More shit that pisses you off: What does that say about the quality of your emails?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > More shit that pisses you off: What does that say about the quality of your emails?

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Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

anthonypants posted:

Our print server admin just told me that changing a printer's default paper type can't be configured on the server, so a printer that incorrectly defaults to glossy paper needs to have that setting changed on each workstation. There've been work orders for printers that have had the wrong paper type or tray before, so now I know why it's taken her a week or two to complete those.

It's as though your print server admin has no idea that group policy templates or scripting exist even in the event that these words are truthful and accurate

# ¿ Oct 8, 2013 18:24

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 04:24

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

rolleyes posted:

This is management being spineless again. It is not your company's responsibility to train this guy to do the job he claimed to be qualified for, nor is it their place to act as social security for him.

I agree a little bit, but not completely. I wouldn't be happy if someone quit overnight without giving me a warning that they were unhappy with their job first. I would try not to go the other way around either. At the very least I'd offer a severance and an offer to help the employee try to find another job, especially if they were nice people who just turned out not to be a very good fit for the organization/role. If they're downright lazy or they're abusive towards coworkers or the company, they get whatever they get.

rolleyes posted:

There are a couple of points which could avert a firing:
- Has your boss actually brought up his poor performance with him and set out an improvement plan for him with targets to meet? If not then this should definitely be done first.

I almost unilaterally disagree with the notion of a "performance improvement plan" or whatever else Sloan-style management programs teach. All the prevailing research in the field has shown time and time again that job satisfaction and individual motivation are tied more to feelings of autonomy and being able to make a difference. If these aren't the problem, then the issues aren't with the individual, and we shouldn't act as though they are. One of the following is more likely:

The employee never had appropriate goals set for them in the first place, which makes the performance problem their manager's, not theirs. Look closely at the goals they already had and whether they're appropriate before trying to set new ones.
The employee doesn't have the skills necessary to cut the mustard in the position. Ask if this is because someone is unwilling to cross-train them (hostile work environments ahoy!), because the company or team itself does not adequately foster organizational learning, or if there are serious problems in the hiring process that allowed someone unqualified to make it through the interview process.
The employee is not a fit for the culture of the organization. If you can't make that work, part ways as amicably as you can.

A performance improvement plan is like saying, "yeah, I think they're just lazy, but I want to see if they can stop being lazy if they know they're being watched really closely." It's just a really counterproductive thing to do, and unless you've already made a significant investment in the employee and their relationship with the company, I don't think it makes sense to tie up a bunch of management's time measuring something that won't actually correlate to the employee's performance when they aren't being micromanaged and scrutinized.

rolleyes posted:

- Is there any training or qualifications he could get (outside of work time and on his own dime) which might improve matters?

Making someone's continued employment contingent on them spending their own time and money outside of work may get the company in serious trouble if a lawsuit ever arises from the situation. Don't do this. If you even suggest this, sure as poo poo don't do it in a system of record like an email or employee review.

rolleyes posted:

- Can he be reassigned to another position?

There's only two times that this is ever really a help. The first is if the person was hired into the wrong position in the first place, and they know it, and you know it. This will make things easier all around. The other circumstance is if an employee contract or regulatory requirement makes it very difficult to outright terminate the employee. If you do this for the second reason, be aware that you aren't disarming a bomb; you're having someone else in your company jump on a grenade.

rolleyes posted:

If none of that is a help then there's not really much choice. It's not nice having to fire someone and it's worse when you know it will cause them hardship, but sometimes it still has to be done.

I'd also suggest your boss has a look at your hiring process to see why he managed to get through it, as from your description it sounds like he's almost comically bad. If she wants to avoid having to fire under-performers then the easiest way to achieve that is to not hire them in the first place.

People tend to appreciate honesty. If a manager is having such serious problems with a subordinate that this approach is even being considered, there should be discussions opened where all that is laid out on the table. The employee should be asked directly if they think another company would be a better fit. If management knows another organization where they might work better, they should try to make an introduction and have the parting be on good terms rather than awful ones.

