NOTE: Note that every time I say “most librarians”, I’m actually saying “most librarians I’ve known, met, talked to, or have heard about”… Which is a pretty sizable number.

A local librarian recently wrote an interesting piece about an interesting piece wondering why librarians aren’t system administrators too.

The answer is simple: Most librarians are not technophiles. Most librarians pine for card catalogs and papery books and papercuts and paperclips and all things paper. Most librarians only use technology because they have to in order to keep their job… or their library open at all. And conversely, most system administrators generally want nothing to do with paper, books, or those that herd them.

How many librarians do you know that don’t have a blog, nor participate in online discussions of any kind short of maybe e-mail? How many librarians do you know that use words like “new-fangled” to describe fairly old ideas like blogs, forums, RSS, messaging, etc.? How many librarians do you know that call the IT people (or a tech-savvy librarian) because a link they clicked didn’t work… immediately? How many librarians do you know that cannot use technology effectively, period?

I’m not slamming librarians as a group – I could have substituted “doctors” or “teachers” or “carpenters” in there as well – Just making the point that people that aren’t required to do IT things, don’t generally do IT things (nor want to).

I have a fair number of librarian colleagues that are very tech savvy and could with an few courses in their degree, or 3-4 months of deep training, be very good system administrators. They think logically. They generally want to do what’s best for their userbase. They usually aren’t sticklers for 9-to-5. They generally embrace automating mundane things because they’re generally lazy. Wait… don’t hate me yet: Lazy is good. Lazy means you’re unwilling to settle for doing things you can make some dumb machine do for you. That is why we have the machines, to work for us. That’s an important part of being a system administrator: Being ambitious about being lazy. Example: We have servers find and destroy spam, because we don’t want to weed them out of our inboxes. We cool? Good.

Many years ago, while I was still something resembling an undergraduate, the “automations librarian” at the time was, actually, a systems administrator (he may not agree with that). The library had a CD Server running Windows NT that served … gosh … 15(?) CD’s worth of data to the library workstations. The hours I spent on WilsonDISC alone are… staggering. He and I got along very well (still do, even though he regressed to being a “real” librarian some time ago ) and worked on a number of fairly pioneering initiatives to help enhance the Information Technology on campus.

I actually spelled “IT” out there, because that’s what we’re talking about – Information Technology – the technology to provide information. Sounds exactly like what a modern librarian should be focused on. Most people responsible for libraries don’t see it that way. Most people teaching future librarians don’t see it that way. Most people creating library science curricula don’t see it that way. Ergo, most librarians aren’t that way.

I openly invite any librarian or library science student (or groups of either), from anywhere that can get here, with an interest in system administration, to up-to a full-day of hands-on this-is-the-kind-of-stuff-a-sysadmin-does . Really! I already do this stuff for high schoolers and college students and mid-life-crisis-folk-considering-a-career-change, so why not offer it to librarians too? I’d love to see a revolution of systems-minded librarians taking real ownership for the systems they rely on. It’s good for them, it’s good for IT, and it’s best for the users.

I think I put more italics and hy-ph-ens in this post than anywhere else, ever…. NO CARRIER

So I was reading in NYMag about lying, then I went over to Bruce Schneier’s blog and he quoted the same article, so for the sake of modding up this article on the Intertubes, I figured I’d link them in.  The article is fascinating, not because it blames parents, but because it relates the cognitive exercise of lying to intellect. A long, but worthy read. Parents suck.

This year, please remember: If at first you don’t succeed, you fail. Stop whining about it, just man-up and move forward.

I’m not old, nor very far removed from recent college graduates. A significant difference between my peer group and recent graduates is “work ethic”. In conversations with my age-similar colleagues, we all observe pretty much the same thing: Recent grads don’t want to work, it’s just “what’s next”. The same generation that really only went to college because that was “what’s next” after secondary education, unsurprisingly has the same view on the workplace. There’s no pride in their work. There’s little-to-no ambition to go above-and-beyond. Work is there to provide the financial means to allow them to continue their uninspired, path-of-least-resistance “lives”. For the most part, a recent graduate’s first job out of college IS their first job- The first time they’ve ever been faced with real responsibility, and the necessity of providing for themselves. They don’t want to work. They have to work.

