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Comment by metalliqaz | Hacker News Reader

I totally feel this comment, myself being a corporate drone that has to deal with this software.

Between disk encryption, anti virus, IT asset management, data custody tracking, etc; my PC is as slow as molasses.

Unfortunately I think its slow in a different way that low-spec machines are slow. Mine is very slow on IO ops, but I have 32GB of RAM and a 20-core i7, so plenty of resources available even after all the BS.

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I could use some tips on talking with IT about this as it cripples work performance

You think it's IT pushing this? They are just executing orders.

Yes and no. Businesses have cyber insurance policies. In a world of frequent ransomware attacks, many security policy changes have been mandated by insurance companies, and for legitimate reasons.

The attacks are not frequent enough. And the IT is already outsourced (because cheaper).

No, we won't make some special golden image for your machine.

However we DONT want annoying "my computer slow" calls. So we can talk.

But you need the antivirus and some kind of intune/rmm software, sorry.

I get that, just sad npm becomes 100x slower (We measured this), and build times and indexing times increase so much too.

You're telling them that your convenience is worth more to the company than plugging a security hole.

The company can live with your loss of productivity because it is living with the loss of everyone's productivity. The company cannot live without security.

On top of that, if you are the only one making noise about slow computers and complaining about stuff and things then you eventually end up being the problem. I mean, why is that lone employee complaining so hard about wanting to remove security assurances from his machine?

No the statement is "it's worth investing in making the UX less crap to increase productivity". Either improve SW (of it's in house crap scripts, as often), switch to more performant AV, etc. etc.

It does not have to be crap actually, I have seen companies with usable machines.

O365 on the other hand, I don't see a solution, it's horrible.

> "it's worth investing in making the UX less crap to increase productivity".

I guess this is the mantra they used to redesign the Windows UI. It didn't work (they stopped at 15%). Now all they do is to use the same mantra to start over and over.

well for Windows specifically I think it's rather a managerial issue, some managers want to leave their mark, and 10% done is good enough to get promoted to other pastures and the the missing 90% become someone else's problem...

or just get rid of microsoft in the workplace and enjoy the absence of a terrible environment with the addition of fewer attack scenarios, better software and happier users but sad management people, but they don't do work on their machines anyway ;)

There's some terrible corporate-ware that runs on Linux and Mac, and the company policy will likely mandate the use of it.

this. in many cases the corporate-ware is worse on linux because they sell it as an afterthought

> or just get rid of microsoft in the workplace

We tried. Managemen and sales _love_ Microsoft Office. Guess who has the money and makes purchasing decisions ? In the mean time we have to live with (the new and improved) PSpice forgetting its settings from one day to the other. Or with (rolls drum) Teams.

How about this. I'll spend a hour writing a virus if your anti-virus picks it up, I'll keep it.

And if it doesn't ? FProt is long gone. Now we have McAffee.

If it only takes an hour of work to bypass it, the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

Anti-virus in practice is more about protecting about broad-spectrum attacks which aren't targeted against anyone in particular. Drive-by trojans, ransomware, and the like. An attacker like that is not going to spend an hour per target. A more motivated, targeted attacker is going to be a lot more of a threat.

Maybe it is part of their secret strategy to force in-house developers to develop for the 5th percentile worst case. As the parent alluded to.

No its a mentality that has been in corporate for decades. The best way for IT to not get in trouble is to lock everything down and define strict policies that prevent any ambiguity and define peoples work requirements in strict categories. This used to be easier with the advent of timeshared terminals but the advent of desktop computing caught them off guard. Now they have done their best to seize back control so much so that it strangles companies to death(as faster moving startups don't have this problem and innovation at the big companies stall)

It was a joke/sarcasm.

Well I am not joking. This has been their M.O. for as far as I can remember. It really sucks as I work for a company that is being strangled to death by IT locking down every opportunity for a developer to get anything done and countless meetings where nothing gets accomplished.

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