# ¿ Oct 19, 2013 21:49

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

hihifellow posted:

That's difficult to quantify since I've got enough work to do that I stopped babysitting him a long time ago, so I only know when other people either complain about him or I get stuck fixing his mistakes. The most recent one I know of is the potential loss of patient data after he re-imaged a computer without backing up anything on the local HDD. The department that uses this computer was re-staffed about 4 weeks ago and from what I heard orientation and training was non-existent; managerial problem there, the new group basically got handed the work of the old group and told to have at it. Nobody even knew they had network drives until about 3 days ago, so lots of locally saved data. So all he did was ask the new manager if any files were saved locally and went ahead and re-imaged it after she said no.

My professional opinion is that what happened wasn't this guy's mistake, and you shouldn't treat it as though it is. You have an IT environment where patient data that you are legally liable for underneath federal law is being allowed to be saved to locations where it is not auditable and not being backed up. In what hosed-up bizarro universe does this get to be a single person's fault? You don't even seem concerned about the lack of auditing, so what other HIPAA mandates is your company completely loving up and slacking off about?

hihifellow posted:

The computer is back in the IT department on our bench, powered off, until I can get to it on Monday and start looking at restoring the data. Depending on what was lost, legal might get involved as any loss of patient data gets filed as an incident, which goes straight to our lawyer and the bigwigs of medical.

You should be treating legal as an ally in this case. Understand the underlying causes of this issue -- which, as far as I can tell, do not at all involve this guy doing his job the exact way he was instructed -- and use the pressure from legal as incentive to implement better solutions. Legal explaining this to executives is a great motivator to allocate more budget money to this stuff. Your network drives should be mapped at logon. You should not allow patient data to be saved to local drives. This should all be covered in documents and training sessions co-sponsored by IT and legal that explain everyone's duties under Federal loving Law.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Oct 19, 2013

# ¿ Oct 19, 2013 21:55

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

hihifellow posted:

But it's reasons like this we don't wipe any computers for 30 days after they're retrieved, so his mistake was not doing a local backup and not following the usual procedure.

That's a different story, but you should still be looking at why people are allowed to save patient data to the local hard drive. Your system image should have C: permissions locked the hell down.

If you audit the other computers in your organization, you will find more patient data saved all over the place by mistake. I don't even need to ask whether these hard drives are being wiped properly before these computers are decommissioned, do I?

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 23:27 on Oct 19, 2013

# ¿ Oct 19, 2013 23:19

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

guppy posted:

I don't work in healthcare but I can't imagine that isn't a HIPAA violation, and even if it isn't it's dumb as gently caress.

It needs to be retained indefinitely and it isn't backed up. It needs to be audited for unauthorized access and disclosure, and the data isn't even known about. Legal needs to document and disclose the data loss to the insurance provider and they can't do it because the company doesn't even know what was on the drive. That's at least three right there.

# ¿ Oct 20, 2013 00:44

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

wintermuteCF posted:

Better on the way to the beer than after you've had the beer. Because the only thing better than a celebratory beer is a celebratory DUI

Or a celebratory accident after too many celebratory beers.

# ¿ Oct 22, 2013 14:41

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

stevewm posted:

In the US, Verizon Wireless (the largest carrier by far), currently charges $60 for 2GB on its "Share Everything" plan. All other devices on your account share this 2GB. Overages are $15 per GB.

It's also only another $10 for each additional 2 GB you want to add onto the plan, so it ends up not being that awful on a family plan.

# ¿ Oct 22, 2013 16:06

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Galler posted:

A 'winter coat' in Texas, at least when I lived in Dallas, was a windbreaker jacket at most.

I was in Florida for that March cold spell a few years ago and they opened up emergency homeless shelters because the overnight lows dipped into the forties. Mind blown.

# ¿ Oct 22, 2013 17:57

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Arven posted:

He has most likely worked there since TDM was relevant, and firing him would be an age discrimination lawsuit.

