The solution there is to document every moment of your time spent on this issue, alongside the user agent logs, and present that alongside your salary, and present it.
Best case, they decide they pay you too much and you cause too much trouble, and let you go.
Worst case they make her upgrade her browser so they're not dumping mountains of money on her preferences and whims.
Either way, I'd be good with it if I were in that position.
I already document every task I do (my immediate boss requires it).
The way I view it is it was good busywork for the weeks before Christmas when not much was getting done anyway. I don't bother fighting it because if they want to waste their money paying me to downgrade a web site for one person, I'm happy to take their money for it.
It's not a tech company, so it doesn't work that way. IT doesn't tell management what to do, it's the other way around.
get someone more senior than her to put her in her place
To get to someone more senior than her would mean contacting her manager on the other side of the country, who would likely wonder why I'm was wasting her time, and come down on me through my boss. Again, it's not a tech company.
I wasn't saying it doesn't. I wasn't saying anything remotely like that. Someone was downvoted for the normally unremarkable observation that intentional sabotage is unethical. I thought that this community response was hilarious and worthy of remark.
If it "swings both ways," I would be most interested in an opinion about the "other way" if you're willing to offer it.
This is somebody who successfully refuses to let IT upgrade her computer. That means she has a huge level of power in the organization and feels entitled to disregard policy.
Do you honestly believe she cares about the IT department wasting a little bit of money (and it really is just a little bit relative to what she probably deals with), or would respond well to an IT guy pointing out his salary in an attempt to convince her to upgrade her computer? The advice you gave is more likely to get someone fired than it is to help.
She seems like she's an easy attack vector into the company network. Is her computer also completely firewalled off from anything important or does the company not care about breaches?
Either that or “IT” is someone who doesn’t feel qualified enough to be assertive in their position. If I was this “IT” person, I would explain to the individual that there was a critical vulnerability found which will not be patched and then print up a liability waver form for them to sign and date, stating that they are doing this on their own terms and I cannot be held responsible should anything go wrong.
> If I was this “IT” person, I would explain to the individual that there was a critical vulnerability found which will not be patched and then print up a liability waver form for them to sign and date, stating that they are doing this on their own terms and I cannot be held responsible should anything go wrong.
That's even worse advice than what I was responding to. Great way to anger a high-ranking executive and probably get fired.
Frankly a lot of the advice in this thread seems to be coming from people who are very junior or otherwise don't have experience dealing with high-ranking executives. Heck, even mid-ranking executives would respond very poorly to the kinds of actions advised in this thread.
Here's the situation: a high-ranking person in the company is so powerful that she can disobey IT policy by refusing to update her computer. This person is also powerful enough to demand that changes be made to a corporate website to make it compatible with her older computer. This is a problem for the head of IT, and the head of IT either lost that battle or decided it was not worth fighting.
This is not the right place for a more junior IT person or developer to stick their nose in by going directly to that executive with some bogus "liability waiver" or appeals to wasted money or whatever else. It won't go well, and it's wrong to do it in the first place because it bypasses layers of management and the historical and political context that led to this outcome. If the head of IT couldn't solve this problem, a stunt like what you are suggesting won't solve it either.
Your advice is worse. Situations like this are entirely a game of dick swinging. If the IT department wants to become a room of ineffectual little shrinking-violet yes-men, then why would you want to work there in the first place?
I get what you're saying, and I think that most corporate IT departments run themselves as little fiefdoms with false pretensions of importance and power. But if someone is insisting upon running systems that don't conform to reasonable standards of the company, then something needs to be done. I would consider requiring that device to be isolated from the network with a small firewall.
But the waiver is a good idea—though unlike your assumption that it would be handled by an junior, such matters ought to be sent up the chain to the CIO or equivalent, and it should be the responsibility of the CIO to get the signature or take personal responsibility themselves.
While I agree that some of these approaches are too agressive and this should first be approached with an honest conversation, I completely disagree that people should just stick to their role and shut up even when they see problems.
Sometimes you need to break the chain of command (either from below or from above) to get things fixed, otherwise some problematic people never called on their shit and the whole organization suffers.
> Either you make progress or get... encouragement to go find a better job
This assumes one has a job where you can easily replace it with an equivalent. Even in IT, this is not the norm outside of a few limited areas and fields. Most people have to worry about keeping jobs that arent perfect.
Frankly, this is the kind of "if it were me Id just be an asshole because being right is the only thing that matters, just don't look at my actual life actions" advice I got from my grandfather growing up and just sounds very unaware and privileged today.
Does it suck? Yes. Is there some act this person can do to change things? Maybe. Are there a lot of actions that can feel morally justified but arent, and are also really bad ideas to attempt? Oh my yes.
Do I think you are offering this terrible advice? Cant say...there's a lot of context we can be assuming differently. I can say that I dont see the take away from many of the messages on this thread being terribly helpful.
At which point you show how much money is being thrown away here.
You assume that wasting a few days of my time will cost the company more than me wasting her time. Remember, this person is probably seven or eight steps higher than me in the org chart. This is a large organization, not some startup.
Has anyone asked her why? She may have a legitimate reason.
From personal experience for a long time I had to keep an old version of IE running in an old windows VM for one specific app. Had I not had that VM and IT decided to upgrade me without asking I’d have lost my sh$& and gave them the what for.
Best case, they decide they pay you too much and you cause too much trouble, and let you go.
Worst case they make her upgrade her browser so they're not dumping mountains of money on her preferences and whims.
Either way, I'd be good with it if I were in that position.