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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Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

SEKCobra posted:

How about in house developers who also run your side of things?

Oh devops, so efficient in theory.

# ? Feb 20, 2014 20:10

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# ? Apr 25, 2024 02:17

Urit: Oct 22, 2010

Oh devops, a lovely, lovely theory that has no redeeming quality whatsoever.

"Hey, let's take a profession that needs to be focused to be effective and add constant random interruptions while also trying to hold the worker to processes that only make sense for dedicated development teams."

There is nothing good about devops, and I don't even know if it would be possible to make it good. Operations work is almost always reactively focused and you can't tell how much of it there will be in any given day. Is the SAN going to pitch a fit and take down all your servers? Is a switch going to go belly up? Is everything going to work perfectly? Are you going to be called at 4am because someone can't figure out how to log in, and screams at the poor helpdesk tech that "THE SYSTEM IS DOWN!!!"? Who knows!

Okay, now be a developer and commit to timelines and a project management methodology. Also, do your own testing! Oh, you signed off on testing you did yourself? Awesome! Documentation? Naw, I built the system, I don't need to document it! I'll just remember how it all goes together! What's that you say, we have a new guy? Oh well. Hope he literally can telepathically extract the info from the dev's head, because it sure isn't written down, and good luck getting them to share how their crusty systems are built.

Can you tell I'm working in a devops team right now?

# ? Feb 20, 2014 20:55

Bob Morales: Aug 18, 2006; ~~Just wear the fucking mask, Bob~~

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

I want to find the person at my company who numbered our internal network with 128.1.x.x

Then I want to ask them when the gently caress they realized this was a dumb idea and just said "gently caress it let's see where it goes"

# ? Feb 20, 2014 21:06

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

Urit posted:

Oh devops, a lovely, lovely theory that has no redeeming quality whatsoever.

"Hey, let's take a profession that needs to be focused to be effective and add constant random interruptions while also trying to hold the worker to processes that only make sense for dedicated development teams."

There is nothing good about devops, and I don't even know if it would be possible to make it good. Operations work is almost always reactively focused and you can't tell how much of it there will be in any given day. Is the SAN going to pitch a fit and take down all your servers? Is a switch going to go belly up? Is everything going to work perfectly? Are you going to be called at 4am because someone can't figure out how to log in, and screams at the poor helpdesk tech that "THE SYSTEM IS DOWN!!!"? Who knows!

Okay, now be a developer and commit to timelines and a project management methodology. Also, do your own testing! Oh, you signed off on testing you did yourself? Awesome! Documentation? Naw, I built the system, I don't need to document it! I'll just remember how it all goes together! What's that you say, we have a new guy? Oh well. Hope he literally can telepathically extract the info from the dev's head, because it sure isn't written down, and good luck getting them to share how their crusty systems are built.

Can you tell I'm working in a devops team right now?

Oh, man. This is so not what devops means. Paging Misogynist.

# ? Feb 20, 2014 21:14

Bhodi: Dec 9, 2007; Oh, it's just a cat.; Pillbug

Devops from the other side is "Encourage dev to release and test a stable product by waking them up at 4am when their lovely application goes down, rather than have them just throw it over the fence to ops with a 'good luck!' every single release"

Also, devops produces people with a basic understanding of the OSI model and what happens outside their little container. You know, useful stuff like cpu/memory usage, network bandwidth, performance, monitoring, all that stuff baked in at the dev level rather than slapped on at the ops level. Maybe even the ability to understand why they don't just slap together 3 outer joins or why they can't just throw more memory at their app.

Edit: Which is awesome. In theory. I've never worked at a place it happens, but I can dream!

Bhodi fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Feb 20, 2014

# ? Feb 20, 2014 21:27

SEKCobra: Feb 28, 2011; Hi
Don't look at my site

Urit posted:

Oh devops, a lovely, lovely theory that has no redeeming quality whatsoever.

"Hey, let's take a profession that needs to be focused to be effective and add constant random interruptions while also trying to hold the worker to processes that only make sense for dedicated development teams."

