Every “rising” company has a few people like this, a few key players who know the field or have such niche expertise that they get given the largest leeway and most room to do whatever they want, as long as the results keep coming in.
The catch here is that the more successful the company gets, the more power and flexibility they have to get the exact kind of employee they want. So if you dream of being in this position, be careful and don’t let it go to your head just because you were free to join the meeting 10 minutes late in your pajamas in the early days.
Yeah, the director of our network security team looks like a swamp wizard.
Overgrown kowakian monkey-lizard?
I worked for a small third party AT&T chop shop once. I pulled all sorts of crap there. I remember they gave me a Dell that annoyed me in just the right way that I nuked it and installed Linux.
Others saw and word spread and they fucking hated windows 11 too. Nothing happened right away, it’s was kind of like a freak show thing. “The nonconformist found an out”. Then the network engineer said “fuck this. What distro are the kids into these days?” and nuked his dell and now we only had one person running bare metal windows left in IT. And he was annoyed he had problems when we didn’t.
So he issued a new decree that we had to use the same software our customers were using. We have to “dogfood our own solutions.” We wiped and moved back, begrudgingly.
He wasn’t wrong but that Dell ran like shit with windows. We had a BYOD policy at work that nobody actually did anything with but was technically there though.
So I bought a surface pro X second hand off eBay and brought it in.
As bad a machine as that was, it was bad in predictable and therefor manageable ways. And boss looked over, sighed, and just let me have the win.
Until big boss saw I had something shinier than he did. And they were NOT going to give him something like that as they did NOT want to provide support for it. So the X was banned from the office.
Until big boss saw I had something shinier than he did. And they were NOT going to give him something like that as they did NOT want to provide support for it. So the X was banned from the office.
It’s really awful working for children who are decades older than you
I work in legal tech.
Can confirm. We’re weird, and you don’t want to piss off accounting.
It’s a bit of a truce, as the only people accounting are really afraid of are IT.
I never come up from my dungeon to talk to accounting. I send a precisely formatted, detailed, and concise email that they inevitably only read half of.
I’d rather have a paper trail anyway.
May I introduce you to my Lord and savior, the recap email.
“As per our conversation on <date>, we discussed <topic> and had the following points/action items…”
I’ve only ever had one job where these emails were not appreciated (current job most send them by default), and man was it fun pissing off people outside of my command chain by documenting the shit they wanted off record.
I’d rather have a paper trail anyway.
This. You do not want to be a scapegoat for some higher-ups ego trips
One of the first thing I learned in my IT internship is that you keep your receipts. That way management can’t blame you for implementing their stupid requests.
That’s why I send “summary” emails, even if the brass tells me not to, for in person discussions
Another legitimately great strategy is the Wally Deflector (hate that Dilbert’s creator turned out to be an asshat). Force them to do some work. Anything really works, just something to slow down the firehose and enforce that it’s a partnership working towards a solution. Usually the best way is to just ask for clarification and actual hard requirements.
So many things just shrivel up and die when the person asking for it realizes IT isn’t going to just outsource their full responsibilities including domain specific knowledge or basic fucking thought for them just because it’s going to become digital or automated.
*Wally Reflector
And yeah, it’s amazing how much simple clarifying questions can frustrate the “ideas guy” who just wants an idea with no clue how to get there.
“Okay, and here are your action items…”
Silence for two weeks thereafter. :D
Had a project recently that was effectively “Hey other teams, you have until $date to make this change or you will lose $feature”
The deadline was extended by a month, and we still quietly didn’t make the breaking change on our end for another month after. Every team impacted (until they made the change needed) got emails weekly about it, even into the “quiet” extended deadline. Emails went to whole teams so it couldn’t be lost by one person going on vacation or something.
Day after breaking change (more than three months after first contact) I sent out the final email to any teams that still hadn’t done the needful. “Hey, looks like your shit was still wrong when we did the thing we warned about. It’s broken now.”
