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Admin
THIS IS BUREAUCRACY
Admin
Yeah, we are currently implementing ITIL in our company too \o/
Admin
Admin
Alas, 'tis often true. A lot of it can be due to reactions to over-the-top health and safety requirements; if a powered circuit fails and it's found that the person who wired it wasn't a qualified electrician then insurance difficulties ensue. This is just one example; yes, it's trivial and stupid, but companies have to cover themselves in some way.
I work in a smaller company where everyone knows everyone (well, almost) and the level of trust people have in each other, both to do their jobs and not to sue if they find a problem, is still refreshing after nearly two years. Previously, I worked on contract for the UK government. Twice.
Admin
The real WTF is that it took T.C. one hour to do the actual job. Unless he had to physically move the machine to another location that far away, I can't fathom anyone needing an hour to change an IP-address.
ETA: How much time did it take to get the "Mission Accomplished" banner BTW? ;)
Admin
Sometimes, the overhead comes from the need to have everything properly documented for -being able to retrace what went where -and outside entities.
I'm working for a company that makes medical devices, and having stuff well documented is a good idea because it helps to get it right. But even more importantly, we really don't want to be caught with incomplete documentation in case of an FDA audit.
So feature changes and the like tend to be slow and inefficient because everything has to be signed off by multiple people. Everything called "prototyping" however has much more relaxed rules.
Admin
Stakeholder != shareholder.
Admin
THIS IS SPARTAAAAAAA
Admin
I worked for a large manufacturing company, apparently for too long, because the procedure kind of makes sense to me. If it's a production server, then I'd rather do a lot of prep work, make sure all the right people are involved and have a smooth transition, than throw something together real quick and take a production site down for a day, losing millions of $$. It took us about a year to replace the servers at our 17 plants, but to the plants themselves, the move was seamless (or so I hope). Obviously, for a small company this process would be overkill. It all depends.
Admin
Or maybe you just have a different common sense. I'm joking somewhat, but how many times have you, as a techie, thought to someone "your lack of planning isn't my emergency"? I think that's how you're seen from an institutional perspective. You have different priorities.
Admin
Who needs efficiency when you can just print more money (go into more and more debt)?
If our governments were run more like businesses where they have access to $X of tax money and had to make it work... and if efficiency was a top priority, think of how much MORE we could get for our tax dollars? Instead we get cash strapped schools, crumbling roads, poor health care AND an exploding national debt.
It took that organization 60 odd DAYS to do what should have taken 2-3 total man hours. Imagine what else they could be doing with that time. sigh
Admin
That's what happened to me.
Admin
Governments don't have a monopoly on red tape. Businesses are often just as bad, once they're large enough. Efficiency is simply inversely related to organization size, and governments just happen to be the largest organizations around.
Admin
I work for a financial institution that makes billions of $ a year. And we get all sorts of red tape like this.
Two years, paperwork out the wazoo, stalling, and an agreement to pay $50K, and we still haven't been able to get a server moved from our office to the datacentre.
6 months would have been a bloody dream.
-- Seejay
Admin
We also have some of the lowest tax rates in the free world, and fund a disproportionately expensive military. I wouldn't dare claim that there's not a lot that could be done to make the fed run more smoothly, but I don't think one can get away with putting all the blame on inefficiency.
As an aside, I worked for a branch of the government for several years, and while I did have run-ins with some red tape, it was never anywhere near this bad.
Admin
Sounds like a problem I had at a previous job. I worked at a university. They converted a former computer lab back into a regular classroom, but never removed the 3 locks on each of the doors, so everyday someone had to find the keys/combinations to get into the room. We put in a request to have facilities remove the locks. After 3 months of waiting and calling every day, I took them off myself. Another month later, the facilities guys finally showed up and asked where the locks went. I handed them a box containing the locks. They filed a complaint against me for doing their job.
Admin
I've worked in many 'large institutions' of many kinds and I find your comment preposterous.
Admin
I'm with you, to a certain extent. I have the same issues in a large company (that may or may not make cell phones, still not actually sure). The same kind of bureaucracy, idiocracy, and general throwing things over the fence. I have no patience for the process and lack of accountability, the delays and herd behavior that make simple things take months, but I do agree that, with sufficient time, you can find those people who will get the work done without an act of Congress.
