IT Uncovered

The sad truth about some IT firms – Part 1

// September 16th, 2008 // No Comments » // IT Insider Information

Most of what I do in life involves technology.  I love everything about technology and for the past four years I’ve been surrounded by it or, in some cases, thrown into it.  The sad truth about IT is nobody can know everything.  It is truly impossible for one person or one firm to be able to handle all the IT needs of a business.  The truly great companies overcome this deficiency by going out and partnering with other firms who offer the experience and specialization in products or services that fall outside the current realm of capabilities.  Unfortunately, for me I’ve not been so blessed with working for one of these perfect firms.  Instead I’ve been put into situations that a normal human might crack and end up in a corner crying.  I  guess I’m not normal in the sense that I was able to overcome the obstacles and not lose my mind at the same time.  This is going to be part one of what I hope is a long series of stories involving the trials and tribulations of the IT industry as I’ve seen it.

About four and a half years ago I started working for a small IT firm in Metro Detroit.  I had just moved down near Detroit from the middle of the state.  My reasoning to move was because I couldn’t find a job in IT there at all.  Everyone wanted experience but how is one to gain experience when one cannot get a job?  Anyway I applied and got hired on as a help desk resource.  I quickly advanced to being a field engineer.  After only one year I was the most billable person in the company, yet I was making $29,000 a year.  The second year started and I got a boost to $40,000.  I was making this company over $200,000 a year in just service dollars and I was only seeing 1/5 of that.

Throughout the first couple years I was thrown into situations where I was clearly not qualified but some how I got through it all.  The training in this company was nonexistent and everything had to be self-taught.  Throughout the first couple years I’d basically taught myself basic Citrix, Exchange, and Windows Server 2003 administration practices in the field.  Was this fair to clients?  Ah no, but that is the way it is with most IT firms.  Everyone is so set on money and not on employee satisfaction.  They saw training as an unnecessary expense and that you should learn by doing and just charge the customer’s for that learning process.

In October 2005, the nightmare began.  The company decided to become more involved with a large security vendor.  I won’t name the vendor but let’s just say the color yellow says enough.  I was told suddenly that I had to fly to New Jersey and do a pilot of a full antivirus/firewall suite for a large company.  I was told two days before I had to fly out.  I was so scared that I almost started hyperventilating and passed out on the spot.  I did everything I could to pull manuals and whitepapers so I could prepared.  I was studying nonstop before I flew out, on the flight, and in the hotel the night before I had to go before a large corporation’s IT staff and sound like I knew what I was doing.  I had a technical liason at the security firm but she turned out to be a huge witch and knew that I was not qualified for the job I was doing.

The first day didn’t seem so bad as I was able to focus on collecting some information for a template that I was given.  I collected all I could in the first day and studied that night until 2 am.  I got about 4 hours of sleep and had to be back at work.  The next few days were nothing short of a living hell.  I was asked questions that no administration book in the world mentions.  They wanted to know things like how much bandwidth does one update take or how much bandwidth does a heartbeat check consume.  I answered the questions as best as I could but I knew they could see right through me.  Through out all of this I was communicating with my technical liaison and she was not happy.  I flew home Friday night to see my girlfriend at the time, but knowing that Sunday I had to fly back out.

The next week was even worse.  I arrived onsite on Monday and they were already not happy with the security firm.  I did all I could and started installing the software for the pilot.  I had to prepare a document during the pilot so I was filling out as much information as I could.  In the end I got through the pilot and the company was satisfied with the job, or so I thought.  My grades that came back for the engagement were horrendous.  My boss was irrate and couldn’t understand why I had not done a better job.  This sent me into a fit of rage and then some depression.  I felt like I had failed and was nothing but a failure.  Looking back on it a week later I realized there’s nothing I could have done different.  I was not properly trained at all on the product or the procedures for engagements.  However, this was only the beginning…

Why this generation of gaming consoles suck.