While I'm all in favor of efforts to keep more older talent in the workforce, "I don't want to learn the 30-year-old technology that drives the entire Internet" is a far cry from being solely an age-related problem.

# ¿ Oct 23, 2013 03:47

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

luminalflux posted:

Oddly enough it was scheduled by a dev (it's an internal "by devs for devs" thing), we just apparently have that many talks that need to be fit in

The Mythical Meeting-Month

# ¿ Oct 24, 2013 14:33

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

CatsOnTheInternet posted:

The absolute worst for me is getting "It's slow" tickets escalated to me from support with absolutely no other details. Outlook is slow. Citrix is slow. Internet is slow.

This is why I'd be a bad manager. If I was having a bad day and one of these landed in my queue, I'd probably storm over and fire someone. Seriously, if you're going to just parrot whatever the user tells you without drilling into the issue, then why don't I just cut out the middleman?

I know this is the bitching thread, and not the Solicit Answers to Your Problems thread, but you need to look deeper at the issue. What is your front-line support doing all day? Are they trying to get users off the phone as fast as possible so they can get back to anime forums, or are they so saddled with calls because of bad product experience that they have no time to take down more information and still get to everything? Do they know the questions to ask in order to troubleshoot a performance problem? If not, why not? Can your group work alongside their group on some of these problems, so they actually feel some sense of autonomy and get to know how these problems are constructed end-to-end?

In my experience, the laziest employees are usually the ones who know their jobs are bullshit, so you might have some luck finding them something to actually do besides acting like a secretary.

# ¿ Oct 25, 2013 04:01

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Raven457 posted:

... Have you ever worked at a help desk? I can't recall a single one I worked at where management actually encouraged this type of activity. The focus is always on having a low ASA (average speed of answer) and a low call handle time. When the choices were make numbers and keep my steady paycheck or actually give a poo poo and get bad schedules, management riding my rear end, or laid off, guess what I did?

I did phone support for five years, I worked in several environments where the NOC stayed on the phone with the problem reporter and engineer on call until the issue was resolved, and I ran a group of sysadmins that looped the helpdesk into everything we did whenever they had any interest in learning about it.

Trying to run a helpdesk like a grist mill is not only representative of bad organizational attitudes towards knowledge workers, it's also bad for the organization because the burnout and churn rates end up costing more than just keeping the staff minimally happy. Metrics-driven cultures can work great if you're measuring the right things. Companies should be focused on customer satisfaction and revenue as organizational KPIs. Anything else is just fluffy bullshit to make executives think they know what they're doing, because math.

wintermuteCF posted:

This is true. This is also unfortunately a short-sighted thing to do, usually suggested by super-smart "business consultants" with MBA's who've never really had to interact with a helpdesk. They miss the point.

When I call a helpdesk, I'm not as concerned about with how long I had to wait (within reason). I'm more concerned with, once I get someone, getting my problem solved effectively. The overall user experience is what's most important, and getting rushed into an unsuccessful conclusion (oh hey wait for a desktop person to get there because I have to get off the phone immediately okthxbye) isn't the way to get there.

And this is what a lot of companies are starting to recognize, as more and more of them realize that the whole Sloan School style of management is largely bullshit, especially with employees younger than Gen X. More of these options in the labor market is only going to be a good thing, since the competitive advantage will crush companies that run lovely customer service organizations and they'll be forced to adapt or die out.

The incredible thing about management is that it really isn't very hard to do well if you understand your employees as people instead of data points in the organizational psych paper you wrote as a freshman.

# ¿ Oct 25, 2013 15:00

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

QPZIL posted:

Unfortunately, the "IT management certifications" like ITIL preach just this thing, so IT management practices are moving that way.

1st level support (helpdesk) takes calls and puts in tickets. Unless it can be fixed quickly over the phone, it's just escalated to level 2
2nd level support (sys admins, technicians) do the majority of the troubleshooting and fixing. If they can't, they escalate to level 3
3rd level support is calling vendor support, which is a hell where sys admins go to when they die

It's been a while since I went through the ITIL cert, but that's the gist of it. Unless you're getting paid well, "take calls and type tickets" is a crappy job.

