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I work for a software development/services company that works with government agencies. I'm currently working on a project where we are a subcontractor for a large billion dollar company. I could go on and on about issues we experience with this company and how surprised I am that they remain in business, but I'll focus on the latest what the gently caress. So, working with government agencies, you can probably imagine that there is a lot of personally identifiable information involved. Well, a couple of weeks ago the prime's project manager sent some unencrypted production files to my email. What was in the email? Oh, only about 300,000 names, addresses, DOBs, SSNs, etc. When this happens our procedure is to delete the email and alert legal and our systems department so this poo poo can get scrubbed from the Exchange server. I do so and let the project manager know that this type of information should not be sent over email and should instead be uploaded to one of the servers instead (where it would end up in a production environment). His response? "My bad." Oh yeah, and the customer gave them the unencrypted files via a USB drive. Do you know how many times those things get lost? I thought they learned their lesson. I got an email this morning that the newest files had been delivered to the prime's office in person and the files were uploaded to one of the servers. Awesome! Then a few minutes ago, I notice my phone is blinking. An email! Let's see what it is... It's an email from the prime's project manager again. Let's see what's in it... Not only personally identifiable information, but the dozens of documents that go along with it. Here's a letter telling me that John Q. Public is $X behind in his child support payments! What the hell? How can you be a project manager of a large company who deals with government agencies without understanding that you don't pass this poo poo around via email? Dear legal department...
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Mar 18, 2014 00:31
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Today started off pissing me off, but ended up enjoyable. Time to have a conference call with a third party to figure out what the hell is wrong with the GPG encrypted zip files they are sending us. Oh, what's this? They can't upload new test files for us? Oh, it turns out the SFTP server software the prime installed was never licensed and had been running in trial mode. I contact the project manager for the prime (we're the sub)... Me: blah blah blah, I don't know if so-and-so (prime employee) forgot to register or never purchased, blah blah blah PM: Are you a Christian man? Me: No. PM: gently caress this! gently caress this place! Jesus loving Christ! I'm sick of all of this poo poo. I keep telling them to just charge things to their loving American Express. I wonder why he's been looking for another job...
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Mar 26, 2014 19:30
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One of the biggest problem areas we have is an ETL process. The customer constantly fucks up the flat files they provide. For example, out of nowhere one of the fields in a file is empty for every record for a couple days. This value is allowed to be empty, so it's not something we give a poo poo about. Why did their process decide not to populate the field? Who knows! The latest issue reported today in the UAT environment was that data that should be there was missing. Based on the error and research, it appears the file includes unicode characters, whereas the files are supposed to be ASCII. We pass along this information, blah blah, the file was probably edited in something like Wordpad, please correct the data in the source system and generate a new file. Their response? "The file was not edited in Wordpad, it was edited in TextPad. The encoding should not have changed. I don't think you are correct, you should keep working on this over the weekend." I don't give a poo poo what you edited it in. A modified file is a modified file and is not a true test of the process. Fix it in the source system and generate a new file. There is no point in troubleshooting a modified file. PS: It is the weekend, we aren't doing jack poo poo.
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Apr 25, 2014 23:48
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We're a sub on a large government project. The prime is a big name vendor. Among their various duties, they are the hosting vendor. Based on communication I've had with employees of theirs on other projects, they have some decent people. Sadly, they don't seem to be on this project. None of the systems have any sort of monitoring. Services down? Database backups failing? Transaction log growing to the size of the entire drive it is hosted on because of backups failing and bringing down the system (twice)? Sure, why not. Also, Windows updates? What are those? Let's just not install them for months on end and let the system fail vulnerability tests over and over and freak the customer the hell out. I was working after hours this evening and I needed to reboot one of the web servers. Twenty minutes later, I still can't establish an RDP connection (though it is pingable). I wouldn't be surprised if it's running through a boatload of Windows updates (maybe even a service pack or two). I told them I'm done for the night. They plan to have someone on site in the morning in case they need to intervene. I hate this project.
