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A ticket came in I work in the finance EBS space (Oracle/SAP etc) with approximate knowledge of many things but master of none. Apparently head office has decided that they are moving to an office365 hosted environment with a bunch of specific addons. Our division doesn't want to pay 200 bucks per user per month for stuff we don't need. Now I get the fun task of buying a server and setting up server 2012 (foundation of course) by myself. First impressions : Why are there so many squares? Why do apps on 2012 not run for administrator for no good reason? What the gently caress is storage pooling? What is the maximum blood alcohol level for employees in Australia?
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Jan 23, 2015 00:33
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CDW posted:A tracert came in... Wasn't there someone just the other day in here that managed to direct all incoming traffic on a new device to 8.8.8.8? Did we just have a real life goon connection?
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Jan 23, 2015 01:06
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...is office365 200 bucks/user in australia????
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Jan 23, 2015 01:27
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incoherent posted:...is office365 200 bucks/user in australia???? Nah its a specialised implementation with a bunch of junk attached like OCR etc. Our division really doesnt need it. I recommended the cheap option of getting a local server with fileserver and replicating to a hosted fileserver solution type thing and hosted exchange. I got blind-sided by them expecting me to install and setup all of this from scratch. Oh and zero documentation from whoever set the current network up beforehand. Also zero credentials.
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Jan 23, 2015 01:42
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If you throw a load of Project licensing, whatever their CRM is etc on the top of it then it can get pretty expensive. I have no idea why a company would have policies that piss that much money away though when obviously not everybody needs that much. I don't see how a single Server 2012 R2 Foundation deployment is going to replace what Office 365 was doing though. Are they cutting you off entirely? http://products.office.com/en-AU/business/compare-office-365-for-business-plans Do not try and do email yourself for these sorts of prices.
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Jan 23, 2015 01:45
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Baxta posted:Nah its a specialised implementation with a bunch of junk attached like OCR etc. Our division really doesnt need it. I recommended the cheap option of getting a local server with fileserver and replicating to a hosted fileserver solution type thing and hosted exchange. I got blind-sided by them expecting me to install and setup all of this from scratch. Lesson learned: if you suggest an alternative solution, you best be prepared to actually do it yourself. "Why pay for X when you can do Y for way less?" should result in someone saying "ok, if you think that's an option, then go do it"
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Jan 23, 2015 01:56
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evol262 posted:Lesson learned: if you suggest an alternative solution, you best be prepared to actually do it yourself. instead it's "That's great! Get it done. You have no budget and we expect to see it working on Monday. I'll be in my beach house for the weekend, so I'm loving off at noon today to beat the Friday traffic home."
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Jan 23, 2015 03:23
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Thanks Ants posted:If you throw a load of Project licensing, whatever their CRM is etc on the top of it then it can get pretty expensive. I have no idea why a company would have policies that piss that much money away though when obviously not everybody needs that much. Basically all we need is a local fileserver and AD to manage folder permissions (in our division). The rest of our stuff is specialised and offsite. Our head office thinks they need a full office365 suite with all the bells and whistles because its new and exciting and some reseller talked it up. Head office is upstairs and the current local fileserver is somehow joined to a hosted SBS (that manages all the AD, DHCP and DNS). So they are getting rid of that whole contract for Office365. Theres absolutely no reason for us to move to the cloud. The reason I got stuck with this implementation is because I probably can eventually get it done which will save the 30 hours setup fee @ 150 bucks an hour. How the hell people charge 30 hours to set up a windows 2012 foundation environment for 5 people I do not know. EDIT: Actually I think now I have to make this new server the DNS server and tell our router to do DHCP... 
Baxta fucked around with this message at 04:39 on Jan 23, 2015 |
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Jan 23, 2015 04:14
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incoherent posted:You are so brave to tread these thread developer-san.
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Jan 23, 2015 04:17
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incoherent posted:You are so brave to tread these thread developer-san.
