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I've had an interesting two weeks. I was assigned to a project that has a high level goal that a client made up with out talking to us. They agree to have me onsite for a ton of hours to help them, but the first day I was onsite it was clear their goals were not aligned with what we could deliver. I told all my PM's that, and let the client know. My company made it clear to the client that we needed a few weeks to develop the solution they required, but the client decided they needed it immediately. My director told them it wasn't possible, but they'd happily let me work with them onsite to try to figure out a solution in the meantime while we developed what they needed. Me and my boss immediately reported that I'm just going to waste two weeks of time on something that will 100% be discarded, and won't matter. We all tell the client, and they basically don't care. They give me a date of this Monday to have something to deliver. I take the two weeks and deliver the half-baked solution exactly as requested by the customer. In the meantime, the senior management of both companies all meet and realize it's a waste of everyone's time, so they push back the deliverable date by two weeks to deliver the actual right solution. As I'm clicking "send" on the email that explains I've finished the half-baked work around, I get an email from my director explaining that all work on that solution is halted and instead to focus on the actual, which is what I wanted to do all along. I tell my boss, and we both have a good laugh since we were doing exactly what was told, and eh if the client knowing wanted to waste 80 billable hours on nothing it's their choice. Also not pissing me off, 3% raise last week (after a 6% raise three months ago), and a discussion about a promotion since we are signing a huge new client and are likely going to build a new sysadm team that I'll be in charge of.
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May 24, 2018 20:37
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LochNessMonster posted:I always wonder why these type of people get any credit at all. For some reason management loves these types but they hardly ever get anything done at all. Software Craftsmanship circlejerks, in this case.
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May 24, 2018 21:06
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Who doesn’t love an Idea Guy?
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May 24, 2018 21:19
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Everyone's an ideas guy, the difference between a good one and a bad one is the good ones are quietly competent while the bad ones constantly interrupt and speak in meetings and promise all kinds of stupid poo poo and this gets them management attention and showered in projects/money/praise/whatever. We're all still primates and being loud works whether it makes sense or not.
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May 24, 2018 21:28
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Sickening posted:Unless that stuff is planning to get rolled into teams calling you really need to be shopping alternatives very soon. Lync phones won't talk to Teams either. Teams is using TLS 1.2 which Lync Edition phones do not and evidently cannot support. Microsoft is also killing 3rd party SBC support for exchange UM and AA in April of next year. Just another big gently caress you. Dammit. edit: Does no one want work right now? We've got an ad up for a windows/VMWare sysadmin. I've had 17 applicants in 8 days now. 15 of the applicants aren't remotely qualified for the job. IDGI. DigitalMocking fucked around with this message at 21:58 on May 24, 2018 |
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May 24, 2018 21:44
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poo poo pissing me off: technical lead might have inadvertently tossed me under the bus on a project. This will be fun to untangle...
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May 24, 2018 23:27
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Thanks Ants posted:
ChubbyThePhat posted:The only way this gets better is with roaming profiles too. Place I used to work had pretty much everything loop from our Illinois office back to corporate in Grand Rapids, Michigan and back
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May 25, 2018 00:58
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who the gently caress moved to redirected folders for branch locations on a 1.5Mbps link?
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LochNessMonster posted:I always wonder why these type of people get any credit at all. For some reason management loves these types but they hardly ever get anything done at all. They have the most face time with management, and have the interpersonal skills to excel at their given role, which is relentless self promotion. Management doesn't know or honestly care how the code works, only that it does. And if the nicest/most recognizable person on the dev team says it's all That Guy's Fault! then they're way more likely to believe it.
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May 25, 2018 01:31
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DigitalMocking posted:I've had 17 applicants in 8 days now. 15 of the applicants aren't remotely qualified for the job. IDGI. 15 applicants are loving desperate for anything that they might remotely be able to handle.
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May 25, 2018 04:06
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Spent all morning putting in new rules in our branch firewalls so MFPs could talk to the new Exchange servers. Email admin migrated to new servers and no one on the project or in the change management department thought to let us know. There is a weekly meeting to go over upcoming changes, and years ago our department was "encouraged" to not attend by our boss's boss. That rule doesn't apply to any other department, so we get constantly surprised by things like this.
