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The original was posted on /r/sysadmin by /u/crankysysadmin on 2024-01-23 19:35:16+00:00.
I'm in a relatively new job and there's an interesting phenomenon with how people fight change and keep legacy systems and processes in place.
Someone will propose something that might be somewhat new to this organization but that would be seen as reasonable in the IT industry.
For example:
"Let's use WSUS to apply Windows updates to servers at 4 am rather than having a person wake up and do it manually"
and then the response is often something that is completely out of left field like:
"How can you prove that this won't turn your hair green?"
The problem: there is no literature on the subject. Nobody in their right mind would ever think that using WSUS would change the color of someone's hair. So the absence of anything on this topic means that "we have no way of knowing"
This stuff is completely out of left field usually, but it's enough to scare VPs.
It's very very difficult to fight this because again, it's not within the reasonable scope of what you'd think would be a problem with the change you want to make. But it's "scary" and as a result slows down change.
How do we combat this?
It's totally weird. Never encountered anything like this before.
If the FUD was about stuff that's actually connected to the issue at hand you can show people how systems work. But if they come up with something totally nutty, you often can't guarantee because there's literally nothing written about such a topic.