Three weeks ago I joined a fast growing startup on the West Coast to improve their dev operations and processes. The company is seeing crazy growth but they are still doing things like pushing directly to master and using prod deploys to test things out. I was hired to help improve this and implement things like staging environments, autoscaling of resources, and other DevOpsy stuff. Since joining I've received considerable pushback on my ideas. Obviously I am the new guy and don't expect to just dictate people around nor is that my intention. However what really gets me is that the founder just straight up does not seem to trust me. Every suggestion I give - even things as industry standard such as the use of a staging environment - is met with suspicion and doubt and the insistence that I hadn't done enough proper "research" on the idea. I find this highly offensive considering I've been working in DevOps for almost seven years and before that was a SysAdmin.

So after two weeks, I got the approval to create a staging branch. I wrote up a huge document on the staging workflow, covering edge cases such as hotfixes and rollbacks. I put time on people's calendars and walked them through it including the founder. Yet he still continues to resist the change and pushes directly to master, ignores the new processes I put in place, and generally just does what he wants. He also keeps harping that I need to "earn his trust." I find this baffling - I mean, I was hired for a reason right? Why would they hire me if they didn't trust me?

I am starting to get frustrated, especially since the founder has pushed breaking changes directly to master and then I got flack since I am now the "systems" guy and am responsible for the health of the app. I'm trying to think of the best way to approach this diplomatically. Do any HNers have some pointers or advice to give? I've worked with difficult clients before but I've never faced such a huge lack of trust.