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SEKCobra posted:A+ is the worst poo poo as far as I can gather. Sort of. The stuff it tests is a mix of "very basic" and "unnecessary," for a variety of reasons ranging from "I don't need to remember the exact wording of every option in Control Panel and how to get to it, I know to go to Control Panel and everything is labeled and I'll figure it out" to "literally no one needs to remember the pinouts for a deprecated connector no one uses anymore." But if your hiring goes through HR, they need some way to filter entry-level candidates. Remember that these are the same HR people who call you because they didn't realize their monitor was off, they are not qualified to evaluate technical competence. What sucks is that a. it's an artificial barrier between perfectly capable people and their first job that's already tough to get, and also that b. there isn't an obviously good way to turn the sort of logical and technical reasoning needed in a job like that into a standardized test, so it gets padded with a bunch of junk you don't need.
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Aug 13, 2013 19:21
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Roargasm posted:Get your A+. If that's directed at me, I have A+ and Network+ certs and I've been working in the industry for a while now. I agree it's worth doing just to have the piece of paper, I'm just pointing out that -- at least when I did it -- there was a whole lot of useless stuff on it. EDIT: It's been a while but I think I remember Network+ actually being decent if you have no networking background at all. I could be wrong.
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Aug 14, 2013 02:11
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dennyk posted:I remember way back in the day when my high school got a lab full of brand new first-gen PowerMacs. Since the school was old, there were like three outlets in every room, so someone came up with the bright idea to daisy-chain a dozen power strips together and plug about thirty PowerMacs into one wall socket. The first time the lab was used was when I was helping teach an elementary school class some multimedia stuff over the summer. Thirty little kids file into the room, sit down, and all push the power buttons at once. Five seconds later, as all the monitors come on, there's a terrible crackling sound and visible arcs of electricity start jumping out of the poor overloaded wall socket. The daisy-chained power strips thing drives me crazy. I don't understand how you get to be an adult without understanding that it's not okay. Ours don't do it to get more outlets, though, they just move offices and insist on having their equipment setup in the least convenient possible places, far away from power and data drops. I did feel bad for one guy who changed offices a couple months ago, though. His new office has exactly one pair of outlets and one data and voice wall plate... and they are on opposite walls across from each other.
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Aug 26, 2013 11:24
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Thank goodness no one was close to the outlet at the time, though one assistant started to reach down and yank the power cord; he came within a few inches of getting fried before he reconsidered his plan.
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I had a guy tell me his MacBook was slow last week. We've been a PC shop for years, but have allowed a mixed environment starting last year. We have no training whatsoever, but we can figure out most of the basic stuff. "It's slow" is almost invariably a bullshit claim, but sure, I'll look at it. He says it's been a problem for months, but he's only bothered to tell us about it now, and it took him a while to actually bring it in. He can't stay, he has things to do, so I look at it and I can find absolutely nothing wrong with it. I get an email at the end of the day as I'm on the way out the door containing both his description of the problem and his assistant's restatement of that description, which do not agree with each other. He says "it keeps spinning when email is open"; she says "the disc spins when Internet Explorer" is open. (Recall that this is a MacBook Pro. It is not running Parallels or anything like that. It is definitely not an "Internet Explorer" problem.) I get nothing more than those descriptions to go on. I have no idea if this is an Outlook issue or something in webmail or what. I did finally manage to catch up with him and he says it's Outlook. (Of course, his descriptions so far have of limited accuracy, so who knows, but it's somewhere to start.) He still hasn't actually managed to bring the machine back in for me to look at.
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Aug 27, 2013 10:16
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BurgerQuest posted:Sounds like an opportunity to sell him an SSD and a days labour for data transfer. This is internal, actually. Lum posted:Guessing the "spinning disc" think refers to the spinning beachball effect that Macs do in place of the Windows XP eggtimer or the Vista/7/8 swirly blue O thing. If you don't realise the beachball is supposed to be a 3D sphere it would look like a spinning disc. Oh, yeah, that part I understood. Thanks though.
