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I was going to post something asking if it makes to contact my interviewer in between holidays as I hadn't heard from him since 2 weeks ago when we met in person. I decided to anyway. Turns out he text me last week to come in to meet the SMEs (I'm guessing a technical interview) and I never received it, so now were scheduled to do that next week. I was hoping I wouldn't have to do a technical, oh well.
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Dec 29, 2017 00:46
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Texting is not an appropriate method of professional communication. Businesses that communicate over text is a red flag, either their communication systems suck so hard they refuse to use them or they're hiding something by communicating outside of official channels.
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Dec 29, 2017 01:14
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Judge Schnoopy posted:Texting is not an appropriate method of professional communication. Glad I'm not the only one that thinks this. I was weirded out when I had a job set up interviews over text messages. It ended up being neither of those things, but still seemed unprofessional, but I thought maybe I was just old-fashioned or something.
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Dec 29, 2017 03:34
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My reference gave him my number and my resume, so it's not weird. What is weird is that I met him and his boss for 2 hours, he's already verbally offered me the position, but when he went to his boss to get approval they decided then that I should have a technical interview.
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Dec 29, 2017 03:37
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Sepist posted:My reference gave him my number and my resume, so it's not weird. What is weird is that I met him and his boss for 2 hours, he's already verbally offered me the position, but when he went to his boss to get approval they decided then that I should have a technical interview.
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Dec 29, 2017 04:03
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Sepist posted:My reference gave him my number and my resume, so it's not weird. What is weird is that I met him and his boss for 2 hours, he's already verbally offered me the position, but when he went to his boss to get approval they decided then that I should have a technical interview. Yep, it's still weird. Also additional hoops to jump through after a verbal offer? Hope you've picked out some updated decor for your new well.
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Dec 29, 2017 04:36
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Question for thread, 1. How many of your co-workers actually working during Christmas and New Years week? And I don’t mean just a few emails or whatever - actual work. For reference, I’ve taken this week off aside from maybe an hour or three. 2. How important do you find references and what if it’s clear none of the references are managers but just coworkers? Gucci Loafers fucked around with this message at 06:39 on Dec 29, 2017 |
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Dec 29, 2017 06:32
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Judge Schnoopy posted:Texting is not an appropriate method of professional communication. My manager, account managers, managers manager prefer phone calls, text messages if it’s complicated or urgent and overwhelming hate email. And I work for a major tech company and they’re all overwhelming professionally successfully and they got a decade or more on me. Those of us of tech side are much, much different and almost the opposite.
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Dec 29, 2017 06:44
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Tab8715 posted:Question for thread, my entire company has the week off, ain't nobody doing actual work. we're all still technically on call and my coworker answered an email earlier today about a user confused their domain account's password and their email password, but nope, no real work. i actually hadn't checked my email for a week straight lol
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Dec 29, 2017 07:04
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Cat Army
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Tab8715 posted:How many of your co-workers actually working during Christmas and New Years week? And I don’t mean just a few emails or whatever - actual work. One.
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Dec 29, 2017 07:05
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CLAM DOWN posted:One. Our office manager, who is also our only part-time, is there this week to do literally nothing.
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Dec 29, 2017 07:10
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Grassy Knowles posted:Our office manager, who is also our only part-time, is there this week to do literally nothing. When I was contracting for ATT I did show up in the office but it maybe 50/50 real work during the holiday break. Gucci Loafers fucked around with this message at 07:31 on Dec 29, 2017 |
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Dec 29, 2017 07:26
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Judge Schnoopy posted:Businesses that communicate over text is a red flag, either their communication systems suck so hard they refuse to use them or they're hiding something by communicating outside of official channels. Pretty sure the interview was with Presidio, which is a really large and well known VAR. I’ve got friends who work there. It’s fine. SeaborneClink posted:Yep, it's still weird. Also additional hoops to jump through after a verbal offer? Hope you've picked out some updated decor for your new well. You’re reaching here.
