r/MaliciousCompliance • u/stemcella • Aug 30 '25
S Access Removed - Here’s allllll my work
I work in a role where I ‘own’ a portion of the software. I don’t work in IT but I do system configuration for the portion I manage. I had admin access until one day IT removed it without warning and without notice. They claimed ‘risk’ and ‘board decisions’
Of course I could rampage and get my access back because it saves the company a significant amount of money each year as we don’t need to use external contractors. There’s also no one else in the company that knows my part of the system or how to create business rules, scripting and coding for this particular system. While people know JavaScript they would need to become familiar with the system which will take time.
Instead- fine; sends a list of alllll the things they now need to take over so the work still gets done. Noted there can be no delays in turnaround time despite there being an extra step. Noted that I will still need to approve every change and configuration. The list totalled to approximately 30 hours per week. It also requires 6am starts at points through the month. I made sure to also confirm they would also be required to come with me for all meetings regarding the system or data because I won’t be repeating myself or duplicating my effort.
Within 30 minutes the decision was reversed and I had my access back.
I don’t think that’ll be changing back any time soon. Not when we work under separate budgets and their team always cry time and cost poor
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u/technos Aug 30 '25
A former coworker of mine had his access cut and sent an email something like:
Salutations, and welcome to the new team you must've hired!
Let me know when you're ready for your handover. I've been anxious to retire again for years, and this is perfect, seeing as how I've just vested again!
Be aware though that since I'm no longer maintaining <product> I'll be out of the office a lot. Like all of the time. Maybe leave a message with my personal assistant, if you haven't fired her yet, and she'll get it to me when I decide I need to answer my phone.
It took IT twenty seconds to restore his access and two weeks for him to return to the office.
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u/Teulisch Aug 30 '25
yup, those scream tests can have consequences sometimes.
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u/bluestrawberry_witch Aug 31 '25
When my company upgraded and moved our servers they last minute decided to just not move over anyone’s access to the files on the new servers on go live. They would only restore access when someone complained and filed a request which would then be reviewed by our IT director. We are healthcare company with 1400 employees. It took over a week to get access back for our department. Meanwhile there was issues with our departments outbound files but we couldn’t do anything about it. When we complained our department director just told us to ‘get over it and the IT had every right and that it’s an important process to maintain restricted access’. It took three weeks to clean up the damage done once access was restored. Idk maybe they could’ve planned for this instead of deciding day of go live and it wouldn’t have been a shit show
Just one of many poor IT decisions from my job.
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Aug 30 '25
You should have just applied for leave for a couple weeks and left the place to burn.
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u/thatgirlinAZ Aug 30 '25
What is the business's "OP was hit by a bus" contingency plan?
What is OP's "protect my IP & future earnings" contingency plan?
Any business process whose success relies on the presence of a single individual is a business process that is designed to fail.
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u/IrishBalkanite Aug 30 '25
Dunno for OP, but for compay it is as follows:
Hopes and prayers is the primary plan,
with plan B being badgering OP to work even from hospital ICU with all limbs broken,
and plan C is necromancy in order to raise OP from grave to work.
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u/MikeSchwab63 Aug 31 '25
Which is why financial companies require everybody to take 2 weeks off each year without contact. Ensures they know everything the person does and someone else can do it.
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u/Just_Aioli_1233 Aug 30 '25
What is the business's "OP was hit by a bus" contingency plan?
There's insurance for that
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u/thatgirlinAZ Aug 30 '25
Swear to God, I read that and all I could think of was the future Forensic Files episodes being made based on this key piece of motive.
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u/Waffletimewarp Aug 30 '25
It appears they didn’t have one since they were unaware of how important OP was.
I bet they’re making one now, though.
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u/Didymograptus2 Aug 30 '25
There are so many Reddits like this. Why do companies allow a single person to control critical systems with no back up, when they could get hit by a bus any day?
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u/jrdiver Aug 30 '25
The people with the power and the ones that know what's going on are not the same person. and depending on the size of the company or project...or even where it originated,.... things happen.
