A friend of mine is a grease monkey: the kind of auto enthusiast who rebuilds engines for fun on
a Saturday night. He explained to me that certain brands of automobiles were designed in ways to
make the mechanic’s job easier. Others, however, were designed as if the company had a pact with
the aspirin industry to make sure there are plenty of mechanics with headaches. He said those car
companies hate mechanics. I understood completely because, as a system administrator, I can tell
when software vendors hate me. It shows in their products.
A panel discussion at CHIMIT (Computer-Human Interaction for Management of Information
Technology) 2009 discussed a number of do’s and don’ts for software vendors looking to make
software that is easy to install, maintain, and upgrade. This article highlights some of the issues
uncovered. CHIMIT is a conference that focuses on computer-human interaction for IT workers—the
opposite of most CHI research, which is about the users of the systems that IT workers maintain. This
panel turned the microscope around and gave system administrators a forum to share how they felt
about the speakers who were analyzing them.