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Public school IT sucks, never again. The apathy, politics, and bullshit sucked the life out of me. MC Fruit Stripe posted:The problem was that three times a week he'd either call in to say he was working from home because of traffic, or be insanely late because of traffic, or take off early because of traffic. None of those things feel like my problem. Depends on your WFH policy. My boss doesn't give a poo poo if I WFH or not as long as the work gets done -- I just spent the last 2 months working from home because of office renovations. My boss lives over an hour away and normally starts work around 8AM at home, leaves for the office after 9:30 to beat traffic, and normally ducks out around 3:30 to beat the traffic. He then does a few hours of work at home to cover the travel time. However, if this guy was using his commute as a crutch for getting in late and leaving early it sounds like he just sucked at time management. I did a 60-90 minute commute at my old company and I would get in early so I could pack up and go home early to beat traffic. Spazz fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Mar 11, 2015 |
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Mar 11, 2015 21:06
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IT firm that handles LARGE_PHARMACY_CHAIN's eProcurement system emailed me an invite to their training session. Also in the To: field were like the 100 other people also invited to the meeting. Thanks a lot.
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Mar 11, 2015 21:07
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Spazz posted:Public school IT sucks, never again.
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Mar 11, 2015 21:07
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Bob Morales posted:No money, everything you do has to make every single teacher happy, board rides your rear end... I had it even worse: I was a contractor doing desktop support so I was as low on the totem pole as you could go. Also gently caress teachers who throw "I have tenure!" in your face. Guess what? $13.50 hour didn't pay me enough to care!
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Mar 11, 2015 21:10
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flosofl posted:Jesus, I had to deal with that but with the infrastructure at a previous job. We spent 3 loving DAYS trying to get the router/firewall guy to unblock HTTP across our WAN link. I'm at 7 months open with a ticket trying to get a fix on a switch from network engineers in India.
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Mar 11, 2015 21:29
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Tab8715 posted:The reason why things like 40-work weeks, OHSA, paid vacation, paid holidays, emergency leave, etc exist is because of unions. Not it's not and no it wouldn't be. This is just a thing unions supporters say because they were told that. I've been in pro union rallys where union reps proudly told stories of hiding the drunk forklift driver in a broom closet to save his job followed by angry racist comments about foreign outsourcing of that factory afterwards. And then the audience stood and applauded. I don't want the equivalent of that, and really given my industry it's already rampant.
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Mar 11, 2015 21:45
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I thought we were above one-anecdote condemnation of an entire concept, but I guess not. Then again, your quip about "oh I could never fire incompetents" betrays your position more than anything else. Sorry that actually following a proper, documented, justified termination process is such a hardship. 
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Mar 11, 2015 21:55
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MJBuddy posted:Not it's not and no it wouldn't be. This is just a thing unions supporters say because they were told that. I'll match your anti-union anecdote with a pro one. My best friend was dubious of a union coming in, he was worried about bad employees keeping their jobs and not making enough money. Turns out it massively increased his salary and helped protect workers from the rampant company politics.(And yes, this was an IT-related job) A union can be just as evil as a company. The best situation is a healthy dialogue between a company and a union. But frequently in this industry, its 'lol, work 60 hours a week. oh, fired for overseas workers!' and a union can help protect against that.
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Mar 11, 2015 21:57
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Bob Morales posted:Go in at 9 you mean. Buddy of mine retired a few years ago, he was a SUPPLY CLERK (ordered office supplies and delivered paper) and he made $24/hr. Crazy. I applied for a job a couple weeks ago. Local government, super cheap cost of living maybe 15 minutes outside of a town with super high cost of living and all the associated restaurants and a few decent stores. 1 year of experience, basic desktop service stuff. Started at 42,000, up to 50,000. Sent in an application, but I misunderstood the process and accidentally submitted it before attaching a cover letter. 
