Visible from the heights..

RANT:

Working in a international company in Tokyo, I am afforded the opportunity to work with people not only from Japan and American, but from all over the world. I recently had a discussion with both a partner of the company and my girlfriend in regards to the way people approach situations and the reasoning methods. Not only from a technical approach, but in general.

I recently have had some issues with people I am dealing with not being what I consider technically capable for their positions. For example, people that are supposed to be senior level technicians that cannot identify a difference between application layer problems and network level problems. I understand that people want to immediately blame someone else when their stuff does not work, and I fully acknowledge the possibility that the network or network related issues could be the problem. However, I do expect a senior person to be able to come to me and say “Hey, I have verified the services are running and that I cannot connect/ping/access/telnet to the port of the affected server/device. I have checked log files etc etc.” Please check the network.. I do not, I repeat do not, enjoy having to learn about your application because you do not know how to debug a problem on your own. “This is the nTH time I have used this application..” is not a valid excuse. DO you think I have used it???

Perhaps it comes from having an engineer father who was always encouraging in my endeavours to disassemble and reassemble something. Perhaps it comes from having a comp sci./math background? Perhaps it comes from being “intelligent” or perhaps experience?

While I do have a lot of experience with networking and computers, I in no way expect to be more knowledgeable then a 40 year old guy who has been doing this his whole life.

At the other end of the spectrum, I want to also say that I find the learning process of some people interesting. Again, perhaps it is a product of up-bringing or education, or even lack of experience.. If you are in the IT field working as an SA you really need to know how to logically approach a problem;

1) Isolate the problem; saying the application is not working is not enough. Thats what the end users says. When an SA comes to me and says the application is broke and they want to fix the network on the basis of that, I immediately feel the urge to head butt them.

2) Troubleshoot at the application layer. You know, the OSI model fabulous for troubleshooting. I fully don’t expect a SQL admin to understand anything below, say session level, but you can verify that you server is actually working.

3) Provide a valid explanation of your problem to your network admin / senior consultant. It actually saves time in the long run, and perhaps you get a little bit of respect.

4) Profit.

As for network troubleshooting, you really need to learn the OSI model and understand what is going on within the TCP/UDP[IP] streams. Just because you cannot ping a host doesn’t mean it is not up. Just because you cannot connect to an ftp port doesn’t mean that ftp is shut off.

Did I learn any of this in college? No.. I don’t think I gained this from experience either, per say. It just seemed logical to me…

Perhaps I am to logical.. perhaps they are just idiots…