Comment by adl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adl | Hacker News Reader

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The company I work for (that shall remain unnamed) signed a thousand million dollars, 10 year contract with IBM for IT infrastructure.

I was in need to log into a Mac Pro that ended up in one of the Server Rooms that IBM took over in our building.

I basically needed to connect a keyboard, log in and enable remote desktop so I could run a few XCode builds (I don't have a Mac, and I needed to test a few hybrid Sencha/Phonegap apps)

after several phone calls involving my boss and his boss, three meetings with five IBMers and 3 months (I kid you not) we gave up, and ended up borrowing a few personal MacBooks from friends to test the apps.

The Server Room was a few meters from the conference room, it was a 2 minute job, but we could not enter and do the changes ourselves without IBMs permission.

The word frustration doesn't even cover it.

(oh, and the 'copy jar files' thing? totally true.)

>>The Server Room was a few meters from the conference room, it was a 2 minute job, but we could not enter and do the changes ourselves without IBMs permission.

Sorry, But there are reasons why your dev team is kept out of the server rooms. Because generally when permission is given they go in and make big mess, which some one has to clean up later. Plus there are thousands of other issues like data security, theft etc that need to be taken care of here.

I've worked for a outsourcing firm here in India, we partnered with another outsourcing firm. While we were there our partner offered a lower hourly billing price and we lost most projects to them. We had a strict server room policy. They came in with all these policies of 'process elimination','cutting bureaucracy' - Which ultimately directly translated to cow boy behavior with total collapse in discipline.

After some time the chaos ensued. Dev's would just walk into servers rooms for even simple things collecting logs, or troubleshooting production software issues. Until some one accidentally pulled out a power cable while toying with a server. A downtime happened, followed by all kind of data consistency problems. It took quite a while, and a lot of beating from senior management for them to realize rules exist for a reason.

My respect for IBM just increased after I read your story. If I have to ever in the future outsource some IT infrastructure I may chose them.

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