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May 17, 2014 03:37
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Not something I had to that pissed me off, but I'm sitting in on the second webinar by a guy at our company. He's got a hipster beard/mustache and his slides are filled with kittens, zombies, and lolspeak. He just said "pwned" a minute ago. I don't know if he thinks his mspaints of kittens with devil horns and putting "lol" on slides and purposefully misspelling words is cute or funny, but it's not. Well, the twenty-something girly girl is laughing, but that's it. Edit: We're a software development/services company. The devs are working on rewriting our desktop apps to be web/cloud based solutions. It's an internal only webinar about threat modeling. Today's analogy is protecting your kittens from zombies in a zombie apocalypse. VVVVVVVVVVVV GI_Clutch fucked around with this message at 19:36 on Feb 27, 2015 |
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Feb 27, 2015 19:25
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So, one of the projects I have been on for years included implementing some integration between some custom software another company was building for one of our customers and a document management system we resell. The whole time we were pushing for them to utilize the DMS's API to perform their functions such as uploading documents. They came up with every excuse in the book not to do it. Call the API to upload a document and it returns back the value they need? Nah, how about instead they SFTP us encrypted ZIP files filled with documents and XML files that need to be processed to convert them to another format (among other things). Then we import them through a process with less error handling and generate flat files to provide them the data they need (not to mention plenty of other processes)? The customer sided with them. So, whatever, we build the stuff and bill the hell out of the prime because it's totally out of scope. So, the software has been live for five months now. I get an email tonight from one of the folks from the company who didn't want to use the API. "Hey, so does the DMS support any kind of web service to do things like uploading documents? Other DMS's like SharePoint do. I think someone said you mentioned the software has Java libraries..." Seriously? You want nothing to do with the API, we build all these dumb roundabout processes, and now that the software's been live for five months you are inquiring about using the API when one of your developers straight up said "we don't want to use the API" on one of the meetings? gently caress off.
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Mar 4, 2015 03:36
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Manslaughter posted:Nobody likes reinventing the wheel, even if you get paid to do it. Exactly. I'm sick of this project and these people. The project was supposed to be completed a year ago, but the customer keeps dragging their feet. Pretty much everything we've done in the past six months has been out of scope and is billed T&M to the prime. The prime is eating these costs left and right as their contract with the customer was ambiguous. Even though the RFP asks for one thing, the customer thinks that doing it another way is still in scope and refuse to sign any CRs. The prime is finally getting to the point where they might get legal involved in the customer refuses particular CRs. There's already an SOW in the works for yet another phase of this project which will keep me on it through the end of the year. As much as I want this to be over, there is one bright side to it all. I haven't been to the customer site in just over two years. Being stuck on this project has kept me working from home practically daily. I did miss out on being assigned the new US Virgin Islands project, but hey, at least I'm not spending weeks in hotels in podunk towns away from my family on other projects.
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Mar 4, 2015 18:43
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Right now not so much pissing me off as making me laugh... We're a sub on an electronic document management project that's been going almost four years now (thanks to dragging of feet by the customer). First, a flashback to October 2012... One of the requirements of the contract is a read-only DR environment. There is word that the prime might cave and give the customer a read/write environment. I'm invited to a call by the prime on a Friday afternoon. Prime: So, [HEAD DUDE] has agreed to provide a read/write environment. We need you to do XYZ this weekend. Me: I cannot do anything without a signed change request as this is now out of scope.  Within a week, one is signed. For some reason they can't make it simple and allow these off site servers to use the same names as the production servers. We point out that it was done on another project handled by them. They said that project was done by a company they bought out, so they do things differently. The solution? Put hosts files entries on the DR and prod servers and use those aliases throughout all of the product configurations. The database and document stores were supposed to be replicated at near real time, yet I remember seeing that configuration change I made in production still didn't exist in the DR environment over a week later. I don't know how this thing every passed the first round. Back to today. I just got an email from the prime that the customer is doing a new DR test this weekend, can I or someone else be on call? Oh, and they were trying to test it and they can't get the web site to come up on the DR server, can I check it? Probably not without a signed change order! My PM asked if it would even work. Probably not, as we haven't touched it in three years and a lot of new processes such as integration with third party applications and SSO were implemented. I think he said it best with "Oh boy, fireworks in November!" I'm laughing now, but if I have to deal with this poo poo this weekend...
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Nov 10, 2015 23:14
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Migishu posted:"I have a family emergency and need to travel out of town this weekend" Oh, I already got another reply from the head of the our entire integration services department. He said that in a meeting last month he told the prime the DR test would not work, the customer knows it won't work, so why the hell are they even bothering to test it? Also, no, we aren't making anyone available to them this weekend. We're meeting up tomorrow for an unrelated project, so we're going to craft a response tomorrow. I'm sure the phrase "time and materials" will be involved.
