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Logging tickets should be to record problems / resolutions and keep a record of communication. Logging time into tickets should be to bill clients or keep metrics on how much time is spent on each issue. Tickets should never be used to report employee activity. What other job has requirements of 40 logged hours every week with a detail of what was done every minute? I'm imagining that policy applying to a sales guy and can't help but visualize him smashing his keyboard into his monitor.
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Jun 20, 2014 17:17
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Judge Schnoopy posted:Logging tickets should be to record problems / resolutions and keep a record of communication. Logging time into tickets should be to bill clients or keep metrics on how much time is spent on each issue. The thing you're forgetting is you're imagining a sales-guy. He's trained and paid to lie. A timesheet like that wouldn't bother him at all, because it would be "Discussed economic possibilities with client", where "client" is his significant other/roommate, and "economic possibilities" are how much he's going to spend on booze this weekend. And he's a sales-guy. As long as he can show he's bringing in money (whether or not he actually is), nobody's going to ask for details anyway.
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Jun 20, 2014 17:25
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Volmarias posted:Source control, automated tests, CI server, automated deployment. We have source control, and I can determine who fucks poo poo up - but should I really double check everything that is committed (does anybody even do that)?. I am continuously saying: "If you don't know what you're doing, tell me to do it"; it's not even their job to touch these things (as - all logic stuff should be assigned to me). One time I had to explain what "if (something)" does, to place things into perspective, yet here you go. Writing automated tests is pointless, I'd say - it's seriously something like - this template needs to output this HTML. They can add to the templates, so every time something gets added I'd have to redo the test, idk - I don't know how this sorts of tests would even look like. I think that the last advice is most sound. Edit: or I'll just drink and stop moaning. That's a good idea as well. canis minor fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Jun 20, 2014 |
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Jun 20, 2014 17:47
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eithedog posted:We have source control, and I can determine who fucks poo poo up - but should I really double check everything that is committed (does anybody even do that)?. I am continuously saying: "If you don't know what you're doing, tell me to do it"; it's not even their job to touch these things (as - all logic stuff should be assigned to me). One time I had to explain what "if (something)" does, to place things into perspective, yet here you go. Which is why you need some kind of deployment system that isn't "sftp". Nothing deploys to prod that isn't checked into source control. NOTHING. If your coworker is changing things, LIVE, on a production site, that is a very bad thing and you need to slam his face into his monitor continuously until he agrees to stop. That poo poo is unacceptable, full stop.
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Jun 20, 2014 20:18
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There are five people at the little tiny remote site I support. Not a single one is willing to run an Ethernet cable I sent them between the printer and a labeled switch 5 feet away, even with me walking them through it.  e: the site is four hours away, so it's not like I can just drive over there and do it myself.
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Jun 20, 2014 23:33
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You need to find a local IT guy who you can use as a pair of remote hands to plug poo poo in that you courier to site who can turn around and invoice your company. gently caress losing a day just in travelling there and back.
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Jun 20, 2014 23:37
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Caged posted:You need to find a local IT guy who you can use as a pair of remote hands to plug poo poo in that you courier to site who can turn around and invoice your company. gently caress losing a day just in travelling there and back.
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Jun 21, 2014 00:46
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Lord Dudeguy posted:HR: "Your review is well-written and justified, but we think you need to justify reducing their raise by 1%." Thankfully I have nothing to do with comp. Apparently some others in similar roles to mine forget this and it causes problems. Comp question? Go talk to a partner (it's literally their money).
