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Working on a high profile tech team and project. We had the most brilliant and insufferable devops engineer I've ever met. I don't mean just your standard grump

Working on a high profile tech team and project. We had the most brilliant and insufferable devops engineer I've ever met. I don't mean just your standard grump overworked sys admin. This guy was a treasure. 1) Previously all engineers had 20% time and would work on personal projects. We had a ton of extra servers lying around and it was fairly simple to provision some space to work on an idea. His first week he went to the CTO and had 20% time axed and demanded that all provisioning go directly through him and all physical servers be nuked from orbit. 2) They got him a personal secretary. He routinely had her go 5 blocks to get him gummy bears, buy him a waffle iron and make him waffles in the office, and routinely made sexist comments. 3) Op sec. We would have media come by the office once in a while so this guy instituted a policy of "security through shame" If you didn't have 2factor auth on your email he would send you snide comments. If you didn't use full disk encryption you had to go to a mandatory course on personal security. If you left your laptop unlocked at your desk to go the bathroom it was prank emails and screwing with your settings. On the 3rd time he would confiscate your laptop and lock it in a personal safe he had under his desk for the day. 4) This guy would use our internal channels and slack to shame anyone non-technical. One time the personal assistant to a VP in another department accidentally posted a listing asking if anyone had a bed for sale to the channel for asking about restaurants in the area. 24hours of shame where he got the entire tech team to participate emailing everyone in the company if they had any food shaped furniture for sale. Apparently she broke down crying and had to go home for the day. 5) Despite the fact that we had no QA team this guy refused to deploy hotfixes even for critical launches. You got one day a week to launch code. You got one chance. If there was anything wrong it was, "roll back and try next week." Unless of course the issue was you needed a CDN cache clear or there was something wrong with the build. Then you could email him (directly after the deployment) and have him refuse to respond or believe you for about an hour before he would actually do anything. I could go on. this guy was a king turd.

tristor 11y ago
The guy sounds like a jerk, but at least #3 seems to have come from a good place even if it might have been handled better. Security is absolutely essential and the weakest link is the human in most cases. That's why its important to build good security habits. Implementing policies and using software to enforce them only goes so far. His intention there was no doubt to try to instill some sense of personal security in the people involved that they might hold with them in the long term by calling them out and sending them to training. The rest of that sounds like reasons to fire the guy though. Although, having been in ops my whole career, I've never had a secretary, so it seems to me like this guy likely had a hookup with somebody in senior leadership so was probably untouchable/unfireable. I've dealt with the type before where it was somebody important's cousin or son who "knows computers", and suddenly they're running the IT department. On the plus side, at least it sounded like the guy wasn't incompetent.
- progressive_dad 11y ago
  #3 is the most problematic in my mind. Personal security is absolutely essential and it is the personal responsibility of everyone. This one most clearly shows his utter lack of empathy, nuance, understanding what a leadership role means, disrespect for basic humanity. This is the one that finally made me quit. He confiscated a guy's PERSONAl laptop that he had express permission to use. I mean, this stuff is currently in the courts being decided, but (to use a not so subtle metaphor) he's gonna fall squarely on the side of, "Its my office bathroom I'll take upskirt shots if I want!" ?
  - tristor 11y ago
    Wow, yeah that's definitely crossing the line. Personal equipment is just that. The company should have no say over how you use it or what it contains, only whether or not its allowed on the network. If there was a security issue with the laptop, it should simply have been blocked from network access (or never given access to begin with). Taking someones's personal laptop and holding it hostage falls on the wrong side of the line for 'theft', I would say.

tristor 11y ago

The guy sounds like a jerk, but at least #3 seems to have come from a good place even if it might have been handled better. Security is absolutely essential and the weakest link is the human in most cases. That's why its important to build good security habits. Implementing policies and using software to enforce them only goes so far. His intention there was no doubt to try to instill some sense of personal security in the people involved that they might hold with them in the long term by calling them out and sending them to training. The rest of that sounds like reasons to fire the guy though. Although, having been in ops my whole career, I've never had a secretary, so it seems to me like this guy likely had a hookup with somebody in senior leadership so was probably untouchable/unfireable. I've dealt with the type before where it was somebody important's cousin or son who "knows computers", and suddenly they're running the IT department. On the plus side, at least it sounded like the guy wasn't incompetent.

progressive_dad 11y ago
#3 is the most problematic in my mind. Personal security is absolutely essential and it is the personal responsibility of everyone. This one most clearly shows his utter lack of empathy, nuance, understanding what a leadership role means, disrespect for basic humanity. This is the one that finally made me quit. He confiscated a guy's PERSONAl laptop that he had express permission to use. I mean, this stuff is currently in the courts being decided, but (to use a not so subtle metaphor) he's gonna fall squarely on the side of, "Its my office bathroom I'll take upskirt shots if I want!" ?
- tristor 11y ago
  Wow, yeah that's definitely crossing the line. Personal equipment is just that. The company should have no say over how you use it or what it contains, only whether or not its allowed on the network. If there was a security issue with the laptop, it should simply have been blocked from network access (or never given access to begin with). Taking someones's personal laptop and holding it hostage falls on the wrong side of the line for 'theft', I would say.