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The Fool
Oct 16, 2003


Krispy Wafer posted:

One manager is a goony looking fucker. How can he not know the tech? So he looks like a complete dork and still doesn't know IT?

Some people just roll ones for every stat.

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LochNessMonster
Feb 3, 2005

I need about three fitty


I’ve had a manager who was a full time musician (with corresponding masters degree). Another one was an electrician. Both joined a financial company (several billion yearly revenue) as lower management without any experience in IT or management.

The musician was completely incompetent and had no idea what he was doing besides making our team fulfill his yearly performance management goals in Q1.

The electrician just stated “sorry, I don’t do email, it’s too much of a hassle” when I asked him why he wasn’t responding to any of my mails.

To this day I still wonder how people who are high on crack at work get to make hiring decisions.

Aunt Beth
Feb 24, 2006

Baby, you're ready!
Grimey Drawer

Krispy Wafer posted:

This is the first job where my managers aren't technical and I hate it. Especially when they hit me up asking for info on tickets they have full access to but apparently can't parse. One manager is a goony looking fucker. How can he not know the tech? So he looks like a complete dork and still doesn't know IT?
He's ex-technical. I think he got out of it somewhere around 2000 because a lot of his stories involve the Unix Wars and Y2K prep. All his skills have atrophied, but rather than shifting fully into manager mode, he pretends like he still knows what we're doing, which involves him telling us no whenever he gets out of his technical comfort zone (and us figuring out ways to do things anyway). Unfortunately, his comfort zone extends to him being the #1 recipient of bulk email in our organization, and he meticulously reads every SANS newsbite and garbage article about how everything is going to neural links in my Butt nowadays and tells us that's what we need to do, while ignoring our legitimate emails to him requesting that he do his managerial duties.

Shockingly, I still really like my job, because the other sysadmins and I can ignore him about 90% of the time and get work done despite him (and our idiot project managers).

e: Because he's so awful: The head of what is for all intents and purposes our project managers' group is managed by an anthropologist with no IT background and whose management experience is limited to a stint at a Blockbuster Video. He is as competent as that sounds.

Aunt Beth fucked around with this message at 23:07 on Jul 11, 2018

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





LochNessMonster posted:

I’ve had a manager who was a full time musician (with corresponding masters degree). Another one was an electrician. Both joined a financial company (several billion yearly revenue) as lower management without any experience in IT or management.

The musician was completely incompetent and had no idea what he was doing besides making our team fulfill his yearly performance management goals in Q1.

The electrician just stated “sorry, I don’t do email, it’s too much of a hassle” when I asked him why he wasn’t responding to any of my mails.

To this day I still wonder how people who are high on crack at work get to make hiring decisions.

I've had approximately 1 manager who would actually reply to my emails. And I'd say a good half of them were "technical people."

Most managers really, really suck at it.

Sheep
Jul 24, 2003

LochNessMonster posted:

I’ve had a manager who was a full time musician (with corresponding masters degree). Another one was an electrician. Both joined a financial company (several billion yearly revenue) as lower management without any experience in IT or management.

The musician was completely incompetent and had no idea what he was doing besides making our team fulfill his yearly performance management goals in Q1.

You worked at Equifax?

adorai
Nov 2, 2002

10/27/04 Never forget
Grimey Drawer

Vulture Culture posted:

Do you all find this to be the optimum cadence? Having 1:1s this infrequently has a number of drawbacks. If you use 1:1s to build and reinforce relationships, it's too infrequent to get any signal on how your directs are doing. By the time they get to talk to you about something that's been on their mind, they may have been sitting on it an entire month. And unless you both do a great job with shared agendas, you're probably going to get a recency bias because a number of things important to them, that they intended to work through or discuss, will have simply come and gone in the intervening period.

I spend a lot of time in direct interaction with them, whether in a group or one on one throughout the month. I schedule just one per month with each of them. If I did not have the team style I do then I would have to schedule them more frequently.

I am very accessable, even by second or third level reports. Also, I have only managers that report to me, so it is a bit different from individual contributors (not to say unnecessary).

MC Fruit Stripe
Nov 26, 2002

around and around we go

The Fool posted:

Some people just roll ones for every stat.
I've never heard it put this way, this is really clever.

Hughmoris
Apr 21, 2007
Let's go to the abyss!

