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lol we're never leaving, just going to keep delaying things until we've spent a decade letting everything else fall to pieces because we ignored it. Anyway, re on call: http://www.acas.org.uk/index.aspx?articleid=1373#oncall
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Apr 21, 2019 12:49
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We're trying to adjust on call at my work currently. Its a split between either expanding the on-call crew to the entire IT staff so that people are only on call one week out of the year, or keeping our smaller rotation and paying people an extra $200 a week to be on call and hope that gets enough volunteers to keep things running. We dont get a ton of calls typically so I could see it being worth it, but I think they'd also want us to do more besides true emergency tickets if we're getting paid. BaseballPCHiker fucked around with this message at 14:51 on Apr 22, 2019 |
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Apr 22, 2019 13:40
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A system I enjoyed in the past is getting a small pay bonus for the week you're on call as well as tracking after-hours work on time cards. Our policy was that regardless of how long you work on the issue, even if the issue is a false positive and you don't have to do anything, you add at least an hour to your time card. As a nice side effect, this really pushes back on folks being lazy with alerts that don't matter, because every false positive "costs" (hourly rate * 1.5) for whoever is on call. I remember being actually excited when my phone buzzed because I'd just made an extra $30.
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Apr 22, 2019 14:42
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Jokes on me, my team is all salaried. We're probably going to have a big fight about uncompensated on call time. IMHO, if you can't go see a movie or go out to dinner for fear of getting a call and needing to respond, you're not able to use that time effectively and that's basically hours worked.
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Apr 22, 2019 18:35
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AlternateAccount posted:Jokes on me, my team is all salaried. We're probably going to have a big fight about uncompensated on call time. IMHO, if you can't go see a movie or go out to dinner for fear of getting a call and needing to respond, you're not able to use that time effectively and that's basically hours worked. Salaried is not the same as exempt.
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Apr 22, 2019 18:43
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Internet Explorer posted:Salaried is not the same as exempt. And if the aren't exempt, they will be when the on-call policy gets applied!
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Apr 22, 2019 19:57
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Internet Explorer posted:Salaried is not the same as exempt. Its also an area you should tread carefully because it can be a very sensitive area for leadership folks. You should only need your on call guys when there is an emergency. Employees pushing back against helping with emergencies are folks that are going to get a lot of ire in a great number of situations. I think its very reasonable to have on call and not get extra money for it but it needs to come with a lot of allowances to make up for it. I understand those that stand firm against it though especially when its not reasonable. Our has changed a few times just in my short tenure for my teams. 1: You are on call for only a week at a time. 2: I have forced enough people back into the rotations that each individual is on call at most 4 times a year. Some teams less. 3: While you are on call your entire job is to be on call. Nobody is forcing you to do anything else. I am sure this will eventually go away but for right now none of my higher ups have complaints. 4: You can do your on call at home if you choose. Almost all do. 5: Holiday on call nets you equal comp time and is by volunteer. (So far extremely successful with a waiting list) Caveats 1: You have to be available. Day/night/whatever, you gotta take that call. 2: Managers have to check up daily with on call guys to make sure they aren't asleep at the wheel. I have left it up to those guys to decide when to call as I am split on calling people in the middle of the night or not to do checks. 3: The more allowances means less mercy when you let your phone die and there is a major outage. So far we are on 18 weeks incident free. We will see.
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Apr 22, 2019 20:19
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You could always test how that system actually works by creating a fault and see how the on-call responds to it.