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Jun 21, 2014 01:25
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Pissing me off: sharepoint. I just want an easy way to minimize chunks of code or other random information about a field, and have it pop up when you click the field. Can't do it in a popup box of any kind because the boss wants to be able to print it off for training purposes.  Fake edit: I currently have a small section in a "web part" that is just text so I can minimize it by default. It's just not the prettiest and I would rather something more flexible so I can throw it inside tables. meanieface fucked around with this message at 04:51 on Jun 21, 2014 |
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Jun 21, 2014 04:49
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Volmarias posted:Which is why you need some kind of deployment system that isn't "sftp". Nothing deploys to prod that isn't checked into source control. NOTHING. If your coworker is changing things, LIVE, on a production site, that is a very bad thing and you need to slam his face into his monitor continuously until he agrees to stop. That poo poo is unacceptable, full stop. Um - where did I write that? We've got SVN, test sites, exporting to prod after review. The problem is as well that I can't get too physical because of him being in another country than me.
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Jun 21, 2014 09:11
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Soylent Heliotrope posted:There are five people at the little tiny remote site I support. Not a single one is willing to run an Ethernet cable I sent them between the printer and a labeled switch 5 feet away, even with me walking them through it. One of my friends once had to drive 400 miles to turn a printer on. Then spend the night in a lovely hotel, and drive back the next day.
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Jun 21, 2014 11:03
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Sulphuric Sundae posted:and we can count the time spent on the timesheet (sometimes a couple hours a week, from what I've been told), but it's seriously the most anal system I've encountered in IT. We had timesheets AND daily rundowns implemented at my old work. I was senior enough for HR and bosses to know that when I did a whole days worth of timesheet like this: 8:00 - Checking work orders 8:06 - Updating timesheet 8:12 - Updating daily rundown 8:18 - Updating timesheet about daily rundown reporting etc etc etc... poo poo changed. I'm honest about what I did and the times I did work for certain clients, even to the point of when i forgot to update stuff and I couldn't find evidence of what the heck I was doing I owned up to it. But gently caress micromanaging when it comes to timesheets.
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Jun 21, 2014 12:47
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I'm pretty sure if we had dumb time reporting like that here (fortunately we don't), the response to a stunt like that would be You need to work on updating your time sheet faster.
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Jun 21, 2014 13:45
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eithedog posted:Um - where did I write that? We've got SVN, test sites, exporting to prod after review. The problem is as well that I can't get too physical because of him being in another country than me. Sorry, I just assumed, since that seems par for the course for web development, and your comment about having to check what was changed implied it. Best suggestion I have is to require code review for all changes, and gate SVN check in on successful code reviews. Yeah, you'll have to read his stuff, but now you can stop problems before they're bigger problems, and eventually he might get the message. If not, you'll have a documented series of critiques on his changes that you can bring to management as to why exactly this person is problematic, instead of "he's an idiot."
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Jun 21, 2014 14:50
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I've had five different interviews in two weeks, so I'm hopefully on my out. We had a 4PM conference call yesterday about serious cutbacks in the company, so the awful timesheet system is the only way the bosses say they can justify keeping all the helpdesk staff on. They admitted it wasn't an optimal system, but the plan to update to something more cohesive isn't set to start until next year. One way or another, I don't think I'll be here much longer. I just have to be picky with benefits and pay on new employment right now, as my wife's job doesn't have very good health insurance.
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Jun 21, 2014 15:02
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It's a really good point that basically no other job requires minute by minute reporting. I could see if you're in a support situation and your time is billable and you consistently only bill 12 hours a week or something, but...
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Jun 21, 2014 15:16
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AlternateAccount posted:It's a really good point that basically no other job requires minute by minute reporting. I could see if you're in a support situation and your time is billable and you consistently only bill 12 hours a week or something, but... Basically all professionals require minute by minute reporting. Every law firm that I have ever worked at required that lawyers account for every 5 minutes, with time codes and work descriptions.
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Jun 21, 2014 15:20
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11:28-11:36 - dropping a deuce
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Jun 21, 2014 15:28
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09:45 - filling out stupid time form 09:46-49 - working 09:50 - filling out stupid time form
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Jun 21, 2014 16:01
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EAT THE EGGS RICOLA posted:Basically all professionals require minute by minute reporting. Every law firm that I have ever worked at required that lawyers account for every 5 minutes, with time codes and work descriptions. But if you require every minute accounted for when all you do is internal work it just reeks of insecure management that think they can't trust people to be responsible adults.
