
A struggle within MIT’s IT department over its future - chei0aiV
http://tech.mit.edu/V136/N3/istfeature.html
======
kough
Just another sign of the continuing corporatization of MIT (and the rest of
academia). Our Dean of Students is now a Vice President, in line with our
"peer institutions." At the end of the day, MIT is a corporation, and exists
to make money, but it's incredibly irritating when administrators refuse to
admit this to students, and frame all debates without that context. "These
changes are to make us more similar to our peer institutions" = "we want to
make more money".

If anyone here is an MIT alum (or boardmember!), please considering getting in
touch with current students and seeing how you can help. At this point it's
pretty clear we have no voice on campus.

~~~
x5n1
The criticism should be directed at the concept of a corporation itself, then
at making more money. It's not just the profit motive, it's the discourse and
the tools that go around it that are even more of a problem. For instance
short term thinking, price cutting, the management and employee hierarchy.
Focus on form rather than function in terms of concepts like professionalism
(or better labeled as a psychological disorder of forcing people to act like
machines).

The whole way that we think about these things needs reform. Corporations are
machines for distributing power to a certain group of people who are in touch
with the capital owners, the shareholders rather than the stakeholders. This
is usually at the detriment of everyone involved, other than the shareholders
and their managers. The ultimate goal of such arrangement is for the reduction
of the power, well-being, happiness, and contentment of the stakeholders for
the financial benefit of the shareholders.

~~~
erikpukinskis
> reduction of power, well-being, and happiness

I love you, but this is not quite right. The goal is to addict the
stakeholders to participation and then reduce their support as low as
possible. Power, well-being, and happiness of stakeholders are parceled out in
order to maximize addiction while minimizing resources spent.

------
gaius
_Many managers were demoted from their supervisor roles, likely as part of the
changes to make IS &T a flatter organization. However, in several cases, new
managers were put in place as soon as their predecessors left._

Friends of the newly appointed boss, I'd not be surprised. Jobs for the boys.

------
coldcode
_The Scrum methodology is about avoiding micromanagement of employees, he
said, which is “completely at odds with the preferences and personalities of
much of IS &T’s current leadership.”_ In my experience Scrum often winds up
micromanaging everyone, like at my current large employer. Scrum is often the
tool of people who want to say agile but still want full control of
everything.

~~~
p4wnc6
Scrum absolutely and unequivocally is all about micromanagement. It is a
system, much like Six Sigma, intended to produce arbitrary metrics surface
area for middle management to use in whatever way that changing political
circumstances dictates. It is emphatically not about being lean or efficient
with short iterations. It is emphatically not about informing the business
about development velocity or anticipated missed deadlines. It is emphatically
not about making customers happy. It is emphatically not about software
quality or craftsmanship.

For someone to say the phrase "The Scrum methodology is about avoiding
micromanagement of employees" it would require such a frightening level of
cognitive dissonance and a desire for violent, Panopticon-like
micromanagement, that you absolutely should run the other way as fast as
possible.

This is by far the most upsetting thing I've read today. And I just read that
other post about war being a racket ...

~~~
julie1
Because both articles are talking about the same. Thieves.

For me agile is embezzlement.

Waterfall has a reason to be: taking enough precautions to make sure costing
and feasibility of a feature would fit the (internal or external) customers'
needs and budget (as specified per contract). Without obligation of results
you have an obligation of means (it is what professionalism is supposed to be
: to be liable).

After Agile, project are ALWAYS delivered on time. Not 100%, but they are
"built to budget".

Sometimes the 10% missing are like not possible and the heart of the feature.
But who cares? Product are not tested anymore, and defects are just now in the
support budget.

The application has a nice reactive angular interface and a mobile
declination. And the customers like in a marketing trick are "empowered". The
IT department always look busy with a constant pipeline of activity that is so
successful it requires even more headcount.

The fact the software was delivered with constant modification on which the
customers was spammed with more or less relevant remarks that made him loose
focus on his initial goal is irrelevant. Staging, delivering is now part of
the past with meaningful version numbers. It is just constant delivery.

It is for the customers' own goods.

