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Aunt Beth
Feb 24, 2006

Baby, you're ready!
Grimey Drawer

Methanar posted:

iperf3 wasn't part of the testing?
Te-sting? Sounds painful. We don’t do that.

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Judge Schnoopy
Nov 2, 2005

dont even TRY it, pal
lol well poo poo the guy I recommended to replace me at my last job backed out, likely took a counter-offer from his current job.

The second guy on the list wasn't nearly as good of a fit and is making a 50 minute commute into work every day. He was making more money at his last job but quit due to insanely long hours and burning out. Still, a paycut is a paycut, and I doubt he's going to be comfortable for long.

Poor government organization, can't catch a break.

Gucci Loafers
May 20, 2006

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


Methanar posted:

windows systems administration and software development are different things entirely.

That’s true but those two but system administration and scripting are in a way apart of software development.

ChubbyThePhat
Dec 22, 2006

Who nico nico needs anyone else
So one of the guys in my office came in to work yesterday and completely lost his poo poo. Spent the entirety of the morning spamming a group chat about how the whole purpose of his life is to think and sleep. He had all of these elaborate statements like "I don't need work/life balance if I like my work because I can think and then sleep otherwise". His box was entirely gone. We sent him home to do anything that isn't be at work, but he continued to hit that chat hard claiming he spent time thinking and this sudden break in his personality must be OCD. It was.... quite something.

What I'm saying is, don't be this guy. Take vacations, PTO, call in sick; whatever it is you gotta do to not drive yourself absolutely mad.

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





Also, stay away from meth/cocaine.

ChubbyThePhat
Dec 22, 2006

Who nico nico needs anyone else
I've heard cocaine is quite the experience though....

Vargatron
Apr 19, 2008

MRAZZLE DAZZLE


Congrats, you work with Dr. Rockso.

H110Hawk
Dec 28, 2006

Sickening posted:

Meanwhile I have gotten two raises, a random bonus, and a promotion in less than a year here.

Oh, I don't know if this is just a regional thing, but if you can be considered a ".net developer" you are probably a job change away from swimming in money scrooge mcduck style. Seriously, we cant hire any without extreme WFH perks, unlimited vacay, and starting 160k. We have a grand total of 3 looking for a 4th. It might be cheaper to recruit these people with with paid escorts. It was recently joked about in a meeting in that borderline not joking way.

Oh hey I hear we do this as well. See how our job reqs page lists Software Engineer in like 8 offices? In general senior roles where we think you can be self directed remote work is fine. We don't specifically care whose seat you keep warm. We're a Windows shop with some Linux. There is a req in there for SRE as well.

https://www.thetradedesk.com/join-us/open-positions/show/department/13642#open-positions

And we have a couple IT positions open as well, but those are location specific because they're going to be dealing with physical laptops I presume:

https://www.thetradedesk.com/join-us/open-positions/show/department/13535#open-positions

Sorry but it's BYOH.

deedee megadoodoo
Sep 28, 2000
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.


ChubbyThePhat posted:

So one of the guys in my office came in to work yesterday and completely lost his poo poo. Spent the entirety of the morning spamming a group chat about how the whole purpose of his life is to think and sleep. He had all of these elaborate statements like "I don't need work/life balance if I like my work because I can think and then sleep otherwise". His box was entirely gone. We sent him home to do anything that isn't be at work, but he continued to hit that chat hard claiming he spent time thinking and this sudden break in his personality must be OCD. It was.... quite something.

What I'm saying is, don't be this guy. Take vacations, PTO, call in sick; whatever it is you gotta do to not drive yourself absolutely mad.

You work with DAF?????

Sprechensiesexy
Dec 26, 2010

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
All right, this could go into the STPMO thread but I'm feeling constructive today. So, how do you teach someone who is terrible at troubleshooting to be less bad? I'm talking no reading comprehension, no research before asking questions to clients, just vomiting out standard questions that show to the client that he doesn't know what he's doing.

ChubbyThePhat
Dec 22, 2006

Who nico nico needs anyone else

Sprechensiesexy posted:

All right, this could go into the STPMO thread but I'm feeling constructive today. So, how do you teach someone who is terrible at troubleshooting to be less bad? I'm talking no reading comprehension, no research before asking questions to clients, just vomiting out standard questions that show to the client that he doesn't know what he's doing.

