Comment by jiggawatts
9 days ago
I was the principal consultant at a subcontractor to a contractor for a large state government IT consolidation project, working on (among other things) the data centre design. This included the storage system.
I noticed that someone had daisy-chained petabytes of disk through relatively slow ports and hadn’t enabled the site-to-site replication that they had the hardware for! They had the dark fibre, the long-range SFPs, they even licensed the HA replication feature from the storage array vendor.
I figured that in a disaster just like this, the time to recover from the tape backups — assuming they were rotated off site, which might not have been the case — would have been six to eight weeks minimum, during which a huge chunk of the government would be down. A war might be less disruptive.
I raised a stink and insisted that the drives be rearranged with higher bandwidth and that the site-to-site replication be turned on.
I was a screamed at. I was called unprofessional. “Not a team player.” Several people tried to get me fired.
At one point this all culminated in a meeting where the lead architect stood up in front of dozens of people and calmly told everyone to understand one critical aspect of his beautiful design: No hardware replication!!!
(Remember: they had paid for hardware replication! The kit had arrived! The licenses were installed!)
I was younger and brave enough to put my hand up and ask “why?”
The screeched reply was: The on-prem architecture must be “cloud compatible”. To clarify: He thought that hardware-replicated data couldn’t be replicated to the cloud in the future.
This was some of the dumbest shit I had ever heard in my life, but there you go: decision made.
This. This is how disasters like the one in South Korea happen.
In private organisations you get competent shouty people at the top insisting on a job done right. In government you get incompetent shouty people insisting that the job gets done wrong.
> In private organisations you get competent shouty people at the top insisting on a job done right. In government you get incompetent shouty people insisting that the job gets done wrong.
Great post and story but this conclusion is questionable. These kinds of incompetences or misaligned incentives absolutely happen in private organisations as well.
Much more rarely in my experience, having been at both kinds of organisations.
There’s a sort-of “gradient descent” optimisation in private organisations, established by the profit motive and the competitors nipping at their heels. There’s no such gradient in government, it’s just “flat”. Promotions hence have a much weaker correlation with competence and a stronger correlation with nepotism, political skill, and willingness to participate in corruption.
I’ve worked with may senior leaders in all kinds of organisations, but only in government will you find someone who is functionally illiterate and innumerate in a position of significant power.
Obviously this is just a statistical bias, so there’s overlap and outliers. Large, established monopoly corporations can be nigh indistinguishable from a government agency.