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Jan 23, 2015 04:48
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KoRMaK posted:I'm a developer. This thread is difficult at times. Thanks for the compliment! So am I, and yeah, every now and then we get the "omg gently caress developers" rants but I try not to take it personally. I've worked with some really lovely IT people too. But in both cases, we're talking about the outliers that make the competent people look bad. Hell, I take them as cautionary tales - all the stories and complaints about, for instance, developers who act like they're better than the IT people. I don't want to be that guy.
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Jan 23, 2015 05:50
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Methylethylaldehyde posted:instead it's "That's great! Get it done. You have no budget and we expect to see it working on Monday. I'll be in my beach house for the weekend, so I'm loving off at noon today to beat the Friday traffic home." I know it's hyperbole, but unless your boss is literally Dilbert's boss or was hired directly from a political cartoon, there's something to be said here about managing expectations. Baxta posted:Head office is upstairs and the current local fileserver is somehow joined to a hosted SBS (that manages all the AD, DHCP and DNS). So they are getting rid of that whole contract for Office365. I could do what you're doing with Foundation 2012 with Linux, too. It'd be even cheaper. Would you go for that? Che Delilas posted:So am I, and yeah, every now and then we get the "omg gently caress developers" rants but I try not to take it personally. I've worked with some really lovely IT people too. But in both cases, we're talking about the outliers that make the competent people look bad. Hell, I take them as cautionary tales - all the stories and complaints about, for instance, developers who act like they're better than the IT people. I don't want to be that guy. Dev #3 checkin' in.
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Jan 23, 2015 05:59
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evol262 posted:
Im salary, I get paid whatever for whatever. The current deal is, we set up the server and then the company running our exchange server will oversee the onsite server in the event I drink myself to death. We get 10 block hours a month for random support. They bought the server for us then tried to tack on the 4500 dollar set up fee. if replication breaks and im not hit by a bus, itll come up with one of these stupid exclamation marks and I will get someone to fix it 
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Jan 23, 2015 06:10
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Che Delilas posted:So am I, and yeah, every now and then we get the "omg gently caress developers" rants but I try not to take it personally. I've worked with some really lovely IT people too. But in both cases, we're talking about the outliers that make the competent people look bad. Hell, I take them as cautionary tales - all the stories and complaints about, for instance, developers who act like they're better than the IT people. I don't want to be that guy. I'm a developer too, and I can understand the "gently caress Developer" hate. I've had a co-worker comment out one of my functions (Not delete, thank god) because he "couldn't understand how it worked therefore it wasn't important" and then threw me under the bus when the next compile didn't work. Surprise Surprise once I removed the comment tags everything worked. Another time a contractor overwrote the definition for an object shared between 3 project runs with one that was a month and a half old right before we had a client demo. We were cleaning that one up for weeks. I know they're the outliers but they're unfortunately very visible ones. Kurieg fucked around with this message at 07:43 on Jan 23, 2015 |
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Jan 23, 2015 07:35
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Every group hates on some other group. Like me, I really hate Sales guys in general. "gently caress Sales" is the "gently caress printers" of my world. I swear, our new guys in our new office are driving me nuts. No, it's not OK to, at 7am, schedule an appointment with a client at 7:30am when I don't get to work until 9am, and then get pissed when I don't attend. Nothing sets me off on the wrong foot more than starting up my system and, before everything even loads, getting half a dozen IMs and a phone call demanding to know where I was and why I didn't help. So gently caress sales. That said, it's easy, as a support-focused thread, for us to say "gently caress developers!" because the bugs, poorly-documented behaviors, and unintentional side effects are ultimately tied to their work. What we don't see are the decisions, thought processes, and technical limitations that lead to the support-related issues we encounter. Sure, feature X makes no sense in environment Y, but maybe it was originally designed for environment Z. Perhaps Sales got some exec's ear and forced a port to environment Y without giving time for proper testing or consideration of the differences. Then it turns out to be super popular so Sales sells the poo poo out of it. Next thing we know, it's entrenched, and there's no easy way to fix the core of the program to work properly due to some technical limitations. Now we are supporting this hodgepodge piece of crap, see that X makes no sense in Y, and say "gently caress the developer who made this!". That anger is misplaced. The developer knows it sucks. He hates it, but there's not much he can do to override the decisions that lead to the wrong product being sold in the wrong environment. And once it's entrenched, it can be VERY difficult to fix. I can think of at least three very central, core things in the product I support that can be traced to some variation of the story above. They all cause significant trouble, and there's nothing that can easily be done. We'd literally have to re-write the entire UI from scratch to fix one of them.