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Aug 27, 2013 13:32
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Nativity In Black posted:Is he actually using Outlook? Or is it Apple's default "Mail" program? I had someone here with an iMac that was running slow and it turned out Mail was taking up like 3GB of the 4GB of RAM. It seemed like it was trying to hold the entire mailbox in RAM or something. She had Entourage installed so I just told her to use that. It's actually Outlook. We use Office 2011 on our Macs. It's bizarrely crippled, too. Apparently Outlook 2011 straight up will not sync distribution lists with Exchange. If you want to create even a local distribution list, you have to actually dig into the options menu and unhide local items, or else the button will be grayed out and unavailable. You can't import ones from a Windows machine, either. It's insane. I have no idea who decided that not implementing this basic feature was acceptable.
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Aug 27, 2013 16:00
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Sickening posted:All apple devices act this way. Interesting, I didn't know that.
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Aug 27, 2013 16:04
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I have senior staffers who cannot resist dumb Outlook stationery. It doesn't cause problems or anything, but it just looks so unprofessional to me.
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Aug 29, 2013 12:39
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My inclination would be to take it to HR rather than involve the cops. Am I missing something about this that makes it worth invoking criminal law? Is there even a case, if it was on company property?
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Aug 29, 2013 21:05
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Did she offer any explanation?
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Sep 1, 2013 13:30
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bitterandtwisted posted:Yes. Ghosts. At this point I am too jaded to assume this was a joke.
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Sep 1, 2013 13:42
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mugrim posted:I've worked underpaid non-profits and blue collar work/mcjobs all my life, is this really how entitled white collar America is? However entitled you believe them to be based on this story, the reality is far worse.
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Sep 4, 2013 14:49
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Ursine Asylum posted:I bet they'd love our company policy of "3 months of email retention". If it's important, you'd better save it off somewhere. We have this policy and I still have users who burn through their quota. For us it's mostly emailing large presentations back and forth and they just don't think about it. Usually I can teach them to manage their mailbox better and that's enough, but once in a while they really do get so much stuff that they need a bigger quota. Our quotas are smaller, though.
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Sep 8, 2013 07:28
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blackswordca posted:to which I got the reply "We decided in the meeting you were going to be a volunteer." Are you obliged, legally, to give them the data? Also, this isn't your employer, right? It's some client company of your employer's company? Setting this up on your own dime was never a good idea, incidentally. Never ever, no matter what promises of reimbursement they make.
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Sep 9, 2013 22:03
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Che Delilas posted:Once they settle up with you for all the back charges they owe, it's time for a new contract. One that specifies that they will pay up front for however many months of hosting and service they want. You can do this with technical support/maintenance hours too. They pay you now for X hours of tech support, maintenance, site updates, etc., that you provide when they need it. And enforce a minimum, like 10 hours or something. gently caress that. Once they've paid up stop working with them.
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Sep 10, 2013 20:39
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Outlook for MacOS is an insane, crippled clusterfuck. Just wait until you try to use distribution lists. I remember bitching about it upthread a bit.
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Sep 11, 2013 15:53
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I got an email from my boss this morning. He's in a meeting with the grand poobahs and he wants to know if I know why a projector in the conference room isn't working. The answer is that it was replaced by TVs a long time ago. When it did eventually break -- I don't even remember how we found out it broke since we don't use it anymore -- we asked management if they wanted it replaced. They said no. This was over a year ago. My boss should know this already because I kept him appraised of the situation at the time. The people he's meeting with should know because they're the ones who made the decision. Did everyone wake up extra crazy this week?
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Sep 13, 2013 14:33
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tomapot posted:You mean like that one Xmas party that resulted one of the techs dancing to Dancing Queen all by himself then later on getting groped by his manager? I never understand how this happens. Inability to behave professionally aside, by the time a person has finished college I really expect them to have learned to drink like an adult. How hard is it to grasp that getting blitzed at a work function is a bad idea? Hell, it's not a great idea at non-work functions either. If you want to drink your way to liver disease in private, that's your business -- and god knows I understand how this industry can drive you there sometimes -- but Christ, learn to operate in public like you're old enough to vote.