The company also loses track of its costing pricing and investment.

Too much information kills the information.

That what agile is : a smoke screen for embezzling a budget in a politically
and acceptable way.

I wonder if there are still any accountant in modern IT companies or if
everyone decided to stop counting how much companies lose and win every
months.

It is as if IT is totally living on another economical planet where
investments are not required to be justified, and products don't need to be
fool proofed against contractual penalties applied to non conformities. If so,
it means we don't have any customers paying.

And of course, in the turmoil of micromanagement, new "new techs from the 70s"
are micro introduced during the scrum making part of the management pushers of
the products they have been nicely solicited to use by nice vendors inviting
them to superb conferences and formation that are not called bribing but
social networking.

This result in making developers gain as much values in "specialized tools" as
they are losing global knowledge of the chain of value and disorganizing most
of the profession.

You never noticed Scrum and scam sounded the same?

------
hga
_Very_ good Reddit discussion on this article:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/mit/comments/458xli/feature_a_strug...](https://www.reddit.com/r/mit/comments/458xli/feature_a_struggle_within_mits_it_department_over/)

I suppose one good piece of news is that it's now possible to fire people
working for MIT (this wasn't particularly true prior to the end of the Cold
War, about the time I left the community as a result of leaving the Boston
area).

~~~
coleca
One of the comments that stuck out to me from the Reddit thread was this:

>> The problem with this transformation is that we lost some of our best and
brightest and might lose more. The good ones who remain are the ones who are
in a life situation that makes a job change at this time difficult.

This says to me that going forward it is going to be a mess. It sounds like
this change was, while maybe good intentioned, will continue to be met with
tremendous resistance. The people with career options saw this as a good
chance to jump ship before things got bad. The people that felt that they were
"stuck" thought they have no other option.

The comments and the article make the whole org sound pretty toxic, but
unfortunately not dissimilar to many other enterprises IT shops. My advice to
the folks that think they don't have an option, is to really think again. Your
skills are probably a lot more valuable than you think. I've been in similar
situations in my career and thought the same thing, but actually the grass can
really be better in other places. You will probably be shocked and surprised
at how valuable what you know and what you have done is when you are in other
organizations.

Likely, the senior management isn't going to give up and admit defeat too
easily. How long will it be before they decide their best option is to
outsource the dept to HP, Wipro, Cognizant, Dell, IBM, etc.?

~~~
concernedforall
Coleca, sorry to say, outsourcing for IS&T's service desk has already been
decided and is underway...

------
Spooky23
Usually when you see the word "transformation" bandied about, particularly in
a functioning organization, that means that McKinsey, Deloitte and their ilk
have been around.

Adding some magical methodology change in the mix is just a way to negatively
impact the performance of the unit and justify headcount reductions. I'll bet
$0.05 there will be a big push to achieve ITIL v3 compliance to fix whatever
was broken. Once that happens, outsourcing is pretty easy.

~~~
Pxtl
How does ITIL enable outsourcing?

~~~
gaius
It's about packaging your IT operation so it's a "black box", certain
workflows go in, certain changes come out. All your users see is a ticket,
they don't know where it's being routed to, could be the next floor, could be
Bangalore.

The problem is you know your IT department is doing jobs A, B and C because
that's what you're paying them for. You don't see them doing jobs D-Z which
they just get on with because they need doing, or because they have informal
relationships with end users that don't show up on the formal org chart. Then
when you want your "trusted outsourcing partner" to do them too, they smile
and say well that's not in our contract for A, B, C, so will be charged at our
bespoke rate, and at that point you're fucked, because you've gotten rid of
your own people and are now utterly reliant on them.

See: every IT project ever attempted by the UK govt.

------
dunkelheit
"Reorganize everything to adopt Agile practices" is the managerial equivalent
of "rewrite everything using Object-Oriented technologies." Never works as
advertised.

Also I feel the article really tries hard to paint this John Charles in a
negative light but if he indeed spews so many PHB cliches that's scary.

------
op00to
That article is way too long with barely a mention of what's actually pissing
people off. Hard for me to get up in arms over this when you bury exactly what
it is that's happening.

