entombed in the shrine of zeroes and ones

In my efforts to find a new job, i've signed up for an AWS Bootcamp class, because THE CLOUD is one of the New Hotnesses that i lack.

So far, i am dismayed by the difficulty some of the people in this Intermediate class are having with finding stuff on a page, following instructions, and figuring stuff out.

Last week, i had a job interview (i'm looking because i'm tired of the night shift and i'm bored as hell and there hasn't been an opening in either the day shift of my group or in another group that i'm qualified for; that might change in 2 or 3 months, but i'm not willing to wait longer than that), and when i asked two of the guys who had just started working there what they liked best about their new employer, they both talked about how smart everyone was.  This made me wince on the inside, because in my experience, smarts only get you so far.  In systems operations, it's much more important to have people who work hard and play well with others than to have some super-sharp person bursting at the seams with cleverness and grand ideas, especially in an industry where it's often too easy to find a brilliant yet intractable coworker who's tolerated because of what they can do whenever they stop being an asshole.  Perhaps i'm biased, but i'd rather see the smart kids doing the programming so that us worker bees can get on with making the infrastructure hum.  I'm so glad i'm a Beta.  Or something.

There has been serious attrition in the Systems group (3 sysadmins, plus the group's director, for whom i worked at Macromedia) over the last couple of months, so i asked my boss as well as the SA manager about the likelihood of my moving to that group.  Both responded very positively, so the next move is going through the interview process... which of course means i'll have to alter my sleeping schedule slightly.  I hope i don't pass out between interviewers.

I'm experiencing some trepidation due to the recent combustibility, but i do think that it's settled down now, and i'm pretty sure that there's little more i can do for the NOC right now, and i think that i can do more for the group if i change cubes to the other side of the building.

Working at Netflix combines the joy of working for a large company that has a corporate culture laden with baggage that results from their vaunted "Rules Annoy Us" core value, with the joy of working for a startup where people are scrabbling to get things done because they can't be arsed to improve the process because everything is changing at a stupidly fast pace.  Tomorrow i get to find out whether they truly value my courage, honesty, and passion, because after this week i'm seriously tired of seeing people in my group either running around like headless chickens herding cats, or clicking buttons like experimental monkeys.

I was told when i was interviewed that the goal of hiring senior-level sysadmins for a NOC (there are a few of us here, and we agree on what i'm bitching about here) was part of a grand plan to raise the NOC's level to something impressive and worthy of, i dunno, a company like Netflix.  Tomorrow i'm gonna ask what the plan is and when we get started on it; i know that one big part of it is getting a monitoring system that isn't a piece of shit, but the putative replacement has been in the wings for six months and just semi-officially got off the ground last week, and, well, we were told to make sure that the new system's alerts matched the old system's alerts, and they aren't even fucking close.  If someone doesn't get fired over this fiasco (and Netflix loves to fire people), i think that i will have to seriously consider whether my sanity is worth my very generous salary.

Now that i'm at a point in my career where i actually, finally, know what i want to do and where i want to go, i really don't want to spin my wheels, and i need to find out whether my shiny new boss (who has already given pause to some in the group) and boss's boss (who is a Netflix veteran but has only been with our group for two months) are going to tell me something good.  If not, i know that there's a recent opening in the sysadmin group, and i'll talk to the boss over there to see what my options are.

Because i could not stop for death, i bought some to go.

What the world needs is a first-person shooter version of Dig Dug.

Working in the data center is like hanging out in Darth Vader's chest.

When i die, i hope to have a funny look on my face.  When the rigor mortis sets in, people coming to my funeral will say, "Wow, Mom was right."

You know the human race is a fucking failure when there's such a thing as a "blogging Lifetime Achievement Award".

Yo mama's so ugly, she can't masturbate anymore `cause her clitoris got a restraining order against her.

There is no 'i' in 'team', but there is an 'eat' and a 'me'.

Consider, if you will, the potential of Dr. Phil/Jim Cramer erotica.

Dear President Obama: stretching out a hand to Joe Lieberman should only happen when your arm fully extends as you backhand him across his Droopy face.

Thank you for reading.  Check back again in three years for more Twitturds.

Nix wrote:

One person at work keeps a file named -i in important directories on Solaris boxes, just to catch rm *'s in them.

Do they keep an extra pair of underpants in their car in case they shit themselves on the way to work?

