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Vulture Culture posted:There's data in it, but there's nothing science about this job. Fair enough, I know next to nothing about that side of this industry and should probably not comment on it. 
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Sep 2, 2015 18:20
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22 Eargesplitten posted:What's the most reliable way to set up a remote user's home printer on his work PC? He said he can't use USB. I have never seen a wireless printer on a home network that didn't need to be reinstalled at least yearly, if not more often. "He can't use USB" means "can't be bothered to look for the USB cable". Have someone buy him a $5 USB cable and order him to use that.
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Sep 2, 2015 18:21
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Inspector_666 posted:His router is likely acting as the DNS server, hostname should be fine. Okay. Turns out I won't be able to try that for a while, though. I'm not sure how he expected us to configure his home printer while he is on a business trip. E: I think he just doesn't want to be limited to sitting close to the printer. We have a stockpile of 15' cables, though. If he doesn't have a proper hostname, I'm telling him he has to use the USB cable. I'm not setting his POS photosmart again in a few months when WSD stops working. 22 Eargesplitten fucked around with this message at 18:24 on Sep 2, 2015 |
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Sep 2, 2015 18:22
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captkirk posted:You're lower than evol in my eyes now. Haha, drat. Six months after implementing, we've automated a ton of business processes: account creation/changes/deletions, asset management, support contract management, etc. It's probably saved me from hiring a tech or two. Service Now Express is a loving disaster, though. They took out all the good stuff and left the painful part.
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Sep 2, 2015 18:29
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Alder posted:I've been looking at my college's job board for listings and not sure if I'm just extremely or very under qualified for IT: This has been beaten to death in the last few posts, but that's a pretty average Data Analyst role and they are probably shooting for the stars with the leadership and specific taxonomies thing (I've never seen those acronyms either). My guess since they posted it at your school is that they would look at someone that just graduated. I've got a number of clients that hire jr data gurus. I forget offhand some of the programs that are data intensive, but one offhand is Bioinformatics. Really nerdy but really cool stuff. It may not be traditional IT the way this thread looks at it (support/infrastructure, etc) but at least in my view, data anything (BI, big data, data warehousing, etc) is as much "Information Technology" as application development is. Harnessing, manipulating, and leveraging data are things that aren't going away. Definitely a legit career path if you are into that sort of thing.
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Sep 2, 2015 18:39
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22 Eargesplitten posted:Okay. Turns out I won't be able to try that for a while, though. I'm not sure how he expected us to configure his home printer while he is on a business trip. Maybe just buy him a reliable printer. The cost will be less than the time you are/will put into supporting his pile of poo poo home inkjet. Or even better - if he doesn't have a specific business need to print at home, tell him gently caress off.
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Sep 2, 2015 19:10
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Unfortunately, he works from home, and this is the kind of company where I regularly get scans of print-outs with handwriting on them. And despite having dual monitors, AP has its own printer that they use to print hundreds of sheets per day, and they freak out and start calling every IT number they know whenever it stops working. We do have a policy that we only give best-effort to nonstandard printers, and they have to be USB connected, but I'm not sure if that is true for home users, too.
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Sep 2, 2015 19:28
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22 Eargesplitten posted:We do have a policy that we only give best-effort to nonstandard printers, and they have to be USB connected, but I'm not sure if that is true for home users, too. It should go loving double for home users.
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Sep 2, 2015 19:32
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Inspector_666 posted:It should go loving double for home users. That said, best-effort is a reasonable policy
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Sep 2, 2015 20:53
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I think a reasonable policy would be to offer to pay for a printer of reasonable quality from a short list of models if it's needed for work.
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Sep 2, 2015 20:58
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I'd think that a reasonable policy would be that if you're working from home you should have some basic level of technical knowledge to be able to take care of yourself. If not, come to the office, where IT can hold your hand every step of the way.
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Sep 2, 2015 21:03
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FISHMANPET posted:I'd think that a reasonable policy would be that if you're working from home you should have some basic level of technical knowledge to be able to take care of yourself. If not, come to the office, where IT can hold your hand every step of the way.
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Sep 2, 2015 21:08
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I think he was saying if your job requires printing stuff and you don't know how to set up a printer yourself, you come to the office and use our printers. Our printers are literally $100, though. I know we have shipped them out to some remote workers, but I think they might have been higher ranking.
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Sep 2, 2015 21:14
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Yeah, if you can't take care of yourself at home then just don't work at home. Serious question: are there jobs that are in such high demand that you need to give people perks like work from home (because of just wanting to be at home or not wanting to relocate) but are not technically skilled? I'm just trying to think why this person needs to be working at home. If they can't come into the office, then replace them with someone who can. If for whatever reason that's not feasible, then you've got to look at something bigger than just "hey IT guy make this work" IT provide VPN tunnel devices so that IT can have access to the internal network (segregated from their personal home network of course). Change the workflow so it doesn't require so much printing and scanning. I mean it's probably just some arrogant executive saying "ugh make this work" but it doesn't seem like there's a real good business case for any of it.
