Ask HN: How to Deal with IT Gatekeepers?

1 points by beams_of_light 1 year ago | 6 comments

At a few F500 companies now, I've sought to automate repetitive tasks, which often requires access to APIs and/or databases. When I submit requests, I'm often either rebuffed by an outright rejection of the request, or a lengthy conversation questioning why I want or need to do something. Once I provide the reasons for why I want to do something, the conversation typically turns into a matter of compute resource protectiveness or IT saying they're working on similar automation, which never comes. It's like a flow chart in which options lead to a rejection.

How have you handled this sort of bureaucracy?

ned_at_codomain 1 year ago |

I have done four things in the past when working at / with big companies:

1. [Usually the best option] You escalate to your manager. If they're unsuccessful, they can escalate to sufficiently high layers of management that bureaucracy doesn't apply. You can't always do this, because it requires getting other people to care. It's also kind of expensive -- you only get so many social capital points to spend.

2. [Second-best option] You don't take the first 'no' as the final answer. Most people go away after getting rebuffed once, but if you keep pestering people, they might give in. Again, have to be careful with how you spend social capital.

3. [Not always applicable] If your ask involves an external vendor, this is exactly the scenario where enterprise sales representatives become really valuable. Good ones know how to climb the management ladder and build cases for change.

4. [Generally not advisable] You can sometimes just 'break the rules' and accept some risk of consequences. Some rules are real and inviolable. Others can be nonsense bureaucracy. Need to be sure which you're dealing with and whether your reputation would carry you through if you got in trouble.

fuzzfactor 1 year ago |

Seems to me that any company that existed before "IT departments", especially those that had stellar computing abilities, only adopted modern IT bureaucracy when it was already too late in more ways than one.

Sometimes too late to make a positive contribution, but usually an overworked IT layer from the get-go who can't make any progress at all themselves without everything conforming to an imaginary "best practice" 100%. Where progress toward the achievement of an idyllic IT operation must be tangible before anybody else gets anything they want ever. Those that lament the company that could accomplish way more before computers than afterward, they move on, or age out and retire, and all that's left is those that accept the BS for some reason or another.

Then you get "modern" companies formed after show-stopping IT was already very common, and they perceive the "best practice" as imitating the bigger, more well-established failures, for lack of any truly shining examples.

I was in a small company imitating a big one and the right move for me was to prioritize something simple that anybody could physically do, like running an ethernet wire to an additional location so the same laptop could be utilized from either desk. Requiring no server action or behind-the-scenes effort from any IT employee whatsoever. After IT proved incapable of timely performance the site manager then justified the relatively negligible cost of more cables, which we ran ourselves to a dozen PC's that had no benefit from being on the internet, since they were not "office machines" in any way. Got this little network air-gapped less than a year before IT got hacked and we came out smelling like a rose. After that we could do anything we wanted on the isolated network, IT only procured the hardware and software we wanted and it was not at their company-wide expense, so they came out ahead and our small profit center could absorb the full cost easily.

PaulHoule 1 year ago |

You are an ordinary employee of the company and not a vendor or consultant, right?

jarule 1 year ago |

You're going to break shit. People don't get raises or recognition for having to clean up after you.