One thing I didn’t realize being the CTO of a company that provides a software application to other companies is how often you have to fix — unpaid and way out of scope — the IT infrastructure of third-party companies so that your software application works correctly.

I’m not talking about minor brokenness here. I mean we have to routinely go in and fix out-of-scope areas for entire large companies with whole IT departments bigger than our entire company when they say “Your application doesn’t work and it’s definitely your application. Fix it.” And then we go remote in and look around and see that their DNS is entirely non-functional, their Citrix does not work, their network is set up in a way that could never function correctly, and their “failover” does only the first part but no “over.”

Note again that we are not an infrastructure company. We provide a single software application (that can be customized to do many things). Technically, our contract is for the provision of that application only and absolutely nothing else. But functionally, we are on the hook for correcting poor infrastructure because inevitably our application gets blamed for other IT departments’ completely broken environments. So far in the new job, I have done a few hundred hours of unpaid infrastructure consulting so that other companies don’t blame us when our application doesn’t work because their infrastructure is so terrible.

Like I said, I wasn’t expecting this. I knew a lot of IT departments were horrendous but to this level I had no idea.

I was semi-joking with the CEO yesterday that we should start an infrastructure consulting business as well, since we already spend so much time doing it for free. However, these companies rarely believe their infrastructure is the problem, and instead insist it’s something to do with our application. But so far, it never has been because it’s just a small application that requires very little to work correctly.

I can really see why users tend to hate IT because all the users that we end up helping are very thankful that for once someone fixed something after we remote in and correct or work around all these out-of-scope infrastructure issues.

According to liberals, we should get rid of the space program, and the Olympics*, and anything that has anything at all to do with enjoyment or that frivolous “fun” stuff and live in high-rise concrete boxes and undergo constant penance for our grave sins.

This is primarily why I am not a liberal, even though my outlook overall aligns most closely with typically-liberal views.

Liberals are increasingly authoritarian, ever-more on board with censorship, just dandy with neoliberalism and predatory capitalism, and are fans of innately insane ideas like completely open borders.

I want no part of any of that. But mostly, many liberals are just completely against fun or adventure or actually attempting to make anything better, and I really want no part of that in particular.

*The Olympics should be held in the same place every year. No stadium building and all that. That is ridiculous.

The first eggnog of the year has been detected, and it’s at Earth Fare. This is perhaps the earliest ever. It’s Homestead Creamery, too, which is the closest to homemade you can get (it also goes bad fast, so drink up).

Eggnog! Eggnog!

My boss, the CEO, said something today that I really liked. We were discussing someone at another company closely associated to ours and who had completely fouled up a major calculation that resulted in all sorts of erroneous billing.

Instead of relying on our expertise, this young, brash person who is also a know-it-all just decided to attempt to do the (very complicated) billing calculation himself rather than rely on someone in the company who is one of the top world experts in this type of business and had already offered to help.

Anyway, what my boss said was, “This isn’t school. There’s no A for effort. You don’t get it 90% right. You either get it right or you fail. Just because he wrote a valid SQL query doesn’t mean he knew anything else. And he doesn’t, but he’s learning that the hard way.”

He’s right. In the real world, there is no A for effort. You either get it or you fail. That’s a huge difference from school, and I bet it takes a lot of people a while — if they ever do — to make that transition.