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GreenNight posted:Yeah I’m loving terrible at IT. Fingers crossed none of my bosses figure it out. Working in IT has taught me you don't have to be good at this to earn a paycheck, you only have to be slightly less bad then the people in charge of you.
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Jul 2, 2018 14:08
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Eventually I'm working toward being the boss and then I can hire people smarter than me. That's the goal anyways.
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Jul 2, 2018 14:12
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GreenNight posted:Eventually I'm working toward being the boss and then I can hire people smarter than me. That's the goal anyways. Back to the mines with this one y’all.
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Jul 2, 2018 14:23
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you ate my cat posted:I started a new job last week, and I'm taking over departure processing from someone else who's leaving. They walked me through the steps - disable the user, remove and log groups, Exchange stuff, the usual - and my first thought was "I can do all of this with Powershell". They're currently doing everything manually and that sounds terrible. No one here uses scripting at all and I don't understand why. How you do this is you automate it with Powershell and then crucially tell absolutely no one and use your newfound free time to study or do something else productive.
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Jul 2, 2018 15:18
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Sheep posted:How you do this is you automate it with Powershell and then crucially tell absolutely no one and use your newfound free time to study or do something else productive. This. It was pretty weird when I became director and handed my team a script to handle all the offboarding stuff I was in charge of before and they were like "what the hell"
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Jul 2, 2018 16:47
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Kashuno posted:This. It was pretty weird when I became director and handed my team a script to handle all the offboarding stuff I was in charge of before and they were like "what the hell" And that they looked at the script like it was space magics is why you became director and they didn't. Normal IT looks like magic to non-technical folks. Automated IT looks like magic to IT folks. Even if you're not customer-facing, you can still be a wizard among your peers.
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Jul 2, 2018 17:08
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Catching up on this thread and I thought i'd accidentally opened loving D&D for a few pages. 
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Jul 2, 2018 17:40
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dogstile posted:Catching up on this thread and I thought i'd accidentally opened loving D&D for a few pages. IT in the real world is like D&D here. Lots of people screaming that the other is stupid while the vast majority remains silent because they don’t even care anymore.
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Jul 2, 2018 17:45
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I've almost completely automated our entire onboarding and offboarding process. Including building an integration with our HR tool, since the vendor had no out of the box Active Directory support. The only part that requires manual approval is termination, since there have been a number of edge cases that result in the HR system terminating someone, but they are still employed/still need accounts. With one exception. I have not been able to automate e-mail provisioning. One of my coworkers manages O365 for us and a number of our subsidiaries as his primary responsibility and he refuses to automate anything. It's not like he doesn't use powershell, but he basically just keeps a bunch of snippets in OneNote and copy-pastes them when he needs them. dogstile posted:Catching up on this thread and I thought i'd accidentally opened loving D&D for a few pages. Sorry but not sorry. LochNessMonster posted:IT in the real world is like D&D here. People being silent is what allows the toxic behavior to spread.
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Jul 2, 2018 18:31
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The Fool posted:It's not like he doesn't use powershell, but he basically just keeps a bunch of snippets in OneNote and copy-pastes them when he needs them. ugh gross. At least show him some cursory information on building a module file and using an 'import-module' line in his default powershell profile. Maybe that's what will finally push him over the edge to fleshing out those snippets into scripts.
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Jul 2, 2018 18:41
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The Fool posted:It's not like he doesn't use powershell, but he basically just keeps a bunch of snippets in OneNote and copy-pastes them when he needs them. This. I have dozens and dozens of several line scripts scattered through years of OneNotes. I am trying to force myself to use Git.
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Jul 2, 2018 18:42
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Oh man I hadn't thought about email provisioning. I'm having our tech work on that piece right now just so we can export their mailbox to PST, but having them just give it to another user would own.