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Dec 29, 2017 08:56
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Tab8715 posted:Question for thread, It's pretty much just a regular day for us. I had to play a half comp day they owed me rather than get either tomorrow or last Friday as a half day automatically like before. They told us they wanted 5 new PCs for new hires on Monday, they only told us yesterday afternoon. We had to talk them down from 10. Also executives off-site need support that Tuesday too. All they told us when we noted how unrealistic this was, was that overtime was approved 
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Dec 29, 2017 09:12
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e: Wrong thread
Collateral Damage fucked around with this message at 10:25 on Dec 29, 2017 |
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Dec 29, 2017 09:44
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SeaborneClink posted:Yep, it's still weird. Also additional hoops to jump through after a verbal offer? Hope you've picked out some updated decor for your new well. That's a bit of a stretch. I think the issue is that the VP is concerned about onboarding someone with a 200k+ salary that they didn't even tech out, just because he has an internal reference. I understand why they are being cautious about it. Also I'm one of those assholes working this week. Not sure why I even bother going in when it's loving 11 degrees in the morning Sepist fucked around with this message at 14:05 on Dec 29, 2017 |
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Dec 29, 2017 14:01
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Sepist posted:That's a bit of a stretch. I think the issue is that the VP is concerned about onboarding someone with a 200k+ salary that they didn't even tech out, just because he has an internal reference. I understand why they are being cautious about it. Yeah glad I am not going in to the office, my phone says it's 13 degrees outside, but I bet it feels colder thanks to horrid wind. Also, been up since 2:30am (thanks to my cute annoying puppy), so I've been working for a while and will hopefully be done by noon and back in bed for a nap with the pup!
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Dec 29, 2017 14:28
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I was about to post how it's been about 5-7 degrees when I leave at 7:30-7:45 every morning for the past week or two. Then I checked the temperature right now (6:50AM) and it's 52 degrees.
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Dec 29, 2017 14:49
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I work in a manufacturing company. This is the busiest time of the year. We're busy as gently caress.
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Dec 29, 2017 14:53
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This week it is me and one other windows admin. It is still end of year blackout and have only had a couple minor things break. Mainly been watching a udemy course on aws certified solutions architect associate or powershell training.
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Dec 29, 2017 15:44
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I am ending the year by deploying MS Teams to every single user PC and cellphone and saying "hi, per CO/E/FO mandate, we are having a required MS Teams training on Tuesday."
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Dec 29, 2017 18:53
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I like Teams, but I still wouldn’t put it in production yet. We have a test group that is going to start using it at the beginning of the year.
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Dec 29, 2017 19:00
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The Fool posted:I like Teams, but I still wouldn’t put it in production yet. We're using it for our BU and if everyone gets on board it's great. Most important thing to manage at the start is the file structure in each channel, or it's gonna get crazy fast. After that, it's p good.
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Dec 29, 2017 19:13
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MF_James posted:Yeah glad I am not going in to the office, my phone says it's 13 degrees outside, but I bet it feels colder thanks to horrid wind. It’s -28C (-18F) before windchill right now. I don’t have to work, but I am going out tonight...
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Dec 29, 2017 19:47
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Kashuno posted:I am ending the year by deploying MS Teams to every single user PC and cellphone and saying "hi, per CO/E/FO mandate, we are having a required MS Teams training on Tuesday." for a second i thought this was the "greatest hits of trauma" from the other thread
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Dec 29, 2017 19:50
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Avenging_Mikon posted:It’s -28C (-18F) before windchill right now. I don’t have to work, but I am going out tonight... Extreme Cold Warning for Northern Alberta  ! I have beer and rum at home and no plans allllll weekend. On call can eat me, change freeze to go along with the regular old outside freeze, and every boss I have up to the CIO is on vacation somewhere warm.
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Dec 29, 2017 20:09
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I was walked out of a help desk contract job that I was three weeks into. I was told they thought I had the knowledge, but had doubts that I would be able to keep up with their call volume. This was my first experience with an internal help desk; I've previously had six years doing IT support for external customers. I thought I would do fine, but I found it frustrating how little we were trained. This was a help desk where a lot was done with third party websites and apps. The only real training we got was a quick look at the ticketing system. Beyond that, we did a few days of shadowing, and then worked the email dispatch for a week. I was on the phones since Wednesday. I felt like I was thrown in the pool, and it was up to me whether I sink or swim. My previous tech support positions had at least a full month of dedicated training. Is this typical for a help desk job?