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Nov 11, 2015 03:28
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GI_Clutch posted:Oh, I already got another reply from the head of the our entire integration services department. He said that in a meeting last month he told the prime the DR test would not work, the customer knows it won't work, so why the hell are they even bothering to test it? Also, no, we aren't making anyone available to them this weekend. We're meeting up tomorrow for an unrelated project, so we're going to craft a response tomorrow. I'm sure the phrase "time and materials" will be involved. And we decided to help them anyway. Been working with them for an hour. Get this, though: the prime is cheating. They left all of the production servers on except for the web server (that's all the customer can access). The only DR servers in play are web and the app server. The DR app server is pointing to all of the production servers (they never migrated any of the document disk groups over the past three years), so they are faking that the system is fully functional. I'd love to just tell them to gently caress off, I don't want a part of this crap, but I just want to get this poo poo over with and it's the prime who at fault here not me.
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Nov 14, 2015 20:47
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I'm not concerned with that. I've let my PM know what's going on. This is par for the course with them. The guy who is running all of this has the title of "Disaster Recovery Manager". They will take the fall. This vendor is required by the customer to take weekly screenshots showing there are no pending Windows updates because they are so terrible at what they are doing. They were actually paying us to manage their own project for them for five months because they know we do a better job at pretty much everything related to the project.
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Nov 14, 2015 21:04
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So, last weekend I posted about getting pulled in to help the prime fake a disaster recovery test. What does this weekend hold? I'll try to keep it short. Prime promises the customer we will upgrade production this weekend, but never told us about it until Wednesday. I tell them I'm not available which results in them crying to my PM. He tells them too bad, no one is available. It turns out that since federal dollars are involved, if it isn't done this weekend, they need to explain to the state's secretary of state, so the customer starts talking about lawyers. The prime gets desperate and offers to pay us to perform what would normally be in scope work. They escalate to our COO who agrees with us. Then it turns out my wife needs to see the eye doctor ASAP because of a possible tear in her retina. Now I actually do have a legitimate reason to get out of it. The PM, COO, and myself get on the phone last night and it's decided that if plans can be canceled (playing video games most likely) and my wife's eye is OK, we'll do it (side note: no torn retina, but she does need to go back for more tests). So, oh boy, I get to spend my Friday night and probably part of Saturday working. On the plus side, I'm getting $2500 of the change request to perform this weekend's work which I wouldn't be getting if it were done on another date.
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Nov 20, 2015 22:00
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I love when I am remoted into a server and the customer decides to restart it. That "other users are signed in, are you sure?" just gets in the way, i guess. Goodbye half hour of unsaved configuration. Also, I was happy when it was announced we were getting new laptops soon. Then I was sad when I found out they didn't have numeric keypads like our current laptops. Then I saw one in person last week and noticed they don't even have dedicated home, end, page up, or page down keys. I guess I'll need to start swapping in my desktop keyboard while I'm working or get a USB splitter or something. I can't imagine not having home or end in Visual Studio, SSMS, or even loving notepad. Those keys should not be tied to a function key.
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Jan 27, 2016 07:07
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Che Delilas posted:Development laptops are meant to be carted between docking stations. Two 23" monitors and a full sized keyboard at the minimum, thanks. Yes, our product delivery team has all of that. I'm a solution architect on the integration side of things though, so I get the same machines as project managers and business analysts. That's what's frustrating. If they had approached our team at all before deciding which model to go with for replacement, we'd have asked them to consider something else. At least I work from home most of the time, so I have the option of plugging in a keyboard easily.
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Jan 27, 2016 18:08
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I returned Monday from a week off. My work laptop no longer boots. Safe mode won't boot, even picking Repair mode doesn't work. It just hangs after the progress bar fills up. At least the drives are still working, so I am not going to lose anything.I was already getting a new laptop later this week, so I'm bumped to the top of the list. Internal IT department asks for my password so they can sign in and join me to the domain/sign in to download Office apps. Uh, no. Reset it. UPS delivered it at the end of the day. Boot it up. Oh, they didn't give me the BitLocker key. Force shutdown as I didn't see any other way to shut it down. Email IT department and get the key. Boot it up. Oh, the master boot record is hosed. Great. Burn a Windows 10 ISO to a DVD, plug in an external DVD drive. Boot up and try to launch the command prompt. Oh, it doesn't want the BitLocker key, it wants a BitLocker Recovery PIN. Goddammit. I guess I'll wait until morning to bother with this again. Thankfully I copied the VM I use for all my VPN work to my desktop a month ago, so between that and Office Online Outlook/Skype for Business, so I'm able to get poo poo done this week.
