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Just be a better employee than your admins. Come in with an agenda, never be "doing tickets" or waiting around for tickets when your boss asks, and show up every single day. I don't care how productive someone is if they don't use the freed up time effectively. I don't know anything about your work habits, just what worked for me 
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Aug 5, 2014 23:04
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Manslaughter posted:Lync is a piece of garbo trash that I was forced to reinstall by my superiors yesterday, so far it is stolen focus five times and freezes Word whenever I click the Review tab every single time. If all you use Lync for is chat, get Pidgin and the Office plugin for it. It has a few buggy bits (the calendar status sync thing usually doesn't work or likes to randomly change your status for no particular reason), but it works, uses fewer resources and is far more configurable than the Lync client, and of course logs all conversations (note that this might actually be a bad thing if your company deliberately has a policy that Lync chat isn't logged for liability reasons, rather than just being too lazy to enable logging on the server). EAT THE EGGS RICOLA posted:Outside of the restaurant industry, I have never worked a salaried job where I didn't get overtime (which I could chose to take in time off or have paid in cash). If it was legal for you to choose to take additional PTO in lieu of overtime pay, then your employer wasn't legally obligated to pay overtime, though. It's illegal to not pay you 1.5x your effective hourly rate for overtime hours if you are FLSA non-exempt, regardless of what other perks you might get for working overtime. (The exception would be if you had to take the time off during the same week to keep you under 40 hours, of course, since in that case you didn't actually work any overtime...) Sadly, most employers aren't generous enough to pay for overtime in any way if they don't have to, though, so exempt employees usually get jack. That said, it is true that being paid on a salary basis doesn't make you FLSA exempt by itself. Exempt vs. non-exempt is generally based on your job duties and total pay. Unfortunately, with the current laws, most positions in IT above entry-level call center/help desk arguably make you exempt as long as they barely pay a living salary (~$24k/yr).
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Aug 6, 2014 00:14
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Just to be clear, are there any of you that like your current boss? I just want to make sure there are indeed good ones. I've really started to hate my job recently because of mine and I've only been there just around 6 months. I don't hate the work, or even hate my coworkers (they are actually all awesome). It's just the boss.
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Aug 6, 2014 00:23
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In my entire working career I've only had one truly solid boss, a person that knew their line of work expertly and was eager to share that knowledge with those under him. He was master of his domain and it felt great to know that he had my back. I later had a boss that although he didn't know anything about I.T. he believed in me and supported me and had the authority to back it up. Every other boss has either been mediocre or outright terrible, which is why after a few decades of work I find very little about it to look forward to. I know the lion's share of responsibility for my poor career results lie with me, but I've been stuck with lovely bosses so often, for so long in so many industries that I have to feel like it made a difference.
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Aug 6, 2014 00:32
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dennyk posted:If it was legal for you to choose to take additional PTO in lieu of overtime pay, then your employer wasn't legally obligated to pay overtime, though. It's illegal to not pay you 1.5x your effective hourly rate for overtime hours if you are FLSA non-exempt, regardless of what other perks you might get for working overtime. (The exception would be if you had to take the time off during the same week to keep you under 40 hours, of course, since in that case you didn't actually work any overtime...) Sadly, most employers aren't generous enough to pay for overtime in any way if they don't have to, though, so exempt employees usually get jack. This doesn't apply to me, I'm Canadian. This was my situation before I switched over to a dev role:  But, because the work I did was in such demand, most of the things in this list were never applied to me. HR at a few places has tried to go with "oh but you're exempt, you have to work overtime without being compensated" and every time they did, my bosses would tell them that they had to pay me/us because otherwise we would just quit.
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Aug 6, 2014 00:54
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Lareous posted:Just to be clear, are there any of you that like your current boss? I just want to make sure there are indeed good ones. My boss is awesome. He ensures that we have a reasonable workload, doesn't let people dump crap on us, keeps track of things, had frequent 1:1 meetings, and in general is a pretty chill guy. They exist, believe me.
