• (cs) in reply to pmv
    pmv:
    No offense but you do know programmers and it staff can't unionize don't you? I believe they're still considered 'munitions' much like air traffic controllers and defense contractors. Unless congress has rescinded that law , but I don't think so.

    If you'd quote the person you were responding to, it would make it easier to know WTF you're talking about.

    And FYI - some programmers and IT staff are part of a union; me for one. Have been for more than four years now.

    Next time have a clue what you're talking about before posting.

  • tshawn (unregistered)

    hmmm..'Initrod'...is that not the company that someone from 'Initech' went to work for?

  • rast (unregistered) in reply to Spectre
    Spectre:
    There are no other keys on this keyboard. Now what do you do?

    This meme will never grow old

  • Andrew Baker (unregistered) in reply to danixdefcon5

    Oh yes yes I do believe it's true.

    I was once written up, for not following the process. I had to get two desks ready for new employees. I needed to install phones. This consisted of plugging a phone into a wall. I took the first phone (sitting on desk) and plugged it in. A senior manager saw this and pulled me into his office, and proceeded to rip me a new one. For not following process. Evidently there was a form I had to fill out for phone installation. I had plugged in the first, I had to fill out the form for the second. 9 days later they sent out a phone specialist to plug in the phone.

    For 8 days the new employee had a phone on her desk, (but was not allowed to plug it in). And the service call cost the company $200.

  • Matt (unregistered) in reply to mrs_helm

    The best way to fight The Process is to maneuver so that the people who have the power to change it also suffer the consequence of the problem is causes.

  • Tourist (unregistered) in reply to danixdefcon5
    danixdefcon5:
    --:
    Funny but there is no way on earth it's true. No matter how ingrained "The Process" is in a company, if they lost an entire day due to something as stupid as this, people would be fired.
    You haven't worked in big-iron sites, have you?

    My previous work was at a large financial institution, where "changes" are a complex process involving things much like "The Process" mentioned here. Some of these "change requests" sometimes involved trivial things like "service something stop; service something start", but nothing is allowed to be done outside the change process. Urgent changes can skip the "changes board" meeting, but require even more signatures and a good explanation.

    Oh, and say, if something bad happens like the mainframe going down... well that might involve an Emergent change, which doesn't need that much signatures, but you'd better have a good, proven reason to do something like that.

    That said, I doubt "press F1 to continue" would've been an issue under said process.

    Yes, the only purpose of "The Process" is to be able to identify who to blame when shit hits the fan, that is the sole purpose! It doesn't ensure quality or anything else.

    In my previous company it took 1 week(sometimes longer if people were traveling) of meetings to change one line of code in the app.

  • Blake (unregistered)

    Thanks Enron!

  • D (unregistered) in reply to danixdefcon5

    I could see this happening at my last company. Not joking.

  • Now What (unregistered) in reply to rast
    rast:
    Spectre:
    There are no other keys on this keyboard. Now what do you do?

    This meme will never grow old

    This meme grew old. Now what do you do?

  • Daryl King (unregistered)

    This sounds alllll too familiar; here in the beautiful river-side town of Shower, Northern New England.

    ;~)

    DK

  • El Duderino (unregistered) in reply to danixdefcon5
    danixdefcon5:
    --:
    Funny but there is no way on earth it's true. No matter how ingrained "The Process" is in a company, if they lost an entire day due to something as stupid as this, people would be fired.
    You haven't worked in big-iron sites, have you?

    My previous work was at a large financial institution, where "changes" are a complex process involving things much like "The Process" mentioned here....

    My bank is getting more and more process oriented. In some ways it's a good thing but in other ways . . . well, here's the email I came back from vacation to:

    In addition to making updates as needed to the Information Technology Procedures Manual, we also committed to completing a full review annually. I am pleased to let you know that we completed this update cycle and have posted the updated procedures at http://it.mybank.com/procedures.htm.

    It is critically important that these procedures are accurate, understood, and regularly followed. They are not only the basis for how we provide service; they are also the basis for external reviews of our performance by auditors and examiners.

    My thanks to everyone who contributed to these updates. The Process be Praised!

    So I added that last bit but this article doesn't seem so far fetched anymore.

  • Aegrotatio (unregistered) in reply to bd

    Sorry but you just vectored another I.T. Urban Legend.

    Congratulations!

    si

  • OBloodyhell (unregistered) in reply to Grovesy
    Grovesy:
    I think I've got a fix for removing the process.

