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My last (insanely hellish) job was this weird cobbled together hourly/salaried mix. I was technically hired to be salary, and my awful awful boss wanted (rightly so) me to be able to bill at least 40 hours to clients a week, but if I didn't because I was dealing with our awful infrastructure for a while, he would dock me down to whatever 40 hours would pay, and when I worked MORE than that there was no overtime pay. I routinely worked 50+ hours a week at that job too. On top of that the vacation policy was something terrible like 13 vacation days a year, and since it was a small ~5 person contracting outfit that worked closely with our clients, there wasn't a lot to do when the big multinational I was hired to help since they were most of our revenue was on holiday like a sane company. My boss basically said "you can come in and work, but if you don't have anything to do then don't and just use your PTO". This meant I ended up with about 3 days a year total, which was not enough time at all. Thank god he's an idiot and lost the contract I was working on and I got laid off. I feel bad for his longtime "friend" who worked there and easily put in 80 hours a week because he felt obligated. I don't even have kids to not see. And I guess in the spirit of the thread: ticket posted:User states that a client received an error message when attempting to make a payment online. Client disconnected call before providing additional information, user would like to have the system checked to verify that this is a single member issue. Pretty sure the klaxons would be sounding and the lights flashing if the payment system were down, so let me go look up this anonymous client real fast and
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Jan 5, 2015 17:04
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GreenNight posted:I'd rather sit at home with my thumb in my rear end getting paid than sitting at work. There are people all over these very threads who have refused to take any vacation because they sincerely believe that things will fall apart if they aren't there for two days. Which is probably the oddest combination of being a doormat and having a huge ego that I can think of.
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Jan 5, 2015 17:04
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Part of it is just getting older, I think- when you're in your lower twenties I feel like people are less jaded when it comes to extended work hours. The rest of it for me is that better pay comes with more real work- my last two jobs were both more gently caress-around, cog-in-the-machine jobs, even if the more recent one had long hours. Now that I'm actually responsible for managing my own projects and time, the fact that I can't spend time at work doing what I'd do at home makes me far less inclined to do the opposite, and far more likely to make use of that sweet, sweet time off. (Also the fact that I got basically no time off the first year because of  )
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Jan 5, 2015 17:09
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Che Delilas posted:There are people all over these very threads who have refused to take any vacation because they sincerely believe that things will fall apart if they aren't there for two days. Which is probably the oddest combination of being a doormat and having a huge ego that I can think of. If this is true then your number one obligation to that job is to eliminate any single point of failure in that system, and that does mean making yourself redundant.
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Jan 5, 2015 17:11
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RFC2324 posted:If this is true then your number one obligation to that job is to eliminate any single point of failure in that system, and that does mean making yourself redundant. Yeah right. "Sir, we need to hire someone to do my job when I'm on vacation".
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Jan 5, 2015 17:13
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Ursine Asylum posted:Of course they were paying me peanuts so I couldn't even think about using vacation time to actually go anywhere for vacation... When I worked for a university I had that issue, I ended up spending a lot of time just visiting family one state over. Now I make enough money to do cool stuff but need to learn how to budget my vacation time better.
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Jan 5, 2015 17:15
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thebigcow posted:We don't roll vacation hours into the next year. My boss has a story about the last place she worked where they did roll over everything and when one old guy quit he had roughly half a year worth of hours that they had to pay out. Why would that be a problem? If they were accruing those charges accurately, it wouldn't affect their bottom line in the year of the payout and it should have been listed as a liability all along so it wouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. If the issue was the cash hit, said company needs to get its poo poo together.
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Jan 5, 2015 17:15
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Eldercain posted:Pretty sure the klaxons would be sounding and the lights flashing if the payment system were down, so let me go look up this anonymous client real fast and Rule of thumb is that something like 1-5% of users hitting an issue will actually report an issue, the rest will bitch about it to their friends. When I get tickets like that I'll just take 30 seconds to grep the payment hosts for weird errors, 90% of the time it's nothing but that other 10% can result in some really fun poo poo. Edge cases on a legacy account system are as great way to
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Jan 5, 2015 17:15
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GreenNight posted:Yeah right. "Sir, we need to hire someone to do my job when I'm on vacation". The actual argument is this. "Sir, we need to hire someone who can do my job in the event I am unable to work tomorrow due to illness or other unforeseen accident." You never make it clear that the redundancy is for planned maintenance, you sell it as part of a DR scheme, and point out that human machines fail almost as often as the hardware itself.
