Ad agency boss owned two Ferraris but wouldn't buy a real server
theregister.com
theregister.com
Maybe he had two Ferraris because he was frugal with his business?
Why does everybody think it is absolute must to maximise the profits? Maybe he was ok with his profits and just didn't care to optimise his business as long as he has comfortable life? Is there something wrong with it.
Over the years I have worked as an advisor with many owners and CEOs of various sized companies (up to couple thousand employees). I had many situations when those CEOs would confide in me how disappointed they were in some of the decisions their employees made when it comes to finances. Especially high level leaders, who should know better. As a rather typical example, situation when an ex-Microsoft director hired as new IT director would sign a contract with Snowflake to commit 300k USD over 3 years for a 10% discount. The issue is I calculated if we did not commit, we would actually pay about 500 USD/year. Yes, not 500 thousand, just 500 USD. After that we have instituted a near total ban on commitments as a recognition of the fact that we just can't predict the future.
Or people that would start some expensive stuff on AWS and then would just "forget" to turn them off. Or a guy who thought it is ok to pay almost $100k for a marketing stunt where they would livestream with a single webcam a bunch of grazing cows for a week.
Yeah, it is kind of easy to waste money when it is not your money.
Whilst there's nothing wrong with frugality, there's definitely something wrong with abusing those who try and show you the cause of the problem you're unhappy with.
I'm unsure if maybe you misunderstood the article, or if I'm being too narrow lensed here?
There are differences between efficient, frugal, and cheap.
Article:
> The Ferrari-owning boss got wind of this mess and would berate Aaron and his crew whenever the server became unavailable, citing the enormous cost of outages.
"Enormous cost".
It is a difficult situation for owners and sometimes they do mistakes.
I imagine society would be nearing utopia if your average upper management cared about building good businesses instead of getting unreasonably wealthy.
If the boss comes down on the actual workers for activities that could have been solved by steering the Ferrari money into making the work easier, then there absolutely is something wrong.
> A couple of months later, the ad agency agreed to buy a new file server. A real one. Aaron built the box with a glad heart.
> But the agency never paid for it.
So he had his company agree to pay for a replacement server but after they procured it he just refused to pay for it and forced the MSP to eat the cost instead.
> Why does everybody think it is absolute must to maximise the profits? Maybe he was ok with his profits and just didn't care to optimise his business as long as he has comfortable life? Is there something wrong with it.
This clearly isn't the case as the article says quote:
> The Ferrari-owning boss got wind of this mess and would berate Aaron and his crew whenever the server became unavailable, citing the enormous cost of outages.
So he was penny pinching and refused to do things that would allow the company to save money while harassing the MSP each time his self inflicted problem occurred.
This is a trend with a lot of these types where they will not spend a dime to fix a problem in a perceived cost center but then each the problem predictably occurs, they subject said "cost center" with abuse for not fixing the problem despite actively being the reason the problem is unresolved.
No
> Maybe he had two Ferraris because he was frugal with his business?
Maybe he have little comprehension of his own business so he is unable to evaluate the tool of the trade his business need and as a result he made bad choices...
It's not a matter of profit but a matter of understanding that administrative CAN'T BE just "managers" meaning with an economy CV, they must know what the company they manage do, not at the level of understatement of any single technicians but enough to know and make wise decisions helped by their technicians of any fields.
Years ago the founder and CEO of a historic mass distribution company was used to visit potential new warehouses with the senior head warehouseman alongside others just as an example of how things works in the recent past. A step at a time when the detachment between the management and the material activity happened China have started to gain ground and we in Europe have started to loose. I imaging the same happen in USA and other countries.
That's almost as wild as suggesting someone hosts their software on a Mac Mini because they're a penny-pincher. Nobody owns two Ferraris as a product of life-long frugality, let alone one.
I’m a bit surprised about the need to have macOS versions in sync though. That sounds unusual.
I’m curious about their share server setup; my solution would probably be a Debian server exposing AppleTalk.
I’ve used that to transfers files between a G3 iMac and an M2 MacBook :)
However, this sounds like maybe one of those all in one IT services shops of overworked, underpaid technicians where everything is duct tape and requests go from “my icons have moved how do I send emails now” to this sharing files on Macs thing.
Getting out is the only good move.
NFS is another option, but I mostly use that for r/o media shares.
3 hours downtime seems fine for an ad agency, not sure what “drivers” they were reinstalling on MacOS feels like a windows technician approach and makes me wonder if there was some other weirdness they were doing to fit a square peg into a round hole.
It's a reader-contributed column. I give that as much credibility as the fiction on AITA and similar subreddits.
What's missing from this article is what the service provider wanted to charge the ad agency for a new server. An M2 Mac Mini is like $600 USD. I just Google>Shopping searched "2u file server" and the prices for new equipment seemed to start at around $4,000. Is that close to what an IT company like the one from the article would charge or would there be some significant markup?
Heck, if I was Aaron, I’d just go to the storage room and dig out parts or a whole pc out of it. There’s always some electronic residue. Worst case buying it at my expense.
Also, I remember integrating a realty company that needed client accounting (among other things). My app was pretty light and cheap and could run on a simple pc. Then their serious IT guys came to the meeting and added virtualization, firewall services, SQL server, numerous licenses, a beefy rack server, etc. Even their assistant director had her eyes widened when they announced the estimates. Later I told her my thoughts on it in private, so she could make her own decision. So keep in mind that TFA is only one side of the story.
Please don't ever spend your own money on stuff for a business you have no ownership of
This is absolutely not a behavior we should encourage or normalize
One place I worked an employee bought a domain for a particular marketing promotion. Promotion was successful, and the site grew into a life of its own, and was even promoted from the main product. The domain showed up on Google search results, etc.
