Daniel's Blog

I can’t view the thread in which this discussion is ongoing, because shortly after Schlake discovered that he might have hit a nerve with this one, he made it private. I’m not on his friends list (nor is he on mine), and so that’s how it is. Here is what I originally said:

1. Schlake probably made it private because I mentioned that his blog was a great place to discover things about the TCC which were not public knowledge. Schlake likes hitting nerves.

2. Schlake will happily put you on his friends list if you simply put him on your friends list. Since LiveJournal is a game, and your friends list does not represent reality, you should be willing to do that. To prove the point, I’ve added you to my friends list. It’s just a list.

As to mailhost coverups: I wasn’t working at the TCC then. I know very little about what happened. But if I had been there, I can tell you I would have refrained from posting about it in a public forum until all the facts were known.

Restraint is one thing. To pretend that there have never been instances of mail loss (or file loss, or whatever) is quite another. The TCC has never stepped up to the plate of professionalism.

Interesting … I don’t believe I’ve ever been called a “cornhole” before. Is that a particular habit of yours?

Yes.

My name is Matthew—something you could easily discover if you bothered to look at my user info page. Do you feel name-calling is necessary?

As a matter of general principle, yes. But for the sake of argument, I’ll go over the paragraph you skipped slowly here, without name-calling:

There’s plenty of history of TCC lies and a general lack of internal and external communication, mostly due to ridiculous over-structuring and in-fighting. It doesn’t take a conspiracy to explain it—it’s just the same old cover-your-ass behavior that goes on in every sufficiently large organization.

If you think you can refute this, I’d love to see it.

The student employees think “I’m a student, so I can slack off” and the administrators think “I can blame the students because they have no power or history.”

It would be nice if the students took the job seriously, but that isn’t going to happen until they get paid enough, and even then, they’re there for school rather than work. It would be nice if the administrators took the job seriously, but the TCC’s history and budget prevents it from acquiring talented people with actual skills. Instead, they wind up with local yahoos who want to work there because of sentimental reasons and twats who can take advantage of it for other reasons. It doesn’t pay enough to be taken seriously, and they don’t have enough money to start taking it seriously.

There is no real reason for having three organizational units for managing 5-10 people per, except to create confusion, inefficiency and additional work. It might be excusable if it didn’t create artificial rivalries that only serve to inflate the egos of the hopeless and pathetic. It’s a fucking soap opera.

When I worked there, on the UC side, there were 5-8 UCs, normally about 6. Above us is a man named Ray Piworunas, who I like, but whose job seems to consist of managing UCs and maintaining valid information in the ticket database. There were meetings initially, and office hours, and things like that. I got lured back after these things went away by creating the concept of “closing UC” when closing our rooms started to take more than 3/4ths of the time of a given shift. By that point, meetings were either memorial or ridiculously abbreviated, and no one would show up. This would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that nobody documents anything, so nobody knows all of the “fixes” for the various things that go wrong. This leads to apathy, which kills the enthusiasm of everyone, including the users.

The sysprogs lived in another dimension without tickets or work, playing zangband and tweaking their window managers in the back room with Schlake. Schlake didn’t document anything or read tickets, but he did respond to direct emails or, if you were lucky enough to have a problem when he was at work, you could go and ask him in person. This became my own standard operating procedure: something weird is broken, go ask Schlake, or tell the user to come back during the day and ask the UC to ask Schlake. The sysprogs treated everyone with a kind of disdain, because they were and are paid more than any of the other students, which is a well-known fact. The UCs are expected to eventually get switch jobs and go for the sysprog position, but the UCs have no advantage over any other student in applying for the job. So the UCs quickly acquire a fatalistic sensibility akin to a McDonald’s cashier, because that’s how they’re treated by the rest of the department. Eww, you have to deal with users, how unsanitary. And our requests for documentation, or notifications, go largely unheard, because Ray isn’t at the desk seeing problems, he’s upstairs making sure that you spell “projector” right. The maint guys were pretty responsive but didn’t do the paperwork very much.

But the question I’m getting at, is why do we need four managers for ~20 people? If I thought the maint guys needed to be aware of something, I would need to tell Ray, who would then tell Steve, who would then tell the maint guys if there were a meeting of some kind. Using the tcc- email addresses was discouraged, I don’t think anyone in tcc-uc used any of the others once when I was working there. Everyone there has a holier-than-thou attitude, which only encourages it in other people.

You think it isn’t a soap opera? Really?

I realize\u2014and freely admit\u2014that there has been, and continues to be, much that is wrong with the TCC. I am interested to hear what you think could change and/or be improved. However, I do not share your fatalism. I believe I can, and will, make things better.

Basically, what I think is this: the TCC needs to undergo a massive, unilateral organizational restructuring. It might need to be split into several organizations. Some of the services it provides may need to be reduced or stopped, while focus changes to other services. The TCC needs a goal or a purpose, because it really doesn’t have one right now. The managerial layer needs to be removed or drastically reduced, the funding increased, and community involvement needs to take place. Then it might become an efficient and effective organization.

I defend the TCC because I generally like to say positive things about the place I work, not negative ones. I’ve discovered over the years that if I have more bad things than good to say about my place of work, then perhaps it’s time to look elsewhere.

Yes, but you aren’t working for the TCC because you love the TCC. You’re working there because it’s one of three games in town, it was hiring when you were looking, and you’re too comfortable to live outside of Socorro or look for a different job. Those are the same reasons everyone who works there has, and they have nothing to do with the TCC as an organization, and everything to do with warm fuzzies about being near or “a part of” Tech and college kids.

And I have a good idea of many, if not most, of the services the TCC is supposed to be providing. Web services, dial-in services, wireless network access, VPN access, software installation and support, security, a help desk\u2014I would have thought that you, as a former senior User Consultant, would have known those things as well. …

Suppose I describe a device that brushes teeth, waters plants, keeps track of your checkbook and plays music. Yes, those are all services, but what does “it” do? What should the engineers making “it” focus on, watering plants or playing music? If the users find it skips when it plays music, are they going to just sit back and be happy about the fact that it balances their checkbook perfectly?

What is ISD’s purpose? They provide internet and phone services to campus. This quite naturally includes the phone directory and the dormitory internet access. What does the TCC provide? Well, dialup internet access, and computer labs, and remotes for projectors, and foo, and bar, and we water plants, and we play video games, and we have no idea what we’re supposed to be doing. You want to expand the services—that’s great, but what are you expanding on? You also say you offer “security”—what does that mean? Why does ISD provide internet access, and we provide dialup and web pages? There aren’t any good answers for these questions, and that’s part of why the TCC sucks so much.

The TCC has managed to stick around primarily by being an early-adopter of a variety of systems. Whenever one of them doesn’t pan out, the users gradually forget about it. Whenever one of them is particularly useful, it becomes a focus for a while, and then drifts aside, usually long before the usefulness is exhausted for a particular user. But the TCC’s main focus has always been survival in a corrupt and ridiculous environment. You should ask Topliff why the TCC is there sometime. I’d be curious what he’d say its focus is. Probably something greasy and vague like “Providing services to the students.”

I’m glad you’re happy there and I’m glad that you’re proud enough of it to speak highly of it. I’d agree if I hadn’t experienced it first-hand and seen just how slipshod and, well, useless the whole thing is.