Adding to the other replies: because it’s not just about you. A large environment will include tens to hundreds of colleagues in the immediate blast radius of any change you make (and possibility thousands to tens of thousands beyond), including ringers from external contractors, and ranging in skill and disposition from ninja sorcerer to middle-of-the-road unimaginative plodders, and none of whom particularly wish to deal with someone’s idiosyncratic preferences.
If there’s a crisis in which your unexpected novelty is an impediment to resolution, or (worse) a direct contributing factor, it’ll be your head on a pike.
Conversely, if you introduce a tool that takes “only” fifteen minutes to learn, but a thousand people have to learn it, that’s six weeks of aggregate human productivity you just appropriated. So it’d better be worth it.
You absolutely can introduce new ideas and utilities and capabilities, but you have to bring everyone along with you, and it has to be a material benefit. Good news, the leadership skills required to do so are not innate, they can be learned.
Some organisations are better at fostering change as a matter of their overall strategy, and anyone whose professional disposition is towards constant reinvention would be well advised to seek them out.
Corporate servers can have strict rules about what software is allowed to be installed. It all depends on the corporation and what the servers are doing. Financial and health care companies are extremely risk averse. Even if the downside of installing something like murex is vanishingly tiny, the fact that there's any possible downside is enough to give them pause. Even if the new software is genuinely more productive, you may have to make the argument before a committee who's primary incentive is CYA above all else.
8 years I was working at a huge manufacturing company in a technical role, although related to a physical product rather than software. I had to ask for permission to install python from corporate HQ, and was denied...
Indeed. The problem isn't that you can't install anything, it's that the goalposts for getting software installation approved are so high that it's faster to reinvent the wheel using the tools you have.
The technical reason is that all accounts I can get access to (which doesn’t include root) are not able to call any package manager and any installed tools are “reverted” to a whitelisted set of tools every day.
The practical reason is that I’d need to convince some board of managers who have “more important shit to do” to change the default set of tools for all 10.000 servers (VM’s) for no other apparent gain than “better scripting”, which to them will sound like making it easier for hackers to extract sensitive data :-)
If there’s a crisis in which your unexpected novelty is an impediment to resolution, or (worse) a direct contributing factor, it’ll be your head on a pike.
Conversely, if you introduce a tool that takes “only” fifteen minutes to learn, but a thousand people have to learn it, that’s six weeks of aggregate human productivity you just appropriated. So it’d better be worth it.
You absolutely can introduce new ideas and utilities and capabilities, but you have to bring everyone along with you, and it has to be a material benefit. Good news, the leadership skills required to do so are not innate, they can be learned.
Some organisations are better at fostering change as a matter of their overall strategy, and anyone whose professional disposition is towards constant reinvention would be well advised to seek them out.