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Reddit was recently acquired by (mostly print media company)
Condé Nast. In his
personal blog (recommended!), Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz
describes the how the bigger, more expensive I.T. and facilities infrastructure Condé Nast provides inhibits more than it helps.
... Nobody else seems to get work done here either. Everybody's always coming into our room to hang out and chat or invite us to play the new video game system that Wired is testing. The upside is that while we haven't gotten much of our work done, we have managed to do many other people's. Various folks from around the office have shown up to have us help them with their technical problems, which we usually solve fairly quickly. We joked that we should get transferred to their IT department instead of Web development.
There's a company Internet connection, which routes everything through the IT HQ in Delaware, presumably the better to spy on us on. On Day 1 they took our laptops and "backed up" the drives to ensure they had a copy of all our data. (We scurried to get our MP3 collections and worse off first.) Then they issued us company-approved laptops: terribly-slow iBook G4s complete with Conde Nast desktop and screensaver with spy software pre-installed. When they gave us the machines we didn't even have administrator access on them. The clock was set to the Eastern time zone; I needed an IT department person to change it to show me California time.
The company laptop is necessary to read our company email which, being on a Microsoft Exchange server, requires a special Microsoft email client to read. You also need to be on a company laptop to access the company network, where you can log into a maze of PeopleSoft web sites to file expense reports and change your health benefits.
Labels: conde nast, corporate culture, information technology, IT, reddit
