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teethgrinder posted:Strangest thing ... last time I needed to call in somewhere, I could not get to whatever department I needed from the office VOIP system, but it worked fine from my cellphone. It seems incredibly unlikely that it was just luck. I had to call back a number of times and I just couldn't get past the main switchboard over VOIP. I don't understand why it would matter what/where I was calling from. Basically phone systems can be complicated. If the 800 number comes in at point A, and the department you needed was at point B, and your internal VOIP endpoint is at point C, then the system was able to set up a talkpath/complete the call from A to B but not C to B. There could be a number of reasons for this, including network, configuration, calling permissions etc.
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Oct 2, 2013 17:47
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Caged posted:All I know about old PBXs is that a guy I worked with who dealt with the Avaya stuff we had used to drink heavily. Confirming that liver function of PBX admins is on par with sysadmins. We just complain about ATT and other trunk providers instead of Microsoft/Dell/HP. Although I do have hardware horror stories about softswitch server hardware.
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Nov 4, 2013 23:26
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Crowley posted:So.. how about those guys who are both PBX and sysadmin? The people I have seen who were really good PBX engineers and knew the back end OS stuff were either Linux Zen Masters or right wing gun nuts. I don't think they drank that much. If they got stressed they just shot something or reinstalled Slackware.
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Nov 5, 2013 15:36
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Misogynist posted:Days of my young life, wasted loving with EMM386.EXE so Ultima VII or whatever would run. Messing with PC config files got me started on the path that let me to an IT career. I am not sure if that is good or bad.
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Nov 13, 2013 20:01
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Volmarias posted:Why would a modern phone system that isn't "the phone company" still support pulse dialing? Because manufacturing plants in the middle of nowhere still have that one guard shack where all the trucks making night deliveries have to stop that has a rotary phone. They are too cheap to replace it, but if Jimmy the night guard can't call 911 when his coronary arteries finally congeal, then it could AFFECT PRODUCTION. I support Avaya stuff and I had to look up if the newest stuff supports pulse dialing. It does.
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Nov 17, 2013 22:41
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Crowley posted:Over here in Euroland I think the operators stopped supporting pulse dialing around 2005. Yeah, but PBX's are a whole different thing. With the newest equipment, your rotary phone connects to a card in a cabinet (or gateway) that converts everything to voip anyway. Analog is not going anywhere anytime soon (thanks modems and faxes!) and it is pretty simple to have the analog cards support pulse. Please do not ask me about Modem or Fax Over IP, although FOIP is pretty much the sound I make when I get a Fax ticket.
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Nov 18, 2013 01:13
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Caged posted:Is there a reason to use FoIP when email gateways are a thing that aren't poo poo and are dirt cheap? Not sure how an email gateway compares to fax, but in some places, a fax has more legal standing than an email. That and people have large installed bases of faxes that they want to keep using. There are fax servers that send the fax over voip, but they still do T.38 so a far end fax can receive.
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Nov 18, 2013 03:14
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Do you happen to own a pig farm?
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Nov 18, 2013 15:38
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So I screwed up massively at work. Our biggest customer had a major issue over a weekend that I was on call and I worked the whole weekend getting it straightened out. So now I am on the team that is supporting them and they request me by name. Yeah it's job security, but I went from a place where most of the issues I was working on I knew and I could just put my head down and crank out tickets to now where I am given tickets for a major customer because they are bleeding edge enough that no one knows their stuff exactly, but I am the one to figure it out. It would be a nice learning opportunity except for the time and political pressures.
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Nov 25, 2013 18:05
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Holy cow I can actually see the reports flying through cyberspace! Either that or I have been working too much OT. I will now attempt to derail this derail with a different derail. Hmm, let's see, printers, no, too gloomy. Dell support? Not on a Friday. I know! Booze chat. Much OT which means I can afford good rum. Any advice? I know there is a thread in GWCC, but I want to know from the REAL drinkers.