P2Opt1: Academia doesn’t help this. I work in “Higher Education”, and I network with colleagues throughout industry and academia: All of which say the same thing on both sides of the coin. Those in academia are clamoring that their students are unambitious and are in “need” of being sandboxed, lest an entire generation of students flunk to the standards of those that came before them. Those in industry, who hire recent graduates, are underwhelmed by the ho-hum, excitementless, droll emo attitude of their new employees: Employees who are barely competent in fundamentals that the employer needs them to have- and that they allegedly do have on paper- but that’s been disposed of. Yup, they had to take a networking course to get their Computer Science degree, but they still don’t know network speeds are measured in bits and not bytes, and as such a 1GB file should not take only 1 second to transfer over a 1Gb network connection. *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* I’m used to CS students thinking there’s something “wrong” with our network because of mismath like this, but your employer shouldn’t have to deal with such incompetency.

P2Opt2: Academia doesn’t help this. I work at a “publicly-funded” four-year liberal arts school (that gets less per-student public funds than the “privately funded” four-year tech school across the river, mind you), but have commiserated with colleagues at private schools, specialized schools, trade schools, etc. – all of which are exasperated at our collective inability to instill real values into the students. “Higher Education” is constantly being dumbed-down to accommodate the “modern student”: More online learning, less stringent attendance policies, higher retake caps, complete bypassing of experiential education requirements, and fluffy brainless requirements for final projects and theses.

Not only are faculty being forced to not use red pens lest it hurt the students’ feelings, but completely failing graduation requirements still allows you to graduate. We had a student in recent years who did their “required-to-graduate final project” in our department- Not only were we underwhelmed when the student had “no idea” what they wanted to do for a project (this was in an interdepartmental meeting set up specifically to accommodate the fact that this student had to graduate in May, and hadn’t worked out anything yet), but the project was never even really attempted AND the student stole the computer that we loaned him to work on (it was “returned” some time later, after a public shaming). This student was still allowed to graduate. According to colleagues at some private schools, it’s just as bad or “worse, if you count the kids of Board members who have free reign to terrorize the community”.

Students today want a free lunch. They don’t want to really learn. They want to put in the time, get a pat on the back, and get on to “what’s next” – only to find out that they don’t really want that either. Academia is doing a disservice by catering to the lackadaisical desires of underachievers by reinforcing their self-centric attitudes and certifying them in the hopes that they’ll iron it out someday.

Fail students who underperform.

Don’t allow people who flagrantly disregard graduation requirements to graduate.

Use your red pen.

Make us new knowledge workers.

Note: The following is  largely my opinion, spattered with factual details and explanations, along with a dash of cynicism. Even more than usual, the disclaimer at the bottom of every page of my blog very much applies. Don’t complain to my food-chain because you don’t agree with me. It won’t get you anywhere you want to be.

In 2007 accessing the Internet has really come down to three factors: Availability, latency, and cost.

Availability is “the nines”, or what percentage of some period of time is your provider providing the 1’s and 0’s.

Latency is “the wow”, or how long the 1’s and 0’s take to get from A to B (this is NOT bandwidth, you armchair admins)

Cost is “the ka-ching”, or how much is someone charging you for “the nines” and “the wow”.

There used to be more factors: bandwidth, peering relationships, MAE affinity, trunk type[s], distribution, yadda yadda yadda. That was then, this is now. Everyone can offer gobs of bandwidth, peering relationships are matters or fomality, MAE .. isn’t, and the guts of an ISP’s service is diverse and all boils down to “the nines” and “the wow”. If you can move packets from NY to LA in 2ms w/ 99.999% uptime, I don’t care if you have an “all fiber ATM backbone” or “barbed wire”.

So here we are. After over a decade of leasing circuits to get to an Internet Service Provider over 100 miles away, and having to pay entirely too many people to send 1’s and 0’s from here to there, we have moved to TimeWarner.