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Apr 22, 2019 20:21
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Currently 75K + State Benefits working in higher Ed. in Eastern VA. Infrastructure Manager handling almost everything other than the SIS. VMWare clusters, OSes, Integrations, Email, O365, Identity Management etc. been here about 3 years. However, PTO, Sick leave, baller ins. and we shutdown for almost two weeks at Christmas so, it could be worse, like the rat poo poo MSP I came from. On call for hundreds of clients once every five weeks... The issue for me is this, if this place was even remotely competent, I could be happy here. But literally everyone is afraid of pissing off the Faculty and Staff. And I don't mean the kinds of stuff that would put more burden on them, I mean the poo poo that would make their lives better?!?! Any time the meetings ends with "Once we get to this point we need to start communicating with the University that this change is happening and give them documentation on how to use X" everything stops. There is no forward motion. And projects just keep flowing in with no end because University. There is no planning, no setting of expectations, just we bought a thing and GOGOGOGOGOGOGO  . So I can automate anything I want UNLESS it affects Faculty / Staff / Students in any way. Things are slowly getting better, my boss is good, but is in the same boat as me, too much poo poo to do, not enough hands, and no one gives a gently caress about IT unless its to cover their rear end because they don't know how to do their jobs. Everyone else above him is probably gonna get fired when the new administration starts, been through two of those already (don't doxx me please!). I love working in higher ed, I love the mission and the work is always changing because of new fun things to learn about, but I am in a broken culture that has no idea what up even looks like anymore. And a place where IT is treated as a hot potatoe that has been rolled in poop. And if the new administration is good, it is going to take at least a decade to really get things back on track because state employees are barnacles for better or worse. I'm kinda done. I'm not here for this fight, I just wanna engineer the gently caress out of things for people that wants things engi-hosed.I just applied for a position at my alma mater that actually has their poo poo together and hires enough people to do the work they scope out. It would be building labs in the cloud for students all over the place to beat the gently caress out of. My networking seems to have paid off as my contact already spoke to the director of the area and they were very impressed with my resume. So here is hoping. It would be a big change and moving, and going back to the mountain land I learned at, compared to the land of bridges, tunnels, shipyards and lead poisoning. A little scary, but the place + getting a masters for free would be alright.
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Apr 22, 2019 20:29
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Sickening posted:You should only need your on call guys when there is an emergency. I think this is key. Our support team (not me) do an on-call rotation and it's sold to them as a "your phone will ring when something goes down" type service. But it's sold to a customer as "you have 24x7 cover and can raise tickets", so you get somebody kicking off that their new user request wasn't implemented overnight, and neither party is happy.
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Apr 22, 2019 20:52
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Thanks Ants posted:I think this is key. Our support team (not me) do an on-call rotation and it's sold to them as a "your phone will ring when something goes down" type service. But it's sold to a customer as "you have 24x7 cover and can raise tickets", so you get somebody kicking off that their new user request wasn't implemented overnight, and neither party is happy. That is absolutely not on call. I actually don't have any idea on what to call that except toxic as gently caress. I can't see how anyone would work that kind of extra rotation and not quit.
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Apr 22, 2019 21:59
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Anyone here using Nutanix in a larger environment? Pros/cons? The company that acquired us is planning on moving all compute and storage to Nutanix's platform and we have some reservations about it. Our existing VMware environment using Cisco UCS blades with a NetApp backend work pretty well. Some of our smaller environments wouldn't be a big deal, but our largest is north of 1200VM's over 3PB of data. I know nothing about it at all.
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Apr 22, 2019 22:03
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I've heard so little buzz about them recently that I honestly thought they'd been acquired. You might get a better response in the virtualization megathread: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3467608
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Apr 22, 2019 22:06
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skipdogg posted:Anyone here using Nutanix in a larger environment? Pros/cons? It's basically "the cloud" that you can host. My company uses it and it's quite possibly one of the best products I've encountered. We use Hyper-V as our hypervisor, but they also support their own homegrown hypervisor and VMWare. Just be aware that each node requires the use of a CVM, which is a Linux-based VM that manages the node it lives on. They are resource intensive and we learned that the hard way by not taking those requirements into account. They have good documentation and their support team is also knowledgeable.
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Apr 22, 2019 22:10
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36k and working helpdesk/networks.
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Apr 23, 2019 00:35
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Sickening posted:That is absolutely not on call. I actually don't have any idea on what to call that except toxic as gently caress. Why yes, I'd love to be woken up at 3am because someone forgot to submit a new user request 3 days ago! They also didn't tell her that there would be any on-call until a few weeks in. Oh and they decided to start a new shift of noon-10pm too! I warned her healthcare IT sucks...
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Apr 23, 2019 01:15
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I'm on call always for emergencies but emergencies are strictly defined as something that is actively impacting production lines or an error condition that's going to very shortly result in line stoppage, so in practice I rarely actually get called. edit: and before they call me they have to go through their normal on site resources who would escalate it up if they can't handle it. Sickening posted:That is absolutely not on call. I actually don't have any idea on what to call that except toxic as gently caress. I would absolutely find a new job ASAP if my employer did that kind of bullshit bait and switch. Nuclearmonkee fucked around with this message at 01:56 on Apr 23, 2019 |
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Apr 23, 2019 01:49
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Healthcare IT is probably the worst sector of the industry to work with. Well that and for day-trade finance.
