[Gllug] Controversial Joel Spolsky article

[itsbruce at uklinux.net]

On Mon, Dec 22, 2003 at 04:03:06PM +0000, Bernard Peek wrote:
> >Turning a computer on and copying some user files to a zip drive hardly
> >represent the sum of an administrator's job.  Besides, most home users
> >administer their home computers very badly, home computers absolutely
> >*not* having been improved and simplified to the point where unskilled
> >users can use them easily and efficiently.
> 
> That depends a lot on what you mean by efficiency. Home computers have 
> improved to the point where most people can use them reasonably easily 
> and reasonably efficiently. The Windows way is to compromise on 
> efficiency to make the systems easier to use (and more secure, if you 
> believe Bill's latest announcements.)

It's spin.  Most home computer systems sputter on till they fail from
simple accumulation of errors, at which point the home user either
reinstalls or buys a new PC, usually losing a large amount of data each
time this happens.  In the meantime, the user is diverted from the tasks
for which s/he originally bought the PC - games, Internet browsing,
occasional letters or bookkeeping - to constant tweaking and
maintenance.  The help forums of domestic ISPs are filled with people
who have become amateur PC gurus (in a very small way) through necessity
and who are now more or less hooked on it.

> 
> There are several hundred million sites with one PC, administered by 
> people with little or no computer training. They aren't maintaining them 
> efficiently but they are maintaining them adequately.

Even if that were true, it isn't relevant to the thread you parachuted
into, which was discussing the inadequacies of Windows admins in
traditional computing environments.  It's also becoming less true as
those home computers become more connected to global networks, as the
recent explosion of Internet worms has demonstrated.

> >Only because the demand for computing services has expanded
> >significantly faster than the pool of skilled IT staff.  The fact that
> >much IT administration and development is being done by poorly skilled
> >staff doesn't mean that it is being done well.
> 
> There are two ways around that. One is to hire people with lots of 
> computer skills to do the job efficiently. The other is to automate the 
> tasks so that someone with a little knowledge can do them reasonably 
> well. On a site with lots of computers it pays to hire a sysadmin to 
> make them run efficiently. On a small site it pays to have tasks 
> automated.

Skilled admins are all about automation, that's why a skilled admin can
run a much larger network than a poor one.  Windows is notoriously bad
at automation and Windows admins tend to be ignorant even of the limited
mechanisms for automation that do exist, which is why Windows systems
require more admin staff than *nix systems.

The extremely limited automation on a Windows home computer is crude,
poorly planned, often too generalised to be useful and too vulnerable to
user tampering.

> 
> The cutover point is changing. In the 1950s if you had one computer you 
> needed at least multiple sysadmins. In the 2000s you need a sysadmin if 
> you have more than a dozen computers.

That's not even beginning to compare like with like.  You're comparing
mainframes (which still often have large support teams) with PC
networks.

> By the end of the decade nobody 
> with less than fifty computers will hire a dedicated sysadmin.

That's a very contentious claim.  None of the various "zero
administration" initiatives trumpeted over the last couple of decades
have delivered: most of them have failed and vanished.  For such systems
to be practical, the systems they have to run on have to place
significant restrictions on the user, quite unlike the current Windows
XP home systems which create users as passwordless admins by default.
It's very difficult to make such systems flexible and responsive to the
user at the same time, which is why the makers of soho systems duck the
issue.

In practice, unfortunately, there are a significant number of
organisations with networks of around 50 PCs who think they can get away
with getting their bookkeeper to maintain the system in his or her
alleged spare moments.  They are not fun places to work and their
productivity suffers a great deal.

-- 
Bruce
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