Even in ITIL, this is pretty much completely untrue. The Service Desk management stuff makes copious distinctions between "call center" and "help desk," and is pretty descriptive about when a company should use each. The nature of IT as a cost center in most organizations causes executive pressure to do pretty much everything wrong. The cost center bit is largely caused by ineffective managers who think they "align themselves with the business" because they occasionally sit in on another department's meetings, but they do nothing proactive to get the right technology resources out in front of key business initiatives. Lots of companies ended up outsourcing IT because predatory consulting company salespeople are trained to jump on every whiff of a new business opportunity with a client, and internal IT people don't generally do that. Baby, bathwater, meet window.

As a guy who's pretty aligned in the DevOps movement and the web startup space it occupies, it might surprise you to know that I don't completely disagree with ITIL on its face. Even back a whole decade ago, Kevin Behr, Gene Kim and the other Visible Ops guys did a really great job of enumerating how to implement ITIL in a book that was all of 90 pages, and they did it in a way that's remarkably similar to what most people call DevOps nowadays.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 15:40 on Oct 25, 2013

# ¿ Oct 25, 2013 15:35

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Finally got my VPC-to-VPC Openswan VPN working on EC2, thanks to Amazon's not-quite-100% incorrect documentation!

# ¿ Oct 26, 2013 04:53

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Kyrosiris posted:

That's not how progressive taxation works.

Viewing the situation only in terms of income taxation is a short-sighted and narrow view of the problem. A good CPA would backhand you for that.

Some other taxes and many subsidies are not progressive but are levied based on your gross annual income. For example, the American Opportunity Credit (Hope credit) is available to individuals earning $80,000 or less or married couples earning $160,000 or less, and can provide up to $2,500 in tax writeoffs. So if you're going from $80,000 to $80,001 and you have a college-aged child, you may have lost $2,499 per year.

In most cases, I don't think it's worth worrying about. If you're right at the border of one of those cutoffs and your raise is so low that it doesn't cover that difference, you may have bigger problems. But your current base salary is your biggest bartering chip when negotiating new salaries with new employers, so it's silly in the long run not to run it up as high as you can even if it costs you for a year or two.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Oct 27, 2013

# ¿ Oct 27, 2013 21:01

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Lum posted:

I was thinking more of realising that it was a poo poo idea and getting rid, but ok I guess. BYOD has been around a few years now hasn't it?

BYOD has been around pretty much forever if you count consultants and all othet on-sites who don't get assigned computers by the companies they're contracting with.

As more and more software moves to the web, BYOD has less and less impact. Might as well let users bring the UI experience they're comfortable with.

# ¿ Oct 28, 2013 04:40

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Sickening posted:

Talk about overrated. Pretzel buns were never good.

Someone's been eating at lovely pubs and not great German restaurants.

# ¿ Oct 28, 2013 20:01

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

evol262 posted:

These are probably the same devs who believe that AWS and "the cloud" will obviate the need for sysadmins and let devs rule the world.

Nobody's claiming that it will obviate the need for sysadmins the globe over, but it does change the dynamics quite a bit, especially within small orgs using PaaS deliberately so they don't have to focus on systems management.

# ¿ Oct 31, 2013 06:26

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

evol262 posted:

It definitely changes the dynamics of it, and my statement was a little hyperbolic. There seems to be (especially in the startup space) a push towards developer-focused shops because the logistics of AWS make spinning up additional infrastructure extremely easy, and configuration management tools make it easy to keep an environment in sync. Larger shops and more experienced devs aren't making the argument, but there's a segment of the under 30 crowd and HackerNews crowd which doesn't seem to understand what sysadmins actually do, and why they're necessary in a shop that does nothing but spin up AWS Redis+nginx+cool_javascript_framework instances.

