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anthonypants
May 6, 2007

by Nyc_Tattoo
Dinosaur Gum
Sometimes I'll use sudo cat thing | grep words because I have sudo rights to cat, but not to grep or less

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Volmarias
Dec 31, 2002

EMAIL... THE INTERNET... SEARCH ENGINES...

Lightning Jim posted:

I was in a Red Hat Training class and the trainer kept using "cat file | grep words".

To be fair, I have the bad habit of doing this too, because I so rarely use grep to open a file that I just forget that it does so. Meanwhile, my brain mentally inserts 'cat <file> |' for 'stream file and' so I don't even notice anything missing.

evol262
Nov 30, 2010
#!/usr/bin/perl
Also, because the entire point of the pipe operator is iteratively building commands, and "show me what's in this file" easily turns into "show me what's in this file [then] pick out lines containing some word"

Unnecessary use of cat is the spergiest award in a :spergin: community

Gucci Loafers
May 20, 2006

Ask yourself, do you really want to talk to pair of really nice gaudy shoes?


reddit liker posted:

it bothers me when people do stupid command line poo poo

code:
cat file | grep words
ps aux | grep -v grep

This is bad because...?

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!

Tab8715 posted:

This is bad because...?

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/16279/should-i-care-about-unnecessary-cats

FlapYoJacks
Feb 12, 2009

Tab8715 posted:

This is bad because...?

cat does the same thing grep does in this instance. So in essence you are running cat twice.

grep "words" file.txt works just as well and you don't have to run two programs to do it.


edit*

I use ps aux |grep [p]rocess a lot because most embedded platforms don't come with pgrep. :smith:

FlapYoJacks fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Aug 31, 2015

RISCy Business
Jun 17, 2015

bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork bork
Fun Shoe

theperminator posted:

The first one at least does something, did you ask what they're thinking with the second?

for some reason when idiots grep ps they feel the need to grep out the grep process

:confused:

Rhymenoserous
May 23, 2008

captkirk posted:

Where do you think we got the file the first day we ran into this problem?

Even money says they are using telco racks. The webhost I worked at (Also a colo facility...huh) bought some flood damaged telco racks, sanded them down then spraypainted them and used them as server racks. Many hours were spent drilling through the holes so we could put server rackmounts on them. A: The holes were just too small. B: They were full of blue spraypaint.

These racks... they weren't blue were they?

Antifreeze Head
Jun 6, 2005

It begins
Pillbug

ratbert90 posted:

cat does the same thing cat does in this instance. So in essence you are running cat twice.

:psyduck:

I assume one of those is supposed to be grep but it it "cat does the same thing as grep" or "grep does the same thing as cat"?

I like lurking this thread because I pick up the odd bit of useful info for my completely non-related job. We are a small office that doesn't have anyone to do IT, or rather we do but he is an old radio engineer so he set up our network with as many cheap D-Link 5 port switches as he needed. I get to stare longingly at what real infrastructure set up by more competent people might look like.

FlapYoJacks
Feb 12, 2009

Antifreeze Head posted:

:psyduck:

I assume one of those is supposed to be grep but it it "cat does the same thing as grep" or "grep does the same thing as cat"?

I like lurking this thread because I pick up the odd bit of useful info for my completely non-related job. We are a small office that doesn't have anyone to do IT, or rather we do but he is an old radio engineer so he set up our network with as many cheap D-Link 5 port switches as he needed. I get to stare longingly at what real infrastructure set up by more competent people might look like.

cat does the same thing as grep in this instance. :unsmith:

captkirk
Feb 5, 2010

Rhymenoserous posted:

Even money says they are using telco racks. The webhost I worked at (Also a colo facility...huh) bought some flood damaged telco racks, sanded them down then spraypainted them and used them as server racks. Many hours were spent drilling through the holes so we could put server rackmounts on them. A: The holes were just too small. B: They were full of blue spraypaint.

These racks... they weren't blue were they?

It's been a while, but I don't think they were blue. They were black IIRC. You didn't work in a colo in Chicago, did you?

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

UFOTofuTacoCat posted:

On the clock = customers in your ear holes at all times.
For the six months that I did phone support for DSL I've never felt more like I was renting my brain/life/soul out to an employer. What a terrible job, the cherry on top is the fact that you are hired to handle calls quickly...not actually fix things. What you think your job is is not your job. What the customers think your job is is not your job. We've got service levels to worry about.
I just realized that was about 13 years ago. What a terrible job.