// September 16th, 2008 // No Comments » // Consoles

Honestly everyone is so stuck on arguing about what system is better or which one pwns the other one.  You know what?  They all suck.  Not one system actually lives up the hype.  For every positive on each system there are a number of negatives that bring it back down.  I’m so sick of talking about this but here we go with one last discussion.

All Systems:

Everyone loves to argue that the games are so much better on the 360 then the PS3 or the Wii but are they really?  Outside of graphics are the current iteration of gaming offering anything that wasn’t there before?  The answer is no.  Game play certainly hasn’t taken some revolutionary step by any means.  Madden is a perfect example of a game that focused more on graphics and less on improving game play.  There’s been things that you could do on the PS2 or the Xbox that you can not do on the the 360 or PS3.  How they get away with releasing games like this is beyond my comprehension.  Halo 3 gets rave reviews but if you look beyond the updated graphics (which are not spectacular) there is nothing new in the gameplay.  Nothing that hasn’t been done on PC gaming as far back as 6 or 7 years ago.  I can’t find one game or genre that actually has some new game play features that excites me.  Game developers seem to be more interested in putting out the same games with minor updates then taking a chance and releasing something that’s true revolutionary. 

What irritates me even more then the influx of mediocre games and lack of innovation is the genius idea of releasing multiple versions of the same console with different hardware.  I get the fact that you want to offer cheaper options to certain consumers but if you want to do that then just make one version of the console with expansion slots and then offer all the peripherals.  Microsoft should be beaten for releasing a console without a hard drive and then forcing developers to not require a hard drive for every game.  Talk about a way to stifle innovation.

Backwards compatibility seems to be a huge topic for a small percentage of gamers.  Seriously it’s not that important and people need to stop complaining that they can’t play their 5 year old games on a current console.  Just keep your old console around and use it.  It’s much more effective for console companies to focus on the future and not supporting the past.  Sony has done a great job of keeping the PS2 going and continues to create games for it.  That is a much more effective use of resources then trying to keep up with an emulation layer on the PS3.  At least Sony is still supporting the PS3, the Xbox died as soon as Microsoft released the 360.  Nintendo is well Nintendo and doesn’t support their old systems very well but they are still the kings of backwards compatibility. 

Xbox 360:

Microsoft rushed development and the release of the 360 and blatantly ignored hardware design issues just so they could be first to the market.  Microsoft is so intent on owning the home entertainment sector, yet they outfitted their machine with old technology.  They screwed people out of HDMI, Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi, hard drive space (or even a hard drive in general), stifled developers releasing new content for free, and horrible DVD playback.  Sure Microsoft improved the console with HDMI later on but it screwed the initial users out of it.  Their solution for hard drive space is to charge $170-180 for 120 GB.  I can buy a laptop drive for less than half that so they are ripping off consumers.  Speaking of ripping of consumers how about the fact they charge $100 for WiFi.  Microsoft has certainly done a good job of getting exclusive games and also further development on Xbox Live.  The sheer number of games on the 360 is great but there are still more lumps of coal then diamonds for games.  There are very few great titles with more of them being stuck in the average range and anything but next gen.

Xbox Live certainly trumps anything with Xbox Live, but with all the positives, Live still is its own worst enemy.  The problem with a centralized model means we are all at the mercy of Microsoft to keep their systems running for us to enjoy the Live experience.  Everyone knows what happened in December so I’ll just leave it at that.  The other problem is games are limited with the number of players that can be supported in online multiplayer.  Live has so much overhead that it makes it very difficult to reliably support more then 16 players online in a game.  Once it gets above that developers have struggled.  This brings me to another complaint.  Why when you have a centralized model do you then have most games use a decentralized model for game hosting?  Doing this is far from efficient.  It’s must more efficient to have dedicated servers that act as the host instead of forcing everyone through what amounts to a slow proxy to then use a player’s unreliable connection as a host.  If everyone had FiOS or some equivalent this would be fine but that’s not reality and it definitely restricts huge multiplayer games on Xbox Live.

