The Event Horizon For IT Professionals
There now follows a deeply philosophical note about the seeming pointlessness of order in IT; brought to you on behalf of the frustrated people out there 'who do IT'[1].
Driving into work this morning, I passed two Transit-loads of communications engineers, working on a cluster of boxes by the side of the road; each worker wrestling with an armful of spaghetti.
This got me thinking, on my drive into the web design office in Harpenden, that no-matter how much order we put into our computer code, our server racks and our data cabling, at some point the stuff we do has to surface; and the moment our stuff surfaces is when the spaghettification happens and order is lost.
[1] We, the people who do IT for the people who happily profess that I don't do IT
, like control and require order to be able to do the things we do.
I guess there comes point when we have to accept and be aware of where our work surfaces; to acknowledge where order and logic stops because it's pointless getting worked-up over things we can't shape, direct or control.
I shared this emergent thought with a learned friend who replied: It irks me seeing the condition the boxes are in. You just know that it's a case of someone who can't be arsed with their job!
Perhaps the learning point here is to suggest that it shouldn't irk us - it's way beyond our control. The origins of spaghettification lie in banks of telephone operators, plugging cables into boards and not programmers plugging cables into mainframes.
There is an Event Horizon in IT, one beyond which everything gets spaghettified.
There is a certain amount of order in our IT Universe but so much that is beyond our control. Beyond the Event Horizon of IT, lies a black hole of chaos and a whole new set of rules.
[BBC Radio 4 Voice]
"That was Thought For The Day, read to you by the Reverend Steven Pulpit."
We asked an AI about The Event Horizon
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