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Jun 16, 2016 02:59
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Besides long chip card verification times, my biggest gripe (besides people using self scan that shouldn't) is when you touch "Pay Now" or another button and the system audibly beeps at you, but doesn't actually do anything. If it loving beeps, it obviously registered that I touched it, so ask me how I want to pay, dammit.
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Feb 4, 2017 01:32
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stevewm posted:Why do people have such a hard time understanding scanning/printing/attaching files? Our company sets up document management systems. Some customers buy the virtual print module which converts anything you can print into a tiff file and pops open the import dialog. It's useful for things such as capturing web pages, mainframe screens, etc. A customer was bitching that the system was timing out when performing a virtual print. It turns out they were virtually printing a 150 page PDF. No wonder it's timing out. It's trying to create a ridiculously huge full color 150 page tiff file. The solution? A PDF is already a document, so just loving import the 6MB file instead of creating a likely 300+MB tiff file.
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Feb 9, 2017 06:34
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SEKCobra posted:What's a good DMS anyway? Preferably encrypted and with a good GUI, I just wanna scan everything and get rid of paper <things>. You said it was a small shop, but how many? As mentioned, Laserfiche is decent. We have a number of customers that use it, but we don't resell it (we develop capture, forms, and mobile solutions that integrate with various DMS's). I'm partial to OnBase myself because that's what I've worked with for the past twelve years. It's one of the Gartner magic quadrant leaders for content management. It's extremely modular so you could go with something basic like allowing users to scan in documents, index them manually, and retrieve. Or you can go balls out with advanced capture to recognize documents automatically, pull keyword values from them automatically, etc. It also has a very robust workflow engine. I only know a portion of our own company's software these days because I've been mostly working on workflow and custom API integrations for state projects for the past five years. Speaking of workflow, we visited a customer a few months ago because they wanted us to evaluate how they are using the system, what could be done to improve processes, etc. because it's been eight years since we implemented and processes have changed. It turns out most of the agency isn't even using the dozen or so custom workflows we built for them years ago due to changes in how they assign work. They sent their own guys to workflow training, but they were afraid to touch anything (they've broken things in the past). So what do they do instead? Well, all of the documents are still being sent to workflow, but the workers don't use it. Instead, on a daily basis supervisors print out lists of cases that are coming up due soon and divvy them up between their workers. Then the supervisor goes into the various workflows and clear out the documents that have come in to their workers. They spend hours each week doing this. They might as well just tell the mailroom/frontdesk to stop scanning them to people because they're just giving the supervisors more busy work.
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Feb 9, 2017 21:26
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HR at our workplace mostly focuses on onboarding new folks, insurance plans, ordering us new business cards, etc. We don't have performance reviews anymore either (even then it was with your manager, not HR). Starting last year, we now have "touch calls" where you have a call with your manager six times a year to catch up on things. My manager does it monthly though. He calls once a month and we bullshit for half an hour. We might talk about some work stuff for a few minutes, catching up on things that have happened since I talked to him the previous day (all of our team members are remote). But after that it's just poo poo like "What have you been up to? Been hitting the bike trails? How's [wife's name]?" He lets HR know we had the call and for each of the six official ones, we can put up to $5 on the company card to treat ourselves. For most people that means buying yourself a $5 amazon gift card six times a year. Much nicer than evaluations.
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Apr 14, 2017 06:30
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We have a project manager who always uses the provide your own conference number option when setting up a GoToMeeting. Dude, just use the built in conference bridge option. It takes less key presses and then we can use the mic and speakers option. Then there are people who send a meeting invite with a conference bridge when you are the only other person who will be on the line. Just call me directly.
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Apr 18, 2017 02:08
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Avenging_Mikon posted:"I don't know how to take a screenshot." If you are one of our customers the answer is: Hit print screen, paste the two monitor wide screenshot into MS Word, save it, and email it, unredacted SSNs and all other sensitive information intact.