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Dec 7, 2013 00:54
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Caged posted:Currently pissing me off is our lovely PBX software (3CX) that seems to change what handsets are flavour of the week based on the wind direction. If we bought the recommended handset brand then we'd be replacing them every 2 years as that seems to be how long these clowns can be bothered to write provisioning files that work for them for. Remember, SIP is not a standard, but rather a set of recommendations. Different companies implement SIP in different ways. Sometimes the do it incorrectly, but other times the differences boil down to different opinions on how the RFC should be implemented.
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Dec 9, 2013 16:29
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Thing pissing me off today. The manufacturer whose software I support has a web based knowledge base that is searchable. They made changes such that the search form scrubs the input of special characters, which makes searching for log entries almost unusable. So if a log entry says (made up example) error code=123, you get back error code123 not found. Putting quotes does nothing. You have to hope for a hit on a partial match.
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Dec 12, 2013 17:27
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-10 F here. It totally sucked getting out of my nice warm bed and going downstairs to my heated office. 
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Jan 6, 2014 19:23
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So my job has gone the metric route, and now is going the 'new process to follow every week' route. It seems like every new process I learn, I forget another one, or my work gets that much slower. I am not sure if this is because I am slowing down as I get into my 40's, or I've lost my passion, or burnout or whatever, but work is not fun. For those of you who are older and in IT, is there a point where you hit a wall? It seems like I am fixing the same things over and over, and nothing is new, and I feel like a grumpy old man.
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Jan 24, 2014 15:25
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Tailored Sauce posted:Pissing me off: Being on this schedule long term has been shown to have health effects, not to mention the impact to your social life. The good news is you will have time to interview during the day.
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Feb 3, 2014 14:48
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Pissing me off: my job. But they have online training for a variety of products. I am looking to acquire more skills. Does anyone here use/administer Lync? I do telecom, and this is one of the things that I could get training on. My big concern is that the jobs I see end up being, 'Need Windows Admin, 5 years exp in an AD environment, blah blah, oh yeah and admin Lync too. Anyone want to share their experience?
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Feb 6, 2014 19:14
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Just want to say thanks to the folks who wrote all that fine info on Lync. Given that I am a linux Avaya type guy not sure if I want to go that direction, but it was helpful.
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Feb 8, 2014 00:54
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Che Delilas posted:Generally no, and don't try to be cute and say you're prejudiced or "they wouldn't have been arrested if they weren't guilty right? My last tour on jury duty this worked for one person. She was an older lady and she just flat out said that she was raised to live your life to avoid even the appearance of any problems, and that fact that the buy was arrested means he must have done something. One interesting thing from my time there was I think I got let off because I was an engineer. With CSI and other programs such a big deal, all prosecutors have a set speech of how there may not be DNA evidence, or video, or a confession, or any thing else that lets them solve a murder in an hours time, counting commercial. They grilled a lot of us, and especially me because of job title, on whether or not we would be able to make a decision based on victim testimony only. If you really need to get out, this may be the way to go.
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Feb 11, 2014 01:36
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" or something. They've heard it before and they aren't amused (I have not tried this, just passing along advice that was given to me)..
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If a customer sends an email to me and CC's the ticketing system, I get an email from the customer and an email from the ticket system stating that my ticket was updated with an email. If I reply to all to the customer's email, I get an email from the ticketing system indicating that my ticket has been updated. And they want us to include the ticketing system on all emails. Now imagine an email thread that generates a lot of replies. And they have gone full metric, including directors sending out daily updates with who were the top ticket closers the previous day and arranging 'friendly' competitions between teams to see who can close the most tickets. I have a meeting with my manager today to figure out if there will be a place for me here or if I will get laid off as soon as executives see that the lower tier closes more tickets than us expensive engineers.