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Jun 21, 2014 16:03
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Collateral Damage posted:When it's time you're billing customers or work with internal billing I can see the point even if 5 minute granularity still feels like massive overkill. When I worked at a company that practised internal billing we reported in 30 minute chunks, and as a consultant my billing is per hour. Most of my customers are longer term though, I know other people who work more with short stints bill on a 15 or 30 minute basis. Yeah, I'm a consultant now and my invoices just say "1 day: work on [project]" every day.
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Jun 21, 2014 16:09
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Keeping timesheets for internal work is part of that "internal market" horse poo poo that has infected every medium to large business in the last 20 years. They don't value your experience or knowledge, all you are to them is a replaceable grunt who costs X per hour to do Y.
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Jun 21, 2014 16:30
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The less granularity the better, for billing purposes. My sister-in-law and I both have 15-minute increments, though only by amount (I.e. not by a clock). That keeps minimum charges higher than 1/12th the hourly rate.
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Jun 21, 2014 16:32
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Sweevo posted:Keeping timesheets for internal work is part of that "internal market" horse poo poo that has infected every medium to large business in the last 20 years. They don't value your experience or knowledge, all you are to them is a replaceable grunt who costs X per hour to do Y. It's the favorite crutch of lazy, clueless management. They have no idea how to evaluate the quality of your work, and if they did they'd be too busy talking about college football with the general manager to put the time in to actually perform the evaluation. So they latch on to "time spent" as if it were an effective metric for anything except pulling a lever on an assembly line.
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Jun 21, 2014 18:38
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I have timesheets but it's because we're working on client projects, so the beancounters need to keep an eye on project profitability. Thankfully there are no stupid rules about 5 minute increments. The minimum is 15 minutes and the guidance is "look, just try to be reasonably accurate and we're all good". Basically, no-one's going to get fired for mis-reporting 15 minutes to the wrong project. How anyone can work under a system where timesheets must be accurate to within 5 minutes escapes me. You'd think common sense would say the overhead of tracking the time would exceed any gains.
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Jun 21, 2014 20:18
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Where I'm at it's especially dumb because they just look at the most meaningless metrics. The big metrics they look at are: -Ticket count Just the raw number of tickets. Not how long you spent per ticket or anything. So people just take every job and break it down into multiple tickets. Deployed a new machine? Well that's a separate ticket for loading it, deploying it, a ticket for each piece of software you installed, a ticket for setting up Outlook/etc with the user and so on. -Number of tickets put on hold They don't really care how long they're on hold (unless its like several days) or why. Even though 95% of the time if a ticket goes on hold it's for reasons completely out of your control. -Open-to-closed time Ok this one could potentially be meaningful, except for the fact that we put in half of our tickets ourselves. So people just don't put in tickets until they're done. We've got one guy who basically works right in the same area as all of his users so they go to him and not the helpdesk. His average open-to-closed time last month? 3.6 minutes. They're telling us to get our times down while pointing to comically bullshit numbers. Fellatio del Toro fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Jun 21, 2014 |
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Jun 21, 2014 20:52
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Volmarias posted:Sorry, I just assumed, since that seems par for the course for web development, and your comment about having to check what was changed implied it. Ah, no - I was on about going through SVN commits; sorry about the confusion - I instantly thought of SVN as source control. It is a sensible solution, if I had time to do that. On the other hand I don't really want to be tracking what people do wrong and I don't want to moan about issues with it - I'm ok with people making mistakes or learning how to code, if there's some kind of reasoning behind it (if that makes sense - ok, you bugged something out, happens, but you've learned that context is dynamic depending upon the file you're accessing and you're not going to make the same mistake again - fine). The thing is that, paradoxically, if he were to either ask or assign tasks like he was told, probably both of our lives would be easier. Just ask, that's probably what I'm most depressed about. And even if not with me (if I'm not approachable), there're plenty of people at the other branch he (or others) can discuss stuff with... Thanks for the ideas though (and definitely for hearing me vent)! Probably at some point (if I'm still working here, that is), I'll be doing some lessons. It would be easier working here if our layout team (design / css / templates etc.) knew about granularity (as - separating functionalities into consise objects), or for that matter - consistency and definitely: logic. They definitely know how to make things look nice, but then I get HTML that in the body has classes "user", "container-product" and "pageBox" that makes me do 20 or so ifs. Or I get spaghetti code of JS instead of any sensible library / function encapsulation...