There is nothing good about devops, and I don't even know if it would be possible to make it good. Operations work is almost always reactively focused and you can't tell how much of it there will be in any given day. Is the SAN going to pitch a fit and take down all your servers? Is a switch going to go belly up? Is everything going to work perfectly? Are you going to be called at 4am because someone can't figure out how to log in, and screams at the poor helpdesk tech that "THE SYSTEM IS DOWN!!!"? Who knows!

Okay, now be a developer and commit to timelines and a project management methodology. Also, do your own testing! Oh, you signed off on testing you did yourself? Awesome! Documentation? Naw, I built the system, I don't need to document it! I'll just remember how it all goes together! What's that you say, we have a new guy? Oh well. Hope he literally can telepathically extract the info from the dev's head, because it sure isn't written down, and good luck getting them to share how their crusty systems are built.

Can you tell I'm working in a devops team right now?

This is why I dont feel as part of devops. More like "Hey you can program too? Ok you are now in charge of all testing also no you cant have hardware or time for this. I also I need you to find me a tool for x."
"Hey theres a call and no one from Ops wants to go and you are just sitting there doing thing I dont understand. You go."
"What do you mean you were out on calls??"
I basically am expected to learn Java in our shared office/workshop/small parts storage on my own and without exemption from regular work. My boss even scolded me for "Poor work ethics trying to avoid going on calls" after he forced this on me.
Also I get no money for this either.
2 more years...

# ? Feb 20, 2014 21:53

Urit: Oct 22, 2010

evol262 posted:

Oh, man. This is so not what devops means. Paging Misogynist.

Sorry, I'm just going off of approximately 4 years of experience with "devops" teams. I know that's not the actual theoretical meaning of devops, it's just what gets implemented.

# ? Feb 20, 2014 22:13

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

SEKCobra posted:

This is why I dont feel as part of devops. More like "Hey you can program too? Ok you are now in charge of all testing also no you cant have hardware or time for this. I also I need you to find me a tool for x."
"Hey theres a call and no one from Ops wants to go and you are just sitting there doing thing I dont understand. You go."
"What do you mean you were out on calls??"
I basically am expected to learn Java in our shared office/workshop/small parts storage on my own and without exemption from regular work. My boss even scolded me for "Poor work ethics trying to avoid going on calls" after he forced this on me.
Also I get no money for this either.
2 more years...

Yeah, so it's been said already, but none of this has anything to do with DevOps.

DevOps basically means two things:

People in the organization are accountable to themselves.
People in the organization are accountable to each other.

Breaking down silos doesn't mean breaking down roles. It means that if someone fucks something up and it means that someone else a) can't get their job done or b) has a living hell of a life now, it's their job to fix it. It was a methodology developed to fix one very specific problem: some cowboy shithead developer who circumvents QA and testing doesn't get to push code from their desktop to production on a Friday at 5 PM because, gently caress it, on-call ops will deal with it. If DevOps could be summarized in one sentence: it's your mess, have the common courtesy to loving clean it up.

There's a lot of small details that have come to be associated with the term: continuous integration, rigorous systems automation, in-depth monitoring and metrics collection, etc. These are details. It comes down to confidence in your work through confidence in the process: if you gently caress up, you should know before anyone else does. You should know you hosed up before it hits production. A user should never know somebody hosed up.

The term has gotten so oversaturated and stripped of meaning by incompetent half-measure practitioners that, like ITIL, I've stopped using it, but people should at least be aware of what it meant.

# ? Feb 20, 2014 22:52

Urit: Oct 22, 2010

Misogynist posted:

People in the organization are accountable to themselves.

People in the organization are accountable to each other.

Tell me more about these wonderlands where people are accountable for anything at all.

Serious-post edit: Got any stuff I can read about ITIL and devops that are actual serious things rather than "THIS ONE WEIRD TRICK TO DISCOVERED BY A WISCONSIN MAN TO MAKE YOUR COMPANY JUST LIKE GOOGLE: PMS HATE HIM" marketing docs? It's a pain to find anything at all that's not marketing bullshit.

Urit fucked around with this message at 23:44 on Feb 20, 2014

# ? Feb 20, 2014 23:00

Che Delilas: Nov 23, 2009; FREE TIBET WEED

Misogynist posted:

If DevOps could be summarized in one sentence: it's your mess, have the common courtesy to loving clean it up.