In the time between beginning in those environments, and actually finding the way to get things done without causing defcon two, people may find themselve sympathetic to the postal worker who feels that sending a memo to his supervisor via assault rifle has a certain appeal.
For those who've expressed disgust and horror that this "actually" happens, I've found that government or private sector doesn't matter. As long as someone who has sufficient motivation to hide behind procedure and delay can do so, expect that it will happen. In smaller organization, this usually isn't really possible because pretty much everyone has daily interaction. The people who play that game usually do it in a limited context, but if they don't then everyone knows it and goes around them. In a large organization where someones sole job is to evaluate the appropriate use of three letter acronyms and lick stamps, however, a venture into doing something not specifically defined as a job function is akin to travel to Mars (i.e., exciting, but fraught with peril and the unknown). I can guarantee that any company of sufficient size is as likey to have theses problems as government, and the effect may actually be worse since many companies can and do simply lay off large numbers of people whenever wall street is unhappy with them (usually, the wrong folks, it would appear), while government-folks probably live in less fear of censure or dismissal for doing something proactive.
For T.C. - don't worry about it. I think that I felt a great dela of satisfaction the first time I successfully colored between the lines, but ever since then the act has left me feeling less than fulfilled. Try to find a way to accomplish the actual work, and then let others fret about how to go about ensuring that form 2633t-a was filled out in triplicate and faxed to outer Mongolia with the correct sub-footer attachment stating that in no circumstance should outer Mongolia, receive, acknowledge, or otherwise accept form 2633t-a without the appropriate sub-footer which must remain (for privacy purposes) unspecified.
Admin
That brought tears of AWESOME to my eyes
Admin
SO who's for socialized healthcare!!
Admin
Sounds familiar. I don’t want to try to top, but in my current situation, I’m pretty sure no mere human would be able to get the “stakeholders” to agree in any such rapid timeframe. I have nightly status meetings with Asia development in which 34 "core" people are expected to call in, and getting agreement with 34 people who will invariably have 68 opinions is an excercise in futility.
Admin
Been there too; And just as I started getting used to it, our project failed, the workers were dispersed, and I found another job where we don't really have any configuration management concerns at all - and it's been kind of hard to get used to. Sort of disquieting, in a way.
I mean, some of the bureaucracy is designed so that; if TC's data center burns down, they at least have the plans documented somewhere (including TC's IP address) so that, in theory, it can be rebuilt. That's an extreme scenario, but it's at the heart of what CMMI and Engineering is all about. It's the same for large organizations and small organizations if you want repeatability. It's how grown-ups do business, and yes, the process can get bogged down in paperwork and meetings when you have one idiot in the chain who can't handle their responsibilities - which is almost always a given, unfortunately. Especially with today's distributed, outsourced organizations.
You want REAL pain? Add the requirements of having to work on a DoD Secret or Top Secret program.
You want to know why we're spending $12 Billion a month for only 180,000 or so troops in Iraq? All those programs, all that 'technology'.
Admin
If it wasn't for all the "stuff" in the way of doing real work, I probably would not have nearly enough time to read this site everyday. Beaurocracy has its upside :).
Admin
who's for socialized healthcare!!
I'd much rather have a review board of qualified, government medical consultants take 6 months to decide that I'm covered for a hip replacement, than have a private insurance company bean-counter deny me in 5 minutes, on the basis of an excel spreadsheet, after sitting on his fat ass collecting my $1000 monthly premiums for 10 years.
Admin
At my last job, our division was run by a CTO whose canned response to everything was "speak to your boss about it".
I was tasked with designing a new application infrastructure. Procedures required me to get approval of my designs from a) hardware team, b) architecture team, c) messaging team, d) programming team for messaging (not the same as [c]), e) networking team, f) legal department, g) security and h) DBAs. Each had their own forms, and review and approval procedures. In each case, I was mandated to put certain levels of redundancy into the system (a second local standby server for failover, then a second pair of primary/standby servers in case the SAN for the first pair failed, duplicate T1's (as opposed to a primary T1 and a backup ISDN), extra CPU's in case the primary CPU in a box failed, etc). All this in addition to the disaster recovery site which had an EXACT DUPLICATE of everything!
