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I think I would really enjoy the environment if it were like that. Currently my employer is in the position of being a legacy telecoms supplier and integrator with an IT MSP bolted on the side (I arrived via an acquisition). Anything outside of what people are used to is shot down, we offer no bespoke systems that you can't just buy off the shelf, none of the services we deploy for our customers are linked up in any meaningful way, and we have no datacenter space for providing DR systems for clients because the bean counters can't get their head around an ongoing cost that might lose money until it's gotten up to speed and has a few clients using it. Literally everything follows the formula of 'buy product/service from supplier, sell on at a profit', and if it can't be purchased as a line item then we can't/won't supply it.
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Aug 16, 2015 16:24
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J posted:I knew their warehouse environments were hosed up, didn't know the office environment was this bad too. I'd last a week there before sending crypto locker to the company wide mailing list and pouring kerosene over my desk.
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Aug 16, 2015 16:49
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If coworkers crying at their desks is a regular thing, you are working in the definition of a negative work environment
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Aug 16, 2015 17:07
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quote:“You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a grown man covering his face,” he said. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.” What the gently caress
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Aug 16, 2015 17:15
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Bow to your corporate overlords
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Aug 16, 2015 17:23
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Man, I don't want to have to stop buying from amazon. It sounds like a poo poo place from top to bottom though
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Aug 16, 2015 18:04
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fart
Chickenwalker fucked around with this message at 05:48 on Sep 23, 2018 |
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Aug 16, 2015 18:17
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I can't say that's an appealing environment but Amazon success is undisputed and I doubt we'll see anything changing. Something that stuck out to me is how management hated how Microsoft conducted business, was a "Country Club" but what's weird is they've both practiced Stack-Ranking.
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Aug 16, 2015 19:02
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Tab8715 posted:I can't say that's an appealing environment but Amazon success is undisputed and I doubt we'll see anything changing. If you mean success in a lot of people use it, I'd agree. If you mean success in that annual revenue far exceeds costs and debt, that would be incorrect. Here's chart of comparing Profit per Quarter with a company most people would agree is a success (Apple) against a company most people *think* is a success (Amazon) 
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Aug 16, 2015 19:22
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Apple and Amazon are two entirely different companies.
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Aug 16, 2015 19:26
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Show the same graph but Amazon vs overstock.
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Aug 16, 2015 19:29
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flosofl posted:If you mean success in a lot of people use it, I'd agree. If you mean success in that annual revenue far exceeds costs and debt, that would be incorrect. Amazon reinvests into itself to continue building future revenue. If anything seriously bad happened they could free up billions in a few weeks.
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Aug 16, 2015 19:29
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fart
Chickenwalker fucked around with this message at 05:48 on Sep 23, 2018 |
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Aug 16, 2015 19:32
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 Amazon's low profit is by design, it uses it to expand its revenue.
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Aug 16, 2015 19:32
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Bigass Moth posted:Show the same graph but Amazon vs overstock. Exactly, compare Amazon to Walmart, Target, Costco, Walgreens. Hell, Amazon wasn't even a tech company and they're directly competing with Google, Microsoft.
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Aug 16, 2015 19:36
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Bigass Moth posted:I must be in the minority that likes working for a small msp. I get to do different stuff everyday in varied environments, they pay for all training and certs, I learn a ton daily and my advancement is encouraged. I guess that's probably not the usual. How long have you been there? I loved working for the 5 guy msp for two years, it was fantastic as an opening job in IT. My employer was great, I had access to everything, they allowed me to study for my CCNA during work hours, experience out the rear end. Eventually the fast pace and lack of stability in knowing what I was doing any particular day, and lack of being able to plan my week, and the constant battle of scope creep wore me down and I jumped to a much higher paying internal job.