2wanda has said before (and i admit that she, as my wife, might be biased) that she thinks that computer systems administrators should unionize because we're the tech workers who are most often abused by companies.  I have mixed feelings about unions, but there's little doubt that the industry takes us for granted far too often.  And yet, in all of my career, i have never encountered a situation so dire as in my current place of employ.  If they'd offered me a full-time position, i would have turned it down and fled screaming; however, the contract lets me stick to fulfilling tasks instead of worrying about my future with the company, or the company's future.

Right now, IT ("Ops" is reserved for another part of the company that fulfills a different role) is composed of the Director, who is a senior sysadmin with a managerial title, and one junior sysadmin.  Normally, that's a bit light for a small startup, but not egregious.  The guy they hired before me absconded with a new Mac laptop and an iPhone after four days there.  The guy they hired before that lasted two weeks before they realized that he was a complete charlatan (he was hired over the Director's objection, too).  The guy who was the boss when the current Director was hired was such an idiot that he recompiled the kernel on the phone system server in the middle of the afternoon, rebooted it, and when it failed to come up, took a few half-hearted stabs at fixing it before leaving for an appointment, leaving the phones down until the next day.  This was normal for him, i was told; he was too often worse than no help at all.

Aside from the personnel problems, the infrastructure is a complete cockup.  A few examples: the whole office is on a /24 (a network segment with 256 IP addresses) that has been out of available addresses for months, predictably yielding IP conflicts; the Ops team works in an office that is restricted to people with an Ops keycard for security reasons, but their network is fully reachable from anywhere in the company; the office has both wired and wireless pipes to the Internet, but they are not set up for failover, nor are services such as VPN set up to use either one; production has been running on network equipment that dates from the Clinton administration, and development is running on servers from a manufacturer that stopped making hardware in 2001; the source control repository that contains the code for the company's applications has not been backed up in months.

The CEO introduced herself to me on Wednesday, and told me, "I'm glad you're here.  We really need you.  As a SaaS company, infrastructure is really important to us."  You know what, lady?  You don't really believe that.  If you did, you wouldn't keep hiring morons, you wouldn't be running your company on spit and baling wire, and you wouldn't be telling your Director of IT that you can't afford to hire the people he needs to keep your fucking company from imploding.

I cannot fathom why so many Internet technology companies run their business on a suboptimal infrastructure that is always the result of an abject failure of prioritization.  They get the best possible developers because they want a top-notch product, they get the best possible sales and marketing because they want to have as many customers as possible, but when it comes to building the base on which everything runs, well, the founders just slapped together some whitebox PCs from Fry's, and the product's been running on that just fine, so why change it?  It's this and eleven billion other idiotic excuses that come from people who Don't Fucking Understand how to build an infrastructure and are, somehow, Utterly Incapable of hiring someone who does.

Why?  It can't be that we're scary; yes, it's easy to lean on the "sysadmins and netadmins are all disturbed or disturbing" stereotype, but you know what, every FUCKING job req out there demands "excellent writing and speaking skills", and people get hired, so maybe we're not nearly as bestial as people think.  In the end, i think it's simply a complete lack of respect for what we do; we're almost never given the resources that we need to do the job right, and when the resource starvation produces less than stellar results, the blame always comes quickly at us.  We need advocacy.  I don't get the impression that SAGE has any idea or interest in it, but they damn well should.  Maybe i'll go yell at them for a while.  Yelling at people is always an effective communication tool.

(Before you panic, i am still gainfully employed and have no reason to doubt this will continue for a while.)

I was recently contacted by a recruiter who found my résumé on the Web.  The dotcom's job req began: "You're smart, you're fast, and most importantly, you always get it done.  Admit it, you're a rockstar."

I had to suppress the urge to backhand my craptop's screen.  So instead i wrote this and asked the recruiter to pass it onto the responsible party:

This is embarrassing.  I wouldn't hire someone who calls himself "a rockstar" any more than i'd want to work somewhere that looks for one.  It sets the wrong tone for this sort of work, implying that this person is going to hog the spotlight. The only worse term i can imagine is "cowboy".

Speaking of systems administration in The Other Place:

rone: I'd love the job more if the industry weren't overrun with fuckheads at all levels.

Nix: But that's true of *all* jobs, and all humanity, everywhere, forever.

rone: No, man, what we have here in Silicon Valley is far from fucking normal.

allbery: Which is why you need to fund my new startup based around XML modelling of Facebook relationships, through which it's possible to build a metadata repository of all interesting people in the world and hire only perfect employees!  I call it WebHire 3.0!  It will revolutionize the way that people work by letting them conduct all interpersonal relationships through Twitter!

Safari and TouchTerm SSH allow me to deal with most of the problems that crop up during my on-call period from the safety and warmth of my bed.