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MJP posted:Work-life balance is given a nice blurb in HR but "what is the status of X? need to know by tomorrow AM first thing" for constant, minor issues is enough to give someone anxiety problems. You don't even need a phone to take work home with you, I was nudged awake this Saturday at about 3am and had a hard time getting back to sleep since my brain was going through the crap that happened during the week and what to get ready for on the Monday.
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Mar 3, 2015 00:22
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Super Slash posted:You don't even need a phone to take work home with you, I was nudged awake this Saturday at about 3am and had a hard time getting back to sleep since my brain was going through the crap that happened during the week and what to get ready for on the Monday. I call that Wide Area Anxiety tbh
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Mar 3, 2015 00:28
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I'm looking for a "Personal Analog Assistant", like what it described in Time Management for System Administrators. Anybody have any favorites? Or a good app for Android? I'd prefer something non-phone, I think.
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Mar 3, 2015 00:51
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myron cope posted:I'm looking for a "Personal Analog Assistant", like what it described in Time Management for System Administrators. Anybody have any favorites? Or a good app for Android? I'd prefer something non-phone, I think. http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Business-Planner-Notebook-Black/dp/B0000AQONK/
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Mar 3, 2015 00:59
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Misogynist posted:Part of the problem is that employers have gone so far in selling "the work is its own reward," Oh my god, this chaps my rear end so much. I never understood this, the idea that work, in and of itself, is viewed as some kind of goddamn virtue. It's virtuous to provide for yourself and your loved ones, the product of your work can be something worthwhile and the fact that you're contributing to it can be virtuous (like, cancer research for example), but the act of working is not, itself, anything but a means to an end. I present this idea to people and half the time they look at me like they expect me to ask them for money in my next breath, the rest of the time, they just look uncomfortable. Inspector_666 posted:Probably because it doesn't feel like "work" like physical labor does. It's much easier to mentally justify staying a couple hours later all the time to sit at your desk than it would to dig another ditch or whatever. Hate this sentiment too, the idea of "real work" being physical labor. Don't tell me I haven't done any real work after I've spent the last 8 hours beating my head against a software design problem; I'd cut you if my melted brain could figure out how to tell my hand to grip a knife.
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Mar 3, 2015 01:00
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Che Delilas posted:Hate this sentiment too, the idea of "real work" being physical labor. Don't tell me I haven't done any real work after I've spent the last 8 hours beating my head against a software design problem; I'd cut you if my melted brain could figure out how to tell my hand to grip a knife. I hope you don't think this was supposed to be the takeaway from my post, or what I meant.
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Mar 3, 2015 01:10
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Between omnipresent lovely 'management' and IT guys that are predisposed to either try and be the hero or simply can't say no its a wonder there aren't more suicides. I try to spare my guys as much of the 'work follows you home' bullshit as much as possible because I don't pay them to deal with that, I pay myself to deal with that.
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Mar 3, 2015 01:27
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Inspector_666 posted:I hope you don't think this was supposed to be the takeaway from my post, or what I meant. Oh no, not at all. I was just saying that I see this idea (that work must be physical to be work) everywhere and hate it. go3 posted:Between omnipresent lovely 'management' and IT guys that are predisposed to either try and be the hero or simply can't say no its a wonder there aren't more suicides. I try to spare my guys as much of the 'work follows you home' bullshit as much as possible because I don't pay them to deal with that, I pay myself to deal with that. I've not been a manager but I go out of my way to avoid discussions of work during non-work time (including lunch - lunch is a safe place with me). Because I know many of them take their work home with them and I'll be damned if I'm going to add to the burden they're already placing upon themselves. Hell, there's purely practical reasons for putting your work down. I can't tell you how many times I've spent all day chewing on a problem to no avail, only to have a solution pop into my head 30 minutes after I stop thinking about it. Sometimes there's no easier way to solve a problem than to step back from it. Che Delilas fucked around with this message at 01:48 on Mar 3, 2015 |
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Mar 3, 2015 01:41
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This is why I go camping, read paperbacks, and play board games.