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Jul 2, 2018 18:57
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Tab8715 posted:This. I didn't start using git regularly until I signed up for VSTS and started messing with deployment pipelines. Have a powershell script that needs to be deployed to a certain server? Edit it on your computer, commit and push, then the deployment pipeline send the updated version to the server automatically. Need to have a script run on a schedule? Setup a deployment on a timer that copies the script to a server, runs it, then cleans up after itself. Have three domain controllers and have a script that needs to be run on one of them, but it doesn't matter which? Create an agent pool, and the script will run on whichever server is available. A few months ago I moved everything I had in scheduled tasks to VSTS.
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Jul 2, 2018 18:58
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As someone who's graduating next year, this thread has been super helpful. I really appreciate knowledge you folks have, sincerely. I'm certainly going to brush up on my powershell stuff before I head off into the great unknown of job searches.
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Jul 2, 2018 19:20
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This thread and the negotiating thread have probably been the two most useful things from this dead gay site. It’s an absolute wealth of information.
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Jul 2, 2018 19:22
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George H.W. oval office posted:This thread and the negotiating thread have probably been the two most useful things from this dead gay site. It’s an absolute wealth of information. same, completely. Probably a better resource than basically anything else in my career
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Jul 2, 2018 19:27
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Lets Get Patchy posted:As someone who's graduating next year, this thread has been super helpful. I really appreciate knowledge you folks have, sincerely. Fresh college graduates are a hot commodity in all metro areas. If I had to do it all over against starting at 2018 I would probably be breaking down amazon's door trying to get on somewhere. Do yourself a favor (the future you) and don't get stuck at some helpdesk somewhere. Just graduating from college is the fragile time period where if you land somewhere decent doing something marketable you are mostly likely set for your career going forward. Settle for something not marketable and you have delayed your career in a big way on average. Graduates have this small window where employers will almost fight over you to get a chance to mold you into something that currently costs them an arm and a leg. Please learn to code or at the very least becomes mediocre at a scripting language before you graduate. The future you will thank me.
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Jul 2, 2018 19:37
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How much should I push to upgrade the network and lovely legacy software? I told my boss all this crap has security holes and a lot of this softwares help files are lost to time or incompatible with current os' and he doesnt seem to care. I mean its sorta less work for me, but its not really tenable in the long term.
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Jul 2, 2018 19:44
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The Fool posted:I didn't start using git regularly until I signed up for VSTS and started messing with deployment pipelines. This is really interesting, I'm going to have to look into VSTS this week. We currently run tons of scripts as scheduled tasks doing all sorts of things, and we have kind of a hacked together module that runs once a week pulling the latest version from git and overwriting the old scripts.
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Jul 2, 2018 19:45
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Defenestrategy posted:How much should I push to upgrade the network and lovely legacy software? I told my boss all this crap has security holes and a lot of this softwares help files are lost to time or incompatible with current os' and he doesnt seem to care. I mean its sorta less work for me, but its not really tenable in the long term. are you still getting paid warm piss? If so, none
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Jul 2, 2018 19:47
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Sickening posted:Graduates have this small window where employers will almost fight over you to get a chance to mold you into something that currently costs them an arm and a leg. Please learn to code or at the very least becomes mediocre at a scripting language before you graduate. The future you will thank me. I can echo this. I did a stint in the military and graduated from college in my late 20s. I fell into that "no experience is better than some experience" trap and even had a recruiter refer to me as "mid-career" at a school job fair. Better to pass on 20 qualified candidates than risk getting a bad one, I guess.
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Jul 2, 2018 19:47
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Kashuno posted:are you still getting paid warm piss? If so, none Gotcha, now suppose I wasn't paid lovely for future reference? Do you just drop it and go I told ya so when something cant be put back together?