I'm again embarrassed for my industry that we had to come up with a specialized term for "personal responsibility" just for developers.

# ? Feb 20, 2014 23:43

angry armadillo: Jul 26, 2010

I can't really go into specifics here but I'll try and convey my frustrations

I am currently on a project for a client that has some very high security requirements

We made a decision earlier in the project to allow 1 network to connect to certain resources on another network which info sec guys boss agreed to in writing.

Now the client is bemused at why said resources are accessible so info sec guy is pointing the finger at me and my line manager saying you shouldn't have ever connected those certain things to that network

However info sec guy attached an email from his boss (who we also ultimately report to ) stating we all agreed to do what we did (so I feel I'm well covered)

8 am telecon to discuss next steps. I feel O/T coming on...

# ? Feb 20, 2014 23:51

Volmarias: Dec 31, 2002; EMAIL... THE INTERNET... SEARCH ENGINES...

Misogynist posted:

Yeah, so it's been said already, but none of this has anything to do with DevOps.

Basically this. I hate devops, but only because
1. I hate being on call
2. I'm traditionally in roles where if something were to go sideways, not only is it probably not my fault but I wouldn't know how to or be able to fix it. But, because I'm a developer, ~devops~ means you're on the on call rotation for the general product.

Fortunately, management at my last job finally wised up to #2 about a year before I left, and I'm now not doing pager duty at all, so my life has gotten much happier.

But, like misogynist said, devops isn't the reason that your company stinks, your company is the reason that your company stinks. There should always be a dedicated QA department; developers should test their own changes but someone needs to double test it and sign off. It sounds like your company just found a way to cut QA staffing while calling it a win to themselves.

# ? Feb 21, 2014 00:07

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

Urit posted:

Okay, now be a developer and commit to timelines and a project management methodology.

By definition only the project manager needs to abide by their domain methodology.

I'm looking forward to a Google technical project manager interview, the only interesting material in regards to project management I could find was from Microsoft:

http://www.microsoft.com/project/en/gb/policies-delay.aspx

Which I summarize as "PMP's and project management are hokey".

# ? Feb 21, 2014 00:11

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

angry armadillo posted:

I can't really go into specifics here but I'll try and convey my frustrations

I am currently on a project for a client that has some very high security requirements

We made a decision earlier in the project to allow 1 network to connect to certain resources on another network which info sec guys boss agreed to in writing.

Now the client is bemused at why said resources are accessible so info sec guy is pointing the finger at me and my line manager saying you shouldn't have ever connected those certain things to that network

However info sec guy attached an email from his boss (who we also ultimately report to ) stating we all agreed to do what we did (so I feel I'm well covered)

8 am telecon to discuss next steps. I feel O/T coming on...

This is exactly why controlled access networks exist. You should be proxying everything through or have joint resources in a DMZ that's tightly controlled.

Urit posted:

Tell me more about these wonderlands where people are accountable for anything at all.

Serious-post edit: Got any stuff I can read about ITIL and devops that are actual serious things rather than "THIS ONE WEIRD TRICK TO DISCOVERED BY A WISCONSIN MAN TO MAKE YOUR COMPANY JUST LIKE GOOGLE: PMS HATE HIM" marketing docs? It's a pain to find anything at all that's not marketing bullshit.

I'm just gonna quote Misogynist. ITIL is way beyond the scope of any kind of simple explanation, and devops isn't really a holistic movement. They're ways to define best practice. ITIL verges on process management, and the scope of it can cover your entire business.

Devops basically means "gently caress dev -> qa -> production and the associated change requests, blackbox QA testing, etc". You should do those things anyway. But I shouldn't need to read your deployment document to figure out how to ship it. You should check into source control, have an automated test suite run which rejects your code if it fails code smells, build a package, spin up a new VM which is provisioned from configuration management (or an entire virtual environment for your test database/etc), and do automated testing there. And ops/admins/devs/dbas should work together so they all know how the moving parts work and what can break. No more "works for me" or "copy this file into the web root" or whatever. Clean, reproducable results with standardized tools that the entire team knows and and owns, even if there are still individual content owners.

Want to read about devops? Read about jenkins. And gerrit. And puppet/chef/salt/ansible. And openstack/aws/powercli. And selenium. And...