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Mar 11, 2015 22:25
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Mrit posted:I'll match your anti-union anecdote with a pro one. I'm not saying a union won't increase your salary. I'm saying there's zero % chance I'd have my job if a union existed because they'd do what literally every union does and severely restrict entry into their market. I also work with people who are basically immune to being fired and basically just bail them out all day, so I'd rather not be responsible for bailing out more people. Kyrosiris posted:I thought we were above one-anecdote condemnation of an entire concept, but I guess not. Betrays what position? I have as much as a right to quit as my employer has to fire me and neither has happened because I have a healthy dialogue with my boss. If I didn't, I'd have left by now. Or they'd have fired me. So basically, Sickening posted:Unions could improve your situation but it isn't going to grow you a backbone.
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Mar 12, 2015 00:34
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MJBuddy posted:I'm not saying a union won't increase your salary. I'm saying there's zero % chance I'd have my job if a union existed because they'd do what literally every union does and severely restrict entry into their market. I also work with people who are basically immune to being fired and basically just bail them out all day, so I'd rather not be responsible for bailing out more people. Or are you just trolling? Because if you unironically think that having the right to quit (and not be able to pay rent) is anywhere near equal to the right to fire somebody (and make them unable to pay rent), I don't have any adjectives I'm willing to use for you.
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Mar 12, 2015 03:56
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22 Eargesplitten posted:You've obviously never worked construction. I guess you've got me there. I'm sorry. I'm having a bad day. So on topic: I got pressured into providing a delivery date on an application and basically the moment I had the date set my computer decided to no longer connect to any form or network, meaning in the 9 hours I spent at work today I was able to get one hour of work done and 8 hours of fussing with the help desk who wanted to come by tomorrow while I was completely shut down. Normally I'd have never egged on this conversation, so I guess I'm unintentionally trolling because I've had a bad week.
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Mar 12, 2015 04:03
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Eh, no problem. We all have lovely days/weeks/jobs (I'm in the last category). Today I went out to a customer site only to find that the customer is temporarily working at a site 45 minutes away, but dispatch had put her normal site's address in the ticket. It was an issue I've never seen before, with the user being denied access to some cloud storage that masquerades as a drive on the PC. I call our account-specific helpdesk twice, and their advice is to backup and re-image the computer. I say I'm pretty sure that isn't going to help, considering that it's not an actual drive and that nobody else at the site is having the same problem, even when using the same computer. They say "Well, that's all we've got, contact our supervisor for more help," and they don't give me a phone number, just an email. On a highest-priority call. I email the guy, but I didn't have a response by end of day, and after a while I just went home because by the time I could get to the city the user was working in and find the site that I'd never been to before, she would have been done for the day. I emailed my boss about it, told her exactly what was going on, if I catch any poo poo about not getting the call completed, I am throwing our helpdesk under the bus so hard. They speak English fairly well, but when I explained the situation, they completely misunderstood what I wanted. They thought I was asking if I needed to go to the site she was actually at, when I was asking what I needed to do to fix this problem I had never seen before. Because I'm not driving an extra 45 minutes each way when you can't even point me in the direction of documentation of how to fix the issue. We've got some of our helpdesks in-country and some outsourced, and the difference is just night and day. I think part of it is most of our on-shore helpdesk is people who got promoted out of my position, so they actually have some experience.
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Mar 12, 2015 05:15
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22 Eargesplitten posted:Eh, no problem. We all have lovely days/weeks/jobs (I'm in the last category). I can't help your dumb helpdesk, but the issue you're seeing sounds like a profile issue. If I'm reading this right, you've got the following: 1. User 1 on Computer A can't connect to App a. 2. User 1 on Computer A can connect to App b. 3. User 2 on Computer A can connect to App a and b. If that's true, then check to see if User 1 can access App a on Computer B, just to confirm that it's an issue with the local computer and not her account within App a. If it IS localized to Computer A, then you have two options: 1. Uninstall and reinstall the cloud-drive app. 2. Recreate her Windows profile. Step back, and eliminate whatever variables you can.