Naturally, all this sent the total cost through the roof. When I told my boss we could make do with about 1/4 of what was being mandated, he told me that we had no choice but to build what was "required". As such, I told him he had to swallow the budget. He got the money. After a year of weekly all-hands-on-desk meetings, status reports and excuses, the thing still isn't built (I figure one dedicated person working a normal day could have put the whole thing together in about two months). I offered to do the work myself, but he didn't want to step on anyone's toes. sighs
Admin
When I want my government computer moved, I go to the IT support internal web site, submit a "move my stuff" ticket telling them what equipment, where it is now, and where it's going, then I wait a week or two and it gets moved. It only takes that long because we have the lowest-level (cheapest) service contract.
I can understand it taking longer if it's not "corporate" IT stuff (as in, "owned" by a branch of the organization rather than "owned" by the organization's IT contractors), but even then it should just be a matter of getting the "owning" branch to sign off on an order, then submitting the order to the branch in charge of moving it. I think the story must be a bit exaggerated if it takes more than a month.
Admin
or 6 months to schedule you in for the brain surgery you needed 3 months ago?
the current system is crap, indeed. but we can go on to a good system, socialized would be just a little less crappy. i'm hard pressed to find any socialized program that does well.
Admin
Me as well.
Private sector, large company you never heard of. I changed one line of code to fix a debilitating production problem the weekend before the product was to go into broad distribution. There was not time to follow the "approved" procedures. The fix worked great, the product and the reputation of the company was preserved.
My reward? A written reprimand, dismal annual review, loss of merit increase, and living in fear of summary dismissal for the year following. Had my pension not been so close to vesting I would have left.
That was when I stopped giving a shit. Once I did that, things have been smooth ever since.
I'm still at that same company, still not giving a shit.
Captcha: Bling - Not any more. :-(
Admin
Damn, I was reading through the comments hoping no one beat me to it.
Captcha: ewww - Is that the electronic version of the www? I get mine printed for me everyday by cron.
Admin
I get the feeling all you people bashing this company for their corporate structure aren't team players, and you are obviously not cut out for the professional world.
Admin
Thankfully I work in one of the few non-formal IT groups in our company, so this isn't what I deal with regularly. We are one of the few groups "empowered" to do what it takes to get our job done.
When I compare my work to the formal IT groups, I am able to do the work of a team of ten, and a big part of it is I generally am allowed to avoid the bureaucracy. I would pull my hair out if this wasn't the case...
Admin
Try working in a very large professional environment where it takes two months to get something simple done that would take half an hour, but because thirty other people need to give their approval on it first, it turns into a grand endeavour, then you can flap your yap about being "team players" numbnuts.
There's more than enough feedback from people on here that in many situations, companies doing stuff like this is the norm, but it doesn't mean that it's the best way. Two months to move equipment? Reprimanded for tiny changes that are of benefit to the company? Two years and corporate bullpucky to not even get something done that would be of beneficial use to several hundred people?
Yeah, red tape may be there for a reason, but it can easily be one of worst things someone has to go through, especially if they don't know the process because it's more covoluted than anything they've seen before.
Know what you're talking about before trying to sound smart.
-- Seejay
Admin
Let that be a lesson. When someone asks where the locks are, the appropriate answer is "I don't know."
Admin
Hey, at least the buggers won't try to bankrupt me if they're gov't employees...
Admin
Sigh...
When I read the first replies I was sad... people think I suck! I'm not lazy! I work very hard and have worked with some of the best companies in the US.
Then some people started to stand up for me. Thank you.
And yes, it took me an hour to do the move. The box needed to be moved from one part of the datacenter to another because of it's new IP address. There is a rule about that and I had to follow it. The hour was spent telling the electrician to ensure I got a 208V plug, having the necessary crew to do the physical move, get the network cables plugged in and ports activated, log into the *nix box and change the IP info (including pointing to the new DNS servers).
My reason for the WTF wasn't how long it took me to DO my job... my point was that this is your hard earned tax dollars at work! Thw WTF is that this is standard operating proceedure in various US Gov agencies.
Thanks!
TC
BTW - This is a true story! I'm just glad it is finally done. Now on to monitoring!
