|
GOOCHY posted:My bosses method of troubleshooting - swing the hammer, if the hammer doesn't fix it, swing it faster and harder and that will eventually fix the problem. I use that too! It fixes it in the sense that eventually it causes a more critical problem, which is also someone else's. Sadly, sometimes creating a more critical problem is the only way to get things fixed sometimes, since that's when you can get the budget/time to spend on it. See: backups, RAID arrays, site security.
|
#
?
Jan 30, 2015 23:47
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 12, 2024 14:20 |
|
|
Collateral Damage posted:The ancient art of percussive maintenance. Also known as Emergency Repair Procedure Number 1.
|
|
#
?
Jan 31, 2015 01:55
|
|
|
Ursine Asylum posted:I use that too! It fixes it in the sense that eventually it causes a more critical problem, which is also someone else's. Or, to quote Dan Blumenthal, Broke gets fixed; crappy is forever. Sometimes things need a bit of helping to get them over that hump and into the realm of the fixable.
|
|
#
?
Jan 31, 2015 02:50
|
|
|
meanieface posted:Stop. Work is a thing you do for pay, and they're not paying. Yes, I'm aware that's the party line here. Except that in the real world, where a large number of my former coworkers remain professional contacts and personal friends, saying "gently caress off or give me money" over a simple question makes you look less professional and more insane.
|
|
#
?
Jan 31, 2015 05:14
|
|
|
I had someone leave and hit me up at my current job for help.
|
|
#
?
Jan 31, 2015 05:16
|
|
|
Sonic Dude posted:Yes, I'm aware that's the party line here. Except that in the real world, where a large number of my former coworkers remain professional contacts and personal friends, saying "gently caress off or give me money" over a simple question makes you look less professional and more insane. I don't think its a dick move at all. I classify it as the same as loaning your friends money. Its better to not go down and road and if these people are your friends they will understand.
|
|
#
?
Jan 31, 2015 05:17
|
|
|
Sonic Dude posted:Yes, I'm aware that's the party line here. Except that in the real world, where a large number of my former coworkers remain professional contacts and personal friends, saying "gently caress off or give me money" over a simple question makes you look less professional and more insane. Wrong. A professional is paid for their services. A friend would understand that(unless you did a terrible job of documentation before left, but I am assuming that isn't the case).
|
|
#
?
Jan 31, 2015 09:36
|
|
|
Mrit posted:Wrong. A professional is paid for their services. A friend would understand that(unless you did a terrible job of documentation before left, but I am assuming that isn't the case). Wrong. "Professional" also includes standards of behavior. See how productive that kind of statement can be? Being "unprofessional" doesn't mean "not being paid for you services". The expectation of professional courtesy (again, nothing to do with payment for your services) also extends to not saying "gib me stuff or gently caress off" as long as it's not a totally unreasonable request. Which simple questions from a former employer whom you still have an amicable relationship with are not, in general. It's Sonic Dude's place to decide what he thinks is reasonable, not yours. Sickening posted:I don't think its a dick move at all. I classify it as the same as loaning your friends money. Its better to not go down and road and if these people are your friends they will understand. You and Mrit both decided that "friends" should understand. You should also understand that the courtesy of friendship sometimes extends to doing things without compensation. There's a point where you can push back on this, especially if it's taking an inordinate amount of time or you feel like you're being taken advantage of, but "simple questions" are not that boundary. evol262 fucked around with this message at 10:49 on Jan 31, 2015 |
|
#
?
Jan 31, 2015 10:46
|
|
|
I'm with evol here. When my coworker calls me on my vacation and asks me a simple question or for some information that I may have forgotten to pass on or whatever it's fine. When my coworker wants to give me a company iphone so I can keep an eye on my work email during my vacation I politely tell him to eat a dick or pay me the equivalent of being on call. It's all about how reasonable the request is.
|
|
#
?
Jan 31, 2015 11:27
|
|
|
evol262 posted:You and Mrit both decided that "friends" should understand. You should also understand that the courtesy of friendship sometimes extends to doing things without compensation. There's a point where you can push back on this, especially if it's taking an inordinate amount of time or you feel like you're being taken advantage of, but "simple questions" are not that boundary. I'm in basic agreement with this. Ex-co-worker called me a couple times wanting help with the last project I had worked on, soon after I quit, and I helped him out. They essentially dumped all my work on him, when he was already overloaded, and he was having some trouble understanding WTF because he's a DBA and hasn't programmed in a few years. He's mostly a cool guy, and I didn't mind. It cost me a couple hours of my time, saved a ton of his, and I got something out of it (teaching is probably the best way to learn and solidify your own knowledge). Yes, technically I was providing value to a company that was not paying me, but that was a side effect. If my old boss had called me asking for help I would have hit him with the, "$300/hr, 10 hour minimum, minimum up front, and I never interact with you directly," but in this case it was just me helping out a colleague who has always treated me well. Just as important, dude I helped didn't abuse it. It was a couple calls to orient himself on decently complex code that he hadn't ever touched. There are limits to this kind of thing (which is where never wanting to work for family for free comes from, and rightly so), but he didn't go past them.
|
|
#
?