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Mar 12, 2015 06:12
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Yeah. User A can access the app via her normal computer, (computer B). She can't access it from the computer at her temporary location, computer A. User B can access his app from computer A. I was thinking it sounded like a profile permissions issue, possibly related to her not being set up properly to use that particular PC. I'll float the idea to the helpdesk supervisor, if I can get hold of him. If it is that, it's probably considered too complex to be done by me. The funny thing is, they apparently tried unsuccessfully to resolve the issue remotely before they dispatched me. Not sure what the hell I'm supposed to do about an issue like this, I think that's just their fallback plan for everything. What we were trying didn't work? Send out a tech, no matter how obviously non-hardware related it is, and no matter how much we hamstring them on software fixes.
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Mar 12, 2015 06:28
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The anti-union talk in here is literally some of the dumbest poo poo I've ever read. Plenty of bad employees keep their jobs in non-union shops, I don't see how that's even a concern in the first place? I don't understand how people can be so oblivious or even supportive of the coercive power-imbalance between employer and employee. It's bullshit like this that makes wages a race to the bottom.
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Mar 12, 2015 15:58
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My favorite counterpoint to all the unions r bad chat is that all of the arguments against vaccinations are literally the same ones against unions.
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Mar 12, 2015 17:59
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anthonypants posted:My favorite counterpoint to all the unions r bad chat is that all of the arguments against vaccinations are literally the same ones against unions. I like to think "Unions give you Autism" is a talking point. 
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Mar 12, 2015 18:01
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Spazz posted:I had it even worse: I was a contractor doing desktop support so I was as low on the totem pole as you could go. So far it hasn't been bad for me. I do a public school and a elementary school, and other than the self-important people, it's been pretty good. However, the third grade teachers hate calling us or letting us know about their issues, they just like to bitch about having them.
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Mar 12, 2015 18:54
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Well, what do you expect from a 3rd grader?
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Mar 12, 2015 20:38
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Ugh felt so sick this morning I was going to call in sick. Then I check my phone and see that the customer service person had already called in sick. We're launching an automated ordering system today for our two biggest suppliers, so I had to come in and cover for the support person while also babysitting the launch. The launch goes perfect, and every single customer I've talked to today has been happy and enthusiastic and just great to deal with. Not so bad after all. Then I found out Terry Pratchett died*. gently caress today. I'm going home. *sorry if you're finding this out now. That gut punch of anger and sadness? I feel it too.
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Mar 12, 2015 21:32
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Scaramouche posted:Ugh felt so sick this morning I was going to call in sick. Then I check my phone and see that the customer service person had already called in sick. We're launching an automated ordering system today for our two biggest suppliers, so I had to come in and cover for the support person while also babysitting the launch. The launch goes perfect, and every single customer I've talked to today has been happy and enthusiastic and just great to deal with. Not so bad after all. Then I found out Terry Pratchett died*. FFS why don't you throw out some GoT spoilers while you're at it. 
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Mar 12, 2015 22:18
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Scaramouche posted:Then I found out Terry Pratchett died*.  Oh, no. That is just... lovely news. EDIT: Those last tweets on his account. 