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Aug 6, 2014 01:00
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Roargasm posted:Just be a better employee than your admins. Come in with an agenda, never be "doing tickets" or waiting around for tickets when your boss asks, and show up every single day. I don't care how productive someone is if they don't use the freed up time effectively. I don't know anything about your work habits, just what worked for me What? So, just so I understand, you don't care if someone, say, gets twice as much work done as someone else. It's all about the show to you? Am I completely misinterpreting the emphasized line up there? It sounds absurd. I always go into a new job giving my employers the benefit of the doubt, doing what needs to be done (within reasonable limits) to get a project out the door. I deal in good faith. Thus far, when it comes time for a company to show me that they appreciate that effort, they've failed to do so. Usually it comes with a side of insults to my intelligence in the form of nebulous goals for undefined rewards on nonexistent timelines. It's a good attitude to have by default but if you know they're taking advantage of you, working harder for them is just going to make them take advantage harder.
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Aug 6, 2014 02:00
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Che Delilas posted:What? So, just so I understand, you don't care if someone, say, gets twice as much work done as someone else. It's all about the show to you? Am I completely misinterpreting the emphasized line up there? It sounds absurd. He's saying that if person A gets their work done in 20 minutes and then dicks around on Facebook all day, he's not really any more productive than person B who takes their whole shift to do the same work. If you're productive enough to get your work done faster than everyone else, invest at least some of that time into something that will push your career forward.
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Aug 6, 2014 02:06
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Thanks Ants posted:I've found out that people who email things to themselves is a pretty good litmus test for how likely they are to piss you off when attempting simple tasks.  ).Lareous posted:Just to be clear, are there any of you that like your current boss? I just want to make sure there are indeed good ones. My supervisor and my boss are both awesome. Supervisor is super chill, highly technical, knows how to bypass most of the corporate bureaucracy, and does all the things a supervisor should do and does them well. Boss keeps the higher ups and other managers out of our hair so we can actually work and goes to bat for us to get whatever we need (if we can articulate why we need something we'll get it even if it's expensive) and ensures that we're getting plenty of training (2 SANS classes and a conference per year, currently). He also keeps pushing (with some success) to increase our head count. He lets us get away with a lot so long as we get our work done.
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Aug 6, 2014 02:12
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:He's saying that if person A gets their work done in 20 minutes and then dicks around on Facebook all day, he's not really any more productive than person B who takes their whole shift to do the same work. Ah yeah, I was thinking productivity in terms of total poo poo done, not a fixed amount of poo poo getting done at varying times.
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Aug 6, 2014 02:14
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:He's saying that if person A gets their work done in 20 minutes and then dicks around on Facebook all day, he's not really any more productive than person B who takes their whole shift to do the same work. Unless tomorrow, the job takes person A 6 hours and person B takes the week to do it. Don't be silly, he's still more productive, unless you run your employees lockstep so no one can move on to the next task till everyone has finished their part of the previous step.
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Aug 6, 2014 02:20
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I mean don't be lazy and camp out on tickets, which is probably exactly what is happening given that his manager is riding his rear end.
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Aug 6, 2014 02:26
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Lareous posted:Just to be clear, are there any of you that like your current boss? I just want to make sure there are indeed good ones. My current manager is a great guy, very chill and laid-back and does everything he can to support us. He has a technical background as well, even if it's not in our exact area (he was a Windows admin, and our team is all Unix, SAN and VM folks), so he knows how it is in the trenches. Our director, who used to be my direct boss, is also an awesome guy; really smart (he's probably forgotten more about Unix than I'll ever know), a great manager, and goes to bat for our team all the time. He's also fun to hang out with at the gun range (and has all the best toys, of course  ). Hell, actually our department's entire management chain is pretty cool; our department VP is also a great guy and friendly with everyone, and our senior VP, who is the most cheerful guy I've ever met, joined our bowling team this summer. 
dennyk fucked around with this message at 02:42 on Aug 6, 2014 |
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Aug 6, 2014 02:40
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Lareous posted:Just to be clear, are there any of you that like your current boss? I just want to make sure there are indeed good ones. My previous boss was a great person in terms of managing our technology, standing up for us and generally being a decent person. His only downside was that he really didn't like managing people, and made some pretty bad employee decisions. Also he split our department into a networking and security department, and took all the interesting work with him, leaving us with the dregs. Kinda sore about that one. Which leads to my current boss, who is a glory hog that will throw anyone under the bus to look important. He will withhold information from people in his department simply so he can look good when he swoops in to save the day. But his boss loves him because he gets to hear exactly what he wants to from him, which is important then what he should hear. Basically, I my personality and his don't mix at all, and he's made my job lovely for the last year.
