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And the wind wasn't blowing too hard. And Pat didn't pick up the extension in the den. PAT, HANG UP THE PHONE. I'M TALKING TO A FRIEND. NO, YOU DON'T KNOW THEM. ETA: Unintentional lovely page snipe. I don't have to do too much with phones, but getting a working headset at my new place has been a struggle. Mostly because I don't want to go back and tell them the headset I'll use once a day isn't actually working. Wizard of the Deep fucked around with this message at 03:39 on Nov 16, 2019 |
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Nov 16, 2019 03:36
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Dirt Road Junglist posted:It really is like being a second class citizen when you're on the help desk team at work... The expectations for first-tier help desk are a line drawn on the floor. Literally everyone every help desk routes tickets to is surprised that most of the helldesk staffers can find the office every day. They don't give help desk people the good equipment because of a certain apprehension that it will get drool on it. Most of the people in this thread graduated from that particular kindergarten and know this, welcome. And most of us know someone who spent more than ten years in that role and weep for them in weaker moments. In most orgs, help desk won't even get new keyboards; not even the ones that come with new computers. Which they don't get either. Instead, someone with some promise is offered a special project. The special project involves a jar of sani-wipes and a pile of old keyboards. Anyone who doesn't eat any of the sani-wipes and manages to successfully weed out the actually broken keyboards (it's only the broken keyboard part that's actually important) is marked for possible advancement off of tier one. Guess how many candidates pass the test. No, lower. Again, congratulations for making it out ! Okay, question for the thread. What's the easiest test you've set someone that got completely botched ? I once was handed a candidate for part-time IT at the hosed up little telemarketing company I used to work for and told to find them something to do as a test. I had just put out six new computers with monitors, but not done any of the cabling. I gave the candidate twelve power cords and six extension strips, pointed out the ones that went from monitor to computer (late-90s Macs had a power supply with one outlet for the standard cord that goes to power, and a special outlet for a female-female power cord for the monitor, this saved a power outlet), and the ones that went from computer to extension strip. I'm sure I mentioned that the extension strips plugged into the wall. Their success rate ? Two of six were wired up correctly. None of the four failures were done wrong in the same way. Shut up Meg posted:Some of your posts give me little boners. 
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Nov 16, 2019 05:12
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mllaneza posted:The expectations for first-tier help desk are a line drawn on the floor. Literally everyone every help desk routes tickets to is surprised that most of the helldesk staffers can find the office every day. They don't give help desk people the good equipment because of a certain apprehension that it will get drool on it. Most of the people in this thread graduated from that particular kindergarten and know this, welcome. And most of us know someone who spent more than ten years in that role and weep for them in weaker moments. How many of the "incorrect" ones worked? If they all, or all but maybe one, worked, I'd say they passed whether they did it your way or not. Less than a 66% success rate on that would be a fail, because they just cannibalized instead of doing it in a way you didn't expect
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Nov 16, 2019 09:06
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mllaneza posted:Okay, question for the thread. What's the easiest test you've set someone that got completely botched ?
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Nov 16, 2019 10:55
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Not a simple test per sé but I interviewed somebody once for a disk forensics position who failed to mount the image. Which is the first step.
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Nov 16, 2019 12:11
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Test wise, I'm not strictly speaking the target audience for this thread, but at my last job I had to do a simple forecasting test (here's five datasets, pick one and forecast it out for three years. Dead easy, I did all five because I'm a show off. I found out after I got the job that they introduced that test because the previous guy aced the competency based interview and then once he started couldn't do the actual job AT ALL. We're talking "could barely do sums in excel" bad. He was gone inside of three months, hence the vacancy.