Proteus Jones fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Mar 12, 2015 |
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Mar 12, 2015 22:20
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Standing in front of an enclosure, with 32 blades leering at me, looking at the callsheet and noting that the loving server details don't match any of the blades in the enclosure. I ring the office and they say "yeah, they're in the disaster recovery data center", I get in my car, start driving over there and get another call "no, wait, they are where you were 15 minutes ago, OUR BAD". Return to the office with a face like thunder and am told "well it was no-one in here's fault".... I just want a holiday or competent co-workers
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Mar 12, 2015 22:37
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Cleaning off my work laptop, I came across a report issued to a client by another penetration testing company. Boy is it a stinker. The entire thing looks like a magazine spread designed by a first year student in the Devry institute of graphic design / VCR repair. Highlights include: -First 2 pages are a spread with a stock image of a data center with a small blurb by the company's founder thats basically a lovely "letter from the editor" thanking the client for continuing to provide the company with work and what an honor it is to etc  .-The whole report is littered with disjointed excerpts from the report itself that have little to no context. At least one of these interrupts the paragraph that the excerpt is from. -The general layout of the text is awful and confusing. The sections do not segue into one another and are often interrupted for some pointless bullshit (in big block letters "RISK = TREAT * VULNERABILITY"). Section headings are confusing and don't paint a timeline of the events at all. -The whole report is littered with literally meaningless charts and graphs. A few are actually stock images of graphs in case you forget what one looks like. One graph, labeled "vulnerabilities" adds up to 173 percent. -Pointless stock images everywhere. Pictures of people on tightropes, staring at whiteboards, pictures of Anonymous, and that stupid one of a guy dressed up as a ninja in front of a keyboard. My personal favorite are the pictures of the client's retail locations. All taking up space and bloating the size of the report. -Statistics and quotes that reek of feeble attempts to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt. None of these come with a reference. -"Screenshots" (actually copied text from Metasploit output) that are totally uncensored, containing domain admin passwords and password hashes as well as other sensitive info. Several of these screenshots come totally without context and at least one is labeled with the wrong description. -Most of the pages have a solid colored background in addition to the worthless pictures so the report is totally unprintable unless you want to spend 4,000 dollars in ink in one sitting. Clients love to print reports, I have no idea why you'd design a report like this. -The content of the report is appallingly bad. I still have no idea what the hell went on during this assessment. I've read it through 5 times and I still don't understand. They do an absolutely piss poor job of explaining the timeline of events. They dive right into "we found a critical vulnerability and exploited it" without ever explaining their process of enumeration or discovery. Reading the report makes you feel totally lost because there's no cohesive narrative. Also, recommendations for remediating vulnerabilities are sparse and non-specific. -The summary of vulnerabilities at the end of the report leads me to believe they just blasted Nessus at target hosts, plopped the output in the report, and called it a night. 400+ high rated vulnerabilities? Give me a break. -Personal penetration testing pet peeve: The report mentions that "they were unable to compromise additional hosts because antivirus prevented deploying backdoors". Horse poo poo. Any pen tester worth their salt can sail right by just about any antivirus solution with minimal effort. Even our junior testers go entire assessments without knowing what antivirus solution the client uses because they just bypass the hell out of it from the start. I guarantee these guys just tried to directly deploy Metasploit shells, tripped antivirus, shrugged, then fell over and farted. Sometimes it's comforting to to see how incompetent the competition is, but at the same time I can't help but feel like it cheapens the profession. This client got straight up ripped off and they had no idea. From what I understand, the assessment was ordered by internal audit and they had no idea how lousy the report was until they had us come in a few years later and saw ours. Live and learn, I guess.
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Mar 12, 2015 23:47
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Ynglaur posted:FFS why don't you throw out some GoT spoilers while you're at it. Spoilers: That character you like dies, pee pee, poo poo, it is a bad series.
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Mar 13, 2015 00:02
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bossy lady posted:Cleaning off my work laptop, I came across a report issued to a client by another penetration testing company. Boy is it a stinker. The entire thing looks like a magazine spread designed by a first year student in the Devry institute of graphic design / VCR repair. Highlights include: 90% of everything is crap, and that goes for the security industry as much as anywhere else.
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Mar 13, 2015 01:17
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Buyout of the client didn't go through, and as if that isn't bad enough, I'm responsible for my offsite location indefinitely  There's no discharge in the war.