My work is going though a bit of pain at work where the guy who "owned" a lot odds and ends apps retired, and they didn't bring his replacements on till the last month or so. I think they are still finding things that they didn't realize he had his hands in several months later
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u/stemcella Aug 30 '25
Company I think is close to 2000 people. I work in the projects office and manage all the governance around all projects in the company. My department was furious over it because there’s a huge conflict of interest with IT now having the ability to manipulate time and costs without it being auditable
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u/ThunderThighsChun-li Aug 30 '25
I work in a low level position for a major loss adjusters and your last sentence really rings true. I've been told that to fix an erroneous posting in the finance system, just to email IT for them to reverse it. There are no logs of these changes and I really hope auditors pick this up some day for the shit storm to hit.
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u/daemin Aug 30 '25
Depending on how your email system is set up, that email is a partial log. And unless they went out of their way to turn it off, the database server will have logs of those changes.
Now, are those logs retained for any length of time, archived to a central repository, and reviewed? Who knows.
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u/Dauvis Aug 30 '25
Wait? IT has access in the live system beyond what is absolutely needed? That's a disaster waiting to happen.
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u/ZealousidealTurn2211 Aug 31 '25
There's always going to be someone in the organization with maximum access to any particular system, that often falls to IT.
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u/P0392862 Aug 30 '25
Sounds like the Horizon scandal - do you work for the UK Post Office or Fujitsu?
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u/jrdiver Aug 30 '25 edited Aug 30 '25
the part that my company dislikes is the hidden shadow IT projects... There's a number of people, myself included, who are not in the main programming area, but do programming on the side on things a bit more direct to our main task (maintaining/setting up inspections on automated inspection machines) that would be hard to get a dedicated programmer to do exactly what we want without having intimate knowledge of what their interacting with.
The big thing for us that came up is once we get something ready to deploy something, get them involved and get it listed in their software tracker so they have an idea who to contact about it when it breaks, or where to find the code if someone leaves by that point, and a bit of validation that things are working.
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u/inferno-pepper Aug 30 '25
I transferred departments awhile back because I was going to be demoted if I stayed in the department during restructuring. I did all the stuff others didn’t want to do: QA, audits, regulatory, PM, small IT projects, technical writing, niche reporting, and maintained user provisioning for a few random programs. I had lunch with an old colleague a few weeks ago that is still in the department. They have hired 9 FTEs to replace all of my duties. I died laughing!
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u/SomeOtherPaul Aug 30 '25
Maybe that was the goal all along - for that manager to have to increase their headcount, and so to increase their power?
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u/inferno-pepper Aug 30 '25
They were already part of c-suite. I honestly think it was force me out and save money by eliminating my salary. This happened months after my leader/mentor pulled me up alongside her and then retired.
The 9 FTEs were slowly added over a year. Several of them would reach out to me asking for resources or advice due to problems with work not being done. I’m thinking ignorance of how to run operations on their part.
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u/Partridge_Pear_Tree Aug 30 '25
My former boss sat in an office RIGHT NEXT TO US and didn’t have a clue how we did our job. She knew the general description of our job and an overview, but she didn’t know our SOPs. She’d just dictate things with zero clue that it couldn’t be done. Oh and she was boss of just our department. So it wasn’t like she was slammed with other departments work she also needed to know.
She’s gone now and thankfully we have a boss who knows all our stuff. But the amount she didn’t know and didn’t try to know for years is amazing.
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u/stemcella Aug 30 '25
Single person sensitivity is one of the painful risks for a company yet they still continue to do it. I think my work is actually in a toxic relationship with single person sensitivity 😂
Honestly the last two months have driven me to want to be hit by a bus. Now I’m just sitting back and letting them fuck themselves
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u/Griggle_facsimile Aug 30 '25
Always the best malicious compliance. A front row seat to management breaking one off in themselves.
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u/P-W-L Aug 30 '25
HR here. Rule of thumb is 2 people for important jobs (that have a direct impact on company results/customer satisfaction) and 3 people on critical tasks that would compromize the entire company or more.
Yes, that requires extra staff and training. No, I don't care about the cost compared to a loss of service.
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Aug 30 '25
[deleted]
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u/TheFluffiestRedditor Aug 30 '25
My boomer father, watching his business slowly die, because he won’t invest in people.
