I'm at a company that has been very profitable with a limited internet presence. But now they are buying up web properties and trying to integrate them into their website.
The IT department consists of: me - a unix/python/perl data munger head of IT - an MCSE certified sysadmin another guy - web developer one more guy - web developer/sql dba combined The tech stack consists of a production environment with _no_ QA tier. Everything that I munge gets loaded into live databases and displayed on the live web servers. Our customers have become our QA department and it makes me feel angry and sad at the same time. It's not fair that the salesmen have to sell a slow/broken website and lose potential sales when the site is down (and the broken part could've been caught in QA). I am screaming to deaf ears. I want them to understand that they need to: - invest in a CTO who has years of experience in architecting and optimizing websites from end to end - invest in a QA staff and a QA tier of hardware - invest in a release control manager to push and rollback code And more than anything, I want them to know that they need more than they could ever know they need. A good business person has no real idea was an IT team needs in terms of personnel. Only CTO-type person I mention above has a right to make those types of decisions. I came all the way from Las Vegas for this job in Tampa and had hoped I would stay a long time. But I don't enjoy being part of an outfit that wants to handle their web presence in a tacky, sub-standard, naive way.