Jan 31, 2015 12:35
|
|
|
There's also the concept of non-monetary compensation. I taught 12 hours of structured classes for my company. I was underpaid for it, but my students were division heads, executives, and project managers from other projects and I get a great line to add to my resume for it. Getting paid in good will and connections is legitimate. So is getting paid in experience. You can't afford to get paid in either entirely, but I've got no problem giving up an hour or two every month to do something that pays me in non-monetary ways.
|
|
#
?
Jan 31, 2015 17:03
|
|
|
Just a friendly reminder to check your Lync certificate expirations... and make some calendar reminders for yourselves to get that poo poo renewed in advance. Edge services went down today. 
|
|
#
?
Jan 31, 2015 23:07
|
|
|
It's ok though. Places like Digicert emails someone at 90 60 and 30 day intervals of certificate expiration.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2015 00:08
|
|
|
incoherent posted:It's ok though. Places like Digicert emails someone at 90 60 and 30 day intervals of certificate expiration. And this is why you sign up to poo poo with mailing list addresses and not personal addresses. I ended up doing this two jobs ago retroactively, modifying the account info for every account with SCEA/SCEE/XBLA/iTunes Connect/blah, it was really great finding that some alert emails were still going into a dead letter box owned by my great-great-grand-predecessor for that position.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2015 01:06
|
|
|
Ursine Asylum posted:And this is why you sign up to poo poo with mailing list addresses and not personal addresses. I'm facing similar trouble in our environment, but of a different flavor -- we have a guy who is getting really touchy as we move more and more lines of communication from his mailbox to the communal helpdesk email. Every time we want to change a communication email address to something more global, it's "Soon, not now, I'm too busy." It's going both ways though -- if he drops the ball on something, it's because we haven't changed the communication email address yet for him .
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2015 01:35
|
|
|
Sonic Dude posted:Yes, I'm aware that's the party line here. Except that in the real world, where a large number of my former coworkers remain professional contacts and personal friends, saying "gently caress off or give me money" over a simple question makes you look less professional and more insane. Collateral Damage posted:I'm with evol here. I must have misunderstood the original post, I read something about former coworkers texting instead of reading documentation and it seemed.. Awful. Establishing healthy boundaries can be done without being a raging rear end in a top hat. I expect people treat me respectfully if they want me to employ my time/talents on their request. Edit:phone post -- double quoted.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2015 04:43
|
|
|
meanieface posted:I must have misunderstood the original post, I read something about former coworkers texting instead of reading documentation and it seemed.. Awful. A few of them did text instead of reading. That said, there was a way to handle it which wasn't screaming "me want money" like a loving idiot. I handled it by being reasonably flexible (as that employer had always been with me) but not letting it interfere with my new job. This wasn't acceptable to some, as apparently the SH/SC Approved™ method would have been to have a tantrum and burn every bridge that I had spent, in some cases, 10 years building. I entirely agree that a boundary is necessary. Interpreting that to mean that you won't give a professional acquaintance the time of day without a check in-hand is ludicrous.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2015 06:42
|
|
|
Nuance is hard to grasp sometimes. Just like there's a line between someone from your old job e-mailing you about X when X is something simple and quick to explain versus 'hey our stuff exploded, let me tie up your day here.'
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2015 07:26
|
|
|
Stanos posted:Nuance is hard to grasp sometimes. Just like there's a line between someone from your old job e-mailing you about X when X is something simple and quick to explain versus 'hey our stuff exploded, let me tie up your day here.' Since about last August (right after a special system a now-retired guy built exploded), I've started to log my setup of new systems screenshot-by-screenshot, including links to best practices I was following. If someone has questions in the future, they can read the f* extended manual.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2015 20:49
|
|
|
Speaking of documentation, anyone who thinks it means "a step-by-step guide for how to rebuild the infrastructure from scratch with no experience" needs to reacquaint themselves with reality. My view on documentation is it is something along the lines of "these are the VLANs in use, and the subnets on each" and not "this is what VLAN means, and this is how you configure them on our switches".