It's not just that it makes spinning up additional infrastructure really easy. It's that it makes hiring system administrators, and coordinating changes between dedicated sysadmins and developers, completely unnecessary. The shift to IaaS/PaaS is like when banking went online, and you could check balances and move money between accounts yourself instead of having to call somebody to do it for you.

I've been a sysadmin for almost 12 years, and I'm not sure I understand and can justify what we do anymore in the majority of shops. Well-run app deployment environments should run themselves without needing people to babysit stupid poo poo like log rotation.

# ¿ Oct 31, 2013 18:34

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

evol262 posted:

Having recently moved from systems admin/engineering into development, it's hard to argue with the idea that change management is a dying process, but I can't help but believe that there's a lot more tradecraft than babysitting logrotate and cronjobs. Particularly in web shops, there's an argument for spinning up more frontend instances which proxy back to your actual app servers when performance problems come up, but AWS isn't that cheap in the long run, and scaling out/up rather than looking more closely at your infrastructure turns you into Twitter 5 years ago.

Infrastructure engineering will always have a place, and there will always be people who focus on problems of scalability. That doesn't necessarily translate into "software shops need full-time employees whose job is just to manage systems", though. I've been a sysadmin since I was sixteen, and I'm doing business analytics now because while IT is a competitive advantage, infrastructure is more often just a necessary evil.

# ¿ Oct 31, 2013 19:51

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Sickening posted:

Good luck finding someone someone good to do part time skill position work.

Most midsize companies don't have full-time statisticians, because the siloing of a skill set that general is absurd, but they need people who are good with statistics to do analytics work. "Good with computers" should be subsumed just as quickly.

Caged posted:

I'm trying to get an understanding of how this would be handled myself so maybe I'm just way off the mark here, but wouldn't a contract with another company to look after that sort of stuff be better in the long run? It doesn't involve someone extra being employed, and it means your guys who don't do infrastructure day to day don't have to drop into infrastructure mode to fight fires.

This is exactly what IaaS/PaaS is, except that it's a packaged, polished product instead of a bunch of half-assed one-offs put in place for your special snowflake of a company by some MSP who had the number of hours in their SOW cut in half.

There will always be problems with production applications, but the idea is to limit the scope of problems you're responsible for to problems you're actually good at fixing.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Oct 31, 2013

# ¿ Oct 31, 2013 20:40

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

evol262 posted:

Document retention and confidentiality is no worse on hosted email. If you don't have in house expertise, you're probably safer hosted with Google than with "Bob, IT consultant" grasping the nuances of SOX.

Retention is just one piece of the puzzle; Google Apps is bad at e-discovery. A lot of the bigger players like Symantec with the E-Discovery Accelerator for Enterprise Vault have really nailed this, even though they're slow. Google Apps handles search a lot faster than the other alternatives, but it gets a lot of things wrong. It doesn't include calendar appointments. It outputs to mbox instead of PST, which is the format that every lawyer is interested in. It's really bad at capturing full conversations between several parties unless you programmatically generate your search filters. Your email is probably safer, but their e-discovery solution will probably give you an incomplete result on the data you do have versus something like Enterprise Vault.

evol262 posted:

Google and Microsoft don't get their fiber cut. We had ours cut at my first job. Then the copper two weeks later. Hosting yourself isn't a safety net from municipal workers.

Google has had more interesting things happen to their fiber than most companies ever have to deal with.

# ¿ Nov 1, 2013 18:54

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

evol262 posted:

Google Apps was probably the wrong example for this, which is why I kept hammering on Office 365. E-Discovery is available as a hosted service which works (mostly) with Office 365, so you can have your take can eat it, too, even with hosted mail solutions and offsite/cloud E-discovery. I have no idea if this is working with E-Discovery for Compliance yet, but Enterprise Vault is a go.

Yeah, that's true. Office 365 does have its own set of availability problems, but it's a service where the availability is getting better without businesses needing to invest tons of hours and money into infrastructure and monitoring to make that happen for themselves.

evol262 posted:

I suspect Google doesn't go offline when hunters shoot down their fiber, though, whereas "SMB self-hosted exchange" shop probably has no redundancy.

