Bureaucratic processes, low work standard, "good enough for the business". IT in a large financial company is a pretty appalling thing to observe. Everything that would take minutes to fix in a small organisation is taking years.
For instance the network drives hang regularly, sometimes for several minutes. That affects everyone on the floor. Because of a bug in Windows that was never fixed that also causes windows to hang for minutes, basically when it happens it is coffee time. Everyone I know in the organisation is affected, and has been for years. One would have thought that IT would do something about it, not the least because they must experience that themselves. That's counting without the "I don't give a shit attitude" that I pretty much always see in that part of the organisation.
It's not about money. If we need to make even the most minor changes, it becomes multi-year projects costing millions. As far as I can tell these millions are spent in project managers who understand neither the tech nor the business and ensure that the maximum amount of confusion is maintained. They are spent on paying salaries matching industry standard to bottom of their class developers who were not smart enough to work for google or facebook, and have no idea of what they are doing. Some of the things I see are pretty shocking. I faced developpers who are litteraly mild amateurs. And I would say developers are the "elite" of the IT crowd in these organisations.
Outsourcing didn't help with the I don't give a shit attitude. I doubt that the fact that a guy in London has to make 10 unecessary clicks everytime he needs to do something frequently, or has his computer completely unusable for minutes affects much a contractor in Bangalore. One would assume that a guy who would actually meet his "victims" would have a little more compassion, but as thing stands these problems are very much virtual to these guys.
For instance the network drives hang regularly, sometimes for several minutes. That affects everyone on the floor. Because of a bug in Windows that was never fixed that also causes windows to hang for minutes, basically when it happens it is coffee time. Everyone I know in the organisation is affected, and has been for years. One would have thought that IT would do something about it, not the least because they must experience that themselves. That's counting without the "I don't give a shit attitude" that I pretty much always see in that part of the organisation.
It's not about money. If we need to make even the most minor changes, it becomes multi-year projects costing millions. As far as I can tell these millions are spent in project managers who understand neither the tech nor the business and ensure that the maximum amount of confusion is maintained. They are spent on paying salaries matching industry standard to bottom of their class developers who were not smart enough to work for google or facebook, and have no idea of what they are doing. Some of the things I see are pretty shocking. I faced developpers who are litteraly mild amateurs. And I would say developers are the "elite" of the IT crowd in these organisations.
Outsourcing didn't help with the I don't give a shit attitude. I doubt that the fact that a guy in London has to make 10 unecessary clicks everytime he needs to do something frequently, or has his computer completely unusable for minutes affects much a contractor in Bangalore. One would assume that a guy who would actually meet his "victims" would have a little more compassion, but as thing stands these problems are very much virtual to these guys.