ATT sucks from the inside too
I know someone who works there. this person is is part of the team that updates and maintains the billing servers among other things, some of the difficulties that they encounter are ...
Degenerate corporate culture, for some reason its nearly impossible to get fired from ATT. The pay is sub-average, but they have good benefits, so talented people go elsewhere .. eventually, who likes trying to push everyone you have to deal with to do their job so you can do yours?! That leaves the rest, mostly lazy, many idiots, and in many cases (like internal IT) woefully unqualified to do what they are supposed to do every day.
The 'new' craptop given to this person who is a programmer/developer is one of the cheapest Dell's out there, as a matter of fact I did not know you could still find one with a 30GB hard drive, yeah this is 'new'.
Some of the major consequences of this situation are ...
1) Incredibly ridiculous SPAM for starters, not internet spam, but CORPORATE SPAM, and the in-DUH-viduals who send this have found some nasty tricks, the email are usually an image not text, and very LONG and usually raves about required updates .. no searching, you have to read the whole damned thing only to find out that its NOT for your department!!! Actually making a mailing list for them would require thought (and IT people who know how), and that might smoke one of the last 3 brain cells they have left .. so they send it (yes they have permissions) to "everyone". As if that wasn't bad enough they've somehow (using Outlook/Exchange) figured out how to make the message pop up as an action required item EVERY TIME YOU CLICK ON IT, de-selecting the message and resorting the list .. so it takes as long as 10 to 20 minutes to deal with one of these turds marked URGENT.
Multiply that by 50 to 100 per day .. then try to find the important scheduled events sent by your department, or that you need to work on,it's worse than the heyday of AOL advertising!
2) Next up (Vogon Style) absolutely everything requires forms, and not just ones for you, you get to fill out a form to request authorization, send it to someone who does not want to do his or her job (Idiocracy style) to get the forms to get clearance (again from a disinterested drooler) to notify everyone you are about to recompile the binary that was due to go into production yesterday .. or last week. Then you need to get permission to recompile. Typically (re)compiling a binary that would normally take someone 20 minutes on a slow machine (like the Craptop given as the ONLY work computer), takes something like a month to accomplish??
3) What else do you think could be detrimental to getting your job done?? How about an IT department that does not setup the (yes they do use) HP/UX server properly, because THEY DON'T KNOW HOW !! And you aren't allowed to modify it even though you know *exactly* what is wrong/missing (or has the config file copied from the old server) and could easily fix it in 10 minutes. Yes you heard it here first folks the majority of IT at ATT couldn't find their asses with both hands tied behind their backs and a 10 minute head start !! Because they don't know what it is or how to use it!!
Telecommunications in the US is doomed.