What can you do if your boss is basically refusing to give you access to a server that you need access to to do your job? It's really weird to me. Only he has access to any prod systems we have. Is this realistic? Is this more of an attempt at staying necessary and needed? I'm pretty fed up with it as I've had prod access at every other company I've worked for and have nearly ten years of web experience .. what gives?

Hard to know but you could ask how they plan for you to complete the task given.

No access, no job.

Tell him you’ll chill outside. Alternatively, he should tell you how you can make it work without it, maybe then he realizes it’s easier to just give you access, just maybe. Little hope.

Very... little.

Sometimes people do this because they got burned in the past.

The question should be: What is the process for updating the production system?

@Demolishun

That's probably a less confrontational path than mine. I like that better.

Quite honestly, I'd be fine with that. All my Dev work happens locally or on a nonprod, and while I have access to prod, I barely touch it aside from deployments.

If I didn't have access, then my boss would just have to deal with all the deployments while I did the Dev. Wouldn't bother me personally 🤷

Throw a shoe at him?

I don't have write access to prod either - only QA has. Nothing can end up in prod that hasn't been approved by QA.

That prevents fuckups arising from "oh just one little patch here, it's really nothing, I don't need to test that, I'm totally sure".

To get around heavy processes if the objective is just getting customer approval on an early prototype version (sort of agile), we have a special category that isn't actually prod release. Such SW is clearly labelled "for test evaluation only".

If it's in prod, it's reproducible in a UAT / Staging environment.

If it's not, someone needs to be shot.

If you don't have a staging environment, shut the fuck up and make one.

Although I have full access to everything, I rarely login to production on any project unless it's to generate reports, download a debug log, or spot check a broken record someone can't figure out.

And this is the way it should be.
Prod is for users, a fully functional mock environment is for Dev/QA.

Imho it makes sense.

I try to take away as much rights away from devs as possible.

Everyone can have a bad day.

It can be your last day when you burn down prod by accident.

For me this seems more like an communication issue.

Maybe you should put up the white flag for peace first and ask in a nice, non offended and calm voice how you could do a workflow with limited permissions but full efficiency.

It's possible. But please - don't behave like a total dick (yeah I'm speaking from experience … had these talks) and behave like an raging child just because you can't do everything.

While there are exceptions, usually the values of programmers and sysadmins are just too different. Developers generally want things as up-to-date as possible (feature-wise), and wouldn't be shy of deploying something quick and dirty if it's done quickly (hell even with dev branches and whatnot, should be used more). Sysadmins meanwhile consider stability and rigorous deployment processes very important. Dev, test, prod and all that... And if each of those doesn't reflect prod sufficiently to be used instead, there's already an issue.

As others have said already, I wouldn't really trust devs with the production infrastructure either. Too risky, skillsets and values are too different, so easy to fuck up. It's a recipe for disaster. And even if the boss isn't a sysadmin, at the end of the day he's probably gonna be who's responsible if the servers are on fire.

I have no oversight over infra here unfortunately. Boss man has bamboo ci running on a prod server containing our atlassian stack. He has tasked me with configuring bamboo but I have no access to the backend logs or debugging tools I would use to trace through some of the issues I have. My question is why is this a huge problem, these are employee facing systems and bamboo probably shouldn't even be on a prod server. Whole thing doesn't make a lot of sense. This isn't our product server.. just atlassian stuff.

Just seems silly to say "go setup bamboo! *but with one hand tied behind your back*"

Thank you guys for all the interesting and informed ideas and perspectives 🤠

At the end of the day I'm just venting because the whole situation seems absurd.

I'm trying be more involved in infra and devops but it's really hard to do if I have no ability to do anything -__-