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Mar 3, 2015 02:17
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Fiendish Dr. Wu posted:This is why I go camping, read paperbacks, and play board games. Yup, IT people need to be not doing IT stuff in their downtime! It's essential to destressing and not burning out 
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Mar 3, 2015 02:26
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Fiendish Dr. Wu posted:This is why I go camping, read paperbacks, and play board games. Camping is by far my favorite way to decompress. Nothing like telling the shop to gently caress off for the weekend because I won't have cell service. On the rare occasion that I have cell service in the area I'm camping, I like to mock my co-workers by emailing them pictures of the view.
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Mar 3, 2015 02:45
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The Fool posted:
Dick. I'd do the same though.
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Mar 3, 2015 04:15
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Swink posted:Not having a laptop for a new hire is one of my biggest fears. This would happen multiple times a year at my first IT job. Drove me up the loving wall. "Hey Docjowles! We have a new hire coming on board!" "Sweet, when do they start so I can get a laptop and set up accounts?" "Oh they've been at their desk for 3 hours already, you mean it's not done yet?"  Like you, I learned to keep a few loaners hidden away for these times.CLAM DOWN posted:Oh for sure, that's absolutely my friends problem. His entire life revolves around IT, all his friends are IT people, we need to have that separation and priorities that are not easy to achieve. It's not something I've consciously chosen, but very few of my friends are in IT or really any technical field. Makes it a little easier to switch off when I'd just get a room full of blank stares if I started sperging about SAN technology or the latest Ubuntu LTS or whatever.
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Mar 3, 2015 04:17
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Docjowles posted:This would happen multiple times a year at my first IT job. Drove me up the loving wall. "Hey Docjowles! We have a new hire coming on board!" "Sweet, when do they start so I can get a laptop and set up accounts?" "Oh they've been at their desk for 3 hours already, you mean it's not done yet?" Doesn't that just make them expect it, though? I'm not saying it's a bad idea it just sounds like you're asking for "well, it was ok last time..."
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Mar 3, 2015 04:23
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Chickenwalker fucked around with this message at 03:01 on Mar 1, 2019 |
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Mar 3, 2015 04:35
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myron cope posted:Doesn't that just make them expect it, though? I'm not saying it's a bad idea it just sounds like you're asking for "well, it was ok last time..." Possibly. Like I said it was my first job and I was the junior guy fresh out of school. It was frustrating but not to the point where I wanted to go to war with management over whose fault it was that their new hire couldn't do any work for 2 weeks until Dell shipped a laptop to us. It's not like anyone ever got mad at me about it, they were more like "oh golly gee, we didn't think about that. We thought laptops just magically appeared!" And they did, because I started making sure we always had 1 or 2 spares. The IT Manager was lazy as poo poo so I didn't really have any backup. He eventually quit and I took his job so the story has a happy ending. Docjowles fucked around with this message at 04:47 on Mar 3, 2015 |
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Mar 3, 2015 04:45
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Inspector_666 posted:Probably because it doesn't feel like "work" like physical labor does. It's much easier to mentally justify staying a couple hours later all the time to sit at your desk than it would to dig another ditch or whatever. I never thought if it quite like that but it's starting to make more sense. Our work doesn't require daylight, in constant demand 24x7 and we have the ability to work anywhere. bull3964 posted:It's all squeeze squeeze squeeze. Until we get some sort of overtime legislation with teeth, the American worker is going to keep getting poo poo on from top to bottom. I don't think it's that bad but we could learn from our friends overseas and force corporations to dole out 15-day of PTO. More pressure/incentives for less contract-gigs would be greatly beneficial. Ideally, a international minimum wage would be better but unfortunately humanity isn't quite there just yet...