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Jul 10, 2017 05:55
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We had a product named FrontDesk because it was primarily used at our customers' front desk (reception area). Another of our products had a button that gave an overview used primarily by reception called the Front Desk View. So when someone said front desk, it could have meant anything (product, feature, physical location) because customers tend to do a bad job getting the point across. Thankfully, there is no FrontDesk application anymore and that's all behind us. The newest refresh of that software is named Pilot. So now when you are rolling out to a customer you have a pilot group piloting Pilot. Also, customers love to refer to a product by the suite name. It would be like someone saying "I'm having trouble with Microsoft" when they mean Word. Or Excel. Or Windows. The name of the suite is not the company name in our case, but it's late and I can't come up with a better example.
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Jul 18, 2017 07:14
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We're in the middle of a statewide contract with a government agency that's worth almost as much as our company pulls in a single year. It covers a few departments in the agency, with the rest to come in another contract that's in the early stages. Of course, they want some stopgap work done in the meantime for one of the departments that's in the pipeline. Our project manager won't say no since we need to be nice to get all of the money. Basically, some developers at another vendor want to integrate with one of the products we installed. No big deal, I configure a few things and provide them with the SDK. Then they show it to the customer and request more changes. OK, no big deal, few more hours of configuration. Then they start getting really pushy and annoying, emailing me all of the time. Their PM has been told that requests should come through him, but LOL, like that's going to happen. Highlights since have included:
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Jan 24, 2018 01:55
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To go along with the above discussion, I agree, don't do anything you don't have to. There are some internal procedures our company has that drive me nuts. The process of getting feedback to certain departments the correct way is long and convoluted. But if a customer isn't following a process? Hell no, I'm going to not deal with that poo poo. We're at the tail end of a statewide rollout. Counties have a handoff to the help desk at the end of their week of onsite support. Yet, two months later they will reach out to the trainers/readiness coordinators if they feel something isn't quite right. Next thing you know, that person is forwarding to the help desk and me (lead architect on the project) to get feedback. Apparently they are telling the customer to go ahead and reach out to them, even though they are supposed to be going to the help desk so tickets can be created, etc. I tell them they should not being doing that, but it keeps happening. If a customer reaches out to me that shouldn't be, I just forward that poo poo on to the help desk with a few sentences to put them on the right track if I think I know what's going on. The other big one is scope. Sticking to the project scope was hammered into everyone's heads years ago. My go-to phrase when asked if something is possible by a customer is "That is possible from a technical standpoint" so they don't think I'm saying yes to implementing anything. Project managers are always so concerned about hours, but they love sneaking in dumb poo poo to make an already happy paying customer happier. You use the phrase out of scope and someone's getting angry that you're worrying about that because that's not your concern. Well, when my team is the one who actually has to do the dumb poo poo you agree to that we aren't getting paid for and the help desk has to support in the future, yes, it is my concern. If I'm doing something, it should be because we are getting paid for it, and years down the line I'm not going to be dragged into supporting this wacky solution you agreed we'd do that involved custom code because it wasn't in the base product. GI_Clutch fucked around with this message at 02:17 on Feb 11, 2019 |
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Feb 11, 2019 02:14
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angry armadillo posted:I like our version of "out of scope" which is to ask for a change request where the project sponsor has to approve all the extras that *demanding manager* is asking for. Sadly, on the project I'm referencing, it's the project sponsor who is approving it and cringing when I mention scope. He's actually involved in the day to day as it's the largest project we've ever had. And as far as I know, there are no $0 change requests being created. It's just phone calls or emails saying we'll do something. The hope was that there would be a trade off where we did these items and got in contract bonkers items with no use case taken out. Of course, those types of conversations were never solidified, so now we're nearing the end and trying to get stuff straightened out. Being our biggest customer, we've been playing politics and bending over backwards to make them happy to get additional contracts. Once we got those, we continued bending over. On one hand, I can't wait for this project to be over. On the other, it keeps me working from home, so I'd love to just keep milking this thing with add-ons until the cows come home.
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Feb 12, 2019 00:15
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Scrapez posted:They've already sold the solution to customers that I'm currently designing/building and are actually discussing timelines for moving traffic to it with the customers...that are not far into the future. Our sales team would tell customers our solutions did things they didn't (in fairness, I don't think they were aware in some cases). One got pretty upset about a particular item, so we had to make it happen. We reached out to the software vendor for suggestions. They had an idea of how it possibly do it, but had never done it themselves, and had no such example to provide us. I managed to pull it off. It's now one of my most hated creations because while it makes things extremely useful for the customers, it is the biggest pain in the rear end to support. Any time we add something new to the system, we need to go out of our way to code additional logic to make it work with the crazy solution.