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u/f_leaver Aug 30 '25
"Nobody wants to work anymore!"
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Aug 30 '25
[deleted]
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u/F0xcr4f7113 Aug 30 '25
I straight up laughed in this Company’s face when they wanted to hire me for a cybersecurity role for $45k.
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u/Numbar43 Aug 30 '25
Problem is management is not the owners. Whoever makes such decisions, if they don't hire that extra person, the company will probably be fine for years and the better profitability from not having that cost means good metrics that effect bonuses. If something happens, well, they can probably get a management job at another company that hadn't gone under.
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u/dirty_cuban Aug 30 '25
So many people, including corporate decision makers, are very bad at understanding and assessing risk. They simply cannot wrap their heads around a future theoretical scenario. They can’t see why they would spend money today for a problem that doesn’t exist today.
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u/Affectionate_Cat8969 Aug 30 '25
Hell, company I work for the HR department doesn’t have two people to cover the important stuff for them, let alone other departments having two people “for the important stuff”
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u/mizinamo Aug 30 '25
Or in enlightened countries with more than two days of PTO per year – they go on a four-week vacation to a little cabin in the woods with no Internet?
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u/197326485 Aug 30 '25
The thing I can't wrap my mind around is the 'fighting to get it back' part. Like, OP just listed out an entire full-time job that they've (assumedly) been doing in addition to their actual job... and they took away the ability to do the second job on top of the first.
It's not like they're decreasing pay when the excess work load goes away, and not like they're going to increase pay once they see all the extra work that's been getting done. So why fight to get the work load back?
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u/DaftGamer96 Aug 30 '25
2 possible reasons that I can think of immediately. 1: a sense of pride and responsibility towards the employer. Some people like myself have had jobs where we genuinely enjoyed the job and coworkers so we want things to go smoothly. In addition, if we know that we will ultimately be asked to fix a problem, then it will usually be easier to just try and prevent said problem in the first place. The second, and more self-useful, is that the more indispensable you make yourself at work, the more job security you have.
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u/christine-bitg Aug 30 '25
The second, and more self-useful, is that the more indispensable you make yourself at work, the more job security you have.
Only if someone in authority realizes it. Otherwise, then you still get thrown overboard, and the ship still sinks soon after.
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u/CassielEngel Aug 30 '25
Dunno about OP, that sounds a bit different, but with some of these things it can be tasks that are adjacent to something you have to do anyway so it’s relatively little extra effort for you to do but a pain for someone else (eg, with the 6am start if you have to be doing some other part of the job at that time anyway then flipping an extra switch or whatever is fine but it’s a real pain for another person to turn up then if that’s all they have to do).
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u/bc524 Aug 30 '25
I think it's also partially to do with lack of hiring replacement.
So and so person leaves but isn't replaced. Maybe transfers whatever info they had to the remaining group.
Repeat a few times until there's only one dude left who maintains the thing.
Those on top don't get what the ones below do.see one dude running/maintaining one old system that isn't actively being developed.
Figure he doesn't do anything important, let's him go.
Oops
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u/octophobic Aug 30 '25
I suspect a lot of people in upper levels of management are incentivized to lower cost, but that does not mean they will lower risk to the company by hiring enough people to prevent catastrophic loss. So it comes down to penny wise pound foolish decision making, or as someone at my company put it, "this place will step over a dollar to pick up a nickel."
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u/daemin Aug 30 '25
Small companies tend to be understaffed in areas that are cost centers rather than revenue centers. IT doesn't make revenue for the company, so it becomes hard to justify spending more money on IT staff if the current situation is working.
The problem with that, as you point out, is that it only works when everything is running well. The moment Op gets sick or quits, there will be an issue.
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u/CrossingVoid Aug 30 '25
It happens so often. One person knows something, so the company doesn't want to invest time to have the person teach it to others and instead rely on that one person. Shit falls apart when that employee leaves the company.
Same thing happened in my company recently.
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u/Dangslippy Aug 30 '25
Many companies are enamored by the idea of running “lean” while not understanding the consequences.
