Enterprise IT rant

[airdata]

Remember one thing.

It's not your computer.

The IT Department is simply letting you use one of theirs.

 

[seepy83]

IT is all opinion. I should know, I report directly to my CIO and I'm responsible for for keeping the company I work for secure, cutting edge, and running. If you fired me and hired a new systems architect I can tell you that he would do everything different.

FACT: The previous administrator was an idiot.

That statement is 100% true everywhere at all times. I've never met a IT professional who didn't think the guy before him ran things like an idiot.

It's not all opinion. There is absolutely some level of opinion involved, but it's the opinion of an informed IT professional, not some clown who builds his own PCs at home and thinks he knows how to run an enterprise network.

I also don't agree that a new Systems Admin, Engineer, Architect, etc would do everything different. Yes, all IT professionals have certain products/vendors they prefer to use. But we're all going to agree that we need to run some kind of antivirus software, systems need to be patched in a timely manner, etc.

I wouldn't hire my neighbor to rebuild the transmission in my car because I know he can change the oil in his car. And I wouldn't hire my other neighbor's grandson to define policies and procedures for an enterprise network because he fixes grandma's computer when she can't get it to print a cheesecake recipe.

I would, however, evaluate the recommendations of any IT professional that has the experience, knowledge, credentials, etc to make an informed decision and back that decision up with facts when he/she needs to.

 

[IceBergSLiM]

lol your help desk sucks. That would never fly here.

 

[Zargon]

You had rights to add a machine to the domain?

If so seems like a crappy Sys admin/IT group there.

this.

 

[seepy83]

Oh yes, we needn't question the IT gods! All hail the IT gods for their judgments are wise and their policies just!

Get back to me when you can explain why IT needs to further lock down a server that isn't exposed to the outside world, hasn't had issues in the past, and already has lots of authentication. Yet, they want everyone to put the information that is protected by that server onto their laptops and take those laptops home with them.

Next, you can explain to me why IT (different company) lets a web application run exposed to the outside world with a VERY big security flaw (SQL injection) and then says "well, its not that big of a deal" when it is brought to their attention.

IT does stupid stuff. Employees aren't all completely blind to it.

I didn't read your post earlier. You have legitimate concerns. You should take them up with the CSO/ISO or whoever else is responsible for information security. Your complaints are a far cry from the others posting in this thread that don't want to run A/V software or think they're cool because they attempt to evade the implemented policies.

Like I said before, in any profession there are people who claim to be professionals but are not good at what they do. IT is not an exception to that.

 

[sourceninja]

It's not all opinion. There is absolutely some level of opinion involved, but it's the opinion of an informed IT professional, not some clown who builds his own PCs at home and thinks he knows how to run an enterprise network.

I also don't agree that a new Systems Admin, Engineer, Architect, etc would do everything different. Yes, all IT professionals have certain products/vendors they prefer to use. But we're all going to agree that we need to run some kind of antivirus software, systems need to be patched in a timely manner, etc.

I wouldn't hire my neighbor to rebuild the transmission in my car because I know he can change the oil in his car. And I wouldn't hire my other neighbor's grandson to define policies and procedures for an enterprise network because he fixes grandma's computer when she can't get it to print a cheesecake recipe.

I would, however, evaluate the recommendations of any IT professional that has the experience, knowledge, credentials, etc to make an informed decision and back that decision up with facts when he/she needs to.

I've been though enough consultants, turn over, and previous employers to hear enough "Oh you setup your vmware 'that' way", "Oh that tree design sucks", "Why would you let your employee's do that", "Your not using exchange!!! How do you even do business", "Linux, in a fortune 500 company, are you mad??", "Wait, your telling me your desktop is a macbook pro?", etc to know that most 'IT professionals' are winging it.

Understaffed, under-educated, under-funded, and really just doing anything they think might have some impact that hides these facts while trying to do as little actual work as possible.

That's why I love my job, I finally work at a place where for the most part, we get to do things 'the right way' and not the 'easiest way without learning something'.

 

[ch33zw1z]

f-it, take a 2 hour paid break.

 

[ViviTheMage]

antivirus can be disabled if you are local admin on your pc, even if IT thinks they have it "locked down from their side"

We have to have local admin on each PC, and you can disable mcafee...but if it comes in with mcafee disabled, there will be shit to say.

Bob ... i've had someone fired for much less then that, for fucking around on their PC at work.

 

[ShawnD1]

FACT: The previous administrator was an idiot.

That statement is 100% true everywhere at all times. I've never met a IT professional who didn't think the guy before him ran things like an idiot.

Well he wouldn't have been fired if he were not an idiot, true?

It does seem like a lot of the IT people are terrible. My computer is fast and it's secure. Why isn't everyone else's computer like mine? It still takes 5 minutes to log in because it does a bunch of server stuff, but I get around that by locking the computer and putting it to sleep at night.

