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See I thought it was really bad when I worked at a moving company and we had these gems: A few "servers" that were just like old XP(and sometimes even older Win98 and Win2000) machines running old vb apps. Like just winforms apps that would have a timer going that would repeatedly do some thing on the timer. There was a big problem with people randomly turning these machines off or closing the apps. A crazy email based API which was basically one of the above, except also needed outlook running so it could keep checking the mailbox to either do updates/inserts/deletes operations based on incoming email or send responses to retrieval requests. An actual server running as the domain controller/fax server/file sharing server on Windows 2000 Server edition. A main application that was a winforms app running off an access db file on a file share. But like dos applications and win3.1 apps seems like just next level poo poo.
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Nov 10, 2021 18:18
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goatface posted:Industrial 486s are beautiful things. I still see plenty of these in RTUs and other SCADA equipment currently in use.
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Nov 10, 2021 18:20
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They will outlive us all.
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Nov 10, 2021 18:25
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A particular GE RTU I sometimes deal with uses a Motorola 68000 as main processor. I think GE finally retired it after ~30 or so years, but it was only recently. Electronic devices (all devices, really) in electric infrastructure are expected to be used for a long rear end time. 10-20 service years are common. Additionally, it seems that many electric utilities/generators/transmission operators will consider new technology only once it has a proven track record of 20+ trouble-free years of service in industry. Unsurprisingly, a lot of boomers are involved.
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Nov 10, 2021 18:37
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StrangersInTheNight posted:Lol this is rich considering half the time these giant PDFs are an effort from IT to avoid doing their jobs and foisting it off onto the user instead. So your workers are dumb as poo poo and lazy.
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Nov 10, 2021 18:47
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StrangersInTheNight posted:Lol this is rich considering half the time these giant PDFs are an effort from IT to avoid doing their jobs and foisting it off onto the user instead. A critical part of IT support is to educate users, so they can prevent or fix issues themselves, freeing up IT to handle other, more important break-fix issues or projects. If users don't want to be educated to prevent downtime due to simple issues like "I lost my post-it with my password" or "I made everything on my screen big" then they're poo poo-rear end workers.
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Nov 10, 2021 18:59
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My favorite thing is when users teach themselves wrong things. Like maybe you have a load balancer, but to test an issue with a user you give them a direct address to an individual host that's usually behind the load balancer. Well that works fine for them, and you go to research further why. Then, they start telling their coworkers that IT fixed their problem by sending them to OurWebAppVM1 instead of OurWebApp so the load balancing slowly becomes very unbalanced as more and more users find out about this one quick trick.
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Nov 10, 2021 19:06
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Cthulu Carl posted:A critical part of IT support is to educate users, so they can prevent or fix issues themselves, freeing up IT to handle other, more important break-fix issues or projects.  Imagine every user as a boomer or gen xer who Will.Not.Learn. anything that isn't forced on them at gunpoint. I had a woman who was probably fifty six, tops, ask me for a paper version of a document "because I'm not good with computers". I was going to email her an attachment and the act of opening this was beyond her ken. The mistake here is assuming people are rational and reasonable, and not actually the files scene from Zoolander where they smash a computer because 'the files are IN the computer!'.
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Nov 10, 2021 19:49
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wilderthanmild posted:My favorite thing is when users teach themselves wrong things. You're technically load balancing....just uhh manually lol
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Nov 10, 2021 19:52
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A Festivus Miracle posted:
Oh no, users are dumb as poo poo, especially here. But it's still useful to educate people because someone will have it stick and that'll be one less future ticket. They'll probably still blow up batteries and mash feces into the keyboard, but by God they'll know how to fix the screen resolution. It also helps when you're the one with the gun. We just completed a domain migration and there's definitely at least a hundred users who haven't migrated. Guess who aren't going to be able to log in after Friday because we're killing the old domain. Adapt or die, fuckers.