Unfortunately, teaching troubleshooting is a very difficult task. I tend to view it not as problem solving, but problem identification. You have all these different sources of information and need to decide which bits are important and which can be discarded. It is absolutely a practiced skill and anyone can learn it, but the question is how do you help steer their thought process?

You could potentially start with some probing questions like "What other things affect thing X?". "If I do X and I get result Y, what does that mean?" or "how does X impact Y?" The idea here is to ask roughly a billion questions to help diagnose their thinking and to help push the habit on them of doing these same routines independently. Basically work through some problems with them (or more accurately watch them work through them) so that you can figure out where the train is coming off the rails.

I would be super in to having a discussion about this because I'm sure it's something we've all come across.

deedee megadoodoo
Sep 28, 2000
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one to Flavortown, and that has made all the difference.


I think it really starts with reading comprehension. When someone reports a problem, do you really understand what the problem is? That’s the first step. If you don’t actually understand what they’re reporting you should either ask for clarification or examples of how to reproduce.

Once you’re at the point where you understand the issue then you can start troubleshooting. The biggest problem with learning how to troubleshoot once you understand the problem is that it involves understanding how your particular ecosystem works. The two are linked. You can’t troubleshoot a system you don’t understand. So your employees really need to understand how everything works. Because if you don’t understand how everything works you’ll never understand why it doesn’t work.

Captain Ironblood
Nov 9, 2009
Just pulled our salesman's internet history. Lmao @ all this porn.

Filthy Lucre
Feb 27, 2006
I'm having the same sort of issue with one of my staff. In his case he seems to be completely incapable of putting two facts together or understanding any sort of cause/effect relationship.

Fortunately, he's really personable and good with customers but I can't give him any tasks more complicated than basic rote tasks. The kind that get automated.

Sprechensiesexy
Dec 26, 2010

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

ChubbyThePhat posted:

Unfortunately, teaching troubleshooting is a very difficult task. I tend to view it not as problem solving, but problem identification. You have all these different sources of information and need to decide which bits are important and which can be discarded. It is absolutely a practiced skill and anyone can learn it, but the question is how do you help steer their thought process?

You could potentially start with some probing questions like "What other things affect thing X?". "If I do X and I get result Y, what does that mean?" or "how does X impact Y?" The idea here is to ask roughly a billion questions to help diagnose their thinking and to help push the habit on them of doing these same routines independently. Basically work through some problems with them (or more accurately watch them work through them) so that you can figure out where the train is coming off the rails.

I would be super in to having a discussion about this because I'm sure it's something we've all come across.

Well, what I am seeing in my case is that he sort of panics when a client provides logs and detailed info that he doesn't understand. The wall of text intimidates him and he shoots into a scripted mode where he asks for things that might point to a problem that he is familiar with solving. But telling someone to not panic when they are panicking is like telling an agitated person to calm down, it just doesn't work. And I'm pretty sure that when you tell him to google something he will latch onto the first search result regardless of whether it's relevant or not.

MF_James
May 8, 2008
I CANNOT HANDLE BEING CALLED OUT ON MY DUMBASS OPINIONS ABOUT ANTI-VIRUS AND SECURITY. I REALLY LIKE TO THINK THAT I KNOW THINGS HERE

INSTEAD I AM GOING TO WHINE ABOUT IT IN OTHER THREADS SO MY OPINION CAN FEEL VALIDATED IN AN ECHO CHAMBER I LIKE

It's hard to teach people how to troubleshoot, because it comes down to critical thinking.

What is being reported? What does our user(s) see? Can they reliably reproduce? What is the scope of the problem (one user, all users, 10 users)? If multiple users, do those users have things in common? What do I think the problem is, based on the symptoms? How does the failing thing work, from beginning to end and where is the likely break in the process? Have I seen this exact problem before and is it worthwhile to look at whatever solved it previously, or is this an entirely new problem?

There are a ton more things that I think about without even thinking about them, due to experience I can generally narrow problems down to some overarching thing (network, application, server, workstation etc), and then further narrow down within that category based on different factors.

Sprechensiesexy posted:

Well, what I am seeing in my case is that he sort of panics when a client provides logs and detailed info that he doesn't understand. The wall of text intimidates him and he shoots into a scripted mode where he asks for things that might point to a problem that he is familiar with solving. But telling someone to not panic when they are panicking is like telling an agitated person to calm down, it just doesn't work. And I'm pretty sure that when you tell him to google something he will latch onto the first search result regardless of whether it's relevant or not.

