The Butt Ugly Weblog

IT, what IT?

I no longer really know what my field is. Whenever people ask what I do, I just usually say something about being in the IT business, and wave my hands dismissively. But when I look at the answer myself, it is empty and hollow.

I read articles about the "IT business". They're filled with big words like ITIL and Cloud and SaaS. Yet they mean nothing to me, and whenever I try to read about them, my eyes glaze over and I wish I had something more interesting and easier to read - like Perl code written by a drunken monkey.

But yet, being the CTO in a hot startup means that by some definition I really must be in the IT business. However, it feels like I deal with far more mundane matters: I worry daily about open issues, answering to support questions, running unit tests, feature roadmapping beyond the next two weeks (with the product owner, of course), architecture design, license conditions, terms of service, developers, systems monitoring, capacity planning, functional test suites, deploying releases, continuous integration, paying service fees on time, talking to customers, making sure everyone knows what they're doing and where we're going (need to improve on this), learning a new language on the side, interviewing recruits, managing subcontracting, upgrading servers, DNS configuration, scalability, clustering, helping people through rough spots, documentation, coding rules, but most of all writing the actual code - in other words, Shit That Gets Things Done.

So when someone raves to me about how the cloud is going to change everything I usually just go "So? It's servers and data. You can either manage them yourself, or you can outsource them to some cloud provider. You make the calculation how much it costs to own, rent or cloudify your shit, factor in expansion costs and SW development and run with the one that produces a smaller number. No philosophy required."

On the other hand it is useful to put labels on stuff; it's so much easier to research on the internet if everyone agrees that a particular set of techniques is called "The Cloud", rather than everyone inventing their own name for it. However, it must be understood that these labels are only temporary and loose. Let the historians then give them proper labels once the full reach and impact of things are understood. Prior to that it's mostly about marketing, and desperate attempts of people dropping off the bandwagon to sound relevant again.

What matters is Getting Things Done. It's also useful to talk about How To Get Things Done, because it teaches others How Things Can Be Get Done, and henceforth More Things Get Done. It's far, far less useful to talk about What Does It Exactly Mean That Things Might Be Done In A Certain Way And Could We Have Another Meeting About The Impact Next Week Please?

(Here's a small idea to the Finnish IT press: write more about How To Get Things Done. You don't have to become a clone of the Make magazine, but write sometimes about companies and how they've approached certain problems, like recruiting or scalability or HR or even document change control. Help people to share the knowledge, 'cos we just don't have the time in the IT industry.)