Professionalism, IT Depts, performance measures and Big MNC companies

This is a bit of a grumbling/whining post. I just need to get this out. As you can see in my profile, I started my career working at IBM. Now I had(and still have) enough gripes about them, and their processes, but over the career working for various companies, I've come to appreciate IBM.

This also an example of how a manager not experienced/leveraged in an MNC and not capable of helping you setup your environment, can basically ruin the work experience just by being passive.

So here's an example that I doubt(unless of course, if they treat their contractors much worse) would've happened to me at IBM. I recently entered another big MNC company as a contractor from one of my employers.(Don't bother looking through profile, I'm not here for shaming and unless we know each other, you wouldn't figure it out.) Now for the most part of my career, I've avoided working at MNCs or big companies, and worked with small startups/ small companies. Over the last 10 years or so, I've used my obsessive urges to customize my work OS/environment for efficiency, that the first thing i do these days is to install some linux (mostly debian) and then go on to run my custom script of installers to use a bunch of tools i like to use. (most primary of them being a tiling window manager(awesome), vim, bash shell, python and some python libraries).

So with this MNC(they had a direct interview before i joined) I made very clear from the interview stage i need linux, and at every other stage of on-boarding, and yet when i finally am given a laptop, I am told I can't have it as it's as IT security risk.. sigh.. I give up and try to work with windows OS, but surprise I don't have admin rights to install my tiling window manager and vim.

Once again i talk to the IT team to get somethings installed like anaconda, cargo and install neovim and start trying to use Powershell to focus on my work. Then I run into the big distraction that's part of windows experience. 'Alt-tab' to switch windows. Every time I have to go through all possible windows and pick one. I can't even expect them to be from only my current workspace.. (I tend to use 3 or 4 workspaces with about 5-6 windows/apps split across them switch as i needed). I find that this is a big hindrance every time I try to get productive.

So I find a tiling window manager, but it needs admin permissions and I ask the IT team to install it for me, please. Here's where trouble starts, first answer, they don't know if it's approved, then somebody looks at it says the webpage itself throws a warning (from router settings that generally throws a warning for any external site) and it's beta so it's not reliable.

I find the first argument silly, but can see second is quite valid from IT security viewpoint and don't argue. But instead, I create a new ticket saying, can you please find me any tiling window manager that doesn't violate IT security policy. (I explain I haven't used windows or any window manager similar to it's default in 11 years so it's productivity issue). I also cc a copy to my contracting company manager (who also happens to be ex IBMer and understands my stance). So he sends out an email checking if it's within the IT teams' SLA, and if so please take the time to look into the problem.

I get an email(from India Head of IT) cc'ed to my contracting company manager saying they don't understand why I'm asking the same thing they already explained could not be done. (Note: there was no ambiguity either in my request or my manager's phrasing, but somehow, someone in that position didn't have time to read and parse the email well??) They also refer to a code of conduct between companies and how I was being imperative when I asked. It's at this point I realize a few things:

1. The IT team has multiple objectives security + helping the employees.
2. The focus on security focuses on restricting employees' ability to install programs and stuff.
3. The helping employees part is narrowly focused on the familiar of this software needed(like office, visual studio dev env. etc..)
4. This leads me to wonder what's the incentive that helps them ignore cases like this(Time to close the ticket? no. of tickets closed? complexity or difficulty of a ticket? etc..

As a data scientist, I realize the key issue here is that (at the top-level) the multiple objectives were never explicitly discussed in detail, well maybe extreme rhetoric stances were taken and arguments conducted in meetings, but never tried to put a weightage on each well enough and write out an equation.

At the middle level, the measures focused on time to ticket close, tickets closed in a day, tickets priority or importance(as set by the IT team itself than by the employee) are all measures that let them impose a bit of narrow (maybe organizational survival) techniques and help them with rising in the hierarchy, but fail to actually help the employees.

For ex: ticket priority can be a dummy for ticket impact, but ticket impact can have other factors than time.

I would hardly blame the end employees for any of these instead of pointing out that it's the middle-managers and executive management team have failed in trying to find a balanced objective(aka vision in managerial speak) and communicating them to the mid-manager levels. It's either that or they don't care(as a company/division of a company) about employee productivity.

I'll stop ranting now and go do something productive. :-P