In my -very- humble opinion, you should wait at least a year before making big swinging changes or recommendations, most importantly in any big company.
After that honeymoon period, all but the most autistic people will learn the organisational politics, keep their head down, and “play the game” to be assigned trivial menial tasks in some unimportant corner of the system. At that point, only after two beers will they give their closest colleagues their true opinion.
I’ve seen this play out over and over, organisation after organisation.
The corollary is that you yourself are not immune to this effect and will grow accustomed to almost any amount of insanity. You too will find yourself saying sentences like “oh, it always has been like this” and “don’t try to change that” or “that’s the responsibility of another team” even though you know full well they’re barely even aware of what that thing is, let alone maintaining it in a responsible fashion.
PS: This is my purpose in a nutshell as a consultant. I turn up and provide my unvarnished opinion, without being even aware of what I’m “not supposed to say” because “it upsets that psychotic manager”. I’ll be gone before I have any personal political consequences, but the report document will remain, pointing the finger at people that would normally try to bite it off.
I also see a single-mindedness to specific technical implementations where a more mature view would be to see tech as a business and us less as artisans than blue collar workers.
> steve jobs on "You're right, but it doesn't matter" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o
My comment was a statistical observation of what typically happens in ordinary organisations without a strong-willed, technically capable leader at the helm.
Disclaimer: Also, I have a biased view, because as a consultant I will generally only turn up if there is something already wrong with an organisation that insiders are unable to fix.
FWIW, academia has off-the-charts levels of "wtf" that newcomers will point out, though it's even more ossified than corporate culture, and they don't hire consultants to come in and fix things :)
Interfacing with IT, who thought they knew the "right" way to do everything but in reality had little to no understanding of our constraints, was always interesting.