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Sep 13, 2013 18:13
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A department I support got some new computers about a month and a half ago. I imaged them when they came in, but they need specialised software I I don't have and don't know how to install. I asked my coworker (also my team lead) about it since he's dealt with it before, and he said no problem, he'd show me what to do. Time passes. I've asked him a few times about it and he always says "oh we'll take care of it on Monday" and the like. Fast forward to today. The guy who runs that department emails my boss to ask why he doesn't have his computers yet. I noncommittally reply that they're imaged but I'm still waiting on software, because this is in writing and I don't want to throw my coworker -- who has generally been on the level with me in the past -- under the bus. He responds by pretending to have no idea what this is about and scapegoating me as not taking care of it earlier. Now that my boss is involved, suddenly this is a priority for him, and he insists we go up and take care of it right away. We get the new computers set up -- mostly I mean I get them set up, as he bails on me after doing one of them -- which is no small hassle given the goofy ways some of these users insist on setting up their offices. Before he leaves he shows me how to install this software package. It doesn't work right away and I have to wrestle with it -- he's no help, which should have tipped me off that this was going to be a problem. By now it's almost 3:00pm, I haven't eaten lunch, and I'm starving. I finish the installs and I test it with the users -- it doesn't work. I go talk to the guy who administers this POS, and it turns out this is far more complicated than I was led to believe, and requires additional software. In his rush to blame me for the delay, my coworkers has crippled a department for half a business day. (I hadn't set up the computers because I didn't want to take down their working computers until these were ready to replace them. He insisted we put the new computers in place and then install the software.) I give a quick report to my boss by phone, just the situation with the app, leaving the personnel crap out of it. I tell him I'll give him a more complete explanation next time I see him in person. My coworker calls me a little later, presumably having spoken to my boss. He apparently didn't bother getting the details from my boss, though, because I have to re-explain the situation to him. He asks what software it needs, I tell him. According to him, he who did not know the first goddamned thing about this app, everything's fine, because "it's easy to install." Words cannot express how livid I am right now. guppy fucked around with this message at 20:47 on Sep 17, 2013 |
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Sep 17, 2013 20:44
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EAT THE EGGS RICOLA posted:People seem almost desperate to email or tell me their passwords though. Unsurprisingly, I have this problem too, but although I try to train them out of it, I also have to deal with my coworker straight up asking people for their passwords, so I will never win that battle.
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Sep 23, 2013 04:31
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I was drug tested as a condition of employment. I don't do any drugs so, you know, no big deal, but it's common.
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Sep 23, 2013 13:33
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I think it's more about the nature of the employer. Larger organizations more likely to require it than small, public more than private, and so on.
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Sep 23, 2013 14:03
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This is barely even technical, but we have a computerized system for checking out visitors to the building we work in for security reasons, for several reasons, to make sure we aren't giving felons or whoever access to the building. I don't really know anything about it, we weren't involved in its implementation. I got a call today from a user who's having trouble logging in. She apparently thinks nothing of saying her password to this sensitive security system, out loud, not only to me but in front of visitors to the building. The same visitors she's supposed to be background checking. I'm sure these particular people were fine, but Jesus, does no one have any sense at all?
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Sep 24, 2013 16:41
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How long have you been in this job?
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Sep 25, 2013 13:08
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I'm still early in my career, so I'll defer to others, but that first job to get your foot in the door in the industry is critical. You can go shopping, but I'd give it a bit. Experience talks in the field, and if you can deal with the low pay for now -- especially if you're learning -- getting a year or two on your resume will help you a lot. And leaving a job after a month or two looks bad. EDIT: Also that ^^^. And you said you were a writer, is this your first job working for other people? You always make a fraction of what the organization does.
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Sep 25, 2013 13:47
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Good points. I still think it might be good for him to stay there for a bit, though, based on what he said. He's learning things and, especially for a first job, I think it will help him to get the work time on his resume.
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Sep 25, 2013 16:14
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CitizenKain posted:During one of our many department renames, they asked for input on what our group should be called. I volunteered Office of Applied Technomancy. Since then they have stopped asking me for input on things like that. In a way, I consider that a victory. I wish they'd let us name ourselves. I work for a public agency and I secretly suspect that the horrible job titles they give us are a ploy to make us unhireable elsewhere so we'll stay forever. The worst title I've ever seen in any place I've ever worked was "Person In Charge."
