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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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# ? Jul 11, 2018 22:03 |
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# ? Mar 28, 2024 21:32 |
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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.
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# ? Jul 11, 2018 22:30 |
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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? 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 |
# ? Jul 11, 2018 22:31 |
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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. 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.
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# ? Jul 11, 2018 22:35 |
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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. You worked at Equifax?
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# ? Jul 11, 2018 23:29 |
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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).
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# ? Jul 11, 2018 23:43 |
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The Fool posted:Some people just roll ones for every stat.
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# ? Jul 12, 2018 02:31 |
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The Fool posted:Some people just roll ones for every stat. Definitely stealing this.
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# ? Jul 12, 2018 03:40 |
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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.
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# ? Jul 12, 2018 04:45 |
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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.
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# ? Jul 12, 2018 06:10 |
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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.
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# ? Jul 12, 2018 06:17 |
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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.
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# ? Jul 12, 2018 08:07 |
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Judge Schnoopy posted:"This is what I'm working on. This is the progress I've made on x and Y since last week." 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 |
# ? Jul 12, 2018 10:36 |
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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.
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# ? Jul 12, 2018 14:15 |
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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.
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# ? Jul 12, 2018 14:22 |
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Congrats. Glad it went well for you.
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# ? Jul 12, 2018 14:24 |
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.
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# ? Jul 12, 2018 14:30 |
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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. 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.
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# ? Jul 12, 2018 15:56 |
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Ops DBA. Never again.
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# ? Jul 12, 2018 16:02 |
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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.
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# ? Jul 12, 2018 16:03 |
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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.
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# ? Jul 12, 2018 16:04 |
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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 |
# ? Jul 12, 2018 16:44 |
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.
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# ? Jul 12, 2018 16:46 |
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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.
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# ? Jul 12, 2018 16:46 |
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CLAM DOWN posted:kanban extremely triggered by this.
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# ? Jul 12, 2018 17:20 |
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I see a manager sometimes
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# ? Jul 12, 2018 18:28 |
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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. 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.
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# ? Jul 12, 2018 18:30 |
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Vargatron posted:extremely triggered by this. He actually means that his tyrannical rule over IYG keeps him relaxed.
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# ? Jul 12, 2018 18:37 |
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Vargatron posted:extremely triggered by this. Do you want me to ballpark story points for that spike?
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# ? Jul 12, 2018 18:38 |
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CLAM DOWN posted:Do you want me to ballpark story points for that spike? MAKE IT STOP PLEASE!!!!
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# ? Jul 12, 2018 18:57 |
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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. 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.
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# ? Jul 12, 2018 19:01 |
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:
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# ? Jul 12, 2018 19:41 |
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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.
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# ? Jul 12, 2018 19:43 |
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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.
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# ? Jul 12, 2018 19:49 |
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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. Yeah Aggressive Compliance has been a tool I’ve had to pull from the toolbox more than once.
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# ? Jul 12, 2018 19:51 |
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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.
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# ? Jul 12, 2018 19:55 |
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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.
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# ? Jul 12, 2018 19:56 |
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I usually hear "malicious compliance."
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# ? Jul 12, 2018 19:56 |
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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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# ? Jul 12, 2018 19:57 |
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# ? Mar 28, 2024 21:32 |
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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. 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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# ? Jul 12, 2018 20:00 |