Working for the man

So my internship started on the 19th of June and so far so good. I am making some money and learning some new things about working in the IT department for the state. I will say that it is nothing like what I expected at all, they use software that is 10 years old on machines that are 4 years old. So it’s not like things are that slow but it’s more or less that the transition in software seems to be more or less nonexistent. For instance they are still using Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer 6, Office 97 to office 2000, and just finished deploying Windows XP Service Pack 2. Now from the amount of explanation that I got I see why it takes so long to get anything done. The licensing issues that are associated with things are what slow things down and when you put in a request it could take up to 9 months to a year to get a reply back. When you have to wait that long either you will forget what the problem was in the first place or you will find another way to get the job done entirely.

When it comes to service packs and security patches I know that they must be deployed sometime long before 4 full years have passed. For instance, Service Pack 2 came out over the summer of 2004 giving Albany a very long time to test and wait for things to work themselves out before deploying to a network of thousands if not 10′s of thousands of computers. Now I can understand being a little weary and not wanting to create an IT nightmare but at the same time 2004 and 2005 where the worst years in history of virus and malware production. Now if 2004 and 2005 where the worst years for infections wouldn’t you think that the upgrades would have been pushed down from above before there was any chance that something could get lost or stolen? Well the more that I pondered this it started to dawn on me how ridiculous the state really is.

When you need to fill out a form to order more forms you know that the there might be something wrong with the current system you are using. There are many more things that are very similar to that, that I have found but will stop at that.

It is amazing what the IT department really does and I am honestly shocked the way that they are done. There is no new technology, there is no experimentation, there is no forward thinking, it is all just do then adjust permissions then do again.

Now not to say that I am really complaining here but there are some shortcomings of the IT departments, there are some things that need to be worked on at a state level that will help to ensure that personal data doesn’t get released to outside sources. There are some existing plans to prevent the loss of data but I feel that there are better ways to implement these new ideas and these new protocols.

So all in all I am working at least and I am getting things done. I have been working on a database program for the last week and a day getting their inventory database all updated from DOS 2.6 to at least Office 1997, there have been some problems here and there as I don’t know about Office 97 too well but at least most of the features from Office 03 are there so I am making some progress now, actually I am getting pretty close to being done, they did provide me with a database to use as a template of sorts that I pretty much completely rewrote from scratch to get things working properly. The problem with using other peoples designs is that there are never enough comments anyplace for you to go on so you must actually use the thing for a little bit and debug to see where and when things are written within the database. Needless to say I am looking very forward to this project being done since I have had some issues starting up with it. I will be happy to get it done and to say that I have accomplished something this summer that people will actually be using in the production system.

Thankfully this is a paid internship and will last me through the summer. So to anyone out there, be nice to your IT working interns, you might just be using something that we fixed from some other sort of mess someone else handed to us, and remember that we can forget to debug things before we ship them….. so don’t make me program in more bugs if you know what is good for you.