The indefinable allure of the high school, defined. Wed, Jul 16. 2008
Anyone who has ever had the pleasure of working with me knows I like to talk about the time I worked at my high school. Whenever I talk about working in IT, it is the job the sets the bar for all other locations. Generally I talk about why it was so great such as being able to RIS the whole domain because all the roaming profiles and software deploys worked so well. I could go on for hours about how great it was setup and sometimes I do.
While listening to "The StackOverflow Podcast" episode 10 Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky made an excellent point about developers who love coding really need to work at a software development company.
"I mean, that's one of the key pieces of advice I think a lot of people eventually arrive at as a software developer is if you really love this stuff you have to work somewhere where software is the product, it's the thing you're trying to deliver to the customer, because if you don't then you're invariably going to get frustrated with the model." - Jeff Atwood
The main point is that in internal development once something "works" there is not business reason to make it better. This is true with IT as well.
This is what made the high school different. Matt and I were always working towards the very best solution we could put together. I spent a large amount of time building MSI files for all the little applications that were needed. The extra effort to make all the computers as RISable as possible it the main reason I hold the high school is such high regards. The easy of repeatable automated builds made administration easier because if a computer was having issues it was just reRISed back to standards instead of spending hours trying to clean and recover. This is just one example of how our love of system administration made the environment that much better.
This makes me realize what a difference it makes working with people with a get it right mindset verse a just get it done attitude.