I worked support for Earthlink dialup back in the late 90s/early 00s and I never realized how lovely services like that could be. It was no wonder half the people couldn't fix a problem, they weren't allowed to because of bullshit metrics like handle times and all that. Best part was they worked on old-rear end, half-broken Dell desktops still running Pentium 2 procs and maybe 512MB of RAM each. We could always tell when supervisors were monitoring our calls because the screen would flicker for a second and everything would slow to a crawl. Didn't take long to find the process, end it, then figure out what service controlled it and shut it off. No point in monitoring what I do when I get paid to fix problems and the fuckers won't let me fix anything, then wonder why people jump ship left and right (customers and employees alike). At the time I was taking night classes for college and they wanted to switch me to cable/DSL support, but the only training shifts they had were 4pm-12am, my classes were 5pm-10pm, so we amicably parted ways since they had gently caress-all for any other work to do.

Dick Trauma posted:

HAVE A NICE DAY YOU ASSHOLES!

The way you handle this is (1) bring in treats, (2) tell everyone to go gently caress themselves, (3) take the treats back and point to the list showing that "go gently caress yourself" isn't listed as offensive and boss doesn't want anyone getting fat on cupcakes. Watch heads explode and rule changes immediately follow (with possible bonus of boss getting let go).

BOOTY-ADE fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Aug 31, 2015

SixFigureSandwich
Oct 30, 2004
Exciting Lemon
Me and my colleagues got the OK to order new laptops through our company's internal system for all software/hardware requests. The request eventually makes it's way to our outsourced IT people. They then send out an email saying they need our username/passwords to finish setting up some of the software. One of my colleagues emails them back (CCing some internal higherups) that this really isn't how things should be done. Cue today when a Security Officer (apparently we have those) replies that asking for user/pass is indeed very much against company policy, and he's going to raise the issue with outsourced IT :munch:

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

Yeah, cat is bad, but this is somehow good:
code:
< data \
    sed s/bla/blaha/ |
    grep blah \
    grep -n babla
Is it worth sacrificing readability for people trying to parse your script in order to avoid an extra set of file descriptors and a process? Probably not.

cat is fine. Don't use it if you don't want to, but people should just let that poo poo go

Kazinsal
Dec 13, 2011



Reading this thread makes me terrified I'm going to graduate uni with decent marks and a handful of certifications and practical lab experience, and then end up asking people on the phone if their monitor is on.

I think if those are my prospects after graduating I'm going to become a Tibetan monk.

Alliterate Addict
Jul 10, 2012

dreaming of that face again

it's bright and blue and shimmering

grinning wide and comforting me with it's three warm and wild eyes

evol262 posted:

Unnecessary use of cat is the spergiest award in a :spergin: community

:agreed:

Of all of the things to get up in arms over, this ranks up there as "even less useful an argument to have than vim vs emacs" which is pretty drat impressive. I can see it as an argument if you're talking about "I'm writing a shell script on an embedded system and EVERY CPU CYCLE COUNTS" but if you're talking about throwing together a pipe on the command line to grep some logs, then it's a drat silly hill to die on.

edit: This is reminding me of a friend that was swearing up and down that "find . -type f -exec grep -Hni $term {} \;" was faster than "grep -RnIi $term .", despite time saying otherwise.

Alliterate Addict fucked around with this message at 22:14 on Aug 31, 2015

Volmarias
Dec 31, 2002

EMAIL... THE INTERNET... SEARCH ENGINES...

John Dough posted:

Me and my colleagues got the OK to order new laptops through our company's internal system for all software/hardware requests. The request eventually makes it's way to our outsourced IT people. They then send out an email saying they need our username/passwords to finish setting up some of the software. One of my colleagues emails them back (CCing some internal higherups) that this really isn't how things should be done. Cue today when a Security Officer (apparently we have those) replies that asking for user/pass is indeed very much against company policy, and he's going to raise the issue with outsourced IT :munch:

Unless your security officer has the power of life and death over their contract in his hands, good loving luck.


Kazinsal posted:

Reading this thread makes me terrified I'm going to graduate uni with decent marks and a handful of certifications and practical lab experience, and then end up asking people on the phone if their monitor is on.

I think if those are my prospects after graduating I'm going to become a Tibetan monk.

