So who is the bottleneck in your company preventing you from getting your job done? Well I just started working at a new company here in San Diego (I won’t mention who) and so far it’s the networking guys. There are five of them and it takes frickin forever to get anything out of them, if at all. Let me give you an example of what I have experienced in my first seven days…
Last Thursday my boss came to me and wanted me to setup a already running SharePoint server so we can setup a new project management site for our development group. Cool, I have been using and programming with SPS since it first came out. I went to the server and SPS would not run because it could not communicate with the database server. I told the networking guys and they said they would look into it. The guy who was supposed to be looking into it spends out two minutes and that’s about it as far as I know. Every time I saw him after that he just said to me "… is it working?"!
After me and my boss bugged them for two days, they finally gave up I guess and said they were going to rebuild two boxes for me but they could not get to it for a day or two! So my boss asked if I would do it. I quickly agreed so I would have something to do.
Well this is easier said then done around here. First I had to wait about three hours just to get the boxes, keyboards etc. Then I was given a "bad" Windows 2003 CD that I struggled with all morning trying to get it to install. Then I was given a good CD, but the wrong serial number (took half a day just to get this number). I had to rebuild one box because of this!
So I finally got the boxes built and patched. Now I have been waiting all day (it's now 2:30pm) for the networking guys to join the machines to the domain and get me the rest of the CD’s I need for the boxes.
Now I know why I like working for small companies where they usually don’t have a networking department or just one guy. At least I can do the work myself and get my job done instead of writing this for my blog!
Oh, you are going to cringe at this, for the both boxes (one for SPS and one for SQL Server) they gave me Dell desktops 1.7GHz, 256MB of memory and 20GB hard drive. I hope people don’t expect SPS to operate faster than a crawl!
Update (September 23, 2005):
Yesterday we discovered that we could not get to our QA web server. We called the IT help line, but no one answered (6 people work in IT now). We submitted a trouble ticket, but they ignored that too. Today we finally discovered from one of the IT people that in the chaos of our office space reconstruction, someone in IT moved our QA web server into storage! Yes, if you can believe it, we QA on a Dell desktop machine that was sitting in someones cube.
We were told by IT it would take 2.5 hours to hook it back up!?!?! Come on, how hard it is to plug a computer back into the network? Well in true IT fashion around here it took 4.5 hours. So most of the day I could not even run my web project locally to test changes because it relied on pages on the QA web server (don't even get me started on why this project is that way).