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May 25, 2018 06:03
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I don't share ideas until I have it working in testing or close enough to working in the test environment at this job. I just do it, and I dont share it at all. because it gets immediately shut down with "no need, the current process is working, we don't have 1000's of people that we need to have it automated"
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May 25, 2018 09:32
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It is easier to ask forgiveness than permission.
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May 25, 2018 12:41
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When I got home last night I turned off my alarm for Friday and Monday and the little notification popped up 'Alarm set for 4 days and 10 hours from now' and my icy little heart felt a glow 
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May 25, 2018 13:09
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Wibla posted:poo poo pissing me off: technical lead might have inadvertently tossed me under the bus on a project. This will be fun to untangle... Don't work where I work. poo poo it fan today on a project going forward. I had placed conditions on an order in writing until X equipment was delivered to the site by the supplier rep. Manager was there and knew when I set said conditions and was filled in on the gritty info while I was isolating the gear awaiting the extra stuff in case I wasn't on site. That was monday morning. End Client rushed a delivery in person themselves a few hours later and Manager said he would take care of it so I could deal with something else. We are on a 48 hour turn around on this job. Fast forward to today with angry client calling that the equipment isn't back out to site. Whole service department in front of my site big boss "Well HUMPHREYS started the job and explicitly said in documentation and isolation to not work on it until X equipent arrives!" Me: Correct I did. Also I know Manager took delivery of equipment and would take care of it. Manager: Yes I took delivery and installed it but no idea on the hold on service! *Yelling match between Service and Manager* Manager: Well I guess I'm going to take the blame for something SOMEONE *fake cough* Humphreys didn't formalise. Being the wild west part of Australia everything had more swearing and breaking things to make silly points from everyone (including me). I'm trying to find the clip of Milton from Office Space saying he is going to burn the building down but cannot find. I feel that way and considering I work in an industrial gas facility and with my experience and access it's very easy to burn half the city let alone the building.
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May 25, 2018 15:26
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Humphreys posted:Don't work where I work. poo poo it fan today on a project going forward. I had placed conditions on an order in writing until X equipment was delivered to the site by the supplier rep. Manager was there and knew when I set said conditions and was filled in on the gritty info while I was isolating the gear awaiting the extra stuff in case I wasn't on site. Seeing as you’re in the blast radius, make sure you move all your stuff first.
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May 25, 2018 15:35
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dragonshardz posted:15 applicants are loving desperate for anything that they might remotely be able to handle. To be fair, half the jobs i've applied for list a ton of complete bullshit and it turned out that even though poo poo was listed, when I did interview and get the job, I was overqualified. I blame lovely HR / recruiting teams.
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May 26, 2018 01:27
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Not really IT, or at least on the other side of it, but I'm sure you guys will feel my pain: I'm supposed to do an online "don't fall for phishing scams" class for work. I rearrange loving grocery stores, most of my coworkerswould have a hard time figuring out how to bang two rocks together... which tbf I guess is the ideal victim for phishing. But I'm a man in my mid-30s who's been on the internet since the 486 days and aware of such things, I should be able to test out of this bullshit. I'm considering just not doing it, and if they say anything, tell them "oh, it looked like a scam, so I didn't click it." That should be an automatic pass, right?  (I know they'll just yell at me and make me do it eventually, but I can hope.)