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Mar 3, 2015 05:20
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CLAM DOWN posted:Yup, IT people need to be not doing IT stuff in their downtime! It's essential to destressing and not burning out Nearly my entire time at my current job has been pretty stressful. I moved out to Seattle on a whim in 2010 with no job lined up and managed to get a job within two weeks as the 2nd IT guy for a construction company. I have no college degree, no certifications, and while I was extremely confident, and had always been much better than most of my colleagues at most jobs in my career, I wasn't mentally prepared for what came next. Within 4 months, my boss had quit to go off for some other job. I got called into the CFO's office and was told that they were promoting me to IT manager in part due to my then boss’ recommendation. I asked for, and got a 50% raise. I was left with an infrastructure that I'm still trying to iron out. The SAN was nearly full and was thrashing constantly leading to massive OMFG EVERYTHING IS BURNING 911 scenarios, ESX hosts were massively out of date, the Exchange server weren't being truncated and crashing constantly, DC and GPO issues, a goddamn blackberry server and various other hosts had massive issues. I tried my best to fix the biggest problems out there – added more disks to increase the SAN capacity, upgraded hosts to much newer ESXi versions (which was a nightmare due to IBM bricking a couple motherboards due to bad firmware update instructions), blah blah blah. I don’t really feel like going too much further down explaining my entire work history at this job, so I’ll get to the bigger stuff. The CFO that was my boss for several years got poo poo-canned a few years back, and the 7-8 people that reported to him got called into a meeting with the president of the company and we were all told why he was fired and that the new “All Star” CFO they were looking for would have the final say in who worked for them. He looked around the room and said “I don’t know what you do, I don’t know what you do, I sort of know what you do…” and proceeded to tell us that we could all easily be gone within 6 months. We had an awesome, laid back, temp CFO (yes this is a thing) for a while. Miss that guy. Then came my current boss. She’s scared of eye contact, prone to all of the stress-induced rear end in a top hat behavior that I exhibit, and has been generally a very unpleasant experience working for her. I got to the point late last year where almost every day, I would get to the point sometime during the day, where I would feel mentally done. Anything beyond mindless tasks that I’ve done a million times was seemingly impossible. My temples hurt from clenching and grinding my teeth and I just wanted to take a nap. I was angry as gently caress, all the time. I was conscious of the fact that I become intense and terse when I’m busy as gently caress with the massive problems of my infrastructure, and I was making a conscious effort to try and be less of an rear end in a top hat. Apparently people noticed, but I still felt angry as hell all the time. I made a few posts at the time, but my coworker buddy who I hung out with occasionally outside of work killed himself after a bad break-up this past summer and I ended up having to clean his blood out of our server rack the next day. Months later I ended up talking to a shrink due to my constant “burn out” feeling I was running into every day, and was diagnosed with ADHD and got a prescription for Adderall. I was able to tackle things that I previously started numerous times and gave up, actually listen to users when they talked rather than starting the likely fix and telling them to let me know if they ran into issues before running off to get back to other more important things, and generally just approaching things in a more logical manner. I’m still a bit of an rear end in a top hat when I’m trying to set up something or fix something that has huge implications (and then get repeatedly interrupted with comparatively dumb poo poo), but most of it is just the fact that my current workload is ridiculous. Part of it is the fact that I got thrown into a situation which in reality, I wasn’t qualified for. Anyway, I’ve found that most of my stress is self-imposed, and that if I just accept that sometimes, staying longer to make sure things that will help me in the long run are done, it lowers my stress level. I strongly dislike my boss, this job has been pretty unhealthy for me, but due to my situation where I have no degree or certs, I don’t want to jump ship on this. I found some non-reseller consultants that have been pretty good as a support system, and I’m making a lot of progress on big-ticket items. I’m really hoping that within this year, I can get on top of the biggest things that cause the most problems for my users and my mental health. In the past couple of weeks I’ve been dealing with the latest in an ongoing saga of SAN issues, and finally believe we found the root of the problem. An HBA poo poo out last week on a host, and a controller that I’ve noticed some flakiness up and died yesterday. Replaced both and just got everything reconfigured and going over their preferred paths. Latencies look better than they ever have. Between that, tweaking the WDS/MDT server I created a few weeks ago, and the tons of other items on the “make this better to save you time” list, I’m hoping to get to the point where stress is low. This is poorly written, but I'm tired, so, the end. goobernoodles fucked around with this message at 05:50 on Mar 3, 2015 |
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Mar 3, 2015 05:23
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I could be wrong on this, but if you've been working at that level for 4+ years, I don't think you're going to have a hard time finding someplace that will hire you without a degree or certs. Especially Seattle. Edit: I mean, around here most jobs that say they require a B.S. generally have an "or x years of experience." I'm still very junior, but I'm just going off of what the job postings have said. 22 Eargesplitten fucked around with this message at 05:35 on Mar 3, 2015 |
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Mar 3, 2015 05:31
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goobernoodles posted:I was having to clean his blood out of our server rack the next day. I would have noped the gently caress out of there so fast. I had a friend commit suicide a couple months ago. I wouldn't have been able to handle that.