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Jan 23, 2015 08:03
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This is why I really try not to judge any seemingly terrible decisions IT makes. At the end of the day I really don't have any idea of what they're dealing with; both from a technological standpoint and a policy/management standpoint. There's always going to be someone who's really goddamn lazy or plays political games with you for personal gain, but in general I prefer to operate as if everyone is trying their best to see success happen across the board.
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Jan 23, 2015 08:41
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You could totally "gently caress sales" by the nature of it's self-interest (performance bonuses).
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Jan 23, 2015 08:48
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Che Delilas posted:I prefer to operate as if everyone is trying their best to see success happen across the board.  You'll break eventually. Everyone does.
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Jan 23, 2015 08:48
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Clients email isn't working. Outlook cannot connect to Office 365. Turns out their trial period expired, and my supervisor forgot to order licenses. I'm off to meet their CEO, wish me luck.
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Jan 23, 2015 09:49
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incoherent posted:You could totally "gently caress sales" by the nature of it's self-interest (performance bonuses). Performance bonuses, commissions, the culture of competition, all of it. I don't know who to be angrier at in this case though; sales is full of lying shitheels, but management listens to the lying shitheels and takes their side against the actual technical professionals when the two groups disagree on the way the laws of time and physics work. Like, if a pit bull bites me, am I madder at the dog or the rear end in a top hat owner who let him off the leash in the first place?
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Jan 23, 2015 10:03
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Che Delilas posted:Performance bonuses, commissions, the culture of competition, all of it. I don't know who to be angrier at in this case though; sales is full of lying shitheels, but management listens to the lying shitheels and takes their side against the actual technical professionals when the two groups disagree on the way the laws of time and physics work. You shoot the dog and press charges against the owner. I wish this translated to sales and management... 
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Jan 23, 2015 11:04
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Che Delilas posted:Performance bonuses, commissions, the culture of competition, all of it. I don't know who to be angrier at in this case though; sales is full of lying shitheels, but management listens to the lying shitheels and takes their side against the actual technical professionals when the two groups disagree on the way the laws of time and physics work. See, sales makes money, you spend it.
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Jan 23, 2015 13:16
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Gothmog1065 posted:See, sales makes money, you spend it. Thank god I've never had anyone actually say that to me. The closest was an impromptu speech at a company gathering where the head of finance told us that development shouldn't make any bugs, because that's expensive. And yet, every day, there would be emails asking if anyone knew why we had just gotten a $50k check from some client? Volmarias fucked around with this message at 13:42 on Jan 23, 2015 |
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Jan 23, 2015 13:40
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Volmarias posted:Thank god I've never had anyone actually say that to me. The closest was an impromptu speech at a company gathering where the head of finance told us that development shouldn't make any bugs, because that's expensive. Cue me making the biggest, loudest, most ostentatious, wide-eyed, open-mouthed forehead slap I possibly could . Thank god for that director or we might never have realized. My life. So much simpler now.