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2015 20:55
|
|
|
I hated the ideal when they suggested that we do that for our modern, clustered virtualized infrastructure. Sure it was fine when it was 2004 and this company had 4 servers. But in 2015 I'm documenting scope and functionality. That's it. Oh and steps to troubleshoot the internet, but really that's it.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2015 21:14
|
|
|
Thanks Ants posted:Speaking of documentation, anyone who thinks it means "a step-by-step guide for how to rebuild the infrastructure from scratch with no experience" needs to reacquaint themselves with reality. My view on documentation is it is something along the lines of "these are the VLANs in use, and the subnets on each" and not "this is what VLAN means, and this is how you configure them on our switches". The itty bitty part of me that still thinks of myself as a scientists wants my work to be reproducible, so really it's just screenshots of options, names, and whatever else ProgramInstallerX asked for upon setup. Justifications for the decisions made rest with best practices and "F* you, this was my project." Edit: It boils down to our team's organization. There are only four of us, including our supervisor, so it is thought that we each need to have a full understanding of how each of our systems works. Management fears, maybe with some credulity, that we become segregated and specialized in our knowledge, leaving a vulnerability when one of us eventually moves on. Case in point, I replaced a guy who was really their only anchor to the Linux world, and there were some fairly basic issues that were wrecking uptime. A lot of emphasis is being placed on cross-training. Instead of fumbling around in the dark when I build something, I read. Research. Look at best practices, at examples, run tests, etc. A teammate of mine does not, and my supervisor has his hands way too full to really be building things. This, combined with the expectation that either (a) everyone needs to know exactly how everything works or (b) documentation needs to facilitate holes in part (a), leads to me having to cover my rear end with screenshots every time I select something / add something / modify something in a system whose intricacies I alone understand at the time. If / when something is later changed without consideration / understanding of all consequences, I'm able to go back and show that (1) it was working before (2) someone changed this and it is different from how I built it (3) here's the best practice document that outlines why I did it. Potato Salad fucked around with this message at 00:30 on Feb 2, 2015 |
|
#
?
Feb 2, 2015 00:08
|
|
|
I think Sickening said it best a while ago, and I paraphrase, "I left them instructions on how to get to where they needed to go. I did not feel I needed to tell them how to drive a car." Documentation that tells me what the hell you were doing rocks. Documentation written for an unknowing novice is dangerous because it is no substitute for experience, it encourages them to rely on the documentation rather than their brain, and it can be difficult for an expert to write for a novice audience.
|
|
#
?
Feb 2, 2015 05:19
|
|
|
SubjectVerbObject posted:I think Sickening said it best a while ago, and I paraphrase, "I left them instructions on how to get to where they needed to go. I did not feel I needed to tell them how to drive a car." When the instructions are as simple as "if there is any communication from clients X, Y and Z, forward them to person X" and First Line still manage to gently caress it up there's no hope. 
|
|
#
?
Feb 2, 2015 12:17
|
|
|
Old workplace: remote site (factory) calling me at production system incident management to report that the factory is on fire. I kindly informed the idiot that he should call the emergency services as I am not able to dispatch firetrucks, only IT guys. And they suck at putting out fires. Also fixing 70% of most small issues by standing next to the user while he reboots the machine to discover that the issue magically disappeared. Some users believe I have magical IT powers now. 
|
|
#
?
Feb 2, 2015 15:48
|
|
|
moosepoop posted:Also fixing 70% of most small issues by standing next to the user while he reboots the machine to discover that the issue magically disappeared. Some users believe I have magical IT powers now. loving hell this. This right here. "It didn't do that last time I restarted." Yeah, that time that never happened you stupid loving lying shitstain.
|
|
#
?
Feb 2, 2015 16:34
|
|
|
moosepoop posted:Old workplace: remote site (factory) calling me at production system incident management to report that the factory is on fire. Did they start off the call by saying that there was a fire: or were they complaining about not being able to get email and you eventually troubleshooted the route cause as being the server melting?
|
|
#
?
Feb 2, 2015 18:07
|
|
|
moosepoop posted:Old workplace: remote site (factory) calling me at production system incident management to report that the factory is on fire. This happened to me when I was Tier 1 tech support for Dish Network back in 01/02 or so. Little old lady called in. Wanted a tech to come out to look at her system. I had to go through the script, said we couldn't send a tech without trying a few things first, etc etc. She was calm, but took ages to do anything. Finally I asked her to unplug it. She started screaming. I CANT I CANT THIS THING IS ON FIRE AND NOW MY CURTAINS ARE ON FIRE AND I NEED YOU TO SEND SOMEONE TO LOOK AT THIS BEFORE MY HOUSE BURNS DOWN OH MY GOD MY HOUSE IS ON FIRE!
|
|
#
?
Feb 2, 2015 18:12
|
|
|
This isn't internal ticket related, but I switched off of my ISP-provided modem (which I'm glad I chose to rent instead of purchase outright) Things not pissing me off: Called my ISP to setup my new Modem and they got it done quickly (phone agent already guessed I was calling in for that). Things pissing me off in relation: man, the ISP's provided modems are crap, primarily to being locked down (which obviously so non-technical people don't break their setup). I also noticed an immediate speed up after switching off of my rented modem. Things pissing me off (work-related): No, you don't get to whine up the chain about a production-level issue and that it needs to get fixed ASAP when you stated the hardware is pre-production and never-before configured this way.
|
|
#
?