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Jan 5, 2015 17:20
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RFC2324 posted:If this is true then your number one obligation to that job is to eliminate any single point of failure in that system, and that does mean making yourself redundant. The problem is usually managers in situations like that. If you work for people who subscribe to the "who needs a spare tire anyways" school of accounting, I'd say your time is better spent  ing out than trying to convince them that backups and distributed domain knowledge are requirements and not extravagances.
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Jan 5, 2015 17:21
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GreenNight posted:Yeah right. "Sir, we need to hire someone to do my job when I'm on vacation". If a system is so important that the business will fail if someone isn't there to deal with it all the time, then yes, the people in charge need to make sure that someone is there to deal with it all the time. Whether that means hiring enough people for redundancy or having a contracting firm on standby for emergencies or whatever. It's the admin's job to communicate that fact to his bosses, sure, but not to chain himself to the building. Ursine Asylum posted:The problem is usually managers in situations like that. If you work for people who subscribe to the "who needs a spare tire anyways" school of accounting, I'd say your time is better spent My philosophy is, I bring problems that my bosses have to deal with to my bosses (through email and other such media). If they refuse to deal with them, I've done my part and I refuse to compromise my life to make up for their failures. Che Delilas fucked around with this message at 17:27 on Jan 5, 2015 |
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Jan 5, 2015 17:25
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Che Delilas posted:If a system is so important that the business will fail if someone isn't there to deal with it all the time, then yes, the people in charge need to make sure that someone is there to deal with it all the time. Whether that means hiring enough people for redundancy or having a contracting firm on standby for emergencies or whatever. It's the admin's job to communicate that fact to his bosses, sure, but not to chain himself to the building. I absolutely agree, but unfortunately it isn't always like that. I still take a few weeks off here and there cause gently caress em.
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Jan 5, 2015 17:26
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GreenNight posted:I absolutely agree, but unfortunately it isn't always like that. I still take a few weeks off here and there cause gently caress em. Of course it isn't. But it's not on me to take up the slack by destroying my own life. That's my point, not that I expect every business to run their poo poo correctly.
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Jan 5, 2015 17:29
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RFC2324 posted:The actual argument is this. "Sir, we need to hire someone who can do my job in the event I am unable to work tomorrow due to illness or other unforeseen accident." Alternative: Sir, I need to take <other employee> and train him to do my job in case I am hit by a bus tomorrow.
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Jan 5, 2015 17:30
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We can roll over 4 weeks here, and I'm at about 3 right now. I probably won't go anywhere, so I'm looking forward to a lot of "gently caress it I'm not coming in today" kind of mornings in the future.Ursine Asylum posted:Rule of thumb is that something like 1-5% of users hitting an issue will actually report an issue, the rest will bitch about it to their friends. When I get tickets like that I'll just take 30 seconds to grep the payment hosts for weird errors, 90% of the time it's nothing but that other 10% can result in some really fun poo poo. Edge cases on a legacy account system are as great way to Yeah I took a quick jaunt over and made sure we had payments coming in, but I certainly can't look up that specific problem with literally no information. I just closed the ticket. Even if only 1% of our users called, we have incredibly robust call volume monitoring software because of how many people that would be, and the CSRs are on my floor and you can tell when poo poo has gone belly up in some way our customers can see. This ticket came in last wednesday too so it was basically when everyone was scrambling to make their last payments before end of year.
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Jan 5, 2015 17:32
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thebigcow posted:We don't roll vacation hours into the next year. My boss has a story about the last place she worked where they did roll over everything and when one old guy quit he had roughly half a year worth of hours that they had to pay out. My old boss used to work for the Canadian government as an electronics engineer tech type of things (engineers plan a circuit, he builds it/tests it, reports back with results. etc). This was back in the late 70's into the late 90's or so. He never took vacations. At one point he and one of the guys he worked with had something like almost a year of vacation to take - they forced them to take it off in one month chunks for the next couple of years, and changed policy to only allow for at most 3 months vacation banked up. I don't get saving that much unless you are planning some life-changing sabbatical/want to take another year or two of school and get paid while doing it.
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Jan 5, 2015 18:01
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A ticket came in... Newer guy was having trouble logging into a UNIX server so he submitted a ticket. Ended up being an issue with me not configuring something because I didn't realize people actually used it. The  comes from when he casually mentioned that he also tested this with his manager's credentials.
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Jan 5, 2015 18:22
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What's the zeitgeist opinion on decent data recovery shops for microSD cards? A VIP client's card isn't even showing up in her phone, Testdisk and Recuva don't even see it as a partition or disk , let alone in Explorer. Free attempts would be best. My wife's got a bunch of games that only save locally, and it'd break her heart if we're really that far out of options
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Jan 5, 2015 19:05
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Try a couple different USB card readers for PC? Wiggle the card around a bit, leave it in for a while. Maybe try if a Linux system will detect it.
