Lovers lie down in trust.

[reddragdiva]

You know, when I heard about the UK ID card plan, my first thought was "EDS are going to land the contract, aren't they."

When I was at Ericsson, I got to be the company admin trying to beat service out of EDS. Outsourcing Liaison Committee, no less. I can't tell you how fucked up it is having your IT outsourced to EDS. Every contract I've heard about is the same. They start off with glowing promises. The first three months is fuckup hell. The next three months is slightly less worse. At six months, they put the halfway competent on the contract. I got this from multiple sources, then it happened just like they said.

I mind the occasion we had a pile of Sun workstations to be upgraded from Solaris 2.6 to Solaris 7 (the next version) for a particular program. The right answer is: install a test workstation, make sure the installation works, then jumpstart all the workstations from that configuration. A "jumpstart" is when you have a carefully-tweaked installation and you install it just by telling it "install, please." Total time: a few hours, no matter how many machines you have. (This is part of why Unix is nicer than Windows.) EDS came back to us with a quote for AUD$30,000 labour in which they installed each machine, one by one, by hand, four hours each. In the Windows manner. This was actually a serious business proposal. Their clueful Solaris admin blanched when I told him.

I know many an outsourcee who has been sent to EDS. The corporate culture is built in the image of Ross Perot's brain. It is not only deeply psychotic, it's Texan.

I am now hearing that the division I work for is for sale (yet) again. The prospective buyers are IBM and ... EDS.

Every detail of your life is, of course, utterly safe with them.

(*pint* to wyrdlinks for provoking the above.)

Comments

[arkady.livejournal.com]

It could be worse. They could be Klingons. (http://www.mathnews.uwaterloo.ca/Issues/mn9105/klingon.php)

[reddragdiva]

At least then they might be effective.

[templeofpopart.livejournal.com]

I had mates who went to work for EDS's mainframe for British Aerospace, the Inland Revenue & Customs in Worthing...
It was a sackable offence for them to ever discuss how much they got paid! :-/

[dan-lane.livejournal.com]

Isn't that the case in most companies?

[templeofpopart.livejournal.com]

Not in any of the places I've ever worked - including Civil Service - first time I ever came across it...?

[dan-lane.livejournal.com]

I've certainly seen it in some of my employment contracts/company handbooks before.

[inulro.livejournal.com]

Yes, but in the civil service isn't there a set pay scale like the NHS, so it's not that hard for everyone to work out what everyone else makes?

[templeofpopart.livejournal.com]

Just realised this is a public post - sorry

[reddragdiva]

No, it's one of those warning signs you should be working elsewhere!

Most people don't mention it in case they don't like someone else's answer ...

[dan-lane.livejournal.com]

I disagree... I had to have a word with someone recently about blabbing his salary out loud... when I mentioned it he said it was HIS salary and HE should be able to tell everyone how much HE gets paid... I swiftly informed him that it was a financial agreement between The Company and Him and that The Company might not want the details of this financial agreement broadcast loudly in the office as it could make some of the lesser paid employees feel bad and make him look like a dick to the higher paid employees.

[dcarson.livejournal.com]

The Man always tells the workers not to discuss their salaries with each other. This is a tactic to undermine the solidarity of the working class.

From 9 to 5, you belong to ME!

[dan-lane.livejournal.com]

I find that people who seriously use the phrase "The Man" generally have a very restricted view of The Real World.

There are two sides to every argument and not everything is a conspiricy against YOU.

... or is it.

Re: From 9 to 5, you belong to ME!

[reddragdiva]

In paid employment, you are rong and I'm sufficiently paranoid.

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

That depends. In the States, threatening termination against an employee who reveals his/her salary is a violation of the Labor Act of 1928, and, if enforced, is good for a minimum fine of $20,000 per incident against the company threatening to terminate or actually terminating. However, it's enforced about as often as the requirement that journalists actually know something about their subject before writing an article about it: if that requirement were enforced, fully nine-tenths of all music and movie critics would be facing the electric chair.

[vatine]

I'd say taht salary discussions is part and parcel of "occasional coffee-table discussions" at non-set-payscale workplaces where it isn't explicitly forbidden. Possibly not in the "how much do I earn pre-tax" sense, but at least in the "how much is my take after taxes" sense. I see it as a healthy thing in the workplace, as long as mentions are made less often than, say, every half year or so. It's also something that gets discussed between aquantainces in the same industry, selling their work to different work-buyers.

