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It's always easier to blame contractors than to determine why and how. And Snowden talked about in his book that roughly 95% of the fed gov is contractors. Reas

It's always easier to blame contractors than to determine why and how. And Snowden talked about in his book that roughly 95% of the fed gov is contractors. Reason is that getting money is easy, but getting OMB approval for more hires is ridiculous. These people had a public trust or a clearance. They've worked their way in the fed gov. I wouldn't immediately question malice or otherwise. You don't just throw away a career with sabotage. Also having worked in a similar environment, I can guarantee you that although there may be a test env, it is nowhere near similar to prod. I've seen it myself with different firewall rules, different GPOs, different software hardening packages. And I also complained that there should be no distinctions between stage and prod - insomuch that DNS and SSL should be the only real differences. I'm also acutely aware if my project has a similar incident, that I too would be scapegoated and fired. It's part of the course of this job.

codeslave13 4y ago
I worked there for 10 years. What is this test env you speak of? /s We had dev and prod. No version control and no testing requirements. Was a while ago for sure (i used svn locally for sanity). But from what i hear not a lot has changed. This was not flight related software. They did have better tools and procedures but not by leaps and bounds
- tarotuser 4y ago
  Oh, we always have a test environment :) Sometimes its also called prod. Ive had the displeasure of having another team write the Cloudformation scripts, and they wrote them in such a way that none could be redeployed, or changed. And since they're domain joined windows machines, effectively un-redeployable. My first start, which died in situ, was to do the work to get stage up and running, and then clone stage into prod and changing the DNS and naming bits. Since this was a no-go, ended up piecemealing everything. It still stings too. We're nearly done and ready to go live as well. Ive been pushing for live since November. But when a single person speaks out, "delays get delayed by meetings to discuss in meetings to have meetings about delays" (note: I'm not making this up)... I shouldn't complain too much. A good 4h a workday is filled with gaming and stuff, since the enforced delays and "hurry up and waits" require me to literally do nothing. But when I do work, I'm going at the 5-10x speed I'm accustomed to going. But when it takes weeks to open up SMB from internal machines to other internal machines... there's not a lot I can do to fix broken process. And, I'm just a lousy contractor out of hundreds of thousands.

codeslave13 4y ago

I worked there for 10 years. What is this test env you speak of? /s We had dev and prod. No version control and no testing requirements. Was a while ago for sure (i used svn locally for sanity). But from what i hear not a lot has changed. This was not flight related software. They did have better tools and procedures but not by leaps and bounds

tarotuser 4y ago
Oh, we always have a test environment :) Sometimes its also called prod. Ive had the displeasure of having another team write the Cloudformation scripts, and they wrote them in such a way that none could be redeployed, or changed. And since they're domain joined windows machines, effectively un-redeployable. My first start, which died in situ, was to do the work to get stage up and running, and then clone stage into prod and changing the DNS and naming bits. Since this was a no-go, ended up piecemealing everything. It still stings too. We're nearly done and ready to go live as well. Ive been pushing for live since November. But when a single person speaks out, "delays get delayed by meetings to discuss in meetings to have meetings about delays" (note: I'm not making this up)... I shouldn't complain too much. A good 4h a workday is filled with gaming and stuff, since the enforced delays and "hurry up and waits" require me to literally do nothing. But when I do work, I'm going at the 5-10x speed I'm accustomed to going. But when it takes weeks to open up SMB from internal machines to other internal machines... there's not a lot I can do to fix broken process. And, I'm just a lousy contractor out of hundreds of thousands.