neorants

So, I originally posted these buried about 5 levels deep in a digg comment thread. I figured nobody would ever see it there, so here it is. This is a slightly modified amalgamation of my response to someone’s sarcastic statement of “Yes, my company sucks. A Fortune 500 company,” and another response to a different user. Sometimes I don’t know why I bother surfing digg. But it’s an addiction.

Just because you’re good at turning a profit doesn’t mean you’re good at using technology in the way that most benefits your employees. I worked for a Fortune 500 company for 7 years, and their IT department just spent the past 9 months with a dedicated team of Remedy developers to roll out an AR System rewrite of a Perl/Tk ticketing system I’d written myself in-house.

As I understand it, it has numerous and exotic bugs, suffers from lockups and server crashes, and requires adherence to the ridiculously expensive (and restrictive) AR System licenses for all users actively logging calls. It benchmarks at approximately 1/20th the speed of the original application in performing common functions. It requires them to regularly archive data to continue to run at acceptable speeds, despite the old system holding years of data at once. Employees are actively pleading with management to roll back to the old system.

Plenty of Fortune 500 companies have clueless IT departments. Someone nearly always has too much skin in the game to admit that something that got by on being “good enough” is still woefully inadequate when compared to an infrastructure designed from the ground up to do things better. Management is nearly always too risk-averse to do anything better than the status quo. It’s a recipe for mediocrity.