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Nov 10, 2021 20:00
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vyst posted:You're technically load balancing....just uhh manually lol Manual load misbalancing
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Nov 10, 2021 20:12
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'That ticket never would have happened if IT had a gun.'
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Nov 10, 2021 20:16
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TotalLossBrain posted:A particular GE RTU I sometimes deal with uses a Motorola 68000 as main processor. I think GE finally retired it after ~30 or so years, but it was only recently. You can do so in a forward looking way. Things like analyzing fundamentals to predict what goes wrong, or stuff like simulating 20 years wear and tear by hitting it with a mallet every 30 seconds for a week. This all remains predictive. Great stuff to insure a consumer warranty program and write the manuals. But still just a guess at what happens during the service life. The only way to really know what happens over 20 years of service is to watch it for 20 years. So the conservative approach is to wait for 20 years of X number consumer users making Y warranty claims and suddenly your FMEA is subsidized and full of a shitload of data.
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Nov 10, 2021 20:39
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Samuel L. Hacksaw posted:
lol.. sounds like me. I work in a uni & agreed to help our network guy out with the simple stuff to take the pressure off him. A few weeks later he got knocked off his push bike & was off for about 6 months. He came back & a couple weeks later resigned as he'd got another job. Now a few years & a couple changes of management later, I'm somehow lead network guy.... Ah well, as long as I can blag it out for a couple more years I can retire 
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Nov 10, 2021 20:50
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These are probably the two most important skills I've developed in my career. 
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Nov 10, 2021 21:30
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A Festivus Miracle posted:
I'm extremely far removed from IT, but every now and then I have to explain Computer Things to a person in my office. They are older, but perfectly capable of learning how to use a computer to do their job, but completely unwilling to do so. Here is an example: every year, central IT requires password resets. It's all automated. This person ignores the emails until they get locked out of their computer. So I have to log in to the server and open a browser so they can log into their email, which involves two-fingered typing IF they remember their email password (they don't). Then they look for the latest password reset email by scrolling slowly through the 3,000 unopened emails in the inbox while I say "Just search for it. Look, click on this search bar. Type in 'password reset. No not the address bar, the search bar." [peck...peck...peck] "Wait, this is your personal email, not your work email? It was sent to your work email which you can't log into because you ignored the password reset emails." So then someone has to go back to their computer and forward a password reset link to their personal email because talking them through navigating the IT website to the password reset is just not worth the trouble. OK, we're at the password reset finally. "Now enter your old password. Ok, go find your post-it note while I fix my lunch." -later- "No, look, it's 15 characters now, both upper and lowercase, a number, and one of these symbols. You good?" About half the time it works out. This same person was due for a safety training a couple months back, for which I am a supervisor and responsible for making sure everyone in the office is current on. It's a standard slideshow followed by a quiz at the end. The old supervisor for this used to just give them printed out answers because making it all the way through the training was such a hassle. This time, I conveniently couldn't find the answer sheet and told them to take the entire training like they're supposed to and take the quiz at the end like all the rest of us. At the quiz portion (which you should be able to pass without even taking the training because you've been here for 20 YEARS TAKING THIS EVERY YEAR) the entire training slideshow is in a side pane, which is searchable, so you can literally ctrl+f every one of the 30 answers. I went and hid from them and came back to find that another coworker took pity and found a printed out copy of the safety handbook for this training so they could look for the answers in a paper copy of it. When they print anything, they always have to reconnect to the office printer, which involves at least 5 test pages printed out. The department IT guy was just down in their office a little while ago today, so it seems like I'm off the hook for a while now.
