About 4 or 5 months ago I started working for a new company, and I've never really seen an environment where the network team is so ostracized from the rest of the IT department.
A little background. It's a mid-sized company of about 3k employees in 5 different states (about 300 remote sites, 2 data centers, and 5 floors in a high rise building in a downtown metro.)
Every group in our IT department has multiple team members that have been with the company for years (usually 10+ years) except for our team. The network team here has had a high rate of turnover and supposedly is constantly rebuilt "from scratch" every 2-3 years. Right now my direct supervisor who has been with the company about 7-8 months has the highest tenure on the Network Team. There are three other coworkers all of whom were hired after I was.
Anyway, almost off the bat from day one, I have discovered our team is pretty much the dumping ground for all the other teams. Every little problem here is shoved in our basket and the network is blamed for EVERYTHING. Pretty much a living stereotype. An application crashed on a user? Sent to Networking. Computer blue screened? Sent to Networking. Website is returning a 403 Forbidden? Sent to networking. We usually have to fight tooth and nail to get said tickets out of our basket, where a juvenile game of back and forth proceeds with the ticket coming back to us 2-3 times and usually nasty emails circulate about us to management. (We're not team players. We're not interested in helping. We can't figure anything out.)
The security team is the worst offender. They will make undocumented changes in the firewall, "experimenting", block something important, and then forward any tickets directly to our team. They will not share any kind of management or visibility over the firewall's logs, so we have no way of knowing their stuff is blocking it, other than doing a pcap on a client machine and determining we're not completing a three way handshake.
Sometimes when we've pushed back and proved it wasn't the network, it led to C-Levels getting included on e-mails they really have no reason to be included on.
The worst part is a brick wall of resistance against doing any kind of changes. When I first got here I mapped out the network and identified all kinds of things that needed to be swapped out or improved, including single points of failure for critical infrastructure elements. Any attempt to get any of it done though, is met with outright resistance ("Why do you have to do this? It's been working fine for the last 20 years!") and almost no change window will get approved, not even on the weekend at 2:00am or whatever. They just won't let us do anything.
When anything does get approved, the other teams will utterly stonewall us, refusing to provide any information about their end of things that would help the upgrade succeed, to the point where we pretty much have had to realize "this isn't going to work" and cancel the change.
I've gone to management explaining my concerns and telling them if they want to do things differently and want things to work better around here, the culture has to change.. basically something has to give. I've been told to watch my step and not rock the boat, and that "at the end of the day we are here to keep this place online so we can make money. You want to take stuff OFFline. That's not how we work here."
The teams also go and do team building stuff like mini golfing or go karting etc, once a month, and we're not invited. We're the only ones who aren't invited and the stated reason is that we have to be available at all times in case anything stops working.
Has anyone else experienced something like this before? Did it ever improve? If so, what happened to change things?
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