| Hacking is only a short-term solution to getting around these immovable
people.The way to motivate these people 'who are afraid of losing their
jobs' (and others), is to let them hang themselves. By hacking around them
you (without people knowing you are hacking), give the appearance to others
that the MIS director's policies are working. Only by showing that people
are going to fail due to the director's policies, will the REAL PROBLEM
be solved. For example,
I'm working in an office where we've had a system for the specialists for
about the last 4 years. Since then, a DCS was formed in this office, which
rents computer time and equipment and facilities management to customers.
This group has generated a lot of revenue for DEC.
Unfortunately, it is usually perceived by specialists that the DCS is
'renting' out from under them. Terminals disappear, modems disappear,
and disks disappear. By 'disappear', I mean they are rented or negotiated
in some way to be at a customer site. Most of this is good, since it
generates revenue for DEC. At the same time, the DCS acquires new equipment
for specialists (until it is rented out), so in many cases the DCS has
allowed for equipment to be obtained that would otherwise be required
from other budgets, etc. In the meantime, specialists never know what tools
will be available to them from day to day, and have a very impossible time
scheduling activities that depend upon DEC equipment.
On the other hand, the more systems DCS can control, the more they can
rent. For instance, now, our system that we have had since before DCS's
ever existed, is being moved to the basement (8 floors down) where the
DCS 'will take care of it'. They have also said they want to 'straighten
it out' by doing such things as reorganizing the directories, etc.
During these past years, specialists have all had privileges on the system.
This has allowed them to access the files they use, mount tapes, etc
(this is a 2020). It is of course anticipated that privileges will be
taken away from the specialists since 'customers will be on the system'.
It appears that here, too, hacking will become part of being able to
accomplish our jobs.
Now the question is:
Hacking to get around the restrictions MIS puts on you, avoids the problem,
but does not SOLVE it. The thing to do is: Don't successfully complete your
tasks. Make sure the appropriate people know why you cannot do your
job, and the rules will be changed. The longer you hack to get around your
MIS director, the more that things will be 'OK' the way MIS has set things
up. It is only when the MIS director's way of doing things is seen by management
to be causing more trouble than its worth, that the rules will be changed
(or the director's fear for job shown to be for a good reason).
My plan here, for instance, is to let the DCS hang themselves, and when they
keep losing customers due to obsolete systems software, poor system maintenance,
etc., they will WANT the specialists to again be privileged maintainers of the
system. Of course, some of the specialists may not want to be around long
enough to wait the DCS out, so PATIENCE is also required.
Of course also, you have to really care about your organization's overall
success for this method to work. In many cases, for instance, I don't think
people will be patient long enough to see this thing through. After all, if
management doesn't respect your needs enough now, you may already be de-motivated
enough, that hacking is your easiest recourse (short-term solution since you
only feel you want to be around for the short term anyway). But if you are really
interested in long term success for yourself and your organization, you may
want to watch your MIS director's policies strangle him.
DON'T FIGHT THE SYSTEM BY HACKING IN THIS SCENARIO; LET THE MIS DIRECTOR'S
POLICIES DO THE FIGHTING FOR YOU.
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| RE: .2
Like many other people, I have deadlines to meet. If I spend too much time
putting requests through channels, I don't get my job done.
Actually, I agree in principle that when you have time, you should follow
procedures. If you don't have that time.....
I am not paid to tune a VAX/VMS system, I do know a little about it and
that little is a lot more than the average MIS person. If performance is
the problem, I try and help the MIS people, not circumvent them. Other
problems I may try to solve my self.
Perhaps the problem is that MIS people do not have enough training on the
machines they are supposed to manage. A VAX with a mixed work load takes
a lot of management! Maybe the hackers should try and help their system
management more (but where do I get a project code for it!).
Hugh
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| Re: .2
John,
I doubt that you will be able to "wait out" DCS. Since DCS
is bringing in money they have a lot of flexibility (more than you and I do).
One of the things they can do is hire a knowledgeable -20 person who, being
part of DCS, will have privileges and will keep customers satisfied by
updating software, etc.
I don't think that specialists should have privileges on a production
machine (i.e. machine with customers) for no reason at all, just because they
are specialists. Even the most knowledgeable person can forget, mistype, walk
away from his terminal while logged in, etc. These accidents did happen!
In our particular situation, if you do have a good reason you
can obtain any privileges you want. All that is required is filling out DCS
resource request form and securing your manager's signature on it. If you
don't do that and instead blame DCS for interfering with your work I am afraid
that you might be digging a hole under yourself. DCS can always say, "But why
didn't he just follow the procedures?"
In two years that I've been a system manager for DCS Vaxes I heard
very few reasons for specialists to have privileges on production machine (we
in New York have a "specialists" machine, where privileges, while restricted
can be obtained easier). Usually requests for privileges result from:
a) Poor understanding of Operating System on the part of a specialist
(or laziness to set things up). For instance, a specialist came to us to
request BYPASS, because he needed to share a data file with someone else.
Instead it was possible for him and his partner to change the file protection
to allow group read access (they were in the same group).
b) Jockeying for power (in a technical, not political sense).
Sometimes a specialist does have a valid case for obtaining privileges
(for instance he is writing shareable image libraries and needs to run
Install). In that case the above procedure gives him those privileges.
- Victor -
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| I really don't want to go into specific details of our own site.
My note was mainly aimed to provide an example of letting people's policies
do your work for you.
In the local case, we still have privileges since our disks are entirely
organized assuming that specialists will have privileges. this has been
that way for the past 5 years, long before DCS even existed. In fact, if
privileges become a serious concern for the DCS, the DCS could always get
themselves a 2020 (they're cheap now anyway). Several offices not only
take this philosophy seriously, they have a 'systems' software unit that
runs the systems, totally independent of their DCS unit that sells services
on the systems reserved for the DCS by the 'systems' unit. This gives the
DCS 'good press', and would probably transform disdain for the DCS into
something that specialists would want to help more avidly, since helping
the DCS generate income would not automatically mean the loss of the specialists
own system access.
Again, policies what they are, they encourage the kind of problems that hacker
notes are made of, and they don't encourage specialists to want to find leads
or otherwise help sell DCS services. The solution in many cases is to remove
the reason for someone to want to go through any of the problems that people
have been describing in many of these notes. And the solution is to try to
make the policy makers aware of the problems so that they will hopefully
modify their policies before they actually hang themselves.
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