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Admin
Sorry to say that Tim is the WTF in this one. Company IT is a bit of a WTF for needing to schedule a meeting to discuss giving someone more disk space (where I work, we just have to open a ticket, though we do have to include a sentence about why we need it), but IT definitely isn't going to just accept some hard drive from someone to connect to a company computer.
It's also Tim's fault for letting it become an urgent problem. Either he was slowly using up the disk space and wasn't paying attention to how much he had left, or he really did absolutely zero planning for how much he would need (or at least whether or not what he already had would be enough).
Admin
Honestly, this whole series reads like the story of a coding cowboy riding in from the wild west of home development and into the big city of corporate life and finding out, to his shock, that there are these things called rules and procedures that must be followed. Seriously, like, has he newer heard of a little thing called accounting?
Admin
And more to the point, Coding Cowboy is riding into the world of heavily regulated corporate life. The regulators want to know that you know where all your equipment came from, and that you've done some vetting to make sure they didn't come with malware preinstalled. The bigger you are, the worse it gets, because every additional country you do business in adds a new set of regulations and regulators interpreting them, and you have to follow the least-permissive union of all of those regulations.
The real fun is when you work in IT security for such a company, and your job is to pretend to be the bad guy to find holes in your defenses before they do. In that case, your life involves constant explaining why you need to do X even though it's contrary to policy, because the bad guys aren't constrained by the policy that says you can't do X. You can't determine if the controls that are supposed to keep you from doing X at all are working, if you're not allowed to even try doing X. Add a regulation that says you have to do such testing, and you're deep into the world of Catch-22.
Admin
I deal with users like this all the time. It's always interesting to guess when they'll calm down and figure out how to work with the system.
Admin
Same thing with Researchers at Universities.
They also think they can bypass any rule if it makes their work even slightly more complicated.
F.eks. try to explain to them that No, you can not connect a Win7 computer to the internet or get a 4k screen to fit on a mobile phone via remote desktop.... Even thinking about connecting a Win7 computer directly to the internet is insane....
Admin
I fully expect part 3 to be the big reveal that Tim C is the bad guy of the story & the actual submitter is someone in Desktop Support who had to run virus scans after discovering Tim C's 40GB porn folder.
Maybe there's a WTF in that no one clearly defined how much space would be necessary at the start of the project, but that doesn't much seem like Tim C's style either.
Sometimes there are WTFs when you have to get approvals from multiple managers or the "business justification" needs to be incredibly baroque or bespoke, but "I wanted to plug an unreviewed component which might be engineered to fail after its 90-day warranty for all we know into something in the computer room & put critical project files on it but they made me fill out a ticket‽‽‽" ain't it.
But please, keep WTFs like this coming. We love making fun of stupid situations; it's why we're here. If we end up making fun of OP, that's fine too.
Admin
Even worse, the seeds from which those rules and procedures grew into a vast mass of bureaucracy are things that a home developer might benefit from in his/her home. (Use a bug tracker more elaborate than Notepad(1), get code reviews if you can find someone to help, etc.)
(1) No, I'm not suggesting going to the other extreme by installing Jira in your own home, but almost anything is more elaborate than Notepad.
Admin
I have to do a lot of compliance work - no I'm not happy but this is the way the cookie crumbles. Anyway, indeed every bit of hardware has to go through procurement. Because, like it or not, traceability of everything is a key requirement nowadays. It's a pity development has come to this point, but please don't blame the guys and gals that try to keep up a semblance of formal process. We hate it as much as you do...
Admin
Not just rules, but excessive rules. A meeting over 40Gb? That hasn't been reasonable for a long time. And the more the bureaucracy, the more I'd be asking for way more than that. 200, say, so we don't have to do this again any time soon.
And that's for development. The live system is going to "need" way, way, more than that if it's in any way going to be my fault when the database expands (possibly because the "reasonable, stop whinging you cowboy" procedures require three identical copies on the same server or something equally useless).
Admin
I worked at a place where IT sent out an email every month asking for storage projections for the main file server. If you needed storage on the file server you had an amount, but if you needed more you had to tell IT so they could provision it on the server. Or tell them during the projections email so they could add it to the storage pool ahead of time.