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Apr 23, 2019 01:57
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Vargatron posted:Healthcare IT is probably the worst sector of the industry to work with. Well that and for day-trade finance. Why healthcare? I suspect finance is fine just a ton of but at least the pay is good.
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Apr 23, 2019 02:39
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Tab8715 posted:Why healthcare? Because all your poo poo is two generations past end of life and everything is held together by baling wire and rubber bands. So everything is just on the verge of breaking. Every minute of every day. As far as finance it depends. If you work for a large international bank, you’re probably fine. Trading firms and regional banks can gently caress right off, though.
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Apr 23, 2019 02:48
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ptier posted:Currently working in higher Ed. Good luck! I am working for my alma mater, but it's basically as your current job is described-- too few hands, constant fires to be put out, lack of foresight/planning and politics everywhere. We're trying to change that and it's a lot better than it was a year ago. How large is your current institution? We run into the endless committees and resistance to change, but most of the time we're able to drag the powers that be kicking and screaming into the future. 3,500 students, though, so I imagine change is a lot easier at a school my size than somewhere a bit bigger
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Apr 23, 2019 02:48
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Tab8715 posted:Why healthcare? Healthcare turns basic problems into dire emergencies. Also doctors and nurses are some of the hardest people to work with. Apparently advanced degrees has a higher population of a certain type of personality. Probably explains the lawyer thing as well.
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Apr 23, 2019 02:53
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Nutanix is okay but there are so many brain-dead design decisions that I have like twenty RFEs filed for basic poo poo like "if project admin role can be given snapshot management permissions, they should be able to actually manage snapshots" and such. Real basic things like that. It's generally cool and "just works" though which is nice.
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Apr 23, 2019 03:09
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Sickening posted:Healthcare turns basic problems into dire emergencies. Also doctors and nurses are some of the hardest people to work with. Apparently advanced degrees has a higher population of a certain type of personality. Probably explains the lawyer thing as well. Lawyers, doctors, and professors all have very high incidences of Dunning-Kruger, which makes them very poor students of technology. To say nothing of the aforementioned tendency to have woefully outdated technology.
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Apr 23, 2019 03:59
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Sheep posted:Nutanix is okay but there are so many brain-dead design decisions that I have like twenty RFEs filed for basic poo poo like "if project admin role can be given snapshot management permissions, they should be able to actually manage snapshots" and such. Real basic things like that. I like to pronounce it as New Tuh Nicks.
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Apr 23, 2019 04:15
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Thanatosian posted:Lawyers, doctors, and professors all have very high incidences of Dunning-Kruger, which makes them very poor students of technology. They also conflate their lack of understanding of technology with your "poor" performance as an IT professional.
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Apr 23, 2019 04:21
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Not to mention law firms are generally ran by a executive committee made up of attorneys. Want to get nothing done ever? Get a handful of attorneys in a room together and ask them to make a decision.
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Apr 23, 2019 05:43
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Internet Explorer posted:Not to mention law firms are generally ran by a executive committee made up of attorneys. Want to get nothing done ever? Get a handful of attorneys in a room together and ask them to make a decision.
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Apr 23, 2019 07:53
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PancakeTransmission posted:Sorted alphabetically? By length of string? By the sum of the numerical value of each letter? Is this in Unicode? If so, in what locale?
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Apr 23, 2019 11:11
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My least favorite job was a law firm and I didnt even deal with end users. Some of the IT staff looked down on consultants with disdain and it made the environment incredibly toxic.
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Apr 23, 2019 11:41
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One of the worlds largest retailers for “residential construction goods” had or still has an anti-fraternization policy for all vendors. When you eat lunch in the cafeteria you sit alone or with other vendors. No discussion of the weather, kids, etc. is allowed. The reason being is social influence to buy products or service over its efficacy.
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Apr 23, 2019 11:54
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Tab8715 posted:One of the worlds largest retailers for “residential construction goods” had or still has an anti-fraternization policy for all vendors. Some guys in our Denver office told me similar things about Raytheon. Contractors had different color badges and were highly segregated based that.
