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Comment by ris | Hacker News Reader

Corporate IT needs to die.

It's not corporate IT's fault, it's usually corporate leaderships fault who often cosplay leading technology and not understanding it.

Wherever Tech is a first class citizen and seat at the corporate table, it can be different.

Believe me, the average Fortune 500 CEO does not know or care what “SSL MITM” is, or whether passwords should contain symbols and be changed monthly, or what the difference is between ‘VPN’ and ‘Zero Trust’.

They delegate that stuff. To the corporate IT department.

But they also say "Here, this is Sarah your auditor. Answer these questions and resolve the findings." - every year

It's all CyberSecurity insurance compliance that in many cases deviates from security best practices.

This is 100% it- the auditor is confirming the system is configured to a set of requirements, and those requirements are rarely in lockstep with actual best practices.

This is where the problems come from. Auditors are definitely what ultimately causes IT departments to make dumb decisions.

For example, we got dinged on an audit because instead of using RSA4096, we used ed25519. I kid you not, their main complaint was there wasn't enough bits which meant it wasn't secure.

Auditors are snake oil salesman.

Sometimes they have checkboxes to tick in some compliance document and they must run the software that let them tick those checkboxes, no exceptions, because those compliances allow the company to be on the market. Regulatory captures, etc.

where else are you going to find customers that are so sticky it will take years for them to select another solution regardless of how crappy you are. that will staff teams to work around your failures. who, when faced with obvious evidence of the dysfunction of your product, will roundly blame themselves for not holding it properly. gaslight their own users. pay obscene amounts for support when all you provide is a voice mailbox that never gets emptied. will happily accept your estimate about the number of seats they need. when holding a retro about your failure will happily proclaim that there wasn't anything _they_ could have done, so case closed.

Oh yes you can absolutely profit off that but you have to be dead inside a little bit.

And produce a piece of software no one in the world wants and everyone in the world hates. Yourself included.

I think the general idea/flow of things is "numbers go up, until $bubble explodes, and we built up smaller things from the ground up, making numbers go up, bloating go up, until $bubble explodes..." and then repeat that forever. Seems to be the end result of capitalism.

If you wanna kill corporate IT, you have to kill capitalism first.

I don't believe that. I don't necessarily love capitalism (though I can't say I see very many realistic better alternatives either), but if HN is full of people who could do corporate IT better (read: sanely), then the conclusion is just that corporate IT is run by morons. Maybe that's because the corporate owners like morons, but nothing about capitalism inherently makes it so.

Apparently capitalism doesn’t pay enough for corporate IT admin jobs.

> corporate IT is run by morons

playing devil's advocate for a second, but corpIT is also working with morons as employees. most draconian rules used by corpIT have a basis in at least one real world example. whether that example happened directly by one of the morons they manage or passed along from corpIT lore, people have done some dumb ass things on corp networks.

Yes, and the problem in that picture is the belief (whichever level of the management hierarchy it comes from) that you can introduce technical impediments against every instance of stupidity one by one until morons are no longer able to stupid. Morons will always find a way to stupid, and most organizations push the impediments well past the point of diminishing returns.

> the problem in that picture is the belief (whichever level of the management hierarchy it comes from) that you can introduce technical impediments against every instance of stupidity one by one until morons are no longer able to stupid

I would say the problem in the picture is your belief that corporate IT is introducing technical impediments against every instance of stupidity. I bet there's loads of stupidity they don't introduce technical impediments against. It would just not meet the cost-benefit analysis to spend thousands of tech man-hours introducing a new impediment that didn't cost the company much if any money.

It's because corporate IT has to service non-tech people, and non-tech people get pwned by tech savvy nogoodniks. So the only sane behavior of corporate IT is to lock everything down and then whitelist things rarely.

I’d say there’s nothing inherently capitalist about large and stupid bureaucracies (but I repeat myself) spending money in stupid ways. Military bureaucracies in capitalist countries do it. Military bureaucracies in socialist countries did it. Everything else in end-stage socialist countries did it too. I’m sorry, it’s not the capitalism—things’d be much easier if it were.

Maybe military people are just uniquely stupid

Not at all, no. I gave that example because, first, even in a profoundly capitalist country (whatever that means) the military itself is not particularly motivated by profit; and second, because it’s one of the few bureaucratic organizations that will not (be allowed to) collapse under the weight of its own inefficiencies and so easily grows much larger than is othetwise typical.

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