• bvs23bkv33 (unregistered)

    MEGAfrist

  • Faded (unregistered)

    Was this General Electric Corp? This sounds strangely familiar to an experience I had with them.

  • Huppenzuppen (unregistered) in reply to Faded

    The article talks about 70000 employees, GE has four times as many.

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    This could be every large company I've ever worked for.

  • DT (unregistered)

    No, the moral of the story is that if you do try to go through the process, you will be just another task in a queue and nothing will get done unless you also start making phone calls every day until management makes it happen.

  • isthisunique (unregistered)

    Once I had to wait for 8 months for new servers.

    We had a requirement to have servers in the company we were operating and the only decent solution to this was colo. First the systems department were asked to spec out the servers without knowing anything about the application. They didn't do too badly despite that but did over do a few things (technically could have had half the servers or simply two, FPed). The cost was about $50000 (including redundancy for everything mission critical) for a project that was intended to and has made millions of dollars (now into the tens). Each server was role specific and tailored to that. Standard layout, application, database and gateway (LB, network, firewall, termination, etc) plus a couple of auxiliary servers.

    A business partner took a look at this as someone decided to hand the bill over to them, scoffed and insisted they could get it done much cheaper. Eight months later they finally gave back their shopping list which we had to stick to that was exactly $1 cheaper. Worse than that the hardware had been mixed up. A gateway server which only needed decent CPU had oodles of RAM, dozens of storage slots and two BBU RAID controllers. Meanwhile the app server had no hardware RAID, the database server had hardly any storage slots, the app server had hardly any RAM. It was a mess.

    We did our best to swap what we could without risking the now very tight schedule or breaking any expensive gear but the setup is still pretty stupid. We simply had to make do though.

    After all this, when we started we only needed a little bit of bandwidth. To get more was a monthly charge so we didn't want to expand until needed. By the time we finally got the servers which was delayed and screwed up because of the business partner, now client (since that attitude was always make them pay, they ended up owning everything), the client went berserk because we now needed a fatter pipe since the service had long ago successfully gone live on other leased/dedicated servers.

  • KB (unregistered)

    I went through a similar situation with a previous employer (private, $20B company) of mine. We needed two new SQL Servers. It took well over 10 months to go through the process of standing them up in the data center that was built a few years prior.

    We just went to Azure and migrated the data there. Took a week and had more hardware overall.

  • Developer Dude (google)

    Welcome to my world (50th largest corp in the world with an overseas HQ), but this doesn't come close to what we have gone thru to get something new deployed.

    Addendum 2018-07-18 11:09: Make that 20th largest corp

  • Bruce W (unregistered)

    Wow, I can't believe my nine-year-old WTF is a "classic". Still at the same company but now it's over 200,000 employees (gotta love acquisitions). We've implemented a pretty good internal cloud so provisioning servers is much easier now but the Mega Bureaucracy lives. I moved away from software development so I don't face it as much as I used to. Actually, some people would say I'm part of it now that I'm in Enterprise Security Compliance.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Bruce W

    Yep.

  • Deez (unregistered)

    Misfeasance?

  • (nodebb)

    Behold the glory that is my current workplace:

    • Create a DNS entry: 2-6 weeks

    • Add a user to an existing AD group: 1-2 weeks

    • Create a new VM, with nothing but the OS installed: 2-4 months (longer if they're busy)

    • Create a network share: 2-3 months OR (your deadline + 2 weeks), whichever is longer

    • Get accounting to pay a vendor who delivered a product 3 years ago: 9 months, IF you constantly badger the account department

    Several departments have hired their own "shadow IT" people so they don't have to rely on other departments. It's also common to outsource or hire contractors even when another department in the same building is supposed to do that job.

    Addendum 2018-07-18 19:01: (Times above are only if you know the correct form to fill out and use it appropriately. Some requests require extra info that is not in the form, and failure to provide it will result in a request being denied after a couple weeks. Sometimes there are multiple similar forms, but only 1 is real and the rest are decoys. Sometimes you are required to download and fill out an Excel file form and submit it as an attachment for the proper form.)

  • CodePosse (unregistered)

    So, from experience, I pretty much relocate myself to the team's office and make my physical presence known. I eat tuna, garlic and onion, sometimes lots of curry. I even take off my shoes, make loud-sad sighs, and I also watch videos and laugh out loud. I try my damned best to distract the people that will do anything to get me out of there. One day all this will work, until then, I am perfecting the art of annoyance.

  • WTFGuy (unregistered)

    If they'll let you work from home while awaiting the Bureaucracy delivering your next critical path item this sounds like total heaven.

  • (nodebb)

    Bruce remains positive saying that, maybe in a few years, after meetings to plan meetings, forms to request forms, they will have a process that only has an initial questionnaire of 10 pages and 75 questions.

    Said form which will never be allowed again after the first time someone uses the 75 question questionnaire instead of using the 150 like they're supposed to.

  • not a robot (unregistered)

    Frist! (but delayed by Bureaucracy)

  • jesus (unregistered)

    Yeah - seems pretty typical. I'm in another 70K or so employee company. The "IT head" was right, Bruce should have escalated it with him sooner. It's hard for those groups to prioritize when they're handling all this stuff from all the divisions. Some rando developer that keeps saying "it'll make us millions"...yeah, whatever. Anyone can just say that. This type of stuff frustrates the hell out of developers, but at least the spirit of the policies make sense. Probably the most irksome thing is the server group cancelling the first ticket.

  • (nodebb)

    The "IT head" was right, Bruce should have escalated it with him sooner.

    Didn't that happen in week 4? My reading of it was that he ignored it too and then blamed everyone else.

  • 🤷 (unregistered) in reply to Zemm

    Bruce called the PM, the Prime Minister. Not the head of the Mega Bureaucracy, like he should have!

  • Borg (unregistered)

    In the company I am working, it is not what the procedure is but who you know. So, following the rules will take you 2 to 3 months for e.g. connectivity or a new box installed. Saw one colleague get a box installed in 2 days by directly calling the one of the department doing the installation ;-)

    So, the river might run its course, doesn't mean that you can't sail on it to get to your destination faster...

  • jesus (unregistered) in reply to Zemm

    hmmm - could be. it says bruce's boss raised it up to the IT head of "the entire division", but was yelled at later by the IT head of "their division". reasonable to assume they could be the same.

    i will amend my statement to "bruce should have raised it up to the IT head more times...probably many more times".

  • (nodebb) in reply to Deez

    Misfeasance?

    Like malfeasance except it's because of incompetence rather than malice.

  • I Am A Robot (unregistered)

    So week 18 Bruce's head was one to roll, and two weeks later he's still working on the project?

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