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Feb 17, 2019 00:39
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So, today's thing that pissed me off is of a different variety than the usual stuff posted in this thread. I'm going to spoiler it just in case. So, I work in the document management field. We work with human services agencies. A co-worker hit me up because a process that replicates documents from a document management system to one of our products was failing on a specific document. It appeared to be almost 1GB in size. That seemed a bit off. He wanted me to hop in and see if the size being reported was indeed correct. I hopped into the server and found the document in question. Yep, a 957MB TIFF file. It says it's a checklist which is odd because checklists are usually one page group IV TIFFs, less than 100KB in size. Users sometimes do some goofy stuff (like converting a 100+ page PDF into a TIFF and wondering why it times out when trying to convert/upload). I decided to open the document to see what's going on... This is a child welfare case. The document in question was a series of photographs showing signs of abuse on a unclothed female toddler. So yeah, I'm pissed off because I want to beat the absolute poo poo out of somebody.
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Feb 25, 2019 16:36
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Well, this afternoon has been a total mood killer. Much of my time is creating custom solutions in document management systems. We have a upgrade coming up soon for a pretty big customer (8,000+ users). Well, today we found out that the vendor of the DMS made a change to their API which totally kills some of the functionality we've built. They made a change to what was seen as a security hole to prevent users without a special privilege from modifying restricted (read only or hidden) keyword types. This makes sense for third party integrations, as you wouldn't want someone writing code that runs outside of the system to make such a change. But it also applies to scripts created within the system that only execute within the confines of the system. If I use the built-in workflow actions to access/modify these restricted keywords, it's all cool. It lets that happen because, well, sometimes processes need to do things a user normally couldn't do (like letting you view documents you can't outside of a workflow). But if that workflow task calls a workflow script and that script wants to add a hidden keyword? Sorry, now an exception is thrown. This was caught in one of our "fancier" tasks which performs document queries behind the scenes, pops up a custom interface that allows you to enter some values and check off particular documents, then creates cross references between the checked documents and a new document created by the script. These is no way in the workflow engine to get access to these documents besides within the script, so as far as I know, there's no way to make this functionality work in the new version. Yay.
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Apr 12, 2019 19:34
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Thanks Ants posted:Yeah the amount of stuff that is a two sentence email that people book in as a meeting a week out and then also don't provide an agenda for We have a customer that thinks that in person is the best way to get things done. Email or phone call to discuss a change to a query that generates a flat file? Nah, he thinks I should come on site to meet with the database guy. At least half a dozen times over the past year I drove three hours round-trip for a conversation that lasted less than five minutes. Our project manager won't say no to these requests though as they are our largest customer. On those days I basically hit the road at 9am, then left at lunch time.
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Sep 15, 2019 21:00
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Our company has been involved in a few projects where Maximus was also involved. I remember dealing with a person directly who seemed to have no clue what she was doing with the software she was supposed to be familiar with (I had to explain basic concepts to her on every call). I mentioned her name to a co-worker. He recognized her name from a previous project. Her story on that project was that after a full day of discovery, the project manager asked her to clean up and email her notes. Her response? "What notes?" Her entire responsibility for the discovery sessions was to take notes and she didn't take a single one. She was never seen again after that day. After about a month, she disappeared from the project I was on. Also, re: phones. After being a nice guy and moving a week of vacation for the third time in four years for a very long project to do a big upgrade the other weekend, my manager asked on Friday how to get ahold of me if poo poo hit the fan while I was out. I wanted to say, "You don't. The TO in PTO means time off and my work cell will be off." Thankfully, the guy running the day to day operations on the project in question is a buddy from grade school, and the only person in the company with my personal number. So I just told him that the other guy already knows how to get ahold of me if needed. No way in hell am I giving my personal number to anyone. I wouldn't even give it to the guy that left last month. I have nothing against my co-workers or anything, but I prefer keeping work and personal stuff as separate as possible.
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Oct 9, 2019 04:42
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Oh boy, it's that time of year again. Time to spend hours on security training for our organization plus multiple customers (government). I can't wait to run through the same non-skip modules multiple times because half of them use the same provider/courses. Secure passwords, social engineering, FTI, HIPAA, etc. They really should have some way to link all of your KnowB4 logins so you can do a course once and it counts toward all of the various organizations.
