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It's the opposite of power, it's like being downpromoted to janitor. Now you're the one having to clean jira tickets. Grunt work to add a field or setup a plugi

It's the opposite of power, it's like being downpromoted to janitor. Now you're the one having to clean jira tickets. Grunt work to add a field or setup a plugin for every manager who feels important and a hard-to-maintain software. If you want sysadmin power, get DNS access or AWS admin or active directory admin or root on all servers. Actually, the jira admin probably grants more "power" and visibility onto every manager who's got to come to you for tickets. So it makes sense for politics.

blaser-waffle 6y ago
In an Org there are the actual roles and official power structures, and then there are the unofficial or de facto power structures. The AWS or Network owner may have the keys to the kingdom in terms of provisioning access, turning off routers, running arbitrary code on things, etc. but that also comes with great responsibility. If you fuck around and break something on accident, or shut down a router on purpose, there will be consequences. You may spend 150% of your day putting out fires and getting yelled at by senior leaders for application-killing lag or outages. Meanwhile JIRA guy gets to shift blame and interface with leadership. He may not have any power, but depending on the org, he could have a bunch. When I worked for an ISP -- a big one, chances are everyone here has heard of em -- one of the most powerful people in the PMO was essentially a secretary ("project coordinator") who had the ear of the head of the PMO, the VP of Engineering, and the CTO. She smoked a lot of cigs, so if you could make it to that smokers circle you could twist some powerful levers...