There’s a lot more to doing IT for an SMB than finding technical perfection. Many of you don’t work in the smallest of the small SMB IT. SAM, for example, lives in what I would consider to be the cushy lap of luxury, floating on enormous budgets and working with companies who see value in three year refresh cycles.
SAM would tell me I’m crazy; he’s got plenty of SMB IT experience and I’m just a grouchy old git. John Frappier would tell us both we’re nuts, that he works in SMB IT and that IT for schools is small potatoes compared to “proper” IT.
Up and up and up the stack we go. I have a testlab that is worth the IT infrastructure of 20 of my clients put together. SAM has home IT that would trounce 85% of my clients, I am sure. Most of the people reading this have more up to date home PC towers than my clients have servers…and we all stopped buying PCs years ago.
Now, the above is filled with a bunch of generalisations. I know that. Allow me some artistic license here, I’m venting.
The point I’m trying to get across is that IT is diverse. It’s more diverse as you read this than when I wrote it. It’s more diverse when I wrote it than when I thought of it. And it’s certainly more diverse today than it was when we all started our technological escapades in the first place.
Yet we are all brand tribalists. We get in our heads that something is bad, or that something is good. We crusade for or against something. We champion brands, people, and even entire classes of solutions. I’m guilty of it. You, the reader, are guilty of it. Every single one of us is guilty of it.
What drives me mad is that we always seem unable to stop and remember that diversity thing. That what SAM thinks is “normal” and “small” is positively opulent to me. That what I think is “normal” and “small” would have seemed beyond opulent to 15 year old me.
We don’t all get the chance to do things by the book.
We don’t all get the chance to do things within support.
Hell, we don’t all even get the chance to buy new network cables when they’re needed.
So where do people like that go? Where is the discussion group for people who would consider the kinds of things SAM throws away to be upgrades? Where do the majority of the world’s sysadmins go, when Spiceworks drives these “leeches” out of the ecosystem, and MangoLassi is populated largely by people who have moved up the chain so long ago we don’t remember what it’s like to have your only UPS be 10 years old and running off of salvaged motorcycle batteries?
Where to the people running ESXi free in production and who are happy they managed to get hardware even capable of doing that congregate?
I don’t have answers. I am hoping you do. Because I am broken and I am defeated. I am tired of being told what a failure I am, and how worthless my clients are. I am tired of being told that thousands of people shouldn’t have jobs because we can’t afford to do things in a way that is beneficial to some commercial entity.
I am tired of trying to explain to someone the importance of “ease of use”, because it’s completely different when you have to be master of 200 different applications and all of the infrastructure to run them than it is when you get to be a specialist in just one class of (or even just one) application.
Most of all, I am sick unto death of this attitude that pervades out industry that any one solution is suitable for all people, or that the fact that a product is better in some (frankly irrelevant) technical way means that everyone should buy it, even when they don’t have the money to do so.
I got into IT to help people. Computers were supposed to make our lives better. I still believe that’s what they’re here to do. And I don’t believe “efficiency” means what most of these vendors think it does.
I’ve built an entire career out of making what other people call “impossible” work in the real world. I have built an entire career out of creating solutions that never should have worked work anyways, through sheer force of will.
It’s a young man’s game, but I know for a fact that I am not alone. There are hundreds of thousands of my fellow systems administrators who live that life. Hundreds of thousands of us who string by on the bleeding edge of nothing.
I’m sick of being told we’re worthless and that we should fade away. But I’m far too broken to fight to carve out a niche somewhere else.
So where do we go? Here? A look at the most frequent posters for MangoLassi shows a lot of the people I typically associate with being really down us “junk peddlers”. I don’t think we meet the minimum richness threshold for MangoLassi.
So are there other communities? Do I need to start impovrishednerds.com? I don’t have answers. I rather hope you lot do.