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Jun 21, 2014 22:59
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Sweevo posted:Keeping timesheets for internal work is part of that "internal market" horse poo poo that has infected every medium to large business in the last 20 years. They don't value your experience or knowledge, all you are to them is a replaceable grunt who costs X per hour to do Y.
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Jun 21, 2014 23:16
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It always makes me laugh that the same companies that try and run each individual department like a separate organisation with a magical internal market for stuff like support, office space etc. are very quick to enforce pay scales across the entire organisation. The policy exists mainly to ensure people can't have nice things.
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Jun 21, 2014 23:39
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Pissing me off today: Indian outsourced IT. Got a call for a production stop for one of our fabs at 9pm because a server was reported by a monitoring tool that it was not pinging. I do a quick check, and the server is up and running, completely responsive, and checking into the background of the box, its not even production. What the gently caress guys, are you incapable of taking 30 seconds to verify that the server is down and a thing that needs to cost the company a bunch of money before you decide to call the guys who can fire you for having a bad haircut in the middle of the night? (digging slightly deeper, VCS had a failover hiccup and had to recover, so it might have missed one polling cycle on the oracle db running on it)
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Jun 22, 2014 03:41
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Soylent Heliotrope posted:There are five people at the little tiny remote site I support. Not a single one is willing to run an Ethernet cable I sent them between the printer and a labeled switch 5 feet away, even with me walking them through it. It's funny, because in my situation the company won't pay me a decent salary because they already "pay a lot of money" to an outsourced IT company (they are pretty cool dudes though). I explained that they'll still need boots on the ground to do physical tasks etc since remote support can't do everything, but like they give a gently caress. Also supplier problems; the MD wanted a new laptop and decided on a Dell XPS 13, I suggested a Lenovo instead (or at least ANYTHING that doesn't have a super baller i7 CPU) but he said get the Dell anyway, whatever it's his company he can buy what he wants. It's taken nearly the whole month to arrive since it came from a factory in China, and it finally arrived conveniently during a big managers meeting. So I let him know I've got it and will set it up, to which I powered it on and am unexpectedly greeted with Ubuntu... not Windows, hooray! more delays and poo poo to sort out!
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Jun 22, 2014 10:28
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Fellatio del Toro posted:Where I'm at it's especially dumb because they just look at the most meaningless metrics. That's exactly the same here. My manager is using his new reporting software (which he didn't need, it came with the helpdesk, we've not told him yet) and telling us to close x amounts of tickets a day. This doesn't include tickets passed to sales (licenses/new hardware/software), tickets raised to second line (takes longer than a day to fix) or tickets passed to development. This means that if x amount of people don't need training help, printer setups or password resets during the day, I can't meet my metrics. Its loving stupid. Then they keep pointing at the one rear end in a top hat who is meeting his numbers, by going around other peoples tickets, jacking all the ones that would actually count out of their names and completing them before we can have a look. "Look, he's doing his job, why can't you". Despite he's the only one with that ticket count and the rest of us are actually troubleshooting actual issues.
