This Business and Moment...
- Thread starter randomshenans
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Soldato
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I can beat that.
I had booked yesterday off to recover from helping with a house move all weekend.
Got to work today - junior said "Aren't you on holiday?".
Yes, yes I am. I booked two days off for recovery.
Off I **** back home
The massive lull at my place continues. I feel it's truly been years now. I feel like it's been pretty much since we finished migrating to cloud. We were promised that moving to cloud was right for the business and would enable a whole host of new skills and opportunities.
Reality is, it's cost a **** ton and continues to cost more than on prem, and all the good stuff in Azure portal is locked away from anyone but the Ops team. Somehow we've become even less agile. More complex. There are basic things we used to be able to do on prem which cloud has made so cumbersome and tedious.
The red tape at my place has beaten me to the point now where I just cba. I go to make a new thing/improvement/change and server A won't be able to talk to server B. Standard. I normally have to battle and fight this with meetings, design documents and CRs just to justify why it's needed. Now in 2025 I wait for the thing to get blocked and then stop caring. I tell my boss it's blocked and let him fight it. Things then tend to gradually fall off the radar until ideas are canned. Then a new idea and cycle starts. It's pretty tragic. But I get paid still and have good benefits so... It's damaging my career long term I know, but whilst the job market is as it is, one continues.
Reality is, it's cost a **** ton and continues to cost more than on prem, and all the good stuff in Azure portal is locked away from anyone but the Ops team. Somehow we've become even less agile. More complex. There are basic things we used to be able to do on prem which cloud has made so cumbersome and tedious.
The red tape at my place has beaten me to the point now where I just cba. I go to make a new thing/improvement/change and server A won't be able to talk to server B. Standard. I normally have to battle and fight this with meetings, design documents and CRs just to justify why it's needed. Now in 2025 I wait for the thing to get blocked and then stop caring. I tell my boss it's blocked and let him fight it. Things then tend to gradually fall off the radar until ideas are canned. Then a new idea and cycle starts. It's pretty tragic. But I get paid still and have good benefits so... It's damaging my career long term I know, but whilst the job market is as it is, one continues.
Have had the same experience. I'm glad to hear it's not just me.
Think I've persuaded the boss to take a punt on hiring one of the graduates I worked with when I did my stint at uni earlier in the year. At least on a zero hours to start with and see how he goes, we don't really have the funds to be spooging on training at the moment, but given 90% of the grads are out of work, I figure any work experience is valuable and a smart kid could take a load of donkey work off me. A win for all concerned, assuming he can pull his weight
Welcome to the future!
Give all our infrastructure to the big tech companies. Let them lock the knowledge behind their over complicated infrastructure, we have limited access to behind a huge pay wall. Then have bosses complain about IT skills shortage and lack of basic IT knowledge.
Thank Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, IBM and Google for that.
Working in a startup at the moment, cloud is an absolute godsend, there's no way we'd be able to spin up a company and build it out and be agile like this with just on-premises infrastructure. IT helps that the CEO is an information black hole and did all the AWS certs for fun years ago so know how to use it all.
There'll certainly be a point in your turnover where on-premises may become more attractive, but at least there's healthy competition in the cloud space.
There'll certainly be a point in your turnover where on-premises may become more attractive, but at least there's healthy competition in the cloud space.
At my place it's not the cloud provider that is the issue, or cloud itself. It's the governance and control of access which cripples the usage of cloud and damages innovation, exploration, change, improvements, ideas. It's a red tape issue and a lack of willingness to give up control and to trust IT pros to do their jobs.
This because you have an open CEO.
Our IT locks everything down. I'm in IT and there's a litany of things I can't do due to the lock downs. Likewise the levels of bureaucracy just sucks up resources. To the point where you get new staff but getting less done as their time is spent doing admin.
Our IT locks everything down. I'm in IT and there's a litany of things I can't do due to the lock downs. Likewise the levels of bureaucracy just sucks up resources. To the point where you get new staff but getting less done as their time is spent doing admin.
Same as my current company.
My favourite memory for calls with people (as the owner of one of these cloud platforms):
* a project screamed they had to have a call, turns out that their selected container/service provider must have full admin of the entire AWS org to work. My response was short: No. The service was national infrastructure and the folks, the devops needed counter terrorism checks (CTC), plus their software would be incompatible... etc..