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Aug 16, 2015 19:43
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Also, AWS is insanely profitable, even after (I assume) plowing a bunch of money back into that business annually. They've only just started disclosing the financial details for that side of the house, but they're just as crazy as you'd expect. They're on pace to make $1 billion in profit from AWS this year, on $6bn in revenue. Amazon is doing just fine financially.Chickenwalker posted:I've been thinking a lot lately about how I'll talk to someone about going out sometime and then not do it because I'm so burned out from work every night and weekend. It's to the point that I pretty much feel like being social or dating aren't possible in my current position and work schedule. You don't notice a lot of the time if you have a lot of momentum career-wise but it takes its toll. Not quite the same thing, but I totally didn't realize how bad the stress of a prior job had gotten until I left. It was a typical "only sysadmin for a very small but successful business" gig where I was expected to be on-call for all issues literally 24/7/365. My boss (essentially the owner of the business) was a stickler for 100% uptime and would get up my rear end for the slightest issue, but would also not actually invest in reliable infrastructure or best practices. Despite my constantly proposing improvements. So there was a constant stream of serious issues that needed to be responded to instantly. Out for dinner on a Saturday night with my wife? Better check my phone every 5 minutes to make sure the loving site isn't down. In rural Maine for Christmas vacation? Boss is calling me up to make sure I'm aware of the degraded RAID array on $SHITTY_SUPERMICRO_BOX that runs critical infrastructure with no redundancy! I eventually YOTJ'd out of there. But until I left I was too deep in the weeds to understand how badly it was loving up my life. In retrospect I was stressed all of the time and being an rear end in a top hat to my family because of it. I would literally have nightmares about having to interact with my boss. I couldn't take advantage of the amazing Colorado backcountry because it was not acceptable to be out of cell phone range. As mentioned above, even when I did get away my boss was calling me about stupid bullshit that his cheapness and lack of foresight had directly caused. And so on. Burnout and stress from terrible working conditions is definitely a thing. And you may not even realize how horrible it is until you manage to get out from under it and see that what you were dealing with was in no way normal or acceptable. Not sure if the AWS side of Amazon has the same culture as retail. But that article kind of killed any desire I had to work for them, at any salary.
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Aug 16, 2015 20:01
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Do we know if the issues at Amazon are an Amazon thing or an Amazon-in-the-USA thing? They seem to be going a bit Google in London at least: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/picture-galleries/11090460/Inside-Amazons-new-London-office.html?frame=3035454
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Aug 16, 2015 20:15
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Nintendo Kid posted:Amazon reinvests into itself to continue building future revenue. If anything seriously bad happened they could free up billions in a few weeks. Thanks Ants posted:Do we know if the issues at Amazon are an Amazon thing or an Amazon-in-the-USA thing? http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/09/23/3570669/amazon-germany-protest/
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Aug 16, 2015 20:17
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Bigass Moth posted:I must be in the minority that likes working for a small msp. I get to do different stuff everyday in varied environments, they pay for all training and certs, I learn a ton daily and my advancement is encouraged. I guess that's probably not the usual. I am also loving the small MSP thing. I've been at two, the first one was ok but I learnt a hell of alot which I really think helped me to get to where I am now. Unfortunately it got bought out by Adecco and it went to poo poo, so I jumped ship. My current one is amazing. Its about 45-50 people, almost everyone here been referred as a friend/family of someone else here (but only hired because they're good at what they do) so its a really chill environment full of top quality banter. The CEO is actually a really genuine caring and generous person, and the company itself is really good at saying "Sorry, we wont support your TP-Link and Netgear switch environment, please buy some Cisco or we can send you the number of this bloke that lives round the corner and fixes IT problems in the evenings for a pint". Our 1st and 2nd line guys are really solid aswell, so I get to spend a majority of my time working on projects & presales rather than support issues Ahdinko fucked around with this message at 10:14 on Aug 17, 2015 |
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Aug 17, 2015 10:07
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MSPs are a great way to gain a ton of knowledge about a ton of technologies, but they wear thin after a 2-3 years. Eventually, being small, you rise to the absolute maximum you'll reach, and because of the usual clientele you can't do things "best practices" or even close to it a lot of times.