 

[sourceninja]

Well he wouldn't have been fired if he were not an idiot, true?

It does seem like a lot of the IT people are terrible. My computer is fast and it's secure. Why isn't everyone else's computer like mine? It still takes 5 minutes to log in because it does a bunch of server stuff, but I get around that by locking the computer and putting it to sleep at night.

I don't mean he's actually an idiot (although he could be). It's the perception in the IT world. The last guy is an idiot, or more directly, anyone who isn't you is an idiot.

I've known a lot of smart people in the IT world who left for bigger and better things and their replacement would lament that they were an idiot. I've also known real idiots who somehow faked their way though keeping the network running and didn't get fired for years until a real problem happened and they couldn't solve it.

I've also known people who do nothing. I mean 100% nothing, but the company see's them as the most important IT person on the staff. They have no technical skills, but instead have mastered passing the buck, blaming their customers, and getting other IT people to do the work for them. These are the people most likely to succeed in IT.

 

[brxndxn]

Good for you. Although, depending on the regulations that the IT department needs to comply with and the tools they are approved to use to enforce compliance, you wouldn't get away with that "stunt" with the VM so easily. Some day when you stop wagging your eDick around, maybe you'll realize that the bullshit you claim to have gotten away with would get you fired from almost every employer in the country.

Doubt it.. companies do realize that sometimes people that don't comply with bullshit IT rules actually are very productive. IT has a job to do.. and that job is to make people more productive and not less productive at their jobs. IT may tend to think they run the company - but they rarely make hiring and firing decisions. IT should embrace customers that know what they are doing and increase their system privileges - but instead, they usually label those users as threats to their control.

I work in an industrial environment as a contractor. With one of our customers, they threw IT out of any system or network that has to do with plant control systems. Corporate IT tends to think that the same policies that apply to office computers running Outlook should apply to mission critical distributed control systems that run whole areas of 24/7 manufacturing processes. That kind of thinking gets people injured or killed. You wouldn't make a pilot log into a plane before he tries to control it... you don't make an operator log into a system before he needs to shut it down or adjust a control to prevent an explosion. It is funny how the people that do make corporate decisions get their panties in a bunch as soon as someone from IT threatens plant production in any way.

And yes.. I have had IT departments declare that I was blatantly violating their policy before.. and no.. no customer has ever gotten rid of me for pissing off IT.

And another thing.. how is it more secure that I should call a random guy in India to grant access to a local data system on a plant floor?

 

[FDF12389]

Get back to me when you can explain why IT needs to further lock down a server that isn't exposed to the outside world, hasn't had issues in the past, and already has lots of authentication. Yet, they want everyone to put the information that is protected by that server onto their laptops and take those laptops home with them.

Us IT people don't like doing pointles things. We aren't sitting on our asses thinking about adding more security to a system that doesn't need it, we would rather be neffing.

There's something called compliance, and if we do something that seems pointless in regards to security its probably because we are desparately trying to pull an auditor out of our ass.

 

[ShawnD1]

And another thing.. how is it more secure that I should call a random guy in India to grant access to a local data system on a plant floor?

Maybe it's the same guy who activates Windows for me.

"and how many times in the past have you tried to shut down the heat exchange computer?"

 

[IndyColtsFan]

Bah... reset the admin password on that thing with a password recovery disk and use it to reschedule the antivirus scan.

Bullshit like that is why I don't let IT screw with my work computers.

At best, you'd be written up, or at worst, fired, if you pulled that stunt at any company I've worked at.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

IT spends more time limiting what their own users can do than they do actually securing the assets of their company. Having worked as an IT analyst and now being on the user end, I can tell you that more money is pissed away by paying people to sit around and wait for a small handful of IT people to install something, run something or set up something on their computers. My company is no exception to this rule. I'm currently working on a project that is weeks behind schedule. The reason? Sitting around waiting for IT to finally get to my ticket.

There needs to be a happy medium between protecting your IT infrastructure and allowing your users the privileges they need to get work done. Where I work at best they will give you power user privileges and then lock everything else down with security policies. Can't install software. Can't uninstall software. Can't upgrade printer drivers. Can't manage file share privileges. It's to the point where unless you're doing daily rinse lather and repeat work, it is a complete obstacle. Trying anything new, testing software, connect a new device to the network? Can't do it. I'm happy to sit there and twiddle my thumbs and when the question is asked why isn't this done? Well, waiting on IT is getting to be a common phrase.

Time to stop treating your employees like they are hackers trying to bring everything crashing down and start holding people accountable for what they do if given admin privileges. Crash your computer? Too bad. You reload it. Fuck up a database and cost the company thousands? Get fired. That's how it should be.