* a project data scientist wanted to take production PII data onto a laptop for processing during a late security architecture review. Kicking and screaming resulted - always funny when a project doesn't do its work, gets the sign off from legal, risk and security. Don't shoot the person that points it out. It makes me sound like a BOFH.. but when your platform holds the entire group of airlines, subsidiary service companies and airport systems and your calendar has three meetings on the report submission, and then covering the report in steerco with CDIOs, CISCO, Head of Risk, CTO, and SLT from multiple companies.. You damn right I'm gonna make you the professional you ain't.
I created a sandbox system, outside of the production/internal connectivity, that allowed teams to operate as they saw fit. The sandbox was charged to the cost code too, their budget owner had to give it the thumbs up (all automated approvals) but they could do what they wanted (within the platform permissions) which included external access to market place and AI etc.
I had personal (restricted cost and session time) that was paid for by the global budget - the idea was for people to use for AWS learning. You wouldn't believe the number of projects that attempted to get me change the charge restrictions so they could charge outside of their budget codes! No public internet for you on these either!
This made it quick for PoCs, but it's also safe and secure for people learning. The Dev environments were stricter and aligned with production, so you'd not be developing something that would be incompatible in the real environments.
All our platform code was in a repo for anyone in the company to view. It meant they could see what the system would do (and how best to circumvent we found on one instance!).
The result accelerated use and transformation. It became a standard way of working. They didn't have to spend time integrating with the BSS/OSS/security/networks, the CMDB or finops - it was all automated and integrated into the organisation. The CISO switched from NO to happy the baselines the platform provided, it meant that security review meetings were faster.
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I can't say too much without exposing who I work for but basically when I first came into the company, the first couple of years I radically changed a load of stuff for the better and automated a load of processes. The company probably saved hundreds of thousands of pounds due to this. As time went on it became harder and harder to build automated pipelines and we ended up building in workarounds/hacks/loopholes to get things done. Over time things would break gradually as ops team would change stuff via policy or architecturally. Things became fragile and hard to maintain.
Our reputation as a team was suffering because things we built were viewed as "used to work but won't keep working" rather than the truth being "used to work but OPs team changes broke it". OPs/infra team changes got prioritised and were allowed regardless of what broke because .... well... too many reasons I can't go into. Mostly political/historical company reasons.
There has always been a massive disconnect and hard wall between apps/devs/test/data teams and our core Ops/infra/network teams. Everyone seems to integrate and collaborate until it comes to that wall where things get blocked.
We are also allergic to the idea of open source or non Microsoft/Windows anything so my Linux skills have dropped off a cliff in recent times, which is a shame.
We think we're agile and at the forefront of IT tooling and ideas. It's laughable how out of touch we are. I'm in the devops space but basically we collab in the direction of dev, but not ops. OPs is all blocked and locked down. I can't do any IAC stuff or spin up anything. I can't even click monitoring alerts I get emailed about my own servers. So I get the email, but the access to the actual clickable alert link is blocked. Most stuff inside the Azure portal is blocked and has been for years.
The thing is, people can't see it this way. They feel this is a compliant and fully functional, healthy IT landscape.
Our reputation as a team was suffering because things we built were viewed as "used to work but won't keep working" rather than the truth being "used to work but OPs team changes broke it". OPs/infra team changes got prioritised and were allowed regardless of what broke because .... well... too many reasons I can't go into. Mostly political/historical company reasons.
There has always been a massive disconnect and hard wall between apps/devs/test/data teams and our core Ops/infra/network teams. Everyone seems to integrate and collaborate until it comes to that wall where things get blocked.
We are also allergic to the idea of open source or non Microsoft/Windows anything so my Linux skills have dropped off a cliff in recent times, which is a shame.
We think we're agile and at the forefront of IT tooling and ideas. It's laughable how out of touch we are. I'm in the devops space but basically we collab in the direction of dev, but not ops. OPs is all blocked and locked down. I can't do any IAC stuff or spin up anything. I can't even click monitoring alerts I get emailed about my own servers. So I get the email, but the access to the actual clickable alert link is blocked. Most stuff inside the Azure portal is blocked and has been for years.
The thing is, people can't see it this way. They feel this is a compliant and fully functional, healthy IT landscape.
They've changed our proxy server at work and now the internet be broken. What's funny is nobody has the courage to tell them the things that broke, because strictly speaking they aren't all necessarily work related things. Not bad places at all, just places one may go when one has time. Loads of sites just won't display images now or function as they should and this is deemed to be by design and perfectly normal.
Another thing to add to the list of degradation. Literally nothing improves. We only seem to take away or make things harder/worse/restricted.
Another thing to add to the list of degradation. Literally nothing improves. We only seem to take away or make things harder/worse/restricted.
Soldato
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We have this too, a new tool installed last month that blocks certain certificate chains. It has broken some work stuff in browsers (i.e. visiting our smart TV app via PC), but also lots of other sites.
