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by bongodongobob 639 days ago
Hahaha, I've been in this exact situation. Marketing set up an entire WordPress website unbeknownst to IT. Over a year's worth of effort and they never even mentioned to us they work working on it.

I'm in a monthly directors meeting of all depts and marketing unveils their wonderful website to much applause and oohs and ahhs. They then say, looking at me, "Yes we should be ready to launch in a couple weeks after IT sets up authentication and integrates it with our CRM and mail blast system."

I was so lost for words I just kind of nodded my head, wide-eyed.

The way they had it set up did not allow us to use the same SSO/auth we used for everything else. So users would need a separate account. Their auth system didn't support any kind of MFA. Their plugins were not compatible with our CRM. External accounts would need to be set up manually. They used a different domain thinking they could just change it later but it got so baked into everything that changing it everywhere would be extremely difficult. Their hosting solution was going to cost us a shit ton of money because none of the graphics were optimized for web. Every image was like a 50MB PNG. It did look nice, but nothing was set up in a way that made it compatible with anything we already had in place.

I told marketing there was no way I could make this work and they'd wasted a year's worth of effort by not pulling me in from the get go to at least help them find some sane compatible solutions. "Well, if we can't use SSO, couldn't we just build a spreadsheet with everyone's logins so you could plug that in?" Jfc no.

The CEO/owner sends me a meeting invite and asks me why I'm refusing to work with marketing on their website. I explain that they had decided not mention any of this to me from the get go and explained the reasons why I couldn't make it work.

I said, "well, technically we could make anything work, but you're going to have to hire a small dev team to integrate this with our CRM. We're going to have to pay a lot more monthly for our CRM because now we need API access (we'd need that either way even if the plugins were compatible) and if you want a team to write some custom integrations for this, you'll need some kind of retainer to make sure they can support it when the plugins change and break everything in unpredictable intervals or the plugins are no longer maintained."

He refused to believe me and basically said "Well I'm not sure why I'm paying you if you can't even get a website to work."

I quiet quit and resigned about a month later. You can imagine the other kind of shenanigans that went on if that was considered acceptable.

2 comments

This really doesn't sound believable, on your part. You can't run pngquant on the images directory to shrink down the images? Should take 2 seconds of shell script. Honestly a lot of things you mention seem like pretty trivial to do... Wordpress is so well understood and there are so many utilities and integrations for it, it's one of the simplest things to integrate with something else. This comment sounds like you were mad they made something that the rest of the company wanted and got mad and didn't want to play ball.... could just be misinterpretation over text, who knows.
* yes the images would be an easy fix

* their CRM plugins did not support Salesforce

* even if it did, they didn't realize that was like an extra $1500/month for API connection (something like that), which was also balked at, but just a plain fact

* they already built everything out and changing plugins was not an option

* I have almost no experience with WordPress and 0 time to figure it out alongside the myriad of other projects on my plate

* 0 thought went into authentication and that was also something I couldn't change

* this was not built by a team with WordPress experience, or any technical experience

They said "it's set up like this, make it work". I couldn't, not without dropping everything and hiring someone to do it, and managing a contractor(s) which was also not an option.

> He refused to believe me and basically said "Well I'm not sure why I'm paying you if you can't even get a website to work."

I would quit the moment I was spoken to in that way, if not sooner.