CIOs, what does your nightmare before Christmas look like?

Graveyards are full of IT pros once thought irreplaceable

Body management

In the self deluded world of HR, staff are divided into “Permanent” and “Contract” which our IT execs rightly scoffed at and the increasingly non-permanent nature of permies is causing serious stress. Like any other courtesan, a contractor is always ready to leave for a better deal, but at least they are willing to do anything you will pay them for. Even in a well managed firm (yes, they do exist), when your developers quit, they take a lot of understanding of the way your firm works with them and it takes time to being them up to speed – and, of course, this can ruin delivery schedules.

One solution is to move your development out of London, where it is very easy for your developers to jump ship with minimal hassle, to places like Norfolk where the competition for talent is less intense.

This isn’t risk-free as anyone who’s ever been contacted by a recruiter for a job outside the M25 will know. A CTO may need someone with a niche skill which doesn’t exist in Suffolk or North Wales and HR says “policy is that we pay X for developers”, where X is far less than they can get in London, so you can’t get them. So HR says “policy allows you to hire two developers on X, which is just as good as one on 1.5 X”. Again, this is a risk that’s hard to get budget to fix.

Software, hard risks

It’s nice to live in time when new products from new innovative vendors are streaming in, but they can die as easily as they can start, leaving you dependent upon a system with no support. Code escrow can work but is certainly not risk free. Understanding the vendor code is not trivial and, if tied to a cloud architecture that is obscure or no longer existent, is a hassle – even if you’re running on the version they’ve escrowed which in a world of DevOps; isn’t very likely.

The Hanging Vulture award for 2015 goes to…

One of our CTOs used to run the tech at a huge events business and was host to an On Ice-style extravaganza pitched at children. I questioned him closely about this and under duress he confessed this did include ice skating mammoths, obviously. But like any good CTO at the roundtable he took that horror in his stride; an important part of your character in the events biz where every week you’ve got to deliver a different solution with different people and different tech.

In addition to mammoths, the show unleashed animatronic Pterodactyls upon a rapt audience of children. Sadly they had decided to use the 2.4 GHz band, which as a Reg reader you don’t need to be told is also home to Wi-Fi, like the sort you get in an arena full of phones, so there was a lot of interference. The Pterodactyl, together with pilot (yes, Pterosaur Pilot is a real job) stopped dead in mid-swoop.

At first the audience thought this was part of the show. For a while, at least. Despite handing out ice cream, the young audience got quite upset as they realised it wasn’t going to restart as techs ran around trying to get it to restart.

Eventually they gave up and after what felt like three days of rigorous turning-off of microwave ovens, walkie talkies and impassioned pleas to the audience to turn smartphones off, they persuaded the Pilot to get back in his craft and try again.

What did we learn?

DevOps will prevent most of these problems, or so some of our IT execs insisted forcefully. They reckon merging teams and helping them understand each others jobs will reduce key man risk… or mean hard dangerous things are done by people with superficial understanding. We learned of one firm where the ‘design oriented’ UX designers didn’t understand SQL well and a single delete from the front end actually was a delete all. Wasn’t pretty.

Firms get the CIOs they deserve. Crapness is a pervasive problem; you may think that you’re the one good part of your firm, but it is either a delusion or irrelevant.

If you are a senior IT exec who enjoys sharing insights and war stories with your peers, the round tables of 2016 will be starting real soon now. ®