Misogynist posted:

You're right, in a sense, but a little bit of history is necessary here to really understand some nuances of the movement.

Information Technology has traditionally been one of two things in most organizations. It started out as a loose confederacy of "computer people" who had no ability to actually do important things like estimate time and budget on projects. Businesspeople started getting frustrated at this, so they started doing what businesspeople do worst: micromanaging. Lots of CIO types turned to so-called "process frameworks" like ITIL and COBIT that try to distill down a list of best practices on how to run IT environments. These frameworks cover every crumb of the pie from how to run a service desk and respond to user issues through how to document incidents. Most of it is very bureaucratic, and most of it is very closely aligned with the PMI method of project management. For those who are unfamiliar, the PMI school of project management is super-reliant on "big design up front" and is roughly analogous to the waterfall model in software. It works really well for some projects where your requirements really can't change mid-project � designing and building a suspension bridge, for instance � but it's very inappropriate for many (most?) software projects. Since most crucial software, like ERP, was built using the Waterfall method around this time, this methodology worked. At least, it worked no worse for the business than the applications they were supporting.

Somewhat recently (largely within the last decade), many corporations figured out what most smaller software shops already knew for a long time: that the waterfall model was very good at delivering a finished result, but that this finished result was very often not the right product. After all, if a business kicks off a project that takes three years, or even one year, what are the chances that the market conditions and business priorities are going to be the same at the end of that stretch of time as they were at the beginning? So companies started relying on Agile and Lean software development practices, which eschew the idea of Big Design Up Front and add features iteratively instead. Without getting too far into the mechanics of it for non-developers, the process of Agile software development is really built around the idea that the business's requirements will change at a moment's notice, so the requirements of the software should be able to change at that pace. Minimize and simplify the project, and build 80% or 50% or 20% of the features people want instead of 100%, and you'll make sure you actually hit all the ones that are really relevant to the business. Most importantly, you'll ship those features quickly, so the business isn't waiting a year for a feature they need today in order to be competitive.

Agile software development is really great for a lot of software projects. The problem is that it started leading to this big impedance mismatch between developers who iterated really quickly and infrastructure people who were stuck in a modality from half a decade ago where six months to deploy a minor infrastructure project was okay. When you release features every three months, or every week, or sixty times per day (yes, some shops actually release builds this often, especially in web technology), you can't take sixty days to deploy. You can't bring the system down for two days to run error-prone manual upgrade processes. This led to disconnects between developers and operations people. Operations people (at the behest of the business) were too stodgy and risk-averse. Developers weren't giving operations people enough time to prepare before they threw something over the wall and said "here, make this work."

People with some development background picked up on this much faster than people who were stuck behind a desk babysitting their departments' ERP implementations. Back in the mid-2000s, I was working on a manifesto of "agile systems administration" � I suspect a lot of other sysadmins were doing the same � that applied principles of Agile software development to infrastructures. Iterate quickly, test automatically, catch regressions fast, and be ready to roll back instead of wading through six weeks of change control meetings. Turns out that John Allspaw, Jez Humble and some other people much smarter than me came up with the same ideas, put them into place in much higher-profile places and gave it a much catchier name.

Despite what the proponents of the movement will tell you, DevOps isn't really about developers and operations people working together. They've been working together for years, and to say otherwise is kind of an insult to people who have been in this game a long time and doing their jobs well. DevOps has been about getting PMI-style IT departments on board with a systems management methodology that isn't totally antithetical to the development model of the software it needs to support. There's specific tooling behind that: infrastructure as code (robust systems management), continuous integration, infrastructure testing. But these things are just part of doing IT well. The real movement behind DevOps is getting IT to move at the speed of development, so development can move at the speed of the business's goals.

# ? Feb 21, 2014 00:12

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

Che Delilas posted:

I'm again embarrassed for my industry that we had to come up with a specialized term for "personal responsibility" just for developers.

Every "new way of thinking" is an incremental change over the old way of thinking, with a veneer of marketing flash painted over it. The important thing is to get people excited about doing things the right way instead of doing the lovely thing because it's easy for a minute. If it takes psychological manipulation to make that happen, whatever, I'm game. Placebos still improve people's quality of life, and I'll happily have a dysfunctional organization take a sugar pill over cyanide.