Also true, but I'd wager there's major latency issues without that fiber or they'd abandon it for different above-ground fiber instead of burying that particular set of optics.

# ¿ Nov 1, 2013 19:26

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

mewse posted:

It's definitely an age thing. Boomers weren't expected to know how to use a computer because the PC revolution happened when they were already middle aged. Right now, the 60yo department head isn't going to lose his job for being computer illiterate, because his job is building widgets, not how to use email. As we go forward, these people age out and the excuses for destroying a network will become much less accepted. A baseline of computer literacy will be more strongly enforced.

It's cool, we'll be just as incompetent in something new that we don't understand once we get up there in years.

Becoming this scares me more than literally anything else in the world.

# ¿ Nov 7, 2013 19:59

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

FISHMANPET posted:

I'm 27 and don't get Vine or Pinterest, but I do get Twitter.

But I can create a Vine or Pinterest account and figure out how to use it, meanwhile my wife of the same age can't even handle Twitter, or really anything that isn't Word and Facebook.

Pinterest's biggest demographic is women in the Midwest, so that doesn't surprise me.

gently caress me, I've committed way too many useless startup facts to memory since I started working at one.

# ¿ Nov 7, 2013 21:31

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

ratbert90 posted:

modern Bugzilla

# ¿ Nov 8, 2013 00:19

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Che Delilas posted:

No, your auto repair analogy is fine. Notice that in pretty much all of those examples, people are actually listing symptoms of actual problems they are having. "Bad smell, car wants to die at stop lights," "dark, burned out headlights," "engine fell out." These are specifics that can be homed in on by experts and tested. None of them are simply "it's broken." Keep using those car analogies, they're by far the best tool I've found to explain to laypeople why they should or should not do a computer thing, or why something is happening.

Now the causes of these problems are silly as hell. But at least they're describing the drat problems.

Now ask the same person to describe their problems to a mechanic who continually interrupts them to give them a condescending frown, and tell them how their explanations aren't good enough and demonstrate a really serious misunderstanding of how cars work. Do this over and over and over, every week, for years. Then, see if you get the same quantity of words coming out.

While there are always users who are just bad at what they're doing, most people don't avoid describing problems because they're incompetent. They avoid describing problems because of the fuckoff idiot people in industry who make them feel incompetent when they do. These are what people have been taught to expect when calling the IT department since the mid-nineties.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 16:35 on Nov 9, 2013

# ¿ Nov 9, 2013 16:32

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Sirotan posted:

I'm sure there are people out there like this but in the end, this is a customer service industry. I'd argue that these people are the exception and not the rule, who would eventually be weeded out by their management. You're also stripping all agency from the user's role, shouldn't they be responsible for learning something about the hardware and software they use day in and day out?

I don't mean to imply that most people in the industry are unprofessional to the point of reprimand. It's usually a lot more subtle, and I know exactly how subtle it is because I do it all the loving time myself when I find myself explaining things to people. I haven't decided if I'm blessed or cursed with the self-awareness to realize what an rear end in a top hat I am to people sometimes.

But if you think of it less like the high school football captain swirlying a geek and more like an awkward teenage boy trying to ask out a girl who's way out of his league, you're getting closer to the dynamic. We don't have much common ground, and it's like we don't even speak the same language. What if she laughs at me? What if all her friends laugh at me behind her back? Better if I just don't say anything.

Sirotan posted:

People understand the rudimentary functions and parts of cars because in order to operate them, they are required to go through training and pass tests to become licensed drivers. Have you ever heard of a company that hire non-IT positions and put them through computer training and tests, contingent upon employment? They probably exist, but I've never heard anyone in this thread ever mention their company does. Mine sure doesn't. You can't lay all the blame on the poor computer janitors.

I'm going to separate this out, because there's a piece I agree with and a piece I don't.

