Non-Technical Tech Decisions

You're not alone. In my experience the senior executive are enamoured by the possibility of halving headcount. The engineers reporting honestly about the limitations of connecting it to core systems (or using it to generate complex code running on core systems) are at risk of being perceived as blocking progress. So everyone keeps quiet, tries to find a quick and safe use case for the tech to present to management, and make sure that they aren't involved in any project that will be the

This feels like it's a common thing in large enterprisey companies. Execs out of touch with technical teams, always pushing for more for less.

This is quite normal in big companies and it doesn’t just apply to building stuff, buying stuff has the same problem. Managers will propose a certain product vendor and after roll out will continue to support it, no matter the consequences. We had to use a terrible “data virtualizzation” tool for 2 years because IT “leaders” had bought into it and now would not admit their mistake.

At a tech-focused business, probably, but think about all the programming jobs and IT departments that ultimately roll up to very non-technical people. Often what happens is a vendor becomes the chosen vendor for some expensive tool (think Microsoft, Red Hat/IBM, Oracle, whatever), and they have a solution for almost everything (theoretically). You start having to justify why you want to use a different thing to people who don't care.Say you have 200 windows servers, and someone wan

From the trenches in large corporate (aka 'enterprise') tech departments:* Technology decisions in large organizations will often not be made based on technical evaluations or merit. Some other arbitrary thing will influence a decision. You will get stuck with technically inferior product and have to deal, some call this job security.* If you propose something and it gets floated up the management chain, chances are good that management will not "buy in". Not until t

Kickbacks are most likely not the case. Why would a billions of dollars a year in profit company need to pay people to adopt tech? It is highly unethical and probably a fire-able offense for a sales person at a US company to bribe (aka kickback) potential customers to buy their stuff. Think about that for a minute.Just like you and your peers have a culture of liking Open Source, macs, etc. he/she likely has a strong bias (culture?) towards Microsoft solution stack.See if you can g

The problem I've always encountered with this (which I 100% agree with), is that I've never met anyone in a decision making position who's cared or been open to discussing it. Most places seem to just pick something because they heard it's used by Facebook or Google, and they think cargo culting those companies might make them successful too.Usually, any disagreement is seen as either contrarian or ignorant, and you end up building an over engineered monstrosity because th

In my experience, it isn’t that companies don’t want to put in the work, it’s that some middle manager made a decision. I’ve been told to “implement login with X” more than once in my career and when asked what about Y or Z, they say, “we only want X” with no further explanation.

We have a big problem with these in my org. High execs buy software that sucks (From HP, Microfocus, CA, Oracle). They literally have to force people to use it. A lot of money is thrown so people use it. Even after everybody realizes it is bad software. Because somebody high up has to save face.Meanwhile other software just is being organically, underground until everybody uses it and it cannot hidden anymore. As an example, Git took years and years to be accepted. Now everybody wants to get

You are in the minority. Most IT and devops people are massively change averse and tend to blame all problems on the most recent change. They would rather pay more for a known quantity. This is even more the case for non technical management.