Since August of 2004, we have used TimeWarner to provide connectivity within our dorms. They have provided a consistently good service to our students, at a responsible price and with exceptional “the nines” and “the wow”.  We have honed our relationship with them, they have provided us unprecedented access to their internal monitoring and management systems, and we have been nothing short of “very pleased” with that relationship. If we were anything less than that, we would not have entertained allowing TimeWarner to provide the rest of the campus Internet access.

Some have likened this move to “selling out”: We’re discarding the DANC OATN for the “evil cable company”. I, personally, despise TV- Cable, Satellite, Airwaves, whatever- But at the end of the day, it comes down to Availability, Latency, and Cost.

Availability: In the past year,  our dorm network has had 99.993% uptime with only two (2!) downtime incidents. One of those incidents: 33 minutes in January – Was a regional fiber failure, impacting large swaths of our area. The other incident, was 4 minutes long and I can’t recall the RFO.

Latency: I have a testsuite that I developed some time ago that measures latency between the testing system and a number of other systems on the Internet. The metric for latency is generally the millisecond (ms), and my test suite uses a metric called the “composite millisecond average” (cmsa).

CMSA is derived from measuring the latency between the testing system and the targets over a sustained period of time (5 minutes), several times a day (24), for a block of days (2). The averages per target are computed and the difference from the theoretical baseline across all targets are then averaged to compute the CMSA index. I don’t want to get into the details of why I use the baseline diff’s, or how that is computed, but ping me if you’re curious.

The bottom line is that our TimeWarner provided Internet connection gets a 7.63cmsa, and the DANC OATN-to-BroadWing circuit gets an 11.81cmsa. Lower is “better”. To say this in plain English, “if some 1’s and 0’s take 11.81ms to get from here to there on the DANC OATN-to-BroadWing, then it will probably take 7.63ms on the TimeWarner connection”.

Cost: I’m not going to get into this other than saying we’re paying considerably less that we ever thought possible, let alone what we were paying.

Equal-or-better “the nines” plus better “the wow” at considerably less “the ka-ching” is, in my opinion, “the logical”. We’ve freed up considerable recurring funds to do new and better things that will end up substantially improving the technology architecture on-campus, as well as providing much needed redundancy off-campus.

I know that I’m here to provide better services to the campus community, and that why I supported doing what we did. Not everyone agrees, but that’s expected as not everyone is here for the same reason.

The problem is that we’ve shifted from being knowledge workers to collective thinkers. Anyone who works in higher education and has watched the last 5-8 years-worth of students coming into college has seen collective thinking first hand (whether they’ve recognized it or not, I won’t posit).

I remember, as a “non-traditional student” a few years ago, in the middle of an exam, a girl picked up her cell phone and started to dial it. The professor, obviously flustered by this, demand she put it away: She didn’t realize it wasn’t ok to call her friend who could help her out. Is this that show that lets you call the “lifeline”? No, it’s an examination of what you know, not what you can find out. I’m pretty far removed from K-12 education these days, but I have to assume that she got away with those ideals there.

Even when it comes to learning, that too is disposable to the collective thinker. As long as they remember where it was (or the search terms to find it), they don’t need to remember how to do something because after all: It’ll always be somewhere on the Internet. A consultant colleague of mine subcontracts with me frequently in areas that require work without a network. He gets a modest $100/hour to surf the Internet and read HOWTO’s to fix problems, but has significant troubles when there is no Internet access: Even if it’s a problem he’s fixed before. With some people I’d be afraid that “bad-mouthing” him here might cost me contracts, but he makes no bones about it. He, correctly, believes that he’s “normal”: Most consultants I work with who aren’t graytops have similar problems, they think it’s ok for their clients to pay them to use Google.

