Non-Technical People Working in a Technical Environment

It bothers me when, for whatever reason, non-technical people are drawn to the I.T. group or other technical department. Why does this happen? I don't know.

Today, we started jumping through the hoops and running the maze setup by our corporate "Enterprise I.T." (EIT) group in order to get some development machines opened up to the Internet. These machines will need to be accessible to a vendor with whom we're partnering to develop some automated processes for our ERP system.

Well, the EIT folks have a "production servers only" rule when making firewall changes. Anything that's not a production server must be classified as a "test" machine and will therefore be subject to time limitations on the firewall change. That is to say, they'll open the ports for a week but, after that time expires, they'll close it again. Re-opening requires a new request with a new round of approvals.

We tried to explain that this is for development collaboration with a third party and would need to be open for longer than that. The glorified admin assistant whose title is "Network Security Administrator" was giving us some push-back on this. She insisted that, because this was a development environment, it was subject to their temporary firewall change policy. She suggested we could provide an "end date" should we have that. We tried "December 31, 2015" but that didn't fly.

We responded that this was totally unreasonable and that our best guess would be January 1, 2010. She went for that but responded by saying, "Hopefully developers are not going to be making changes every week. More than likely a handful of times a year."

If developers are only making changes "a handful of times a year," what in the world are they doing the rest of the time? I mean, they're full time people. They're making changes to their code all the time. That's their job!

We've had other run-ins with this particular Network Security Administrator who just doesn't seem to grasp the technical concepts we're trying to explain to her. I've been in this situation before with others and it always makes me wonder why they chose the job they did and, even more, how in the world they got hired in the first place.