Admin
Unfortunately, this is true. This is the result of focusing on "Process" instead of results. Happens all the time. The "professional" project manager is the ultimate example of someone who does nothing but create paperwork to justify their employment...
Admin
Unfortunately, this is true. This is the result of focusing on "Process" instead of results. Happens all the time. The "professional" project manager is the ultimate example of someone who does nothing but create paperwork to justify their employment...
Admin
WTF #3: Suggesting that an employee should set up linux-based web servers on his own that can potentially expose a large telecommunications company to a serious security breach. It's easier to fire the knob for violating every IT security policy in the book than it is to forgive.
Admin
s/Government/Big UK Business/g
Except, we're slower. 6 months to get approval for a one line change explicitly recommended by the vendors documentation.
Admin
[quote user="T.C. - the submitter"]Sigh...
When I read the first replies I was sad... people think I suck! I'm not lazy! I work very hard and have worked with some of the best companies in the US.
Then some people started to stand up for me. Thank you. [quote] Thanks to you TC! An excellent story. As TopCoder and others have said - for those of you who think this is bullsh^t/exaggeration/whatever, you have just never working the right (wrong) type of place.
Quick example of my pain: I can order an overnight delivery part for prototyping work. STill takes 3 weeks to get to my desk. (3 weeks = 1.5weeks to order + overnight + 1.3 weeks to get through incoming stores). Oh and it costs $400 in overheads/labour to place an order of any size - like for the $25 piece of wood we needed (to do a MIL spec test BTW, but that is another story).
As others have said, it is the size of the orgainsiation that gives rise to the ineratia/beaurocracy - doesn't matter if it government/private defence/commercial.
And a nod to those who have pointed out there ARE reasons behind having a process in place (despite the process sometimes being corrupted). Running acceptance test for the client (in Oil platform work), and a cowboy coder throws in a change overnight for a bugfix without regression testing. Then we engineers have to scramble and scrap, and the salesmen have to smooch, to not have a $10m job rejected on the spot.
Admin
This is exactly why I turned down jobs at "big" companies and one at a national public union head office. I saw what this drone-ish lifestyle did to my dad.
I make a little bit less than I could have working where I do now but I'm 10x happier. Slightly less money is worth my sanity. Besides, if I was in that situation I'd probably just blow all the extra cash on booze anyway just to forget the day.
Admin
As someone who works in the U.S. financial industry, I can definitely say the story is plausible. And I second the assertion that while the red tape sucks, there is a reason for it.
At my previous job (a large midwestern finance company) one of my first tasks was to make a small change to a batch process that fed loan data to several downstream processes. It was a one-line change, took all of about 10 minutes for me to make the change and test it. However, the standard process to get this thing requested, approved, and into production went like this:
Project approval and funding approval: 5 days (this does not include the downstream impact analysis that had to be completed prior to project approval) Procurement of development resource (me): 3 days Development: 1 day Shared testing (basically, initial QA with another developer): 3 days (had to find someone who had time to do the testing) Acceptance of project for QA review: 3 days Schedule test and production releases with Change Management and secure approval for release: 2 days Move project to QA servers:4 days (QA builds were done once a week) QA: 2 weeks (QA was understaffed, behind schedule, and there were several higher priority projects already in the queue) Move project to integrated test environment: 1 week (INTG builds were done once a week) Move project to production: 3 days Total elapsed time: 45 days.
Contrast this with how things are done at my current job (a subsidiary of a large national bank). A batch process was changed 3 months ago to accommodate a change in a data feed from the corporate office. The change took about a day, and it was put into production a week later. No documentation, no impact analysis, no record of what was changed, who changed it, or how to roll back if something went wrong.
Elapsed time: 1 week.
Everything was peachy for a couple of weeks, until someone complained that several departments were getting incomplete month-end compliance reports. These were SEC-related documents, so the managers were very interested in finding out why they were wrong. Without documentation, it took a couple of days worth of hunting to trace the bad extracts back to the source batch process. Ultimately we discovered that the change made to the process had caused it to fail to write certain expected values into its extract, which triggered the chain of bad extracts to be produced downstream.
Elapsed time to hunt down the problem, do an impact analysis, rework the batch process, test it, and get it back into production: about 2 weeks.