# ? Feb 21, 2014 00:22

Urit: Oct 22, 2010

evol262 posted:

Devops basically means "gently caress dev -> qa -> production and the associated change requests, blackbox QA testing, etc". You should do those things anyway. But I shouldn't need to read your deployment document to figure out how to ship it. You should check into source control, have an automated test suite run which rejects your code if it fails code smells, build a package, spin up a new VM which is provisioned from configuration management (or an entire virtual environment for your test database/etc), and do automated testing there. And ops/admins/devs/dbas should work together so they all know how the moving parts work and what can break. No more "works for me" or "copy this file into the web root" or whatever. Clean, reproducable results with standardized tools that the entire team knows and and owns, even if there are still individual content owners.

Want to read about devops? Read about jenkins. And gerrit. And puppet/chef/salt/ansible. And openstack/aws/powercli. And selenium. And...

Yeah, I use Chef/Jenkins every day. The problem is, my lovely organization basically views Chef as a replacement for AD Group Policy ( :iiam:

) and a way to run server setup scripts. They don't do any config management. Source control is treated as a roadblock, not an assistance. Code reviews are nonexistent, pull requests are auto-approved because no one has time to read the diff in Stash and understand that the commit would gently caress up performance or fill up a disk when it actually ran. Testing is done on crusty old VMs, almost no one does a fresh VM setup as a test. I'm personally all about that stuff you said. I think Volmarias hit it on the head. I just haven't run into an company that actually does any of those cool things, but they sure call what they do "devops" and that's what people think of when they hear it.

Volmarias posted:

devops isn't the reason that your company stinks, your company is the reason that your company stinks.

My rant about devops was the "poo poo that was pissing me off".

# ? Feb 21, 2014 00:24

EAT THE EGGS RICOLA: May 29, 2008

Urit posted:

Yeah, I use Chef/Jenkins every day. The problem is, my lovely organization basically views Chef as a replacement for AD Group Policy () and a way to run server setup scripts. They don't do any config management. Source control is treated as a roadblock, not an assistance. Code reviews are nonexistent, pull requests are auto-approved because no one has time to read the diff in Stash and understand that the commit would gently caress up performance or fill up a disk when it actually ran. Testing is done on crusty old VMs, almost no one does a fresh VM setup as a test. I'm personally all about that stuff you said. I think Volmarias hit it on the head. I just haven't run into an company that actually does any of those cool things, but they sure call what they do "devops" and that's what people think of when they hear it.

Is this in Windows? If so they really should be doing this with Powershell's Desired State Configuration

# ? Feb 21, 2014 00:28

Cenodoxus: Mar 29, 2012; while [[ true ]] ; do
��pour()
done

Misogynist posted:

The term has gotten so oversaturated and stripped of meaning by incompetent half-measure practitioners that, like ITIL, I've stopped using it, but people should at least be aware of what it meant.

I foresee this being one of those things where someone goes

Oh my god I know how to program and I know Linux I'M SO DEVOPS RIGHT NOW

...while having no understanding of the underlying principles or methodologies.

It's very coincidental that this topic came up here because my business unit had a meeting today where someone pitched a DevOps collaboration event. Whether or not it was a legitimate form of DevOps remains to be seen. I didn't pay much attention.

It would be nice to see a true DevOps approach sprout at my workplace though, so next time I encounter a developer going "LALALALALA gently caress YOU HAVE MORE DOWNTIME" I can forward all my angry client emails and phone calls to them.

Cenodoxus fucked around with this message at 00:34 on Feb 21, 2014

# ? Feb 21, 2014 00:30

Urit: Oct 22, 2010

EAT THE EGGS RICOLA posted:

Is this in Windows? If so they really should be doing this with Powershell's Desired State Configuration

Yes, that is :thejoke:

. We're using Windows Server 2008R2/2012R2. We're using Chef to do stuff that Group Policy should be doing. Not Powershell DCM, actual Group Policy settings that exist in the base Group Policy editor. Yes, I agree Powershell DCM should be used.

