[curryst]

When I worked at a Fortune 500 company, even finding someone capable of creating a good UX was difficult. We used ServiceNow for our CMDB, and since Infra "owned" that, our customizations were done by SysAdmins that were "repurposed" into devs through the course of like a month long training with ServiceNow, despite them having never done any development.

The result was that our ServiceNow pages were horribly long to load. The "devs" complained that it was because ServiceNow's database was slow, and said ServiceNow said they couldn't make it any faster. I did like 30 seconds of digging and found out that every. single. Javascript request. was made synchronously. The reason it took 7 seconds for a page to load was because it had to execute a series of like 15 HTTP calls to get data to load the page, and each one was waiting for the one before it. The library they were using even exposed the methods with a name something like `synchronousGet`.

I don't think ServiceNow could have possibly returned results fast enough for that to not be painful. The requests had to go over WAN, there was like 100ms of latency just on the network connection. Even if ServiceNow's response was instant, we're still talking about a couple of seconds to execute that many requests.

My takeaway was that at most Fortune 500 companies, the perks aren't generally great (pay is lower than a lot of tech companies, the perks are generally few) and it's hard to get fired. So those who excel will move on to greener pastures with better pay/perks, and low performers are difficult to get rid of. Through attrition, you gradually end up with an employee base mostly made up of those who can't or won't move elsewhere, who do silly things like design architectures that are fundamentally incapable of HA, or writing webapps with entirely synchronous Javascript. Not that there aren't exceptional people within those organizations, however the IT department is defined by the majority, not by its most competent member.