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Nov 16, 2019 12:21
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spankmeister posted:It's always DNS anyway Sometimes it's not!! I'm not a network person anymore, but I get pulled into troubleshooting network/firewall issues since I'm the 'security guy', but I recently had a fun network experience that I think you all will appreciate. My company recently implemented an on-premise video bridge since we have a pretty robust internal WAN and most of the video traffic is internal. Everything seems OK until we start testing external connectivity via a proxy that sits in our DMZ. Calls go just dandy until exactly 30 minutes and the external feed drops. The remote side just seems to stop sending video and the external call ends. Happens with multiple remote clients, so not just a one-off. Tickets are opened, vendors are notified, tests are run, firewalls are blamed. A note on this particular vendor (they recently dropped the -com from their name): they insisted we disable all the VTC algos on the firewalls, no h323 h245, SIP, no nothing, just pass it all thru, the whole loving range of ephemerals. Fine, I don't actually care so I figure out how to do overrides the right way (mildly counterintuitive in Palo Alto) and open up the requisite ranges. As expected the vendor blames the firewall "timeouts" for the dropped calls, various ideas are thrown around. The funny thing is, there are no timeouts that are exactly 30 minutes that I can find in the firewall. UDP is 60 seconds for session timeout, TCP is an hour for half-open connections. Various zone protection settings are checked, nothing seems to match. Finally packet captures are made and sessions recorded. From the proxy video appliance, traffic just..stops being received from the remote host, exactly 30 minutes in. The damndest thing. The firewall reports that all sessions close naturally, and nothing unusual shows up in the pcaps--except one thing, oddly enough the proxy seems to be suddenly sending ICMP port unreachables to the remote host. But these ICMP messages only show up in the firewall's pcaps, not the proxy. Hmmm. Digging through the pcaps, I randomly take a look at the layer 2 info in Wireshark. Wait, what the heck is SensorMatic? That proxy is a Dell physical server. MAC does not match the server. Where the hell are these ICMP's coming from? Turns out there was some forgotten physical security box on the DMZ that does not respond to ICMP so you can't ping it, seems to share the private IP of the proxy but does not generate any arp entries to cause the proxy to see it as a conflict. And this thing has some insane network setting such that it gets bored and responds to random UDP packets with ICMP unreachables--not immediately--but exactly 30 minutes after the traffic starts  So of course the unreachables get to the remote end, it stops sending traffic, the VTC call times out since it's not getting any data from the remote side, and it looks like a firewall problem. Moral of the story: keep your inventories updated and always allow ICMP
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Nov 17, 2019 08:10
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quote:always allow ICMP I'm leaving this in spoilers because this is exactly why I'll cut you.
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Nov 17, 2019 08:39
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RFC2324 posted:How many of the "incorrect" ones worked? None. Correct means the monitor and the computer both turned on. Of six machines, given all the cables, only two had power to both the computer and the monitor. Since the four incorrectly configured workstations all had different mistakes, I'm assuming the two correctly set up workstations got that way by sheer chance. The six power strips only plug into the wall. The six power cords for the computer could plug into the monitor or the computer at one end, but the other end only plugs in to the power strip. The six power cords for the monitor could connect to the monitor or the computer at one end, but the other end only plugs in to the computer. One of the four failed setups had a cable connected to the computer at both ends. I appreciate that you're trying to give the benefit of the doubt here, but the person I was testing plugged a power cable in to a computer at both ends and then came and told me they were done. They hosed up. Badly.
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Nov 17, 2019 08:58
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... did they think the test was to plug in all the cords as fast as possible, accuracy be damned?
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Nov 17, 2019 09:09
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Malachite_Dragon posted:... did they think the test was to plug in all the cords as fast as possible, accuracy be damned? I stopped a guy from destroying a video scaler/switcher at a previous Event AV job who thought that method was the way to go. The warehouse manager found him a job with the moving company next building over shortly afterwards.
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Nov 17, 2019 09:57
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Malachite_Dragon posted:... did they think the test was to plug in all the cords as fast as possible, accuracy be damned? Sometimes people in these things just have absolutely no idea what they're doing and there's not a reasonable explanation for what happened. I get tickets escalated to me where the helpdesk tech literally didn't try anything to fix the problem before giving up.
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Nov 17, 2019 11:44
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Thankfully we have full support of the service desk manager to kick any escalated tickets back down if they didn’t do their due diligence. Half the time I’ll just link a KB article that I’ve already written for some GPO exclusion process or whatever, their admin accounts have appropriate delegation to the right groups.
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Nov 17, 2019 12:26
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I'm not necessarily against the practise of rebooting a device if it's acting up and you can't figure out why - providing that some attempt to figure it out has been made and you've copied any logs that only exist in RAM out first. But if you reboot to clear up an issue and then it comes back four days later, the fix isn't to just reboot it again and close the ticket until you next get a report of an issue. Maybe you set up some more in-depth monitoring, maybe you up the log verbosity and ship them somewhere, maybe you open a case with the vendor. You don't just consider it normal and 'yeah it does that sometimes'. No, rebooting on a schedule isn't a fix either.