# ? Feb 21, 2014 00:33

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

Cenodoxus posted:

It would be nice to see a true DevOps approach sprout at my workplace though, so next time I encounter a developer going "LALALALALA gently caress YOU HAVE MORE DOWNTIME" I can forward all my angry client emails and phone calls to them.

I think its a core component of a developer role and in my office all developers are on call for their work. If you don't you're just a programmer.

There's an interesting venn diagram of developer, devops, and site reliability engineer though.

# ? Feb 21, 2014 01:04

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

Cenodoxus posted:

It would be nice to see a true DevOps approach sprout at my workplace though, so next time I encounter a developer going "LALALALALA gently caress YOU HAVE MORE DOWNTIME" I can forward all my angry client emails and phone calls to them.

Humorously, DevOps doesn't imply that organizations should have lovely incident management processes. In fact, what the smart people (Dave Zweiback, Mike Rembetsy, Mark Imbriaco et al.) in the DevOps community are doing is starting to kind of look like ITIL's version of incident management, which is kind of ironic.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 05:33 on Feb 21, 2014

# ? Feb 21, 2014 05:22

Cowboy Mark: Sep 9, 2001; Grimey Drawer

I work for a small UK company, ~30 computers. We use a lot of Office VBA, and our practice has been to purchase new computers with OEM Windows and Office 20xx Home and Business installed. That's all we need.

Last year a couple of Office updates caused our VBA macros to slow down massively (on the order of from <1s to 18s to run). We declined these updates in WSUS and all was well again. Considering VBA is all but dead I have no idea how or what to migrate our workflow to when it stops being supported.

Dell then told us they're only shipping Office 2013. So I downloaded a copy from TechNet to test it, all seems well. The corresponding 'slow' updates for Office 2013 were declined. Yet when we receive the computers we get the same rubbish performance. Turns out the OEM copies come installed in a virtual-app Click-to-Run installation, which updates itself via delta against a master image over the internet, and cannot use WSUS. Simple: uninstall Office and reinstall with a normal MSI installer. Except the only version of Office that has the MSI installer now is Professional Plus, and that won't take H&B keys. Because of course, a business buying a version called Home and Business will have no need for a WSUS server.

Fine. We'll just have to use Professional Plus at greater cost for no benefit to us except it doing what we want. This is only available through volume licensing. I contacted our Dell and Misco account managers enquiring about VL and they basically blanked us.

Can someone clue me in on how you get set up with VL?

# ? Feb 21, 2014 12:19

Thanks Ants: May 21, 2004; #essereFerrari

Speak to Softcat. For some reason everyone else I tried to deal with for licensing was unhelpful.

# ? Feb 21, 2014 12:42

PainBreak: Jun 9, 2001

Bob Morales posted:

I want to find the person at my company who numbered our internal network with 128.1.x.x

Then I want to ask them when the gently caress they realized this was a dumb idea and just said "gently caress it let's see where it goes"

I had a break/fix customer whose LAN segment was 200.200.200.0/24. Cue the" Guinness in bottles" guys... BRILLIANT!

Got an email from a customer at 10:45 last night with a laundry list of firewall changes to be made. Then, got one at 6:30 AM asking why it wasn't done yet. Hmm... Maybe I'll bill them an extra 15 minutes today to explain, even engineers sleep.

# ? Feb 21, 2014 15:47

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

You may remember me as the person who was moaning about the shittiness that is Amazon.

Amazon, I forgive you. I want to kiss your feet.

eBay however can go and royally gently caress itself. eBay is the only organisation that I know of that wants people to pay �45 to get two support tickets. Not even three. Two.
What the gently caress is the deal there, eh?

# ? Feb 21, 2014 16:55

ookiimarukochan: Apr 4, 2011

Westie posted:

eBay however can go and royally gently caress itself. eBay is the only organisation that I know of that wants people to pay �45 to get two support tickets. Not even three. Two.
What the gently caress is the deal there, eh?

They've seen Apple's pricing. That said, Apple actually refund you if you can prove it's their fuckup.

# ? Feb 21, 2014 17:40

Ouroborus: Mar 31, 2010; I really only come here for the Paradise Lost: Clash of the Heavens CYOA these days.
SA was one of the first websites I ever frequented, waaaaay back in the day. I only got off my ass and got an account about 8 years ago. I bought the platinum upgrade recently.

