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by chuckadams 24 days ago
I've worked for a few Fortune 50 companies, and they all had "shadow IT" that would crank out scripts and tools with no official sanction to work around the cumbersomeness of the official tools (or sometimes their complete lack). That's what corporate hackers are.
3 comments
crabbone 20 days ago
Well, where I work, "automation" is part of my job title. And if I ever even suggest that I've done some work outside of the tasks assigned to me that has something to do with my job, I'd be sent into disciplinary hearing. Any work I do for the company must be sanctioned by my boss, otherwise it's treated as dereliction of duty (under the pretext, that I should've been using that time to work on my tasks given me by my boss, or, if I had no such tasks, I should've informed my boss about the situation).

And, in my specific case, my boss is not very good at programming, and doesn't like anything I do on that count. So, anything I've done so far was mired in pointless PR reviews and discussions, stalled for many months or simply never made it after more than a year of PRs waiting. Ironically, my boss had to order the cancellation of some CI tests because he didn't accept my PR fixing those tests. And it's been like that for something like three years now.

I wish this situation was exceptional, but it happened more than once, and, by far, I'm not the only one experiencing this. That's what I mean by "initiative is punishable."

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hibikir 24 days ago
You know your company has made it when shadow IT has been merged into central IT after a tough political fight, and as they try to make the old shadow IT less responsive and more standard, a new wave of real shadow IT gets hired. That new, real shadow IT might even be paid more, because they are often hidden in CapEx somewhere, instead of having to go with HR standards for leveling and job descriptions. I've seen the biggest things come out of said shadow IT groups, precisely because their management is uninterested in the glacial procedures of real IT.
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malfist 24 days ago
My other half is one of those. Works in setting up hospital pharmacies for new hospitals and he's the "excel and VBA guy" to all his coworkers.

It's amazing how far just a little bit of programming can

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