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Jan 23, 2015 14:04
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For my "gently caress Sales" rant for today, you might remember Tim from my previous rant. The guy has been intimately involved with bringing on a new client over the last month. It's a (very popular, successful) donut shop with two locations, each with a POS and backup terminal. The actual conversion has been planned out for the last couple of weeks, and it's simple. We've been biding our time while Tim and I play nice with the client and get them to love us. I do this by going there and being proactive and encouraging about the changeover, and reassuring the owners that things will go smoothly. Tim does something similar, but tries to do more relationship building than professional confidence building, which isn't too bad of a thing on it's own. Where this becomes a gently caress Sales rant is that today, in an hour, I have an appointment scheduled. It's been on the calendar for literally a month. Immediately after this, I've got another appointment which has been scheduled for the last 4 days. Both are at locations half an hour away from the office, and I have the rest of the day open otherwise. Last night, Tim was doing his thing with the merchant, when they finally said "Sure, come over tomorrow and do the changeover." What does Tim do? Without calling or texting me, without consulting the calendar, he schedules me to go to both of the merchant's locations to do the changeover at the exact same time as these other two appointments. I don't find this out until about 5 minutes ago, when I walk in. Now, here's what really pisses me off. When I ask him if we can reschedule, he tells me that this client is too important to even go there a couple hours later in the day, they need to be done asap. He reluctantly volunteers to go do one of my two installations on the other side of town, which is dumb because he knows nothing about the client I was scheduled to meet with, and I still have to go do the other one after this. Further, he knows full well that the conversion is as easy as making two phone calls. I don't even need to be at the merchant's shops at all. But he wants me to go there "to make a show of it, have presence there, and just in case something goes wrong." Like it's some circus. At least they have tasty donuts. Too bad I've been dieting and losing weight for the last couple weeks.
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Jan 23, 2015 15:18
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Doctor Bombadil posted:Clients email isn't working. Outlook cannot connect to Office 365. I hope you have a schedule for exactly how long it will take to unfuck things. That generally goes a long way towards smoothing things over.
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Jan 23, 2015 16:37
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As another dev, I think the important thing is to get mad about individuals and not concepts. I have had very few interactions with IT here because I don't break my poo poo constantly, but I know a lot of developers (I use this word somewhat loosely). I work with a pretty good team, but I have definitely met some folks that I am glad I don't deal with their code. That's what happens when you work as a "programmer" for a company for 35 years. In the early 80s, you didn't need to know jack poo poo to get a job doing it and it turns out that that's pretty obvious now that you kind of do! Some of them are great at the continuing education thing, and then we have people that ftp files from windows to our mainframe and THEN BACK because they just don't know anything else. Some have have their own little castles of programs and workflows they've built (undocumented ofc) for years that I've had a few glimpses into, and whatever poor young thing replaces them will be driven to madness at the sight of them.
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Jan 23, 2015 17:41
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MG42 posted:And then there was a toolbar wanting me to enter a captcha to uninstall it. Never thought they'd go that far. I've seen those a bunch and I alway wondering if they're grabbing the captcha from another site that they're trying to automatically make accounts for and getting you to break the captcha for them. Probably not a high enough volume of uninstalls for that to be worth it.
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Jan 23, 2015 17:45
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Kurieg posted:I'm a developer too, and I can understand the "gently caress Developer" hate. I've had a co-worker comment out one of my functions (Not delete, thank god) because he "couldn't understand how it worked therefore it wasn't important" and then threw me under the bus when the next compile didn't work. Surprise Surprise once I removed the comment tags everything worked. If you are going to poo poo on someone elses code, at least make sure it compiles. And before you do that, do a loving text search for the function name. How old was this idiot? ConfusedUs posted:Every group hates on some other group. Like me, I really hate Sales guys in general. "gently caress Sales" is the "gently caress printers" of my world. I swear, our new guys in our new office are driving me nuts. No, it's not OK to, at 7am, schedule an appointment with a client at 7:30am when I don't get to work until 9am, and then get pissed when I don't attend. My grandfather's version is "gently caress engineers, those drat educated idiots". He would complain (still does even though an event took place 40+ years ago) about small details - like a bolt not lining up or something. My perception of that now is "do you realize how far they got? you're a competent journeyman on a team, they were expecting you to be able to handle these things that they may have overlooked. As part of a team you gotta help catch each others mistakes" So when I see any form of "educated idiots" e.g. gently caress developers I have the same skeptical reaction.