Bob Morales posted:

I want to find the person at my company who numbered our internal network with 128.1.x.x

Then I want to ask them when the gently caress they realized this was a dumb idea and just said "gently caress it let's see where it goes"

Do I work with you? My internal network is 128.x.x.x and has been that way for more than a decade. We're slowly swapping all our branches to 192.168.x.x

Here's an annoyance: Legacy code. We used to have an IT manager who was a company founder... His mantra was "Cheaper is Better" he was also insane.
One of my first tasks here was to swap a branch with about 70 people from ubuntu desktops to windows. When the guy retired he never bothered to pass along the
configuration of various important things and he locked those things down so hard it was simpler to wipe them and re-install windows (most of them actually came
with windows initially) but I digress.

He was also some kind of demented computer genius though he almost never commented his code, except for things like "/This bit isn't needed anymore."
His stuff generally works, but you're hosed if you need to change anything. We'd had a regulatory change and needed to add some lines to the rear end covering on our invoices, so they went below the box on the template for the CYA section. It stayed that way for three years because no one could figure out what the hell.
I had what I initially thought was a simple task: I had to update the template that was used to generate our nightly invoice mailings from a giant 200mb text file.
Turns out it was way harder than I'd thought because of the way he'd set up the template. It was a Postscript file split in two, a nonstandard postscript file
I might add. The way the script worked was it split that file into hundreds of 75 line text files, it grabbed the E-mail, invoice# and such, copied the first part of template to a file, then somehow used xxd to convert the text invoice to postscript data, striped the headers, paste it after the first part of the template, then added the second postscript file, then converted the resulting .ps file into a pdf. It worked, but it was slow and awful and I couldn't find a tool that could edit the postscript template and leave it usable (I learned after that he had typed it by hand)
I ended up re-doing it largely from scratch so that instead of inserting stuff into the middle of a postscript file it just turns the text directly into a .ps file with a2ps, then ghostscripted to a pdf, then applied our template as a background. This allowed us to use a pdf as the template which is a lot easier to modify and turned out to be much faster. Unfortunately for me this guy's code is everywhere.

# ? Feb 21, 2014 17:50

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

ookiimarukochan posted:

They've seen Apple's pricing. That said, Apple actually refund you if you can prove it's their fuckup.

eBay will refund credits too, if it's their fault. Did I mention credits?

If you report an issue via live chat then you're hosed. Bye bye half an hour in credits!

# ? Feb 21, 2014 18:13

Ynglaur: Oct 9, 2013; The Malta Conference, anyone?

Pissing me off: I ask for a simple definition of one term in the context of a process. I get a 20 page PDF in reply. It does not even provide an answer.

# ? Feb 21, 2014 18:21

Paladine_PSoT: Jan 2, 2010; If you have a problem Yo, I'll solve it

MrMoo posted:

I'm looking forward to a Google technical project manager interview, the only interesting material in regards to project management I could find was from Microsoft:

Are you looking to transition from dev to PM?

# ? Feb 21, 2014 18:29

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

I think my current title is "Solutions Architect / Project Manager", I think Googles went a bit Peter Principle and thought I'll be a better TPM than dev. I pretty much do everything from PM, architect, dev, QA, CJ, networking, ops, docs, training, data visualisation, analytics, DB admin, etc. No one else wants this job really.

# ? Feb 21, 2014 18:40

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

Ynglaur posted:

Pissing me off: I ask for a simple definition of one term in the context of a process. I get a 20 page PDF in reply. It does not even provide an answer.

Read: they don't know either

# ? Feb 21, 2014 20:05

Ynglaur: Oct 9, 2013; The Malta Conference, anyone?

Westie posted:

Read: they don't know either

This is the God's honest truth. The individual in question is quite pleasant, but is in way over his head. He should have taken one look at this project and said "I'm sorry, I'm not the right person for this role." Instead, he's spent the last 6 months trying to define his role in the most narrow way possible.

# ? Feb 21, 2014 20:07

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

Startups: move fast and break the dev branch and don't tell anyone about it

# ? Feb 21, 2014 20:17

FlapYoJacks: Feb 12, 2009

Ynglaur posted:

Pissing me off: I ask for a simple definition of one term in the context of a process. I get a 20 page PDF in reply. It does not even provide an answer.

