My most recent employment was for a large firm. It was one of the majors in the oil and gas industry. The company was of course, a Windows house.

I did most of my work in the Windows WSL [aka Ubuntu] subsystem. This allowed me to use my usual Linux scripts and tricks. So, I only needed to pick up some of the Windows software and workflows that the company used.

For example, instead of learning Visio and doing laborious point and click procedures to draw architecture diagrams, I whipped up a Python diagram script framework and used that.

You mentioned Support.

Support per se for essentially anything was largely non-existent. One would open a ticket with an overseas call center. A few months later, one would check and the ticket would still be there. You could open another ticket to request an escalation. That ticket would still be there months later as well.

If you ask, how did things get done, the answer is that it was largely about tribal knowledge.

My favorite story from that company is that I wrote a CLI script for a manager to enable her to do something. The script needed to be stored somewhere formally.

Management convened a team of about a dozen senior people to review the matter. I had to explain what CLI was. What a script was as well and the concept of storing a file.

There was a lot of pushback about, couldn't the company simply use some sort of outside SaaS tool that it could rent from its usual vendors?

The discussion took about two weeks. In the end, a subcommittee was designated to manage the storage of a single file and to keep an eye on it so that it couldn't go rogue. Everybody seemed proud to have worked this out.

It isn't solely about Windows.

Note that #Windows supports its own scripts. PowerShell, not just Linux type. But the culture in some firms has shifted entirely to online #SaaS. Even long-term developers, in some cases, don't know that #CLI even exists. They do things by click, move mouse, click, move mouse. It's incredibly slow.