[eastbayjake]

> Want to use a different programming language? An OSS library? A SASS vendor? Please get approvals from legal and finance with ROI estimates.

This is true of all of enterprise IT though. It's not due to "CFO types" getting involved, it's just part of operating at scale in a public company where your tool choices have an impact on long-term support and governance/controls. I don't begrudge technologists who are chafed by this, but it's inherent to the category and not particular to a single corporate entity.

[throwaway86442]

It's more the severity and granularity at which they did this. It's definitely done by most enterprise IT orgs and there's good reason for it. Then there's what Disney does which blows past any level of reasonable.

Think: getting approvals for upsizing an AWS instance in accordance with AWS's recommendations on an instance class you're already using in an account already serving production. Adding a user to a per user billed SASS that's critical to the org (we had to seek approvals to add employees to Slack/Github/email, and they frequently got denied).

They will spend thousands of dollars in man hours to make sure you're not misusing a penny.

[DarthGhandi]

Found this comment really strange, I work at a far smaller company and not only would they ask that they'd be laughing at me the whole time while doing it. These aren't the sort of things even nimble companies take lightly and without a lot of discussion and review.

[throwaway86442]

These would be things that would have to be escalated to an SVP or above to be brought to an equivalent on the business side. In just about every company I've had experience with, these type of decisions stay within engineering and rarely need to involve lower executives.

[strken]

I've worked at companies where adopting an OSS library was an engineering decision, no purchasing and no management approval required.