The company had lots of users but wasn't too successful financially, and a few employees including that one were laid off. Six months later the domain suddenly pointed to the new product that person created after leaving the company.
We removed the links from our product to that site, but other than that there wasn't a great deal we could do.
Collectible cars are an asset class that has been doing extremely well in the face of endless money printing.
Perhaps they didnt believe that internal investment could actually bring profits.
Perhaps it could bring profits, but the opportunity cost wasn't worth it.
Businesses can do all sorts of investments, beyond upgrading their file serving setup to meet the ideals of IT workers.
The head of IT was volunteering there, and finally got so fed up that he quit. Everyone in IT left at the same time and now the new head of IT can not build a PC, because a math teacher is the only person who will take the job.
Seriously.
* this client is giving me xxxx $
* it costs me yyyy $ for salary team... so there's so gains... so let's no lose the client (even if it means dumb work for the team)
Moreover: it's easier to justify the contract's cost (we have to monitor closely your infra to get your IT business running... here are the numbers of tickets that we processed) than having to explain: "OK, we did nothing this month BUT you pay us because MAYBE SOMEDAY something bad may happens"... because the client might either think that he doesn't need the support contract or that he doesn't need to pay that much...
All in all: it's not a bad thing for the team to leave that kind of bullshit job
If the Mac mini is slow and not able to keep up then fair enough, that’s a good reason to invest in new hardware. But monitoring your emails for software updates makes zero sense, and is clearly just an excuse for something else that IT is doing wrong.
If you’re out of your depth admining a machine and then the server has a failure in software, that’s not proof that you were right all along that new hardware was necessary.
New hardware may solve the problem incidentally by gifting you a software environment that you’re more familiar with. Given that the author was doing some very strange things with this Mac mini we can’t rule out a misconfiguration.
Moreover, almost any hardware can fail so unless you buy two new servers you’re not going to get many more 9s out of only one “real” server compared to just buying redundant drives for the mini.
It depends on how close they were to the maximum capacity of the mini. Their biggest grievance seemed to be configuration related, they don’t say that the mini is on its knees trying to keep up.
I'm saying it doesn't matter whether or not the workers are right. If the workers tell the boss "we don't know how to keep this server running", and then the server goes down, and the boss treats them badly, then the boss is morally wrong.
If the boss is professional and says "well, we need someone who knows how to keep the server running, so we're going to hire someone else" then that's better. However, that's not what the boss did here, probably because (if your argument is true), the boss doesn't treat people very well and competent people wont work for him.
Reason being, you have unlimited potential to growth your revenue.
The max you can save, is 100% (fire everyone).
I assume the owner is all-in Apple fanboi. I worked with a similar 50-60 y.o. business owner, he was (and still is) under the impression that Apple is not just the best, but the competitors are shit. Funnily enough, everyone else at the company has Windows laptops (not very cheap ones, though).
They have an old (also about 50, maybe 45 to 55) IT admin guy, who doesn’t get the Mac thing, like at all. And me, I was their website contractor, who also (was) all-in Apple at the time. The boss kept asking me time and again whether the Apple is the best, to which I always replied positively. Over time, I started mentioning that for most cases Apple is very good, but not for each one. So he won’t be under the impression that non-Apple means bad. I hope that helped their tech guy. Also, when I visit them now (very infrequently), I am on Android and Linux, to which boss doesn’t understand. I keep telling him that in some cases Apple is very limiting and that for my web work it’s easier to do my work that way. Which is truth, for me at least.
Also, I remembered something. The boss has a full-blown iPad Pro 12.9 with keyboard case. He never takes it with him, so it’s his office computer. He uses it for email and browser. His illusions that iPad is the future keep him from buying at least an iMac, which would be better from any angle. Even the battery thing, as they have powerful generators on site, in case of power outages. Since he travels with his luxury car, I think he doesn’t really need an iPad on the go anyway (could use his latest iPhone). So this iPad-but-not-an-iMac thing is the perfect illustration for me. Not to say he could use a second-hand £10 used PC with Linux installed. Which I use on one of my work locations (so I won’t need to bring my MacBook) with a couple of cheap second hand displays. My setup is like under 50 bucks, and is much better than his from every angle. Maybe just the screen quality is worse due to me taking the cheap displays, but I don’t need too much of a good screen there anyway. But the screen real estate is like 3 to 4 times more.
more for me, nothing for thee.
"But the agency never paid for it [the server]."
How can SharePoint be choked? And if it is really choked, how can they dream of doing it better than Microsoft?
Share point is just MSSQL in the backend and while setting up share point is mostly a simple affair with clicking through the wizards, managing it can get complex for the inexperienced since there’s a lot going on for on premises. the allure of a quick and easy self hosted share point site vanishes pretty fast once the reality of protecting it and keeping it running hits.
Share point is just MSSQL in the backend
Well, a lot of software is just xyzSQL/DB in the backend.
If they want an all-Apple environment, what the hell are they doing messing with SharePoint and SMB? I'm so sick and tired of this industry taking simple problems and applying the most convoluted solution they can come up with.
Lets not turn this forum into Reddit quips.
As a developer, I often see other developers/Adkins propose "huge improvements" only for it to cost much more than expected and deliver less. Maybe Ferrari guy was right to ignore this suggestion.
Ha I see that too at my group. I try to fight it. But buying a NAS for like few hundred <insert favorite major currency> just seems like common sense. Just buy it, connect it to a VPN, setup regular backps, then forget about it for a decade.