Adrian Zaugg <devuan.org@???> wrote:

> One more thing: A management how decides on products their IT has to work
> with, is like a team manager who tells a coach which player to send on the ice
> during a hockey game. A no-go. Technical decisions are IT decisions, financial
> and functional decisions are made by the management towards their IT. They
> just don't know the technical finesses, hurdles and dependencies. They should
> know about money and what is needed by the company.

In an ideal world, yes. But in practice there are a lot of managers who do get involved - and in my opinion that can be a good thing if done right.

I agree that a manager with no skills or knowledge making such decisions is a bad thing - but the reality is that it happens. They get taken in by the sharp suited salesman with a glossy sales pitch for the latest incarnation of proprietary lock-in rubbish; they get taken in by the “horror stories” they hear from their network (you only hear the bad news, like “we let the IT guy do something with Linux and it <insert tale of woes>"; or simply they look around and go with the safety in numbers game (everyone else runs Windows, so Windows must be a good tool to use); and so on.

But, a manager’s job (the degree depending on their level and the size of the company) is to make things happen and in a way that will allow the company to carry on into the future. That means taking strategic decisions. So they might have to decide whether to shell out a huge amount of money (and putting the company at risk if there’s a downturn in sales in the short term) on automated tooling to make production cheaper and thus give them an advantage in the future.
And when it comes to IT, they should be involved in decision making as to the strategic direction they want to take. We may pooh-pooh the idea that a manager is involved, but in my experience it’s a good thing as long as their involvement is the right kind. It’s for us IT people to distill the complicated stuff to a level they can deal with (i.e. tailored to their skills/knowledge) and present them with the options :
You can do it with X which has these pros and cons; you can do it with Y which has these pros and cons; or you can do it with Z with these pros and cons. We recommend X because <list of reasons why X is the best fit for the business>. And you need to be able to then have a conversation where the manager asks questions like “but most places are using Y, are they all wrong ?”, or “the world seems to be following Z, how can I be confident I'll still be able to find people to work with X in 5 years time ?”. These are not questions to be put down as not worthy of an answer (as Steph asserts), but they are valid questions that you need to be able to answer. And yes, sometimes the question will be a “daft” as “that nice Mr Salesman from company B assured me that W would fit our needs perfectly - why isn’t that in your list ?"
If you cannot have a conversation at that level with the mangers taking the strategic decisions and holding the purse strings then you’re not an IT manager.

> If a management manages to create a sustainable working environment, they
> don't need to find anyone new so soon. They get longstanding IT workers who
> care for "their" systems and lead the ones that step in, to get them
> integrated to the team and the system that's in place. If the management
> doesn't do it's job, they have to fear what they say, but then I'm also sure
> the IT department lacks time, documentation and team spirit already today.

Agreed. But my experience is that the management that doesn’t create the right environment is also unable to understand why people don’t stay, why sickness is high, why morale is low, why things don’t work smoothly, etc, etc. I’ve worked for a couple of that type - they think they are gods gift to IT and management and any suggestion that doesn’t fit their own ideas is automatically wrong. At one place, we had a saying about one manager - “it’s X’s way or no way”. And I can tell you, X really could not understand why people didn’t respect him.



steph.tougard via Dng <dng@???> wrote:

> The question is so stupid that it does not even call for an answer.

Unfortunately, to the customer it does. If you can’t or won’t answer the question then you’ve lost the argument.

In one of the wholesalers I frequent, there’s a sign up behind the counter for their staff - it basically says “no one ever won an argument with a customer”. It then goes on to point out that the customer is the reason for them being there, the customer pays their wages, and so on.
Basically (and I know there are limits to this), if you want the customer’s business, you have to be prepared to answer their questions - even if you think the question is stupid.

> If an admin is unable to understand a Unix system without SystemD, he's not a sys admin.

True. But I suspect there are now a lot of “admins” who really don’t have the skills outside of the toolset provided by SystemD. Just like there are a lot of Windows admins who can’t cope with anything beyond randomly changing settings in the GUI.


Simon