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Mar 3, 2015 05:44
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For anybody feeling really burned out and mad all the time, I cannot recommend enough that you read Peace Is Every Step. I just burned through it and it's seriously made my life better even just in the last couple of weeks. There are so many "bells of mindfulness" in IT work. EDIT: I think zen in generally can be really helpful for stress, but that book specifically gives you really easy ways to work a little practice into everyday life. Inspector_666 fucked around with this message at 06:06 on Mar 3, 2015 |
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Mar 3, 2015 06:00
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goobernoodles posted:I made a few posts at the time, but my coworker buddy who I hung out with occasionally outside of work killed himself after a bad break-up this past summer and I ended up having to clean his blood out of our server rack the next day.
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Mar 3, 2015 07:28
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Goobernoodles, I just switched my job without certs or a degree but also with four years of experience. Don't let the lack of paper stop you from  Then again I never cleaned out the blood of my colleagues out of a server rack 
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Mar 3, 2015 08:33
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I was digging around our cabinets looking for a tone generator I know we bought a few years ago. I cannot believe how much crap our former admins kept around (we've been without an admin for about 4 months now). Box of Windows 95 installation floppies? Check. 12-year-old software we stopped using 4 years ago? Check. Adobe Acrobat 5.0 retail boxes? Check. Backup tapes for the old Novell servers we haven't had in 7 years? Of course! Ancient hardware labeled "DO NOT REMOVE" that's been gathering dust for 15 years? Yup. I really hope we get to go through all this poo poo this summer and get rid of it all. We'd probably clear up 90% of our shelving. In other news, poo poo's finally happening! After the consultant delayed all of our plans for about 5 months, we've got some new cabling in (new cat6 to every other classroom ceiling for a new wireless system). Looks so pretty, compared to the cat5 (e if we're lucky) we have everywhere else. We've got over 200 Meraki APs in our receiving center, that we're going to start deploying this week. And an order was supposed to be placed yesterday for several hundred new HP laptops, to be used first for student testing next month, and then for replacing all teacher laptops. Active Directory is supposed to be getting redesigned next month, by people who know what they're doing. The job opening for a new network admin (a lower-level one) closed last Friday, so maybe we'll have an actual admin rather than a web guy who fell into cautiously poking at the servers and calling our consultant for help soon! I've got a question, too. Since we've been admin-less, it's fallen to me to try and figure out why faxes keep getting rejected with 'NG' on our Canon copier. I want to see if there's a problem with the phone line, but I have no idea where the hell it goes. The only tone generator I found was on our Fluke CableIQ test kit, but when I plug the fax line into it, within a few seconds it warns about high voltage and won't tone (I thought phone lines only carried high voltage when they were ringing). Since I don't even know what rack that fax line goes to, I can't remove voltage from the line, as far as I'm aware, unless it can be done via the Mitel admin interface. I really don't want to trace it back manually in the ceiling, but if I can't tone with this thing, I don't see any other options. Pyroclastic fucked around with this message at 10:05 on Mar 3, 2015 |
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Mar 3, 2015 09:57
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This may have already been covered but I'll ask anyway. My wife just let me know she got accepted into medical school in downtown Dallas and so I'm off to hunt for a job so we can move there. Does everyone here recommend using recruiters or going through normal listings online? My buddy who lives in Dallas swears by Robert Half, but I've heard mostly bad things about them and recruiters in general.