Welcome to the world, my gentle little butterfly, and be prepared for the hurricane of P0 bugs about being unable to print.

Potato Salad
Oct 23, 2014

nobody cares


Kazinsal posted:

Reading this thread makes me terrified I'm going to graduate uni with decent marks and a handful of certifications and practical lab experience, and then end up asking people on the phone if their monitor is on.

I think if those are my prospects after graduating I'm going to become a Tibetan monk.

Networking (social, that is -- not switching/routing) will be one thing that can get you in to the workplace starting above a helpdesk starter position. It's okay! This is a natural order of things, and if you're any good at your work and maintaining a friendly working relationship with your co-workers, one of 'em will pull you in somewhere behind the helpdesk in a few years.

Edit: just constantly freggin' apply to places while working a helpdesk somewhere if that's how it pans out. Don't go too long without accepting SOMETHING after graduation. Your certs and lab experience DO have a shelf life.

There are so many absolutely terrible people in this industry. You'll stand out eventually and get what you want if you just keep applying you're a SA member and there is no hope for you.

Potato Salad fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Aug 31, 2015

bull3964
Nov 18, 2000

DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.


Why is it that everything internet, computer, and IT related comes back to cats?

22 Eargesplitten
Oct 10, 2010



Because most code is a tangled ball of string.

Volmarias
Dec 31, 2002

EMAIL... THE INTERNET... SEARCH ENGINES...

bull3964 posted:

Why is it that everything internet, computer, and IT related comes back to cats?

Many people in IT come to admire them for their uncompromising manor on feature requests, scope increases, and sudden emergencies, as well as their BOFH attitude towards unexpected maintenance and taking things down. This is as opposed to dogs who exemplify what we really are with their willingness to do any degrading and shameful thing in exchange for being thrown a bone every once in a while.

Crowley
Mar 13, 2003

bull3964 posted:

Why is it that everything internet, computer, and IT related comes back to cats?

and car analogies.



What piss me off today..
I couldn't be arsed to research all the latest socket standards and RAM technologies and whatnot for my home Skyrim-box, so I ordered a costumize-from-a-list machine from a decently renowned local vendor. I received it yesterday and everything runs as greased lightning. The only problem is that both the CPU fan and chassis fan runs as max RPM all the time. Two hours of BIOS/driver/software fuckery and I find out they used 3-pin fans on a motherboard that only supports 4-pin fans. They run, and the motherboard can read the RPM but can't regulate it.
I've sent a mail to the vendor asking if they want to fix the issue or if I should just return the whole thing and buy from someone who knows what they're doing.

They should be better than that. That was why I opted for a pre-built box in the first place. :sigh:

Partycat
Oct 25, 2004

Norton Ghost. I understand why it is used (blast an image to a bunch of PCs simultaneously), but it never seems to work right.

Multicast either doesn't work or runs slow for no reason. Machines join and leave the group randomly.

And of course we wait until 2 days before a semester starts to image the PCs and then report it ~critical~ that your Peter Norton branded poo poo trash isn't working right yet again.

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


We are distributing instructions to end users of one of our clients for deployment of a new system. One of the steps for people to follow is to turn off checking for a valid SSL certificate, because nobody thought to quote for or supply a sub-£100 certificate.

:suicide101:

mattfl
Aug 27, 2004

Kazinsal posted:

Reading this thread makes me terrified I'm going to graduate uni with decent marks and a handful of certifications and practical lab experience, and then end up asking people on the phone if their monitor is on.

I think if those are my prospects after graduating I'm going to become a Tibetan monk.

Well I mean, what did you expect? Everyone in this thread has most likely started at the bottom and worked their way up. I fully believe everyone in IT should do time on help desk to learn some people skills before moving into higher positions.

CptJackLaser
Jul 16, 2013

mattfl posted:

Well I mean, what did you expect? Everyone in this thread has most likely started at the bottom and worked their way up. I fully believe everyone in IT should do time on help desk to learn some people skills before moving into higher positions.

Can confirm. Did not start at the bottom. Moved into Network Engineering position right out of college and I hate most users.

Starting on the helpdesk wouldn't be so bad. The trick to avoiding it becoming a career is to have a solid plan to move out of it in 1 to 2 years. Either find a way to move up in your own company, or don't be afraid to pull the trigger and move to a new one with better opportunities.

