Comment by jampekka | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jampekka | Hacker News Reader

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What bothers me as practically 100% shadow IT worker (to the point of buying my own devices and internet connections with my own money) is that IT-departments don't care about the users, usability or productivity almost at all (and security people are especially bad at this). And that a lot of IT people frankly don't understand IT very much.

Without shadowing it, I couldn't get anything done. I have to install new (open source) software or packages more or less every day, but IT would expect me to wait for a week for some bureaucracy for each package. IT fights me getting a computer with a specific GPU although it is required to use a library that I need. IT forces a reboot of my laptop in a middle of a conference presentation. IT blocks me from sending Python source code files over email. IT makes my computer boot to take ten minutes. IT forces me to use OneDrive that often simply doesn't work.

Maybe the abomination is not the private projects? Maybe it's the systems architecture?

And the software that is installed is always 4+ years out of date. But oddly there are no “security concerns” about running 4 year old conda install that has had zero updates ever.

I don't think it's often even about actual security concerns as such but rather about following "best practices" (i.e. what some company sells) so nobody in the org can be blamed when the security fails.

This happens in physical security as well. It's rather common to have door accesses set up so that a person may not have access to go through a door, but can access both sides of the door from other routes. But there was a door-based access policy so nobody is to blame.

Sadly the main concern in many/most organizations is to avoid getting blamed for bad things, so rather than actually trying to prevent bad things, a lot of effort is used to just dissipate the responsibility away.

I’m loving this thread. I feel like Hunter S Thompson reading the gonzo review: “okay, that’s what I do. Shadow IT.”

> IT forces me to use OneDrive that often simply doesn't work.

Also happens to me. OneDrive sucks. It can't even generate proper zip files. Any zip files over 2GB or so I download from it shows as corrupted when I try to extract under linux. IIRC is because OneDrive puts some invalid flags in the files.

Oftentimes the download just is left short. And I recall it not even giving error, just sending a part of the file, which of course is a corrupted archive.

OneDrive sucks and organizational structures that buy OneDrive sucks and the company that produces it really sucks.

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