The Fool posted:

Some people just roll ones for every stat.

Definitely stealing this.

Cirrhosis Johnson
Jan 9, 2014
You know what I enjoy? People telling me I’m handling tickets wrong, then failing to give a single example. IT is fun and cool.

DropsySufferer
Nov 9, 2008

Impractical practicality
What is a "one on one" exactly? Just a meeting between manager and employee to talk about issues?

I've been there three months despite my perceived weaker social ability I get things done and I am reliable. So I'd be surprised if I was let go.

The real problem with this job is my issue with social anxiety. Helpdesk, desktop support are one thing. I can deal with that. This role has been a real stretch for me. I have to deal with a bit of project management and I have to deal with so many different people and not in the usual tech support role I'm accustomed to and I have a mental script for. I'm not used to this much responsibility either.

What I've learned from this role is that this type of position is not for me and would never be something I'd excel at. I'm holding this position until I finish two more classes and have my Bachelor's degree done. Then back to the job market for a less client facing role. Wish I could hold it for a whole year just to put on the resume but it's been real tough.

Judge Schnoopy
Nov 2, 2005

dont even TRY it, pal

DropsySufferer posted:

What is a "one on one" exactly? Just a meeting between manager and employee to talk about issues?

"This is what I'm working on. This is the progress I've made on x and Y since last week."

"Great. Y is falling behind and we've had a push from higher up on the results, can you prioritize that ahead of x for this next week?"

And then whatever other issues should be brought to light but maybe weren't important enough to go knock on your bosses door.

LochNessMonster
Feb 3, 2005

I need about three fitty



I did not, but it sure sounds like they have the same hiring policies.

I’ve had so many absolutely abyssmal and/or toxic managers I just can’t trust any of them anymore. I don’t tell anything more than then the absolute minimum. I always make to to cover my rear end by confirming everything by mail and sure as hell never tell them what I’m actually thinking about poo poo even if that means lying through my teeth.

I’m a cynic, but after being burnt (badly) twice I just can’t help but think “you’re probably lying to me to improve your own position” at everything any manager says to me. :(

DropsySufferer
Nov 9, 2008

Impractical practicality

Judge Schnoopy posted:

"This is what I'm working on. This is the progress I've made on x and Y since last week."

"Great. Y is falling behind and we've had a push from higher up on the results, can you prioritize that ahead of x for this next week?"

And then whatever other issues should be brought to light but maybe weren't important enough to go knock on your bosses door.

That’s very useful thank you for letting me know so I won’t walk into this blindsided. I already have a chance to prepare counter arguments.

DropsySufferer fucked around with this message at 10:41 on Jul 12, 2018

Vargatron
Apr 19, 2008

MRAZZLE DAZZLE


It's good to have constructive conversations with your manager about project updates. I always preferred doing one on ones with my previous boss as opposed to group project discussions, because I would always get dragged into the line of fire when one of my coworkers goofed on something. But like I said, it has to be a constructive conversation; getting bitched at or complaining to your boss with no purpose just wastes time. I get that sometimes you gotta vent, but I never liked just arguing about things with no action plan coming out of it.

I guess the biggest thing about having one on ones is that it's got to be a productive conversation.

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!

Interview went really good this morning. Got asked one pretty basic question on setting up failover internet at a second site. Asked a couple questions drawing a diagram of the current setup and they liked what I came up with.

CFO stuck around for 5 minutes after works to ask about salary requirements, and mentioned that he talked to their owner about hiring someone from another company (families know each other from various community/business things). Said I should hear back by the end of next week.

Vargatron
Apr 19, 2008

MRAZZLE DAZZLE


Congrats. Glad it went well for you.

Submarine Sandpaper
May 27, 2007


I dislike my 1 on 1's. I'm told ticket statistics. That they're good, that I do work befitting of a title promo. Then denied promos/good raises because of ticket statistics.

I lateraled into the wrong group, I'm still convinced the economy is going to implode though and this company pays well.

Krispy Wafer
Jul 26, 2002

I shouted out "Free the exposed 67"
But they stood on my hair and told me I was fat

Grimey Drawer

Submarine Sandpaper posted:

I dislike my 1 on 1's. I'm told ticket statistics. That they're good, that I do work befitting of a title promo. Then denied promos/good raises because of ticket statistics.

I lateraled into the wrong group, I'm still convinced the economy is going to implode though and this company pays well.