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Mar 13, 2015 07:09
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Chalets the Baka posted:The anti-union talk in here is literally some of the dumbest poo poo I've ever read. Plenty of bad employees keep their jobs in non-union shops, I don't see how that's even a concern in the first place? I don't understand how people can be so oblivious or even supportive of the coercive power-imbalance between employer and employee. It's bullshit like this that makes wages a race to the bottom. Where I live without unions people would literally have nothing to say in regards to wages, pay for overtime and anything else. We have a collective deal that gives people a shitload of stuff they would not otherwise have. Also we keep tabs on the employer so they follow deals and laws to the letter. And if the employee wants it we will negotiate salary for them. We are so good at this there is now a pay gap between Union affiliated people and non affiliated people. Also the union pays for work related education and a bunch of other stuff and if you get laid off there is additional unemployment benefits through the union. There is a lot of stuff that would not work at all if the unions did not exist basically. At least here the unions are very valuable. Especially since basically all employers are incompetent and/or assholes. Content: My employer trying to not pay me for ~20h of work because of "reasons". Also my boss making every stupid and lazy mistake possible to make my life miserable. Last mistake got me locked out from every system I needed for work for a week.
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Mar 13, 2015 10:49
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I'm in Swedish IT as well and joined the union last week. Don't know why I put it off so long but it feels good to finally have it done. My employer doesn't have a collective agreement though (loving consulting firms).
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Mar 13, 2015 11:52
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skooma512 posted:Buyout of the client didn't go through, and as if that isn't bad enough, I'm responsible for my offsite location indefinitely Not if you YOTJ! Like I need to do. loving hell do I need to YOTJ. Our sales team is absolutely abysmal. To give some background, the small MSP I work for was bought out by the company next door 6 months ago, when we were circling the drain due to an insane director losing all our contracts. The management team was replaced and a new sales manager was brought in to drum up new business, and manage accounts. She is awful. 0 new clients in 6 months. Countless project fuckups, and has no IT experience at all. Any time a project/purchase goes to her, she will inevitably send me an email asking me what the product is, how much it is, who she should send the quote to. I did actually end up doing 100% of her job for a couple of projects, and just barely managed to get the commission for it following the fuss she caused. The crux of the issue is that all future payrises are tied to the performance of the sales team. I've been prepared to give them a few months to allow them to get up to speed, but as it stands I know I'm worth far more $$$ to them than I'm getting paid. Time to move on.
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Mar 13, 2015 11:54
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Our support team are a loving waste of space. I am busy pretty much 100% of the time, and I'm getting assigned tickets where one PC doesn't have network connectivity, where no documented troubleshooting has been performed. I've tried to give them the benefit of the doubt because they are understaffed but if you have limited time then stop wasting it by passing tickets around and spend it wisely. If you don't have the skills for really basic troubleshooting then I'm really sorry, but that's not my problem. I've reassigned everything to the guy who is supposed to be in charge of the support side of the business because I've had enough now. The entire business has an attitude that it's totally cool to pretty much ignore things until they blow up, and then run around trying to put fires out, it's insane.
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Mar 13, 2015 12:13
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I had forgotten how much of a piece of poo poo ASDM is. Also how much I hate ASAs.
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Mar 13, 2015 16:18
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My supervisor is pissing me off. He doesn't do anything. He's supposed to ship stuff, but every day has someone else on the help desk do it for him. He plays on Google Earth and The Dude all day, to the exclusion of pretty much everything else. He answers the phone for corporate calls...unless it's someone he doesn't want to talk to, then he has someone else do it. Delegation is one thing, but the dude basically does no work. He takes at least a half hour longer lunch than he's suppose to, after coming in late and also leaving early basically every day. It's irritating.moosepoop posted:Where I live without unions people would literally have nothing to say in regards to wages, pay for overtime and anything else. We have a collective deal that gives people a shitload of stuff they would not otherwise have. This is basically what unions do in America, but somehow it is seen as a bad thing here. Better wages, preventing employers from taking advantage of employees, etc. are seen as "greed and corruption". In the auto industry (historically union-heavy but now not so much), companies try so hard to keep unions out that they raise wages/provide better benefits. People don't/can't/won't see that unions have even helped them in that case. That's not to say those don't exist in unions, but the number of Americans who see unions as a negative is astounding.