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Feb 12, 2014 17:21
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Ok, so need advice on how to handle this. FYI I am starting to look for another job. but have a family and mortgage. Been at new job for 2 years and it is turning into the job I left: Overworked, metrics, no time to focus on anything because of the escalations that keep coming in. For about a year and a half it was a place where I could work 8 hours and feel like I did something. Now I am starting to work more (with OT), but nothing is getting fixed. We are starting to lose people and they are replacing them with temps (for a support engineering job). The thing was, this was supposed to be a break out year. We have some big support contracts and we were well positioned to take on more work. I did pretty well, and our largest customer asked that I be their main point of contact. And there my troubles began... I would have loved for them to come to me and say 'hey, XXX loves you and wants you to work with them, good job, keep up the good work, etc." But instead they announced the move on a conference call so I found out about it second hand from people. Still I took on the work, and the customer loves me. They love me because I work as hard as they do, almost, and I know what I am doing. At first this was working well, and like I said, I did good work, but it is burning me out and it is my old job all over again. I have so many things to work on that I can't focus and just sit and spin in my chair. Add to this the fact that we are heavily metriced, so if I focus on one issue, I get dinged on 5 others, and I feel like I can do no right. A year ago my old manager would have took me aside and told me what a great job I was doing, and to keep it up and he has my back. Now I just get emails about how case xxxxx has not been updated in so many days. I need to figure out if this can be fixed. My manager is awesome. Unfortunately she is new, really overworked, and, as a front line manager has almost no power. The folks above her are also new, but were brought in to implement ITIL processes in order to drive quality, or something, and do not understand why people are leaving or why employee surveys show high stress. They are working on focus groups to help us Accept Change. I am thinking that I need to make an attempt before I really try to leave. My position in front of our big customer may help me, or they may see that as me not stepping up. I am thinking about trying to talk to my manager about my concerns and get her ok to raise them with the people above her, and see how that goes. Ideas? tldr: My job has become Dilbert. Can I change it?
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Feb 26, 2014 21:41
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AlternateAccount posted:Are metrics ever actually used for anything except: I have seen them used very successfully by managers who fudge the numbers by threats or outright deceit and then use those numbers to show how good they are. As in: "Customer satisfaction evaluations will go up or you will all be finding new jobs" - Workers beg borrow or steal good survey results. "Hey CTO, look at me! Under my leadership customer satisfaction went up 10%!" Heck I remember someone who worked for a Wendy's franchise telling me that the drive through people were told to automatically upsize all lunch drive through orders because the people would be in too much of a hurry and would be less likely to correct them, and they needed to hit their upsize targets.
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Feb 26, 2014 23:25
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guppy posted:Current big organizational priority: professional development. My company spent a lot of money on access for all employees to web based training on all sorts of technical stuff and encouraged us to take training classes on our own time. 2 months later they wondered why no one was taking training classes after they spent all that money.
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Feb 27, 2014 18:56
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I am getting to be a broken record about my job, but I just got my annual review. It was the best one I ever had, for any job. They love me, my customers love me. Sunshine and lollipops. 2.5% raise. I am not even pretending that the booze I am drinking is any sort of quality.
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Mar 5, 2014 03:30
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The VP that was hired at my old company before I left came from some consulting company that had a knowledge base focus. Their point was that each tier could fix 80% of the issues, and the first tier was the knowledge base. So tier 1 is look it up on the web, tier 2 is for people who can't figure out how to look it up on the web and for real problems, which get escalated, etc, with each tier closing 80% of the issues. As each tier solves problems, the solution gets put in the knowledge base and then even more problems get solved by a web search. This is how you use low paid, low skill workers to solve most of your issues and save your company millions. At least in theory. In reality, my new company gets a lot of business from people that don't want to pay $$$$$ to be told to do a web search first.
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Mar 14, 2014 03:33
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That email is perfect. He doesn't give flex time for people that work 8-5 M-F, and he is not giving you flex time. Therefore he just told you that you should be working 8-5 M-F. Next time someone wants you to work later, tell them you have written instructions from you boss to not work OT.
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Mar 14, 2014 15:34
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TheFuzzyLumpkin posted:One of these days I want to land an interview for an IT rock star position that I really don't want, so I can show up with a guitar and leopard print leggings, full 80's hair, throw the table out the window and assault the interviewer. As long as they aren't looking for a new drummer.