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May 26, 2018 01:35
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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Was on a call with a vendor troubleshooting some issues. Their log files are around 50MB so I load it up in Notepad++. The guy says hey can you open this in Notepad I can't really read the logs. Fuuuuck Offf Now notepad.exe is not responding because you tried to open it and this poo poo is unreadable anyway what the hell
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May 26, 2018 01:41
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Had my first full rage at this job today. Working on something non-critical. It's a bug, but it's not breaking anything outside of the staff portal, and then only if people are being loving morons and trying to book 14 appointments into the same slot (my solution to this bug was "please just fire everyone too stupid to select the empty slots, I frankly don't understand how they survived the drive to work if they're that stupid".....or at least let me just kick an error). I need to set poo poo up to correct the mistakes of these idiots and automatically book them the way it should be done instead. But that's not the rage-inducing part, just mildly frustrating. I had a fix working and pushed it out to a hotfix branch for testing.....and QA tells me it didn't work. Sentry tells me exactly where it failed, and it made no sense. It was a very simple `.filter()` call, but it did involve a property method as an argument, which for some reason was returning None in hotstage but worked totally fine locally. But even that wasn't worthy of rage.... I walked away to get dinner, and came back to my laptop to see a message saying now it broke a different way. I explain that I understand where it's breaking but not why. I'll take a look at it Tuesday, this is the first food I've seen all day and I have plans tonight. "Oh, we REALLY need this working so this team we use in India can do their regression testing on Monday." (they're not off for our holiday over there). "Um. Ok. I guess I'll cancel my plans...." "Oh you don't have to do that! Just do it some time this weekend, but I just won't be around to help test it." This same QA person left work EARLY today because holiday weekend traffic is just such a hardship. I'm supposed to stay until [undetermined] to fix this poo poo and/or just casually give up part of my holiday weekend, but oh btw I'm leaving work early to avoid traffic and *I* can't come in to help at all this weekend. Hours later, I solved it. It's hacky but it works, and the passive-aggressively-named commits have been pushed up. I lost 3 pets in as many weeks and ended up in the ER on Wednesday.....I need a loving vacation, but I'll take a three day weekend. (speaking of which, they hosed up my PTO poo poo again  )
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May 26, 2018 01:48
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No one where I work now gets local admin unless they get sign off from a bunch of departments. Except that doesn’t help when you give your people bare bones images with no software installed and then expect them to install SSMS, Visual Studio, and a bunch of other software themselves. If you happen to know someone with a domain administrator account and have them install the software for you because it has been a month it alerts the infosec department who actually follow up on things. I still can’t actually install SSMS because the antivirus blocks it.
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May 26, 2018 01:50
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Jesus gently caress man, take some sick days for your mental health. It's not your problem if your company is structured in a way that you aren't backed up by somebody else.
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May 26, 2018 01:52
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Thanks Ants posted:Jesus gently caress man, take some sick days for your mental health. It's not your problem if your company is structured in a way that you aren't backed up by somebody else. I've taken a couple. I'm trying to get the PTO poo poo straightened out so I can schedule a real vacation this summer (haven't taken one of those in.....2 years? spent last year changing jobs twice to get here). Normally I should have more backup, but we just shuffled teams around so no one has any clue who's responsible for anything  . I kind of want to count the number of emails in my trash from JIRA about one ticket being relabeled with different teams over and over today. I'd bet a significant amount of money it's at least in the mid-teens.
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May 26, 2018 02:00
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BaronVonVaderham posted:Had my first full rage at this job today. That sounds so terrible. Tell India to go gently caress themselves and enjoy your weekend. Sorry for the loss of your pets. That is always really difficult and hard.
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May 26, 2018 02:07
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Obsoletely Fabulous posted:Sorry for the loss of your pets. That is always really difficult and hard. Thanks. I should clarify ONE didn't die. His brother did and sugar gliders can't be solitary, so I just had to give him up for adoption instead. Still hard but at least he's super happy with his new family of five other furballs 
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May 26, 2018 02:09
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Chillbro Baggins posted:Not really IT, or at least on the other side of it, but I'm sure you guys will feel my pain: I'm supposed to do an online "don't fall for phishing scams" class for work. I rearrange loving grocery stores, most of my coworkerswould have a hard time figuring out how to bang two rocks together... which tbf I guess is the ideal victim for phishing. But I'm a man in my mid-30s who's been on the internet since the 486 days and aware of such things, I should be able to test out of this bullshit. I'm considering just not doing it, and if they say anything, tell them "oh, it looked like a scam, so I didn't click it." That should be an automatic pass, right? It's not to educate you, it's to check off a box for the lawyers so if you ever do gently caress up and cost the company a bunch of money they can fire you for ignoring your training. Basically everyone these days is at-will so I don't think they really have to care but I suppose it's a good way to short circuit potential wrongful termination suits. I got a huge list of bullshit training I have to renew annually and the materials+tests are so loving low effort there is literally no other justification, no one takes those tests and feels smarter.
