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evol262 posted:It's hard to find good PMs. This guy sounds like he's a newly minted MBA who has no idea what his actual job is. The job of a PM is to coordinate and manage expectations. It is not to update excel documents and forward emails from Team A to Team B. The PM should be evaluating whether or not Team A's concerns are within scope and addressing why it wasn't part of a requirements document, and who missed that req in the first place, and... Most PMs suck. Oh I know what a good PM is supposed to do, my brother is a great PM and I learned a great deal from him. Also thanks for the minor english lesson, I'm generally pretty good about who/whom I honestly don't know why I used it there, but whatever.
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Nov 21, 2014 18:48
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Lightning Jim posted:There are still at least 3 people from my old team that have basically elected to not change their situation. Why would you get irritated at something that literally has no bearing on you?
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Nov 21, 2014 19:01
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Chalets the Baka posted:Why would you get irritated at something that literally has no bearing on you? I would posit that people like that have a big bearing on you if you have to work with them at all or if their work can affect yours. People who stay in one position too long stagnate and their bad habits seem to amplify and additionally rub off on new hires because they often look towards the people that have been there a long time for guidance.
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Nov 21, 2014 19:28
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Worst PM I ever had was from another company. Original quote came in way too high so I think we got an economy manager. First real meeting we set up the entire action list for the two month project and she set every single date for the next Tuesday, figuring we would just "push back" the stuff that didn't get done on time. She also had purple hair and had a nasty knack for touching other people's laptop screens. I hate that poo poo.
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Nov 21, 2014 19:38
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Roargasm posted:Worst PM I ever had was from another company. Original quote came in way too high so I think we got an economy manager. First real meeting we set up the entire action list for the two month project and she set every single date for the next Tuesday, figuring we would just "push back" the stuff that didn't get done on time. She also had purple hair and had a nasty knack for touching other people's laptop screens. I hate that poo poo. gently caress you, purple hair is awesome. agree with everything else, mind
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Nov 21, 2014 20:11
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MrMoo posted:The registry being used for configuration, who would have thought. Okay, I'll play your silly game. "I don't understand why PuTTY doesn't allow you to export your settings in case you need to use another machine to access the same thing. I.e. PuTTY is a user tool, not a system library."
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Nov 21, 2014 20:16
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Roargasm posted:First real meeting we set up the entire action list for the two month project and she set every single date for the next Tuesday, figuring we would just "push back" the stuff that didn't get done on time. So you didn't push back right there and say that nothing would get done by next Tuesday?
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Nov 21, 2014 20:17
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Demonachizer posted:I would posit that people like that have a big bearing on you if you have to work with them at all or if their work can affect yours. People who stay in one position too long stagnate and their bad habits seem to amplify and additionally rub off on new hires because they often look towards the people that have been there a long time for guidance. I'm surrounded by people that should have been put out to pasture 15 years ago and it's incredibly infuriating.
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Nov 21, 2014 20:25
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Lightning Jim posted:There are still at least 3 people from my old team that have basically elected to not change their situation. Some people are comfortable. A guy I used to work with was perfectly happy being a NOC technician and didn't want anything more than that. They made him several offers to move up, but he wanted to stay where he's at.
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Nov 21, 2014 20:33
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Roargasm posted:Worst PM I ever had was from another company. Original quote came in way too high so I think we got an economy manager. First real meeting we set up the entire action list for the two month project and she set every single date for the next Tuesday, figuring we would just "push back" the stuff that didn't get done on time. She also had purple hair and had a nasty knack for touching other people's laptop screens. I hate that poo poo. Proper response... If you want me to do my job, then please do yours.
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Nov 21, 2014 20:36
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Spazz posted:Some people are comfortable. A guy I used to work with was perfectly happy being a NOC technician and didn't want anything more than that. They made him several offers to move up, but he wanted to stay where he's at.
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Nov 21, 2014 20:38
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Pretty sure our new guy just signed his death warrent by refering to a dwarf we had interview with us and just hired as "The guy with no legs".
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Nov 21, 2014 20:42
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:I can't relate to these people at all. A coworker was looking for a new job and got an offer for "infrastructure architect" but turned it down because he didn't feel like he was ready. Dude, you know when you're ready for a position? When the offer letter arrives. Ugh. There is a difference between Goon-in-a-well and 'been there, done that, gently caress it, never doing it again, finally happy-ish with a job, not moving from it'. I know two guys in their 40s who work tier 1 and 2 helpdesk because they've done the sysadmin routine, and just don't want the responsibility and stress. They do good work, and are happy where they are.
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Nov 21, 2014 20:44
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God-tier helpdesk mavericks.
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Nov 21, 2014 20:47
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There's a difference between "I'm happy where I am, and I'm going to keep my skills current to continue to be good at this job." and "I'm happy where I am and doing things the same way forever." I'm surrounded by the latter.