    Simply remove all the lines from the process documentation which state

    'Once complete, walk to server room door, Open Server Room door, place one foot in front of the other... Leave server room, turn around, close server room door...'

    In a few weeks anyone who knows anything about the process will be stuck in the server room

    For my money, the really impressive thing is how literally everyone at this company got their heads so far up their asses that they were sticking back out the top.

    It seems to me some physicists and mathematicians would want to know more about this, since it appears to violate known laws of physics. It seems as though it might be usable in fusion reactor design, if it were properly understood.

    A new triumph for Cranio-Rectal Insertion Syndrome!!

    That's my US$.02, anyway.

  • IT Guy (unregistered) in reply to danixdefcon5

    I agree. I work at a pharmaceutical company. We once had a failure in one of our UPS grids during a switch test. Normally, this error should have been caught by the other devices, but a tech of the company providing them had set the emergency routines to default during a check-up accidently, thus the grid booted down all main NDS servers (in a very orderly fashion, I must admit). Due to a very specific process which was so specific to satisfy regulatory requirements, we had to call a tech from the said company; who arrived 2 hours later. Our processes have been updated since, to the disenjoyment of our employees, who quite enjoyed the extended lunch break.

  • ryll (unregistered) in reply to danixdefcon5

    Urban legend or not, I have personally seen the likes of this happen far too many times - the worst was a 12 working day delay on approval for rebooting a router to clear an intermittant problem for over a thousand people, because someone in the chain of command was on leave and wasn't answering their mobile.

  • Wyrd (unregistered)

    If I were the junior tech--after The Process exploded into a huge thing, I would have

    1. Made a mental note to start seeking other long term employment
    2. Repeatedly make the suggestion that the request be modified from a request to press F1 to a request to edit the BIOS settings to disable the Halt-on-no-keyboard present error. I realize that this attempt to modify the request might, in itself, cause more Process headaches, and the server might be down for several days rather than just the one, but it would be worth it in the long term.

    The people I really feel bad for in this situation are all those out in the field who needed that server for their work. If I were one of those people, and if I found out what was going on, I would make the same plans as in point #1 above.

    Any IT dept that operates like this clearly has its priorities out of whack. Any business that lets IT operate this way either has its priorities out of whack or else is woefully out of the loop as to what's going on.

    -- Furry cows moo and decompress.

  • Willy (unregistered) in reply to flaquito

    Yes, but they still have the old mechanical switches. Putting in a new keyboard switch would require purchasing approval for the kvm, then for each cable, then you would require approvals to unplus each old cable from the old kvm and plug into the new kvm...that would take months to years to get accomplished.

  • jw.o (unregistered) in reply to danixdefcon5

    I was let go from my last job for powering on a kernel panic'ed loghost. Yes, a passive loghost. The official reason for termination? (And this is a direct quote) "Your fixing problems without management approval sets the example for others to do the same. We cannot allow that." So this 'press F1 to continue' story is entirely possible.

  • Nevyn (unregistered) in reply to danixdefcon5
    danixdefcon5:
    --:
    Funny but there is no way on earth it's true. No matter how ingrained "The Process" is in a company, if they lost an entire day due to something as stupid as this, people would be fired.
    You haven't worked in big-iron sites, have you?

    My previous work was at a large financial institution, where "changes" are a complex process involving things much like "The Process" mentioned here. Some of these "change requests" sometimes involved trivial things like "service something stop; service something start", but nothing is allowed to be done outside the change process. Urgent changes can skip the "changes board" meeting, but require even more signatures and a good explanation.

    Oh, and say, if something bad happens like the mainframe going down... well that might involve an Emergent change, which doesn't need that much signatures, but you'd better have a good, proven reason to do something like that.

    That said, I doubt "press F1 to continue" would've been an issue under said process.

    At a big IT firm I was working for this error did indeed come up except that there was no one in the server room to clear the issue. It involved a 8 hour delay while people tried to figure out what had gone wrong. Meanwhile, the team that had requested the change which lead to the reboot, were told that responsibility for any outages as a result of their change requests would fall on them in the future.

    The customer soon got frustrated as no changes to their I.T. systems got through as the risk was just too high.

  • Aaron Zacharkiw (unregistered)

    I think the Vogons got their system from The Process.

    I think it's time to feed a Vogon's Grandmother to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.

Leave a comment on “Slaves to The Process”

Log In or post as a guest

Replying to comment #:

Log Out

« Return to Article