The Department of NO

Fash · Post by **Fash** » April 19, 2006, 11:02 pm

Do you know what I hate? Corporate IT departments.

The whole notion of what it means to work in IT is lost in todays world. When I worked in IT, the users were priority #2 behind my own ass. I went out of my way to make their lives easier and to teach them something at the same time. If there was some way to make something more efficient, I was on it. I grew to hate working in IT, not because of the users, but because of management.

I know I was the exception to the rule, however... Most IT departments are full of people who consider their users morons incapable of operating the machine in front of them.

I started in January at my current employer and quickly realized I would be dealing with another IT department whose rabid control issues are only rivaled by their stupidity. Say you have tough security, and give everyone the same password. Set up a restrictive Web Proxy while threatening that all web traffic is monitored, and then allow users to uncheck the 'use proxy' option and bypass all the security. Say you want to help, and then say No.

I am a Business Analyst, but the processors in the billing department were tasked with data-entry of over 50,000 items into an unfriendly graphical system... Using a completely free and open-source program, AutoHotkey (http://www.autohotkey.com), I created a macro script that eliminated 60 keystrokes per form.. Thats 3,000,000 keystrokes on 50,000 forms.. At 200 keystrokes per minute, that is 250 man-hours of labor. I demonstrated it for the manager of the billing department, and he directed me to set it up on the 18 processor machines. Weeks go by and just as another large batch arrives, he tells me that even though he had mentioned it to IT three times already, they threw a shit-fit this time because they had not approved it, and demanded it be removed from all systems immediately. I thought *I* was pissed, until I started going to the processors to uninstall it...

I've been operating under the radar ever since. I have developed in a programming language called PHP for over 6 years, and I find it to be absolutely invaluable as a command-line text processor/data manipulator. Almost every day I'm asked to do something, or a problem is brought to my attention, that I could do faster, or actually have a solution for, by using a PHP script... but I knew getting approval, or even trying, would be futile.

I was working with a VP in the company on an issue, and had to drive to our other building with him... I took the opportunity to bring up the topic. He advised me to email the head IT person and CC him on it. I did just that, explaining exactly what I wanted to use it for, that it was free and open-source, and listed 3 specific examples of situations it *could* have been a tremendous help (it was!).

The response included one of the strangest things I've ever heard of... a policy against open-source. What?! Other than that I was not surprised they responded in the negative. The reasons included not wanting to become responsible for maintaining development created outside of their 'life cycle' if I were to resign or post for another job, and that open-source software has no structured support.

I responded professionally while negating all reasons. I'll be more blunt here though. I don't need any fucking support for PHP, and if I were to leave or move up in the company, other people would just do it their own way, using fucking Access or something in the corporate handbook.

The response was simply, "Application and process develop belongs in IT. The open source policy stands as is.", or, "No, just because, now get lost."

The VP and Manager that were CC'd on the whole chain will now discuss a way around this cockblock. Meanwhile, I risk getting fired everyday.

Go team go!

Animalor · Post by **Animalor** » April 20, 2006, 8:04 am

I can empathise with your situation but I also understand why a policy like this would be put in place.

There's noone truly accountable for OpenSource software/solutions. If it breaks and noone knows why or how to fix it, then you're up shit creek without a paddle.

Bubba Grizz · Post by **Bubba Grizz** » April 20, 2006, 9:32 am

You could get hit by the beer truck and they would suffer. I'd make your code super simple to use and comment on every aspect of it so if someone else had to do any work on it they could.

cadalano · Post by **cadalano** » April 20, 2006, 10:27 am

I had something similar happen to me. When I was a back office processor I wrote an automation program that basically allowed one human processor to do the workload of 3 or 4 processors. It eventually got noticed and they took me off of processing and put me on this program full-time to continue developing it. It was (and still is) a huge success and soon 90% of the workload done in the payment department was through my application. The department really depended on the program at this point, because shortly before the release they laid everyone off, moved to a new location, rehired very scantily, bought a new processing system that blew ass, etc.. after the transition they basically needed all the help they could get.

Anyway, eventually someone got smart and realized that a 19 year old kid was the sole supervisor for a program that applied billions of dollars of customer payments to loans.. and that probably wasnt a good thing. At first the idea was just to switch SQL and application servers to the IT group, but I would still have the freedom to administrate the SQL database and all of the source code. When the switch actually happened, literally the day of, they said that I would no longer have any control and that any future development work would need to be requested by the business (me) and developed by the IT group.

So I flipped out for awhile obviously because at this point there was nothing me or my managers could do. The old SQL server and application server was shutting down and we had nowhere else to move the program.

And that was basically the end of the program's development. It really is a shame because now 3 years later theres so much more that I could have done with it. Even though I could potentially request changes to be made, its a little ridiculous because I have to justify somewhere around $50,000.00 in FTE hours between myself and the IT group employees just to, say, fix a typo. For example, we did make one compliance change where we added a paragraph of legal corporate information to the login screen of the program. It took a little over 3 months, mostly waiting for approvals and paperwork, lots of "development time" from the IT group, and many days of testing the new change to make sure they didnt break anything. The bill for the job was over 50k and it was something I could have done literally in 5 minutes.

So yeah I'm a whiny little bitch about it now, but I learned a valuable lesson, and it sounds like you did too. I was at least lucky and my program is still widely used, but honestly thats only because they had no other option. If they could have shut it down, they would have. So yeah, just stay under the damn radar.

miir · Post by **miir** » April 20, 2006, 12:29 pm

I could write fucking chapters on apps/scripts that were written/supported by people who hadn't worked for the bank in X number of years and nobody had a fucking clue what they did, how they worked or who supported them...

I've worked on projects for server decommisions where people didn't even fucking realise where these apps/scripts were or where the databases were until we pulled the plug on the server... at which point we'd have traders/managers/developers/etc fucking SCREAMING about why their mission critical processes were no longer working...

So fuck you and your open source unsupported custom apps/scripts.

masteen · Post by **masteen** » April 20, 2006, 7:24 pm

I can't tell you the number of troubleshooting calls I took that started, "Well, we had this one guy, but he got fired, and none of us really know WTF we're doing."

Plus those same clueless fucktards trying to "tweak" their networks, and end up taking the whole shebang down.

Was it broken or moving slowly? No? THEN WHY WERE YOU MESSING WITH IT?

Aslanna · Post by **Aslanna** » April 20, 2006, 7:52 pm

They frown upon open source solutions where I work due to security / support issues. Of course where I happen to work it's a highly regulated company so that may have something to do with it. Smaller IT shops more than likely have more flexibility in implementing open source solutions. Large corporations typically want some avenue of support and usually COTS software gets them that.

I can't really fault them for that just because some homebrewed open-source solution may save me, or other people, work.

So.. Perhaps you'd have more luck if you were able to find a product that does the same thing AutoHotKey but that has support available. Sure it may not be free.. But not everything is better simply because it's free.