Over a week after breaking change, ten minutes before I’m off for the weekend: “Hey, we’ve been troubleshooting for a while trying to figure out why $feature no longer works. This is business critical for $reasons. How can we get this resolved?”
“Please see the attached email from over three months ago (attached).”
I’ve got a customer right now who needs this lesson taught to them, but I lack the power to properly discipline them.
That’s always the fucking worst. “You have all the responsibility, but none of the power”.
It’s all internal “customers” at my workplace. So very often by the time it comes to my team the contract is already signed, and they of course didn’t get proper vendor support in the contract. So my team is left to scrape together whatever we can from public info about some obscure industry specific system. Always great to ask support questions and told “we can’t answer that, it’s proprietary”.
We can say “you need to negotiate vendor engineer support for this” until we’re blue in the face, but at the end of the day when the shit doesn’t work how they were sold it by the sales guy they end up trusting the friendly smiley sales guy when the vendor blames us, rather than the fucking professionals in their own workplace because we tell it to them straight, so interactions with us don’t always leave them feeling warm and fuzzy.
Our tech side’s upper management has switched up in the last few years, and they say that it’s been codified into the purchasing approval process that tech gets a seat at the table before shit gets inked. So I was optimistic.
Then we signed the first new vendor/external support contract for our own tech side shit in a long time, no way for us not to be at the table.
Additional support rebuiling our cloud infra that was previously hacked together as needed, but this time do it “right”. Templates, automated tagging, top down more easily managed governance and security controls instead of a messy mix of shit, the works. The plan is to automate a shit ton as infra as code. No one on my team has previous experience doing this as we’re not very cloud heavy.
All of this hinges on infra as code and resource templates, and the fucking contract expicitly doesn’t include any coding/cloud template building assistance. It wasn’t forgotten, they decided against it.
I’m the best script/code monkey on my team. I know I can figure it out, but I was looking forward to having a break from spending 90% of my time staring at code. Or being on projects that succeed or fail entirely on my own efforts. I’ve been stuck on this sort of shit for multiple years while some of my coworkers have been able to be important, but not a bus factor of 1.
Guess it’s nice to have job security 🫠
…and that shaggy MF wants $40,000,000 for next years hardware refresh and 8yr support licensing.
Source: I am that shaggy MF.
and you get just about through the door and they already are saying no.
Part of my job is to to scare finance into saying “yes”. Recent news headlines over the last two years have made my job a lot easier.
Yeah. It’s always fun “convincing” the bean-counters that spending money is usually cheaper “in the long run”.
Soecifically, my department was refurbishing laptops to enable us to keep our new hires supplied with computers. We asked for a nice new computer for a department VP coming in, and we got told to send a refurb. That guy put in about a dozen tickets in the first week about how one of the desk workers had a newer computer. We just sent those straight to the team that denied giving us the money for new computers.
And because management lacks nuance, that extra budget came with a new policy…“No more refurbished computers”. So when an intern got hired, and all we had was a few refurbs and a 2200 dollar executive 2-in-1 ultra book, we sent the ultra book. After 3 layers of that guy’s bosses submitted immediate tickets demanding to have their brand new, lower spec machines replaced, accounting finally decided that they should let my team do the work we were hired to do.
Lol i scared the shit out of them on some data breach fines one time.
Manamana
Doo dooooo doo-doodoo
Manamana
Doo too-doo too
Manamana
Doo too doodoo-doo doodoo-doo doodoo-too doodoo doo doo doodoo doo doodoo doo.
Alright, let’s just do this for real.
Mahna Mahna
In a company I worked for in the 1990’s, accounting was all women, many hot, and all horned up. I do not mean this as a good thing. I was in a committed relationship to my now wife and these ladies didn’t stop. They also had a stack of Playgirl and other nude men magazines in their bathroom. Very toxic, but that was southern Louisiana back then.
Same. I worked at a Pharmaceutical company in the early 00’s where the CFO, accounts payable/receivable and many managers were all power hungry horn dog women.
My immediate IT boss (one down from CTO) was banging my coworker, a guy who was already banging the HR secretary and a lady in finance all to get favoritism. I literally quit over the whole thing.