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Aug 6, 2014 03:16
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dennyk posted:If it was legal for you to choose to take additional PTO in lieu of overtime pay, then your employer wasn't legally obligated to pay overtime, though. It's illegal to not pay you 1.5x your effective hourly rate for overtime hours if you are FLSA non-exempt, regardless of what other perks you might get for working overtime. (The exception would be if you had to take the time off during the same week to keep you under 40 hours, of course, since in that case you didn't actually work any overtime...) Sadly, most employers aren't generous enough to pay for overtime in any way if they don't have to, though, so exempt employees usually get jack. My previous (non-IT) job had union-negotiated overtime rules: any work over 8 hours in a day, any work over 40 hours in a week, any work on a 6th day. All three were paid at time and a half. That way, no dickery could keep you from getting overtime for working overtime. I think that if you get comp time instead of overtime pay, you should be getting equivalent hours. As in, you work 8 hours of overtime, you should receive 12 hours of comp time, not just 8. That's probably not how it works though, since that seems logical, and employment/labor law rarely is logical.
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Aug 6, 2014 03:19
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Managers who think CCing random people is how to get their way. Computer was down thanks to cheap crappy Dell supplied hard drives. I jumped on the ticket right away. I go off and make a new hard drive with a proper install in my office. Between this and the entire rest of the site, this takes me all day and by the end of the day there's still a little bit left to do. Come in the morning and the manager emails about why it isn't done. Fine, but she CCs an applications manager I've never even met in my life and that has nothing to do with any of this. It's very clear she wants to throw weight around in order to make applications install faster or something. She's very well known in the department for this kind of behavior. She's CCed the CFO and the account executive (!) about petty little ticket bullshit before. Neither of these people give a poo poo about her problems, real or otherwise. In that case it was an issue she claimed was extant for 4 months, yet we never saw a single ticket about it. If a user wasn't down, I was inclined to just sit on the ticket all day just to not reward this kind of histrionic behavior.
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Aug 6, 2014 04:22
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skooma512 posted:Managers who think CCing random people is how to get their way. This kinda poo poo pisses me off. Users know my manager (and his manager (and the CIO)) and depending on what they want done, they will include them on help desk emails. Every once in a while they will push back and tell the person to knock the poo poo off, but usually it's just "can you look at this ASAP" from said manager. Rewarding bad behavior just encourages it
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Aug 6, 2014 04:28
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skooma512 posted:Managers who think CCing random people is how to get their way. They think this because it works on a large number of people.
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Aug 6, 2014 07:13
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Volmarias posted:My boss is awesome. He ensures that we have a reasonable workload, doesn't let people dump crap on us, keeps track of things, had frequent 1:1 meetings, and in general is a pretty chill guy. Echoing this. We're pretty engineering-driven as a company, but my manager (and every other manager I've had here) meets with me frequently, has an open door policy, runs interference with other teams, and is eager to help me with anything at all times if I feel like I need/want it.
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Aug 6, 2014 07:27
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Sickening posted:If the situation is exactly as you describe it the writing on the wall is pretty clear. Do you butt heads with your boss often? Sounds like you are the social pariah of the group. If I am i'd be kind of surprised considering how often I get invited out to go drinking with everyone that isn't my boss  Roargasm posted:I mean don't be lazy and camp out on tickets, which is probably exactly what is happening given that his manager is riding his rear end. To be honest, i'm not even camping them. My tickets all get done within a day. He's just annoyed because i'm doing around 70% of my usual work. Seeing him hire new people and instantly put them on training kind of gets me down, because I can see that he's just keeping me at this level as long as he can. Its cool though, i'm just gonna keep working and see if I can get out of the slump. Keep my fingers cross an application comes back soon and I don't choke on the interview again. I always choke in interviews.