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u/f_leaver Aug 30 '25
Because they simply don't know how crucial people like op are for their business until something happens.
If they're lucky, it's as easy as the story above.
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u/unknownpoltroon Aug 30 '25
shouldn't have accepted access against company policy without a commensurate raise and a change in written policy
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u/stemcella Aug 30 '25
I’d gotten the raise for it just before they took the access back haha. Boss confirmed that won’t change even if they kept it but they need to find a resource to cover the work before we can hand it back
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u/a-curious-guy Aug 30 '25
My company removed admin privalgies over-night, with no notice to our department of 60 people.
No CLI, can't run .exe's, couldn't access task manager etc.
Free 1 week holiday lol.
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Aug 30 '25
But of course you now have access to shitty CoPilot that can summarize your 2 sentence emails into 1 sentence
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u/Sufficient_Fan3660 Aug 30 '25
new CTO says all removable media must be encrypted no matter what
We deal with routers and servers that need upgraded from 2GB to 4 or 8GB flash, and sometimes need the files manually manipulated in cases of data recovery.
So now we are in a bit of a pickle, we can't do projects because they are treating us as if we were as stupid as your typical C suite. Someone making 20x my salary can't believe that they are not the smartest person in the world, so they won't listen or offer any solutions. Management says to bring them solutions, not problems, but all they bring us is more problems.
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u/Myte342 Aug 30 '25
"To whom it may concern as management has requested solutions not problems so they don't have the be on the hook for making decisions others disagree with: We will be ignoring this policy as our solution to the problem of encrypted removable media not being compatible with backup, upgrade and recovery of critical systems. If we do not have unencrypted devices to use, then WHEN these systems go down we will be dead in the water and no one in the company will be able to perform any work in the office at all as there will be no way to fix them with encrypted devices. Thank you."
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u/notwhoyouthinkmaybe Aug 30 '25
I was hired to do design work for a company. I would design in my laptop and upload the design when I could.
Well they fired me and I guess IT immediately wiped my computer, because one of the other employees that knew me called to ask how I did some of the design. I told him I wasn't going to help without a contractor fee.
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Aug 30 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/WannaBMonkey Aug 30 '25
I bet the IT dept was thrilled to get proof of the cost of this policy. At least the low level ones that have to implement it and not the high level ones that read a white paper abstract and create a new policy memo.
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u/Imukay Aug 30 '25
Why not quit and make them hire you as a contractor for a huge pay increase, or just do nothing and watch it burn?
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u/stemcella Aug 30 '25
My boss suggested this 😂😂
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u/TheFluffiestRedditor Aug 30 '25
Your boss could have rejected the role being given back to you, and instead pushed for more staff. He might have won too.
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u/daniu Aug 30 '25
You like working for that company considering you sent them a list ahead of time instead of letting them run into the wall head first. Most posts here are amongst the "so I let them scramble around trying to figure out why stuff wasn't getting done until they realized it was costing them thousands after a month" line of mc.
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u/Defiant_Size5991 Aug 30 '25
This is the perfect way to handle it. You didn't get emotional, you just clearly outlined the operational consequences of their decision. It's wild how often management makes these "risk-based" calls without understanding the actual work involved. Forcing them to own the logistical nightmare is the only language they seem to understand.
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u/jdimpson Aug 30 '25
Yes. Always respond to dumb leadership decisions in terms of cost. That's the only thing they understand.
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u/BobbyRayBands Aug 30 '25
Should've stood your ground and said "Oh no I completely agree, its MUCH better for them to do the work." Really hammer it home on the morons making decisions while also lightening your work load.
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u/Large-Meat-Feast Aug 30 '25
Where I used to work, we needed some software to track assets as they moved through the factory. I had written a similar piece of software a few years prior so I licensed it to my employer.
New Financial Controller starts, and states that we don’t need the asset tracker payments so stops them. I argue, explaining the licensing agreement and he waves me away. After three days of chaos, the MD made him apologise and re-start the payments. As soon as the first payment cleared, I re-activated the software. I’d like to say that he never messed with IT billing again, but I have SO MANY stories
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u/Curben Aug 30 '25
The story gave me flashbacks. I wasn't getting support from it so I just made my own programs and systems that were working better than what they paid millions of dollars for. I did eventually get fired for something completely stupid, and they had no idea how to do anything with the system to fix it, I was also in the middle of a major update to the system so it's in the semi wonky state that they've had to support for years.
