Best case, they decide they pay you too much and you cause too much trouble, and let you go.

Worst case they make her upgrade her browser so they're not dumping mountains of money on her preferences and whims.

Either way, I'd be good with it if I were in that position.

The way I view it is it was good busywork for the weeks before Christmas when not much was getting done anyway. I don't bother fighting it because if they want to waste their money paying me to downgrade a web site for one person, I'm happy to take their money for it.

Or get someone more senior than her to put her in her place.

It's not a tech company, so it doesn't work that way. IT doesn't tell management what to do, it's the other way around.

get someone more senior than her to put her in her place

To get to someone more senior than her would mean contacting her manager on the other side of the country, who would likely wonder why I'm was wasting her time, and come down on me through my boss. Again, it's not a tech company.

No, but IT come and say "in order to get ISO313186461 certified we need to do an upgrade" tends to work pretty well.

If it "swings both ways," I would be most interested in an opinion about the "other way" if you're willing to offer it.

IT might be lowest in the foodchain, but they always have the last word when it comes to something.. technical.

At which point you show how much money is being thrown away here.

Do you honestly believe she cares about the IT department wasting a little bit of money (and it really is just a little bit relative to what she probably deals with), or would respond well to an IT guy pointing out his salary in an attempt to convince her to upgrade her computer? The advice you gave is more likely to get someone fired than it is to help.

That's even worse advice than what I was responding to. Great way to anger a high-ranking executive and probably get fired.

Frankly a lot of the advice in this thread seems to be coming from people who are very junior or otherwise don't have experience dealing with high-ranking executives. Heck, even mid-ranking executives would respond very poorly to the kinds of actions advised in this thread.

Here's the situation: a high-ranking person in the company is so powerful that she can disobey IT policy by refusing to update her computer. This person is also powerful enough to demand that changes be made to a corporate website to make it compatible with her older computer. This is a problem for the head of IT, and the head of IT either lost that battle or decided it was not worth fighting.

This is not the right place for a more junior IT person or developer to stick their nose in by going directly to that executive with some bogus "liability waiver" or appeals to wasted money or whatever else. It won't go well, and it's wrong to do it in the first place because it bypasses layers of management and the historical and political context that led to this outcome. If the head of IT couldn't solve this problem, a stunt like what you are suggesting won't solve it either.

I get what you're saying, and I think that most corporate IT departments run themselves as little fiefdoms with false pretensions of importance and power. But if someone is insisting upon running systems that don't conform to reasonable standards of the company, then something needs to be done. I would consider requiring that device to be isolated from the network with a small firewall.

But the waiver is a good idea—though unlike your assumption that it would be handled by an junior, such matters ought to be sent up the chain to the CIO or equivalent, and it should be the responsibility of the CIO to get the signature or take personal responsibility themselves.

Sometimes you need to break the chain of command (either from below or from above) to get things fixed, otherwise some problematic people never called on their shit and the whole organization suffers.

Either you make progress or get... encouragement to go find a better job. Sounds like a win-win to me.

This assumes one has a job where you can easily replace it with an equivalent. Even in IT, this is not the norm outside of a few limited areas and fields. Most people have to worry about keeping jobs that arent perfect.

Frankly, this is the kind of "if it were me Id just be an asshole because being right is the only thing that matters, just don't look at my actual life actions" advice I got from my grandfather growing up and just sounds very unaware and privileged today.

Does it suck? Yes. Is there some act this person can do to change things? Maybe. Are there a lot of actions that can feel morally justified but arent, and are also really bad ideas to attempt? Oh my yes.

Do I think you are offering this terrible advice? Cant say...there's a lot of context we can be assuming differently. I can say that I dont see the take away from many of the messages on this thread being terribly helpful.

You assume that wasting a few days of my time will cost the company more than me wasting her time. Remember, this person is probably seven or eight steps higher than me in the org chart. This is a large organization, not some startup.

Also, 7 or 8 steps in any org chart is insane.

It’s more likely to cost a ton of money if someone hacks her browser/OS though.

From personal experience for a long time I had to keep an old version of IE running in an old windows VM for one specific app. Had I not had that VM and IT decided to upgrade me without asking I’d have lost my sh$& and gave them the what for.

See this for details on the IE 10/11 implementation:

https://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2016/11/26/should-i-try-...

MS has free downloadable virtual machine images to help with that kind of testing. They have IE8, IE9, IE10, and IE11 Win7 VMs, an IE11 Win8 VM, and an Edge Win10 VM.

They have images for VirtualBox, Vagrant, VMWare, HyperV, and Parallels.

Link:

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/v...

> From this follows a simple but surprising truth: The lack of support for CSS grid in an old browser should not affect the experience of the visitor, but rather just make the experience different.

> If you agree with this (and you should), there is no reason you can’t use CSS grid today!

> Here’s how that approach could work in practice. Rather than using fallbacks and shims to ensure a design and layout look the same across all browsers, we’d provide the mobile vertical single-column layout to all browsers and then serve up advanced functionality to those browsers and viewport widths that can take advantage of them. It might sound like progressive enhancement, but it’s actually more of an accessibility-centric approach enabled by a mental shift.

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2017/06/building-production...

I went home to build something personal and thought CSS Grid would be awesome. Turns out my PC runs IE 11 (Windows 7...). I personally use Firefox Quantum for all my web browsing, but the fact that I had it meant there would be good enough amount of people that have it. At the point I gave up on CSS Grid, and just threw in bootstrap.

But I do have a certain fondness for wrapping modern layout in @supports(display: block) {}. It's kind of like a hidden fu in the code. Additionally it has lower specificity than body:not(.ie) &.

Most people here will be too young to remember, so let me tell an old-people tale of when everyone used Netscape (which cost $29.99 ...let that sink in first of all), and then microsoft gave IE for free for everyone! Then webdevelopers without a true CS background (and by that i do not mean university), like yourself, started to use IE niceties to develop. One of those niceties was the F12 developer tool. Which now become the every-browser's-dev-panel. And they cursed at everyone that was still using Netscape4 instead of their fancy new IE6. So much so they put buttons on those sites saying "better displayed on IE6" (or 4, don't remember).

I am tired of typing now. So have fun figuring out the moral of the history. I is my cristimas present to you :⁎