, where did I say that there aren't truly stupid/bad IT departments, or people? Hmm...no where. But, if you don't set me up as the self-annointed voice of IT, then the takedown isn't as much fun. I speak for myself Rob, and I'd think you were smart enough to figure that out without a disclaimer. (No, i'm not putting a fucking disclaimer in. If anyone is so stupid as to need one, they need to not read this site.)

Then comes the quote mining. Of course, Rob does a good job, first class job of quote-mining in fact. Of course, Rob doesn't include any context. I'm amazed he even linked back to the original post, normally, quote-miners don't do that. Bad form Rob, if you're going to quote-mine, do it right, or don't bother.

I'll skip the quote-mining, I already wrote the words, why reprint them? Now, onto his next statement:

Welch’s attitude towards his users, his bosses, and any critics of the IT industry is clear.

What Rob doesn't seem to get is that it is perfectly, completely possible to dislike bullshit disguised as crusading for the little guy, and not hate everything about your work environment. I tend to not work for companies I dislike, it wears down the soul. See, here's the part Rob missed in his epic leap over Conclusion Canyon: I like my job. In fact, I took a pay cut to take my current gig, because my (then) soon-to-be boss and the company he represented was something I don't see often: A guy who can't do anything but shoot straight, and a fun as hell environment. That doesn't mean there aren't days I don't go home wishing I was a gargbageman instead. We all have bad days. But overall, I really like my current gig. I even, regularly, like my industry. THat does not however mean it's perfect. I think IT people, like any other group, are as capable of raging stupidity as any other, and there are a lot of well-reasoned criticisms of IT out there.

Manjoo's hack job was not one of them. It was childish and whining, and deserves as much vitriol as can be heaped upon it.

He does, of course, also include some unsubstantiated claims in his rant. It’s mostly just transparent hand-waving and misdirection, but I’ll make an attempt at a few of them:

When employees need to beg the CEO for help getting around IT policy that makes it hard to work, the IT department has failed at its job. Disastrously.

If that is truly the only way to get things done, Rob is right. However, we don't know that. Unlike Rob however, I've a bit of direct experience in IT matters, and I can tell you that the percentage of time this is truly necessary is quite small. I will also agree, having dealt with it, and having quite a few friends who deal with it, that IT at the federal level is astoundingly slow-moving at times. However, that still doesn't meant that you aren't six kinds of an idiot to expect the Secretary of State to be familiar with the pros and cons of different browsers as they apply to the State Department.

An IT worker who considers the cost of disallowing any and all software to be zero needs a better understanding of “cost”.

Bullshit. That is the precise word for this. Bullshit. Oh, the joys of firefox, until you have to deal with an internal site with old code that has sat there running fine, doing its job for years, but Firefox can’t use it. Oh sure, there’s a point that the site should be upgraded, but right now, it costs zero dollars to maintain, while upgrading it solely so that another browser can use it will cost...not zero dollars.

Next:

We all know you don’t need intimate familiarity with every last detail of a network, “down to OS versions on routers and servers”, in order to install software. If you think that’s necessary, you don’t understand modern IT. And your security policy sucks.

Oh yes, how outlandish. Outlandish things like testing new versions of applications to make sure that the things you need to work right, work right. You’ll do that for us, right? Oh, did that Firefox plugin come up with a security hole? You’ll manage that update on your machine for us, right? You’ll read the staggering amount of security reports, mailing lists and newsfeeds that we have to just to keep on top of things. You’ll learn the details of the way the slate network is set up, down to OS versions on routers and servers, so you can tell what the implications of a security issue may or may not be. You’ll do all that for us, and never, ever, complain that it’s not your job to do that, that it’s IT’s job to do that, but never, ever, ever inconvenience you in any way, shape, or form in the process.

However, there are some changes made to the Java Implementation in Snow that if you aren't prepared, can catch you off guard. For one, Snow kind of sucks, in both Firefox 3.5.x and Safari, for talking to Cisco gear. Cisco uses Java for the ADSM stuff, but something about Snow's Java has issues with it. If you notice, you also see problems with the Java components of CS4 and Snow. Huh...how'd that happen. A ROUTER and a GRAPHICS SUITE having the same problems.

The meme Rob seems to be pushing is that if installing random software can fuck up your network, your network and its policies suck. As an IT person, Rob is a great programmer and CompSci Doctoral Student. I think he'd be rather amazed at how even minor bits of software can cause rather fascinating problems in ways you couldn't predict with a gun at your head. Like Aqua Connect Terminal Server freaking out serialnumberd in Mac OS X Server 10.5.8 on a single-homed Xserve, and completely fubaring the use of Kerberized AFP and SMB across the network. That was a fun one to figure out.