I've been through reorgs like this in two different research university IT
groups. It's natural to evolve from the free-wheeling pre-IT-as-a-utility days
to the current structures of today. There are huge liabilities that were just
not important when the entire university didn't rely on IT for EVERYTHING. MIT
has some cool stuff going on in IT, but you can't claw back the changes of
time, especially with how IT has matured. If I was at MIT, I'd try to find
that new field where I could make a mark rather than try to retain the spoils
of the past.

~~~
hga
_free-wheeling pre-IT-as-a-utility days_

If IS&T didn't do that, it was because they'd stopped after, when I showed up
in 1979, running a 370 mainframe and a Multics, the latter explicitly designed
to run as a utility. Or while I was there, moving a lot of education to the
Athena service (something that part of MIT eventually took over). Or, I think
after I left in the early '90s, converting the university to run on SAP.

The article and comments are quite explicit on what happened, new top dog
comes in with a new vision, his most powerful direct reports sandbag the
initiative while using it as an excuse to execute a massive purge. A story
we've seen many times before in all sorts of contexts.

------
noname123
>Another former employee said that he decided to leave IS&T when he realized
“the organization would never truly be able to adopt agile practices such as
Scrum.”

I am curious if anyone in software/IT has successfully lobbied management for
a "rollback" of agile development methodology?

Anecdote: Last year, I was put on as a tech lead for a project; my boss asked
me to use Agile to track and manage the project. I tracked the project's tasks
as JIRA tickets, but I did not do morning standup's because I did not think I
was going to get buy-in from the rest of my team (my workplace has a 2 day
work-from-home policy, common hatred on team for meetings, so it's impossible
to have everyone meet in person every weekday consistently due to flex-time).

I did not do Sprint planning meeting and ticket estimation (Agile poker cards)
because people on my team loved to argue over minutiae's and I strongly
suspected half of the team didn't know the details of what the other half is
working on; So instead, we had a weekly "flowchart" meeting on a large
whiteboard where we brainstormed and added more details to our software
project (a big data pipeline lends itself to a flowchart); I found it to be a
better visualization of the project than a post-it covered poster.

Fortunately for me, I had a much senior technical person in my org also lobby
also against Agile. The crux of the argument was Agile wasn't well suited for
our team; the sprint model of Agile easily lends itself to arbitrary deadlines
and building for the "demo" of the story/epic of that sprint and build-up of
tech-debt (e.g., build a demo for one sprint, spent next 3 sprints fixing bugs
for the features of the first sprint).

In the end, management relented and we ended our Agile experiment. Project
tracking is done in Google Doc's with milestones instead. I am curious to hear
if there are pushbacks in other places against Agile since it is now the de-
facto "industry best-practice" (which means consulting should soon come up
with newer set of workshops/manifesto's for a "new best-practice).

~~~
julian_1
> I did not do morning standup's because I did not think I was going to get
> buy-in from the rest of my team

Standup is expressly designed to function as a substitute for meetings - and
to avoid the situation where employees waste time in meetings where only 10%
of the meeting content is relevant to their particular domain/work.

The reason individuals are required to stand, is so that there's a slight
physical discomfort in order that people report quickly (ours are about 1
minute per person).

If there's some topical convergence on a bit of work that emerges from standup
that requires further elaboration and communication between members - then the
idea is that those team-members will be able to self-organize a meeting
outside standup.

The key benefit is that noone else on the team needs to be distracted with
things that don't concern them.

