Ways Data Projects Fail
&gt;Your Data Scientists are about to quit.<p>This is me. I work for a non-profit that is stuck in the stone age--not for lack of money, mind you, but because the IT Director is an incompetent megalomaniac who views &quot;security&quot; as a reasonable justification to refuse any and all requests, and treats everyone like an enemy.<p>I haven&#x27;t been allowed to use Python or R. In fact, the only programming language I have access to is VBA (for applications, not the stand-alone variant). Of course that&#x27;s a huge mess because the IT director disables macros once a month, generally right after another crypto attack makes the news. Thankfully, he didn&#x27;t even realize that it was possible to use VBA from inside any office application until after I had already used it to create several Access applications which made the jobs of the most important people in the organization easier. So when he breaks VBA every director in the organization yells at him and the functionality is restored nearly instantly.<p>Of course he could restrict the applications to run only signed macros, but he won&#x27;t give me permission to sign things because he is (literally) afraid I might hack something.<p>On top of that, my computer is a Core 2 Duo from 2007 or so with 4 gb of ram. He bought over 100 of them used from a computer recycler about 2 years ago. For the first three months at this job I had a Pentium D, which literally couldn&#x27;t run Excel and Firefox at the same time. I&#x27;m not allowed to get a better computer, because the employee handbook states that every computer needs to be the same for &quot;security&quot; reasons. If my director used our budget to purchase a computer I wouldn&#x27;t be granted access to any of the databases containing our data because of &quot;HIPAA compliance.&quot; (For the record, we don&#x27;t have any medical data whatsoever. We only have names, addresses, and donation amounts. We don&#x27;t even know the birthdays of our constituents.)<p>The worst part is that we randomly started losing data after all of our network drives were moved offsite at one point to provide &quot;redundancy.&quot; I created several tickets about this issue, and each time I was told that it couldn&#x27;t have possibly happened, and there was no record of the file ever existing. I created a script that created a log file each hour with a list of files and their attributes from each directory to try record proof of this happening. After I recorded about a week of files disappearing randomly overnight, he reported me to HR for hacking.<p>Once I proved nothing I did was wrong he amended the &quot;IT security&quot; section of the employee handbook. Several of these measures were impossible to follow because of restrictions he had placed on the computers&#x2F;network. I brought this up with HR, and they removed these measures from the handbook. Once this happened, he sent an email to me cc&#x27;ing my boss and HR accusing me of trying to frame him by deleting files. I don&#x27;t know how that accusation even made sense, because the files would still have to show up in transaction logs.<p>Despite all this, I KNOW my director and HR aren&#x27;t going to believe me when I tell them I&#x27;m quitting because our IT director is an incompetent tyrant. From their perspective, IT issues are something that can be solved by compromise, just like everything else. So IT has to let me use VBA, and that should be enough.<p>Anyways, long story short, anybody hiring in Chicago?