great article!

Another theory is that it is possible that vendors like Cisco prefer to have one main man to keep the competition at bay and therefore 'enrich' such a sole person one way or another. The solution can be to have redundancy, e.g. 2 nic cards per box and some failover technology. PC’s can also have a UPS built in! This is not rocket science, but when everything is made in Taiwan, why should we be surprised that we are becoming a 3rd world country! Imagine trying to explain to a 'manager' why one needs a redundant network!

Regarding management, it is common now in the USA to take an amazingly complex technical enterprise (e.g. IBM) and put a 'non-technical weenie' in charge. The worst case I know being the Detroit Tigers hired the Michigan football coach as 'general manager'. Hey, both sports use a ball!

I had suspected this was the case and was mortified upon hearing the initial reports. 5 million bail? I mean, yeah the guy's a flight risk, but mass murders don't get that sort of treatment. Childs definitely has a defamation suit on his hands against the city now, as everybody overreacted (including Childs himself, but that is not an excuse) in ceremonial ignorance. I'm telling you...Biz education is not enough, you need a technical education to oversee techies, and I predict more of this sort of thing is going to happen, especially where the office politics is rough (like a city government). The City of SF shot themselves in the foot with this story, and they are simply blaming the messenger. Childs case will be thrown out of court and SF will lose a good network engineer, and those guys don't grow on trees.

Kudos to the guy risking his Rass.. As I stated before....most upper management [especially city] have no technical experience. They should be the ones held liable for this fiasco...no reason for the situation to go have gone this far.

(Red Vs Blue Reference: Team Killing F... T...)

I'm so sick of people putting technogods up on a pedestal. It's not all just about your ability to manipulate bits, but it's also about your ability to work effectively in an organization. Frankly, it doesn't just sound like he was "protecting" his network, it sounds (by the description of his hairy configurations) that he had built a castle on the sand and was afraid someone else would bring it down (or even witness it for what it was...).

How can he call himself a professional while promoting the fact that he was a single point of failure? This alone identifies him as a grade-A nimrod. I *hope* the new security guy demanded the keys to the kingdom from him.

Also note how he hated to waste time on the documentation and change control and the like. What kind of amateur is this? He doesn't have the brains to be an architect, he should have stuck with being an ops monkey. It takes professional maturity to do the right thing, to document your processes, ensure operational availability, configuration backups and to support change windows. In the meantime, it sounds like he was acting like a child.

I'm sorry. A Childs.

Terry is a talented engineer who worked hard for the people of SF. Do not throw him away so easily.

Support Terry Childs.

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futureprogress.net

When reviewing the time line of the case against Childs it's clear that neither the SFGate, Chron, or the press conference led by Harris (and avoided by Newsom) have facts, each provided false or unsubstantiated information then nothing, no facts or follow-up.

Now we see that PCMag wrote a detailed article with internal discussions with co-workers and applied a filter over the story applying typical scenarios on the case, demonstrating that it looks like Childs did his job and is continuing to do his job properly while in jail. Furthermore the PCMag story points to clear failures of the Management and Harris.

So gentle readers what can we know for sure? We know that any facts to substantiate prosecution claims would have been presented if they had existed.

Finally the lack of reported facts, the lack of any substantial evidence of wrongdoing does support Childs claim of innocence.

As the center of innovation and technology this story is unsurprisingly inane and lacking of any cohesive thread or reasonable quality.

Truthfully for us in the tech field and as average citizens, this case sucks and illustrates a thoroughly corrupt environment for workers, management are clearly ineffectual and the media and City Administration complicit in a rush to persecute an innocent and hard working contributor under false charges and inflamatory accusations using emotionally charged words and no facts.

SFGate has fallen hard down the path of sensationalism. As you read this story, remind yourself the next victim falsely accused will be you.

Large organizations who fail to follow best practices top down, fail their employees. What Phil reiterated in his later comment is that no one should be burdened with the entire 24/7 responsibility over the long haul and yet this problem persists due to failures in management.

Ultimately what this essay connotes is that too often failures in management are pushed upon individual grand contributors. C'mon it does not take a tech genius to see the facts and know that best management practices were not applied by senior management and that Harris, too, lacks understanding of planning and implementation and deployment from development to production environments in computer networks.

This scenario looks ore like glorified managers were in over their heads and failed to deliver while one employee covered their collective butts.

Truly, when one understands the foundations of silicon valley, our skills sets and innovation combined, we see that this case is about managers who just didn't understand and execute their job.