Industry

Skilled Labor

Gordon Weakliem jumps from Jon Udell's speculation about the film industry's project-oriented, just-in-time assembly of resources and talent to a parallel with the construction industry.

So I had the realization that the construction industry works this way as well: a builder or developer generally doesn't build anything, they hire people to build it for them. So somebody gets the job of contracting and scheduling the work of concrete workers, drywallers, plumbers, electricians, painters, etc.

... Software development as it's typically practiced isn't much like construction, but maybe it should be. Which makes some of the current trends in the Software industry, in particular the practice of standardizing on a technology, assuming that people can be retrained to do anything, and plugged into any project ... seem as ridiculous as a developer hiring a bunch of construction workers and assuming that they can train concrete finishers to be electricians.

My father-in-law's been in construction for years. Though trained as a civil engineer, he has run projects from the pending addition to our house to the Danbury Square Mall to oil rigs and whatnot in Indonesia. And he likes to tell stories about those projects. And the stories he tells are not unlike project management stories in any field. One of the essentials is always how he keeps the good workers, and, because of that, comes in on time and under budget.

Which makes you wonder about corporations which think that a sysadmin or a NOC monkey only needs to know how to use 26 of the 104 keys on the keyboard. If you can't afford to hire or train skilled labor, perhaps there's a deeper problem that you need to solve.

3:38:21 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry, System Administration