4 ms·

Corporate IT - which is now it's own behemoth in most modern organizations. IMHO it's actively preventing any work getting done. There are tons of startups that

Corporate IT - which is now it's own behemoth in most modern organizations. IMHO it's actively preventing any work getting done. There are tons of startups that are meeting this need (generally referred to as "dark IT" or "shadow IT"). More power to you if you find yourself actually meeting business needs over the company's own internal programmers and systems folks. I am, of course, trying to effect change from within the org I am employed by.

tyingq 9y ago
Somewhat related. A fair amount of the cloud initiatives I've seen within Fortune 500's aren't really about the cloud at all. It's solely to get to a data center where the provider does what you ask in a reasonable amount of time without overzealous and slow approval flows. "Shadow Data Center" I guess.
horusthecat 9y ago
> Corporate IT - which is now it's own behemoth in most modern organizations. IMHO it's actively preventing any work getting done I will co-sign to this every day of the week and twice on sundays. In our org chart, developers are not "IT" and getting nearly anything done that requires involvement from IT borders on impossible. I honestly will probably never work for this sort of Microsoft/Oracle/IBM shop ever again unless I get a blood promise I can use a Mac or Linux workstation, get on-demand development VM creation, and have absolutely 0 Oracle product I'm required to integrate with. The org I work at is so old that it still has groups with "Wintel" in their names, but the UNIX guys (the majority of our non-windoze stuff is AIX) aren't any better. It literally feels like I'm in a time warp back in the 1990s. Some horror stories: - having a systems engineer tell me to put in a ticket for the purpose of making a phone call to discuss something that had no pending action needed on his part - having a DBA tell me the same thing - having a DBA not know how to turn on query logging - getting told we had to put together a hardware acquisition plan to do an in-place upgrade of database modules - having a ticket to get log rotation turned on ignored for months and then told (when logs filled up the disk) that they'd have to turn off the service - tediously going through change control to alter permissions, elevation rights, etc., only to have "implemented" changes mysteriously disappear the next time security patches were applied - requesting and getting access to some very nice and expensive commercial applications only to be told that our use case was unsupported - a half-dozen vendors' antivirus clients on windows machines - unplanned outages during non-brownout/storm conditions corrupting databases Ironically enough, some of the PMs (who are generally non-technical) we've talked to in IT literally complain about the exact same sort of problems. The upside is I can take two or three hour lunch breaks whenever I have to wait on these guys, which is a couple times a week.
sebazzz 9y ago
Corporate IT is a disaster. So many people responsible for only one thing, causing them not to think outside their box. Going from one conference call to the other without any dedicated focus on the project. Instead of getting an application live in several days, it costs months. Slow communication, cheap outsourcing so in the end you need to do constant hand-holding to complete installation of an web application. Does this sound familiar to anyone?
- nmstoker 9y ago
  Absolutely, the more layers the worse it gets. It's a version of Chinese whispers/Telephone where not only is confusion added at each stage but huge amounts of time delay.
cname 9y ago
This applies to pretty much any institutional IT (non-profit, education, etc). We waste an incredible amount of time and money badly maintaining systems just for hosting websites, for example. And not for any good reason, mind you--our systems are less convenient, less secure, and far more expensive than any competent third party host would be. The time it takes to get a host set up is absolutely mind-boggling. There's talk about making changes, but it takes years to overcome years of bad leadership and apathy, and there's institutional inertia that actively works against modernizing.
nmstoker 9y ago
This is spot on. It's bad enough that money is saved within IT departments that costs multiples of wasted staff wages in the business, but there are battles between sub sections of IT that try to save money in their area by pushing it on to others (again at net cost).

tyingq 9y ago

Somewhat related. A fair amount of the cloud initiatives I've seen within Fortune 500's aren't really about the cloud at all. It's solely to get to a data center where the provider does what you ask in a reasonable amount of time without overzealous and slow approval flows. "Shadow Data Center" I guess.

horusthecat 9y ago

> Corporate IT - which is now it's own behemoth in most modern organizations. IMHO it's actively preventing any work getting done I will co-sign to this every day of the week and twice on sundays. In our org chart, developers are not "IT" and getting nearly anything done that requires involvement from IT borders on impossible. I honestly will probably never work for this sort of Microsoft/Oracle/IBM shop ever again unless I get a blood promise I can use a Mac or Linux workstation, get on-demand development VM creation, and have absolutely 0 Oracle product I'm required to integrate with. The org I work at is so old that it still has groups with "Wintel" in their names, but the UNIX guys (the majority of our non-windoze stuff is AIX) aren't any better. It literally feels like I'm in a time warp back in the 1990s. Some horror stories: - having a systems engineer tell me to put in a ticket for the purpose of making a phone call to discuss something that had no pending action needed on his part - having a DBA tell me the same thing - having a DBA not know how to turn on query logging - getting told we had to put together a hardware acquisition plan to do an in-place upgrade of database modules - having a ticket to get log rotation turned on ignored for months and then told (when logs filled up the disk) that they'd have to turn off the service - tediously going through change control to alter permissions, elevation rights, etc., only to have "implemented" changes mysteriously disappear the next time security patches were applied - requesting and getting access to some very nice and expensive commercial applications only to be told that our use case was unsupported - a half-dozen vendors' antivirus clients on windows machines - unplanned outages during non-brownout/storm conditions corrupting databases Ironically enough, some of the PMs (who are generally non-technical) we've talked to in IT literally complain about the exact same sort of problems. The upside is I can take two or three hour lunch breaks whenever I have to wait on these guys, which is a couple times a week.

sebazzz 9y ago

Corporate IT is a disaster. So many people responsible for only one thing, causing them not to think outside their box. Going from one conference call to the other without any dedicated focus on the project. Instead of getting an application live in several days, it costs months. Slow communication, cheap outsourcing so in the end you need to do constant hand-holding to complete installation of an web application. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

nmstoker 9y ago
Absolutely, the more layers the worse it gets. It's a version of Chinese whispers/Telephone where not only is confusion added at each stage but huge amounts of time delay.

cname 9y ago

This applies to pretty much any institutional IT (non-profit, education, etc). We waste an incredible amount of time and money badly maintaining systems just for hosting websites, for example. And not for any good reason, mind you--our systems are less convenient, less secure, and far more expensive than any competent third party host would be. The time it takes to get a host set up is absolutely mind-boggling. There's talk about making changes, but it takes years to overcome years of bad leadership and apathy, and there's institutional inertia that actively works against modernizing.

nmstoker 9y ago

This is spot on. It's bad enough that money is saved within IT departments that costs multiples of wasted staff wages in the business, but there are battles between sub sections of IT that try to save money in their area by pushing it on to others (again at net cost).