[templeofpopart.livejournal.com]

Ok it could potentially cause ill feeling or makes you look smug or an idiot - but don't you feel dismissal is a bit harsh? This isn't Victorian times..?
My questions would be why do they want this kept so quiet and are so extreme over it? Doesn't that ring some alarm bells? Why are they so concerned that people will compare notes?

[reddragdiva]

Further on that, I know that my pay is the same as my boss, and one of my Bill-sucking cow-orkers is actually paid a chunk more ... I don't whine because Jobserve tells me I'm actually paid about what I'm worth. How annoying.

[dan-lane.livejournal.com]

ohh this is a public post!! *click*

[reddragdiva]

Very wise ;-)

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

It is not only deeply psychotic, it's Texan.

Three years ago, I literally worked across the street from EDS' headquarters in Plano, Texas. You have no idea how correct you are: when I worked at the Frito-Lay HQ across the Dallas North Tollway, Frito's IT VP made a huge noise about offering bonuses to anyone able to get good IT people for the company, and I was inundated with resumes from EDS grunts desperately trying to escape the company while they still had their souls. (As to why I'm still here in Texas, it's only because I haven't been able to escape. Even Oregon is starting to sound good, and I detest Oregon.)

[twicezero.livejournal.com]

in the windows world anyone sensible builds one machine, makes a 'ghost' image and installs all the identical machines from that. We've not completely backwards ya know :)

[reddragdiva]

You assume identical machines. Solaris Jumpstart doesn't. (It's helpful, but far from required.)

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

The Jumpstart thingy sounds a lot like OS/2 Response File installs. Is it?

[reddragdiva]

I have no idea. It works by installing a Solaris generic kernel and then attempting to install a metric shitload of patches. That's why it helps if the hardware is substantially identical, but that's far from a requirement - at worst, a few patches might fail.

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

Hmm... Not terribly close then....

The response file thingy worked by allowing pretty much every answer that a setup program would need to be put into what was basically an environmental variable. The installer would skip asking any question that had an answer already defined, and stow the answers in the same file from the interactive questions being answered. So, you run through it with one machine, change any workstation-specific bits in the file that you want with a text editor, and fire it up on the next machine and if the hardware is close enough that it doesn't have to ask any new questions, the next install is hands-off. keep copying the file, and you could do simultaneous installs on as many machines as you had blank diskettes to copy the file to.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

More accurately, Jumpstart works by booting the kernel over the network (fetches it with TFTP), mounting the OS install image (NFS), and then installing the OS just as it would from the interactive installer but with the very few questions that asks already answered.

It can do more -- you can explicitly include or exclude packages or package groups -- but that's about the gist of it.

The patching is a standard part of the OS install, and happens even with the interactive installer.

The thing about Solaris is that you can, typically, take the boot disk from one machine (say, a modern Enterprise-class box), put it in another machine (say, an Ultra 5 or even a SPARCstation 20) and it should boot. You'll probably need to do a boot -r first time so that /devices and /dev are updated, but all the drivers are always there for anything that ever shipped in a Sun box, unless you've gone and stripped the install *way* down.

(Even more than I would typically strip a Solaris install.)

There are a few exceptions, but those are to do with OS support for particular machines rather than any special customization of the OS during install. For example, I believe some of the current high-end workstations still can't run Solaris 9, and often a brand-new box will need a recent OS revision because some new bit of hardware was added -- e.g., try booting an Ultra-10 with the first release of Solaris 2.6...

But mostly it Just Works.

[twicezero.livejournal.com]

interesting, and clever...

[wyrdlinks.livejournal.com]

As RDD says, that's great for (harward) identical machines. I can't see (given my understanding of Windows) how we could do that for non-identical machines. I may (of course) be wrong and would love to be so! :-)

[reddragdiva]

Admittedly, with Windows 95/98 with a full kit of drivers and .CAB files, you can pretty much transplant a hard drive from any machine to any other and only have cleanup to do on the drivers. So you can get close.

