I worked in University IT. In fact, for one of the schools listed though it’s been 10+ years.
Basically everything the above poster said. It was pulling teeth to update or upgrade anything.
Basically everything the above poster said. It was pulling teeth to update or upgrade anything.
The problem was never users/faculty. It was other people doing IT there for longer who would not accept anything they were unfamiliar with, and treated "their" hardware as if it was their own children. It led to a sort of balkanization of infrastructure that was extremely difficult to break, and you often had to spend way more of the budget to come up with convoluted solutions so you didn't touch their ancient setups rather than just making the whole thing homogenous and centrally managed.
As a result, depending on what you were working on, you could have to deal with wildly different AWS/Azure/GCP platforms, or on-prem hardware that could range from independent(!) OpenStack installs to ancient Debian machines that might not even be supported anymore. Sometimes people negotiate licensing completely separately, where you could have unused licenses available but it's not communicated so it's bought again by someone else. Some places even had random servers running inside people's offices connected via Wi-Fi.
There's a reason I got out of that line of work. I'm frankly surprised universities aren't a larger target.
it doesn't have to be that way. IT people are pretty shit in general at soft skills. sometimes, you need to stand up for yourself in a conflict.
your userbases digs in their heels because you let them.
Then you just get fired. They’ll just replace you with someone else who’ll listen. Some people just don’t learn no matter how hard you try.