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Vargatron posted:Does the term "internal customer" bother anybody else, or is it just me? jfc, they're our coworkers, we don't need to set up departments like we're a completely separate service entity. Whenever I hear someone earnestly talking about “internal customers” I think about Max Barry’s novel Company, where everyone works for this massive generic corporation but nobody knows what the company actually does outside of the CEO, no one’s allowed to ask, and every department is just providing a service to some other department. Haven’t touched that book in almost 20 years and I honestly don’t remember if it was even any good, but that bit stuck with me.
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Feb 7, 2024 20:28
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We had people use that term in our company and the CEO removed them, possibly somewhat related. I think the team was based on billable work though so they had to track when time was spent not billing customers. The issue was they were trying to actually bill other departments lmao
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Feb 7, 2024 22:09
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Sepist posted:We had people use that term in our company and the CEO removed them, possibly somewhat related. I think the team was based on billable work though so they had to track when time was spent not billing customers. The issue was they were trying to actually bill other departments lmao This gets thrown over the fence every once and a while, and I just tell them "Sure we can do that, and it will create a good 10-20% overhead of admin waste. It'll also foster an environment where department head X doesn't ask for Y even though they really should, because it hits his department budget and looks bad. So even if he does ask, we will start quibbling over how many hours it took for Joe Developer to do his stuff." Just do a steering committee, let the business throw everything they want on the board, and force a decision maker to actually prioritize things. It's not hard. The only place I like to see direct resource billing done is on capex projects, so you can bill internal resource time against that project so it's properly accounted for. ie internal resources aren't taken for granted when doing new projects. Makes it clearer that there is a cost to actually implement <dumb thing no one needs> beyond the cost to just buy it.
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Feb 7, 2024 22:24
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Nuclearmonkee posted:Just ... force a decision maker ... prioritize things. It's not hard. I mean, it's the right answer, but lmao
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Feb 7, 2024 22:30
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The Fool posted:I mean, it's the right answer, but lmao Ok maybe "not complex". It took a long time to actually get a functional steering committee.
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Feb 7, 2024 22:42
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If anybody lands at a place like that then please know how rare it is. Cherish it.
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Feb 7, 2024 22:42
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Nuclearmonkee posted:Ok maybe "not complex". It took a long time to actually get a functional steering committee. Our IT steering committee is filled with people with no technical background to be able to make a knowledge based decision RE: application projects As such, we get garbage programs from garbage vendors that don’t meet our customers needs. Hooray!
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Feb 7, 2024 23:08
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Reoxygenation posted:I also hate it, but sometimes it does help to have a different label to distinguish stuff that's internal vs external, but in most cases it's a superfluous term, especially when it comes to IT, imo We use it in this respect. Ultimately our IT department is acting as liaisons between the company and a bunch of 3rd party vendors. We serve the other departments while our vendors serve us.
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Feb 7, 2024 23:18
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made the classic mistake of forgetting to treat a CEO at a client as a tempermental baby in an email today
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Feb 7, 2024 23:26
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ziasquinn posted:made the classic mistake of forgetting to treat a CEO at a client as a tempermental baby in an email today lol there's like 5 different styles of "executive communication" I have to use depending on the user addressed in e-mail because some professors will get extremely petulant that you didn't use Dr. <CHARNAME>, as the salutation.
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Feb 7, 2024 23:36
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I'm so glad I have never had to do "white glove" support. Also glad that at my side job I can basically get away with any kind of communication although I try to be polite to everyone and deferential to upper management. Also my boss and I pinch-hit for each other constantly so if upper management is being particularly stupid in an email chain I have him respond to it because he's better at hiding when he wants to end a sentence with "you idiot." I've got an appointment with Parahexavoctal tomorrow for a resume write/re-write, hopefully I can start getting more responses with a better resume. It's rough, I've gotten some cold-calls for stuff that's in the right salary range but in a specialty I haven't worked in for like 4 years.
