<story><title>Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary</title><url>https://nibblestew.blogspot.com/2020/08/most-mandatory-requirements-in.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rvense</author><text>About five years ago, a place I was working at was selecting a new laptop for all employees. Mine was up for replacement, so I was interested in what they were picking.
They&amp;#x27;d arrived at some god-awful Lenovo gamer model. It fit the performance and price point they&amp;#x27;d decided they needed.&lt;p&gt;I said I&amp;#x27;d prefer to have something smaller with less Christmas lights.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Policy is everyone has to have the same laptop, and some people need more graphics power than the one you&amp;#x27;re asking for.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Turns out there&amp;#x27;d been some big thing back and forth already about size and performance and this was the compromise that nobody liked.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;But why does everyone have to have the same laptop?&amp;quot; I asked.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Well, it&amp;#x27;s just policy. Every desk has a docking station, and we don&amp;#x27;t want to have to buy different ones.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;So I flipped the selected monstrosity over to reveal the extremely lacking docking connector at the bottom. There were some awkward laughs and I got my Thinkpad.</text></item><item><author>sfifs</author><text>In BigCorps, if there&amp;#x27;s a stupid requirement, there&amp;#x27;s usually a reason for the stupid requirement to be there in the first place but getting to the reason might require un-peeling a few org layers to since the people enforcing the policy will not be the people who wrote the policy. A more productive use of time would be to understand the reason for the policy, document out why it doesn&amp;#x27;t apply to your case and then attempt to get approval.&lt;p&gt;For instance, there&amp;#x27;s a restriction at my workplace (not a software company, a regular old industry fortune 500) which prevents git installs from pushing to any non corporate GitHub repo from our work machines.&lt;p&gt;The obvious reason it exists is to prevent people (a lot of who are analysts or data scientists - not professional programmers) from shooting themselves in the foot by pushing code to their personal repos in error.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s annoying to work around if you need to say push a contribution to an open source project and you could rage at the infosec for enforcing it - but it obviously exists because stupid errors would have happened.&lt;p&gt;This principle is also called Chesterton&amp;#x27;s fence&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fen...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>grogenaut</author><text>This is literally my job. Amazon calls it Dive Deep&amp;#x2F;Earn Trust. I get called in constantly to &amp;quot;Remove Blockers&amp;quot;. Part of it is just understanding why the policy exists and then getting a policy modification. While it&amp;#x27;s definitely an art, it&amp;#x27;s not as hard as a lot of people think, but you can&amp;#x27;t be afraid to escalate.</text></comment>
<story><title>Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary</title><url>https://nibblestew.blogspot.com/2020/08/most-mandatory-requirements-in.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rvense</author><text>About five years ago, a place I was working at was selecting a new laptop for all employees. Mine was up for replacement, so I was interested in what they were picking.
They&amp;#x27;d arrived at some god-awful Lenovo gamer model. It fit the performance and price point they&amp;#x27;d decided they needed.&lt;p&gt;I said I&amp;#x27;d prefer to have something smaller with less Christmas lights.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Policy is everyone has to have the same laptop, and some people need more graphics power than the one you&amp;#x27;re asking for.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Turns out there&amp;#x27;d been some big thing back and forth already about size and performance and this was the compromise that nobody liked.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;But why does everyone have to have the same laptop?&amp;quot; I asked.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Well, it&amp;#x27;s just policy. Every desk has a docking station, and we don&amp;#x27;t want to have to buy different ones.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;So I flipped the selected monstrosity over to reveal the extremely lacking docking connector at the bottom. There were some awkward laughs and I got my Thinkpad.</text></item><item><author>sfifs</author><text>In BigCorps, if there&amp;#x27;s a stupid requirement, there&amp;#x27;s usually a reason for the stupid requirement to be there in the first place but getting to the reason might require un-peeling a few org layers to since the people enforcing the policy will not be the people who wrote the policy. A more productive use of time would be to understand the reason for the policy, document out why it doesn&amp;#x27;t apply to your case and then attempt to get approval.&lt;p&gt;For instance, there&amp;#x27;s a restriction at my workplace (not a software company, a regular old industry fortune 500) which prevents git installs from pushing to any non corporate GitHub repo from our work machines.&lt;p&gt;The obvious reason it exists is to prevent people (a lot of who are analysts or data scientists - not professional programmers) from shooting themselves in the foot by pushing code to their personal repos in error.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s annoying to work around if you need to say push a contribution to an open source project and you could rage at the infosec for enforcing it - but it obviously exists because stupid errors would have happened.&lt;p&gt;This principle is also called Chesterton&amp;#x27;s fence&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fen...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>robbyking</author><text>I had the opposite experience once: at my previous company we were all issued mid-tier ThinkPads. Completely out of the blue we all received an email saying we&amp;#x27;d be given a set budget and would be able to choose any machine we wanted. We went from 100% Windows to about 80% OS X within a week. They ended up giving the old ThinkPads away. (I put Ubuntu on one and gave it to my mom.)&lt;p&gt;This was in 2012 or so, and because of that I was able to learn Objective-C and go on to work on the first version of our native app. It made me a stronger engineer, and allowed the company to have developers who were already familiar with the product and backend services work on native. It was win-win.</text></comment>