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Jul 2, 2018 19:54
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Contingency posted:I can echo this. I did a stint in the military and graduated from college in my late 20s. I fell into that "no experience is better than some experience" trap and even had a recruiter refer to me as "mid-career" at a school job fair. Better to pass on 20 qualified candidates than risk getting a bad one, I guess. I did the same... a few years in the Navy followed by a BSc in industrial automation. That combination got me masters degree-level pay starting out, heh 
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Jul 2, 2018 19:56
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Defenestrategy posted:Gotcha, now suppose I wasn't paid lovely for future reference? Do you just drop it and go I told ya so when something cant be put back together? What you're asking is one of the core difficulties of working in IT. It's really hard to make people appreciate that they need to spend money if things aren't currently on fire. A big part of that is having the experience and personality to get the ones holding the purse strings to trust you. A lot of it is explaining to non-technical people what is going to happen if they don't spend the money. Downtime is going to happen (learn RPO/RTO). Security breaches are going to happen, possibly putting your company out of business. Having a solid foundation allows you to be more flexible and more responsible when a requirement comes up. Etc, etc. There's not generally a silver bullet. [Edit: I told you so's are useful when done in a productive manner. It's really easy to come off wrong when having the conversation, but in my experience it's something that has to be done to get people who aren't involved in the day-to-day to realize that their decisions had ramifications. Because they will absolutely forget and blame you.]
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Jul 2, 2018 19:57
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xsf421 posted:and we have kind of a hacked together module that runs once a week pulling the latest version from git and overwriting the old scripts. This is seriously the easiest lowest hanging fruit in VSTS. Install an agent a server, create a deployment that triggers on a commit to master that copies the file or files to a folder on the server. It's like a two step pipeline. VSTS doesn't even care if you're using it to host your repository, you can trigger on a webhook, and it'll pull from your existing repository to do the deployment.
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Jul 2, 2018 19:57
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Internet Explorer posted:What you're asking is one of the core difficulties of working in IT. It's really hard to make people appreciate that they need to spend money if things aren't currently on fire. A big part of that is having the experience and personality to get the ones holding the purse strings to trust you. A lot of it is explaining to non-technical people what is going to happen if they don't spend the money. Downtime is going to happen (learn RPO/RTO). Security breaches are going to happen, possibly putting your company out of business. Having a solid foundation allows you to be more flexible and more responsible when a requirement comes up. Etc, etc. I've had better luck telling a story about positive things that they can expect to happen. "You know that thing that accounting does every day that they complain about, well these upgrades will make that task significantly shorter and more reliable so we will increase efficiency and increase morale" Be a revenue multiplier, not a cost center.
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Jul 2, 2018 20:02
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The Fool posted:I've had better luck telling a story about positive things that they can expect to happen. "You know that thing that accounting does every day that they complain about, well these upgrades will make that task significantly shorter and more reliable so we will increase efficiency and increase morale" That's good advice that I left out in my rush to post.  I still think it's important to talk about the bad things. But definitely use both tools in your toolbox.
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Jul 2, 2018 20:03
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Defenestrategy posted:Gotcha, now suppose I wasn't paid lovely for future reference? Do you just drop it and go I told ya so when something cant be put back together? That's a hard answer. Ultimately, the decision of whether or not to upgrade certain systems comes down to 1) Manhours needed to be invested to perform the upgrades and any testing that goes with it 2) The obvious, cost 3) A risk analysis you aren't going to get rid of security risk or compatibility difficulty most of the time. Generally, you have to find a level your company is willing to accept the cost of vs the expense of change. Generally, for expenses I've found you really need to get as un-technical as possible with it. Tell people what could happen, in dollars, not technical outcomes, and propose a solution with dollars, not technical jargon. Also do as above, point out how it can improve business. Dollars dollars dollars.
