It has been a month since i started consulting for the big IT firm. Day one was just a precursor to month one. A lot of frustration, a lot of complaints but invaluable and important lessons learnt. I am still trying to analyze all the information I have and trying to make sense of some of the absolutely ridiculous policies that seem to be in place.
The first thing that struck me was the restrictions that were in place especially on the IT infrastructure and data movement. All computers are centrally managed to the extent of wallpapers and screen savers. Computers are alloted only with XP, some ultra basic version of Office, the Lotus Notes client, Winzip and Acrobat Reader. There is a blanket ban on all binary downloads from the internet and I am told that acquiring a license for any software from the IT department is nothing short of a nightmare. This essentially means that you have to be content with the list of tools I listed above. The policy seems to be that all activity either managerial or development has to be carried out with the list of tools I mentioned above.
I was already cribbing at this point. This set of policies meant that I had to be content with IE6 which comes bundled with XP. No downloads meant no Firefox which in turn meant I would be deprived of my cherished feature of modern day browsing, tabs! How could they do such a thing to anyone? This amounts to cruelty in by book. It is just absurd. I would have settled for IE7 but even that is not available.
It is obviously not impossible to work only with these tools. It calls for some level of ingenuity and some patience. What I mean is that it is not impossible to make a GANTT chart or a block diagram in Excel but imagine coloring cells to show a time line, it is just tedious and error prone. Now, if it is a 12 Lakhs a year manager / engineer coloring the cells it becomes even more absurd. Wouldn't it be cheaper to give him a copy of Microsoft Project or a similar tool is something I kept asking myself. It would make life simpler when the chart is being made and when the chart is being modified and when the project needs to be tracked. Why put in a lengthy process to obtain the necessary tools which can substantially help improve efficiency especially at the managerial levels is beyond me.
Maybe it is my outlook which causes me to think this way. For example for me my computer is a natural extension of myself, my being. I know her (Sunshine) inside out. She is always has all the tools that i will possibly need. She is always updated and ready to go. Over the years I have learnt the hard way that you are only as efficient as you know your tools. I customize Sunshine to my whims and fancies and this definitely helps me work faster and produce results more effectively. Now at this firm there doesn't even seem to be a concept of one machine per employee. People are alloted and re-alloted machines randomly at a drop a hat. Forget tools and efficiency how does one manage data in such a transient environment. This is another one of those polices that makes no sense to me at all. Maybe there would be some order in the chaos if there were shares on some central server so that data remains at a common place while machines are being shifted but there seem to be no shares as well. Without shares the only legitimate way to move around data is mail and yes I am sure you guessed it by now, mailboxes have a 100MB quota. To complete the viscous circle you need to archive mail on your local hard disk! I have to wonder if these guys really know what they are doing!
The restrictions on the Internet are also stretched to a point which amounts to nothing less than paranoia. Apart from a blanket ban on binary downloads and popular email servers there is also a ban on searching pictures and maps because this activity is thought of as criminal or so says the firewall message. I wonder how the people working at this firm will use wikimapia to do something criminal considering the fact that at induction they have been through extensive background checks including a police verification.
That aside, not having the Internet for simple day to day development can have some seriously adverse effects. Just yesterday, I saw a case when this became a serious issue. These guys have a hardware lab which just got some fancy boards from TI running Linux and the plan was to get some basic tests done like booting up the board and mounting an NFS file system and so on. First some ground rules. The lab is isolated from all networks that means there is no Internet there. There is a single Linux box there with some archaic distribution of Suse and best of all USB and CDROMs are disabled on all machines. The first problem we hit upon was that there was no minicom. That was a easy problem to solve, we just got another laptop running Windows and used Hypeterminal. But then we discovered that the NFS server on the Linux box may be corrupt. Now how do we replace the defunct server. There seems to be no way of doing this and the whole activity is just stuck up for the last two days. This seems like a such a waste. Standing there I felt like I had time traveled to 2000 or something when I was in college and such lack of infrastructure was more common place.
There were more reasons why college memories came up. One more rule that i forgot to mention before is that the fancy board is not allowed outside the lab because it costs about 2000 dollars. In college this rule made sense. Undergrads playing with 2000 dollar boards is a little scary but 10 years on when I am paid twice as much a month to build something of similar complexity, I couldn't help but be amazed at the sheer oversight of the person who came up with such a policy.
The levels of ignorance among the less experienced engineers could be one of the reasons for this policy. The guys in the lab sat on the no minicom issue for two days before we were brought in to solve the problem. The manual said minicom and there was no minicon on the Suse box so the whole thing just stalled. Nobody even remotely thought of using Hyperterminal. I wouldn't trust a 2000 dollar board with these guys even inside the lab with supervision let alone the outside.
But my point is that blanket bans are counter productive in almost all cases. I could have solved these problems out in a couple of hours if I had the right resources with me. Some level of restriction is fine but when it reaches a level when work gets impeded so severely that deadlines are not met then the restrictions and the policies that enforce them need to be reviewed and modified. Scraped if necessary! One solution that comes to me is seniority based access to resources such as the internet and fancy boards instead of a blanket ban. An assumption that senior people will be more responsible and will also be more liable is not all that bad. Some training to everyone concerned wouldn't hurt either.
Again I guess the basic rule remains. It comes down to implementation of the policies on the floor. Any and every policy should be periodically reviewed to check if it is really working as it was designed. The only way is for the policy makers to taste their own medicine.