Feb 2, 2015 18:33
|
|
|
No, ex-customer who canceled your subscription a month ago, you are not at the top of my support queue today and have to wait more than 20 minutes to get a copy of your invoice so stop bugging me.
|
|
#
?
Feb 2, 2015 18:55
|
|
|
Gounads posted:No, ex-customer who canceled your subscription a month ago, you are not at the top of my support queue today and have to wait more than 20 minutes to get a copy of your invoice so stop bugging me. Similarly, please stop repeatedly submitting the ticket, user with a problem that isn't in any way the fault of our software. We will discuss your hypervisor issues when I have finished with other people. I don't care that you marked the first six as High-priority and the last five as Urgent.
|
|
#
?
Feb 2, 2015 19:07
|
|
|
ConfusedUs posted:This happened to me when I was Tier 1 tech support for Dish Network back in 01/02 or so. If only we had a standard, default number to call in case of fire or other emergency.
|
|
#
?
Feb 2, 2015 20:09
|
|
|
Ynglaur posted:If only we had a standard, default number to call in case of fire or other emergency. I know, right? She was old and kind of confused and wouldn't get off the line, so my supervisor at the time actually looked up the emergency number for her location and called them himself.
|
|
#
?
Feb 2, 2015 20:22
|
|
|
ConfusedUs posted:I know, right? 0118 999 881 999 119 725 ........ 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab8GtuPdrUQ
|
|
#
?
Feb 2, 2015 20:59
|
|
|
Lord Dudeguy posted:Just a friendly reminder to check your Lync certificate expirations... and make some calendar reminders for yourselves to get that poo poo renewed in advance. This is happening at my company too. Here come less of panicked users and tickets. Hooray!
|
|
#
?
Feb 2, 2015 21:45
|
|
|
moosepoop posted:Also fixing 70% of most small issues by standing next to the user while he reboots the machine to discover that the issue magically disappeared. Some users believe I have magical IT powers now. Preface; Our phones are controlled through an applet but using any of the hard phone functions breaks a lot of stuff, I don't know why the gently caress our supplier uses hard phones when we can't use ANY of the features.  "Phones are down, I can't make any calls"  *Test calls main phone line, success* *Try to call dumbass, Error: Fault on line* "The phone system is working fine, do you have Do Not Disturb toggled on the phone LCD screen?" "No mate I haven't touched it" *Walk over to dumbass* *See the words Do Not Disturb on screen, press button to disable* "Haw haw gawrsh I don't know how I didn't notice that" "Dear office, don't touch any of the loving phone buttons and only use the applet to do things"And then today rolls around where I'm finally the victim of not following my own advice; User has a new Blackberry Classic which won't tether properly. I spent around an hour loving with it as it would pair with a laptop fine but wouldn't deliver an Internet connection, supplier response? Remove battery and try again. One power cycle later and it connects totally fine...
|
|
#
?
Feb 2, 2015 22:55
|
|
|
Super Slash posted:Remove battery and try again. Blackberry.txt Don't know a thing about them, but it's fixed every issue I've ran into.
|
|
#
?
Feb 2, 2015 23:00
|
|
|
poo poo that pisses me off: MOAC online labs. There is no way in hell it takes 25 minutes to install loving ACT and SQL Server 2012, and then 10 more to reboot Server 2012. This web-RDP-to-Hyper-V thing loving sucks.
|
|
#
?
Feb 2, 2015 23:04
|
|
|
Orcs and Ostriches posted:Blackberry.txt I had a woman get really mad at me because the Passport that she bought for herself didn't have a removable battery.
|
|
#
?
Feb 2, 2015 23:12
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 12, 2024 14:20 |
|
|
Foxtrot_13 posted:Some one needs to grow a spine and stand up to the sales people or it will turn into Wolf of Wall Street/Enron. The CIO had a meeting with the other directors including sales and marketing, it didn't go as well as I would've hoped. He mentioned he would bring up new hire turnaround times and a few other things. Turns out he will be working remotely for the next month and then he is leaving. He assured us that all of our jobs are safe but there will be some heads rolling in other departments. Looks like the ERP director and and regulatory director will both be going as well as a few other upper IT folks. You may remember my multiple gripes from this thread and others about people in the company wanting the iPad to be the be all end all of sales equipment as well as my months long fight to get windows updates approved. Thing's should get interesting in the next few months. Waiting to hear from my boss to see if he got fired or resigned because he saw the writing on the wall. All that said looks like he at least got us one new hire possibly a few months down the road so hopefully... BaseballPCHiker fucked around with this message at 23:23 on Feb 2, 2015 |
|
#
?
Feb 2, 2015 23:17
|
|