I never ran out of disk space on the server, so I don't know how much they really allocated for the project I was on, but I guess it's so IT has a heads up if they need to upgrade storage because a new project might need a few TB of storage.
Admin
It might not be his, or his team's, code which needs the extra space. It might be some test databases which they slop the data between, to see if their code and/or the underlying db engine are fast enough.
The extra space might only be needed on the dev system, and not on the production system.
The extra space might be needed only during compliation, to hold the compiler's workfiles and/or final binaries. I ran into that compiling the kernel and userland of OpenBSD on a netbook with an Intel Atom 270 CPU, 2GB RAM, and 4GB of non-volatile storage. Temporarily hanging an 8GB hard drive off a USB port, partitioning it, and newfs-ing it solved the problem. After the compilation, I mv'd the new binaries to the appropriate directories, dismounted the 8GB drive, rebooted, and all was well.
Predicting how large a/the end-user's(s') database will grow to: sorry, my Magic 8-Ball is broken.
(Magritte -- "You could have resealed the package"): You are trusting him to write your code. If he was intending to compromise your business, or your product, he would not need to attach a malware-laden device to your system(s)!
Admin
This whole comments section reminds me of a friend's work. There was a strong procurement process for everything, all equipment had to have a paper trail to the source, and importantly, all files had to be saved to an approved file server that is secured and backed up by IT.
But the file servers could only be accessed from approved computers. The approved, company-procured computers had 2gb of ram, not enough to run the 6 powerpoints, 15 word docs, 10 ie tabs (the company's official browser, which half of the company's systems required), and 10 chrome tabs (ibecause the other half of the company's systems don't support ie) that the job demanded. This was in 2024. This meant that everyone brought their own laptop and usbs, because that was the only practical way to get files from the network to other computers, and a common way of sharing files because one has to put in a ticket with IT if they want to sent or recieve an email with an attachment, which took at least day for IT to process.
Then the company network got owned, it turned out that IT wasn't doing any backups, and everything had to be rebuild from the copies on unauthorized storage devices.
Side note, to the person who says "you can not connect a Win7 computer to the internet", this company, again, in 2024, had ms-dos computers running the entire payroll and scheduling system, with a couple terminals in every office. Because dos is insecure, they are not allowed on the company's network, so they were instead connected directly to the internet.
Admin
This is the sort of thing I had to deal with a lot during the years. Yes, I understand workers don't like being tied down by rules. It slows things down. It's annoying. Especially for us creative engineer types. We want to get things done, get them done well and most importantly get them done without friction.
But rules exist for a reason. And at certain levels and positions ultimately your job is not to question why, not to understand or to feel they are smart or good or fair but to OBEY. At some point you just have to shut up and accept that rules are made by the rule making people and obeyed by the rule obeying people.
And I think it's safe to say that Tim falls squarely into the later category.
Admin
You wrote, "Rules exist for a reason".
I disagree slightly. I'd rewrite that as, "rules exist for one or more reasons."
Some of those reasons are bad. Some of the rules themselves are bad, or /become/ bad as time passes and circumstances change.
Enough bad rules can kill a company through wasted time, wasted materials, and decreased staff morale.
Most rules are never reviewed for relevance and effectiveness, nor aporopriately modified or discarded.
A company whose culture is "shut up abd obey the executive fiat" is headed for accelerated death.
Admin
It's not that what you say is untrue. It's just that we are describing things from different levels of abstraction.
Yes, rules need to be understood, reviewed and generally treated not as gospel but as a living breathing thing that needs to adapt or die. An organization that does not change and adapt is one that dies. But that is on an organizational level. On the level of individual participants in that organization things are different.
Unless you are working in a startup or really small company where everyone wears multiple hats you as the end worker can not and should not be expected to participate in the whole thing on an organizational level. You simply do not have the context or perspective to do this from.
A rule that looks perfectly sound from your perspective as a widget maker might actually be hilariously bad for the company. And vice versa, a rule that you think is merely red tape designed to maliciously slow you down might actually be a critical requirement further down the chain or a compliance issue that only ever becomes relevant 5 years into the support contract.
As an individual member of the organization you or I are akin to the blind men feeling up an elephant. We each only have a tiny portion of the big picture. And the larger and more complex the organization and the lower down the pyramid of organization you are the smaller this portion becomes.