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Aug 17, 2015 13:07
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MSP's can be great but nightmare scenario is being stuck at some client site every other week until 11pm cutting over servers etc. They're also great for having clients pull you aside and say "Hey we'll pay you more than you're making now if you come work for us full-time."
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Aug 17, 2015 13:58
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KillHour posted:I'm quite fond of the Lenovo yoga pro. I had a Yoga Pro and loved it but not for work. The high res display wouldn't scale correctly on a lot of applications so I'd have to blow up the font or turn down the resolution to get it to the point I could read anything on it. Amazing display though, loved watching movies on it.
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Aug 17, 2015 14:08
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Bezos says that prior article is not the Amazon he knows!
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Aug 17, 2015 14:58
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Colonial Air Force posted:Bezos says that prior article is not the Amazon he knows! The Ceo has a different workplace experience? Color me shocked.
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Aug 17, 2015 15:06
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flosofl posted:If you mean success in a lot of people use it, I'd agree. If you mean success in that annual revenue far exceeds costs and debt, that would be incorrect. I love graphs and stuff 
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Aug 17, 2015 15:45
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Colonial Air Force posted:Bezos says that prior article is not the Amazon he knows! This is hilarious. Your company just got blasted by one of the top newspapers in the country for treating people like complete poo poo, and you just say 'That is not the company I know?'. drat.
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Aug 17, 2015 16:22
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AntennaGeek posted:One of my current coworkers spent 3 years working for Amazon doing AWS-related work; he speaks highly of the tech environment on the AWS side of the house but really disliked management. It seems like Amazon is really different across the divisions. I know folks in AWS who love it and don't seem stressed at all, but the main site people and management seems miserable, and the actual fulfillment centers issues have been very well documented.
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Aug 17, 2015 16:25
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mayodreams posted:This is hilarious. Your company just got blasted by one of the top newspapers in the country for treating people like complete poo poo, and you just say 'That is not the company I know?'. drat. It's also hilarious that he declined an interview request for the original article but now that it's blown up he's publicly trying to contradict what was written
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Aug 17, 2015 16:29
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In my deep and varied experience with lovely workplaces the people at the top will never ever admit that there's a problem. It comes either from egotistical lunacy, or anxious denial, but they will never say "I need to improve." Why? Because most of the lovely places I worked the people at the top could convince themselves that they were successful. In some cases they were fabulously wealthy, in others they had so well-insulated themselves from negative feedback that they could exist in a happy little bubble. They must be successful because only a handful of people have complaints. If one is successful one must be doing things right, and if one is doing things right then one has no need for self-examination. It's also part of the weird "anti-complaint" culture that's been cultivated by American management. They've managed to merge the definition of "whining" and "complaining" so that a complaint is now by definition without merit. People who complain are simply complainers and can be ignored. I worked at one horrible place (a call center) where one of the senior supervisors would classify all complaints as whines. Eventually the complaining stopped as people grew tired of the denigration. He was qualified to pass this judgement because he... briefly dated the customer service manager's daughter. The customer service manager brought him on as a supervisor, handed him a senior supervisor position and promptly Retired in Place while he sowed dismay. Doesn't that idiotic worker's manifesto Mike Rowe promotes have something in there about whiners and complainers? It's depressing. I can't tell you much about what makes a good workplace. I can tell you plenty about what makes a bad one.
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Aug 17, 2015 16:46
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I am a huge fan of complaining. When I was in the Navy we had a saying, "A complaining sailor is a happy sailor."
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Aug 17, 2015 16:56
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:I am a huge fan of complaining. When I was in the Navy we had a saying, "A complaining sailor is a happy sailor." The most important saying I learned from the Navy was "Never Again Volunteer Yourself". Hey, anybody do any Chat Ops automation stuff using hubot? We've got it set up for to start / stop / restart docker containers, and can use it to list hosts and packages. We're specifically working on getting it to recognize specific versions of packages. Just wondering who's used it, to what degrees of success, and and what your setup was like (or even what you didn't like and want to improve).
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Aug 17, 2015 17:16
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Fiendish Dr. Wu posted:The most important saying I learned from the Navy was "Never Again Volunteer Yourself".