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Aug 6, 2014 07:55
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Lareous posted:Just to be clear, are there any of you that like your current boss? I just want to make sure there are indeed good ones. My "line manager" (department CEO) at my "normal job" back in Sweden is great - makes sure I have budget, trusts my decisions and is a general great guy. My current CTO in Mexico is great too, giving me what I need but also providing pushback and feedback to make my solutions a lot better than my first draft.
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Aug 6, 2014 10:31
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I hate sales users with such passion. I have more of a sysadmin/networking background but got talked into taking a assistant manager help desk job because they offered to bump me up pay wise quite a bit and it would get me into management. To go from having to work mostly with other techs to dealing with some of these mouth breathers half the time is really trying my patience. What really kills me is that it's the same dumb poo poo day after day. Password resets, broken equipment, general bitching. I wish I could just go back to building point to point WAN links all day like I used to. Still it's not all bad. I'm getting to learn and work more with server 2012 then I ever used to and learn SCCM which is at least interesting. But still gently caress sales.
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Aug 6, 2014 15:13
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BaseballPCHiker posted:gently caress sales. Yep. I work support for a product used by sales people. I loving hate my job. I really do. I'm going to start YoTC and become either a welder or electrician.
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Aug 6, 2014 17:27
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When SharePoint locks a site collection as read only, absolutely nothing gets written to the ULS logs. One of the systems at my day job keeps locking spontaneously. No backup jobs, no DB corruption, nothing. 
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Aug 6, 2014 17:37
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Wow... So we need to update a lot of user fields in AD. Things like Manager, Title, Department, Phone numbers, etc. I've managed to collect good(as good as it gets anyway) data and get it all into a nice sheet. But now, I get "I am not comfortable with scripting since our AD is such a mess. Let's go through and update all of these fields by hand." And the other guys involved agree that running a few lines of very easy to read script against a CSV is just too dangerous and that we should have our process be hand loving editing AD records. AlternateAccount fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Aug 6, 2014 |
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Aug 6, 2014 17:38
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dogstile posted:If I am i'd be kind of surprised considering how often I get invited out to go drinking with everyone that isn't my boss Disregard this, I got switched to a new team today after pulling him aside to ask what the hell and pointing out it made no sense for me to be the only first liner in the office when all the others are outsourced. E: 
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Aug 6, 2014 18:23
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dogstile posted:Disregard this, I got switched to a new team today after pulling him aside to ask what the hell and pointing out it made no sense for me to be the only first liner in the office when all the others are outsourced. Great! What percentage was your raise?
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Aug 6, 2014 20:34
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dogstile posted:Disregard this, I got switched to a new team today after pulling him aside to ask what the hell and pointing out it made no sense for me to be the only first liner in the office when all the others are outsourced. Glad to hear it. I'm sympathetic because I remember what it feels like to be the odd man out. Depending on how you talked to your boss, you may have just earned some respect from him. tango alpha delta fucked around with this message at 20:57 on Aug 6, 2014 |
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Aug 6, 2014 20:36
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Spazz posted:When SharePoint locks a site collection as read only, absolutely nothing gets written to the ULS logs. One of the systems at my day job keeps locking spontaneously. No backup jobs, no DB corruption, nothing. Would this help? It's for 2013, but it probably works for older versions: http://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/questions/64726/site-collection-locked-stucked-in-read-only-mode
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Aug 6, 2014 20:46
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BaseballPCHiker posted:But still gently caress sales. Either it was the 'ol "Aura of make everything work" or just whiny bullshit; but today someone came to me saying the phones are broken because because it takes upwards of 15 seconds to dial out, and everyone else in sales is having the same deal. I say to him it doesn't really sound like an urgent issue if they still dial out fine, especially as our half of the office is totally fine, double especially as the whole floor is wired the exact same way. A few of them mail me about it so I figure what the hell and go and investigate, one of them gets all puffed up to show me... dials out straight away, again, and again. Check the Internet/web browsing, all fine... sorry pal, guess it was a ghost. Then again I was asked earlier to do a phone test because no one is ringing in... it's just a quiet day people, relax. (Maybe I should tell them my testing solution is just me phoning the office on my mobile)
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Aug 6, 2014 20:50
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AlternateAccount posted:Wow... Are they afraid of Powershell? Because this sounds like the perfect problem for Powershell. You could even suggest that because it's integrated into the server, it's totally safe.