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Dec 30, 2017 00:37
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Yeah, unfortunately training for something like a Helpdesk position is usually fairly non-existent these days. It wasn't like that when I started in IT and it's lovely how it is now. A month of training is pretty extraordinary. Like, I'm pretty sure that's what a surgeon gets before he operates on you or something. That being said internal positions are usually slower than external IT support. I'd be surprised if you couldn't manage the ticket load if you did external support for an extended period of time. I guess it might depend on what you were doing, maybe?
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Dec 30, 2017 04:18
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I started out doing internal helpdesk and IT stuff as a (paid) intern a year ago. Other than starting me out with the easy stuff (wipe and image 50 computers for charity) but it ramped up as time went on. Even when I was brought onboard full time there wasn't really any training, though I'm a sysadmin now. Took a few weeks to familiarize myself, and I was asking a ton of questions on how to do things process wise. But I was asking process questions about actual cases I was working on, there's no official training on the actual work part of your work. Unofficial training is more just learning from those you're working with, whether that's best practice, tips and tricks to unfuck keychain bs (fuuuuuck keychain), etc. Mostly it's learning from doing however. External helpdesk always seemed pretty awful to me in terms of workload and dealing with irate customers. Internal, you all work for the same company and people tend not to be horrible assholes to you, though obviously that depends on where you're working. The Iron Rose fucked around with this message at 05:00 on Dec 30, 2017 |
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Dec 30, 2017 04:34
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My last two helpdesk hires have both been internal transfers with zero real world IT experience. One had basically no technical skills at all, the other had some college and home lab experience. Both of them got about 2 weeks of direct instruction and job shadowing before being asked to "go it alone." Afterward, they had about 4 weeks of very light duty, then increasingly more thrown at them. It has worked out tremendously well in both cases. The difference in both of these is that they were as entry level as you can get, so the expectation was very low to begin with. I will also say that all of the training they received was very informal.
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Dec 30, 2017 04:56
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I’m doing an interview with a guy with an @earthlink email address. I’m already thinking this is a red flag
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Dec 30, 2017 05:12
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I wouldn't have expected much training in the general IT helpdesk knowledge. This job asks for prior experience, and that should cover it. What was at issue is that this is a healthcare industry company. Our end users are using dozens of different kinds of sites to interact with customers, orders, so on, as well as different kinds of programs for order taking and such. The only dedicated training for this that we got was how to reset passwords for about a handful of these systems.Internet Explorer posted:That being said internal positions are usually slower than external IT support. I'd be surprised if you couldn't manage the ticket load if you did external support for an extended period of time. I guess it might depend on what you were doing, maybe? They're really backed up because the team size doesn't meet demand. On a normal day, there is just about always 5+ calls waiting with 30+ minute hold time. Today was quite different, a lot of availability, but there were obviously a lot of people on vacation. I would have only expected that kind of volume to last a month or two, because they're adding more bodies to the team. The Iron Rose posted:External helpdesk always seemed pretty awful to me in terms of workload and dealing with irate customers. Internal, you all work for the same company and people tend not to be horrible assholes to you, though obviously that depends on where you're working. I think the other issue was that with external helpdesk, the expectation is that you solve the customer's problem. On this internal helpdesk, there seemed to be more of a focus of simply moving things along. If a call got too long, it's essentially an automatic escalation. Too long was considered 20 minutes, which is weird because in my prior experience, 20 was the average length that you wanted to reach. I know I had a call today that I was told to get off and move on, that I felt I was on the verge of solving. But I wasn't about to argue about it. Now that ticket is sitting in an escalation queue that is handled by two people, one of which has been on vacation all week, and the other was training us, so it's gotta be overflowing. That really bothers me. Because of my past experience, I am very customer-driven. I don't like the idea of having somebody wait for days, maybe weeks, when I might have taken care of them if I had 10 more minutes. But is that just the way internal helpdesk works? jaegerx posted:I’m doing an interview with a guy with an @earthlink email address. I’m already thinking this is a red flag Either he is over sixty or it's ironic.