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Nov 17, 2019 16:21
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Thanks Ants posted:I'm not necessarily against the practise of rebooting a device if it's acting up and you can't figure out why - providing that some attempt to figure it out has been made and you've copied any logs that only exist in RAM out first. But if you reboot to clear up an issue and then it comes back four days later, the fix isn't to just reboot it again and close the ticket until you next get a report of an issue. Maybe you set up some more in-depth monitoring, maybe you up the log verbosity and ship them somewhere, maybe you open a case with the vendor. You don't just consider it normal and 'yeah it does that sometimes'. And with dtrace in Windows, there's no excuse not to go debug the issue at runtime.
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Nov 17, 2019 18:14
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Thanks Ants posted:I'm not necessarily against the practise of rebooting a device if it's acting up and you can't figure out why - providing that some attempt to figure it out has been made and you've copied any logs that only exist in RAM out first. But if you reboot to clear up an issue and then it comes back four days later, the fix isn't to just reboot it again and close the ticket until you next get a report of an issue. Maybe you set up some more in-depth monitoring, maybe you up the log verbosity and ship them somewhere, maybe you open a case with the vendor. You don't just consider it normal and 'yeah it does that sometimes'. Yeah, I am not against rebooting to temporarily relieve an issue, especially if it's causing a production issue, but do not close the ticket, keep it open for monitoring, and do things to TS the issue.
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Nov 17, 2019 22:58
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mllaneza posted:None. Correct means the monitor and the computer both turned on. 
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Nov 18, 2019 03:23
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ewiley posted:Sometimes it's not!!
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Nov 18, 2019 03:32
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I might have missed it, I was looking several minutes after so arp might have expired. But yeah I've no clue how the traffic got there and why the drat thing started complaining exactly 30 min later. What's even more fucky is the broken device is 2 switches away on a large, sparse vlan.could be a loop somewhere 
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Nov 18, 2019 03:47
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I kinda will tell people that the fact our communications work as well as they do is a bit of a miracle. The last page of this thread is not changing my stance there.
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Nov 18, 2019 04:13
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When I started in the call center, I was in a training group with two guys. One was the department director's little brother, who had studied horticulture in college and wanted to be a high-tech farmer, DGAF about IT, but needed a job to get ahead of his student loans; the other was an extremely high strung white guy with one of those ego/self-loathing type personalities that's a pain in the rear end to deal with. One of the common issues we had to fix was broken disk encryption keys. We had a 3rd party FDE suite, and unlocking it meant the user had to call in, read us a long string of hex, then we would enter that, read back another long string of hex, and the user would be prompted to reset their password. It's pretty loving simple. Biff, let's call him Biff, has not been paying attention all afternoon. I do a flawless simulated encryption call to demonstrate. Our trainer then hands the reins over to Biff. An hour later, the trainer and I are both IMing each other on the side about how utterly hopeless Biff is, while Technofarmer Pete is idly reading stuff about tractors on his phone. Biff made it through two weeks of training and one week of actual work before getting summarily fired for being, essentially, incompetent. And being the sort of incompetent that is convinced there's no way he's actually loving up. Technofarmer Pete left of his own volition a few months later, after his brother decided the direction management wanted to take the call center was bullshit. Big bro is a big wig in Silicon Valley, and Technofarmer Pete is following his very specific but okay dream in NorCal. The punchline? I forgot that I'd friended Biff on Facebook. Couple years later, someone messages me and says, "Hey, if you know Biff, you should know he's a sociopath and an abuser, and he's been hurting his girlfriend for months now. If you're anywhere near him, you should get the gently caress out immediately." 
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Nov 18, 2019 06:08
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mllaneza posted:Okay, question for the thread. What's the easiest test you've set someone that got completely botched ? I worked at a place that made java browser games in 2005 or so and it was always fun to see the head marketing head into the glass interview room with someone. Sometimes they got out not 30 seconds later, and when you asked what happened, he'd say the interview went:  hi! nice to have you here. so you're here for position [x]. do you know what we do? have you looked at our website? no ok I guess the interview's over then.
