12 posts tagged with "Business"

According to internet lore the quickest way to get an answer on a technical forum is to use a sockpuppet account to post the wrong answer to your own question. People rush to correct the mistake, when they would otherwise have ignored the original question.

I've been thinking about documented standards again, particularly why getting that first draft written is so difficult. We're paralysed by the need to write it perfectly. But like that sockpuppet posting the wrong answer, sometimes the quickest way to get a good standard is to put out an imperfect one.

Every engineer, no matter what the discipline, has had to deal with the endless pipeline of requests from stakeholders, customers, or colleagues. As we're often quite a long way to the right of the timeline and very close to the deadline, these requests are almost always urgent and important and often come accompanied with escalations that sound like a roll call of the leadership team.

Way back in the heady days of 2008 when I was working at a sub-prime mortgage lender (true story, it was us) we had a fella who was 'the MI guy' - his job was to produce some lovely management information reports that told the leadership team how well we were doing at lending money to people who couldn't pay it back. While I had quite a bit of involvement in networks we were a small team so I looked after a lot of the server tin as well back then, and that meant changing backup tapes and that sort of stuff (as was the fashion in those days).

The Mad Men of advertising had a knack for selling ideas, lifestyles, and products with flair and persuasion. But what if they turned their talents to selling networks? How might they approach the task of convincing businesses to invest in robust networking solutions?

I've been thinking about why network documentation always feels incomplete. You know the feeling - you've got spreadsheets full of device details, beautiful network diagrams, and configuration backups. But when something breaks at 3am, you're still calling Dave from the pub because he's the only one who knows why VLAN 247 exists.

The problem isn't that we don't document things. It's that we're only capturing the bottom layer of what we actually need.

The topic of documentation always comes up in tech and it's one that has had a lot of attention in world of software development which has led to some excellent solutions. In the world of infrastructure, however, the solutions have not been as readily available or adopted.

How Economic Growth Reshaped the Gender Equality Conversation

The Great Misdirection​

Have we been sold a false bill of goods when it comes to gender equality in the workplace? When women fought to enter the workforce en masse in the latter half of the 20th century, the vision wasn't simply to double household working hours. Yet somewhere along the way, what was once revolutionary became a requirement: the 40-hour workweek per household transformed into 80 hours just to maintain the same standard of living our parents achieved.

A Matter of Western Digital Privilege​

In a recent conversation about IPv6 adoption at a Western technology company, I witnessed a familiar scene play out. Engineers and architects discussed IPv6 implementation as an optional future consideration rather than an immediate necessity. 'We don't really need it yet', was the prevailing sentiment. This perspective, common among Western organisations, reveals a profound blindspot born of privilege – one that unconsciously perpetuates digital inequality on a global scale.

Breaking the Technical Hierarchy Trap​

In tech, we often assume technical teams should be led by the most technically skilled people. This common thinking, while it seems sensible, might actually be stopping organisations from reaching their full potential. Promoting technical experts to management creates a range of problems that affect everything from innovation to career growth.

Note for US readers: CV, or Curriculum Vitae, is the standard term in the UK and many other countries for what Americans call a resume. While traditionally a CV might be longer and more detailed than a resume, the terms are often used interchangeably in today's international job market.

Lessons from Personal Tech and Enterprise IT​

Notifications and alerts are everywhere in our always-on, connected world. But as I've learned from personal experience and my work in enterprise IT, more alerts don't always mean better outcomes. In fact, too many alerts can be completely counterproductive.

Rethinking Infrastructure Support​

In IT operations, there's a metric that network teams know all too well: Mean Time to Innocence (MTTI). It's how long it takes for a network team to prove they're not responsible for an outage or performance issue. While that might sound funny, it highlights a serious problem in how we structure our infrastructure teams.