LogFAQs > #971935414

tl'dr: A director level employee made a demand that would have caused me and another guy to have to do hours of re-work on a project. He listened to my concerns, though, and changed his mind.

I've been at this company for 3 years now and I don't think I want to leave. I could probably earn more money by job hopping, but I really like it here.

I'm assigned to a project where they're testing some new technology out in a few of our branch locations, and there is a bunch of network configuration that needs to be done for each branch. I worked with a remote hands guy a bunch and we got all of the vendor's cables plugged into our switches.

Then one of the directors of the field tech teams said he wanted all of the vendor's devices connected to a dedicated switch. This is after we had already spent hours plugging in and configuring about 65 devices in two different network closets. This would have caused us to have to go back and do hours worth of re-work. The field tech would have had to connect 3 more switches to a remote console device. I would have had to spend time code leveling the switches and configuring them. Then the field tech would have had to pick up the switches, drive to the branch location, put them in the rack and connect all of the infrastructure cables, and then move all of the cables that we already connected to that new switch.

I was pretty frustrated at first. In past jobs, I would have raised a bunch of concerns about that, but it would have fallen on deaf ears. I would have just had to do it. At my old job, the director of IT operations made a lot of dumb ass decisions, a number of which directly impacted my job. He wouldn't listen to anyone's concerns, though, so we ended up having to implement a bunch of dumb shit. We would also have to spend a lot of time trying to plan out how to implement things we knew wouldn't work.

• Dedicating switches that cost thousands of dollars to one application isn't cost effective
• All of the hours of re-work required by at least two people
• It complicates our typical branch network design, which also adds complications to troubleshooting and automation.

Being that this guy was a director, the guy on the project that reports to him was thinking we'd have to just do it. I asked more questions in the email thread where all this was being discussed.

• Do we also need to move the vendor's other devices that are on our switch? This vendor has had devices on our normal switches for a while now.

The director wasn't aware of that, so he relented on his position and asked what we (the network team) would prefer. I asked the team about it and gave my opinion on the matter, that we should probably just keep their devices on our normal switches so that we don't have another one-off. The whole team agreed with me and added their thoughts. I replied back with the team's thoughts, and now we don't have to do a bunch of re-work.

This is great.