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Sep 2, 2015 21:19
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FISHMANPET posted:I'd think that a reasonable policy would be that if you're working from home you should have some basic level of technical knowledge to be able to take care of yourself. If not, come to the office, where IT can hold your hand every step of the way. Otoh, do you REALLY want the guy who thinks he knows how to work on computers taking a power drill to one of the laptops you are ultimately responsible for?
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Sep 2, 2015 21:20
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That sounds like something to be covered in your WFH agreement. I kinda have this same discussion whenever we start talking about BYOD at my office. The big question I have is "why?" Generally these are pretty much commodity workers. And I know they don't have the technical knowledge to really take care of a device properly. I'm much happier with a $700 small form factor tower I can bolt to their desks that I have full control over. And it not only makes me happier, but it makes them happier, because I've made sure to take care of all the stupid bullshit of maintaining a computer.
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Sep 2, 2015 21:24
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FISHMANPET posted:That sounds like something to be covered in your WFH agreement. I am currently a remote worker(sysadmin), and I have a simple approach to this. Before I make changes to company property, I shoot an email to desktop support(who are still responsible for supporting my hardware) to ask them how they want me to handle it. I'm competent and knowledgable, but its not my machine to make changes to freely.
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Sep 2, 2015 21:28
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FISHMANPET posted:Yeah, if you can't take care of yourself at home then just don't work at home. Our WFH users are usually engaged with customers of ours in locations we don't have offices in. We have a huge customer in Dallas, but no office there. Our VP of Sales for their account and his support staff all work from home in the Dallas area. Same thing in a few other cities with very large customers of ours. I haven't supported them in a while, but we send the WFH people a laptop, dock, monitor and a Office Jet 6500 printer. We pay for their cell, mobile hotspot, home internet and they can expense reasonable office supplies. Office space is really expensive, WFH works well for us in our scenarios.
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Sep 2, 2015 21:31
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FISHMANPET posted:I'd think that a reasonable policy would be that if you're working from home you should have some basic level of technical knowledge to be able to take care of yourself. If not, come to the office, where IT can hold your hand every step of the way. Can't really fault this argument to be honest. If you're the sort of person who throws their hands in the air and just says "welp, I don't understand this computer stuff can't you just do it for me" then congratulations, that sort of service exists in the office.
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Sep 2, 2015 21:32
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skipdogg posted:Our WFH users are usually engaged with customers of ours in locations we don't have offices in. We have a huge customer in Dallas, but no office there. Our VP of Sales for their account and his support staff all work from home in the Dallas area. Same thing in a few other cities with very large customers of ours. I'll admit my perspective is fairly limited as far as being geographically spread out because I work for a major university and everything we do is 30 years behind the cutting edge. But basically it sounds like you're doing what I suggested, is adapting the IT to the needs of the business because there's an actual business need, whereas it sounds like 22 Eargesplitten is in one of those "hey computer guy make it work" situations where the business is not being flexible in allowing IT and business needs to meet somewhere in the middle. As in is there even a business need for this guy to work from home?
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Sep 2, 2015 21:40
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Run the corporate standard build if you want support. The entire "if you work from home you should have basic skills, otherwise come to the office" argument is crap -- support workers help people sight unseen all the time. Standard build, standard list of hardware. You can't do anything about users who call for problems when they're nowhere near it, but "troubleshoot computer problems" is not in the repertoire or required skill set of non-technical wfh staff. "Buy a $90 laserjet from this list, follow this document, call us if it doesn't work" is fine. "Haul your poo poo into the office if you want support" isn't, really. Almost everything other than checking cables can be done with some remote access solution, and you can get a visual check with a webcam/Skype on their phone/whatever, eliminating 99/100 reasons for a physical presence. The business case for "does this guy even need to work from home" isn't IT's call to make.
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Sep 2, 2015 21:45
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Honest question - do modern computers ever fail a ping to localhost? I've never seen a machine that failed a ping to localhost, and I suspect it's a leftover troubleshooting step of yesteryear. Obviously the time it takes to try it is trivial and there's no reason not to... I'm just wondering how wrong I am about this assumption. Maybe this is more common/relevant on non-Windows machines?
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Sep 3, 2015 00:34
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If the network stack is completely and utterly hosed then I imagine it would fail. Like if you managed to break IPv4 entirely then pinging 127.0.0.1 would fail so you'd know to stop looking at anything outside of the PC.
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Sep 3, 2015 00:57
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i really recommend OTRS for helpdesk. it's free and works well.
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Sep 3, 2015 01:00
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It's a useful command for telephone troubleshooting because it confirms that the person on the other end was able to type in the command.
