3 ms·

dilbert-esque anecdote please?

oblio 4y ago
Want one? I'm not OP, but I hope this is enjoyable. Ok... I was hired as a DevOps expert by a bank. They had this "user friendly" click-click platform nobody was actually using for automation. I mean, they were trying, but there's a reason modern stuff is Configuration as Code. I wanted to use Jenkins and a bunch of Python scripts. The local "tech expert" shot that down, told me that Jenkins was for "builds". I was like, ok, in that case let's use something else to trigger the launch of the scripts. While that was in the pipeline, I started working on the Python scripts. I worked a bit on them, got them working form my workstation. Then during the "review", I was asked which version they were. I said, Python 3. Nope, the servers only have Python 2. Ok, I'll make them backwards compatible. Finished that, then I was told that we can't run unapproved Python scripts (!!!). At that point I figured, you know what, what if I write just some local automation to cut down on my tedium, and maybe I share the scripts with the team later on. I asked what I could use for sure, and they told me: whatever I had pre-installed on the workstation. So I wrote a bunch Powershell scripts that controlled the IO of plink.exe (SSH client bundled with PuTTY) to send shell commands to servers. I basically reinvented a dumb version of Python fabric... And I programmed that using Vim bundled with Git Bash, because that was the only decent "simple" editor that I had access to (actual devs were only using company sanctioned Java IDEs with limited plugins allowed, i.e. Eclipse). My scripts ran well, but when it came around to sharing them with the team, I was basically told that it would be more prudent to keep my head down and let people do what they'd always been doing (i.e. deploying manually...). I left shortly after that.
- sumedh 4y ago
  To be fair you could have gathered the requirements and proposed your solution, wait for the approvals and then start the coding work instead of working on the solution.
  - oblio 4y ago
    I did try all of that, was basically told no, use the official solution, and meanwhile deploy hundreds of applications manually on Linux servers, using shell commands. And for the official solution, I kid you not, they had me fill in a huge Excel spreadsheet, print it, have my manager sign it, then attach the PDF scan to another Excel I was supposed to email. And that was for a review by the architects team. One step out of tens of super similar steps (including the print and scan part). I presented my project as a small, "skunkworks project", to try to get approval on the side of the main solution, to have some automation so I wouldn't go crazy. If they were better organized and frankly less political, I would have tried to help them more. But at every step the impression was that they didn't want me there, I was a troublemaker...

Want one? I'm not OP, but I hope this is enjoyable. Ok... I was hired as a DevOps expert by a bank. They had this "user friendly" click-click platform nobody was actually using for automation. I mean, they were trying, but there's a reason modern stuff is Configuration as Code. I wanted to use Jenkins and a bunch of Python scripts. The local "tech expert" shot that down, told me that Jenkins was for "builds". I was like, ok, in that case let's use something else to trigger the launch of the scripts. While that was in the pipeline, I started working on the Python scripts. I worked a bit on them, got them working form my workstation. Then during the "review", I was asked which version they were. I said, Python 3. Nope, the servers only have Python 2. Ok, I'll make them backwards compatible. Finished that, then I was told that we can't run unapproved Python scripts (!!!). At that point I figured, you know what, what if I write just some local automation to cut down on my tedium, and maybe I share the scripts with the team later on. I asked what I could use for sure, and they told me: whatever I had pre-installed on the workstation. So I wrote a bunch Powershell scripts that controlled the IO of plink.exe (SSH client bundled with PuTTY) to send shell commands to servers. I basically reinvented a dumb version of Python fabric... And I programmed that using Vim bundled with Git Bash, because that was the only decent "simple" editor that I had access to (actual devs were only using company sanctioned Java IDEs with limited plugins allowed, i.e. Eclipse). My scripts ran well, but when it came around to sharing them with the team, I was basically told that it would be more prudent to keep my head down and let people do what they'd always been doing (i.e. deploying manually...). I left shortly after that.

sumedh 4y ago
To be fair you could have gathered the requirements and proposed your solution, wait for the approvals and then start the coding work instead of working on the solution.
- oblio 4y ago
  I did try all of that, was basically told no, use the official solution, and meanwhile deploy hundreds of applications manually on Linux servers, using shell commands. And for the official solution, I kid you not, they had me fill in a huge Excel spreadsheet, print it, have my manager sign it, then attach the PDF scan to another Excel I was supposed to email. And that was for a review by the architects team. One step out of tens of super similar steps (including the print and scan part). I presented my project as a small, "skunkworks project", to try to get approval on the side of the main solution, to have some automation so I wouldn't go crazy. If they were better organized and frankly less political, I would have tried to help them more. But at every step the impression was that they didn't want me there, I was a troublemaker...