You get burned by freaky shit like that a few times, and you stop being sanguine about just installing stuff and hoping for the best.

We also have some idea of what it takes to keep computers and networks running. Most of us do that at home these days. Vague claims that “[it’s] not easy. No matter what your Googleh.D in computer science tells you”, are not good enough any more.

Right.

Just like the fact that I can bang out some shell and AppleScript means I'm exactly as qualified for a Ph.D from Oxford as Rob's years of study and work have made him. After all, it's all computer science, right?

Seriously, that's just a laughable statement for anyone to make.

If management is making IT decisions, then they are running your IT department. Blaming bad policy on internal politics isn’t really a defense.

At one place I worked, we had some problems with people going on vacation, and the people who were supposed to take over for them not being able to get to work-related emails they needed to help out customers. IT gets asked if there's any way to help with this and we say "Sure, it's cake. We're on Exchange, sharing individual mail folders is trivial. When someone goes on vacation, they share the folders they need to share. When they come back, they stop sharing those folders. We can write up a nice howto, with screenshots if you like, and put them up on the internal site so folks can refer to it whenever they need." Oh no, we can't do that. Why, that would be horrible. Everytime we'd ask why, the answer never made a lick of sense, but since my title didn't start with "Executive VP", we came up with some convoluted-assed forwarding scheme that no one liked, and were forbidden to mention the quicker, easier way unless specifically asked about it.

Guess what Rob: Setting policy, even stupid policy is what management does. Following policy, even stupid policy, is what non-management does if they fail to convince management to change the policy. Welcome to reality.

We understand how email works. Forwarding a message to GMail doesn’t force you to delete the original. Really. Even if you throw acronyms like EAS and BES at us.

There is not enough room here to detail how wrong you are about SOX. In fact, SOX doesn’t specifically proscribe much of anything. It’s a crappily worded law that gives almost no guidance, so the interpretations of the law come from auditors, and every company’s auditors do things differently. SOX auditors may only proscribe deleting emails for certain company officers, or they may proscribe it for all. They may require you to keep a copy of every email sent and received for the last n days, they may not. In some cases, auditors may very well proscribe forwarding email to Gmail et all. You never know until they tell you. So your interpretation of SOX, while convenient for your article, is um..incomplete. As well, the implication that somehow, you know more about the advantages and use of things like Gmail than every IT person everywhere? Can you even sit within arms reach of a computer, with your head all bloated like that? Oh, and your attempt to liken the use of things like EAS and BES to forwarding to Gmail? What you don’t know about such things would fill oceans. Oceans. But rather than learn, you instead run the New Media Douchebag playbook, and assume that only you, Farhad Manjoo, is able to really understand what’s going on.

This has nothing to do with deleting email, forwarded or not. It's that you now have forwarded company email on non-company servers that do not have to comply with the various rules and laws and policies about discoverablilty, retention, and all the rest of the bullshit that too many corporate IT people have to deal with that by and large, don't exist for academia. (FYI Rob, I worked for MIT, so I'm actually somewhat conversant with the far greater freedoms academia has in this area than corporate America, or even Corporate Britain does.) I don't agree with the paranoia about forwarding to Gmail et al, because about 70% of it is legal CYA, the solution for which is "don't do illegal or unethical shit, and you don't have to care". The other 30% tends to be legitimate security concerns, again, something that's not as common in academia as in other places.

Oh, yes, and Rob, it was Manjoo who was comparing the use of BlackBerries, iPhones, et al to forwarding email to Gmail, and that's simply not a valid comparison. EAS and BES are not the same as forwarding email from Account A to Account B, no matter how badly you try to spin it. (Rob's really bad at spinning, in case you hadn't noticed.)

If anybody wants to intentionally leak confidential data they can. Spending your time blocking IM and Twitter won’t change that.

If there's anyone who doesn't realize that IT has progressed since the 80s, I'd say it's Rob.

We install applications on our personal machines all the time, yet we do not “spend hours a day dealing with application/OS/network interaction”.

Once again Rob, networks are not what you seem to think they are, and what you do at home does not perfectly replicate to every network on the planet, on any level. But, if you want to pretend they do, party on man. However, you may want to lay off the Guinness, I think you're starting to kill some of the important brain cells.

When big-company IT is no longer dominated by pathetic and incompetent despots then maybe the profession will regain a little bit of respect.

Oh, and unlike Rob, I allow comments on my site. Way to man up there.

Douchebag.

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