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Nov 10, 2021 21:53
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HenryJLittlefinger posted:I'm extremely far removed from IT, but every now and then I have to explain Computer Things to a person in my office. They are older, but perfectly capable of learning how to use a computer to do their job, but completely unwilling to do so. Here is an example: every year, central IT requires password resets. It's all automated. This person ignores the emails until they get locked out of their computer. So I have to log in to the server and open a browser so they can log into their email, which involves two-fingered typing IF they remember their email password (they don't). Then they look for the latest password reset email by scrolling slowly through the 3,000 unopened emails in the inbox while I say "Just search for it. Look, click on this search bar. Type in 'password reset. No not the address bar, the search bar." [peck...peck...peck] "Wait, this is your personal email, not your work email? It was sent to your work email which you can't log into because you ignored the password reset emails." So then someone has to go back to their computer and forward a password reset link to their personal email because talking them through navigating the IT website to the password reset is just not worth the trouble. OK, we're at the password reset finally. "Now enter your old password. Ok, go find your post-it note while I fix my lunch." -later- "No, look, it's 15 characters now, both upper and lowercase, a number, and one of these symbols. You good?" About half the time it works out. These people should not have these jobs. It's a stupid comment, but these are people who should be digging holes or stocking shelves and working toll booths. Something simple while younger people with some initiative get poo poo done.
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Nov 10, 2021 22:02
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my email is now hidden behind two party authentication. to check emails i have to request they text my boss and wait for my boss to get back to me with the pass code to log in. and i can't send emails now. he blames me for "clicking emails". the last time something hosed up he took away my administrative privileges so i can't even update my computer let alone download something. i have no idea who he gets computer advice from but the only thing i can do on the computer now is surf online.
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Nov 10, 2021 22:20
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InsertPotPun posted:
So what malware did you get infected with?
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Nov 10, 2021 22:31
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Cthulu Carl posted:A critical part of IT support is to educate users, so they can prevent or fix issues themselves, freeing up IT to handle other, more important break-fix issues or projects. In my IT support role, there are so many users who don’t even want to learn. Doctors will straight up call in and get me on remote support then just walk away, hang up, and expect me to fix it. Also they love to submit tickets bitching about how things work, that aren’t even errors, they just don’t like it.
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Nov 10, 2021 22:43
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for the past couple months I've been in the routine of going into the office, staying for the morning stand-up meeting and then leaving to work at home once certain that my boss would be doing the same that day (which has been about 90% of the time as of late) apparently somebody told on me because my boss mentioned my "disappearances" during our 1:1 today, though he was at last smart enough to realize that he couldn't discipline me for anything given that I'd only been WFH when he had bad news is that he's going to start coming into the office much more often. good news is that this is the last straw I needed (after suffering through a pitiful raise and my company's refusal to consider any sort of ongoing WFH policy) to start searching for a new gig, a search that I will be conducting entirely while stuck in the office
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Nov 10, 2021 23:27
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InsertPotPun posted:my email is now hidden behind two party authentication. to check emails i have to request they text my boss and wait for my boss to get back to me with the pass code to log in. Just want to say I appreciate this rare and correct use of "two party authentication." Also lol at many of these posts.
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Nov 11, 2021 01:33
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HenryJLittlefinger posted:This same person was due for a safety training a couple months back, for which I am a supervisor and responsible for making sure everyone in the office is current on. It's a standard slideshow followed by a quiz at the end. The old supervisor for this used to just give them printed out answers because making it all the way through the training was such a hassle. This time, I conveniently couldn't find the answer sheet and told them to take the entire training like they're supposed to and take the quiz at the end like all the rest of us. At the quiz portion (which you should be able to pass without even taking the training because you've been here for 20 YEARS TAKING THIS EVERY YEAR) the entire training slideshow is in a side pane, which is searchable, so you can literally ctrl+f every one of the 30 answers. I went and hid from them and came back to find that another coworker took pity and found a printed out copy of the safety handbook for this training so they could look for the answers in a paper copy of it.
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Nov 11, 2021 01:57
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Powered Descent posted:These are probably the two most important skills I've developed in my career. I've worked for a long time for a single business, 2 other office staff besides me (one of which is the owner) in a trucking company, and they're well aware this is a ton of what I do. But their eyes also glaze over the second I even mention words like "Excel functions" or "network printer/storage" so unless they suddenly take an interest in data entry and management I'm fairly safe.