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Jul 2, 2018 20:04
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Contingency posted:I can echo this. I did a stint in the military and graduated from college in my late 20s. I fell into that "no experience is better than some experience" trap and even had a recruiter refer to me as "mid-career" at a school job fair. Better to pass on 20 qualified candidates than risk getting a bad one, I guess. I'm basically in the same situation as you were, just a little older. Decided to use that GI bill money to learn something I've been passionate about all my life. That said, our IT program focuses a lot on python programming and it was a huge reason why a lot of students washed out. Intro to programming was one thing but data structures really kicked everyone's rear end. After multiple 20 hour "labs" I really learned the benefits of it, moreso after watching videos about security and network engineering. I've got a pretty good handle on it and still practice despite my limited time. When our high level sysadmin classes came around, I forced myself to use powershell while everyone was clicking in AD. I hosed up a lot but I definitely learned a lot from it.
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Jul 2, 2018 20:11
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Being able to do a cost/benefits analysis is a very good skill to have, especially if you can present that in a way that gets senior management to buy into your projects.
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Jul 2, 2018 20:15
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My networking mentor back in the day told me the key to budget approval was to strike fear in their minds if you didn't buy X thing
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Jul 2, 2018 20:18
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Sepist posted:My networking mentor back in the day told me the key to budget approval was to strike fear in their minds if you didn't buy X thing "Always make the problem more expensive than the solution."
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Jul 2, 2018 20:22
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Kashuno posted:are you still getting paid warm piss? If so, none Uh what? Even if you are paid poo poo and you have an opportunity to do something awesome just do it. Why? The experience you’ll get out if it is worth it’s weight in gold. When you get your next job tell them all the stuff you did and learned.
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Jul 2, 2018 20:23
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Kashuno posted:
Sure, but when half of your company is currently running Win XP, Eudora 5(circa 2000), and Word Perfect suite 8(circa 1997), and the other half is on Win10, GSuite, and Office 365 and the manager wants to know why can't she open this complex excel sheet in loving Correl Quatro, or why Eudora 5 won't import outlook contacts correctly, it seems like a simpler and probably only solution would be to at least update to something made in the last ten years and has been supported for at least the last five.
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Jul 2, 2018 20:25
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Tab8715 posted:Uh what? Because it's generally not worth fighting with management if you aren't getting paid enough to fight with management.
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Jul 2, 2018 20:34
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Defenestrategy posted:Sure, but when half of your company is currently running Win XP, Eudora 5(circa 2000), and Word Perfect suite 8(circa 1997), and the other half is on Win10, GSuite, and Office 365 and the manager wants to know why can't she open this complex excel sheet in loving Correl Quatro, or why Eudora 5 won't import outlook contacts correctly, it seems like a simpler and probably only solution would be to at least update to something made in the last ten years and has been supported for at least the last five. Between this and the fact that they are paying you nothing, I'd make sure you find a new job sooner rather than later. That place is where tech and tech careers go to die.
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Jul 2, 2018 20:34
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Defenestrategy posted:Sure, but when half of your company is currently running Win XP, Eudora 5(circa 2000), and Word Perfect suite 8(circa 1997), and the other half is on Win10, GSuite, and Office 365 and the manager wants to know why can't she open this complex excel sheet in loving Correl Quatro, or why Eudora 5 won't import outlook contacts correctly, it seems like a simpler and probably only solution would be to at least update to something made in the last ten years and has been supported for at least the last five. What. The. gently caress. That's an exaggeration, right? 
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Jul 2, 2018 20:38
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That all owns so hard. Glad I don't work there.
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Jul 2, 2018 20:39
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Wibla posted:What. The. gently caress.  I wish I could tell you that I just offhandedly thought of this software, but I wasn't even aware of half of this legacy stuff existing let alone still sorta kinda working before I had this job.Internet Explorer posted:Between this and the fact that they are paying you nothing, I'd make sure you find a new job sooner rather than later. That place is where tech and tech careers go to die. Yea, I graduate in December, I'll probably be on the hunt sometime in November.
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Jul 2, 2018 20:43
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Defenestrategy posted:
Job hunt casually today. I don't really see a downside. Waiting until a month out doesn't benefit you much.
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Jul 2, 2018 20:49
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