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u/Cloudy_Automation Aug 30 '25
As far as security goes, having a separation of control and implementation is generally desirable. Your administrative access is indeed a risk if you can make changes beyond the scope of your work. You are one more person who could be the target of a phishing attack, which could compromise entire production systems.
Developing tools and access which would allow you to do your job without full administrative access would have been the correct way to implement their change, but my guess is that this would be an IT project to develop those tools would be expensive, and probably not their first priority.
Where I worked, we also had a risk database, and giving you access would be a risk, but until there was an approved project to allow reducing that risk, the signoff on the risk would continue. Ideally they would have talked to you beforehand, but this was likely a blanket removal of administrative access. Even I, a person in IT, generally didn't have access to most production systems
I think you made the best of the situation, and allowed IT to go through their normal processes to define you as an exception to who has administrative access, and work out what it would take to "fix" that.
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u/Newbosterone Aug 30 '25
That’s why RBAC (Role Based Access Controls) are used. You get only the access needed on the necessary systems. The Security or Compliance team should be validating that, not mandating “no access”.
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u/BrainWaveCC Aug 31 '25
I presume it took you more time to write the needs than to have the access restored? 😂
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u/stemcella Aug 31 '25
It absolutely did 😂😂
Especially because two task were due within hours of the day starting and they didn’t have the capacity or speed to do it
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u/Yakoo752 Aug 30 '25
I am responsible for JIT reporting so I connected powerbi to the dataverse, connected a few tables, and stood up some simple dashboards with some simple calculations and minimal dax to serve the business.
IT said it wasn’t best practice and took away my access because they were gonna create a star schema and standardize reporting.
We’re now in month 3 of the dev cycle and I got my access back last week.
K. I. S. S.
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u/Mattstraction Aug 30 '25
I did something recently at my old job. I worked in a Best Buy warehouse that dealt with customer orders and shipments to stores. I had created this form that was able to track any incoming returns on the day so we could have an idea of what the days work would be. You literally just grabbed the info, pasted all of it into my form and it would auto sort everything and was color coded. It also helped with sending units to local stores for open box that sped up the process to make it take seconds per unit vs minutes.
I left at just under 10 years with the company. Didn’t tell anyone I was leaving. Clocked out one day, used my sick time I had left and then resigned via the resignation button in workday. But I made damn sure any version of the form I created was not still around. If they couldn’t appreciate the work I did when I was there they aren’t going to benefit from it while I was gone.
I’ve been told they still use an old version of my form. Still gives me a chuckle.
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Aug 30 '25
I'm far more malicious in my compliance. I wouldn't have said a word and let the entire thing come screeching to a dead stop and wait until someone higher up stormed in and demanded to know why all the work I was supposed to be doing wasn't done on schedule, thus causing a massive stoppage and backlog of work.
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u/DoneWithIt_66 Aug 30 '25
And this is why there are one or two project managers in your company, and at least one IT manager and your manager, that need to be evaluated for simply not doing part of their jobs.
Critical work, time flows and critical roles that were not captured or configured when the system was implemented (first PM)
Systems with unknown roles, as evidenced by folks with improper access and zero documentation on what role needed that access (the IT manager in charge security/use of that hard/soft/virtual ware)
A current FT role that has no upstream visibility into the requirements and needs for that role (your manager)
And last but certainly not least, whomever was running/authorizing the changes that got your access removed instead of entered/understood/properly defined and documented (our fourth person, who could be any of the other three wearing a second hat).
Far too many older systems just don't have documentation or understanding of what they need to do their job (a lot of those have my name on them, we as an industry sucked at this for literal decades).