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Sep 25, 2013 18:28
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go3 posted:Maybe we shouldnt be distributing iPads and laptops and poo poo to students but who am I to question I have similar concerns, but look at it in this light: it doesn't seem preposterous to suggest that having some kind of computing device is advantageous for a student, relative to not having one. You can look stuff up online, you can type papers, lots of other stuff that you and I take for granted. Now consider that a lot of students in public school systems lack any such device. Giving everyone a device of some kind starts to look like a way to significantly improve equity of opportunity for students. Maybe an iPad winds up being the best choice, maybe it doesn't, but if you've decided to take that plunge, you have to consider the logistics. What's cheapest, since deployment on this scale is a huge chunk of change no matter what you go with? What's easiest to administer? What's easiest to repair or replace? What's the most resistant to the damage that kids will inevitably inflict on it? What's easiest for students to use, both in terms of UI and logistically -- maybe they don't have a place at home to put a desktop computer, but a laptop or a tablet doesn't have that kind of physical footprint. There are a ton of logistical challenges to be worked out, certainly, but I'm not sure it's as crazy as it sounds. EDIT: I used the word "logistics" way too much in this post. guppy fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Sep 26, 2013 |
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Sep 26, 2013 22:34
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blackswordca posted:Website Update: Good for you, man. It amazes me what people think they can get away with. "May consider paying you." The loving nerve of these people.
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Oct 1, 2013 17:48
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Today a developer emailed me because he was using FTP and wanted me to check his firewall settings. I knew it shouldn't be an issue, but I went to go see what the real problem was. The issue, of course, is that he was typing the password (which was emailed to him in plaintext) incorrectly. This was very clear on cursory inspection, because the error message being spit out by the FTP server explicitly said that the credentials were wrong. (It took a few minutes to discover this, because for some reason, when prompted to attempt to log in so I could see the issue, he was disinclined to do so. I know developers often don't really know poo poo about computers outside their specialty, but I'd expect one to at least read and understand that message, and try retyping the password. Not only did he not retype it on his own, he was even resistant to the idea of retyping the password when I suggested it, but eventually he did it and it worked. Of course.
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Oct 2, 2013 05:50
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Bishyaler posted:Our IT managers have the same mortal fear of the cloud, but with better reason. A few of our executives thought it would be a great idea to use Dropbox to correspond on project. We caught them through the sheer amount of bandwidth being used, as they were uploading 5-20Gb PST files and sharing them to people outside the company. I think this is going to be an increasing problem for IT departments. I apologize in advance for how buzzword-filled this is going to sound. I swear I am writing it right now, not copying it from Infoworld or whatever. IT is going to become increasingly consumerized as home technology use increases. People are going to get used to being able to get to any of their poo poo from wherever they are -- it's already happening. They're going to do it with work stuff too, whether we like it or not. The average user doesn't draw any distinction between home and work computing, even though there are important differences, they just get annoyed when they can't get to their data. And we're going to wind up having to deal with it, so it would really behoove us to get in on it early while we still have the ability to dictate. By not offering an in-house solution, or at least a secure third-party one, we're going to end up shut out and there are going to be consequences. Look at what happened with flash drives. People got used to putting their personal poo poo on them, because they're convenient and portable. As a result, they also started using them for work. Nowhere but the most locked-down employers (e.g., defense contractors) actually forbids them, and as a result they're all over the loving place creating security problems. Very few people are offering a convenient in-house option for (offsite) online data access. We offer VPNs to our employees, but we make them jump through stupid hoops to get an account, and it's way less convenient to use than Dropbox. Consequently, every time I turn around one of my users is using Dropbox instead. I warn them not to put confidential data on it any chance I get, but I shudder to think of how many people just haven't told me they're using it. The fact that there are drawbacks to consumer tech isn't going to matter. There are all kinds of good reasons not to use Apple products in an enterprise environment right now. Guess what's all over my loving enterprise? I've mentioned this to my boss, but we have no power to actually get any of it done, and it is going to bite us in the rear end.