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

Che Delilas posted:

The old facilities director had worked for that company for 11 years. Within three months of working under my boss, that man and his wife both quit. Maybe he didn't like being dragged into weekly four-hour meetings that started at 10:00AM and did not have a lunch break nor lunch provided (four hours because my boss said they'd be four hours, not because they had four hours' worth of stuff to talk about). Maybe my boss just strutted into the other director's office and waved his dick around too much. Maybe it was unrelated to the consolidation (hah). All I know is, after 11 years, he quit after working under my boss for three months.

My dad told me a similar story when working IT at an old job over 10 years back (he and like 40+ other people got laid off) - he had a coworker that was going through cancer treatment, I forget what type it was. His old boss was such an rear end in a top hat that he wouldn't give the guy any time off for medical, PTO, or anything else to take care of his cancer treatments. Dude was working in the office, at home, you name it, all while undergoing chemo/radiation treatment. Dad said the last time he saw the guy he looked miserable, had lost a ton of weight and his hair was literally falling out all over his clothes. From what he told me, that was the last straw for this particular manager and he was literally forced to resign because of that and other complaints from higher-ups. No idea how they allowed that behavior to go on so long but I'd never wish that on anyone, that manager was a disgusting, money-grubbing piece of human poo poo and I hope he has to suffer a thousand times more than the way he made his employees suffer.

CptJackLaser posted:

Can confirm. Did not start at the bottom. Moved into Network Engineering position right out of college and I hate most users.

Starting on the helpdesk wouldn't be so bad. The trick to avoiding it becoming a career is to have a solid plan to move out of it in 1 to 2 years. Either find a way to move up in your own company, or don't be afraid to pull the trigger and move to a new one with better opportunities.

You lucked out either with an area with a good job market, or just really good timing. Took me a few years working IT help desk to make any progress, either because the market was saturated or companies wanted entry level people with like 5+ years experience right from college (laughable) because they were stupid and super picky. I'm at a spot now where I'm in between a field engineer/system engineer, do some traveling but also have been able to brush up on certs, get hands-on with servers and network equipment, and enjoy being able to pass off little stuff to someone below me (e.g. account lockout, password reset, software installs) on a help desk instead of burning time. Made my work life a million times more enjoyable when people trusted my experience and knowledge versus trying to move up or prove myself to some know-nothing team lead or manager that didn't know their rear end from a hole in the wall.

BOOTY-ADE fucked around with this message at 15:11 on Sep 1, 2015

Ynglaur
Oct 9, 2013

The Malta Conference, anyone?

Ozz81 posted:

...either because the market was saturated or companies wanted entry level people with like 5+ years experience right from college (laughable) because they were stupid and super picky. ...
It's fun to point out to recruiters that their request for "x years of technology-platform-of-the-day experience" is impossible because technology-platform-of-the-day hasn't existed for that long yet.

CptJackLaser
Jul 16, 2013

Ozz81 posted:


You lucked out either with an area with a good job market, or just really good timing. Took me a few years working IT help desk to make any progress, either because the market was saturated or companies wanted entry level people with like 5+ years experience right from college (laughable) because they were stupid and super picky. I'm at a spot now where I'm in between a field engineer/system engineer, do some traveling but also have been able to brush up on certs, get hands-on with servers and network equipment, and enjoy being able to pass off little stuff to someone below me (e.g. account lockout, password reset, software installs) on a help desk instead of burning time. Made my work life a million times more enjoyable when people trusted my experience and knowledge versus trying to move up or prove myself to some know-nothing team lead or manager that didn't know their rear end from a hole in the wall.


Luck was definitely part of it, I have no illusions about that. I know that my experience with entering the market was not normal. The cliche line "it's all about who you know" is how I got my job. A friend of mine was working at a hospital that was looking for an intern on the Network Engineering team. He recommended me while I was still finishing up my degree in computer networking. Once I was in I worked my butt off, learned as quickly as I could, and got my CCNA. A year later I was given a full time position and 2 years after that I left the company because I felt I couldn't move up any more. Now I'm a lead network engineer at a global pharma company. It's been a pretty wild ride.

Proud Christian Mom
Dec 20, 2006
READING COMPREHENSION IS HARD
If you don't know anyone you're in for a long arduous trip in any industry. Picking up that phone and saying "hey help a brother out" is pretty much the Warp Whistle of life.

Crowley
Mar 13, 2003

go3 posted:

If you don't know anyone you're in for a long arduous trip in any industry. Picking up that phone and saying "hey help a brother out" is pretty much the Warp Whistle of life.

