Network World: Homegrown applications are prime culprits of downtime

Developers and network engineers often see themselves as separate groups; and to an extent, that's somewhat true. But the applications the developer codes can have significant impact on the network, and for that reason it is very important for application coders to keep in mind network performance.

According to this article by Denise Dubie in Network World, that's something that does not happen nearly enough.

But the most telling results, according to Managed Objects, were those that pointed to companies supporting more homegrown applications and citing applications as the cause of network downtime. Homegrown and custom applications can represent up to 90% of some organizations application mix, the vendor says, and more than 80% of survey respondents relying more on homegrown applications than off-the-shelf packaged applications blamed software as the main cause of most outages.

If Jim Metzler is right, and we think he is, network teams and application development teams are in the same business: the business of application delivery. Good, network-friendly code is vital to maintaining a good end-user experience.

Network World: The top network inventors of all time

My vote goes for the guy who invented token-ring Ethernet simply because of all the jolly time I used to have at my old job convincing my co-workers that when the network went down, it was because the token fell out and one had to look under the desk for where it could have rolled to.

Inventor: Radia Perlman

Invention: Spanning-tree algorithm -- 1983

The story: The spanning-tree algorithm, used by all bridges and switches to route traffic from one point to another, is credited to Perlman, then working at Digital Equipment. Now sometimes called the Mother of the Internet, Perlman is a distinguished engineer at Sun, where her goal is killing off the technology she invented. The algorithm is too fragile, she says -- if a temporary loop was created, it could cause problems from which the network might never recover. "It's time to redo it in a way that is more robust and gives more efficient paths," Perlman says in her bio on Sun's site.

Builderau.com.au: Take off your suit pants and jacket - It's Web 2.0.

This article, featured on Slashdot, proclaims that the dotcom days of a relaxed corporate culture for IT is back. That may or may not be true.

The word is out. IT rock geeks are back in demand and stereotypical "dot-com" culture (and smell) is back in vogue. Managers are again in a bidding war to compete with their rivals and new Web juggernauts like Google to retain their best employees by offering a laid-back environment to benefit staff moral, retention and productivity. Enter Web 2.0 work culture, the future of yesterday.

According to this year's Deloitte study of 500 CEOs finding, hiring, and retaining top IT talent is on top of the high brass' agenda for future growth. According to the report what is making the situation worse is the impending retirement of baby boomers who are leaving the workforce in droves.

The article makes the point that perks like free soda and foozball tables are what retain IT talent. A cynic would say that a foozball table is cheaper than paying your workers more, but I think there's more to it than that.

I recently heard of a developer taking a pay cut of around $40K a year to leave his business intelligence programming and consultancy job to work as an engineer for Google Australia. It wasn't the money that necessarily was keeping him around but the lure of working on innovative projects in an environment where lunch is provided, developers get to work on their own projects, and most people have passed a stringent brainiac litmus test before being employed.

Corporate culture is more than just "wear a suit everyday." The suit is merely a symbol of conformity to authority. Certainly, in business, that's a good idea - except when it's a bad idea!

The suit in the IT department is a throwback. In many cases your IT department is crawling around on the floor, under desks, fighting off rabid dust-bunnies with giant man-eating teeth, in order to get the new hardware set up or to make a crucial repair. Suits simply don't make sense in that environment.

As we covered previously, geeks tend to be the guys in class with the right answer even when everyone else tells them they're wrong. When the bosses tell the geeks to toe the line even though it doesn't actually make any sense for what they're doing, the message that companies inadvertently send is: "We don't care what the best solution is, and we don't care about challenging you and letting you work to the best of your abilities."

And that is why the attitude that Google is full of "brainiacs" has probably done more for Google's recruitment efforts than the free lunches or on-site haircuts. Geeks want to work someplace that they feel that they can take pride in their work and that they're appreciated. That's the real secret of the "dotcom" culture.