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

2000 and XP should work the same way, and they keep a 50 meg cab file of ALL their drivers on disk at all times. But you still have the sid issue to deal with. I have zilch experience with MS' home brewed remote install thingy, but it sounds almost sane. Real fun can only be had making one image, and buying (leasing in my case) your new computers (which of course come preinstalled with 98, wiping them and installing your image) as you need to replace old ones, which of course is flawless because major manufacterors such as Comp*q NEVER EVER EVER change their hardware, especially not in the same model. Most especially, they would never all of a sudden ship you kit with onboard video, resulting in the deployment of an entire batch of machines unable to boot. We won't discuss Peter Norton[1]'s absolutely perfect disk images, complete with the least defragged layout I've ever seen.

[1] Seriously, the guy looked like his twin.

[reddragdiva]

IBM's model numbers are my friend.

[twicezero.livejournal.com]

hmmm, I've not tried it, but depending on similarity - might get away with a set of drivers in a directly and a bit of plug and play-ville... but i might be missing something major...
we tended to have seporate image disks for each of our different laptops, but you could sometimes cheat and install a harddrive for one on a different build which suggests general compatibilies, something to playwith perhaps... if you get anywhere let me know...

[wyrdlinks.livejournal.com]

This discussion prompted me to look into it a little more. In the specific situation I face, where 22 machines are arriving from the same source, identical spec, identical setup, it looks as if I can WinInstall LE (from Veritas) to take a "before" snapshot, apply all the changes and applications, then take an "after" snapshot and make a single MSI from the changes. That can then be launched from each machine.

I'll post to my journal how I get on!

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

As I have been lately scrounging for reasons for *not* circulating my CV around North America, this became the second: My current employer is vastly unlikely to ever contract EDS¹ for anything. It's that and If I'm going to move, I might as well move someplace better. Which means I need a degree of some sort (*any* sort) to get Canada to accept me. Even a 2-year degree in History of Poetry will push me up into the "skilled worker" category.

¹Yes, that sounds like a disease for a reason.

[reddragdiva]

If we're sold to EDS, I put myself on the market promptly. If we're sold to IBM, I hold on like a barnacle with a superglue foot.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

Until IBM move your role to India, as they've done with a bunch of people they got from Telstra as part of yet another IT outsourcing project.

[frou-frou.livejournal.com]

oi! we're not all ex Telstra people here you know!

All the same, I do recommend IBM as an employer - it's not their fault that Telstra don't want to pay Australian wages any more. If IBM didn't offshore the roles the work would have gone to Infosys.

[reddragdiva]

Not that anyone of that description reads this journal, of course.

[ozjester.livejournal.com]

No not at all. If you say EDS with the right inflection, it can sound like "idiots".

[reddragdiva]

We generally did.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

What, you have some Shell people reading?

[dan-lane.livejournal.com]

ED'S (http://www.eatdrinketc.com/london/source/site_content_item.asp?item_id=1123&channel_id=1) do excellent milkshakes!

[reddragdiva]

EDS commit unspeakable acts into every one.

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

Never trust any company actually willing to hire a CEO named "Dick Brown". Without exception, every person I've ever come across named "Dick" was one, and considering the ass-reaming ol' Brown gave EDS employees before he was shown the door...well, EDS couldn't have done better with the CEO choice if had tried.

Speaking of Texans...

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Republicans won't rest until abortion is completely outlawed, Social Security is abolished, the welfare state is completely rolled back, the book of Genesis is taught in science classes, and the federal income tax is abolished.

Sound like the ravings from someone far leftfield? Try again...

http://www.calpundit.com/archives/002380.html

Sound like the ravings from someone far leftfield?

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

I thought it sounded more like the ravings of someone from far right field. It's an old article isn't it? There's definately a taste of the Inner Party in the republicans these days. It'd be funny if it wasn't so fucking terrifying.

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

They start off with glowing promises. The first three months is fuckup hell. The next three months is slightly less worse. At six months, they put the halfway competent on the contract.

Sounds to me like all the outsourced IT I've been involved in. Today we finally got the correct coverage schedule for this year, for signing. It was promised for 1st March. The contract, IIRC, was actually due for renewal around the end of February. The contract cover was to be exactly the same as last year, and the hardware to be covered hadn't changed - except where it had been upgraded by the same company providing the support.

I think I've spoken to every member of their Account Management team in the last two months. I am going to be so glad when this is over for the next ten months ...