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Mar 3, 2015 19:52
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penga86 posted:This may have already been covered but I'll ask anyway. My wife just let me know she got accepted into medical school in downtown Dallas and so I'm off to hunt for a job so we can move there. Does everyone here recommend using recruiters or going through normal listings online? My buddy who lives in Dallas swears by Robert Half, but I've heard mostly bad things about them and recruiters in general.
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Mar 3, 2015 19:56
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I guess I'll see the value of a recruiter this week. I applied for a position on a company website and got a typical rejection email. The recruiter I talked to yesterday is apparently recruiting for the same position and mentioned I sounded like a great fit. Will I get pushed through with a recruiter even after what I assume is an auto boot from HR computer filters? Who knows!
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Mar 3, 2015 20:01
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penga86 posted:This may have already been covered but I'll ask anyway. My wife just let me know she got accepted into medical school in downtown Dallas and so I'm off to hunt for a job so we can move there. Does everyone here recommend using recruiters or going through normal listings online? My buddy who lives in Dallas swears by Robert Half, but I've heard mostly bad things about them and recruiters in general. I live in the DFW area - I don't have any special tips for this area versus anywhere else. The IT market's pretty good though. Recruiters are fine; I don't personally recommend Robert Half but they do seem to have a pretty big presence here. Your usual avenues like Indeed & Dice will work fine. The biggest employers in the area are places like Texas Instruments, AT&T (don't work for AT&T), J.C. Penney, etc. So maybe check their sites directly. I'm afraid I don't have names for any good recruiters - I worked with one but the job she got me was pretty bad.  I think Sickening (a poster here, not a company name heh) posted a desktop support role a couple of weeks back in the area, if that fits your experience - not sure if it's filled yet or not. Here it is.
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Mar 3, 2015 20:02
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penga86 posted:This may have already been covered but I'll ask anyway. My wife just let me know she got accepted into medical school in downtown Dallas and so I'm off to hunt for a job so we can move there. Does everyone here recommend using recruiters or going through normal listings online? My buddy who lives in Dallas swears by Robert Half, but I've heard mostly bad things about them and recruiters in general. Apply for jobs that sound interesting and you will get calls from recruiters who 'found your info online' and can probably line you up with something else if you're not a match.
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Mar 3, 2015 20:12
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It continues to annoy me that companies--even "hot new startups"--don't consider remote work an option. I get a steady stream of LinkedIn messages for jobs in the Bay Area that sound potentially interesting, but they all require relocation and I (and my family) have zero interest in living out there. As a random example from last night, check out Careers at Uber. They must have 50 openings just in the engineering group. But they all need someone on-site, and almost all in San Francisco. Have fun filling that many reqs from 10% of the talent pool, and paying them $150k due to the insane cost of living and competition with the 12983187231283 other tech companies hiring locally. It must be loving nuts to be in tech in the Bay Area. I can't even imagine what my recruiter spam would look like. And I'm not even very senior, been doing IT less than 10 years. Docjowles fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Mar 3, 2015 |
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Mar 3, 2015 20:29
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I've never understood what's so appealing about San Francisco for tech startups anyway, especially when you're working on a product that's international in scale. It seems like they're just making their lives that much more difficult for the reasons you're talking about.
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Mar 3, 2015 20:37
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Japanese Dating Sim posted:I've never understood what's so appealing about San Francisco for tech startups anyway, especially when you're working on a product that's international in scale. It seems like they're just making their lives that much more difficult for the reasons you're talking about. Cargo culting. It used to be, way back when a lot more electronics manufacturing actually took place in the US, that you could come up with an idea in the Bay Area, drive on down to Silicon Valley, and get one of the manufacturing facilities to churn out a proof of concept of your thing in a few weeks. So it was a good idea to start your technology thing there, all the manufacturers were around and they could even handle decent mass production. But as actual manufacturing flowed away to overseas, it still maintained the reputation of "Where You Should Be" despite losing that original benefit. And then you had the fact that so many startups started being about web hosting or software, so even being close by to manufacturing didn't matter. Of course, a lot of tech startups realize that it no longer applies, and so a lot of them just decide to open up shop in whatever major city is nearby to them.