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Jun 22, 2014 11:17
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dogstile posted:This doesn't include tickets passed to sales (licenses/new hardware/software), tickets raised to second line (takes longer than a day to fix) or tickets passed to development. This means that if x amount of people don't need training help, printer setups or password resets during the day, I can't meet my metrics. Its loving stupid. Simple. Go around breaking peoples passwords so the have to open a ticket for you to fix it! I mean, thats the obvious solution, right? Also, break all the printers so you have to keep setting up more. btw, did I mention that hard ticket quotas are bullshit that encourage people to do lovely things in order to keep their jobs?
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Jun 22, 2014 11:23
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g0del posted:My first job stuffed 3 people into a tiny office while 3 other offices in the same hallway were empty, all because office space was 'rented' from another part of the same company.
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Jun 22, 2014 11:47
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Before I was informed about the timekeeping system, we were converting my small office to VoIP phones. There were only 15 phones so I said I'd set them all up. They said "No, we have a contractor coming to do that." I argued and fought and I put all the phones together and put them on the users' respective desks. The contractor plugged them in and then had to just stick around while the switches were reconfigured because his console cable worked and mine didn't. The contractor's a cool dude, but it's all poo poo I could have done myself. But they'd rather pay a dude to drive two hours to do it than bill any of my time to telecom support.
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Jun 22, 2014 13:45
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dogstile posted:
This is easy. Issue resolved by escalation to second line (or sales). Closing ticket and creating related case for escalation. The last time I company I worked for started talking about closing a certain number of tickets a month, I told my manager, 'Sure! How many do you want? Let me open up my ticketing system and I will get them for you right now.' I don't think that got the message across, but folks in foreign office centers kicking our butts in ticket count because they opened a ticket for every phone call or email they got did.
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Jun 22, 2014 14:56
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Oh yay we can log in again. I bet a certain database was pissing someone off over the past few days. -- I actually find it more amusing than pissing me off as such, but the way we IT people sometimes don't have to do anything at all other than stand there being a brain bypass for someone because they've sat down in front of a computer and their own brain isn't functioning any more. I literally had an hour of this earlier, like there would be an explanation text and just two buttons "continue" or a "cancel" and she'll ask "how do I proceed, it's SO CONFUSING  " I had to read off the screen for her and say "righhht, so it's telling you that you'll need to have your file ready to upload, and telling you to press continue"At least it makes our jobs pretty easy? The same one basically had to use me as a sounding board while she learned how to do a new aspect of her job (I don't know how to do other people's jobs - but somehow it seems to help to have a 'wizard' stood there nodding and shrugging while they figure things out, like some kind of brain catalyst) sfwarlock posted:Those can't possibly be very expensive. Contact HR and ask for morale budget to spend $20 per employee. They're £38 ($65). It's hard enough getting anyone to sign off that much for a "non-essential" even once, never mind multiplying it by 60 to give them to everyone! It's just not in their mindset. They just refurbished the building we're in (2 building site, our company is squishing into 1) so they can rent it out to other businesses. Everywhere got jazzed up except IT (we can't move to the other building due to the cost of moving all the structured cabling of course) which hasn't even seen a lick of paint. In fact the refurb guys came in to change some pipes and make a complete poo poo tip of it, so it's worse than it was before (it's literally like on The IT Crowd, but it's us saying  not the elevator)
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Jun 26, 2014 20:25
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I love how our electricans constantly shittalk about us 'basically not doing anything', but when I challenged them to plug in the dual beamers they just pulled, they gave up after eyeing the connectors for 2 minutes.
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Jun 26, 2014 20:47
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Showed the guy I've been training for a month how to copy and paste from one excel file to another.
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Jun 26, 2014 20:49
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SEKCobra posted:I love how our electricans constantly shittalk about us 'basically not doing anything', but when I challenged them to plug in the dual beamers they just pulled, they gave up after eyeing the connectors for 2 minutes. Try the line "what's so difficult guys, you lot only work with 3 wires and even one of those isn't really needed" if you really want to troll them back. Be ready to run. 
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Jun 26, 2014 21:07
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