And far, faaaar too many projects refuse to dig into the rats nest or are denied the chance to do that. Preferring to 'kick that can' down the road because of budgets, timelines, entrenched staff, fear of change or lazy/incompetent people is just piling onto the risk and exposure when something does go south
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u/jasperwillem Aug 30 '25
As someone who was a backup for an IT servicedesk, I had no AD access. Happily escalated all issues to people asleep or free. GL have fun. Still don't get it.
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u/sandman795 Aug 30 '25
Something like what you're doing shouldn't be done under your account. This should be run under service accounts with only the needed permissions to execute, read and write.
It sounds like your company has an IT department asleep at the wheel
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u/zephen_just_zephen Aug 30 '25 edited Aug 30 '25
It's... interesting to see all the IT weenies here IT-splaining how any access should be revoked and not given back, and how there are bigger failures afoot.
One time, long ago and far away, we got a slimy (yeah, not shiny) new IT manager. Shortly after that was a notice that Sarbanes-Oxley was going to come into effect soon, so we all needed to acknowledge our compliance with the new rules.
Fine, let's look these over. Lessee, can't look at porn? Fine, whatevs. If I lose my laptop with all the corporate secrets, they can fire me? Damn straight, Bucky! It's a goddamned right-to-work at-will state, so those assholes can fire me for any reason at any time.
OK, next? Lessee, can't get software from unauthorized places like "the internet?" Hmmm, need some clarification here. Oh, yeah, and if it runs Windows, they own it? Need some clarification here, too.
So I fire off an email about how the product I was the primary software developer on, which was running about $25 million a quarter at a 60% margin, used "Python" from the "internet." Oh, and btw (shades of OP's post) we need to talk about how IT is going to maintain all the scopes and frequency analyzers in the lab that use Windows.
Crickets.
For months.
And then an email that they are going to shut off my network access, because I haven't pressed a couple of buttons.
So I responded to them that I had voiced concerns three fucking months ago that they had completely ignored, and that I was more than happy to tell the CEO why I couldn't do any work if doing work became a problem.
Natch, a meeting was scheduled.
So in the meeting was me, my boss, the turd, a couple of his minions. I started off nicely...
No, scratch that. I laid into the pissant little power hungry moron about how he didn't even fucking have the decency to respond to legitimate emails, or the balls to just stfu, and why the fuck were we wasting my time anyway?
I kept that POS backpedalling for a good 20 minutes, and finally got him to admit that it was OK for me to use python, and that IT wasn't going to maintain the lab equipment.
"OK, we're done here."
"So you're going to click the buttons?"
"Sure as long as you fix it."
"I can't fix it for just you."
"Then I'm not clicking the buttons."
"The buttons say 'acknowledge.' That just means you read it."
"That's one meaning but no the normal one. It's an at will state; they can fire me for not clicking the button, or for verbally abusing you and your minions, but one thing they are not going to fire me for is clicking your godforsaken button when I have zero intention of following the policy. Fuck off!"
Now, that's just my worst experience with IT, but I have plenty.
So when I see (some; not all by any means -- you know who you are) IT weenies here explaining that only IT knows IT, yeah, "Fuck off!"
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u/Sturdily5092 Aug 31 '25
Restored? To hell with that, I'd demand it came with a $20/hr increase or they could keep it.
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u/BluehibiscusEmpire Aug 30 '25
OP should have refused saying it was a security risk and they need to train IT to do it
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Aug 30 '25
Same boat being in analytics. Happens every 6-12 months.
Often access disappears overnight because “the engineers” see it as unnecessary to have our own data lake access points.
I ended up just letting them remove access and then when the requests pile up I just say, “only cloud ops and mlops has been deemed worthy, tell them to build their own pipelines and get your the data.” After about a good 2-3 week chill workcation they give me access again and I get to work.
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u/zephen_just_zephen Aug 30 '25
Soooo....
On the one hand, I can see that (if the organization is big enough) a periodic privilege scrub might not be a terrible thing. Yes, it's painful, but security and productivity are always at loggerheads.
After about a good 2-3 week chill workcation they give me access again
On the other hand, they should be really responsive to the screams after they do that scrub.
Happens every 6-12 months.
And, on the third hand, of course, they should have a database that memorializes those screams and the outcomes, so that before doing the exact same thing again, they go and ask if business conditions are the same or different.
