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Comment by drrob | Hacker News Reader

In the better places I've worked "getting things done" was the priority. The places that valued code quality always overshot deadlines by enormous degrees (over a year late on an 8 month project, for instance).

Typically I find that code quality isn't too vital, as the majority of big-co systems tend to get re-written from the ground up every few years, rather than modifying and evolving the existing system.

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Seems that way at most large orgs. A friend of mine was talking about how some random support desk person will just log in, kill a specific logging process and manually type the path to run it in at a root shell, which inevitably borks things, and due to it happening multiple times a day he has written a unit file so systemd will actually kill the process, fix the now wrecked permissions, and start the logging daemon's unit file properly.

But, the real question is why does a support person have global root access to every server in a large enterprise?

Well, because it "used to be like that" and nothing is as persistent as a stopgap solution. Fun story: Used to work at a 8 year old, heavily growing ad network in customer support and hadn't even officially progressed to engineering yet, but people heard stories about my PHP hacking skills.

So one of the old-timers came by (really fun and totally random guy) and was like... "ah, there's this one thing I thing you could help me, I'm trying to find a solution for these tracking error reports. wait, I'm giving you access"

A few minutes later came my email together with password over MS Lync, and nothing else. And I waited for him to come by with some requirements.

Which of course didn't happen. But what happened instead was that the newly minted Head of IT came by who was tasked of cleaning up the mess after the acquisition and introduce a proper process.

He looked at me very earnestly and just when I tried to think hard what I did wrong he blurted out "WTF ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR LIVE DB PRODUCTION CREDENTIALS!?"

In the moment I realized what that guy gave me, it was gone already unfortunately.

So long story short, as time goes by and companies grow, there are very different approaches at "getting things done" ;-)

What one person may think is fine might look crazy to someone else. Getting things done seems to be the MO of most orgs though.

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