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Nov 11, 2021 02:35
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ArbitraryC posted:at bare minimum live classes and proctored exams . The place I work at does this for electrical training, LOTO, and probably some other stuff I'm not aware of. Otoh, Annual refreshers, ethics in research and government contracting? Lol that's for CBT with bullshit multiple choice at the end
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Nov 11, 2021 02:49
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Our latest training course gave you the option to skip straight to the test. If you got anything wrong though, you were forced to read through the whole training before trying the test again.
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Nov 11, 2021 02:52
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Skanky Burns posted:Our latest training course gave you the option to skip straight to the test. If you got anything wrong though, you were forced to read through the whole training before trying the test again. I had this but it was for every attempt at the test, the test was 50 questions long, randomized from a set of 100, not easy, did not tell you what you got wrong, and less than a 90 was failing. Unsurprisingly they had a 0% completion rate until some low level person was assigned to sit there for a week and copy down every single question and answer they could verify until they could pass the test every time.
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Nov 11, 2021 03:00
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zedprime posted:Slack auto responses are trying to tell me to live my best life. This is how we know that "AI" is basically bullshit. Slack, MS and Google have analysed billions of messages and responses and still can't come up with a suggestion that I'd ever want to actually use and probably wouldn't save me any time anyway.
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Nov 11, 2021 03:23
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ArbitraryC posted:Not to pin this on you personally because I'm well aware you have nothing to do with the policy or implementation but at the end of the day isn't this more the fault of your lovely work environment than the individual? I go through these sorts of trainings all the time because I work at sensitive sites and the reality is you can just mash through all the slides of things you're allegedly supposed to learn and do well enough at guessing after you eliminate the majority of clearly wrong answers to pass whatever pulse sensing benchmark exists as the end of chapter quiz. It's literally just safety training theater designed to kick liability cans down the road. The people supposed to learn stuff from these never learn things from them because they never were designed to teach anyone anything, it's all just administrative checkboxes that pay out a salary to do nothing safety officials. If there was any real intent to educate you'd have at bare minimum live classes and proctored exams for the material, but that never has been and never will be the actual goal. It's hard to fault people for failing at system that was never intended to work. Oh yeah, it’s absolutely a poorly implemented system. The training is hazardous materials stuff and it’s for the whole company. Everyone who has any contact with anything classified as hazardous has to stay current with the training, and each unit has one person who coordinates it for the employees in that unit. That coordinator is on the hook for everyones training in their unit. So this whole training fiasco is just me keeping the hazmat department from coming down on me for noncompliance. Fortunately my unit only works with two hazardous chemicals, both of them pretty low priority. I pay careful attention to everybody who uses them, make sure they have PPE and use it when necessary, keep them working under good fume hoods, and really do take the time to keep everyone educated and responsible. Even this one employee is fine with the chemical safety stuff in practice. I really do care about their safety and do everything I can to make it easy for everyone to stay safe. The funny thing is the hazardous materials department is also great to work with for the most part. They understand what’s going on in our unit, they respond to emails and phone calls immediately, and the actual acquisition, use, and disposal of chemicals is pretty rigorously controlled and smooth. But their culture of training and education is just bare bones and typical begrudging red tape. That bugs the poo poo out of me because any one person who is just doing the bare minimum training and certification with no real oversight from their supervisor could easily get their unit and maybe even the whole company into some deep poo poo. Like EPA coming in and just wrecking you deep poo poo.
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Nov 11, 2021 03:23
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Outrail posted:These people should not have these jobs. It's a stupid comment, but these are people who should be digging holes or stocking shelves and working toll booths. Something simple while younger people with some initiative get poo poo done. If they're too old to use "magic boxes" like my coworker calls them then they should loving retire or get another job. loving boggles the mind that these people that refuse to actually do their job don't find something else to do.