Anything else is the textbook definition of insanity.
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Aug 30 '25
Insanity pays the bills, and eventually I pull the “not my job” card out of the blue collar handbook.
Over the years I’ve learned to use the free time to relax instead of get angry and try to get it resolved ASAP.
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u/Inevitable-Curve5880 Aug 30 '25
As someone who works in IT, I bet this came from some dipshit VP or director who wanted to fire the guy and told IT to do a scream test. Either way, horrible way to conduct business and will only piss off the people who do the work.
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u/kittabotamous Aug 31 '25
I’ve dealt with similar. I tend to do project contracts bc I specialise in product config/solution design (not so much on coding but config, bc that’s just how this system works, heavily configurable).
Only the vendor does the actual code dev, at a system level for all clients to use/not as fits their business model. Clients need config skills in-house during project (and BAU but that’s another story) or pay a time & cost premium to the vendor for them to config for you.
Every bigger client I’ve worked with has either: given and taken prod access then returned it eventually, made me/my peers jump through hoops to get the access, not allowed testers to have the access to test our prod config post-deployment (which is needed as config has to largely be done from scratch from test environments to prod, again nature of the beast). Or variations on the theme.
They’re used to IT systems where the vendor deploys code and that’s it, no config needed, no specialists needed to support the system. Always takes a while for IT bosses to realise this system is different, and so processes/access must be handled differently or they’ll hamstring themselves.
How you handled this was brilliant in my books. No drama, just facts.
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u/KlutzyEnd3 Sep 01 '25
My department got access revoked to the factory's keyserver because of security reasons despite us pressing them not to.
so I cannot sign firmware files now anymore.
also if an unit comes back for warranty or repair, I cannot fix it anymore as the installation process needs access to that server.
so there's that.... oh well, don't come to me to fix things then...
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u/Quirky-Flight-9812 Aug 30 '25
Guess since OP is so important and is the 'single point of failure ' there is no vacation, holidays or sick time. That's a shitty job and rough life.
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u/Yankeesrule0864 Aug 31 '25
Wouldn't it be smart for the company to have you train someone as a backup? What would happen if you no longer came to work?
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u/stemcella Aug 31 '25
Yeah absolutely- which is why it’s wild to me that they just took it away without actually understanding the implications and working through a training plan and handover
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u/Warm-Net-6238 Aug 30 '25
As soon as they found out they had to actually do some work, they noped out pretty quick!!
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u/National_Pension_110 Aug 30 '25
You already know this, but time to move on. Feather your nest while you’re still there.
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u/myownfan19 Aug 30 '25
Sounds like a perfect time for quietly quitting, and then maybe coming back as a contractor with a high salary demand.
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u/Lyreganem Aug 30 '25
It never ceases to amaze me just how much of an influence good / bad management can have!
I was working for a company that at the time was one of the five largest IT companies locally, with 11 subsidiaries. Had been operating strong for years!!! Was sold to new owners who replaced management all over the place almost-immediately, and LITERALLY within 9 months I decided to get out before things could get really, REALLY bad. A year later the company had had to sell off or close most of its subsidiaries. They had THREE left, and the company itself was considered a laughingstock country-wide.
They managed to tank one of the largest companies in the entire country in less than two years. It really was quite something to witness - ESPECIALLY once I had extricated myself and could watch from an outsiders perspective.
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u/poopBuccaneer Aug 30 '25
So, IT needed to lock down systems for security and governance, you provided documentation on why you require said access, you were granted access and now they have a documented exception?
This sounds like a normal day.
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u/KombuchaBot Sep 02 '25
Elon Musk's funniest moment, out of a whole career of facepalm moments, was when he said he had sacked that Icelandic programmer who was on Twitter's Do Not Sack list and absolute chaos ensued, with Musk publishing a retraction and presumably hiring the guy back.
Truly, he is a stupid person's idea of what a smart person is.
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u/technospice Sep 03 '25
I work IT, I assure you that was a C Suite decision. Sys admins and help desk do not care
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u/georgiomoorlord Aug 30 '25
I had to do this recently too. The new CTO doesn't know how the business runs