The amount of people heating office spaces at your non-tech large enterprise is astounding in my opinion.

I enjoy discussing the reasons for this, but it’s a lenghty one!

In super-short: lack of competency, meaning IT support and tools are not used even remotely optimal. This lack of competency, which starts at the top, results in laughable lead times for the simplest of tasks and processes. This in turn has resulted in mass outsourcing and off-shoring of a bunch of tasks (processes) that really should have been automated years ago.

Usually the incentive to improve this is 0 with these ”service providers” and things detoriate even further.

The sad state of affairs is that many believe this is the way ”IT” works — slow and error prone.

Awesome example: one place, one of the 500s, built an on-prem ”cloud” within a business unit. Over 2000 physical xen hosts. I wanted them to apply a patch. They refused. The last patch had taken 6 months to roll out. The process was: ssh to server, scp patch, run sudo install patch. The entire operation was bought by a renowned ”service provider”. Ouch.

I could talk about this for weeks! Of course there are those that manage an awesome shop, but my experience is that this is usually isolated teams that are somewhat shielded from the crazyness of big money politics.