Pharma companies are all drama btw. Don’t go into pharma if you dislike drama.
My immediate IT boss (one down from CTO) was banging my coworker, a guy who was already banging the HR secretary and a lady in finance all to get favoritism.
Why not have an orgy and save everyone’s time?
Don’t go into pharma if you dislike drama.
That rhymes.
It pnly rhymes in Bahston.
I worked at two of the biggest accounting firms in the world. You know, the kind that you read about in the news because they’re hiding rich people’s money. And yes, the older ones especially, are useless with computers. We had one secretary to a senior partner who insisted on having a typewriter.
That’s weird to me, because accounting was one of the first fields to dive into computers. My grandpa started his career in the 1950s as an accountant, and ended it as an IT manager.
Electronic spreadsheets were a gamechanger.
I can actually see the point of a typewriter.
If someone involved in underhanded business gets an email or an electronically letter, they might think there’s an electronic trail.
If the letter was hand typed, they’ll know it’s not quite as traceable
I’ve read that Putin’s security people use typewriters for just this reason.
You can forensically link a typed text to the typewriter that wrote it.
Yes, if the person doesn’t burn the message.
Or the typewriter?
Or the secretary?
In Russia, they make windows off all sizes
Well, as a legal secretary in the early 1990s… I had to type things in triplicate (pressure printed on my typewriter…)
I’ll go further back in the Wayback Machine.
When I was very young I got a Disney book where Mickey and Donald Duck are in school. Donald tells Mickey they don’t need to learn to spell because when they grow up they’ll be able to buy typewriters. Donald thought that typewriters would automatically correct any spelling mistakes.
Whoa… I am an old shit who does miss her electronic typewriter that actually produced a product in real time without having to rely on cloud/blueshit connections. but okay, since you probably have not had a real time experience… it is reasonable that you don’t relate. Understand… everytime I try to print post op instructions at work, my computer can’t figure out what printer to send it to so I have to select one out of like 30 printers it lists. This is not convenient nor helpful.
I fixed my mom’s mechanical typewriter when I was twelve, when I was fifteen I released a couple of issues of a punk fanzine that I typed up on my mom’s IBM electric typewriter. My mom was a secretary in the days of Madmen, she learned to use words processors and printers. But this woman would phone IT when her typewriter wasn’t working, in 3005 this was not my problem.
Yep, I can confirm.
Accountants think it’s a guy
IT is far more subtle and complex than that
that sentient shroom owns a custom fursuit that costs as much as a small yaczt
sentient shroom
Is he a descendant of Lenin?
I used to work in the call center of a regional office for a giant company. I got the opportunity to “apprentice” with another department, which basically meant I would shadow the same employee for an hour or two a week for six months and then I could apply for a transfer and they’d hire me preferentially unless I seemed like a fuckup. The department was staffed with 90% former biglaw attorneys who didn’t want to deal with the rat race anymore and located in the main office. I felt like this the first time I showed up in my nice jeans and a fancy-to-me top to this incredible marbled building full of people wearing suits more expensive than my car.
I got that job, by the way, and less than two years later, it had demoralized me to the point that I left “per mutual agreement” and went back to school to move to an entirely different industry. I did also make enough money in that time to finance a move abroad, including living expenses for three years, visas, bringing my cat with me, and grad school though, so I’m not exactly mad about it in the end.
A few jobs ago I had the CEO of the startup I worked at tell me that when he was meeting investors they’d question an engineer’s competence if they showed up looking too well dressed.
I had a colleague, she eventually went to Google, who would hard pass candidates that showed up to an interview in a suit. I find that as stupid as dinging someone for not wearing a buttoned up shirt for the interview.
EDIT: I did tell her that was tremendously stupid and that they were just trying to show respect by dressing up.
Depends if it’s a young tech coming up to fix their computer, or an older tech coming up to elaborate what the recent Capex request is for, because it just takes to damn long to write in email.
If it’s the latter then yeah that checks out.