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Aug 6, 2014 20:51
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During an audit I found a very interesting server. It caught my eye because it doesn't follow our standard naming convention. Oh, gently caress me. It's a server full of hundreds of thousands of .MP3's. Ah poo poo. Who thought this was a good idea to put on a corporate network? Well, it's down. We'll see who screams. If they are smart, they'll let it go. EDIT:It looks like one of our developers brought a tower from home, loaded with .mp3's, and plugged it into our network to share with his dev buddies. Holy gently caress. ANOTHER EDIT: That went really well. The dev is going to copy his music to an external hard drive and remove his XP box from the workplace so that it doesn't show up on another audit. It's already physically disconnected from our network. tango alpha delta fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Aug 6, 2014 |
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Aug 6, 2014 21:14
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tango alpha delta posted:It's a server full of hundreds of thousands of .MP3's. Ah poo poo. Who thought this was a good idea to put on a corporate network?
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Aug 6, 2014 21:21
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tango alpha delta posted:During an audit I found a very interesting server. It caught my eye because it doesn't follow our standard naming convention. You are about to get fired because that was the executive teams MP3 collection that they listen to. It was set up by the CEOs brother's kids boyfriend. Really though was it a server that you could log into? If it has the same credentials as your other servers then that would whittle down your suspect list a bit.
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Aug 6, 2014 21:22
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Trastion posted:You are about to get fired because that was the executive teams MP3 collection that they listen to. It was set up by the CEOs brother's kids boyfriend. Sorry, I said server, but it's actually an XP box. gently caress.
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Aug 6, 2014 21:26
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Bob Morales posted:We did this, but only because we blocked streaming. I personally think it's a great idea, but, unfortunately, I have to look at the big picture.
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Aug 6, 2014 21:34
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tango alpha delta posted:During an audit I found a very interesting server. It caught my eye because it doesn't follow our standard naming convention. A former workplace of mine, had the same problem and they got raided by BPI and the police a month after I quit there (in 2007). The fallout was quite severe. Several employees got charged, convicted, fined and fired, a manager got fired. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6253874.stm
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Aug 6, 2014 22:05
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tango alpha delta posted:Would this help? It's for 2013, but it probably works for older versions: We've tried that, and unfortunately it's on 2010 (which is another headache. Ask me about SAMLv2 and SP2010!). It actually just happened today again and they were OK with us poking around before we reset it. An application pool recycle on the site actually fixed it, so I'm thinking something is getting hung up. The client also reported that the site was incredibly sluggish before the recycle. It's funny: Using stsadm and Set-SPSite to try to unlock it didn't fix it, and it actually doesn't even show up as locked when you do GetLockStatus.
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Aug 6, 2014 22:07
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Spazz posted:We've tried that, and unfortunately it's on 2010 (which is another headache. Ask me about SAMLv2 and SP2010!). It actually just happened today again and they were OK with us poking around before we reset it. An application pool recycle on the site actually fixed it, so I'm thinking something is getting hung up. The client also reported that the site was incredibly sluggish before the recycle. An app pool recycle seems to do the trick for us as well, but ,of course, it's only a band-aid fix and not a solution. Are any of the sites in the site collection running custom plugins or scripts? Is your site collection database over 100GB?
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Aug 6, 2014 22:14
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tango alpha delta posted:An app pool recycle seems to do the trick for us as well, but ,of course, it's only a band-aid fix and not a solution. Are any of the sites in the site collection running custom plugins or scripts? Is your site collection database over 100GB? Well, it's running our flagship product (built on Sharepoint) along with Nintex Workflows, which are a whole other headache. We don't do any sharepoint based backups, it's all SQL backups, so it's not any job running in the background that isn't unlocking when it's done. We also wouldn't run it during peak business hours. No quotas are in place either. I'm thinking Nintex might be doing some fuckery in the background (they are a common culprit). The app pool recycle does help narrow it down to being specific to that site and not a systemic issue.
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Aug 6, 2014 22:20
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