Technically not critical to my job but on work-tangential tasks this week I've been blocked from Bedford borough council (office has planning permission letters for the exterior), Netgear website, and Nationwide building society. I was doing my expenses when accessing the latter.
Exactly this. Our managed IT company responded to a ticket after 2 business days (4 hour SLA), and tried to organise a call next Monday. In the end I just complained to our single in-house analyst who sent me a temporary admin password and I fixed the issue in 90 seconds.
SLAs...
My record is 15 weeks to get a single port opened on the firewall here between two (non prod) internal facing app servers.
It's a 5 minute job.
Soldato
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It's always the simplest of stuff isn't it!
So - update on this grievance I've had at work. My colleague raised a formal grievance, meaning meetings with HR etc. Talked through it from my side, including showing screenshots/evidence, along with discussing anything else around the whole issue. I went in VERY open minded, clearly explained my side and how I believed that it was a huge misunderstanding - and would welcome a mediated conversation to resolve it.
HR seemed surprised at the conversations had, my colleague had clearly not told them some information, including all the times that she had tried to contact me (11 calls in 20 mins).
The upshot of this is - HR were previously not aware of her behaviour and all the complaints that her line manager had received about it, including being dropped from several project teams as a result of their attitude. HR spoke to her line manager, so they now have this information.
The investigation has now concluded, with an outcome meeting tomorrow. I'm reasonably confident that it won't be upheld, but if I have something to learn from this, then I welcome recommendations.
HR seemed surprised at the conversations had, my colleague had clearly not told them some information, including all the times that she had tried to contact me (11 calls in 20 mins).
The upshot of this is - HR were previously not aware of her behaviour and all the complaints that her line manager had received about it, including being dropped from several project teams as a result of their attitude. HR spoke to her line manager, so they now have this information.
The investigation has now concluded, with an outcome meeting tomorrow. I'm reasonably confident that it won't be upheld, but if I have something to learn from this, then I welcome recommendations.
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Soldato
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- 11 May 2007
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- Surrey
Naff all work coming in, nearly 3 months at tickover (working maybe 1-2 days a week on average). Not good.
Going to have to start marketing myself more. You'd think as a marketer that would be easy, right? Wrong.
Going to have to start marketing myself more. You'd think as a marketer that would be easy, right? Wrong.
Soldato
- Joined
- 22 Jul 2014
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- 3,929
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- Oxon
The company I joined in Jan feels like it's going down the pan - we acquired some more companies a few months back and it was all good and full of optimism... But since then it's been one problem after another, redundancies, and general **** that has soured everyone's mood.
The big thing is the change in organisation structure - we now have a business systems team run by someone with no experience in any of the system nor project management. All our integration and transformation projects are going through them without any formal processes or structures.
We're reimplementing Salesforce, a new billing engine and integrating it all (and 6 new entities) into NetSuite. There's no project plans, no project management, stakeholders aren't involved. CFO is only interested in getting to the next sale of the company to another PE firm.
We migrated onto a new MS tenant this week and I now have two profiles in everything (4 in teams) as SSOs and SharePoint weren't migrated yet.
I had a call today with a NetSuite consultant just to get some external resource to help with the NetSuite piece and hopefully sit in on the other projects which I haven't been invited to (I'm the internal NetSuite admin) but I'll probably get in trouble for doing that. Beyond caring at this point.
Reading some of the posts further up this page about moving to the cloud, bureaucracy, it feels like we're heading that way. Things I can fix myself in minutes will take weeks.
At least I'm off next week and can forget about it for a while.
The big thing is the change in organisation structure - we now have a business systems team run by someone with no experience in any of the system nor project management. All our integration and transformation projects are going through them without any formal processes or structures.
We're reimplementing Salesforce, a new billing engine and integrating it all (and 6 new entities) into NetSuite. There's no project plans, no project management, stakeholders aren't involved. CFO is only interested in getting to the next sale of the company to another PE firm.
We migrated onto a new MS tenant this week and I now have two profiles in everything (4 in teams) as SSOs and SharePoint weren't migrated yet.
I had a call today with a NetSuite consultant just to get some external resource to help with the NetSuite piece and hopefully sit in on the other projects which I haven't been invited to (I'm the internal NetSuite admin) but I'll probably get in trouble for doing that. Beyond caring at this point.
Reading some of the posts further up this page about moving to the cloud, bureaucracy, it feels like we're heading that way. Things I can fix myself in minutes will take weeks.
At least I'm off next week and can forget about it for a while.