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Nov 18, 2019 11:51
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mllaneza posted:Okay, question for the thread. What's the easiest test you've set someone that got completely botched ? When I did get the job, my boss told me that one of the other candidates did infact know the FSMO roles, which only confirmed my bosses suspicions that he saw the guy using his phone to get the answers... oops. Fast forward a few years, I now hire guys using the same test - I once interviewed a guy who was really cocky about his technical ability and he even said "I will be the best candidate you speak to, today" - which, from a technical perspective was absolutely true... He certainly got higher marks than any of the other candidates on the test. However, he managed to botch a test we didn't even realise that we had set. I work on quite a big site and on this particular day I had a meeting room right at the back so it was a fair walk to get to the room. After the interview we were escorting him off the premises when we bumped into one of my other bosses who said hello. He basically complained that he wasn't coping very well with the long walk so we decided if he can't do 1 walk across site without looking absolutely wrecked, it's going to be a problem. He was a slightly unfit gentleman, to put it politely and we work a massive site.
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Nov 18, 2019 15:54
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My boss told me about one of the other guys that interviewed for the position that I have now. He was interviewed fairly well, had the technical chops, but after he left the reception told my boss that he super rude and arrogant when checking in and waiting in the lobby. Needless to say, he never got a call back.
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Nov 18, 2019 18:46
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Arquinsiel posted:Something is fucky here. If there were no ARP entries then how was traffic being directed to the MAC? If I had to guess, it was likely sitting on a trunk and passively watching traffic. Once it saw “hey thirty minutes of sustained traffic” it started to ICMP: Destination Unreachable Bomb the far end. No inbound traffic needed. But yeah, if it doesn’t respond to ARP then I’m not seeing how that box could be managed any way other than local console connection (or maybe a static entry in the table?)
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Nov 18, 2019 19:31
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My do-nothing coworker was fired two weeks ago, leaving our IT Support personnel team reduced to two individuals. My boss just announced that he's taking a new role with another company and will be gone in three weeks. panic time
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Nov 18, 2019 19:50
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This wasn't for IT, but the dumbest test failure I remember was when we were trying to get someone in short-term for some data entry catchup. One of the common problems was mistakes (particularly transpositions) in entry not being double-checked or corrected, sometimes resulting in numbers that were hundreds or thousands of dollars off from where they should be. So one part of the interview test was to review a hundred or so rows of data for errors, against the source material. They were told exactly how many errors there were, and to check each entry and highlight the cells green or red depending on whether they were accurate or not. I think it was something like 3 errors out of 100 entries, but the interviewee was told exactly how many errors were present. Out of 10 people interviewed the day I was running the test, three of them said there were no errors. Even after being told the exact number of errors. Moreover most of them didn't even highlight any cells. I ended up doing the data entry myself and another employee double-checked the entries. We didn't hire anyone who interviewed.
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Nov 18, 2019 20:30
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Not a test, but I train new people pretty often here, and one of the first tasks I'll give them is a type of ticket that involves copy/pasting from a web page directly into the worklog. I can figure out if they'll succeed or not based off of how badly they struggle copy and pasting. So far, I've only had one new hire understand what I meant by "just press ctrl+a" and do it in less than 30 seconds. It made me want to cry in happiness. He even alt-tabbed back to the ticket by himself! One guy still didn't understand ctrl+c six months after working that job. He somehow lasted a year before getting fired.