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Oct 11, 2013 23:00
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Posting Principle posted:I think we are talking about different things. I don't care if my developers can administer GPO. It would be nice if they could plug in a mouse without a babysitter or give me a clearer definition of a problem they're having than "it comes up error." Edit: I recently had to help a developer troubleshoot his lovely code, he's bad at his own job as well as being bad at mine
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Oct 18, 2013 17:33
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Blue_monday posted:I have a question: What are these high powered sales and other super important people actually USING their laptops for? Office and maybe a db program that is probably at least a few years old? Yes. Either that or, sometimes, giving to their kids to play with.
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Oct 30, 2013 03:16
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I just got a ticket assigned to me for a user who -- this is my description, hers is nigh incomprehensible -- no longer has her recent recipients auto completing in Outlook. She had previously spoken to our helpdesk for a different email-related issue, and among other things they rebuilt her email profile, nuking the file that holds that information. Fortunately the helpdesk rep had the presence of mind to mention in the ticket that he'd done that, so at least I knew what happened. That file is stored locally and no earlier versions are available, so she's out of luck. Which, whatever, you want external contacts saved, add them to your address book. The user is still very upset because "I took the initiative to know that they'd be there." Motherfucker, that is not what "taking the initiative" means. In fact, you did the opposite of taking the initiative. You didn't do poo poo, and that's why you now have a problem. Same user was also concerned that she wasn't getting email from external senders and thought it might be related, because she texted her son to send her a test email half an hour ago and hadn't gotten anything. Actual problem: no one external to the organization has sent her anything yet today.
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Nov 15, 2013 15:31
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EAT THE EGGS RICOLA posted:This is an issue often enough with basically everyone that uses outlook, and I'd be annoyed at my minions if they didn't back up the NK2 file before rebuilding the profile. it would have been the smart thing, yeah. But autocomplete isn't an address book, and while it's okay to be momentarily annoyed at the inconvenience, the only actual "problem" is that the user used something for an inappropriate purpose and it bit her in the rear end, like users treating the Deleted Items folder like storage. tehloki posted:Easy fix to regenerate the .nk2 file: compose a new email, select every single contact as a recipient, disconnect the computer from the network, hit send, wait for it to fail, delete it from the outbox. All autocomplete entries will be restored. Unfortunately it's specifically external recipients she's concerned about. Internal ones are in the GAL and it isn't a big deal. The issue is that she doesn't remember anyone's email address, and doesn't maintain then as actual contacts, only cached email addresses.
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Nov 15, 2013 15:54
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EoRaptor posted:Somehow, btw, is in an ordinary email in that persons mailbox that has a special subject line and is flagged as hidden. It has exactly all the problems you'd expect it to have. I read this post three times, sure I must have misunderstood it. That is really amazing, and yet I find myself fully prepared to believe it.
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Nov 15, 2013 18:21
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We have a bunch of Polycom crap. We've had an annoying number of equipment failures over five years or so, but "an annoying number" is like 3 -- it's just that they don't get used that much and so when we're informed they're being used on zero notice it's a problem if they've silently failed and we don't know. Make sure wherever you put the main codec unit is properly ventilated. The call quality is pretty good and they're straightforward to use when they're set up. Even their ceiling mics are pretty good. (Do not under any circumstances let them give you lovely battery-powered table mics.)
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Nov 20, 2013 05:28
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Caged posted:The issue at that particular place was that there was never really any interest in knowing what was going on in the world of IT - the IT directors word was taken at face value and no matter how bizarre this sounded the higher ups bought it. There was no effort to do any more investigation, it was a black box that they didn't want to get involved in. Everyone is acting like this is uncommon but it's at the root of incompetent IT troubles in lots of places. When the people making decisions don't understand the job, it should be no surprise when they aren't able to evaluate the performance of the people in it, and a lot of it devolves to who's good at playing politics and making nice.
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Nov 22, 2013 20:22
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I share the horror, but lookit, it's not like those people needed the video to teach them. They've been doing that poo poo for years.
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Nov 25, 2013 13:43
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How much do you guys think a job requiring that skillset is actually worth, before factoring the silly hours they apparently expect? I've seen estimates ranging from $150-200k. Wonder what they actually plan to offer. EDIT: Also, I guess they plan to put all that on one person with absolutely no team or backup? 
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Nov 28, 2013 10:47
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