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Now THAT'S what I call mismanagement :-\

Yes -- the idea that any organization would allow itself to get to the point where it is held hostage by one individual is truly mismanagement. There should be rigorous procedures in place and documentation standards and policies to ensure continuity. What if your "hero" won the lottery? The affect on the enterprise would be the same.

The structure should be in place to allow a talented sysadmin to use his/her creative abilities to create procedures to increase efficiency and effectiveness and then turn it over to a stable operational organization. Anthing less suggests that the individual in question has no sense of dicsipline and doesn't care about the enterprise to which they work. They are just hacks who have been able to take a small amount of knowledge and leverage it to make themselves "indespensible."

I have seen these types of "heros" before in my almost 30 years of IT -- I get them fired as soon as possible since they are mavericks who do more harm than good.

r/to which they work/for which they work/1

Yes -- the idea that any organization would allow itself to get to the point where it is held hostage by one individual is truly mismanagement. There should be rigorous procedures in place and documentation standards and policies to ensure continuity. What if your "hero" won the lottery? The affect on the enterprise would be the same

G-D!!!,,,

You gotta love it...a Hornhair that thinks that ALL THE DOCUMENTATION IN THE WORLD would replace the Human Element...

Well, a couple of decades ago, I was a 'green and wet behind the ears'...programmer hired during a hostile takeover of a NYC Bank [Hint: during the Panic of 1837, only GOLD, SILVER, and the Banknotes with this peculiar CHEMICAL smell were accepted as Legal Tender by ANYONE in New York!!! ].

The takeover was attempted by a Wall Street Darling...who at the end held a Press Conference declaring..."I always knew there was an Establishment, but until today, I thought I was part of it!"

OK, this little company, bought by the Bank to MONKEYWRENCH the takeover [Hint: The Bank Holding Company Act], now had to perform on its own.

A Young Lady was promised a Severence Package to train me in the FORD MOTOR Account...Three rooms full of Excruciating Detailed DOCUMENTATION!!!

She refused...and wished me luck :-(

figuring it ALL out!!!

Eventually, the Bank...'Old Bullion" [from 1837 Panic], Liquidated the company!!!

ROOMSFULL of Documentation is NO SUBSTITUTE for Institutional Memory!!!

BTW, ALL the Software Company's Big Wigs, transfered to the Bank with the CHEMICAL SMELL...were S**t Canned in less than a Year!!!

Who was held hostage? He was perfectly willing to document the software for the $30,000 and be done with it (he was actually in a $75k+ yearly position with another company by that point), but they decided that it was in their best interests to rehire him and keep their IT in-house.

And, IMO, if the company is so worried about portability, they should have probably freed up some budget to have a professional consulting firm put together their global network rather than having their internal IT department, with no previous experience doing this sort of thing, put it together for them. As I said in the first post, these guys started out with a single ancient IBM mainframe and grew it into a global network, and they did so using only their internal resources because management didn't want to spend the money on people with experience doing this sort of thing. When you ask an amateur to design a global network, you get an amateurish global network.

I fault the management, not the programmers.