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May 26, 2018 02:16
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This is why my favorite activity for a long weekend is camping in the middle of a national park with zero cell coverage.
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May 26, 2018 03:00
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poo poo pissing me off: Fleeting moments of happiness at work. See, I was actually happy that we managed to get unsolved tickets down to below 1300 this week. The count hasn't been below 1400 since last fall. At least we're finally touching stuff that was opened in December. (Low priority tickets, but still.) For comparison's sake, two years ago, we actually managed to get down below 200, though to be fair our old "normal" was more around 400-500. Four digits would have had klaxons ringing nonstop then, but after almost a year it feels like this is the new normal and we're sacrificing just about everything else on the altar of trying to get this pile burned down. Is lovely documentation you don't have the time/energy to work on still considered "technical debt" or is there a different shiny term for it? Naturally, this is the perfect time to restructure our department, kick three experienced colleagues over to a new team with an ill-defined purpose and replace them with three newbies from another team, decree that everybody does their old tasks until things are properly transitioned but oh we can't transition tasks or start actual training because X is waiting on Y who are still trying to figure out Z but we moved people around anyway because arbitrary deadlines make everything better, here's a new coffee machine tho. Good luck have fun! Incidentally, does anyone here have experience with Cherwell? We're considering going from an in-house kludge (Lotus Notes!) to that and I may have the political capital to either nix the move or significantly impact implementation.
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May 26, 2018 07:37
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Gatac posted:Incidentally, does anyone here have experience with Cherwell? We're considering going from an in-house kludge (Lotus Notes!) to that and I may have the political capital to either nix the move or significantly impact implementation. It is bad. I can see how you might be able to heavily customize it to make it less bad, but it is a lot of work. It has a dedicated application you install, which is... not great. It also has a web client, which is much worse and doesn't give you access to all the features, although you can get by in a pinch. Sometimes when it's supposed to send emails, like notifying you that you have a ticket, it decides not to. Sometimes it doesn't provide a way for you to search for some types of tickets. It's very frustrating to use and I don't recommend it.
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May 26, 2018 10:32
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Gatac posted:poo poo pissing me off: Fleeting moments of happiness at work. See, I was actually happy that we managed to get unsolved tickets down to below 1300 this week. The count hasn't been below 1400 since last fall. At least we're finally touching stuff that was opened in December. (Low priority tickets, but still.) For comparison's sake, two years ago, we actually managed to get down below 200, though to be fair our old "normal" was more around 400-500. Four digits would have had klaxons ringing nonstop then, but after almost a year it feels like this is the new normal and we're sacrificing just about everything else on the altar of trying to get this pile burned down. Is lovely documentation you don't have the time/energy to work on still considered "technical debt" or is there a different shiny term for it? We use Cherwell as our only ITSM. We're a fairly large company (17,000+) and we have roughly ten people administrating it. It's fairly customizable, but you definitely need people dedicated to it. If you get it set up badly to start, it'll never get fixed.
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May 26, 2018 15:46
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I've had to use cherwell in the past and it was horrible and this was at a client with several thousand users but most of my hatred was for the labyrinth of hoops I had to jump through everytime in needed to touch a ticket
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May 26, 2018 18:09
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guppy posted:It is bad. I can see how you might be able to heavily customize it to make it less bad, but it is a lot of work. It has a dedicated application you install, which is... not great. It also has a web client, which is much worse and doesn't give you access to all the features, although you can get by in a pinch. Sometimes when it's supposed to send emails, like notifying you that you have a ticket, it decides not to. Sometimes it doesn't provide a way for you to search for some types of tickets. It's very frustrating to use and I don't recommend it. I was a Cherwell administrator at my last job. It's a full time job and it requires alot of customization. I was happier with it than any other ticketing system I've used but I was the service desk lead while also on boarding 113 other folks in IT into it so I was running ragged. . However it is significantly cheaper than service now for a similar amount of upkeep. Using kace at my current job and it's cheap and easy but I get a little frustrated at my lack of options. My boss is fine with the data it gives him though so whatever. Edit. Cherwell has some really stupid bugs though. Like sla counters were broken in a whole release because they put a null value in the math. It was fixable which I did but as a customer it was pretty infuriating.