People understand the rudimentary functions of cars. This is true. People understand that "D" means "go straight" and "R" means "go backwards" and the gas pedal makes the car move in that direction.

People understand the rudimentary parts of cars. I couldn't agree less. The gas indicator on the dashboard with the arrow next to it is so poorly understood that it is literally described as a "life hack." Your average car owner knows whether their car is an automatic or manual transmission, but couldn't tell you if their car has drum or disc brakes or what size wiper blades it takes without checking a manual. What's more important to understand than the features that literally keep you from dying? But people don't think of things that way. They can tell you that their car has brakes, but couldn't even identify them in a pile of car parts on a table. People think in terms of what they need in order to accomplish specific tasks. The majority of people are not systems thinkers, and never will be.

Lots of organizations make people go through computer training and tests. Hospitals are a great example. If you don't understand the patient charting software, you don't get to work there, period. The reason that hospitals do this is because not understanding how to work the system presents a real-world safety issue that can literally kill people. Sound familiar? It's the reason that drivers require state licensure.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2013 19:09

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

evol262 posted:

Or don't do any of these things, because ricing the gently caress out of your terminal, editor, and shell is useless when most of your work is over SSH.

Erm, lots of professional sysadmins don't spend 90% of their time at an SSH window. Some people have these crazy tools like Packer and Vagrant that facilitate almost all the infrastructure work they ever need to do for production without needing to compulsively log in and run iostat somewhere every 15 minutes like it's the '80s.

# ¿ Nov 12, 2013 06:46

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

rolleyes posted:

To resume the earlier chat about having a common firstname.lastname@gmail.com address:

Dear Person With The Same First Name As Me But An Entirely Different Surname,

Congratulations on managing to land yourself an interview! In future, please remember to get your name correct when specifying the email address your prospective employer should send a psychological/personality assessment test to. Since I have no other contact details for you, I have taken the trouble of replying to the email to let the hiring company know of the error. Having failed the fairly basic filter of 'candidate should be able to remember their own name' I think your attempt might not get too far on this occasion, but you never know.

Regards,
Me.

So, uh, you're sure the HR person didn't just mistype it?

# ¿ Nov 13, 2013 05:02

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Mercurius posted:

Even if it was a mistake on their end, I'm sure rolleyes was professional enough to have sent a 'hey, this was mistakenly received' reply without any of his comments here. We use this thread as a way to vent about stupid stuff so we don't say or do those things to people at our jobs.

Sometimes I'm very dense and forget which of my 85 open browser tabs I'm reading. :saddowns:

# ¿ Nov 13, 2013 05:54

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

MrBling posted:

Fiddling with EMS and XMS and trying to free up enough memory was more annoying than setting IRQ/DMA.

Days of my young life, wasted loving with EMM386.EXE so Ultima VII or whatever would run.

# ¿ Nov 13, 2013 16:59

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Paladine_PSoT posted:

Kings quest had a whole soundtrack that played over this, and they even tried to give the ogres and whatnot voices by doing rapid modulation of the frequency to make it sound like they were talking.

I remember the PC speaker announcing "BATTLETECH: THE CRESCENT HAWKS' REVENGE" when you started that game. It was a hell of a technical feat, honestly.

# ¿ Nov 13, 2013 18:49

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

evol262 posted:

fglrx mostly works these days, but the open radeon driver is good enough that you only need fglrx for CAD work, essentially.

Both drivers have awful multi-monitor support.

# ¿ Nov 13, 2013 20:38

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Agrikk posted:

Mostly.

Because Microsoft cannot have a straightforward licensing plan that everyone understands, they have to gently caress up the straightforward counting of the cores on a database box with the SQL Server 2012 Core Factor Table.

loving guys.

Why are you licensing new SQL Server installs on servers that are 5+ years old? For anything made since like Nehalem, it's per-core licensing unless you have a Bulldozer-architecture AMD CPU, in which case Microsoft gives you a discount because your integer cores aren't real cores.

