Don't cross the team tasked with policing the surfing habits of California's teens
- Reference: 1619422208
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/04/26/who_me/
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We stick with the current century in today's retelling and skip to the sunny US state of California and a school district with hundreds of thousands of students and teachers.
"A massive behemoth of a school district," our reader, Regomised as "Gavin", told us. And a beast to manage.
[2]
"The district had numerous issues ranging from students misbehaving online to poor network performance," he explained. "Since all traffic was backhauled from the schools to a central office and then sent on its merry way, they had a complex environment (made even more complex by those misbehaving students).
"Each school had a network connection to the central office starting with a lowly T-1 link and able to have bandwidth increased as needed."
This was the mid-2000s, and such internet access was still a bit of a novelty. "Especially to many teachers," he added. "Students, not as much."
Ensuring that all that lovely bandwidth, unfettered access to which was enjoyed by the students, was being put to educational use rather than something more nefarious was a bit of a challenge. Certainly, the teachers (who doubtless were barely able to operate a VCR) didn't have time for it.
[3]
So the district had a team whose sole job was assessing requests for more bandwidth and checking that the bulk of the traffic was not as a result of other "recreational" uses.
Enter Gavin and his employer. Their nifty product was able to spot the source and type of traffic. Reports could be spat out showing which schools were using what bandwidth, what applications were using it and so on.
You want a reboot? I'll give you a reboot! Happy now? [4]READ MORE
It would, Gavin said in his best sales mode, "save all sorts of time and money since all those employees who spent their days investigating this stuff could easily be moved to more critical functions, right? Save time and money, make things easier, more reliable, and consistent. It was win-win."
Except it wasn't. Gavin had reckoned without the power of the unions (similar to the [5]experience of another reader who attempted to streamline a casino payroll system).
It transpired that those tasked with looking at logs were quite happy in their current roles, thank you, and did not care for some newfangled reporting software making their positions anything other than secure when it came to the dispensing of bandwidth.
[6]
The deal was never closed and humans continued to take the lead in studying the traffic generated by the students and deciding if a bandwidth upgrade was in order.
What could possibly have gone wrong with that?
Ever attempted to roll out a whizzy bit of time-saving tech only to run headlong into users more keen on the way things were? Or were you one of those users on the receiving end of a managerial attempt at efficiency? Tell all with an email to [7]Who, Me? ®
Get our [8]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/Tag/who-me
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YIaPPeMxTwykl0vooVzz-wAAAJM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YIaPPeMxTwykl0vooVzz-wAAAJM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/19/who_me/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/29/who_me/
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YIaPPeMxTwykl0vooVzz-wAAAJM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
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Back in the day
We had exchange with many, many Distribution lists, I was tasked with offloading management of these lists to the appropriate admin assistants, with training them on how to manage these lists. Due to push back from those assistants (over worked but plenty of time for coffee breaks) I managed those lists until we waved good bye to Exchange.
Free school meals
I heard from someone who was involved in the early days of biometrics. Some school children got free school meals, others had to pay. A teacher used to monitor the pupils and check who was/was not meant to pay for the meals. Because this showed up the kids who had free school meals, someone thought this might not be a good idea. The school got involved with a project to scan the eyeball of each child, and automatically record who had what.
It used to take the teacher 2 seconds to "tick the list" as the pupils came past. With the new technology it took about 10 seconds. They introduced a second eye scanner which helped, but was still slower.
At the end of the trial, the school decided to go back to the paper way of doing it. The company with the equipment said they learned a lot from it, getting the developers out into the field. For example these developers learned that children are of different heights, and so their equipment needs to handle this. Obvious once you see it.
Re: Free school meals
“ The company with the equipment said they learned a lot from it, getting the developers out into the field.”
So they sold immature tech to the school and got their development funded by tax money. Nice.
What comes to a teacher ticking boxes for kids entitled to free meals, why not to tick everybody? Two rows, one for free, one for paying. Nobody would have known who’s paying and who’s not, since everybody is being ticked. Instead, they decided install to an eyeball scanner, oh man.
P.s. Fucking agile Apple. From now on I attach this thank you message to my every post until they fix battery drainage problem they introduced in iOS 14.4.2.
Re: Free school meals
" why not to tick everybody? "
At my kids school, meals are paid for via thumbprint with a pre-paid account for those who can afford it, and free school meals for those who can't. None of the kids or even the serving staff need to know who has free school meals.
Where's The Story?
Read this waiting for the story/punch line.... Slow news day this week?
Bullshit Jobs by the late David Graeber.
Users never want to change.
One of my biggest headaches - it doesn't matter how much more efficient/easier/faster a new process is they will still wan tto stick with the old one they know.
Re: Users never want to change.
The best system or process is always the last one, not the current one. Users will moan like heck about a system but the moment you change it they'll be, "Can we have the old one back?"
High-level manglement can be just as much a nuisance as unions
I was once on a team contacted to create a document management application that would allow lawyers to, well, manage their documents more efficiently.
One would think that lawyers would appreciate that kind of functionality.
Here I was, explaining that the application could easily track the contributors and the changes, and all the filing would a quick press of a button. What I did not get was all the questions about whose name was going to be on the document and could the secretaries take care of it.
Once we had lost the deal, I twigged to the root cause : these guys didn't want to touch a computer, they wanted their secretaries to do the work. What I was proposing was that they had to do some work, instead of enjoying expensive lunches at fancy restaurants.
Obviously, that was not acceptable.
PCB Assembly
I worked in a factory that made PCBs which had a fair amount of hand assembled components on them as part of customizing them for specific customers. The operators worked from A1 assy drawings that were not only too big for their work areas but were a pain from a config point of view and we had too many cases of either the wrong stuff being built or changes not promulgating either up or down. Our efficiencies were much worse than a sister plant (in the same country, but about 400 miles away) and this was blamed on these customizations, not the poor work practices. As part of a cost reduction project we developed a system to put a PC on each workstation so they could work with the latest drawings and routings. We assembled a test set-up and the operators used it for a while and loved it, as did the production engineers, and the efficiencies improved. Then the unions, who had been involved from the start, insisted on a new grade structure and pay rises cos the operators were now IT staff as PCs were now a fundamental part of their job.
You know the rest: the PCs were never installed, the work was transferred to the other plant about a year later and about 30 people lost their jobs.
Unions...
1980s, working in BT, just pre-privatization. We were in a new office in a newly-created software development centre, nice computer room, and lots of assorted terminals.
All of which had to be placed in a separate room designated as the "terminal room". Couldn't have them on the desks of the engineers, because union rules said that only typists were allowed keyboards on their desks. Engineers weren't allowed to do their own typing, that was beneath them and might put typists out of work. No amount of arguing would convince the union of the difference between "typists" and "software engineers". Rules are rules.
In the end some of us pulled our own RS232 cables through the ducts (ohh, technician work, that ruffled a few feathers) and put VT100s on our own desks. The union grumbled, but when the people they were allegedly 'protecting' told them where to go they eventually gave up and pretended it wasn't happening.