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Jan 5, 2015 19:08
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nielsm posted:Try a couple different USB card readers for PC? Wiggle the card around a bit, leave it in for a while. Maybe try if a Linux system will detect it. We tried that - one SD adapter that was sitting around, and one that came from my digital camera and is known good. Doesn't detect with the known good one in either machine. My next step is to find a bootable Linux livecd with Testdisk and hope for the best.
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Jan 5, 2015 19:11
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MJP posted:What's the zeitgeist opinion on decent data recovery shops for microSD cards? A VIP client's card isn't even showing up in her phone, Testdisk and Recuva don't even see it as a partition or disk , let alone in Explorer. Free attempts would be best. does the device even show up at all in dmesg when you plug it in?
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Jan 5, 2015 19:11
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A phone call came in:quote:The electricity in half of the building went out!
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Jan 5, 2015 20:51
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When you're the CEO, your office is half the building. The half that matters.
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Jan 5, 2015 21:15
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Seems like it's about time for someone on the pinko commie side of the Atlantic to casually mention their legally-mandated 20 paid days off per year plus a variable by nation amount of paid public holidays. The hardest thing is working out what to do on my 38 paid days off (8 public holidays, the rest are mine to do with as I please - my company starts at 25 days then adds on one day per year up to a maximum of 5). It's annoying I can only carry 5 days over a year without upper-management approval but that's mainly through the company recognising that someone not taking all their time off is indicative of a problem somewhere. Anyway on the "Things fall apart when I take leave" - that is unfortunately unavoidable in some circumstances. I've spent a lot of time since getting my own team to
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Jan 5, 2015 21:28
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goddamnedtwisto posted:It's annoying I can only carry 5 days over a year without upper-management approval but that's mainly through the company recognising that someone not taking all their time off is indicative of a problem somewhere. Not only that, but for some departments it's mandatory to take at least 75% of your time. I know in some of the security positions I've held, I was informed I had to take most of my PTO time during the year it's accrued or it would be a cause for discipline. It's another check put in place for activity audits to pick up anomalies. Kind a solution to "who watches the watchmen" kind of thing. Not a perfect one, but it will snap up most people who just can't resist access to all that sweet sweet information.
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Jan 5, 2015 21:56
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Anyone take their MCSA 70-410/411 exams recently? I'm looking for some cheap/free training resources that are helpful in preparing for the exam. I've already done my 074-409 exam which doubles for my 70-412 so I want to hammer out the first two to become MCSA certified before I go for my MCSE. I was looking at the CBT Nuggets courses but I'm paying out of pocket for this and that's more than I can afford right now.
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Jan 5, 2015 22:14
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HalloKitty posted:I've always found this rather unfair. If the company isn't open, and you can't go in, you shouldn't be made to take holiday. What about if I phrase the T&Cs this way? 22 days holiday a year, plus all public holidays, plus the period from 27th-31st December. That's basically how it was presented to me at the interview, the fact that for admin purposes it's counted as 25 days holiday + public holidays is just paperwork. They could do it as "33 days holiday a year, but has to be all the public holidays plus the period between xmas and new year", it would still be the same end result. Springing it on someone mid-December is lovely, but the policy really isn't that bad. The alternative would be keeping the company open during those times and so refusing holiday approval to some people who actually wanted that time off due to needing a certain number of people in for operational or H&S reasons.
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Jan 5, 2015 22:15
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goddamnedtwisto posted:Seems like it's about time for someone on the pinko commie side of the Atlantic to casually mention their legally-mandated 20 paid days off per year plus a variable by nation amount of paid public holidays. The hardest thing is working out what to do on my 38 paid days off (8 public holidays, the rest are mine to do with as I please - my company starts at 25 days then adds on one day per year up to a maximum of 5). Well, since you asked... 36 days off. Four of those every year go towards the xmas period — we're closed the 25th and 26th of December, and the 1st and 2nd of January because national holidays, but we close down before xmas eve and open again on the 3rd, so the four days bulk it out. This year, because of dates, we closed at lunchtime on the 23rd and opened on the 5th. Only security/cleaning/etc are in over the break (why we can't claim to just be closed down entirely). 4 carry forward, optionally more if your line manager agrees. Most of us bank 4 in the first year, then just leave them there in case of emergency. If anyone says "but I can't take a holiday, because things will fall apart without me", then management will deliver a bollocking for creating a system with a bus number of 1. We've had that bite us in the arse repeatedly, and management don't want it happening again. I know, I know, back in my pod...