My ticket stats are off the chart. Like almost 100% over team average. This occurs when half your staff quits and the other half is a higher level tech that thinks tickets are beneath them.

And now I'm working an outage where they ordered everyone to the war room, but I can't go because I'm not important enough to be issued a laptop and the guy who was important enough quit. But at least I can still shitpost in peace.

ElehemEare
May 20, 2001
I am an omnipotent penguin.

:yotj: Ops DBA. Never again.

Vargatron
Apr 19, 2008

MRAZZLE DAZZLE


Ticket stats as measurables might seem like a good idea, but you have to take them within the context of the organization itself. Like ticket stats should drive company improvement, not used as the sole metric of an employee's performance.

Judge Schnoopy
Nov 2, 2005

dont even TRY it, pal

Vargatron posted:

I guess the biggest thing about having one on ones is that it's got to be a productive conversation.

I have a rolling progress tracker that I'm in charge of. New items, in progress, for discussion, and complete. It's my job to update that every week and send it to my boss before the 1 on 1. In the meeting we go over what I've completed, what I need help with to move in progress to complete, and how to set up the new stuff to get it rolling.

It's extremely effective in that there's no 'i don't know what to talk about' time in the meeting, and that every week I look at that thing and am driven to move poo poo over to complete to justify my salary. Keeps me moving forward every day so I don't have to sit in a meeting with nothing in the complete column and answer questions about what's holding everything up.

LochNessMonster
Feb 3, 2005

I need about three fitty


Vargatron posted:

Ticket stats as measurables might seem like a good idea, but you have to take them within the context of the organization itself. Like ticket stats should drive company improvement, not used as the sole metric of an employee's performance.

It also leads to people dodging difficult tickets, or closing them quickly and tell users it’s solved and if it occurs again to open a new ticket.

We once had a KPI for incident reduction. A reduction of 80% would mean 5/5 rating. We stopped creating tickets from our monitoring and hit a 99% reduction. Yay bonus.

Edit: Another one. When they started measuring sprint velocity for our performance review I just started pokering the same stuff for more points. Hooray bonus, My team closed 20% more points than previous year.

LochNessMonster fucked around with this message at 16:47 on Jul 12, 2018

Submarine Sandpaper
May 27, 2007


Vargatron posted:

Ticket stats as measurables might seem like a good idea, but you have to take them within the context of the organization itself. Like ticket stats should drive company improvement, not used as the sole metric of an employee's performance.

Right now, for the best statistics (which changed last week), I send and email and immediately close regardless of resolution with a note for the user to call me if instructions don't resolve. I'll miss any email response with our ticketing system, but it's the path to a promo.

CLAM DOWN
Feb 13, 2007




I have weekly one-on-ones and daily team standups, and couldn't be happier. Combine that with VSTS kanban and I've never been so organized, coordinated, and well-managed at work.

Vargatron
Apr 19, 2008

MRAZZLE DAZZLE



extremely triggered by this.

Sepist
Dec 26, 2005

FUCK BITCHES, ROUTE PACKETS

Gravy Boat 2k
I see a manager sometimes

Corsair Pool Boy
Dec 17, 2004
College Slice

LochNessMonster posted:

It also leads to people dodging difficult tickets, or closing them quickly and tell users it’s solved and if it occurs again to open a new ticket.

We once had a KPI for incident reduction. A reduction of 80% would mean 5/5 rating. We stopped creating tickets from our monitoring and hit a 99% reduction. Yay bonus.

Edit: Another one. When they started measuring sprint velocity for our performance review I just started pokering the same stuff for more points. Hooray bonus, My team closed 20% more points than previous year.

This a million times. If you make ticket stats overly important, most of the team will find ways to game them, do less work, easier work, and come out looking like angels while the people that actually follow the process (next ticket up, work it until completion) look like scrubs even though they are the ones carrying the weight. Those people will start cheating too, or more likely just leave for a job that doesn't suck. I saw it happen constantly in a previous role.


DropsySufferer posted:

That’s very useful thank you for letting me know so I won’t walk into this blindsided. I already have a chance to prepare counter arguments.

If this is your reaction to a manager scheduling a one-on-one with you, it's definitely time to go. They should (generally) not be adversarial.

22 Eargesplitten
Oct 10, 2010



Vargatron posted:

extremely triggered by this.