At least there's the Goons.

Simpleboo
Oct 19, 2013

Left for PAX on Thursday night come back Tuesday morning and lo and behold there are unresolved issues while supervisor reads articles on reddit. I hate my job.

22 Eargesplitten
Oct 10, 2010



I think some of peoples' entry-level experience is related to when they started as well. A friend of my mother's talked about how he thinks certs are worthless when I mentioned getting my A+. The difference is that he started working during the dot-com boom, when anyone who knew how to ping was in demand. I started on the tail end of the recession, when people want 3 years of help desk experience for T1.

AlternateAccount
Apr 25, 2005
FYGM

Aunt Beth posted:

I have a customer who installed rear-door heat exchangers in their computer room, which involved installing a refrigeration infrastructure in the room as well. The contractor doing the installation cut and sweated all the pipe for the chiller lines that ran above the racks... as they installed it above the racks. :psyduck:

Well, I got kind of angry at a job for making me an idiot about datacenters and lowering my standards.

See, I used to work for a datacenter halfway up a 20+ story building. In the wintertime, when the various lovely AC units would fail, we would literally throw open all the windows to bring in cold air.

Then I was in one and saw they didn't allow cardboard boxes on the DC floor... My mind was blown.

SyNack Sassimov
May 4, 2006

Let the robot win.
            --Captain James T. Vader


godfuckingdammit.

We upgraded one of our biggest customers to Exchange 2013 last June. At the time, I was pushing to upgrade Office too, because, uh, one should. "No budget". Natch. Fine whatever, we'll push through the Office upgrade when we can.

Except people, specifically executive level people and their assistants, started having calendaring troubles. Since I generally try to not deal with calendaring, like, as much as possible, I wasn't aware of the loving mess that you get into if you have mismatched versions of Office and Exchange (as in I vaguely knew it was a bad idea, but didn't know specifically why). Yeah, turns out that Exchange calendaring as I'm sure many of you know is actually a black hole of poo poo, and when you have updates flying in from different versions of Office, different ActiveSync devices, etc., it's perfectly possible to have meetings disappear into the ether, to have one instance of a recurring appointment just up and vanish, to have "accept meeting" responses just fail to reach the meeting organizer, and other such awesome occurrences.

This bubbled up finally to my level this June, after our onsite tech had done months and months of troubleshooting. After spending a month or so on it myself, I concluded (based mostly on articles about these issues) that until we got people on the same level of Office and Exchange, any other troubleshooting / fixing was basically pointless (although I did do things like have people work online for calendaring, and other common fixes).

Cue the executive assistant to the COO (and the COO himself, for that matter, because he apparently hates Microsoft and doesn't want to use Office 2013) refusing to consider an upgrade, after we'd already bought 20 O365 Business Premium licenses on an emergency basis to get just the execs upgraded, and last week sending in a ticket referring to continued issues that was literally just:

"If <COO> upgrades and others don’t, this could then cause more calendar issues with other people. There has to be another resolution, even if temporary, to this current calendar issues between <COO>’s and <otherexec>’s calendars. Please look into this further."

(emphasis mine)

Oh really lady? There has to be another resolution? Let me just loving call up Microsoft and tell them that there has to be another solution so if they would be so loving kind as to give me the magical code to type into Exchange that makes it work that'd be great thanks. Also, we don't want to have COO upgrade and others not upgrade. We want to have everyone loving upgrade, like we should have done a year ago, and THEN see if the calendaring issues persist and try to troubleshoot. Because every single loving piece of advice I can find on the subject (like for instance this article) says simply "you're an idiot if you try to fix this without having people on the same versions of Exchange and Outlook", and I completely agree.

And we've been telling them for two months now that they need to upgrade everyone to help fix this issue (in one email to this particular EA I even linked the drat article above), but they're just refusing to listen. Well, that's fine lady, but guess what I can't fix it if you won't let me, and so you get to continue having this problem and continue having your boss yell at you for this problem, and I just can't be hosed to care since it's of your own drat making.

FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams
Can you open a support ticket with Microsoft? There's a small chance they could solve the problem without requiring an upgrade, but more likely they'll say "you need to upgrade" and if you've got a response from a Microsoft engineer that what you're doing isn't going to work, you can pretty much just throw that at the execs and walk away because if they won't listen to that then they won't listen to anything.

