I've been around, and I've seen a number of places, but Harte-Hanks has to be absolutely the worst. I've been out of there for about six months now and I'm going back and reading some of the notes I kept in case anyone tried to fire me.
All I can say is... wow.
Some examples of the fun:
- A database company where storage is a critical part of what they do, that has a 7+ year old backup infrastructure that just can't keep pace.
- Servers that average in age somewhere around 5+ years.
- 9 different kinds of storage because they were just buying whatever was cheapest. (200 TB or so, btw)
- Blaming the guy who just walked in for a problem that has been an existing issue for over two years, repeatedly grilling him as to why it's not completed for months on end, while in the same breath telling him he must complete all "operational" repair work before any broader initiatives. Not having the staff to even complete the emergency work, let along second-tier priorities, and not being allowed to spend any money.
- We had a significant percentage (probably 30%+) of our hardware that was production hardware and was not supported in any way. That meant if the server went down, you were essentially screwed. I couldn't get anyone to pay for support for it.
- Our production DHCP infrastructure server went down hard. It was not supported. My admins were actually physically kicking spare hard drives that the scrounged out of the piles of crap into the machine because it was the only way to get them in.
- A facilities manager selecitng and purchasing desktop hardware. (no real technical knowledge here, btw)
- I think all of IT had about a $5M budget, but I had to fight for ninety days to get $14K to re-up backup licenses that I needed or the backups would actually get worse.
- All told, with all my fighting, I managed to wrestle about $40K total out of them for absolutely critical needs.
- Actually proving out that we could save money by outsourcing our extremely old and dying printer infrastructure to an external company, but not being allowed to do it, and not being allowed to spend money on new printers either. (These things were a serious beast).
- I actually built a staffing plan based upon the priorities (my take on them, anyway), and had actual numbers of hours, cost to business for not completing the work, cost to get the work done, etc. I showed my management this plan. This was the first effort of it's kind and no one had anything close to this kind of information. I was laughed out the door because it couldn't take that long. I was just told I needed to get it all done by July. (that was 6 months down the road- my plan showed that it would all take ~2.5 years with current staffing levels)