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Nov 21, 2014 20:47
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jim truds posted:Pretty sure our new guy just signed his death warrent by refering to a dwarf we had interview with us and just hired as "The guy with no legs". holy poo poo
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Nov 21, 2014 20:48
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A program I wrote has a SQL insertion. The primary key for that table doesn't autoincrement, and my boss told me to just add one to the max key Value. He ignored me pointing out that it's a bad idea. He has a degree in CS too - he should know better.
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Nov 21, 2014 20:49
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MF_James posted:Just had a new experience that many of you most likely have had, my team-lead sent out an email last night regarding work for a project she (literally) just assigned to me and a few other people. My favorite stupid PM trick is to yell and scream "WHY IS THIS NOT DONE YET" first thing in the morning, when they assigned work to be done after everyone goes home. Today, I got to explain to a PM that "No, we do not do failover application testing unless the customer pays for it. We will do basic failover testing of network and SAN equipment only, and that happens before the machines get to the customer.  "BUT WHY DOES ${CUSTOMER1} and ${CUSTOMER2} GET SO MUCH FAILOVER TESTING EVERY TIME THEY DEPLOY NEW APPS OR MACHINES???????!!??" "Because they pay $450/hr for it." "So what you're telling me is that we charge customers for failover but we wont test it?"   [and they removed my favorite smiley for this!]
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Nov 21, 2014 21:13
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is brilliant
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Nov 21, 2014 21:29
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Seafea posted:A program I wrote has a SQL insertion. The primary key for that table doesn't autoincrement, and my boss told me to just add one to the max key Value. Welcome to the world of software engineering, where degrees don't actually guarantee anything and the points don't matter.
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Nov 21, 2014 23:50
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People refusing to answer questions that they know the answer to because they don't want to take responsibility for when it either, a) Fucks up and/or, b) Fucks up because they're too lazy to do their job This is literally a conversation that I just had with my boss: Me: Do you know when we're going live with <major change to workflow here>? Boss: Yes. Me: When? Boss: Soon. Me: ... Me: So we don't know when we're going live then. Boss: That's your interpretation of it. Me: Do we have a specific date and time we are going live with it? Boss: I'm hoping for Monday. Me:  
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Nov 22, 2014 00:37
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Oh hey someone has specced out a small vSphere environment when I've been taking some time off and expects me to take it on when I get back in. Shared storage on a Synology, a device that has a single controller so involves downing the whole environment to do a firmware update? Why yes that's a fantastic idea.
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Nov 22, 2014 00:42
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I do wish it were possible to "like" posts on forums such as these. I want to acknowledge them, but have little to say.incoherent posted:God-tier helpdesk mavericks. Why are you still on those? Upgrade to Helpdesk Yosemite!
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Nov 22, 2014 01:15
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Ynglaur posted:Okay, I'll play your silly game. "I don't understand why PuTTY doesn't allow you to export your settings in case you need to use another machine to access the same thing. I.e. PuTTY is a user tool, not a system library."  I actually regularly do this with regedit32 and exported .reg files. You can make it modular too, I split up into files for UTF-8, fixing scrolling, enable SSH compression, high speed cipher, and colour fixes for the dark blues.
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Nov 22, 2014 02:15
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Just found out my manager has been telling the directors that work on what is essentially a ground-up rewrite of our main web application can begin in January. In C# ASP.NET. We are a PHP shop with a total of one person (me) with any experience in .NET and absolutely zero knowledge of ASP whatsoever, but some Microsoft sales rep has got him chugging the Kool Aid so hard that we're all lined up to replace all our existing infrastructure with Microsoft products over the next two years. Training budget? What training budget, we can "learn on the job". This from a man who's attitude to failed unit tests is to disable whichever suites are failing and live the build anyway because having to delay a launch and say "sorry guys, we hosed up" to other managers might damage his plan of one day becoming a director. This is going to be a such a loving trainwreck. I'm looking forward to the first time a big feature breaks in production and all we can do is stand around shrugging our shoulders and making Scooby Doo "ruh-roh" noises because none of us has a clue what we're doing.
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Nov 22, 2014 03:38
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Ghost Cow Goes Boo posted:This is going to be a such a loving trainwreck.
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Nov 22, 2014 04:19
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Seafea posted:A program I wrote has a SQL insertion. The primary key for that table doesn't autoincrement, and my boss told me to just add one to the max key Value. We managed to convince The Powers That Be to let us make the identity fields all new dbs going forward ACTUAL identity fields. After showing in extensive testing that it wouldn't break anything. Dear Seafea's boss: if it's a real live identity, then when multiple records are inserted at approximately the same time, they will have different values for the primary key and won't "collide". Is he the kind of person who, when shown that it won't adversely affect current processes or require a huge change in code, will go along with your proposed improvement? 