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Mar 13, 2015 17:19
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The problem is you have outlying cases like the London public transport system being brought down because the unions think people should be able to drive trains drunk and will strike for their right to do so. Report those well enough and public opinion shifts.
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Mar 13, 2015 17:27
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myron cope posted:My supervisor is pissing me off. He doesn't do anything. He's supposed to ship stuff, but every day has someone else on the help desk do it for him. He plays on Google Earth and The Dude all day, to the exclusion of pretty much everything else. He answers the phone for corporate calls...unless it's someone he doesn't want to talk to, then he has someone else do it. Delegation is one thing, but the dude basically does no work. He takes at least a half hour longer lunch than he's suppose to, after coming in late and also leaving early basically every day. It's irritating. When I worked for Walmart there was specific time cut out for an anti-union video and talk from one an Asst Mgr. about why Unions are bad. The video was generic blanket and the discussion from the Mgr was anecdotal from a particular. Of course I wanted a job so I didn't say anything but god drat. If the money they spend to bust unions was rather thrown at taking care of the problems that people would want unions for, they wouldn't have to worry about unions. Another question: being vendor support I have a question because I just don't get this type of troubleshooting "I have system that crashes during boot. When I swap in another hard drive that's been imaged it works fine. I therefore need the hard drive replaced." And that's the full extent that's been tested. This really feels lazy to me. This quite easily can just be a broken OS and you're wasting your own time waiting at least a day for a drive rather than flatting the system that'll take an hour at most. Is there pressure from above for some that's leading people to this, or what? I mean even with concerns of a failing drive: our hardware has built-in diagnostics that even test using the drive manufacturer's built-in self-test and has a thorough test mode as well. I am really genuinely wanting to know what the thought process is here.
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Mar 13, 2015 17:43
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Some people are bad at troubleshooting and aren't able to isolate the cause of a problem (hell I've screwed it up a few times) and then probably once there was a machine that wouldn't boot because the hard drive was bad so now every time a machine doesn't boot it's because the hard drive is bad.
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Mar 13, 2015 17:52
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Imaging is faster and easier than 90% of any troubleshooting I have to do with computers out there, especially since I have a decent WDS set up and a good library of images. Anything that isn't completely obvious and quick, from malware to performance issues or any strange behaviour, and I toss in a newly imaged drive. Once they're up and running, I'll run a crystal disk test on their old drive, and if it checks out, toss it in with the spares to repeat the process. Sounds a little different from your scenario though, but I can see how people can be conditioned into just drive swapping.
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Mar 13, 2015 17:54
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Penny-pinching company owner posted:J and D have this HP at their home, J said she can use VPN on this system. Cost $695 Because the $550 Dell Optiplexes we buy are 'too expensive'
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Mar 13, 2015 18:18
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Orcs and Ostriches posted:Imaging is faster and easier than 90% of any troubleshooting I have to do with computers out there, especially since I have a decent WDS set up and a good library of images. Right, it's different. Because what you did is at least testing the drives. COonditioned response makes as much sense as where I've seen people with bosses telling them to not troubleshoot because "the vendor will just replace it for you anyways". Which is not always the case. I have seen people beaufifully complain loud and hard to not troubleshoot (swapping out 2 DIMMs with working ones worked, yeah, but which one was it?) or that they can't troubleshoot but it's a production critical issue and needs resolved now... when the server again isn't down and functioning fine except they're seeing an error not affecting production. Some people just seem to work hard to hardly work. EDIT: OH, and the ones where they setup a never-been-tested issue, in a setup we don't fully support but we try, and when we ask questions they whine to escalate because "it's a production issue". Well, it may be because your deadline says it should be in production, but it's not down causing production-level problems. Lightning Jim fucked around with this message at 18:33 on Mar 13, 2015 |
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Mar 13, 2015 18:30
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