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Nov 11, 2021 05:09
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My work is having a staffing shortage (tons of auto claims came in), and they're also trying to fire a ton of people. Like, what
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Nov 11, 2021 05:18
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Extra row of tits posted:Can I tell a story that is more “Stupid poo poo my workmate did”? One of my contractors that I'm playing acting manager to did this. His job mostly consists of entering data from spreadsheets into two systems. He is fine at that. If there's not enough of that to do, he can pull cases and work them, albeit at a speed and accuracy that wouldn't allow us to keep him if it was his only job. He mentioned that his job can probably be done with an excel macro. We know this. My manager has even mentioned doing it. But nobody has the time, energy, or will to make it happen. I pretty much told him that it was a great idea, and to never mention it again. I think he understood.
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Nov 11, 2021 06:02
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Agoat posted:My work is having a staffing shortage (tons of auto claims came in), and they're also trying to fire a ton of people. Oooo one of my ex employers did this. They were short about thirty part time & casual staff, but were firing existing staff members at a rate of about one per fortnight. To make it more fun, they refused to allow new or existing staff any flexibility when it came to what shifts/hours they could work, it was basically "you will work these shifts, you cannot swap them, or you can quit". So staff were jumping ship for other organisations that had flexible shifts. I was in charge of recruiting, but then I got fired because I failed to magic thirty new employees out of my arse during a nationwide labour shortage. Good times!
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Nov 11, 2021 08:03
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My company has a plan to double the workforce, and hire another 60 new staff within a year. If people weren't quitting and the new starters were staying on, it'd almost be doable. Also no lockers for anyone while they try and implement a uniform for us to change into...
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Nov 11, 2021 09:28
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Agoat posted:My work is having a staffing shortage (tons of auto claims came in), and they're also trying to fire a ton of people. bee posted:Oooo one of my ex employers did this. They were short about thirty part time & casual staff, but were firing existing staff members at a rate of about one per fortnight. To make it more fun, they refused to allow new or existing staff any flexibility when it came to what shifts/hours they could work, it was basically "you will work these shifts, you cannot swap them, or you can quit". So staff were jumping ship for other organisations that had flexible shifts. I'm getting the feeling a lot of places are doing this because they think that nobody can start a competing business, and they might be right. Everyone is in debt, and people in debt can't put together the 30-50k to start a (simple) new business. There's basically zero chance of all the fired employees getting together and going "hey, we're basically an entire company, all we need is a business name and some startup funds" Which is a shame, because it needs to happen a lot more than it does.
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Nov 11, 2021 10:58
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^^^ in my scenario, there are lots of service providers in this particular sector and all of them are screaming out for more staff. My ex employer didn't even do reference checks. The employees can pick and choose where they want to work and they know it. Good luck to them, I say.
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Nov 11, 2021 11:50
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Dongsturm posted:I'm getting the feeling a lot of places are doing this because they think that nobody can start a competing business, and they might be right. Instead, I’m betting that it’s plain stupidity. They still have an outdated mindset of “go ahead and leave, don’t let the door hit you in the rear end, plenty more employees where you came from!” when that’s not the current reality.
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Nov 11, 2021 15:08
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They're fighting off migrants at the border because of how full up the country is, there must be an excess of workers desperate for jobs. The press wouldn't lie about such things.
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Nov 11, 2021 15:12
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Cthulu Carl posted:A critical part of IT support is to educate users, so they can prevent or fix issues themselves, freeing up IT to handle other, more important break-fix issues or projects. Of course, but there's knowing what the best way to educate someone is and adapting to that, instead of getting upset when they won't read your incredibly long pdf while on a deadline crunch. If you're going to take it upon yourselves to be educators, then you must also be as flexible as educators are and understand that each person learns differently and some people need hands-on guidance. That doesn't make them stupid, it makes them human. It also helps if you don't view the people you're teaching as scum.
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Nov 11, 2021 15:33
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goatface posted:They're fighting off migrants at the border because of how full up the country is, there must be an excess of workers desperate for jobs. The press wouldn't lie about such things. BUT
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Nov 11, 2021 16:58
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