My friend Monil recently told me a very humorous story about an application administrator that was attempting to troubleshoot his application. To paraphrase… the application administrator had approached him explaining that the DNS server was down. When Monil asked him to explain, the Administrator showed him that a distinguished name that was defined in the application’s LDAP configuration was not resolving correctly. Apparently, DNS meant Distinguished Name Server to the Application Administrator.
Naturally, I thought that this was amusing. But, the more I milled the story through my mind, the more it actually disturbed me. For you see… other such stories or personal experiences kept popping into my head about IT’ers not understanding the underlying technologies that their solutions are built on top of. Yes, that’s right, it seemed like the more I pondered… the more I concluded that most IT’ers (including application developers) just don’t understand things such as:
- DNS
- LDAP
- TCP/IP
- Kerberos
- DHCP
- FTP
- SSH
- …
The list really does go on.
At this point, I’m left asking the question, why? My belief is that IT’ers are either increasing becoming one technology wonders or are resigned to just managing their environments through a pre-built UI. I can’t remember the exact quote, but this seems eerily familiar to something a friend said to me about newer and newer versions of Visual Studio and how it attempts to write the code for you (hence why I referenced application developers before). In a sense, once you have become removed from the critical thinking aspect of “Information Technology”. It is only natural for one to lose touch with the underlying fundamentals which allow the capacity to understand a solution from end-to-end.
Or at least these are my thoughts and concerns… Maybe I’m being too critical. Or, maybe this has always been problem which is just transpiring in a more noticeable method. What does everyone else think?
