He was put there because he was with the company for years before and he led other departments fine.
Since he can't evaluate anything IT related himself he relies on 'advice' from the people beneath him who try to get the most budget for their departments by overstating how important they are.
This layer beneath him is mostly product managers, RTEs etc... (We are SAFE Agile! Developer Velocity, Woohoo!).
They also don't know much about computer and if they do it's very domain specific, such as SAP or so.
These people try to fight for budget by overstating their importance. They demonstrate this by having more apps and more people relying on them.
"Look we handled 2000 support tickets, the company would grind to a halt without us!".
Never mind that having 2000 support tickets is a bad thing. And also mostly caused by their shitty apps.
This keeps going on and on. I have 10 years experience as engineer and wanted to see "the other side" but it's so exhausting.
A few months back a 'privacy officer' asked why the first and last names of our employees were in the Active Directory and ordered them to reduce the privacy risks.
They failed to specify what risks. Couldn't articulate them even when asked. They also didn't say when the risk would've been reduced 'enough'.
The team was panicking as they were now 'non-compliant' with company policy.
I had to intervene personally to make sure this single directive didn't derail our entire company.
I’m constantly having to fight people to not add new, inactionable alerts as knee-jerk reactions to incidents. I swear the thought process is “an incident happened, we added a new alert - look, we’re proactive!” instead of, you know, fixing the root causes.
In traffic we could see that 12% of the company used the site daily, transferring gigabytes of data between our engineers and contractors.
I asked why we didn't just start paying WeTransfer since it's so widely used and this would solve the problem, too.
They said they should just use the internal SharePoint file sharing tool.
I asked how this would work since most of WeTransfer use was us receiving docs, not sharing them.
They said the contractors should just update their policy, and that was the end of the debate.
Last time I spoke to a field engineer he said they mostly use private mailboxes now mostly since they "can't even copy something in Outlook anymore" on company laptops.
I decided not to report this to CISO and these docs are workorders and pictures demonstrating workorders have been completed. They're irrelevant one day later.
would you listen to a doctor that could not suture a cut? how about a mechanic that could not remove a socket from a ratchet?
simple file editing. vi has been around for every. if you haven't seen it, and needed it at least once, what have you been doing?
(personal anecdote: once had an engineering VP bring up that a stray ":wq" in a document was a sign of a real engineer...working outside of where he should be..)