Jesus, look at IBM's Processor Value Units if you want to complain about vendors doing incomprehensibly dumb poo poo with CPU licensing.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2013 01:06

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Siochain posted:

We support clients all over the world. We run support Mon-Fri 9:00-8:00 EST - people know this before they pay. We will work with people to arrange alternative hours. That being said, its prohibitively expensive to staff people 24/7 for 1-2 tickets a week that come in at "off-hours" time. But that being said, someplace running 9-5 PST with EST customers is silly, we at least cover longer times.

A remote answering service that can escalate (paid, per-incident) severity 1 issues to an engineer on call isn't unheard of, either. Software companies don't understand that people need to run this poo poo in production.

# ¿ Nov 20, 2013 21:41

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

thebigcow posted:

I am like 40% sure my 486 DX2 had a lovely heat sink clipped over it and I know for sure my K6 did. Did the Pentium really not need a heat sink?

Every Socket 7 system I ever used shipped with one, but the lower-clocked models (60/75/90 MHz) seemed to do just fine without. The higher-clocked ones (166 MHz+) often ran fine without them, but would get hot enough to literally fry things on:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iv22eaAkDZQ

# ¿ Nov 22, 2013 17:01

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

MC Fruit Stripe posted:

"This is a production issue."

They're all production issues.

I've dialed non-production issues up to Severity 1 with vendors before because they just gently caress around for months, keeping the thing from ever getting to production while the warranty clock ticks.

# ¿ Nov 22, 2013 18:42

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

mllaneza posted:

The Mythical Man Month is on the required reading list. Brooks managed mainframe development projects for IBM and took away a lot of useful lessons.

Some sections of the book have held up better than others in the last few decades, and others have just been done better by other authors since. In particular, I think the idea of building one to throw away is foolish in light of Agile methodologies that render this unnecessary. (However, the idea is starting to come back in vogue a little bit due to the Lean Startup movement and the visibility of the Minimum Viable Product concept.) His bit on each team having a toolmaker is incredibly obsolete in the presence of the sheer volume of open-source tools that every team has available today.

Still, it's very useful as a piece of history, and it's a short read.

Drighton posted:

I've seen a book mentioned a few times in these threads for IT management. Anyone remember what it is? Or maybe have one they recommend?

IT management is broken into two components: IT service management, and people management (which is the same as in every other profession).

For the former, there's lots of stuff out there on IT Service Management/ITIL, but there's a lot of bad advice in those books as well. Read them, synthesize the methodologies, but pick and choose what works for the environment you're managing and throw away the parts you don't need if they don't pay off for you. If you can still find a copy, grab a copy of The Visible Ops Handbook. It's closer to a leaflet than a book, and you can read it in an hour or two, and it does a great job of distilling out the important points of ITIL while leaving out the red tape that doesn't work (which is 90% of ITIL).

Even if you're not in the business of building software, most IT teams can learn a lot from software development methodologies. I'd recommend picking up a few books on agile development like The Pragmatic Programmer and Clean Code. Scope creep is a common problem in infrastructures just as much as in software systems.

For the latter, there's more great books written on management and leadership than I'll ever get to read. I'm a big fan of Scott Berkun's Making Things Happen, which is a very casual approach towards project management that I've found to work very well. There's also Bob Sutton's The No-rear end in a top hat Rule and Good Boss, Bad Boss (pick one, there's a lot of overlap in content). I'd also recommend at least one book by W. Edwards Deming, who's one of the most influential forces in management to have ever come from the United States. The New Economics is a good starting point.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Nov 23, 2013

# ¿ Nov 23, 2013 18:26

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 04:24

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

It's 4:50 AM. I just got home from running A/V tech support at a concert event 2 hours away! :haw:

At least I was able to get actual work done on the train, but this really fucks up my deadlines for this sprint. Oh well, time for some 5 AM scotch!

# ¿ Nov 27, 2013 10:51

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > More shit that pisses you off: What does that say about the quality of your emails?

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