You have to realize that you (and others like you) are exceptions, and not the rule. Most computer users are clueless and if you DIDN'T restrict their access to install software for "testing," you'd have all sorts of crap in your environment. Who here remembers the trouble Yahoo and Google toolbars caused with IE, for example? You'd have users potentially uninstalling AV because it makes their computers "slow," and look at the mess you'd have if that happened!


I do agree with you that end users should be held accountable, but the issue is that in most organizations, IT doesn't have that kind of power. If you go to a person's manager and complain, little is done. Only the most severe problems/violations would result in employees being terminated.

 

[brxndxn]

You had rights to add a machine to the domain?

If so seems like a crappy Sys admin/IT group there.

Corporate IT typically issues a system that is already assigned to a domain.. Then you take it and run a VMware Convert on it.. no rights needed.. even works with servers.. still stays on the domain.

 

[Cogman]

Us IT people don't like doing pointles things. We aren't sitting on our asses thinking about adding more security to a system that doesn't need it, we would rather be neffing.

There's something called compliance, and if we do something that seems pointless in regards to security its probably because we are desparately trying to pull an auditor out of our ass.

Well, my point was more that IT can do stupid things. In this particular instance, I believe it was started by a former intern turned full-time employee that just got his masters. He's got stupid ideas about what needs to be secured from what "Oh knows, development can look at the test server! We need to lock this down!"

 

[maddogchen]

My new Hospital IT sucks. They just migrated a server from the old IT to the new virtual one and 2 weeks later the virtual server crashed and we lost all data since the migration. How does that happen in a Hospital setting? And they were like oh its ok, its not a vital server because it didn't have patient data. WTF! You just set everyone back 2 weeks! Also there has been very little communication to us as to why the server went down or what we need to do to restore data.

I hear more from the other department who was running another virtual server off of the same physicial server as to why it happened than I have from IT. We don't know much about virtual servers. But does the other guy's explanation of what happened makes sense? That they incorrectly set up a third virtual server that needed more storage space than what they thought, and it quickly expanded and crashed the physicial server?

 

[ShawnD1]

You have to realize that you (and others like you) are exceptions, and not the rule. Most computer users are clueless and if you DIDN'T restrict their access to install software for "testing," you'd have all sorts of crap in your environment. Who here remembers the trouble Yahoo and Google toolbars caused with IE, for example? You'd have users potentially uninstalling AV because it makes their computers "slow," and look at the mess you'd have if that happened!

:awe:

Windows Search came installed on my computer and it was a dog piece of shit that doesn't work properly. It's actually less effective than the search that came with Windows XP at launch. I uninstalled that one and installed Google Desktop which seems to work a lot better.

 

[TheNinja]

Some people on both sides exaggerate a lot here.

1. Normal people can't and don't uninstall virus scan software, create VMs, or try to trick people. People like to talk tough like they find all these magical ways around IT's policies. Believe me, we know what's going on.

2. Even if someone breaks the "computer rules" policy and does stupid stuff, they aren't automatically getting fired. "I'm sorry sir, I know you were our #1 salesperson this year, but you changed the time of your virus scan without IT's approval so I have to fire you"......please.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

:awe:

Windows Search came installed on my computer and it was a dog piece of shit that doesn't work properly. It's actually less effective than the search that came with Windows XP at launch. I uninstalled that one and installed Google Desktop which seems to work a lot better.

We wound up pulling Windows Search after our pilot group reported how horrendous it was.

 

[ultimatebob]

Some people on both sides exaggerate a lot here.

1. Normal people can't and don't uninstall virus scan software, create VMs, or try to trick people. People like to talk tough like they find all these magical ways around IT's policies. Believe me, we know what's going on.

2. Even if someone breaks the "computer rules" policy and does stupid stuff, they aren't automatically getting fired. "I'm sorry sir, I know you were our #1 salesperson this year, but you changed the time of your virus scan without IT's approval so I have to fire you"......please.

I lot of people who replied to my post are assuming that the IT people actually cared what I was doing where I used to work. They just looked at the audit report, saw my machine name on the list as reporting and getting the corporate mandated crapware, and moved on. I knew better than to ask them for help, and they left me alone for the most part. That said, I made sure to wipe my machine clean before returning it on my last day of work

And even if I did get caught, the worst that would have happened would have been a nasty-gram from IT cc'ed to my managers. And most of my managers had better things to worry about than some whiny rant from IT. Maybe the HR guy would have yelled at me. Maybe.

 

[wheresmybacon]

Bah... reset the admin password on that thing with a password recovery disk and use it to reschedule the antivirus scan.

Bullshit like that is why I don't let IT screw with my work computers.

Anywhere I've worked, If you're a regular worker bee this is enough to get your written up at the minimum.