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Mar 3, 2015 20:47
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Not to be a shitter but what does DAF mean?
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Mar 3, 2015 20:51
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Coredump posted:Not to be a shitter but what does DAF mean? Dumb rear end fuckface, a guy that acts like his namesake
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Mar 3, 2015 20:55
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Docjowles posted:It continues to annoy me that companies--even "hot new startups"--don't consider remote work an option. I get a steady stream of LinkedIn messages for jobs in the Bay Area that sound potentially interesting, but they all require relocation and I (and my family) have zero interest in living out there. As a random example from last night, check out Careers at Uber. They must have 50 openings just in the engineering group. But they all need someone on-site, and almost all in San Francisco. Have fun filling that many reqs from 10% of the talent pool, and paying them $150k due to the insane cost of living and competition with the 12983187231283 other tech companies hiring locally.
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Mar 3, 2015 20:56
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I wholeheartedly agree that more companies should be open to remote work given the availability of broadband and 4G but all the IMs, web meetings haven't even come close to replacing physical human contact. California, to me - is awesome and I'd have few qualms moving to San Francisco provided I could afford it. Another poster spoke about this in one of the past IT Threads but if you got in the right startup, it grows big or bought-out you potentially stand to make an obscene amount of money.
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Mar 3, 2015 21:00
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There is real benefit to having a large, liquid, readily-available workforce, even if you have to pay 3 times what you would pay in Des Moines. It's also good to have easily-available capital locally. Network effects and return to scale causing industry concentrations in geographic regions aren't just a valley thing.
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Mar 3, 2015 21:09
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PCjr sidecar posted:There is real benefit to having a large, liquid, readily-available workforce, even if you have to pay 3 times what you would pay in Des Moines. It's also good to have easily-available capital locally. Network effects and return to scale causing industry concentrations in geographic regions aren't just a valley thing. This. I constantly get emails/calls about jobs in Peoria even though I live on the north side of Chicago. No, I will not take your lovely job in the middle of loving nowhere, which on a good day is a 3+ hour drive. And every single one of them says, in bold/caps, NO REMOTE.
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Mar 3, 2015 21:11
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Ugh hiring someone blows. Our first interview for the position was a rockstar that I wanted to hire on the spot but was talked out of by my boss because I have 8 other interviews scheduled. The hardest part about scheduling your strongest candidate early is that it makes every other interview completely poo poo. I am trying to not take it personal how terrible my decision making has been at choosing the candidates I did for a face to face after a phone interview. My boss is having a good time at least. I should have made a bingo card before I started. Some of the slots could have been... 1: The candidate that badmouths his previous boss 50% of the interview. 2: The candidate that didn't shave or iron. 3: The candidate that lied about having a degree. 4: The candidate that seems like they are doing us a favor. 5: The totally made up resume guy. 6: The candidate that smelled of marijuana so strongly that didn't get past the waiting room. 7: The candidate that never showed up after confirming. 8: The candidate who is so nervous and can't be talked out of being nervous. I just hope the rockstar is still available after this last one today is done.
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Mar 3, 2015 21:14
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PCjr sidecar posted:There is real benefit to having a large, liquid, readily-available workforce, even if you have to pay 3 times what you would pay in Des Moines. It's also good to have easily-available capital locally. Network effects and return to scale causing industry concentrations in geographic regions aren't just a valley thing. Yea, I was about to say exactly the above. The Bay Area is where tech simply is for a myriad of reasons. There's a gigantic talent pool, existing infrastructure, etc, etc, etc
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Mar 3, 2015 21:17
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