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May 26, 2018 20:51
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Okay, that...kinda supports what I've seen so far. Obviously we're attracted to the ability to configure everything according to our requirements (which have defeated several other ticketing systems) and we do have another group in-house who's already gone through the trouble of getting their own Cherwell instance running, so we're not starting from scratch. I'm less than psyched to hear about bugs, but they sound manageable. Again, we're coming at this from a Lotus Notes app. I don't mean to jinx anything, but I feel the odds for ending up with something better than that are decently high.
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May 26, 2018 21:05
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xzzy posted:Are you Bob's boss? Last year, I finally wore my boss down enough that she agreed to send our last batch of HP tc4400s to the recycling center. Yes, I like them too. Yes, it’s amazing that they’ve lasted this long. Yes, money is tight and we don’t have many spare laptops left. No, handing someone a tablet PC from 2006 that originally shipped with Windows XP is not an acceptable response to a hardware need under any circumstances.
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May 27, 2018 01:52
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Sheep posted:The people who don't reply to emails. Doubly so the people who will call you instead of replying. This a million times. Especially when you've obviously read the email and completed the task, what is so difficult about letting the other party know? We have a few customers where our only job is alert verification. If it's legit, we email them to fix it. Sometimes three or four times, only for someone to finally say 'we fixed this last week why are you still going on about it?' Bitch, because we still have an open ticket for it. Hit reply, type out 'fixed', and hit send. Also if what we are emailing you about is unimportant or you don't care, isn't it easier to let us know up front instead of waiting weeks and deleting 5-6 emails before you finally say 'oh hey this is a legacy read-only system, don't worry about it'?!? We have some customers that must have rules directing all email from us to trash or a long-forgotten folder. We will warn them repeatedly that the vdisk your Exchange datastores are on has almost no space left. When it fills up your email will TOTALLY STOP. Eventually we pass it off to the AM to follow up, and he gets a reply in like 20 minutes. Well great, at least we didn't wait another week to kick it up.... Jerk McJerkface posted:I've had an interesting two weeks. I was assigned to a project that has a high level goal that a client made up with out talking to us. They agree to have me onsite for a ton of hours to help them, but the first day I was onsite it was clear their goals were not aligned with what we could deliver. I told all my PM's that, and let the client know. My company made it clear to the client that we needed a few weeks to develop the solution they required, but the client decided they needed it immediately. My director told them it wasn't possible, but they'd happily let me work with them onsite to try to figure out a solution in the meantime while we developed what they needed. I absolutely send that email anyway. If I've actually completed the useless task/fix to the point I'm composing the email to let everyone know, I'm still hitting send after the 'lol nevermind' comes in. DigitalMocking posted:edit: Does no one want work right now? We've got an ad up for a windows/VMWare sysadmin. I've had 17 applicants in 8 days now. 15 of the applicants aren't remotely qualified for the job. IDGI. Where is it located, what qualifications are you looking for? I'm probably not remotely qualified either, but it doesn't hurt to ask. Feel free to PM me.