This seems like potentially inexperience is the issue? It's hard to tell from your snippet, but if he is smart and has decent troubleshooting processes, as he gets more comfortable he should grow out of the panic mode, but he also needs to learn how to properly filter information (what is useful, what isn't useful) in stuff given from clients and what he finds via his own searching. Also, he needs to get away from trying to always attributing issues to the same 10 things he knows.

Once I realized the world would not end because it took me a few extra minutes to solve a problem, it helped a lot in keeping me cool and level headed.

MF_James fucked around with this message at 19:20 on May 23, 2018

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Tab8715 posted:

That’s true but those two but system administration and scripting are in a way apart of software development.
So is QA.

Wrath of the Bitch King
May 11, 2005

Research confirms that black is a color like silver is a color, and that beyond black is clarity.

C'mon, the devs can just do their own QA.

Gucci Loafers
May 20, 2006

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



???

RFC2324
Jun 7, 2012

http 418


but QA is actually going away, just look how successful its made Microsoft!

Sprechensiesexy
Dec 26, 2010

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

MF_James posted:


This seems like potentially inexperience is the issue? It's hard to tell from your snippet, but if he is smart and has decent troubleshooting processes, as he gets more comfortable he should grow out of the panic mode, but he also needs to learn how to properly filter information (what is useful, what isn't useful) in stuff given from clients and what he finds via his own searching. Also, he needs to get away from trying to always attributing issues to the same 10 things he knows.

Once I realized the world would not end because it took me a few extra minutes to solve a problem, it helped a lot in keeping me cool and level headed.

I am not sure if its inexperience or unwillingness to learn. I think curiosity is a key skill and with most people who exhibit bad troubleshooting that I know that seems to be the thing lacking. "Why read a problem when you can scan for keywords and poo poo out a preprogrammed response?"

And I can understand having trouble because you have no idea where to start but if the client gives you the error message on a platter it should be self evident that you should start there.

Sprechensiesexy fucked around with this message at 21:04 on May 23, 2018

RFC2324
Jun 7, 2012

http 418

Sprechensiesexy posted:

I am not sure if its inexperience or unwillingness to learn. I think curiosity is a key skill and with most people who exhibit bad troubleshooting that I know that seems to be the thing lacking. "Why read a problem when you can scan for keywords and poo poo out a preprogrammed response?"

And I can understand having trouble because you have no idea where to start but if the client gives you the error message on a platter it should be self evident that you should start there.

Customers who refuse to actually tell you the error message are the best. They will tell you everything else, but not that.

"Whats the error message that its telling you?"
"It says Acer on the box"
"Very nice, but what is the error message?"
"I have microsoft installed on my other computer"
"Neat, but what is the error message on this computer?"
"Once, I got an error message and it turned out to be a mouse in my old computer case"
:commissar:

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.
Sorry, shitposting time constraints mean I'm deliberately obtuse!

Creating software products that people want to use means combining a lot of different disciplines. Coders, scrum masters, product owners, designers, business analysts, data scientists, testers, technical writers, community people, release engineers, toolsmiths, project managers, and people managers, to name a few. Being adjacent to the process of assembling software components does not imply anything about the ease of transferring skills from one of these domains into the others. Doing any of these things in coordination with others, as part of a team, does give you some of the necessary scope and background for moving around once you have the technical aptitude.

Writing scripts and developing applications are similar in that they both entail breaking down constituent problems into steps that can be done by an algorithm. But it can be a bit like the difference between doing handy work on your bathtub and constructing a building. A layperson who's good with the tools can probably figure out how to piece together a sturdy shed from scratch. Applying that at the scope of a skyscraper is a different discipline altogether.

All this means is there's no general rule for how easy or hard it is to hop from one role to another. I got into systems administration by being a dev first, having terrible experiences with the uptime of the systems I was deploying on, and getting 16 years deep into the question "how hard can this poo poo possibly be?" I worked on large software projects during that time, and never became detached from either backend or frontend development on large-scale distributed systems. I've been able to move around seamlessly, because of things unrelated to systems administration or scripting as a discipline unto itself. For someone else whose experience has been really competently stapling together PowerShell snippets from Stack Overflow, it's going to be an altogether different experience. (This is supposed to be illustrative of someone at the other end of the dev-skill spectrum, and not an assumption of you or any other particular person.)