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Feb 8, 2024 00:04
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took the day off because i was too stressed and tired current mood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzP4_JT3Gfo (nsfw, swearing)
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Feb 8, 2024 01:35
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Vargatron posted:lol there's like 5 different styles of "executive communication" I have to use depending on the user addressed in e-mail because some professors will get extremely petulant that you didn't use Dr. <CHARNAME>, as the salutation. Lmao. First name or gtfo. Physicians, okay, sure. But buddy, nobody gives a single poo poo about your pHd E: outside of physicians only people I respect are getting Dr. — if I’m forced, you can bet they’re getting quarter-assed work
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Feb 8, 2024 01:54
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On behalf of MY WIFE, who find advising PhD candidates to be the most fulfilling part of her work as a professor, I feel compelled to point out that in terms of years of study, an MD is closer to a master's degree than a PhD.
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Feb 8, 2024 02:26
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i only call nurses doctors because they do all the actual work
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Feb 8, 2024 02:41
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nurse:doctor::helpdesk:sysadmin
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Feb 8, 2024 02:57
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tokin opposition posted:nurse:doctor::helpdesk:sysadmin this is 100% accurate Funnily enough, my partner is doing premed and as I type is watching a video by a nurse about polarization of the heart, and how ECGs work. compared to the textbook and lecture content (taught by a cardiologist), the nurse is light on the biochemistry and physics, but her clinical analysis and practical application is spot on. Pretty classic theory vs practice dichotomy. She’s also a former veterinary nurse and while vets are a biiiit more hands on vs doctors, they’re also pretty terrible at time management - another classic sysadmin trait! The Iron Rose fucked around with this message at 03:35 on Feb 8, 2024 |
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Feb 8, 2024 03:32
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Cat Army
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I was a vet tech for years before getting into IT and yes absolutely half your job is managing your doctor and shuffling them from appointment to appointment and reminding them what each appointment is for
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Feb 8, 2024 03:40
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tokin opposition posted:nurse:doctor::helpdesk:sysadmin Could not disagree more. If you have a helpdesk good enough for this to be true, I envy you.
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Feb 8, 2024 03:51
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tokin opposition posted:nurse:doctor::helpdesk:sysadmin Any much like helpdesk, nurses are either hyper competent or just the worst
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Feb 8, 2024 04:58
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tokin opposition posted:nurse:doctor::helpdesk:sysadmin That's really generous to doctors. Most doctors are like a level 3 support desk, they have a better understanding of how things work but are still most effective when they follow a script. There's a subset of doctors that develop processes and are more analogous to sysadmins or engineers, but there's no title difference in medicine so it's harder to tell them apart.
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Feb 8, 2024 05:06
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Titles are made up in IT anyway.
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Feb 8, 2024 05:50
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The Chad help desk vs the virgin sysadmin And buddy I wanna be a virgin
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Feb 8, 2024 06:13
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22 Eargesplitten posted:Titles are made up in IT anyway.
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Feb 8, 2024 06:33
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Most of the helpdesk staff I know could be replaced by a simple shell script that forwards incoming requests up the chain There are exceptions, but I'm trying to get them promoted off helpdesk
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Feb 8, 2024 09:34
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When I was in college I had a side job doing tech support. There were several clients varying doing both b2c and b2b. Since it was inbound it was pretty relaxed as you’d help people solve issues that annoyed them, so in general they were fairly happy. One of the companies I supported had a different sales strategy though. They approached businesses/organizations to sell desktops to their employees at a heavily discounted price compared to what you’d normally pay in store. Profit came by way of proposing 3-5 models and selling hundreds of them per project. The absolute worst people to deal with was when they did a project for a hospital. The QA for that project was not done well so we had a higher rate of hardware failures that had to be swapped. All employees were super nice about it after you’d explain the cause. Except doctors. They had the worst Karen energy of all people I ever dealt with in several years of tech support. Refused to follow any troubleshooting script to verify it was indeed a hardware defect and this group was the most prone to user errors. Most of them didn’t want to listen and at one point one of them even went “dO yOu KnOw HoW lOnG i StUdIeD tO bEcOmE a DoCtOr?!?”. I kindly asked if computer troubleshooting and repairs were also part of his studies, which finally made him shut up.
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Feb 8, 2024 09:46
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I'm giving my two weeks notice today. 50/50 odds they'll let me go immediately vs make me stay the entire notice period and I honestly don't know which I'd prefer
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Feb 8, 2024 14:21
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Gort posted:Most of the helpdesk staff I know could be replaced by a simple shell script that forwards incoming requests up the chain Its amazing how varied the term “helpdesk” really is. Minus the very worst dregs at my msp, most techs can handle reasonably difficult tasks and more senior titles generally reflect what someone can handle. As you say there are title exceptions in both directions but certainly not the rule.
