Social Justice Warriors Thread

[SuburbanFarmer]

Can’t lose if you play both sides

[The Conservative]

Can’t lose if you play both sides

Being in charge of IT is a balancing act of control, security, and domination of ones domain.

Too much of one or too little elsewhere and it’s tine to look for a new job because you’ll end up like the Director of Equifax.

[SuburbanFarmer]

And you accomplish this by advocating both for and against cloud services. You must be really good at meetings.

[Ph64]

And you accomplish this by advocating both for and against cloud services. You must be really good at meetings.

Oh, look, it depends on what it is. A system to order office supplies online (pens, paper, etc) who cares if it's in "the cloud".

I bucked them on it when it came to things like the ethics investigation system, online legal cases, etc. I mean, seriously, this is info that "opposing council" in legal courtroom matters would *love* to get their hands on, and you want to let it out of your local control and put it out on the cloud?!? Are you nucking futz??!?

Yes, after I was gone I'm pretty sure they did it anyways, they pretty much moved all their IT to AWS, outsourcing as much as possible. Only one of my former coworkers is still there, last I knew (out of 6 of us 5 years ago), and he's just waiting for the axe to fall.

[SuburbanFarmer]

I’ve been working as a DBA for a shipping company for the past 7 months. About a month after I started, they hired a CIO, and demoted the former head of IT to ‘unknown development role’, and rolled out a new warehouse management system that completely failed. Nothing is compatible with our existing process.

So the solution was to shove all of the IT dept into a conference room for 2 months, to hammer it out. I got tossed into the warehouse with a laptop to ‘fix shipping issues’ because “it’s all in SQL”.

Since then, I’ve been more or less ignored and left to do my thing, which was fantastic. Made huge strides in repairing tech debt, and piecing systems together.

Now we’re shoving random things into The Cloud, because CIO needs to do something. Our operational reporting now runs dozens of queries against Production systems every 10 minutes, and our analytics reporting is all replicated into Azure, for... reasons.

Then a couple of days ago, CIO got the bug up his ass to implement personal source control over any changes made to Production systems. Including index changes, security, system config, and basically anything that I would consider ‘my job’.

I spent the day making him a gigantic spreadsheet showing all of our dbs, and issues to be solved. I have no idea what I’m supposed to do on Monday.

It’s amazing how quickly ‘the business’ can destroy an IT team. I’m plastering my resume everywhere this evening.

[Haumana]

I’ve been working as a DBA for a shipping company for the past 7 months. About a month after I started, they hired a CIO, and demoted the former head of IT to ‘unknown development role’, and rolled out a new warehouse management system that completely failed. Nothing is compatible with our existing process.

So the solution was to shove all of the IT dept into a conference room for 2 months, to hammer it out. I got tossed into the warehouse with a laptop to ‘fix shipping issues’ because “it’s all in SQL”.

Since then, I’ve been more or less ignored and left to do my thing, which was fantastic. Made huge strides in repairing tech debt, and piecing systems together.

Now we’re shoving random things into The Cloud, because CIO needs to do something. Our operational reporting now runs dozens of queries against Production systems every 10 minutes, and our analytics reporting is all replicated into Azure, for... reasons.

Then a couple of days ago, CIO got the bug up his ass to implement personal source control over any changes made to Production systems. Including index changes, security, system config, and basically anything that I would consider ‘my job’.

I spent the day making him a gigantic spreadsheet showing all of our dbs, and issues to be solved. I have no idea what I’m supposed to do on Monday.

It’s amazing how quickly ‘the business’ can destroy an IT team. I’m plastering my resume everywhere this evening.

Ok....

[SuburbanFarmer]

Yeah whatevs. The type of people that want everything ‘in the cloud’ are the opposite of IT.

[Speaker to Animals]

No, he's right. I have seen it in spades in the engineering realm. In general, when you see a successful tech company, most of the time you will find that the CEO and most of his VPs who actually run the core business units are engineers. As soon as you see somebody with nothing but a "business" background take over the corporation, expect failure.

Imagine hiring an IT manager or some senior software engineering manager to run an accounting firm. Does that make sense? Probably not. But somehow people with accounting and -- much less useful -- an MBA can be hired to run tech companies and their IT departments?

Welcome to the dark age.

[The Conservative]

And you accomplish this by advocating both for and against cloud services. You must be really good at meetings.

I negotiate contracts between MS, Google, Adobe, Amazon, RCN, Slack, and a few other smaller groups out there, my first job as a Director of IT, I was able to reduce the costs by 25% by negotiating 1 year deals at the savings of a three year deal, rebuilding the infrastructure, and streamlining costs. The place I am at now, I am doing the same thing. It's not a three month program, it takes a year to do it right minimum if you don't want real downtime while things transition over.

The fact is that there is a time and place for cloud based hardware/infrastructure, and there is a time and place for old school mindset, you need to have not only a feel for what the CIO, CTO, CEO, and CFO are willing to tolerate, but also to make them happy by showing production.

Your CIO, or whatever he is meant to be took too many big steps in the wrong way. You talk to the people that are going to be affected, you ask them what they want, you butter them up and get them on your side. You get the programmers, you get the engineers, you get the people who are going to interact with it all on the same page. Then you figure out how from there you are going to implement it without or as little downtime as possible.

The smartest thing to do is to have it built in the background while the old system is still in place, once you have it up and running you test it out on something that's already in production, see if you can break the system, then fix whatever breaks. From there you let a small group test it out, then do the same thing. Once you get 90% of the bugs out (because let's be honest getting all the bugs out is impossible) you let it into the wild after a training session, and be hands on while people learn it.

Do it though during a slow time, not peak.

This gives time for people to get used to it, and your group to make it work as intended, once it's done, then you can dismantle the old system permanently.

As for the rest, data that is mission critical, you keep off the internet, and treat it as if it should stay in a SCIF, so that should stay local. That data that won't tell people anything, or is general interactions can be cloud based. If anything, if you need to have the database interact between the cloud network at home base, you should at a minimum have SSH running... of course that's like saying you should lock the doors when you leave the house too...but you get my drift, or should.

But what do I know... I just have an associates with 20+ years of IT experience behind me.

[SuburbanFarmer]

Yeah, the best answer I could get was that ‘azure defaults to TLS 1.2 in communicating with your servers’.

So that was taken as a green light to treat the cloud as part of our internal network.

Not that security matters here. The new system uses the database SA account for everything, including scan guns. People were using Admin/admin for passwords everywhere, and even the warehouse people have rights to exit shipping data.

I’m only now realizing what this place has done to my head.