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Nov 22, 2014 06:34
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Hey, let's hire someone and then tell skooma to have a computer ready for them that day with absolutely no notice whatsoever. Also have no tickets filed for account creation, which I cannot do without the tickets per policy. Keeping in mind I'm only at this site once a week and that day had 2 managers in tow for a meeting and had to follow their schedule. I only had less than 2 hours to get anything done. So instead of not having to come next week, which was already approved, I have to drive 2 hours and give this person a new computer. Having them use the outgoing person's computer for a couple days would just be an unworkable solution after all since it is imperative they sit in this particular place right away.
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Nov 22, 2014 07:39
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If you had holiday booked and approved then why are you coming in because someone couldn't be hosed to plan?
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Nov 22, 2014 13:18
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Ghost Cow Goes Boo posted:This is going to be a such a loving trainwreck. I'm looking forward to the first time a big feature breaks in production and all we can do is stand around shrugging our shoulders and making Scooby Doo "ruh-roh" noises because none of us has a clue what we're doing. It's going to be extra hysterical when he tells you that no one is going home until it's fixed, and your other option is to be fired for his incompetence.
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Nov 22, 2014 13:48
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Ghost Cow Goes Boo posted:This is going to be a such a loving trainwreck. Start looking for another job! Is MS just going around paying people off to switch to their garbage? this isn't the first instance I've heard of.
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Nov 22, 2014 15:25
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If you were a manager in a company that badly run that there was no oversight in decisions to change the entire platform your stuff ran on I imagine the temptation to take a Microsoft bribe would be pretty high. And then receive the payoff when it all went to poo poo.
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Nov 22, 2014 15:36
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theperminator posted:Is MS just going around paying people off to switch to their garbage? this isn't the first instance I've heard of. Nah, it's not nearly as bad as that. Executive group: "I don't like X" IT Executive: "Fix X now, or it's your job." IT Director: "Dealing with X is not nearly as bad as dealing with Y, which is what switching to-" Vendor Sales: "WE CAN SOLVE X. X CAN BE SOLVED FOR YOU. YOU BUY NOW! INSTANT GRATIFICATION. MAGIC QUADRANT! TOP 100 COMPANIES IN TOPEKA!" IT Executive: "Do what the vendor says." IT Director: "But we'll have to deal with Y" IT Executive: "We'll worry about that when the time comes." Vendor Sales: "YES WHEN THE TIME COMES WE WILL HAVE Y SOLVED" IT Director: "Ok, Vendor Sales. We bought your product. Vendor Engineer, can we solve X?" Vendor Engineer: "Who said anything about X?" Executive Group: "YOU SAID THIS WOULD SOLVE Z. WHY ISN'T Z SOLVED. NOW WE DONT LIKE X Y AND Z. THIS IS AFFECTING PRODUCTION." The IT Director dies of alcohol poisoning, and the entire IT department gets replaced by the Lord Dudeguy fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Nov 22, 2014 |
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Nov 22, 2014 19:39
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Thanks Ants posted:If you had holiday booked and approved then why are you coming in because someone couldn't be hosed to plan? This, next time laugh at them and hang up. Once people at your workplace understand that you have a certain amount of poo poo you will put up with and calling you on your holiday is not part of that, they stop doing it pretty sharpish.
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Nov 22, 2014 21:25
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He's not on the take, he's just really easily distracted by whatever dumbass thing he decides is the new hotness. We only just got done fixing everything from when he decided we were going to move over to Zend 2 only to get bored a few weeks in. He's an obsessive micromanager and an infrastructure guy who desperately wants to be a programmer, so I think a big part of this is him wanting to level the playing field so he feels like he can contribute to code discussions. You'd think he'd do that by raising his own level of competency instead of lowering ours, but of course he's been here forever and makes a big noise about how many hours he works, so he gets to do what he wants.
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Nov 22, 2014 21:39
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Thanks Ants posted:If you had holiday booked and approved then why are you coming in because someone couldn't be hosed to plan? I'm working that day anyway, I just wanted to save myself another God-forsaken 2 hour drive. If I was properly off, you better believe I'd push back or at least get cover for it. I'm just glad we are dumping them in 2 months. They're nice people and all, but I'm tired of juggling them and the main site and I'd rather keep the main site up and running.