Which means at some point you just have to accept that the rules are as they are because someone, somewhere whose job it is to decide on these things made that decision. And just live with that. Thrust that the people higher up the chain whose job it is to make the rules did what they did for a reason.
Or if you don't, find another job.
Well, that last part is good advice anyway. As I always used to say "Don't get too attached to your workplace. If the company fails, I'll find another job. If I die, they'll find another worker."
Admin
Honestly, the whole "approved vendor" here sounds like a thin-veiled kickback program. Which is depressingly common.
Admin
Not necessarily. There are a great number of perfectly legitimate things that could lead to such a relationship.
For example, you could have a legally exclusive contract with a company in exchange for a steep discount and bulk sales. That is hardly unusual. Or you might be working in an industry where components have to be rated for a certain capability such as EM or dust resistance. Or you might be operating in a security or regulatory environment that requires all equipment to have certain certifications. Or maybe management just thinks that buying from an OEM with a good warranty and support infrastructure is preferable to getting off brand equipment off Temu. The sort of supplier who might also be selling you whole machines complete with a support contract covering upgrades and maintenance.
There is no reason to automatically jump to the conclusion that someone is getting paid off.
Admin
Most of these include a kickback fairly often, in my experience. Also, the disgust in Margarite's reaction is a major red flag. Alas, also experience.
Admin
40 Gb (gigabits, i.e. 5 gigabytes) or 40 GB? It may not really matter to the story, but let's use the right terms, huh? Who measures hard drive space in gigabits??
Admin
Guts, your reaction of "he must have Obeyed The God-Given Rules" on thumb drive-sized $5 resource is not only ridiculous. It is the organizational illness that cripples Western economics. Recently Germany Audi car maker was hit by competition from Chine-produced AUDI, car price for the essentially same model was 4 times cheaper. How it can be? Rules, meetings, year-long decisions, inertia to get things done etc. Or course taxes, tariffs, climate taxes, labour laws etc. Bottom line, Germany loses money.
From the text, WTFX software was producing profit, like $100K a day. Now because this $5 thing is delayed, this company will lose $200-400K income. I know the corpo-drones will eagerly spit on this; "rules are rules" and this guy will not earn those lost money. But in the end, you just shooting in your knees.
Admin
The hard drive companies will, when they find out that they can make the same drive sound larger to the average consumer, without technically lying about capacity.
Admin
There are two kinds of people in this world. Those that accept the way it works and fit into it on their own free will and those that don't and get hammered into place until they do fit. Things simply are as they are.
This is not a moral judgment on whether the way they are is right or wrong, good or evil, smart or stupid etc. It's just how they are. We can no more judge the way of the world than we can the laws of gravity. We can just decide whether to jump out the window or use the stairs.
Admin
Sure, until the company loses millions of dollars because of a security breach caused by unvetted hardware or software, or because of a failure in a system that IT didn't know about and didn't have backups of.
Admin
That happens more often with the kickback schemes protected by such an attitude and regulations. So, I guess it all depends on a size of kickback. Well, obviously it won't cover the millions lost, but it might provide enough for several managers to get out in time, so, still win.
Admin
And you still prattle on about "kickbacks" as if it was relevant or important.
Admin
Maybe you should read up on what is AUDI. Hint: it is not independent of VW Group...
Admin
Kind of fascinating, watching the death of innovation be defended in a comment section.
Admin
Yes Tim, you're the bad guy. Rock up in any company IT dept. with a poundland hard-drive that you've bought or shoplifted yourself and yes, you will absolutely be told where to stick it. No, we're not installing it anywhere except the bin, you absolute duster. Yes, we need a meeting to expand a drive. It's called change control, and it's what grown-ups do. Get back on your coding horse and head out to the range, console cowboy.
Admin
Nobody of course, which is why you should take the "b" in Gb to be "byte" and this isn't the gotcha you think it is..
Admin
This meeting could have been an email (or, for better tracking and management, a ticket).
Admin
ah, so we're back to the "you know what it means" argument, and i call bs on that crutch. you know what i mean in this comment even though i'm not capitalizing anything. if entire articles started showing up here without them (god knows they already don't quite understand punctuation but let's imagine that's worse too for example) what would you say? most of those capitals don't even make a difference in meaning.