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Dec 30, 2017 05:37
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Revol posted:I wouldn't have expected much training in the general IT helpdesk knowledge. This job asks for prior experience, and that should cover it. What was at issue is that this is a healthcare industry company. Our end users are using dozens of different kinds of sites to interact with customers, orders, so on, as well as different kinds of programs for order taking and such. The only dedicated training for this that we got was how to reset passwords for about a handful of these systems. Not at my company at least, but I work for an agency of about ~700 and there's less than half a dozen people who do that work, excluding my manager and department head and the aws/cloud/hosting peeps. We don't hold much truck for the whole T1/T2/T3 system, there are a couple SMEs in their thirties, two intermediate sysadmins also in their thirties, and then me, a plain jane sysadmin in her early twenties. Plus two new folks starting Tuesday since we've been seriously overworked due to (deserved) layoffs and strict hiring standards. We all do a mix of helpdesk and project work. On any given day I'll be setting up a newhire or troubleshooting someone's loving acrobat or printer poo poo. But I'll also be doing other work too, and I can even take initiative with projects as well! Because it's such a small team, we all have our projects that we work on with a huge amount of autonomy, and I genuinely love that. For example, we recently switched to a new antivirus system that and I had been the person who was primarily responsible for rolling that out org-wide and troubleshooting issues that came up as a result. Unfortunately, because I was the only one who was really interacting with this new system, there were lots of detected and quarantined malware that wasn't really being addressed or looked into. With our old provider, we would get a weekly ticket with a list of all detected threats and malware from our security and trust team. Unfortunately, our new AV system didn't have a reporting function, not really. The extent to which you could get reports is have it send an email to your personal account, every single time a new threat was found. Not terribly useful or convenient. So I built a reporting system into it. My manager was off all week and I wanted to show him something impressive when he returned, so I talked to the AV support folks and was basically told "lol sorry, should've bought the on-prem server instead of just the web portal service." But they did help me figure out how to push a .csv of all detected threats to a url. So I wrote a quick powershell script that grabbed the .csv from the url after authentication, parsed it for the quarantined filename, the localhost, and the filepath, tossed the data into a HTML table that then gets emailed every week to our security team. I tried to get it to automatically create a ticket too, but our internally built ticketing system doesn't support what I needed it to, so I figured it was good enough for something nobody actually asked me to do. It was a slow week, and took me the better part of two days to figure out how to do it all by myself, largely because it was the first script I had ever written in any language. My project work can vary, whether that's taking point on everything SCCM, certifying and testing Windows 10 in our environment, things like that and I'm definitely forgetting a few things I've done since I started in August. Other folks do things like rolling out 802.1x, integrating a fancy new print server, integrating building video conferencing out for the entire company, and the like. So there's a nice mix of the kinda run of the mill day to day, and more interesting projects that let me actually interact with technologies as we're developing them. Even our our senior server and network guys get their hands dirty setting up the desks for newhires, and even I get to play around in production environments, interacting and building out new technologies we're integrating into our organization. The ratios are skewed of course - our most senior SME probably spends 80% of his time doing hardcore infrastructure and work and rarely deals with actual tickets, wheras for me it's about the opposite. Which is fine and facially appropriate, the man has fifteen years experience on me and I have no idea how to do the things he does yet. Tickets typically get sent to a queue and we toss them around based on who has time or who's more familiar with an issue. There's no formal escalation process, but we all exchange tickets with one another if we can't figure something out or want advice. One of the people on my team is more familiar with macs and less so with windows, so we toss weird OS issues to one another to sort out, and then share how we fixed it. The point of our jobs is to keep the tools people need to do their job working and in good order, whether that's troubleshooting commercial software, laptops, printers, or meeting rooms. Here's the thing though. You and I both did "internal IT"... but from the sounds of it, our jobs and our responsibilities were radically, radically different. So I'm not sure there's really any way to say that internal IT works in one particular way or another, I think it all ends up depending on who you end up working for. At a certain point the internal/external dividing line isn't terribly useful because it all depends so much on the needs and size and culture of your organization. From your description, your former employer sounds like a unpleasant job, what with being hurried along and dealing