And the water is all of the topics you’re expected to keep
track of and have ready on a moments notice when your boss or coworker asks you about them. There is no way you can actually keep track of all of these topics, some of them spill off and you need a refresher before you can talk about the intelligently.

Then, if you’re trying to learn, you’re brain does this.

Recently I encountered a file permissions issue. Long story short, I had a service that needed to run a .bat file, but because of a Windows quirk, it needed list access to the root of the drive the file was on. I called up my friends at our Information Security department and after getting transferred around a bit, I was informed that their policy was to not grant special access to the root of any
drive.

Rather, their preferred solution was to create a file share and grant the ID access to that, and then require the ID to reference the share through it’s UNC path name.

The computer scientist in me balked at the idea (thankfully I kept it all internal). “Are you kidding me? I’m not sure windows is smart enough to figure out the share is local, the service might wind up bouncing off of a switch or router somewhere to get to a drive on a machine it’s already on! Clearly this is not a good solution.” (It’s like typing “google” into Chrome’s awesome bar to pull up google.com and search for something).

I took some time to think about it and try to come up with a better solution (because there are better solutions out there) but then I stopped to think about it. This is a business, and the goal of every business is to make as much money as possible and spend as little as possible making it. Our information security department has a system they understand and are comfortable with and are providing a workable solution to allow my project to continue (round-a-bout as it may be). The argument, “We can’t do that! It’s….it’s…..bad!” Isn’t going to hold much water.

From a business perspective, there’s no noticable performance drain, no monetary reason not to use the solution that’s in place. It would also cost a significant number of hours to research a “better” solution and train the employees on how to implement and use it.

We computer scientists often think we are working on Platonic computer science. Computer science for computer science’s sake, make it as correct as possible just because it’s more correct. For better or worse, we don’t. We all want to get paid for what we do, and for that to happen, we need to be making the company money and not wasting more than we need to.

I’m not saying we’re going to stick with this solution, I discussed with my manager long enough to get some time to look into a more correct solution. But before you go after your business area for implementing a less correct or less technical solution, do some quick mental cost/benefit analysis of what you want to suggest and make sure it’s as good for the wallet as it is for correctness.

Some people become programmers because they like math, some because they like video games, but most because they are lazy. That’s right, lazy. Picture this scenario (the names have been changed to protect the guilty).

When we work with computer systems, we rarely imagine the people who designed them. If we do, we only think of them in their work context, abstract entities that give us their product and answer our questions about it. We don’t like to think about them being dumb, or having a sense of humor. I’m not sure which of those two to chalk this
little “feature” up to.

I was working with a wiki product recently, made a few changes, and saved the document. A nice little save window popped up like you’d expect.

I moved my mouse back to the task bar when I noticed that my mouse changed when I moved it over the blue bar at the top of the window. A split second later, the page finished saving and the save box was gone. I opened the doc back up, made another change and saved it just to take a look. Sure enough, when I moved my mouse of the blue bar, I got a movement option.

Or, the developers were playing around, figured out how to do something cool and left it in there as an easter egg, in which case, your vendor’s developers are more like this.

It’s a subtle, but significant difference.

I have played through the following scenario at least three times now.

Me: Hello Information Security, I need admin access to for to complete . Would you be able to give it to me?

Info Sec: Thanks for the request. We’ll get back to you.

Info Sec: We don’t feel you need access for . In our experience should only take a tenth of . How about we give you admin access for half of ?

Me: *Grumble grumble* That’s really not what I need. I won’t be able to do my job if I don’t have admin access for for trouble shooting.

Info Sec: Fine, you can have admin access for half of plus one day. Thanks!

I think info sec gets the idea from watching movies like Skyfall where the computer guys watches a colorful map that shows what’s been “hacked” with a count down for how long the hacking will take.

They assume if I have a dastardly plan, and I requested two months of access, giving me access for five days less than that means my evil plot will get cut off just in the nick of time and everyone will be saved. Yay!

Any real computer person knows that if you wanted to damage a server or steal data any amount of time over 15 seconds is probably plenty.

I know we all have to deal with security theatre, but it doesn’t make it any less frustrating.

As someone who works in enterprise IT, I can understand developers’ frustration with purchased technology.  As developers, however, we must learn (for the sake of our own jobs, if for no other reason) to understand the perspectives of those around us.  Doing so will allow us to fully understand the roadmap behind business decisions, and provide the organization with synergy.  Take an enterprise class web server, for example.  This tool could potentially be perceived in any of the following ways . . .

Purchasing

Upper Management

Corporate Communications

The Developer (those guys with the “typey things”)