• (nodebb)

    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).

  • 516052 (unregistered)

    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?

  • (nodebb) in reply to 516052

    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.

  • National Lab Rat (unregistered)

    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.

  • Yazeran (unregistered) in reply to National Lab Rat

    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....

  • The Andrew G your mother warned you about (unregistered) in reply to 516052

    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.

  • (nodebb) in reply to 516052

    finding out, to his shock, that there are these things called rules and procedures that must be followed

    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.

  • Jasmine (unregistered) in reply to Dragnslcr

    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...

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