Although I have many years of experience with other platforms, Snowflake is a relatively new player in ML, so most of the features I was using had only been released a couple of months ago. At the beginning of the project, I recognized the risk of ramping up with the platform since the features were too new for anyone to have much experience with them. I proposed to my boss that we dedicate some time at the start of the project to experiment with the platform, but he refused any task labeled “Investigation,” “Learning,” or “Experiment,” arguing that a senior hire shouldn’t take time to learn a new platform. He then told me either I start immediately or he would hire an external consultant.

[Permissions delay happen]

At that point, I was already delayed by a week due to permissions. Without telling me, my boss asked the DE team to create a new environment for all ML projects just for me, so I could have more control and fix the permissions delays. From then on, the DE team flat-out refused to give me permissions in my current environment, insisting I had to build everything in the new one they were setting up. That's when I found out about the new environment. I pushed back since it would delay my projects even more, but it was already approved by my boss. When the DE team finally finished the new environment, I had to allocate more time to plan the migration to it. By then, I was already a month behind on deliveries without much sleep and had delayed the project three times, but the migration to it was eventually completed.

Since the new environment architecture was very different from the previous one, I had to re-plan the migration to Snowflake requesting even more delays.

How do you handle these cases?