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May 27, 2018 04:25
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ChubbyThePhat posted:The only way this gets better is with roaming profiles too. Aw man! There's goes my PTSD
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May 28, 2018 13:02
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poo poo that's pissing me off today - keyboards. I'm one of those weird freaks who wants their keyboard to be ergo and mechanical switches, and two years ago I bought a Matias Ergo Pro. Boy let me tell you, do never buy Matias keyboards. The keyboard itself was great...until the right hand space bar broke a year and two months in. Warranty replacement took two weeks, but they're in Canada, so OK fine. That was a year and two months ago. GUESS WHAT JUST HAPPENED AGAIN. And this time they come back with that old gem, "well our warranty is one year but here's a 25% coupon off a new keyboard". Motherfuckers you sell $200 keyboards. That is not a loving disposable item. It should last a shitload longer than a loving year, and it should definitely not have a repeatable failure. I mean, this is 100% my fault because I purchased the keyboard pre-release, i.e. no one on the Internet was around to give reviews and be the beta tester. So I was the beta tester. Lesson loving learned. I guess I ASSumed a company making specialty keyboards would be making them well enough to not fail so soon (and I don't pound on the keys either, my goal is speed not assertiveness). So have I learned my lesson? Hell no! I doubled down and bought a Kinesis Advantage 2. And boy howdy motherfuck is it a pain in the dick right now - it turns out I've been hitting the c key with the wrong finger for 20 years, and that is a loving bitch of a thing to unlearn. Plus the keyboard layout is loving weird with the thumb clusters. The Internet says I'll learn to love it in a year (sounds like Stockholm Syndrome to me), and maybe I will, but for now I feel like I'm 8 and learning to type again. I guess the question at this point is do I go all in and just switch to Dvorak while I'm at it. Can we have real NLP dictation to computers please already?
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May 28, 2018 20:10
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Super Soaker Party! posted:poo poo that's pissing me off today - keyboards. I'm one of those weird freaks who wants their keyboard to be ergo and mechanical switches, and two years ago I bought a Matias Ergo Pro. Boy let me tell you, do never buy Matias keyboards. The keyboard itself was great...until the right hand space bar broke a year and two months in. Warranty replacement took two weeks, but they're in Canada, so OK fine. That was a year and two months ago. GUESS WHAT JUST HAPPENED AGAIN. And this time they come back with that old gem, "well our warranty is one year but here's a 25% coupon off a new keyboard". Motherfuckers you sell $200 keyboards. That is not a loving disposable item. It should last a shitload longer than a loving year, and it should definitely not have a repeatable failure. I'm completely incapable of using the right shift key. When I need to do a capital a or w I hit the left shift with my pinky and the letter with my ring finger. I've been trying to correct it for years - IIRC all capital letters typed with the left hand side use the right shift, but after almost 30 years I guess this is just who I am. And I agree that expensive KBs should get at least a 5 year warranty. The left Ctrl key on the mechanical at work broke - the part that fits over the switch cracked and when I hit the key like I usually do it pops off. I tried gluing the housing back together and now it either jams OR pops off. I'm hoping I can find a replacement key, I really like having the same kb at work and at home.
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May 28, 2018 20:22
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MANime in the sheets posted:And I agree that expensive KBs should get at least a 5 year warranty. The left Ctrl key on the mechanical at work broke - the part that fits over the switch cracked and when I hit the key like I usually do it pops off. I tried gluing the housing back together and now it either jams OR pops off. I'm hoping I can find a replacement key, I really like having the same kb at work and at home. Depending on the specific switch type you might also be able to desolder just a single switch and replace it.
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May 28, 2018 20:59
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If you're a keyboard nerd willing to drop $200 on one, I say skip the ready made options and get one that has standard user replaceable switches. There's a pretty big range of options out there, some as low as $50.
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May 28, 2018 21:06
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Super Soaker Party! posted:poo poo that's pissing me off today - keyboards. I'm one of those weird freaks who wants their keyboard to be ergo and mechanical switches, and two years ago I bought a Matias Ergo Pro. Boy let me tell you, do never buy Matias keyboards. The keyboard itself was great...until the right hand space bar broke a year and two months in. Warranty replacement took two weeks, but they're in Canada, so OK fine. That was a year and two months ago. GUESS WHAT JUST HAPPENED AGAIN. And this time they come back with that old gem, "well our warranty is one year but here's a 25% coupon off a new keyboard". Motherfuckers you sell $200 keyboards. That is not a loving disposable item. It should last a shitload longer than a loving year, and it should definitely not have a repeatable failure. The Ergodox EZ might be relevant to your interests. It's the be-all and end-all of ergomech keyboard kits.
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May 28, 2018 21:50
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