Do you know what a meat proxy is? It's when you work as a consultant for a company, and the company doesn't give you credentials to deploy, debug, or interact in any way with your code. You then have to work through the sysadmin, while telling him how to go through every single step, every git pull, every line of code to edit. Kill me

Wow, that sucks.

Especially interesting as someone on here posted that they were on an interview for a company. The company wanted them to solve a problem. They gave this person the password and login to a production system and left the room.

Been there:

I once supported some equipment that was used at some seriously top secret facilities.

They'd email us very vague questions and I'd write back a lot of "If I were to troubleshoot that..." kind of responses.

Then only when things got REALLY desperate they would print out some outputs for us, it would go through a censor of some sort, and we'd get an email of a repeatedly printed / scanned output with redactions.

It was meat proxy to meat proxy and so on.

Every experience working with IBM.

"It doesn't matter if you could do this in 2 minutes, put all instructions in a ticket with all cmd lines to type and we will have a random call center employee in india run the commands. If they mistype it's because you didn't describe command good enough."

@SortOfTested

For me it was IBM and Brazil. I'd call them up "yo, your whole data-center is down" and they would hum and haw about it and hang up...

Next day the big wigs would call back and say "OMG why didn't you tell us!??!?" We'd tell them we did and they'd build this complex web of processes, requiring 2x the amount of management they had before, still nothing worked ... all to replace 12 guys in NY who were plenty good at their job.

IBM gonna IBM.

@N00bPancakes
Yep. 20 people at my last hellscape client were replaced by 334 and counting when I'd left. They literally had a 14 environment deployment process.

The only reason IBM is still in business is the collusion between cheaper line item mismanagement and the sunk cost fallacies. Managers get so deep in bed with them that they don't have a way out that doesn't involve eating the entire crow.

@SortOfTested Yup. My first 'real' job was for an IBM satellite company, one that sort of lived off of the IBM ecosystem without being part of IBM.

In an effort to understand who I work for people would ask me how we get customers, my response was:

"I don't think they have a choice..."

Those customers were so locked into IBM land there was virtually no way out that was politically feasible in any time period shorter than decades.

@N00bPancakes
Yep. From websphere to maximo to their networking appliances and software to the hardware, they're totally locked in. It's why I tell anyone who will listen to drop redhat now, and don't even consider Openshift.

The bright side is you're not locked in to retain your IP and training anymore though. They're going to swap people out on your team as fast as possible and then make you recurrently pay to train their people.

@SortOfTested Jeebus, I loath the fucking vendor lock-in with control systems. They have crazy prices and no way out.

I felt like I was reading the story of my life...

i like the name "zombie server" better, but meat proxy ia more explanatory.