I've met multiple customers where time to get a VM was in the weeks to months. (To be fair, I'm at a vendor that proposed IaC tooling and general workflows and practices to move away from old school ClickOps ticket-based provisioning, so of course we'd get those types of orgs).
And more often than not, it had nothing to do with managers, but with individual contributors resisting change because they were set in their ways and were potentially afraid for their jobs. Same applies for firewall changes btw.
I think a lot of HN crowd hangs out at FAANG/FAANG adjacent or at least young/lean shops, and has no idea how insane it is out there.
I was at a shop that provisions AWS resources via written email requests & clickops, treated fairly similar to a datacenter procurement. Teams don't have access to the AWS console, cannot spin up/down, stop, delete, etc resources.
A year later I found out that all the stuff they provisioned wasn't set up as reserved instances. We weren't even asked. So we paid hourly rates for stuff running 24/7/365.
This was apparently the norm in the org. You have to know reserved instances exist, and ask for them.. you may eventually be granted the discount later. I only realized what they had done when they quoted me rates and I was cross checking ec2instances.info
I can guarantee you less than 20% of my org (its not a tech shop) is aware this difference exists, let alone that ec2instances.info exists for cross reference.
No big deal, just paying 2x for no reason on already overpriced resources!
I went from that type of world (cell carrier) to a FAANG type company and it was shocking. The baseline trust that engineers were given by default was refreshing and actually a bit scary.
I’m not sure my former coworkers would have done well in an environment with so few constraints. Many of them had grown accustomed to (and been rewarded and praised for) only taking actions that would survive bureaucratic process, or fly underneath it.
And more often than not, it had nothing to do with managers, but with individual contributors resisting change because they were set in their ways and were potentially afraid for their jobs. Same applies for firewall changes btw.