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Nov 22, 2014 23:07
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nitrogen posted:My favorite stupid PM trick is to yell and scream "WHY IS THIS NOT DONE YET" first thing in the morning, when they assigned work to be done after everyone goes home. I had a PM like this but I was working away from home so I spent a lot of my downtime just working anyway and keeping up. It wasn't sensible but whatever. It was a strange arrangement where our Project Director would have the team of 20 of us around the table (only 2 of us IT) and ask us all what we were doing today... then at the end of the day exactly the same, but what have you done today... then the PM noted everything. I thought it was overkill but each to their own. In the end me and my boss at the time developed a way of going to these meetings and just saying ying for good day, yang for bad day, as long as we kept ying'ing at him he didn't mind. Obviously at this point we were reporting into the PM more thoroughly... but less frequently The worst PM I ever had was a faux-PM, I say this because his title was Risk Manager so he basically stuck his nose into anything that he felt was a risk for the company, naturally... For one particular risk he setup a 30 minute weekly phone call to make sure us and the client were communicating well... he made the agenda 10 pages long by just adding everything that was ever said, I had a go at him once because I said to the customer I had completed a particular task, the customer said on the conference call said he agreed it was done, so the Risk Manager said can you both email me to confirm in the minutes. I said just minute it and close the action but he refused unless he had emails... He is now banned from IT projects by the Exec board.
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Nov 23, 2014 00:22
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dogstile posted:This, next time laugh at them and hang up. this, 100x this. I had this happen this weekend and I told them i'd gladly work if they paid me OT for any of the hours I worked. (since I was scheduled for PTO) They didn't go for it, so I'm going to go see movies on Monday. My dad's been in sales his whole life. He taught me, "Never say no, but make the price of YES way too high."
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Nov 23, 2014 22:49
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poo poo that's Pissing Me Off: My job in general. This is kind of a ventrant so please bear with me. For the last 6 months or so I've taken a desktop support role in which I'd finally started making money, and all initially seemed well. Then I found I no longer really have the ability to learn and experiment with anything in the company and am no longer really permitted to actually get into the nitty gritty of why things work because myBoss posted:"Focus on the desktop side of things" Although most of the people at the client are okay, maintenance is bloody useless. The chief building guy respects no personal or professional boundaries up to and including keeping his bloody hands to himself  . This is also the same gentleman who likes foisting off as much of his wire pulling duties as possible onto us because... he's busy or something. He left me recently to assemble one of storage racks by myself because.... The only reason he was hired and still probably around is because he schmoozes with the owner who he calls "His uncle".Speaking of his "Uncle", he goes into an apoplectic fit each and every time he visits our server room because there are boxes and also due to my coworkers often refusing to put bins back on the shelves they came from, resulting in my companies owner hearing about it and flying off the handle at me because I apparently cannot babysit all of my older coworkers 24/7 about keeping the damned place in order. Speaking of my companies owner, he's interested in selling cool things to our clients instead of things that actually work and can be supported. We previously had a GFI solution on our in-house exchange server, but GFI would occasionally crash and due to being tied into the exchange transport services, would bring down mail flow for everything in the company. He of course stanchly defended it because... reasons. Speaking of colleagues, the DBA/Head of IT who is my day to day boss apparently has been quitting since before I started and has started progressively acting out including a recent incident in which he decided that the best way to unload a full pallet of monitors would be the Godzilla method of hugging the whole stack and throwing them across the loading dock and has performed other varying acts of... actingness up to and including just plain walking out in the middle of the day. Meanwhile the directors are actively seeking to undermine our operations and set us up to fail what with a lync deployment in which we got the approval order after months of faffing about, and then told we had about a week and a half to bring it live in time for an external audit that the system was supposed to be implemented for. With a full court hustle we were able to get the system up and running internally. I'll never forget the look of the Director of Operations whose face was that of a defeated man who just had his plans shot to hell. I think he's trying to get me to spill dirt on my group so that I might torpedo boss' consulting company On the other side of things we're apparently supporting OS/2 because apparently someone keeps jumping in front of the shotgun to get rid of the goddamn POS Agiecut systems that go through $2000 system boards every few months and singlehandedly keep the floppy disk alive as a storage medium in TYoOL 2014 going on 2015. We also are apparently directly responsible for the DNC solution that feeds all of our CNC machines (Rhymes with Donestek) which as it's implemented by the CNC Admins (Not an IT group) it appears to feed command files to the same receiving folder with the same name which has the hilarious consequence of sending the wrong files to the wrong machines. This of course caused a toolbit to collide with a part fixture which made a tremendously loud F'TANG sound because the floor guys can't be assed to check that they are using the appropriate program for the appropriate job. Oh, by the way, DO NOT get MR34s Meraki has reached out to us after several months of complaining and has told us that the Broadcom controllers on them are known to have issues and that they would get back to us (They haven't.) We have random issues with permenant disassociation requiring a reboot, random acts of 1Mb connections on mutual AC adapters, and general lack of or under powered signal from them. I think I'm going to look for something else soon because my job causes me no end of anxiety and recently anger.
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Nov 24, 2014 00:30
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QuiteEasilyDone posted:anger. Yup. Time to go full Peter Gibbons spaced-out and spend your time looking for something else. We joke about needing to hit the bottle but if it ever gets to that point then it's way past being unhealthy.
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Nov 24, 2014 00:35
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