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Aug 17, 2015 17:44
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Vulture Culture posted:We're not doing that because, for all the cool stuff Jesse Newland and Jason Hand and whoever are apparently doing with it, introducing production dependencies on an externally-hosted chat service feels like a really dumb idea. It would be nice as just a really thin shim around Rundeck or Ansible or whatever though That's true. I probably should've mentioned that right now we're just doing this for our testing environment. So right now we're mostly spinning up docker containers by hand, although we're also playing with Drone for some CI testing.
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Aug 17, 2015 17:51
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At my last job we started having some fun with ChatOps. In our case, it was Slack with the Lita bot, but same idea. We actually wanted to use Err since it's scripted via Python instead of Ruby, but at the time it didn't support Slack. Seems to now  It was definitely as an additional, friendly way to perform Ops tasks. Not the sole or even primary way, since as VC said, Slack having an outage and that impacting production in any way would be loving awful. We wrote a trivial plugin to pass through a whitelisted set of commands to Salt. So for example, devs could restart Tomcat in the test environment if a bad code deploy broke stuff. Things like that. Another idea we hadn't gotten around to was pulling servers in and out of the load balancer. One really nice thing about working this way is that everyone can see what you're doing, and there's a searchable historical record of exactly when a thing was done. The way it automatically gives visibility into what's going on is what I really liked about " ~ChatOps~.
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Aug 17, 2015 18:20
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What do you guys use for remote control? We have 90 local users, 5-10 of them are laptop based and can be out of the office. Just need to remote in when they call for support. Right now we're using LogMeIn. Works fine I guess, but we're missing one feature we'd like. That would the ability to send non-employees (a customer for example, having trouble with one of our websites) to something like logmein.mycompany.com so we can remotely assist them with poo poo. GoToAssist just seems to work goofy when it comes to how admins access local PC's and how credentials are stored, LogMeIn does this part really well. My helpdesk guy is trying a couple programs out. I've used TeamViewer and Dameware before and liked both of those. Maybe we should just buy a separate product (Join.me for $20/month?) to do the remote, non-employee poo poo. Suggestions/comments?
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Aug 17, 2015 19:19
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Bob Morales posted:What do you guys use for remote control? TeamViewer is great for this. I've also had good luck with GoToMeeting which will allow for hosting conference calls as well if you need it. Otherwise TeamViewer is the way to go, there pricing is pretty fair from what I remember too.
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Aug 17, 2015 19:21
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We have ScreenConnect installed on everything. Going to roll out Meraki Systems Manager as well since we've got 100 licenses doing nothing, will make a nice backup in case the ScreenConnect server breaks or someone accidentally hits 'End' and disconnects a session from the server. ScreenConnect can create on the fly sessions as well so I can send random people to whatever.company.com/unique-GUID and it'll use some fancy web technology to automatically start the client if they're using IE, then fails down through Java and ActiveX before prompting them to download and run the client. Three levels of safety before I have to explain to people how to keep and then run a file from within Chrome. Really my only complaint with ScreenConnect is that powered down clients "fall off" the dashboard if they don't get turned on for some arbitrary period of time. Other than that no complaints whatsoever, the whole thing is great to work with. Sheep fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Aug 17, 2015 |
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Aug 17, 2015 19:28
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We use join.me for meetings and remote work with customers. It's easy to use, but we've run across some odd quirks with remote control or viewing not working correctly on some systems.
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Aug 17, 2015 19:33
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Bob Morales posted:What do you guys use for remote control? Logmein Rescue is great, you can have the stuff embedded in your site, you just generate a 6 digit code, they enter it, run an exe and you're in. Its got this cool phone app too where basically the customer can use their phone as a remote camera, amazing for those moments where a site's interet is down and you're trying to diagnose stuff with a random guy at the depot and hes all "wha? pull what cable out of what blue box? i dont know!" Its also not very cheap at all Ahdinko fucked around with this message at 20:03 on Aug 17, 2015 |
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Aug 17, 2015 20:01
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