PS3:

I don’t even know where to start on this one.  On one hand the PS3 is probably the best multimedia device ever released.  It’s ability to play high definition movies, stream media from a PC, copy media to the local hard drive (360 cannot do this), browse the Internet, bluetooth keyboard, mouse, and headset support, and complete integration with streaming media to a PSP over the Internet.  Unfortunately, for Sony the PS3 is supposed to be a game machine also.  This is where they really have failed as a company.  The exclusives are going to be there because Sony actually develops more games in-house than Nintendo (Microsoft basically outsources everything).  However, the third party exclusives are few and far between and haven’t really made it to the market.  MGS 4 will certainly sell and the Final Fantasy series will provide a boost but outside of those it’s been a very turbulent ride for Sony.  The games on the PS3 frequently get lower reviews then the same game on the 360 but a lot of that is because the games were ported to the PS3 after being developed on the 360.

Hardware wise Sony trumped Microsoft completely with regards to offering updated technology out of the 
box.  Gigabit ethernet, WiFi, and Bluetooth are all included and are the future.  The hard drive is also a 2.5″ SATA drive used in laptops and can be switched out in less then 10 minutes and significantly cheaper then adding space for the 360.  Kudos to Sony for at least that.  This brings us to the lovely architecture decisions by Sony.  The Cell processor in theory is far more powerful then the processors in the Wii and 360 but the problem is the radically different architecture takes far more thought during the development process.  This has caused developers to barely utilized the 6 available SPEs (1 is disabled to improve manufacturing yields and one is locked out for the OS to use).  So when a game is ported from the Triple Core, six thread Xenon processor in the 360 to Single Core, 2 thread Cell CPU you can imagine what kind of problem this causes, especially with speed.  If all the SPEs were utilized then the Cell processor can actually handle 9 threads vs 
the 6 threads the 360 can support.  However, that’s not reality and this is one of the major problems with the multiplatform games.  Bottom line is Sony needs to work with IBM and developers and get the programming interface easier and help out third party developers port games more reliably.  Sony really needs to get Home out with in-game XMB for chatting to even compete with Microsoft and Xbox Live.  PSN is great for huge multiplayer games because most of the games have centralized servers to do all the hosting but forcing developers to build in chatting inside a game is just stupid.  However, offering full games in a downloadable fashion is the future and Sony is much further along with that then Microsoft.

Wii:

I am not going to waste time on the GameCube 1.5 with a cool controller.  They still don’t have an online community and any game outside of Nintendo pretty much sucks.  Kudos though to Nintendo for reselling a failed system by simply updating its looks and throwing in one evolutionary feature with the controller.  Now if they could have only updated the hardware and actually embraced HD gaming.  But they are laughing all the way to the bank so again congratulations Nintendo on fooling 24 million people! 

Conclusion:

I really hope that in 5 years the gaming industry moves forward even further.  With cheaper flash memory on the horizon I wouldn’t even be opposed to moving back from an optical format to either downloading games or simply providing games on protected flash drives with internal flash memory for the OS, downloads, and game saves.  This may sound like going as far back as the SNES and Genesis days but in the name of speed flash technology just smokes optical technology.  Today, it wouldn’t make sense because solid state flash hard drives are still too expensive but in 5 years that could be a radically different scenario. 

Obviously the future of media distribution will move to an on-demand technology where you download everything.  However, I’m not sure that it’s going to be widely available to everyone in the US in 5 
years.  There are still far too many areas where broadband technology just doesn’t exist.  Until this is fixed it just doesn’t make sense to push that technology.  My guess is, it’s going to be two generations before we see this technology exclusively used in gaming. 

So basically I’m completely disappointed and excited at the same time with the current technology.  We 
are stuck with these systems for at least another 4 years so get used to it.  Hopefully Sony and Microsoft get their issues worked out and developers become more comfortable and offer additional game play options that we’ve never seen.  Unfortunately, I think we are all going to have to wait for the next generation of gaming to provide revolutionary improvements.