He actually means that his tyrannical rule over IYG keeps him relaxed.

CLAM DOWN
Feb 13, 2007




Vargatron posted:

extremely triggered by this.

Do you want me to ballpark story points for that spike?

Vargatron
Apr 19, 2008

MRAZZLE DAZZLE


CLAM DOWN posted:

Do you want me to ballpark story points for that spike?

MAKE IT STOP PLEASE!!!!

guppy
Sep 21, 2004

sting like a byob

LochNessMonster posted:

It also leads to people dodging difficult tickets, or closing them quickly and tell users it’s solved and if it occurs again to open a new ticket.

We once had a KPI for incident reduction. A reduction of 80% would mean 5/5 rating. We stopped creating tickets from our monitoring and hit a 99% reduction. Yay bonus.

Edit: Another one. When they started measuring sprint velocity for our performance review I just started pokering the same stuff for more points. Hooray bonus, My team closed 20% more points than previous year.

Yeah I think tickets as performance metric are way too easy to game. I get that ticketing is necessary for issue tracking, but it's a poor metric for performance. There is really no substitute for a manager who is actually close enough to the work to know what's going on. It's even more fun when they want to use tickets as a metric to compare groups that work very differently. This happened to me once because the helpdesk insisted, and we absolutely buried them because we had a ton of tiny little things we did all the time and, since they insisted, we started making tickets for all of them. When ticket count is the only metric it doesn't matter if the ticket takes 15 seconds to complete, it gets counted just like any other. It's not that we were better or more hardworking, it's that it's much too crude a method to measure what people always try to use it for.

rafikki
Mar 8, 2008

I see what you did there. (It's pretty easy, since ducks have a field of vision spanning 340 degrees.)

~SMcD


Got something interesting going on here, wondering if anyone has ideas. We have customer with around a hundred sites. All of them get external vulnerability scans. All of the sites in China have recently started flagging with openswan vulnerabilities. Problem is that those are not linux devices. If I run an ike-scan repeatedly sometimes it returns results, sometimes it doesn't.

code:
root@kali:~# ike-scan -M (ip address)
Starting ike-scan 1.9.4 with 1 hosts ([url]http://www.nta-monitor.com/tools/ike-scan/[/url])
(ip address)	Main Mode Handshake returned
	HDR=(CKY-R=da817797df823302)
	SA=(Enc=AES KeyLength=256 Hash=SHA1 Group=14:modp2048 Auth=PSK LifeType=Seconds LifeDuration(4)=0x00007080)
	VID=4f4568794c64414365636661 (Openswan 2.6.32)
	VID=afcad71368a1f1c96b8696fc77570100 (Dead Peer Detection v1.0)
	VID=4a131c81070358455c5728f20e95452f (RFC 3947 NAT-T)

Ending ike-scan 1.9.4: 1 hosts scanned in 0.792 seconds (1.26 hosts/sec).  1 returned handshake; 0 returned notify
root@kali:~# 
root@kali:~# 
root@kali:~# ike-scan -M (ip address)
Starting ike-scan 1.9.4 with 1 hosts ([url]http://www.nta-monitor.com/tools/ike-scan/[/url])

Ending ike-scan 1.9.4: 1 hosts scanned in 2.438 seconds (0.41 hosts/sec).  0 returned handshake; 0 returned notify
Any ideas what might be going on?

Zorak of Michigan
Jun 10, 2006

At an old job, we'd get a ticket every time someone left the company. Since the company had a lot of entry-level jobs, it wasn't unusual to get 20 or 30 of those tickets in a week. One of my guys whipped up a script to do batch terminations, which, since a different team owned our AD implementation, just involved checking all our deployed servers to make sure the departed employee didn't have a local account, sudoers entries with their username in them, cron jobs, etc. We had one junior guy doing terminations, and he'd do a batch or two a week, closing 15-20 tickets all at once. The process was very quick, so that guy routinely closed twice as many tickets as the average admin. Every single time we did performance reviews, my senior manager would grill me on why my most junior guy was doing more work than my senior guys. It's a reasonable question to ask once. The second time, I thought maybe my boss was forgetful. The third time, I began to realize that my boss just didn't give a drat what I had to say, and the real point of the question was that he wanted more even ticket metrics and simply didn't care about why they were different. That was when I realized that, while we'd had a good relationship when he was a pure technical guy, he was going to be a disaster as a senior manager.

