That's always the fucking worst. "You have all the responsibility, but none of the power".

It's all internal "customers" at my workplace. So very often by the time it comes to my team the contract is already signed, and they of course didn't get proper vendor support in the contract. So my team is left to scrape together whatever we can from public info about some obscure industry specific system. Always great to ask support questions and told "we can't answer that, it's proprietary".

We can say "you need to negotiate vendor engineer support for this" until we're blue in the face, but at the end of the day when the shit doesn't work how they were sold it by the sales guy they end up trusting the friendly smiley sales guy when the vendor blames us, rather than the fucking professionals in their own workplace because we tell it to them straight, so interactions with us don't always leave them feeling warm and fuzzy.

Our tech side's upper management has switched up in the last few years, and they say that it's been codified into the purchasing approval process that tech gets a seat at the table before shit gets inked. So I was optimistic.

Then we signed the first new vendor/external support contract for our own tech side shit in a long time, no way for us not to be at the table.

Additional support rebuiling our cloud infra that was previously hacked together as needed, but this time do it "right". Templates, automated tagging, top down more easily managed governance and security controls instead of a messy mix of shit, the works. The plan is to automate a shit ton as infra as code. No one on my team has previous experience doing this as we're not very cloud heavy.

All of this hinges on infra as code and resource templates, and the fucking contract expicitly doesn't include any coding/cloud template building assistance. It wasn't forgotten, they decided against it.

I'm the best script/code monkey on my team. I know I can figure it out, but I was looking forward to having a break from spending 90% of my time staring at code. From being on projects that succeed or fail entirely on my own efforts. I've been stuck on this sort of shit for multiple years while some of my coworkers have been able to be important, but not a bus factor of 1.

Guess it's nice to have job security 🫠

The Who - Won't Get Fooled Again