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Jan 23, 2015 17:49
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KoRMaK posted:Haha, what an rear end in a top hat. Somewhere in his 30s I think, he's got a kid at least. He's earnest but not actively malicious, just always operates as if we were in crunch time and doesn't think things through. The second guy was the worst though, he was a Contractor which meant he was remote to us but on the client site. So he spent a lot of time hanging around with the client's programmers and specifically their CTO. He was responsible for a function that totaled up some revenue values and did other calculations, eventually returning a value that was used to evaluate other things. Every time he demoed it, it worked fine. Every time we tried to use it, it returned a faulty value. We'd keep on kicking it back to him for review and his response was that it was simply user error. Our requests to look at his documentation fell on deaf ears because he didn't document anything, and his code was similarly uncommented. Eventually my team lead told me to go in and dissect his script and do the documentation for him. The function was basically quote:Take Inputs The reason it worked for him and no one else was because he always used the same values when testing. Therefore the outputs always matched up. We had to write up a new function from scratch over the course of an afternoon. When we brought it up to the client they brushed it off as an honest mistake because he was such a great guy and he'd never do anything like that intentionally.
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Jan 23, 2015 18:19
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totalnewbie posted:I hope you have a schedule for exactly how long it will take to unfuck things. That generally goes a long way towards smoothing things over. It actually went surprisingly well. Compromise was reached that they will pay online using credit card (in order to restore services as soon as possible) for first month, then they'll switch over to product key obtained through us, if that is possible. All in all she was very reasonable, they were separating from parent company and last couple of weeks were clusterfuck. In the end she was happy that I showed on location almost immediately, and services were soon restored. They were without email for about two and a half hours. Also, three years ago I was working with this particular client exclusively for 9 months so we have a bit of history which probably helped. No tickets came in for the rest of the day, for which I'm grateful.
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Jan 23, 2015 19:37
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Kurieg posted:The reason it worked for him and no one else was because he always used the same values when testing. Therefore the outputs always matched up. We had to write up a new function from scratch over the course of an afternoon. When we brought it up to the client they brushed it off as an honest mistake because he was such a great guy and he'd never do anything like that intentionally.  I could be getting by with so much less
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Jan 23, 2015 19:47
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how did "here look we tried it with these values and it doesn't work. please explain" not come up?
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Jan 23, 2015 19:48
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EAT THE EGGS RICOLA posted:how did "here look we tried it with these values and it doesn't work. please explain" not come up? Pretty standard Us vs Them kind of thing. If they guy is at least passingly able to do his job in other ways, it's easy enough to just say oh yeah it's just the vendor/contractor's fault, they so dumb. If the rest of them are nontechnical there's no way saying "we rewrote it because he was literally hardcoding it" will do anything.
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Jan 23, 2015 20:12
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Nemo2342 posted:I'm not actually a developer; my job is to sit between the users and the actual programmer so he can get work done without being hounded by the user base. I get to handle user training/setup, Q&A testing, vetting feature requests/bugs before sending them to the programmer, and basically being the help desk for all the day to day problems/questions users get. Obligatory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAY27NU1Jog
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Jan 23, 2015 21:18
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Rhymenoserous get out of my loving head. I didn't want to post that, but it immediately came up. He gets it from both ends, sadly.
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Jan 23, 2015 21:23
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Volmarias posted:The closest was an impromptu speech at a company gathering where the head of finance told us that development shouldn't make any bugs, because that's expensive. Hooooly poo poo, did everyone just start laughing?
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Jan 23, 2015 21:29
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Start rebranding all bugs as unintended features.
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Jan 23, 2015 21:35
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EAT THE EGGS RICOLA posted:how did "here look we tried it with these values and it doesn't work. please explain" not come up? Eldercain posted:Pretty standard Us vs Them kind of thing. If they guy is at least passingly able to do his job in other ways, it's easy enough to just say oh yeah it's just the vendor/contractor's fault, they so dumb. If the rest of them are nontechnical there's no way saying "we rewrote it because he was literally hardcoding it" will do anything. He and the CTO were very good friends. After the incident where he overwrote an object with a month old one, our leads tried to get rid of him. The CTO insisted that he was too important and said that if we got rid of him then they'd drop the contract because of how vital he was to the project's success.
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Jan 23, 2015 21:45
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Kurieg posted:He and the CTO were very good friends. After the incident where he overwrote an object with a month old one, our leads tried to get rid of him. The CTO insisted that he was too important and said that if we got rid of him then they'd drop the contract because of how vital he was to the project's success. What the gently caress was he doing to become such good friends?
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Jan 23, 2015 21:52
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