Forget the inevitable breakdowns of society and Apocalyptic futures, where there won’t be anywhere to search for the knowledge one has not bothered to possess- I’m not even going to get into that reality. How will we, as a society, move past the next hurricane/tidal wave/ice storm/power outage? The Internet goes offline at my place of work, and there are people pacing the halls like zombies with no corpses to feed on, slowly being sapped of their lifeblood. Sure, there are purchasing agents who use the Internet to place orders; yes, there are marketing personnel who use the Internet to canvas the competition: There ARE people whose jobs solely revolve around Internet access. Those are not the people who I’m referring to.

An apropos fortune cookie fortune I have says: If you spend all your time learning the tricks of the trade, you will never learn the trade.

I just wrapped up a major four-position hiring consult with a client who wanted one quality software architect (high-level strategic thinkers who can design large software systems) and three knowledge-worker-grade software engineers (the people who work with the aforementioned architect to produce product) who would oversee the existing sixteen-person software development staff. They were willing to pay more than the going rate for all of those positions- money was not an issue- and had applicant pools of 280 and 416 respectively: Two good engineers. That’s all they got. Not because the people didn’t look good on paper, it was because they couldn’t withstand the vetting questions: The architects couldn’t answer fundamental framework modeling questions. The engineers couldn’t answer object inheritance questions. While this may be over the heads of some people reading this, it damn well shouldn’t be for the people my client was attempting to hire. They didn’t know how to do their jobs. To my chagrin, some of the questions asked in the in-person finalist interviews were identical to those asked in the phone interviews: They “knew” the answer on the phone (with a laptop in front of them) but not in person.

I’m a big fan of a number of buzzphrases like “on the job training” and “never stop learning” and “professional development”. I believe in all career paths, especially in technology, there is always room for improvement, for optimization, and to learn the newest ways to do what you’re doing. To a point, you’ll never – I hope – know everything you need to do a job forever. The concept of the knowledge worker is that you at least have a foundational ability to go into work today and do your job today without costing your employer money today with your need to learn something new.

Every time a wheel has to stop turning so a cog can go ask the Internet how to do their job, the flow of money goes from positive to negative instantly. The wheel is not turning. The employer is now losing money and productivity, because the wheel isn’t turning. This, of course, assumes that the cog hasn’t gotten distracted during their HOWTO session and is off checking unjobrelated headlines, their stock portfolio, or chatting with the cute administrative assistant a couple floors up. The wheel is not turning. The value of this cog to the employer is dropping fast. They’re paying for ineptitude and slacking, all under the guise of “well I had to check the Internet to see how to do something”. The wheel is not turning.

The line between knowing how to do your job, and being completely unable to get by without thousands of other people telling you how to do it, is very blurry in modern times.

The starkest reason for this is that in modern times, the knowledge worker is unobtainable. They’re either making 6-digits at a powerhouses like Google, HP, or Xerox; or they’re making hundreds of dollars an hour as consultants to everyone else who can’t afford a knowledge worker: Because we’ve stopped making new ones.

In the late 80’s, and into the end of the mid-90’s, a new type of worker evolved: The Knowledge Worker. The Knowledge Worker is the subject of lots of books- some of them even good- so I’m not going to go too in depth into the social psychology of it all, but the Knowledge Worker was someone who was hired because of what they knew. It had little to do with aptitude or potential, but rather “We want to insert a square peg into a square hole, so let’s hire someone who can do it”. This was a vast departure from the traditional “We want to insert a square peg into a square hole, so let’s hire someone who could do it if they were trained”.

This was pre-to-primitive Internet, before you could pick the brains of millions of people, thousands of which probably know how to put square pegs in square holes. This is when no one was going to hold your hand and wipe your tears, you had to know how to do things. In the technology space, this meant you had to know how to do a lot of things. Some of us thrived in this era (although some of us wish we were born a bit earlier and could have thriven more) because we knew a lot about a lot of things. We were infinitely marketable, not because we could do things, but because we did things. Any pubescent teen with some Mountain Dew and the Internet can set up a mainframe with the help of a few thousand Internetters, but could they tear up an E6500 in a dark zone, where the only other electric-powered devices are fluorescent lights? Of course not.