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

FISHMANPET posted:

Can you open a support ticket with Microsoft? There's a small chance they could solve the problem without requiring an upgrade, but more likely they'll say "you need to upgrade" and if you've got a response from a Microsoft engineer that what you're doing isn't going to work, you can pretty much just throw that at the execs and walk away because if they won't listen to that then they won't listen to anything.

Or just set up OWA and tell them to eat a dick and use the watered-down web version of email instead. Unless they still see issues there, which they shouldn't unless there's browser fuckery or they're just plain stupid. Otherwise, yeah, I agree with doing whatever possible to get everyone upgraded and using as much ammo as possible to get it done.

nitrogen
May 21, 2004

Oh, what's a 217°C difference between friends?

reddit liker posted:

it bothers me when people do stupid command line poo poo

code:
cat file | grep words
ps aux | grep -v grep

I do that poo poo and won't apologize for it. I am more likely to do it when working on issues, than just at regular times though.

I've seen all sorts of neat ways to avoid the "ps aux | grep -v grep thing.
My favorite is:

ps -ef | grep proces[s]

I'm a big believer in "If it's stupid and it works, it ain't stupid" crowd.

Now a good example of when something like that can get stupid: at ${JOB}-1 i had a kid who was banging his head against something while on call. he was looking for a process with "ps -ef | grep processname | grep -v grep

and the processname he was looking for had "grep" in the title.

Storysmith
Dec 31, 2006

nitrogen posted:

I do that poo poo and won't apologize for it. I am more likely to do it when working on issues, than just at regular times though.

Yeah, especially on a command line, gently caress your purity of essence. I will `cat thing | grep otherthing` because, statistically, I am likely to need to up-arrow and change otherthing, and I'd rather that be sitting at the end of my history.

If you're scripting, it's just like any other coding; do it in a way that makes the code's intentions clear to the people around you. If something would get you sneered at by dickbags on the internet but is what the other people on your team expect to see, it's a lot easier for everyone to maintain. For gently caress's sake, that article whines about using `ls *` in a script with "the `ls` is not very useful. It will just waste an extra process doing absolutely nothing." We're not paying by the PID here, people.

If I'm logged into a system, it's because something's gone wrong and I'm trying to fix it. I'm not code golfing, I'm trying to do my drat job. If the solution was an ideologically pure one-liner, we'd have automated it already.

CptJackLaser posted:

Luck was definitely part of it, I have no illusions about that. I know that my experience with entering the market was not normal. The cliche line "it's all about who you know" is how I got my job.

I became a sysadmin by spending my adolescence maintaining my own herd of linux machines instead of going to high school parties, and by knowing a dude who saw me floundering at a startup that was stiffing me on salary and said "hey, you could be a QA for my company. Come be a QA here." and then getting to know the other sysadmins and accepting the transfer.

It's not just who you know, it's also the ability to think on your feet once you get there and push the impostor syndrome down long enough to actually become the person they hired.

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ADBOT LOVES YOU

SyNack Sassimov
May 4, 2006

Let the robot win.
            --Captain James T. Vader


Ozz81 posted:

Or just set up OWA and tell them to eat a dick and use the watered-down web version of email instead. Unless they still see issues there, which they shouldn't unless there's browser fuckery or they're just plain stupid. Otherwise, yeah, I agree with doing whatever possible to get everyone upgraded and using as much ammo as possible to get it done.

Oh OWA's fully set up etc. They of course don't want to use it as a main way to interact with Exchange, even though with 2013 it's pretty nice to use.

FISHMANPET posted:

Can you open a support ticket with Microsoft? There's a small chance they could solve the problem without requiring an upgrade, but more likely they'll say "you need to upgrade" and if you've got a response from a Microsoft engineer that what you're doing isn't going to work, you can pretty much just throw that at the execs and walk away because if they won't listen to that then they won't listen to anything.

Yeah, at this point that's pretty much my thinking too, because they're definitely not listening to me, so I'd rather be able to have Microsoft actually back me up. My boss is unhelpfully at Burning Man this week so I can't get him to get them to approve the cost of a support incident (and in a separate incidence of stupidity he doesn't like me asking them directly to approve things....but since he's away I may just do it and tell him if he's going to be completely off grid for a week he gets what he gets). It's just so annoying because (SH/SC: "story of my life") this client consistently wants to ignore reality and then bitch to us when it bites them in the rear end.

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