It really puzzles me, that so few seem to comprehend the basic principles
behind Agile workflow.

~~~
noname123
Thanks julian_ for your explanation of the purpose behind morning standup and
how they improve people's work life.

I have to respectfully respond that I've not experienced such successful
implementation of morning standup's (and btw not discounting at all your own
very positive experience at all). I'll give you a few counter-examples just to
offer the other perspective,

Morning standup's used as a pulpit box by the tech lead or team members who
like to talk; e.g., "I was working on this ticket yesterday, and I learned
something new about Java and garbage collection, let me tell you guys..."
(+5-10 minutes/per person)

Morning standup's that become quick resolution and priority meetings for
project managers for either early or late tickets; e.g., "Mr.PM, I finished
this ticket; and now my queue is empty, I am not sure which ticket I should
work on next ... Let me see, Mr.Developer, let me take a look at this large
post-it board to figure out the priorities and we can go and forth and gauge
your interest on several tickets I'll propose for you next..." (+5-10
minutes/per ticket)

Morning standup's that combine two teams or force separate people who have
been working on completely unrelated projects for quite some time but report
to the same PM, listen to the unrelated details. You can imagine how eyes
glaze over for people not involved at all on those projects every morning
during stand up. (perceived waste of time).

However I even agree that morning standup's are great for tech shops with very
well-defined workflows and teams that has buy-in. But I also have to be
respectfully honest and say that I haven't met any person who enjoy standup's
except the project manager (but it might also just be a selection bias since I
don't favor standup's, people who only hate standup's confides to likely-
minded people aka "non-management material").

~~~
julian_1
I very much understand that there needs to be developer buy-in, that
management can and will attempt to derail the process, and that dominant
personalities who don't understand their purpose may use them as a pulpit.

I would still argue, that those particular issues will create worse outcomes
under other management approaches. The distinguishing feature of scrum is that
it is a bottom-up approach created by developers. itil and prince look
ridiculous in comparison - and in terms of their rigidity in trying to
formulate a set-of-rules that can be used to cover all software management
processes.

At the very least scrum is a baseline of principles, created by developers for
developers that can be used to argue against unproductive intrusion by
management.

------
zbjornson
Sad to hear this happening. MIT IST was unparalleled when I was there.
Everyone was knowledgeable, they would go out of their way to help regardless
of whether or not it was within their job description, and they delivered a
strong product that reliably powered the institute. Hopefully this isn't too
disruptive, ultimately, although it sounds like a lot of damage is already
done.

------
Yhippa
Has forced Agile ever turned out well at an organization? I've seen this done
many times before and I've never seen it work well. Organizations typically
end up shoehorning waterfall into whatever stuff the consultants sold them. I
think Agile can work with the right group of people but not getting buy-in
from the ground-up is very dangerous and can really demoralize a shop.

~~~
gherkin0
Also, the "forced" flavor of agile tends to be one that is disconnected from
the trade offs that make agile work.

I was in a shop that had a forced agile adoption. The development teams were
all enthusiastic about it, went to training, etc. However, the very same
managers that pushed it didn't understand it so we got:

* hard delivery dates with fixed functionality (though we could drop small features at the margins)

* lots of useless planning/status reporting ceremony (more than pre-agile)

* pressure to "just start coding" instead of gathering requirements (since "we're agile now")

* very litter tolerance for going back and fixing things that weren't done right (made more common by the above bullet)

It didn't really work, and most of those managers are gone now.

------
silentmars
This article describes some seriously clueless agile practices.

A massive reorg and restructuring dictated from the top to enable agile, a
bottom-up methodology.

They dictate that everyone must do Scrum - even support departments for which
it's laughably mismatched - rather than allowing any level of team-driven
process selection, and then 9 months later they open it up to allowing teams
to choose, including letting them choose waterfall. Their messaging was this
was always the plan, which is either a lie as apparently many people at MIT
believe, or evidence that of even deeper cluelessness.

My opinion is that this Charles character has no business running a technology
org.

~~~
merpnderp
"Okay Bob, what are you working on today?"

"Ah, I'm handling support tickets. Same as I did yesterday, the day before
that, the week before that, and the month before that."

"Any roadblocks?"

"Nope, I'm tier one support. When I can't quickly handle an issue, I push it
up the support ladder. I don't have any roadblocks today, and I won't have any
roadblocks tomorrow or the day after, or even the week after that. Unless of
course you mean the 4 missed support calls that just occurred because I was on
the SCRUM call."

------
tzs
In the article comments there is a link to an org chart from 2014-09 with
those who have departed or been demoted as of 2016-02 marked [1].