At some point, a person's gotta just do it and see what skills are missing.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 22:14 on May 23, 2018

JackDRipper
Feb 13, 2013

Its all about the Fishing.

RFC2324 posted:

but QA is actually going away, just look how successful its made Microsoft!

This goes hand n hand with screw development environments, we do all our testing in Production!

RFC2324
Jun 7, 2012

http 418

JackDRipper posted:

This goes hand n hand with screw development environments, we do all our testing in Production!

I have my wife doing some website design for me(because I have terrible taste and 0 sense of what looks good) and I am eagerly awaiting her explosion when I lock her out of production and tell her she has to use a dev environment to stage changes.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

JackDRipper posted:

This goes hand n hand with screw development environments, we do all our testing in Production!
"We do all our testing in production" is an appropriate solution for an ever-increasing number of companies

Captain Ironblood
Nov 9, 2009
Push out your policies and let God sort it out

mllaneza
Apr 28, 2007

Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1993-1952




guppy posted:

My big one, which I guess is Guppy's Law: All temporary fixes become permanent installations.

Mllaneza's Law of Network Engineering: Check the cables first.

If it's a cable, you fixed in 10 minutes and look like a wizard. If it's not, it'll likely take hours so no time was wasted.

Judge Schnoopy
Nov 2, 2005

dont even TRY it, pal

mllaneza posted:

Mllaneza's Law of Network Engineering: Check the cables first.

If it's a cable, you fixed in 10 minutes and look like a wizard. If it's not, it'll likely take hours so no time was wasted.

This applies to all facets of IT and not just networking. Check layer 0, that the intended equipment actually exists, then check layer 1, that it's loving plugged in right. Then you can dive into whatever hunch you have.

I had an executive complaining that her online class would give her a blank box in chrome whenever she was trying to create media content for her presentation. Turns out not having a webcam or microphone gums up the recording system.

E; do we have an azure thread anywhere on these forums? I need to bootstrap fast so I can become a dedicated resource on this new project and avoid getting thrown into tier 1 bullshit.

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


The AWS thread in the Cavern of COBOL is sort of also an all public clouds thread

freeasinbeer
Mar 26, 2015

by Fluffdaddy

Thanks Ants posted:

The AWS thread in the Cavern of COBOL is sort of also an all public clouds thread

I’ll only make fun of you a little bit for using azure*.






I might use it soon for AD stuff although it’s a bit gimped in weird ways.

Judge Schnoopy
Nov 2, 2005

dont even TRY it, pal
Azure was definitely not my choice, orders from way above my pay grade. The shop is very Windows centric to the point of using powershell for VMware and Cisco management (I know, I know!) so azure fits a lot of the custom built tools we have

CLAM DOWN
Feb 13, 2007




Azure is awesome.

Inspector_666
Oct 7, 2003

benny with the good hair

Judge Schnoopy posted:

Windows centric to the point of using powershell for VMware and Cisco management (I know, I know!)

What's wrong with this?

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


I prefer Azure for “IT” workloads in an AD environment. But yeah if you’re making the next big web app then I can see why you might be less interested.

Virigoth
Apr 28, 2009

Corona rules everything around me
C.R.E.A.M. get the virus
In the ICU y'all......



CLAM DOWN posted:

Azure is awesome.

*leans into the mic* Wrong!

The Fool
Oct 16, 2003


CLAM DOWN posted:

Azure is awesome.

Judge Schnoopy
Nov 2, 2005

dont even TRY it, pal

Thanks Ants posted:

I prefer Azure for “IT” workloads in an AD environment. But yeah if you’re making the next big web app then I can see why you might be less interested.

It's serving a purely iaas function, so I hope it's ok and works well. Nobody on the team has a ton of experience with it so we're all flying by the seat of our pants to pass poc. I'm new so if I take this on I'll be primary for netsec and can stand out from the gate.


Inspector_666 posted:

What's wrong with this?

I'm a huge powershell fan so to me, nothing. To anybody else in the industry we talk to, they look at us like we're insane.

RFC2324
Jun 7, 2012

http 418

Judge Schnoopy posted:

I'm a huge powershell fan so to me, nothing. To anybody else in the industry we talk to, they look at us like we're insane.

as a linux guy powershell seems really cool and good. only people who I have ever seen poo poo talking it are windows guys who refuse to accept that they can't live in the GUI anymore

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Sickening
Jul 16, 2007

Black summer was the best summer.
Being against azure is really dumb.

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