GI_Clutch fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Oct 16, 2019 |
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Oct 16, 2019 21:40
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Our company has gone really hardcore about change orders this year due to issues with our largest project ever and the PM agreeing to new requirements without official change requests, then the customer balking at us later submitting the change orders to them for review (the best part is that during the project the BA told me I was driving the PM nuts with all my scope talk). Per the owner, no more free poo poo. So, I'm working on another project now with a PM I haven't worked with before. On an internal team call, I let her know that I am a stickler for the policies we have and I was hardcore about scope before it was cool. She said she was the same way. It's now two weeks later and she's in the middle of discovery with the customer. We inherited this customer from another company that used to resell our software. I get an email along of lines of "During discovery we've found that they really need [Module X] of [Our Software]. It seems that [Reseller] didn't install it for them. So we need you guys to install and deploy [Module X], hopefully next week. I'll create a task and assign hours." Uh, what? This project isn't even related to our software, it's for building integrations in software that we resell. I give my boss a heads up, validate a few things with sales and our upgrade team, and follow-up, telling her that she should contact the upgrade team as they are most familiar with that module and have been adding it to customers during upgrades. I also mention that it would be out of scope, so that's also a good reason for someone else to do it. Her reply starts out fine, agreeing to reach out to that team, and that she didn't initially because she didn't think they'd do it. But then she adds the doozy "But if not, out of scope or not, if I authorize project hours we can do it." Yeah, no. Remember the company wide meeting when the owner said we need to get paid for our work? I gave my boss another heads up (his boss, the CTO is backing us completely on this), and reply that our team has been instructed not to perform any work that is not outlined in an SOW without a signed change order, even a $0 one. If she has problems with this, talk to my boss. No response yet. I guess maybe these PMs still have the whole do-anything-to-make-the-customer-happy attitude and it's hard for them to shake it, but not me! I've always thought we should get paid because when someone agrees to free poo poo, guess who is doing the majority (if not all) of the work? Me!
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Oct 2, 2020 04:26
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Customer PM: Please CC me, [other PMs], and [other stakeholders] on email chains so we're aware of blah blah blah. *Customer PM starts email chain asking if firewall rules were put in place and vendor can reach the web service* *Multiple emails back and forth between technical resources because poo poo doesn't work* Customer PM: Technical folks, can you please remove non-technical folks from these emails?
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Oct 27, 2020 22:46
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I was tasked to build a workflow process for the internal accounting department that integrated with their accounting system months ago. I knocked that out in between working on customer projects, it was demoed, and they liked it. Then later in the afternoon "What about X process we never told you about?" Annoying, but a few hours of additional work and it was done. Then things get lost in the shuffle for a bit because of the holidays, PTO, etc. The other day they are notified the users have been provisioned and the system is ready for testing. That's followed up by a member of their team notifying us that the project is on hold because they are working with the accounting software vendor to get a new server and upgrade to a new version of the software. That won't be ready for 1-1.5 months. Cool. I hope the API didn't change so much between the 10 year old version you had and the new one that I have to rework all of the integrations.
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Dec 20, 2020 05:46
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I'm doing a deployment to production tonight that's going to take longer than expected because my co-worker got laid off (along with ten others) today. I thought it was weird that my boss asked me yesterday how things were for tonight when I'm technically the "backup" for this project. Especially when I checked his calendar and noticed he had just gotten off his weekly catchup meeting with my co-worker. I'd worked with this guy for over fifteen years.
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Jan 9, 2021 00:52
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My employer really wants to get butts back in seats of the expensive building they bought and renovated right before covid hit. They got blasted on anonymous surveys during previous attempts to get people back in. This time they did a non-anonymous survey to gauge interest. Based on the answers they claimed that people overwhelmingly want to return to the office, so they have set dates because "we're nearing the end of the pandemic." I was bullshitting with a co-worker who happens to be a manager. They had some of the results shared with them. One of the questions was "How many days would you want to work out of the office per week?" Answers were 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5. Anything other than zero was considered "I can't wait to get back into the office!" so they claimed 75% can't wait to come back. At least a dozen people who worked in the office have left since the beginning of the year. From speaking to one of them, they were asking about permanent/partial WFH going forward, told no, and found equal or better paying jobs that would let them WFH. But why keep those people who have been around up to 15 years when you want to justify that expensive-rear end building you bought? Thankfully for me, I have always been a remote employee. Unfortunately for me, our team is half the size it was a year ago and this summer is looking to be busy as gently caress.
