InfoWorld blogger Paul Venezia has been working overtime covering the saga of Terry Childs, the network administrator who locked everyone out of the City of San Francisco's new FiberWAN network and is being held on $5 million bail.
Opinions about Childs and what he did (though details remain fuzzy) run the gamut. On the one hand, a lawyer acquaintance told me flatly, "Childs is a bad guy. It doesn't matter that he gave up the passwords. There are federal laws against doing what he did. He deserves to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law."
A far more generous view prevails in the comments from InfoWorld readers who have responded to Paul's series of posts. Many point to evidence of the San Francisco City government's ignorance of networking basics, not to mention its struggle to pull together a coherent indictment. For example, one reader warned: "I hope SF has actual evidence that he did something wrong, rather than this fearmongering, 'ooooh, he -could- have done something,' because otherwise they're going to be getting a very, very expensive lesson in system administration when Childs files his civil case."
Rightly or wrongly (we still don't know whether Childs harbored darker motives) Childs seems to have emerged as a kind of IT anti-hero. The fact that he alone had the keys to the network was a colossal blunder on the part of the City. On the other hand, he also appears to have been the only person who understood the new network's complex configuration. As in a classic science-fiction tale, he wasn't going to let "fools" destroy his creation.
As IT grows more and more complicated, an increasing number of IT people think they are the only ones who grasp the complexity of what they do -- particularly what they are being asked to do by clueless bosses. Childs' case is extreme, but many IT folks feel themselves pushed to the brink. A programmer friend of mine, caught in a job he despises, tells me stories about colleagues hospitalized for stress -- and others intentionally burnt out on projects so they can be dismissed and replaced by fresh blood. "It's not about productivity anymore," he says. "It's about survival."
That bleak situation and the Childs saga are extreme cases. But they compel me to ask: Has the gap widened between what is asked of IT and what is humanly possible? Or is crossing that chasm just part of the job description? That's the question of the day and I invite all of you to respond -- in detail if you can.