I'd rather deal with the red tape, knowing that what's out in production actually works, has been properly tested, and won't hork something else downstream, than deal with the all-too-frequent fire drills that we go through at my current job (which, incidentally, has implemented more stringent testing and promotion procedures to prevent the aforementioned fire drill from happening again).
Admin
Yeah - that would be normal
I can tell some horror stories about this kinda stuff. Like being the developer, and sole end user on a piece of software used to test a deliverable piece of hardware for the government, and finding - gasp, a bug (after the software had been stable for 2 years)
(note: all these steps have to be done on paper)
The End User (me) had to fill out a bug report, and send it to the developer (me)
The Developer (me) had to find the bug, and send back a proposed revison back to the end user (me), and to the 'committee'
The 'committee' had to meet to approve the proposed fix - the 'committee' was the End User (me), The developer (me), my manager (who had never used a computer in his life - hey, it was 20+ years ago), and a rep from the prime contractor
The committe's results got sent to the Navy for approval
Approval came back to the prime contractor, who forwarded it to the 'committee'
The committee then gave approval to me to get the source code from the "sourcecode repository manager" (me)
The Programmer (me) got to make the change, and send it to QA (me) who signed off, and sent it to the end user (me) for final test, who signed off, and then had the prime contractor check the test - who signed off
QA (me) then got to release the software to the end user (me), had the programmer (me) send the latest versions back to the sourcecode repository manager (me), to have it locked away, and when that was done, paperwork had to subitted to the 'committee', the programmer, and the end user
In case you didn't notice - the ONLY person who actually DID anything was me - but I actually had to fill out pages of documents to myself, and sign them off, then go meet with the boss, and the prime contractor (usually got lunch out of that)
Typically took 3 weeks or so for the paperwork to go from the committee to the prime, to the Navy, and back down - all for a 60 second fix
Admin
And what else changed because of that line of code? Did you do all the proper regression testing? Did you properly perform the change on your local build, then commit the change to the repository, then have your build machine perform a full build from a clean checkout?
Or are these the "bureaucratic", useless practices that you skipped to get your "brillant" fix in?
Release dates can be moved, shoddy code can only be posted here.
Admin
I was a PC Tech back in Win3.1 days and observed an H1B type Cobol Programmer contractor sitting at her PC, day after day, week after week, doing nothing but playing solitaire. All day every day. Probably waiting for approval for this or that minor program change. One evening I simply removed solitaire and all other games from her PC. Sure enough, the problem call came through that this critical user couldn't boot her PC and it was Priority 1. When I responded, I was quietly laughing my ass off when I asked her to show me the problem. "
"The PC boots just fine!!"
I'm sure her salary was ultimately being paid by taxpayers.
Admin
I worked at the Federal Transit Administration and this is exactly my experience there. I had tasks that I submitted to the CCB (Change Control Board) that would take 6 weeks or more to get approval because if a single member of the board couldn't make it they would cancel the meeting. What is worse is that the members of the CCB didn't know what they were talking about or understand the changes.
Working in the federal government was the worst work experience of my life. Everyone laughs and jokes about government's inefficencies but what they don't realize it that it is worse than even the jokes. Furthermore, they go and vote for people who will create more federal agencies and expect a different outcome.
Admin
Changing a non-functional line of code to what that line of code would need to be to be functional should not be an issue. Either a line of code works, or it does not.
"What else changed because of that line of code?". Hmm, let me think: when compiled, the product actually worked. As opposed to, say, did not work?
I don't know where you work, but if something big is shipping, its momentum is taking it out the door regardless. Typical managerial response: 'Pfft, just one line of code wrong... we can handle that later.'
Admin
UNFREAKIN BELIVEABLE...YOU MUST BE ON THOSE SO CALLED G.S. EMPLOYEES!!! T.C. IS FAR FROM WTF LAND...SO GET A FREAKIN CLUE DIPWAD G.S.
Admin
Seriously, who let the AOL ID-10-T people out of their cages?? My brain is bleeding more from this line of wisdom than it is from reading Barrens chat!
-- Seejay
Admin
Hope you learned your lesson: Throw them in the trash and feign ignorance.
Rich