Third month as data engineer by a pharma company. Meeting with IT network admins to solve connectivity issues between departments/machines.

Me: “ok gentleman, I have prepared some slides to show you our issues with the current corporate internal network. Server x is in position y and is behind a firewall. We need to access that server to perform blablabla… I have made a basic HTTP server in python to blablabla. We can try this and this but then we need to designate a TCP port that is open in the firewall… blablabla”.

IT representative listens with vague smile and waits that I finish to add: “good that you joined our group! Let me show you something… [opens paint] this is a computer… an SQL server is an application that runs on a machine. An IP is an “address” we give to computers to find them back and… by the way… we don’t use custom solutions here because nobody else knows how to use python, what if you then leave?!”

…I am so fucked 😂😂😂

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

lol amazing. 2 things this story brings to mind:

1) I remember now that Photoshop was once simply a “custom solution” to a problem encountered making a movie, and that solution birthed a $156 billion company.

2) what if big companies paid employees well enough not to leave when those employees were innovative and engaged in their work? What could be possible?

Imagine that a company pays a couple million dollars in digitalization and the IT department buries all resulting data behind a firewall making sure nobody will ever access it and uses it to do jack shit 😂😂😂 and when this issue becomes apparent, propose to DUPLICATE the database on the same inaccessible machine cause apparently having 2 inaccessible sets of data is better than just having 1. Luckily I started therapy a couple weeks ago… 🤪

😂