Now I can hear the collective-thinkers out there rushing to defend their example-fodder brethren: After all, why shouldn’t anyone be allowed to do anything? Why should her accomplishment be any less impressive? After all, wasn’t the result the same?

Was it? Is the work done by someone who- even after they did the work- does not understand (and probably doesn’t even care) more or less valuable to an employer (and to the collective society) than the work done by someone who understood what they were doing? I know that’s a big sentence, and the collective-thinkers will need to create a new forum thread to fully understand it, so let me make it simple: Society needs people who do things more than people who can do things.

Perfect example: Medical doctors. I don’t know too many people who would go have surgery by someone who said “I’ve never done this before, but I googled it and I’m pretty sure I can do it.” Yes, the collective-thinkers will be upset because that is an extreme example that has life-or-death consequences, and isn’t appropriate when applied to Knowledge Workers.

Isn’t it? As a culture, a society, a workforce, if we are overrun with drones who don’t know how to do things; Who rest assured in their self-confidence believing that they know how to find how to do things. How will we move forward? How will we survive? It is a life-or-death issue.

Automation is what drives me. Taking a process- possibly even an automated one- and tightening things up through technology, reducing or removing the steps involving manual labor. Whether it’s a script for myself/friends that checks the lunch specials at a favorite restaurant and sends them out over Jabber whenever they change, or a complex system involving numerous devices, software pieces, etc.: Computers are our tools, and I am Zen when engineering automation.

Automation, unfortunately, doesn’t sit well with all humans. Sometimes someone notices that they’re not necessary anymore, and  Sometimes it’s an employer that notices that some employees aren’t needed anymore, and lays them off. There’s a couple ways to look at this:

1. Automation that obsoletes humans is bad
2. Humans obsoleted by automation need to re-tool

Of course, I’m a proponent of category 2.
New York is a “right to work” state and heavily pro-Union, which makes it difficult to make the following statements, but unless you want to wallow in self-pity, they’re none-the-less important to be said. If your job was automated, then either: you weren’t doing it efficiently enough or the technological climate has evolved to allow humans to do more important things. If you were laid off because of automation, then you provided your employer no additional benefits other than that which was automated and you need to tool up in order to stay employed. It’s staying abreast of those “more important things” that every employee should always be doing. You never know when some whiz-bang program/invention is going to make your previously irreplaceable duties as Head Basketweaver useless. As Head Basketweaver, it’s an implicit part of your job to position yourself as a valuable asset, and show that you still have value even if the position you currently hold becomes irrelevant.

Automation isn’t going to stop or slow down just because it’s unpleasant. Automation is how society evolves. Unless you’re Amish, or a proponent of primitive living, you use automations every day. You don’t wash your clothes in the river with lye. You don’t walk everywhere you need to go: even riding a horse was an automation. If you’re reading this, then you don’t rely on the Town Crier to get your news and events: newspapers put them out of business, should we have not evolved those as well? For the religious, the Bible/Koran/Torah you read and hymnal/songbook you sing from was produced using automation: Should an army of monks/sages be employed to hand-transcribe every copy?

I do have sympathy for those who get clobbered by new technology. Losing your job is rough regardless of the reason, and that’s why it’s so critical that employees position themselves well. Whether it’s outsourcing to China or automating, change is inevitable. Every human has the capacity to learn and adapt. I know 86 year-olds who whiz around the Internet like teenagers, so the argument that one is too old to learn “new tricks” falls on deaf ears. Learn and adapt, and the inevitable changes will make it trivial to pick up and move on.

I’m in Denver for a security con. I dislike Denver for a number of reasons, but it is a nice change from home. Flights were good. I smuggled in my toothpaste so I wouldn’t have to have another standoff with the TSA over my dental health. If you’re honest and declare your >3.2oz of toothpaste they’ll confiscate it. If you put it in a sock, rolled up in shirts and don’t mention it, you can keep it. Word to the terrorists: Socks fool TSA screeners. Out to have something spicy downtown. I intend to be blogging the highlights… We’ll see.