I'd like to see more IT people get experience with direct client contact, as well. I don't mean Help Desk, but rather face-to-face. I've been doing it for most of my career and far too many of my co-workers have no idea what it entails. They hide at their desks, in our basement cave, and just hand off any contact at all to others. That's a great way to create a practical version of "The Telephone Game."
Sure, I was a consultant for almost 20 years, so I have that, but it's true that a lot of IT guys don't seem to understand what it entails.
Today's FAFO moment is definitely in the thread where the guy who ordered equipment did it wrong.
They want to let the support contract on one switch manufacturer expire, so obviously we would need to replace the switches. So, we told them how many we would need: two network switches and one management switch per cabinet (plus miscellaneous others that don't factor in here).
They apparently asked one guy, "How many active ports are there?" He gave them the number, and they divided that number by the number of ports on each of the switch. Switches in the data center generally aren't fully utilized -- much like I don't use the full power of my phone to land spacecraft on the Moon, we have unused capacity in the Data Center. But what that means is, we now have only two-thirds as many switches as we actually need.
Currently, our thought is, we're going to have to order a mess of long cables and run them to neighboring cabinets, but that means it's going to look ugly, and it's a loooot of extra work (and therefore billable time). If anybody does a tour, it's going to look like my team don't know what they're doing, or are sloppy. But the dudes doing the ordering are patting themselves on the back for the money they "saved"...