Read: Every TI response ever to anything.

# ? Feb 21, 2014 20:30

angry armadillo: Jul 26, 2010

evol262 posted:

This is exactly why controlled access networks exist. You should be proxying everything through or have joint resources in a DMZ that's tightly controlled.

We follow all the guidelines and then some...

Fortunately in our 8 am tele con, nobody really played the blame game, big boss was unhappy that this major stumbling block appeard so close to delivery date

Middle boss suggested failing to deliver this may not be a breach of contract so big boss chilled out and we are probably going to deliver late.

I suspect we will get told it is a breach of contract to deliver late next and will have to panic next week.

Fun fun fun

# ? Feb 21, 2014 22:59

slightpirate: Dec 26, 2006; i am the dance commander

Ok boys, its the big one. This Tuesday will hopefully be one of a couple interview and meetings that will get me promoted from Help Desk up into a Sys Admin role. I'll be the youngest and least experienced admin by 1-3 decades, but my strongest asset is that I'm able to understand concepts quickly and I'm not rooted into the idea of "well that's just how we've always done it". I know when its appropriate to invent a new wheel and when its not.

# ? Feb 21, 2014 23:09

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

slightpirate posted:

Ok boys, its the big one. This Tuesday will hopefully be one of a couple interview and meetings that will get me promoted from Help Desk up into a Sys Admin role. I'll be the youngest and least experienced admin by 1-3 decades, but my strongest asset is that I'm able to understand concepts quickly and I'm not rooted into the idea of "well that's just how we've always done it". I know when its appropriate to invent a new wheel and when its not.

Congrats in advance!

Just be careful not to be too :smug:

A lot of us are younger than our peers by decades, but keep one thing in mind: you have to spend six months anywhere before you understand how their processes work. After that, go hog wild inventing new wheels, because you'll understand why the old ones work the way they do. Before that, it's really easy to go in with grand ideas and get totally crushed because there are three million edge cases that you don't know about.

# ? Feb 21, 2014 23:20

Volmarias: Dec 31, 2002; EMAIL... THE INTERNET... SEARCH ENGINES...

slightpirate posted:

I'll be the youngest and least experienced admin by 1-3 decades

quote:

but my strongest asset is that … I'm not rooted into the idea of "well that's just how we've always done it".

You're probably completely hosed, just breaking this to you gently now.

# ? Feb 21, 2014 23:28

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# ? Apr 25, 2024 02:17

NZAmoeba: Feb 14, 2005; It turns out it's MAN!; Hair Elf

evol262 posted:

This is exactly why controlled access networks exist. You should be proxying everything through or have joint resources in a DMZ that's tightly controlled.

I'm just gonna quote Misogynist. ITIL is way beyond the scope of any kind of simple explanation, and devops isn't really a holistic movement. They're ways to define best practice. ITIL verges on process management, and the scope of it can cover your entire business.

Devops basically means "gently caress dev -> qa -> production and the associated change requests, blackbox QA testing, etc". You should do those things anyway. But I shouldn't need to read your deployment document to figure out how to ship it. You should check into source control, have an automated test suite run which rejects your code if it fails code smells, build a package, spin up a new VM which is provisioned from configuration management (or an entire virtual environment for your test database/etc), and do automated testing there. And ops/admins/devs/dbas should work together so they all know how the moving parts work and what can break. No more "works for me" or "copy this file into the web root" or whatever. Clean, reproducable results with standardized tools that the entire team knows and and owns, even if there are still individual content owners.

Want to read about devops? Read about jenkins. And gerrit. And puppet/chef/salt/ansible. And openstack/aws/powercli. And selenium. And...

Yeah this at least reads like our devops team, though the google guy we hired changed the name to Engineering & Productivity. They're the intermediary between dev and ops, and look after our build and deploy system, which is a nice little setup.

We've also got them looking after our monitoring systems, but the closest they get to on call work is when one of them comes in for an early morning release.

The head if the team is probably the smartest person I've ever met, but is also incredibly helpful and friendly, and talks at a million miles an hour. Sadly he's planning to leave eventually, he's going to become a priest.

# ? Feb 22, 2014 02:41

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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