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.
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).”
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.
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 🫠
The Who - Won’t Get Fooled Again