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Jan 5, 2015 22:19
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Lum posted:What about if I phrase the T&Cs this way? Realistically there's absolutely no issue with the policy in and of itself, as long as it's billed with "You get 22 days of vacation" and not "25 days but you don't get to pick where to spend 3 of them". I mean you're not going to say "30 days of vacation* but 10 of them are used on bank holidays regardless of whether you want to or not", unless you're a really lovely HR person. All I care about is the amount of vacation I actually get to take, not how you register the days in your payroll system. e: It would be on par, to me, with the difference between "You get paid 100k but you're required to spend 5k on mandatory training" and "You get paid 95k and you have mandatory training". Not quite the same because taxes, but one's what the reality is and one is someone trying to sell you something. Alliterate Addict fucked around with this message at 22:43 on Jan 5, 2015 |
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Jan 5, 2015 22:41
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Ursine Asylum posted:All I care about is the amount of vacation I actually get to take, not how you register the days in your payroll system. They're being up front about how many vacation days you actually get to take, so by your own words, you shouldn't care at all how it's presented to you.
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Jan 5, 2015 22:49
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totalnewbie posted:They're being up front about how many vacation days you actually get to take, so by your own words, you shouldn't care at all how it's presented to you. If they're really upfront with it, then yes. My complaint (and ranty post) would be if they're touting "30 DAYS OF VACATION, MORE THAN ANY OTHER COMPANY IN THE INDUSTRY*" and I only find out about asterisk three interviews later when they send me an offer letter. And I can absolutely see why that would rub people the wrong way.
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Jan 5, 2015 22:56
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My boss made it clear when he hired me that we get 6 paid holidays a year, plus 10 vacation days. So, I get paid for Christmas Day, New Years Day, Thanksgiving, Labor Day, Memorial Day, and the 4th of July, and then get to pick when I want to use the 10 other vacation days I get. Those days don't roll over, and expire on the anniversary of my hire, which is in early October for me. Since we're not open on the weekends, that works out to 2 weeks vacation a year. Pretty easy to understand, I feel.
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Jan 5, 2015 23:00
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neogeo0823 posted:...6 paid holidays a year... This is literally how I've had it explained in every job I've been in, so I'd say so. That "3 of your vacation days must be used for holidays with no notice" stuff from upthread is what sets off my bullshit detector.
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Jan 5, 2015 23:06
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A ticket came in: "Hey, I can't open this payment remittance. Says I don't have the appropriate software". PaymentRemittance.rar containing PaymentRemittance.exe. Installing the bare minimum software on computers finally paid off. The system works! Also, I've added .RAR's to my filter. If I have to receive large files via email I'll request a 7z.
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Jan 5, 2015 23:40
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Gmail and Outlook.com / O365 seem to be really pushing the "upload to Google Drive/OneDrive and send a link" thing on people, which I can only totally approve of. gently caress email attachments.
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Jan 5, 2015 23:53
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m.hache posted:If I have to receive large files via email I'll request a 7z. 
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Jan 5, 2015 23:57
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I had to spend 4.5 days and have been out of my office from 1:00pm Christmas Eve until tomorrow (They give us two half days on the eves and the actual holiday off and I work on Saturday "just in case" so always have Mondays off). We always have to spend time because we have a contract at a University and they close over break. It doesn't bother me because I knew it when I took the job. I get 8 days that are sick or whatever days that don't get paid out if I quit and 17 vacation days with +1 per year topping out at 22 (total 30). It is pretty nice for the US.
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Jan 6, 2015 00:01
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m.hache posted:Also, I've added .RAR's to my filter. If I have to receive large files via email I'll request a 7z. I'd say SFTP but I can only imagine trying to walk a non tech through using Filezilla.
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Jan 6, 2015 00:03
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Ursine Asylum posted:I'd say SFTP but I can only imagine trying to walk a non tech through using Filezilla. ZendTo. If they can't figure that out, then USB carrier pigeons.
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Jan 6, 2015 00:14
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goddamnedtwisto posted:Seems like it's about time for someone on the pinko commie side of the Atlantic to casually mention their legally-mandated 20 paid days off per year plus a variable by nation amount of paid public holidays. At this point I will chime in from the glorious socialist south seas with long service leave. You worked here for 10 years, time for 3 months off. This is on top of 20 days vacation, 10 days sick + public holidays.
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Jan 6, 2015 01:16
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