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Apr 23, 2019 12:33
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Sickening posted:4: You can do your on call at home if you choose. Almost all do. If our place did this I would be all in for on call. We are a bums on seats kinda place but this would be a cool perk. Our on call is for multiple sites, no one is really familiar with places they haven't worked at (I'm the only person who has been at more than 1 for any length of time) so our process is: Call the on call person (they get a small fee for taking an OOH call as they get standby pay anyway) -> if they don't know what to do, they call the relevant local guy (who would get a bigger fee [4 hours] for being disturbed whilst not on call) -> Occasionally the call warrants someone actually going in, but not often (that eats in to your 4 hours so, erm, run [the on call guy might be hundreds of miles away, so local people attend site]) We don't get ~loads~ of calls but I'd still prefer not to do it - mainly because my site raised 7 out of hours calls in 2018, one site raised 8, the others were 50+ This annoyed me so I setup a weekly conference call to address people who are leaving stupid things that could be done in the day but are left to break OOH (this was a lot) so we are working to improve things. Sadly, we scheduled the call for Monday, so missed it due to holidays this week - as an example there were 7 call outs last week, on the report it looked like 5 weren't really dealt with because the dude didn't know what to do/lack of documentation which can easily be resolved. He managed to solve 1 thing himself and 1 was for facilities not us. so that's 5 calls to people not on call is 20 hours of O/T which should never have been paid if our documentation was better - it's not my money or anything and I guess people enjoy the O/T but it's annoying that we can't really say we are doing our best here and I don't like that.
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Apr 23, 2019 13:40
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Thanks Ants posted:I think this is key. Our support team (not me) do an on-call rotation and it's sold to them as a "your phone will ring when something goes down" type service. But it's sold to a customer as "you have 24x7 cover and can raise tickets", so you get somebody kicking off that their new user request wasn't implemented overnight, and neither party is happy. We're kind of stuck in the middle like this right now. On-call is supposed to be for emergencies, site wide type issues. But we also support some public safety type sites that call in with account unlocks and password resets. Some people will do it on call others dont, and we dont have a policy written to support either stance. So its a mess, and then you get people pissed off because last week when they called in they got helped right away and the next week it waits until Monday. Something needs to get figured out soon.
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Apr 23, 2019 14:46
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Sepist posted:Some of the IT staff looked down on consultants with disdain
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Apr 23, 2019 14:58
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rafikki posted:Some guys in our Denver office told me similar things about Raytheon. Contractors had different color badges and were highly segregated based that. I could see that given how they’re a defense change contractor.
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Apr 23, 2019 15:33
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Apparently flaming hot take for this thread: On-call should be paid. Not just for call outs, which should be overtime/double pay, but sitting on standby should be compensated. I'll never work anywhere again where it's not.
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Apr 23, 2019 15:35
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CloFan posted:Good luck! I am working for my alma mater, but it's basically as your current job is described-- too few hands, constant fires to be put out, lack of foresight/planning and politics everywhere. We're trying to change that and it's a lot better than it was a year ago. Currently 4400 or so, should be somewhere in the 7800's. Which explains the years upon years of mismanagement has caused decline which causes further crushed budgets, which caused flight, which caused positions to be eliminated due to fuckery... it didn't take a year to get here and it isn't gonna take a year to get out. When I say mismanagement I mean an admin that literally reaped this place for personal management. But yea fun! Who do you report to? Currently we report to finance. We have ping-ponged between them and the provost at least 3 times in the last 2 years. If we reported to the presidents office, we would probably get some of the ability to do things instead of being relegated to either neglect or used as a raid fund.
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Apr 23, 2019 15:42
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CLAM DOWN posted:Apparently flaming hot take for this thread: On-call should be paid. Not just for call outs, which should be overtime/double pay, but sitting on standby should be compensated. I'll never work anywhere again where it's not. Not disagreeing. The amount of stress created by knowing at any moment you have to stop what you are doing and assist a pissed off finance person get payroll done but they need this very important QuickBooks update applied RIGHT NOW (new years eve at 8pm) so they can pay a bunch of ship painters who will definitely set cars on fire if they don't get paid. Yea I wanna get paid for that. Not to mention not doing things or planning things because your time is not your own. I do not miss those days.
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Apr 23, 2019 15:46
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CLAM DOWN posted:Apparently flaming hot take for this thread: On-call should be paid. Not just for call outs, which should be overtime/double pay, but sitting on standby should be compensated. I'll never work anywhere again where it's not. Here at the hospital we get an extra $250/week when we are on call. Only high priority patient safety issues get paged. When paged we get time and a half OT pay at a minimum of 1 hour no matter how quickly we resolve the issue. Works out pretty good.
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Apr 23, 2019 15:51
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