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Regarding outsourcing IT, this is very common, mainly because the big IT companies can attract staff and keep them trained. A non-IT company is distracted, when it has to do its own IT as well…
I say that as the Head of IT for a manufacturing company. We have an on-site team, but many specialist tasks are outsourced to people who have the knowledge to deal with them.
For example, we manage our hypervisor, but we have a consultant who does nothing else, so when we need complex technical changes, we do it with him together. Why? Because he knows what he is doing, he does these things every day, and when it goes pear-shaped, he knows what to do.
For example, it is possible, when extending the LUNs size that the hypervisor can no longer see it and all VMs freeze. If that happened, when we extend the LUN, we would spend a couple of hours scouring the hypervisor documentation and the SAN documentation and internet forums looking for the right answer, because that is something we do every 6 months or so. The consultant does it regularly, and if the LUN disappears, he can reconnect it within a couple of minutes. Such a problem, and that is just one of many problem areas, hypervisor upgrades is another, where things can go pear-shaped bery quickly, save the company more money than if we did alone.
(On the last hypervisor upgrade, we had to restart the hardware servers. They failed to reboot. It turned out that they had been up for so long, that even for the short amount of time they were rebooting, they cooled enough that the DIMMs were loose needed reseating - on 3 from 5 servers. The problem is, the error message was something very different and, if you weren’t faced with such things on a regular basis, you’d never think to open the chassis and press the DIMMs down (we removed and re-seated to be sure), we had the servers back online within a couple of minutes, without that expert knowledge, it could have taken hours or a support call and a 4 hour wait for an engineer to come out, if he hadn’t recognised the symptoms.
The problem isn’t the outsourcing itself, it is outsourcing to a cheapskate company that doesn’t have the training in place for the “plebs” in IT-support (there is such high turnover that many companies simply skip training or the staff just has a script they have to go through). I’ve worked on several helpdesks over the years and the quality has gone steadily downhill, as have the wages… When I was working on or managing helpdesks in the 80s and early 90s, there were high paid experts who were rotated out every few months, to keep them interested. Tech support is a brain numbing job 99% of the time, followed by blind panic, when a real problem raises its head. High level experts don’t like being idle and just answering “stupid”, to them, questions, so the quality of the support dropped and dropped, until it feels like many companies only employ braindead zombies. It is a genuine pleasure these days, when you get through to a helpdesk that has someone knowledgeable about the topic, whereas that used to be the norm.
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In the 90s I worked on the tech support team for a computer manufacturer. At first we only did customer support on our own software and hardware, which we knew well.
Then the sales execs (who out-ranked everybody) started telling the helpdesk manager “oh we sold this customer systems with [third-party software name] and we had to include tech support to get the contract, so you’ll need to send your staff on a course”. I went on a lot of courses for software I’d never heard of before. I dread to think what the quality of support was like where we had a few days training and then went straight into supporting mission critical systems for multinational companies and government departments.
But the C-suite had decided that everything was subordinate to increasing market share, even if it meant operating at a loss.
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Re: the picture of the week. Always and forever there’s a relevant XKCD
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Asked Gemini the following:
Who coined the phrase “tyranny of the default” and when was it first used?
The phrase “tyranny of the default” was coined by Steve Gibson, a computer security researcher and host of the podcast Security Now.
Origin and Meaning
The term describes the phenomenon where users, often due to inertia, a lack of technical expertise, or a belief that the default settings are the “correct” or “safest” option, rarely change the preset configurations of software or devices. This reliance on defaults can have significant implications, particularly in the realm of cybersecurity, as the initial settings may not be the most secure. The phrase highlights how the power of a default setting can effectively dictate user behavior, even to the user’s detriment.
Gibson first used the phrase around 2009. It has since been widely adopted in the tech community and beyond to describe the powerful influence of default choices in various contexts.
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