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Nov 18, 2019 20:38
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Renegret posted:Not a test, but I train new people pretty often here, and one of the first tasks I'll give them is a type of ticket that involves copy/pasting from a web page directly into the worklog. I can figure out if they'll succeed or not based off of how badly they struggle copy and pasting. I've trained people at the "having a hard time grasping ctrl+[n] commands" level of talent and hooooooboy. I had a few who really got it (like, they legitimately were good at problem solving, but had never been turned loose on computers before), but the ones who were incompetent because they were too lazy to take notes or whatever you have to do when you're like me and you can't remember where you left your rear end if you stand up too fast...gently caress those guys. (Almost inevitably guys, but I did have one woman with the kind of ego you usually see on teenage boys named Chad whose dads own the dealership. She wasn't interesting, just really full of herself and couldn't follow directions, so she didn't get her contract renewed.) My least favorite was the dude who leaked the master Mac password, and was told under no uncertain circumstances to never do it again. So the next time, he said in the ticket, "I'm not supposed to do this, but I don't have time to wait for the temp password," and handed it out again. The third time he handed it out, the guy on my team who's never thrown a punch in anger admitted he was having a hard time not flattening that dumbfuck in the break room. ...so obviously, they kept him around for another 6 months until his contract expired. Apparently he was shocked, SHOCKED, that he wasn't getting converted 
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Nov 18, 2019 20:47
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Dirt Road Junglist posted:I've trained people at the "having a hard time grasping ctrl+[n] commands" level of talent and hooooooboy. I had a few who really got it (like, they legitimately were good at problem solving, but had never been turned loose on computers before), but the ones who were incompetent because they were too lazy to take notes or whatever you have to do when you're like me and you can't remember where you left your rear end if you stand up too fast...gently caress those guys. I have a lot of patience for not knowing keyboard shortcuts because I sure as hell didn't know ctrl+a when I started. But someone told me once, and that was it. We had a running problem here for a bit where all we hired were temps, but management was requiring they all had CCNAs even though very few of the full time employees had one. So they were really scraping the bottom of the barrel of candidates and there was usually a good reason why someone had a CCNA but was desperate enough for a temp job that paid jack poo poo.
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Nov 18, 2019 21:01
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my cat is norris posted:My do-nothing coworker was fired two weeks ago, leaving our IT Support personnel team reduced to two individuals. Nope, it's coasting time. It's not your fault that you're criminally understaffed, nor is it your responsibility to fix it. Just put in 40 hours of work every day and leave at 5 on the dot. You don't owe them poo poo, and if they want to MAKE it your responsibility, then the title and pay bump, plus hiring authority should go a long to making those 80 hour weeks worth it long term. Come up with some bland line of mealy mouthed corporate-ese that places the blame where it belongs, and respond to any instances of "get it done, NOW!" with it. Something like: "Due to chronic short staffing, the IT support team is experiencing a large backlog of work. We are currently triaging tickets while leadership works to resolve the underlying causes. Your ticket will be worked on in the order it was received, based on the severity metrics posted (url)here(/url). If you have any questions or concerns, please direct them to Boss's Boss, Thank you for your patience, Norris"
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Nov 18, 2019 21:10
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Methylethylaldehyde posted:Nope, it's coasting time. It's not your fault that you're criminally understaffed, nor is it your responsibility to fix it. Just put in 40 hours of work every day and leave at 5 on the dot. You don't owe them poo poo, and if they want to MAKE it your responsibility, then the title and pay bump, plus hiring authority should go a long to making those 80 hour weeks worth it long term. My boss is doing that for my team right now, and it's glorious  "They won't know how badly they hosed up if we keep fixing everything. Let something burn for once."
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Nov 18, 2019 21:30
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mllaneza posted:I'm leaving this in spoilers because this is exactly why I'll cut you. Some "IT professionals" I've encountered in my career need a printout of it stapled to their forehead.
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Nov 18, 2019 21:36
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Today I learned that ctrl+a is a thing. A thing I should be using. A lot. How did I not know about this beautiful shortcut before now?
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Nov 18, 2019 22:41
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Don't forget Ctrl+E, and Ctrl+U. I would have torn out far less of my hair over the years if everyone I've had to watch over their shoulders had leveled up to fast travel in Unix
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Nov 18, 2019 22:46
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Shift-arrow keys And Ctrl-shift-arrow keys
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Nov 18, 2019 22:52
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Ctrl + 1 and Ctrl + 2 were useful for Single and Double space in Word. I haven't used those since I was in school though.
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Nov 18, 2019 23:26
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My favourite is shift-F3 in Word to toggle the case of an entire block of text. Comes in handy when something all in block caps ends up in your desk amd you need to make it usable.
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Nov 18, 2019 23:37
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if you press space to scroll down a page you can press shift+space to go back up to what you scrolled past
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Nov 18, 2019 23:41
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Data Graham posted:Don't forget Ctrl+E, and Ctrl+U. It's funny the shortcuts we get used to using. I rarely view source in browsers but I always use ctrl+U to do it. Meanwhile I really should use ctrl+e but I always use the mouse to click the address bar. I always use F12 in MS Office programs to save-as, since the ribbon bar added extra clicks to save-as. But that doesn't work in any other programs which is kind of frustrating. It took me years to get used to using win+d (bring desktop forward) instead of win+m (minimize everything).
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Nov 18, 2019 23:54
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