Only in small companies run by morons. In a bigger company, IT is an outsourced company, answerable only to the Network Manager who answers to the CIO. And they do not give two shits about the local production managers problems. They know who will get canned if sensitive data get's stolen off of their network because they kow-towed to some blowhard frat boy line manger at the plant in Detroit.

Funny, i thought gray IC vanished with the advent of comlinks. Must be some leftover stock dumped to market as part of a company liquidation.

Nope, not even close. Budget concerns and the need for hackjobs to fit new requirements into an existing system are hardly limited to small companies.
And outsourcing IT makes it worse. An internal IT department is here to stay, an external company may lose the contract to a competitor every other day and thus has even less standing to tell some suit that his idea is utterly preposterous and borders on sabotage.

God forbid switching contractors and having two different rules sets being imposed. One that the old contractor put in place (but can't be removed or something breaks) and the new set (put in place by the new contractor to "better service your needs").

Or having both companies go out of business, and being the third one in to try and figure out how the hell to fix their FUBARs.

Won't name names, but one place I was at had a whole server rack for two switches. Which were right next to each other so their combined heat killed their lifetime.

Most modern windows printers do that for fancy formating, though HP has moved to universal drivers which eliminates some of that traffic but even *nix systems get bidirectional traffic if its got MFC attached (that would be a scanner, one of those all-in-one printers)



Not limited to but big companies tend to pay big money to CIO/CTOs to make sure hackjobs don't happen. Change controls dont happen without commitee and impact analysis. Though at IBM this was amazingly fast considering the number of aprovals you needed. I could actually get aproval on a segnificant change in less that 24 hours.



This is pretty likely especially if the customer is not IT savy. One IBM customer desided we were to expensive, so they went with a well known cheaper company. We offered to train them for a price but they said no. So one day we get this call from the customer saying their stuff is broke and they needed some training, we said sorry its not our problem any more they didnt want our training.

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