with automatic escalation. I can't imagine only having 20 minutes to troubleshoot an issue. I actually can't think of the last time I've spent less than 20 minutes troubleshooting a non-basic issue. Your attitude does you a lot of credit though - actually caring and taking pride in the quality of work and the resolutions you provide is a rare thing, and I hope it take you places. I think it's profoundly unfortunate that your previous employer not only didn't value that, but actively discouraged it. You don't need to look very far in this thread, or the ticket thread, or the poo poo pissing me off thread to find similar stories to yours. I genuinely love my job, because almost every single day I'm learning something new, and I know my manager and department head have my back and trust me to do my job well without a lot of supervision. Hell, I just spent an hour writing a post about how much I love my job and bragging about how awesome it is because I still genuinely excited talking about the work that I do! That's only the case because my company has created a great working environment where I actually want to show off the cool things I'm doing to my manager so we can both rave about how cool they are. I know for a fact that I could be handling the exact same tickets I do now, but with lovely management I'd go home feeling awful at the end of every day. ...still fairly underpaid relative to the actual work I'm doing in my area, but with a <1 year of IT experience I really can't bitch  E: removed some information that was more revealing than necessary The Iron Rose fucked around with this message at 09:23 on Dec 30, 2017 |
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Dec 30, 2017 07:04
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I’m working an internal help desk, and they’d rather we handle everything possibly possible, even if we’re on the phone for an hour. They trust us to actually know if it’s possible though, and escalate when necessary or prudent (some users are impossible to help over the phone).
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Dec 30, 2017 07:24
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Internet Explorer posted:A month of training is pretty extraordinary. Like, I'm pretty sure that's what a surgeon gets before he operates on you or something. We're going to be doing some training soon. My team is two Level 1 techs, runners to drop off loaners, pick up systems, and ,maybe change a battery; and on paper we're 8 L2 techs who actually do warranty repairs, data rescue from crashed systems, etc. We're going in to the new year with 6 L2s and one of those is planning to retire soon. Coincidentally, I was turned down for two internal promotions in December. That had nothing to do with us being about to hit 50% staffing, nosirree Bob. Training for the 3 new hires will consist of two week shadowing an experienced tech and praying they remember every procedure the new guys need to know and remember it correctly. At about the 15 month mark I got called into the manager's office on a "close the door and sit down" basis. He wanted to yell at me for screwing up some inventory repeatedly over the course of those 15 months, but he screwed that up: he asked me how it came to be that I didn't know that very, very important procedure. "Nobody I shadowed did it, so it never came up" was my response. Shortest "close the door and sit down" meeting on record. I'm pretty sure their training checklists didn't get updated after that.  can't come soon enough.
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Dec 30, 2017 08:24
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Avenging_Mikon posted:It’s -28C (-18F) before windchill right now. I don’t have to work, but I am going out tonight... Jesus Christ where do you live, the south pole? I worked 2 days this week (took an extra day off so I could recover from celebrating my bday). It was awesome, got more stuff done in 2 days than I usually do in a week. Also virtually no traffic so the commute was amazing. Re: texting with hiring managers. Mine kept me up to date with texts on how far along the security clearance screening was and when my expected start date would be. It’s like 4-5 texts over the course of a few weeks.
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Dec 30, 2017 09:15
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LochNessMonster posted:Jesus Christ where do you live, the south pole? Northern Alberta my dude. It got down to -40C (-40F) (not a typo) overnight with windchill. I went from car direct to Hot Row in the datacenter this morning.
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Dec 30, 2017 10:51
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drat, I’m not sur if I could function in weather that cold. I’m already complaining when the temperature drops below 0 C
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Dec 30, 2017 12:25
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Antioch posted:Northern Alberta my dude. It got down to -40C (-40F) (not a typo) overnight with windchill. For my sanity I don’t look at windchill.
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Dec 30, 2017 12:56
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Antioch posted:Northern Alberta my dude. It got down to -40C (-40F) (not a typo) overnight with windchill. Does your DC even have air conditioning? With ambient temperature that low you just need some fans to keep recirculating, and maybe a couple outside vents to mix in cold air.
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Dec 30, 2017 15:43
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