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Apr 18, 2021 16:57
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Devor posted:Nevermind I deleted some records and it's faster now This reminds me of something than happened back in 2006 or so. One of our customers (government agency) ran out of disk space where documents imported into the document management system are initially stored. This was preventing new documents from entering the system (though they were just being dropped off on a server to be pulled in). Shortly after documents are imported and stored on that first copy, they get replicated to additional storage locations. Now, the proper solution here would be to first turn off the job that's attempting to import the documents so it stops bombing. Then you could use the application's platter management tools to validate older volumes to ensure they were properly replicated to the additional storage location(s) and then delete them from the initial copy, making space until you are able to allocate more drive space. Did the customer do that or reach out to us for help? Nope! Instead, the dude just started purging the most recent, not yet replicated batches of documents to free up space. In other words, he permanently deleted thousands of documents that people had either mailed in or drove out to the agency to drop off along with any database records related to them. Of course, they wanted us to provide them a nice report on all of the data that they purged out of the database so they could contact their customers to let them know what documents they need to turn in for the second time. This is not at all covered by support and they didn't want to pay for anything, so instead we pointed them to a folder containing the metadata files generated by the scanning software that should coincide with the period of missing documents.
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Apr 25, 2021 22:00
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gently caress opening tickets for people. A customer emails me about something months or even a week after a project I was on closed? They get a reply telling them to email the help desk at [address]. Even if forwarding it wouldn't open a ticket in my name, I don't think I'd do that for them. Maybe I'm just jaded after sixteen years, but policies and support contracts exist for a reason. I'm working on a number of change requests for one of our biggest customers right now. Something completely unrelated to my projects occurs? Better include me on the emails in case I have the answer! It could be the customer PM, one of their contractors, it doesn't matter. Our help desk is trying to get them to knock that poo poo off, but we'll see. They even send me invites to unrelated meetings as if I'm going to show up to something I can't bill against. We have another trouble customer who loves to leave T&M projects open as long as possible just in case they want to make one last tweak. There's one that I haven't logged against in months. Now they want to meet to see if there are ways to improve the user experience. They are asking for about the sixth time if they can perform the function with a right-click (versus a button in the ribbon) so that the action is performed where they clicked rather than at a predefined location. The answer (like every other time this has come up) is no. I am going to tell them to post that suggestion to the software vendor's Ideas section where customers/resellers can post production suggestions which users can vote on. I hope they ask me if I can post it for them so I can tell them, sure, but I'll need to bill that to the project.
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May 7, 2021 03:59
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Well, we ran into a really nasty issue system testing something that was supposed to be deployed into UAT by EOB today. I guess I'll submit a ticket to the software vendor to see if they have any ideas, and then wait four business days for a response because their support has been ridiculously behind for the past year. Oh wait, no I won't. I can't select the customer from the support ticket dropdown because they are four months behind on their software maintenance with the vendor, lol. Good times. At least if we have to delay UAT we can give the customer some of the blame.
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May 8, 2021 00:44
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Thing pissing me off: Sales promises customer we'd provide free UAT services on a CR that didn't include them, even though there was already a CR to add on to the existing for new functionality that was going to bake in those hours. We provided a spreadsheet to be filled out with test data for the test scenarios. The customer passes it to the vendor developing the product we are integrating with. The vendor butchers the document, breaking our scenarios, telling us our scenarios are invalid, doubles the number of scenarios, and returns it a day late, never asking a single question to try to understand it. It's obvious they are trying to get free UAT services out of us, as many of the tests are related to how their system generates things or handles responses (though this project started with them telling us that these processes were already tested). We respond that this is putting the timeline at risk as it is asking us to perform double the effort and they don't give a gently caress (but why the gently caress is a vendor we don't have a contract with dictating this poo poo?) Thing not pissing me off: Before this morning's call to discuss this disaster with them, we locate the as of yet unsigned $0 CR for the free UAT in SharePoint. Wait, what's this? It specifically calls out the number of scenarios and it matches the number we provided? Interesting. While sharing the CR onscreen was in our back pocket, our BA butted in when the primary d-bag was trying to tell another party involved how it will work and pulls an  we will work with that group to map the scenarios provided to our list, mentioning the number of scenarios repeatedly. They eventually said "OK", but I don't know if they fully understood that we are not doing double the scenarios. I will be out of office during the follow-up, so I may miss a freak-out. If so, I imagine the CR will make a guest appearance.
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May 15, 2021 06:03
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