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Exactly. At a "all hands meeting" of the IT staff of large food manufacturer (top 5 globally), I asked if there was room for developing our own solutions someti

Exactly. At a "all hands meeting" of the IT staff of large food manufacturer (top 5 globally), I asked if there was room for developing our own solutions sometimes (since we complained so much about our current tools and the lack of alternatives). I got an angry response from the CTO and later discovered people were laughing about my proposal (either because I must be stupid or because I was certaintly joking, in their view). I wasn't talking about writing our own ERP, my area was server infrastructure and there was tons of automation we could be creating, but instead the general strategy was to buy off-the-shelf tools and pay to be cheated on by IT consultants. The almost complete inability of the IT area to take ownership of its own fate made me leave 6 months later. "Nobody gets fired by choosing IBM" syndrome in full effect.

dozzie 10y ago
> [...] I asked if there was room for developing our own solutions sometimes [...] > [...] my area was server infrastructure You see, a sysadmin in such an environment is not expected to write programs. That's not in his job description. On the other hand, he probably is free to write scripts and configuration. I never bothered with asking if I, as a sysadmin, can write a service that I will use myself, nor I bothered with asking what language should I use. (This way I learned Erlang.) My job was to keep services running as intended, and how -- it was up to me. It would need to be very hostile environment to prevent sysadmins from writing their tools. Though your last paragraph suggests it was hostile.