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Feb 8, 2024 14:42
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At the place I’m leaving there’s one guy whose up on what development is doing, is pretty good at checking just about everything, has knowledge of coding and can resolve most calls in under ten minutes. There’s another guy who spent 3 hours with a customer’s ISP separating out the bands on the router because someone had mentioned that the WiFi printers only had a 2.4 radio. I got the customer next call. Their model connected over Ethernet. It just came from the same manufacturer as the WiFi printers This guys been here 3 years.
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Feb 8, 2024 14:46
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I work in at a small community college, been here about 2 years. The other two techs were surly last week about lack of new titles in X-number of years, or lack of advancement. There are about a dozen of us in total in the department. With this small a team, wouldnt any advancement probably be into a different job totally? Our tech duties are about Tier 2, and Im not really understanding the intended result just given that internally I dont see anywhere for them to move up if they dont want to expand into additional roles.
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Feb 8, 2024 14:53
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BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:At the place I’m leaving there’s one guy whose up on what development is doing, is pretty good at checking just about everything, has knowledge of coding and can resolve most calls in under ten minutes. Do you work for an MSP that doesn’t require your clients to use a supported network stack?
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Feb 8, 2024 15:11
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Cenodoxus posted:Whenever I hear someone earnestly talking about “internal customers” I think about Max Barry’s novel Company, where everyone works for this massive generic corporation but nobody knows what the company actually does outside of the CEO, no one’s allowed to ask, and every department is just providing a service to some other department. If you liked Company, and you are in this thread, you should check out The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross. Dry British humor + Cold War-ish spy agency in the modern era + some Lovecraftian stuff + IT professional = too drat good. It's the first in a series, so there'll be more after it. Extremely worth the time for this thread's fiction reading list.
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Feb 8, 2024 15:21
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Cyks posted:Do you work for an MSP that doesn’t require your clients to use a supported network stack? No I do tech support for a vendor that targets small businesses and am putting in notice today. We are not supposed to do network support and its out of scope but we end up having to do it all the time because small businesses have no understanding of whats included in their contract and "We have to deliver satisfaction for our customers."
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Feb 8, 2024 15:33
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Sometimes you have to fire a customer.
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Feb 8, 2024 15:48
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Vargatron posted:Sometimes you have to fire a customer. This is not how MSPs work though. Support everything as long as it can be billed. “Figure it out, how hard can it be”
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Feb 8, 2024 15:56
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BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:This guys been here 3 years. I don't blame people for this any more, if they want to quarter-rear end their entire work day and produce crap and nobody cares enough to haul them up for it, then more power to them. poo poo employees being allowed to have no desire to improve is a manager problem or a rotten company.
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Feb 8, 2024 16:10
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Nuclearmonkee posted:This gets thrown over the fence every once and a while, and I just tell them "Sure we can do that, and it will create a good 10-20% overhead of admin waste. It'll also foster an environment where department head X doesn't ask for Y even though they really should, because it hits his department budget and looks bad. So even if he does ask, we will start quibbling over how many hours it took for Joe Developer to do his stuff."
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Feb 8, 2024 16:25
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GreenNight posted:Open a support ticket. I've seen it where support asks for a csv of everyone and they add them all on the backend. We did, and the response was to use Privilege Cloud. They never told us that was even an option
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Feb 8, 2024 16:25
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Vulture Culture posted:If the company culture is aligned around the purpose of the incentive, chargebacks are a really good way of handling the situation where you're trying to do a platform migration to kill an expensive contract or license, and some BU insists on the old platform living longer than it has to It’s a great incentive to actually decom systems, or bleed the department that does not want to migrate because it’s not hurting them (enough) to commit reaources to it.
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Feb 8, 2024 16:37
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MJP posted:If you liked Company, and you are in this thread, you should check out The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross. Dry British humor + Cold War-ish spy agency in the modern era + some Lovecraftian stuff + IT professional = too drat good. It's the first in a series, so there'll be more after it. As a warning it was written in the 90s and a bit of the humor reflects that. It gets woker as times goes on.
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Feb 8, 2024 18:03
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