subservient sysadmins

I've seen this a few times over the course of my career, but it has popped up in the new job I've taken on in a director role. The sysadmin team has historically been very subservient to everyone and has no standards and does literally whatever people ask. As a result, things have grown completely out of control and the environment is ten times larger than it really needs to be.

It wasn't just the sysadmins either as their managers enabled this as well.

Over the last 6 months I've pushed back on everything and pushed to retire things.

As a sysadmin (or sysadmin leader) you want to be accommodating but within reason. So for example if you migrate an application of of Windows 2012 servers, the dev team who runs that app might want to hang onto those old machines for a few weeks. Fine. But put a limit on it. You shouldn't still have them 4 years later.

You don't need 3 different instances of wikis for different teams when you also run sharepoint.

I'm putting an immense amount of focus on getting all this junk retired and cleaned up. It's not easy but we're making progress. But it all goes back to the sysadmin leader from a few years back trying to be a people pleaser and his team refusing to say no to anything or anyone.

Other examples. We have MySQL running on Windows, but also on Linux. Why? They just automatically built whatever was requested. Some dev teams had a personal preference for Windows. Others Linux. So now there is double to support. This is bonkers.

I've already had this team retire 150 VMs and we still have a ton of work to go. My team keeps fighting me when I want to retire things "we can't do that, X person might get upset" and I say try me. So far senior leadership has been supportive of every change I've made.

The previous sysadmin leader's subservient attitude has cost this company untold amounts of money and we have to get things back on track.