That process is draining the life out of me. Gah it's so frustrating. I'm a professional damnit!!! I don't need all these asinine rules and bullshit!! They're going to eventually lose their best Sun person in the group. It's coming, it's coming... Everyone grumbles about the process here. It's pure lunacy. I have to go install some systems in the production environment that are standalone, they don't even have network drops yet and there was a kerfuffle about it and I had to jump through various hoops, many of which I had no idea existed. Ridiculous! That's just the tip of the iceberg. The odds of me working for a big company again are slim. There isn't even job security anymore with big companies.

Take your "at least you've got a job" and cram it! Just wait until the market picks up a bit more and they're going to lose a lot of people...

Not quite to the level we do, but it is necessary. But I don't deal with production stuff. I deal with pre-production systems. I start from the bare metal, go from there and hand off to the support folks later. However many of these production and test environment rules and processes still apply to me when they shouldn't. All these processes are so kneejerk when problems come up that no thought is applied to how they affect non-production people. In many cases the answer isn't more process but to understand what happened and to discipline the person who screwed up.