[1] [https://www.dropbox.com/s/i4zp05qlvrgclzd/Color-
CodedDepartu...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/i4zp05qlvrgclzd/Color-
CodedDepartures.pdf?dl=0)

------
losvedir
MIT '07 here. Interesting read, and speaking from my own experience I can kind
of see both sides of the issue.

(Also, to be clear, this is about the department that provides the IT
infrastructure and tech support to MIT, not the EECS department at MIT.)

I always thought the IT setup at MIT was a little weird. As an MIT student you
chose a campus-wide Athena account name. I liked that you could choose
anything (mine was the same as my user name here, not just gdurazo or
something like that). There were Athena clusters (computer labs) all over
campus that you could log into, but it seemed like it ran an old version of
some Linux distro, I forget which. You could also ssh in via
`athena.dialup.mit.edu`.

But you didn't really need to use it all that often. If a class required
Matlab, or something, you would log in to use it, but I don't really remember
using it for much more than that.

I can certainly see the argument that IS&T should do more programming - MIT
didn't have that great of a scheduling system or framework for classes to host
their assignments and lecture notes, etc. So more custom development could
definitely help the student and professor experience.

On the other hand, the underlying infrastructure worked great. The internet
was fast everywhere, WiFi was fast and open and free, and you could request
static IPs and host stuff. It's definitely what you'd expect from MIT. In
addition, the tech support was wonderful. A few years after I graduated I
remembered a blog I had kept from my athena account, and emailed in to ask if
they happened to still have it. They kind of did; they sent me a SQL dump of
its contents, which was enough for me.

I hope the outcome of this is MIT provides more web services for students for
class registration, scheduling, submitting assignments, etc. But I hope it
doesn't gut the fast and free infrastructure that was there and the great and
friendly tech support.

~~~
achernya
> In addition, the tech support was wonderful. A few years after I graduated I
> remembered a blog I had kept from my athena account, and emailed in to ask
> if they happened to still have it. They kind of did; they sent me a SQL dump
> of its contents, which was enough for me.

While it's true that helpdesk at IS&T was all sorts of wonderful prior to the
transformation, that particular example wasn't handled by them, but rather by
the student volunteers running Scripts (scripts.mit.edu), part of SIPB
(sipb.mit.edu). SIPB does get its funding from IS&T, and worked pretty closely
with many people there on initiatives ranging from the Scripts platform to the
whole Athena operating system.

I don't know if the "fast and free infrastructure" and "friendly tech support"
will continue, as it requires the new IS&T to continue supporting the student
volunteers.

~~~
losvedir
Ah, I see! Thanks for the correction.

------
pmoriarty
Someone needs to watch "The Death of Agile"[1] by one of the authors of the
Agile Manifesto.

[1] -
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpGGRAhes2k](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpGGRAhes2k)

~~~
ScottBurson
I am watching, and this guy is hilarious!

------
ChristianMarks
Unfortunate. University IT departments are susceptible to neoliberal
evangelical insanity. When it happened to my department, I decided that I was
unworthy to clean the digital bedpans of a destructively competitive, rank and
pedigree conscious faculty and took off, never to support faculty again.
Here's a rebuke to the smug, platitudinous know-nothings who insist that the
university is a business.
[http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2016/02/proofs-that-
un...](http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2016/02/proofs-that-universities-
are-not-businesses-look-who-the-richest-ones-are.html)

------
BellsOnSunday
TIL MIT graduates quite frequently (from the sound of it) go on to work in
tech support. Does it pay well enough to make sense as the outcome of what
must be the most expensive higher education in the world?

~~~
hga
It's not so expensive for families with lower incomes due to an initiative
started in 2008; the Institute has backed off on that a bit, here's the
current generic figures:
[http://affordable.mit.edu/](http://affordable.mit.edu/)

------
chris_wot
Uh, one if the employees said:

"In the words of my people … offer me money … power too, promise me that.
Offer me anything I want … I want my managers back, you son of a bitch."

If that's what she said, I can't say I'm terribly sympathetic!

~~~
albert_holm
It is an adapted quote from The Princess Bride.

~~~
Tempest1981
Well quoted then:
[http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0003786/quotes](http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0003786/quotes)
(search for "power")