Agrikk
Oct 17, 2003

Take care with that! We have not fully ascertained its function, and the ticking is accelerating.

guppy posted:

Yeah I think tickets as performance metric are way too easy to game.

Ask me about the time a few jobs ago where management decided that all activities would be tracked via support ticket. If it wasn’t a ticket we were encouraged to create our own tickets to document the encounter.

I don’t remember what my weekly count was, but In the first two days I created thirty seven tickets documenting every query I received from users, putting me at the lead ticket closer for the quarter.

Management rolled back that policy shortly thereafter. And ditched the ticket system all together in a few months.

Proteus Jones
Feb 28, 2013



Agrikk posted:

Ask me about the time a few jobs ago where management decided that all activities would be tracked via support ticket. If it wasn’t a ticket we were encouraged to create our own tickets to document the encounter.

I don’t remember what my weekly count was, but In the first two days I created thirty seven tickets documenting every query I received from users, putting me at the lead ticket closer for the quarter.

Management rolled back that policy shortly thereafter. And ditched the ticket system all together in a few months.

Yeah Aggressive Compliance has been a tool I’ve had to pull from the toolbox more than once.

Ham Equity
Apr 16, 2013

i hosted a great goon meet and all i got was this lousy avatar
Grimey Drawer
I sit next to my boss, and we still have a weekly one-on-one scheduled that ends up getting bumped probably 50-60% of the time, which is fine because we really only need a one-on-one every other week or so. It's usually half an hour or less, we go over ongoing projects and things that get de-prioritized, but we have really good communication. She's a former DBA, and I'm moving in that direction so she has a lot of knowledge that's very helpful to me, but her Windows/admin skills aren't really up to snuff. It's fine, though, because she knows this, and listens to her reports and the reports to the other IT manager when it comes to that stuff.

This is really by far the best work environment I've ever had. My only real complaints are about the pay (which is a bit low, but not desperately low, and I'm learning a ton so I'm okay with it for now) and senior management (which my bosses shield us from very well). I talk to my friends in other departments and am just so loving glad I don't work anywhere else.

Also, since getting bumped up from desktop my ticket volume has dropped 75%, mostly because it takes a few hours to write the scripts and test them for the things I'm doing now instead of just telling someone to reboot, or opening Outlook in Safe mode, closing it, then re-opening it again. At no point have ticket metrics been suggested, thank God.

Agrikk
Oct 17, 2003

Take care with that! We have not fully ascertained its function, and the ticking is accelerating.

Proteus Jones posted:

Yeah Aggressive Compliance has been a tool I’ve had to pull from the toolbox more than once.

I’ve never heard that phrase before but “aggressive compliance” is a great term.

Ham Equity
Apr 16, 2013

i hosted a great goon meet and all i got was this lousy avatar
Grimey Drawer
I usually hear "malicious compliance."

Sprechensiesexy
Dec 26, 2010

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
I look forward to a job where I never see a ticket ever again. Our service desk has 2 tasks, fill out a ticket correctly, put it in the right queue. Not unsurprisingly but unfortunately, they can do neither correctly which is a massive ball ache.

Proteus Jones posted:

Yeah Aggressive Compliance has been a tool I’ve had to pull from the toolbox more than once.

I was gonna call my cricket bat "Escalation Matrix" and put it next to my desk but "Aggressive Compliance" is an even better name

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Ham Equity
Apr 16, 2013

i hosted a great goon meet and all i got was this lousy avatar
Grimey Drawer

Sprechensiesexy posted:

I look forward to a job where I never see a ticket ever again. Our service desk has 2 tasks, fill out a ticket correctly, put it in the right queue. Not unsurprisingly but unfortunately, they can do neither correctly which is a massive ball ache.


I was gonna call my cricket bat "Escalation Matrix" and put it next to my desk but "Aggressive Compliance" is an even better name

Now that I'm in a job that uses a ticketing system, I never want to go back. I can't count the number of times I've saved my own rear end because I had an issue six months ago that I didn't remember, but went back and looked through my own tickets, discovered I'd already fixed it, and written down exactly what I needed to do to do so. It's also really good for keeping me from letting things fall through the cracks.

It's a fantastic tool if it's used correctly, but as with most software, GIGO.

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