I thought about putting this in Personal Computing since that is my career, but decided perhaps it is indicative on modern society.

Over the past 6+ months, I have been faced with many situations where diagnosing a problem has been slammed, and do something pushed.  To the effect that our network has been compromised several times by rash decisions by bosses that don't know what the hell they are talking about, but must get results "NOW".  Even tho said results cost us many hours of down time due to making a bad situation worse.

OK, I will be the first to admit that doing board level diagnostics on a PC is as effective as writing on stone tablets.  And I am not talking about that.  I cut my teeth in the 80s on board level diagnostics, but when boards became cheap, you trashed the board and installed a new one!  I can deal with that.  Indeed today, we don't even try to figure out what is wrong with a PC.  Does not work, slap a new one in and let the Warranty guys figure it out (that is not my department).

But Telecommunications in the 21st century are not PCs.  They are complex beasts with many points of failure.  And before you go and "fix" something, it would be good to know what was broken. 

But instead of allowing high priced engineers to perform the diagnostics to identify the problem, managers are now coming in and saying "wipe and re-install, carte blanche!".  This has happened 3 times to me in the last 6 months.  In 2 of the cases, I was able to prove that our actions made the situation worse through the rash orders of incompetent management.  It is plain to see, and should it ever come up I will call for an inquiry to prove that not allowing me to do my job turned a 2 hours down time, into a 24 hours one.

Today was another example.  But this time I yelled (yes, literally yelled) back that there was a single problem not a rash of problems and we need to identify the source of the problem and fix it.  Not "Wipe and re-install".  I was then "Ordered' to do as I was told.  So I complied.

Fortunately, a saner head decide to re-verify with the user that all his PCs were down, or just one (I told them it was just one).  The user had over reacted (Gee!  Ya think?  I have never seen that before!), and indeed it was only one computer, not a whole department.  At the last moment, we were saved from rebuilding a half dozen computers and instead could fix (a simple renaming) the one that was at fault.

All this brings up the philosophical.  Have we reached the stage in today's society that we are willing to just trash good systems because we do not have the time to do some simple diagnostics?  If so, why are there network Engineers?  That is our job.  To Identify the problem and look for the solution.  Instead I work for people that will not accept that reality, do no wrong, and think that wiping and re-installing works better than finding the problem and fixing it.

And that is a sad commentary on today's throw away society.  Gone are the TV Repairmen.  Gone are the Appliance (except MAJOR ones) repairmen.  instead, it breaks, don't look for the cause, throw away and buy a new one.  Our Dumps are filled with appliances that need nothing more than a solenoid coil, or a new relay.  But instead of fixing it, we trash it.

Now it seems our data communications are coming to that point as well.  Or is it?  Is it just that I work for a couple of arrogant buffoons, or is this the face of the new Telecom world.  I am sure most, if not all of us have been given the run around when calling an ISP, only for the problem to be 'miraculously' fixed all of a sudden.  Those of us in the know, know that the problem was on their end, and they just could not bring themselves to be honest about it and give it to us straight.

Now we have incompetent people forcing us to perform our jobs that way.  Based on what?  The hysteric rantings of an end user that does not understand a keyboard from a mouse.  The Peter Principal is alive and well, and has now taken over IT.  Good Luck NG.  You are going to need it with the clowns you are bringing over.