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Sep 3, 2015 01:00
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Japanese Dating Sim posted:Honest question - do modern computers ever fail a ping to localhost? I've never seen a machine that failed a ping to localhost, and I suspect it's a leftover troubleshooting step of yesteryear. Obviously the time it takes to try it is trivial and there's no reason not to... I'm just wondering how wrong I am about this assumption. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2389159&pagenumber=557#post449538021
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Sep 3, 2015 01:33
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evol262 posted:The entire "if you work from home you should have basic skills, otherwise come to the office" argument is crap -- support workers help people sight unseen all the time. Yeah pretty much this. Sure it can go too far where you're spending 80 hours a week supporting the $20 inkjet printer for the intern who lives down the block but can't be assed to put on pants. But in my experience, most people who work remote, are remote for a reason. They're valuable to the organization and can't be replaced by someone local. It's a better use of resources for helpdesk to walk them through whatever "dumb" issue over the phone, than for someone making a large salary (and possibly generating large amounts of revenue depending on the role) to spend their time farting around with printer settings for 8 hours. At my last job, our remote workers included the sales person generating like 80% of our revenue and the most senior developer. I'm pretty sure if we had asked either of them to go spend their day at Geek Squad they would have just forwarded us the standing job offers they had from 5 other companies. As always, context matters!
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Sep 3, 2015 03:28
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It goes both ways. It can't dictate the business but business can't dictate IT either, you've got to meet in the middle somewhere. A place where business dictates the IT is one where IT is a cost center, and they're going to be constantly squeezed. If IT and the needs of the business work together then IT is seen as contributing to the success of the company rather than being a cost center. E: And since context really is king here, I get the impression that the situation that started this is one where IT is a cost center rather than working with the business.
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Sep 3, 2015 03:35
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Dark Helmut posted:It may not be traditional IT the way this thread looks at it (support/infrastructure, etc) but at least in my view, data anything (BI, big data, data warehousing, etc) is as much "Information Technology" as application development is. Harnessing, manipulating, and leveraging data are things that aren't going away. Definitely a legit career path if you are into that sort of thing. TBH, any reasonable job or career would be great atm. Mostly concerned with the idea of 2+ yrs of working exp in various fields.
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Sep 3, 2015 03:50
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Japanese Dating Sim posted:Honest question - do modern computers ever fail a ping to localhost? I've never seen a machine that failed a ping to localhost, and I suspect it's a leftover troubleshooting step of yesteryear. Obviously the time it takes to try it is trivial and there's no reason not to... I'm just wondering how wrong I am about this assumption. Haven't really thought about this since the Windows 98 days and rebuilding people's winsocks.
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Sep 3, 2015 04:05
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if someone is worth having work from home then its worth providing them equipment that works otherwise theyre just worker #90723479 and if they cant get a loving deskjet to work fire them and go get another contract worker to fill the void.
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Sep 3, 2015 04:18
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Alder posted:TBH, any reasonable job or career would be great atm. Mostly concerned with the idea of 2+ yrs of working exp in various fields. Ignore the experience requirements, either the tech screen will show what you can do, or you have to fake it til you make it. In the latter case, there was no real tech screen, and you are working for people you can BS with 'I gotta figure out the specifics of the environment' and 'This project requires considerable non-standard configuration and testing' that you can use as cover for learning the technology. In the former, they know that it takes time to get up to speed even for someone with experience.
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Sep 3, 2015 05:42
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adorai posted:i really recommend OTRS for helpdesk. it's free and works well. Oh my god thank you. I was trying so hard to remember this last time we were talking about helpdesks and all I could remember was OS ticket
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Sep 3, 2015 13:23
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I've got OTRS set up and ready to go, migrating away from Track-IT. We have a lot of tickets I don't want to input by hand, so I'm waiting for that list to go down before fully implementing. That, and automating our AD field-filling when a user is created.
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Sep 3, 2015 15:17
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 we may get to kill the bad ticketing system and look at others, they are actually interested in Zendesk
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Sep 3, 2015 15:36
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I've had to arrange for a Ricoh tech to come pick up our old Ricoh printer that we leased (replaced with lease renewal two months ago) twice now. The first time that was scheduled the guy coming to pick it up had a horrible accident and has been in recovery since (the week after). I've just heard that the printer is still at the site and that the second Ricoh tech has also somehow wrecked his vehicle/had an accident and never made it by to pick it up. Now on tech number 3. Printers really are evil. 
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Sep 3, 2015 15:51
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I don't know how well it scales, but I like zendesk. It's simple but customizable. It's much better than Clarify, at least. Or maybe it's just better than the lovely internal GUI my last company made for Clarify.
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Sep 3, 2015 15:51
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22 Eargesplitten posted:I don't know how well it scales, but I like zendesk. It's simple but customizable. It's much better than Clarify, at least. Or maybe it's just better than the lovely internal GUI my last company made for Clarify. Their website...  Goddamn millennials.
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Sep 3, 2015 16:06
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GnarlyCharlie4u posted:Their website... Adblocking this, what the hell
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Sep 3, 2015 16:20
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Japanese Dating Sim posted:Adblocking this, what the hell Haha what the gently caress. And somehow it's even more obnoxious/jarring inline on their website.
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Sep 3, 2015 17:17
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