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Mar 20, 2014 23:26
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Pissing me off today. Customer has issue with a device (trying to be a bit vague. It is most likely their network, but we upgrade firmware to latest just in case. Problem still happens and still points to their network at the problem. Their network team says it is not, but will not give us any information on network settings. Instead they tell us that there are known issues with our product and a simple google search would have told us that. I ask them to provide their search results, as I see nothing on the product manufacturer's site stating there are known problems in the current firmware release. I get back a list of links to 2 year old posts on random forums (tek-tips!), most not for their exact product, and most saying 'yeah it was a network issue.'
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Mar 21, 2014 20:22
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antisodachrist posted:Apparently people with three years experience with mdm software are like the Holy Grail for recruiters. So why aren't you contacting one?
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Apr 15, 2014 14:57
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Sickening posted:More COO fun. He had a meeting with us today to talk about new phone solutions. Our small company has a customer service dept of about 8 and they take about 900 calls a week. He wants to turn them into a formal call center with phones they login to and logout of. Our current phone system won't allow all the features he wants so we talk about spending money on stuff. I think people want to be managers due to the prestige and pay, but don't know how or don't want to manage people. So they do the next best(worst) thing, which is manage data. Rather than leading their folks to increase customer satisfaction, they say "your rating on customer satisfaction surveys must be 4.5/5 or higher, or you will be disciplined" and then the responsibility is completely on the employee to get the number above 4.5. It doesn't matter how that happens, or if the number reflects reality. All that matters is them being able to tell their boss that the numbers targets were hit. I have seen people rise 3 levels of management just by doing this.
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Apr 30, 2014 04:57
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At my first helpdesk job, they would write your average call time on a helium balloon that they tied to your desk. Now at my current job they were sending out emails daily with TOP PERFORMERS, the people who closed the most cases the previous day. They stopped after they realized that most of the people on the list of top performers were on performance improvement plans and were cherry picking cases to improve their stats, and that the rest of us who do real work set up rules to trash the emails.
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May 1, 2014 03:44
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Orcs and Ostriches posted:People emailing me know the Shift key exists, but only when adding punctuation. This is the only possible reply: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILVfzx5Pe-A
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May 5, 2014 22:40
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When I dealt with temp agencies, Robert Half had a reputation for scheduling interviews with anyone, and requiring you to give the names of 2 hiring managers as references. They weren't interested in hiring you, but were using you to get leads for their salespeople.
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May 14, 2014 01:25
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beerbot posted:Being the VoIP guy. Oh boy, environment caused sound problems suck. You start getting into things like how far is the phone from the wall/cubical wall, are there things in the environment that vibrate, like windows, metal cabinets, etc, is it under an overhanging cabinet. etc? I hate it when you have to get to that detail, as opposed to just getting a sniff and pointing out the jitter. What phones are these? And if you say early firmware Avaya 96x1 phones, you're screwed.
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May 19, 2014 05:21
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Pissing me off today: One of our customers has managed to mess up their environment royally, mainly by growing and adding resources without any plan, and working their knowledgeable people to the point that they quit. Of course since we are their maintenance provider, this is all our fault. They have raised enough hell that they nowhave an executive embedded with them who is second guessing all of our work, and far today I have received different directives on what I should be focusing on from my manager, the executive, the service manager, and tier 1. There are additional directors and managers that I expect will be chiming in soon. In the meantime, we are still down people, about to lose someone for a while, and the company things they can make this up by hiring contractors, most of whom are close to retirement and have 30 years experience with stuff that is end of life 5 years ago. And while I am writing this another manager is iming me with a different thing to focus on.
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May 22, 2014 15:03
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Cenodoxus posted:Be firm in telling them that they need to coordinate with your manager, not you. Only do what your manager tells you to, because at the end of the day they are the person who ultimately decides who or what needs your attention the most. All of this "I've been here 20 years so I have clout and can tell anyone what to do" or "I'm a Unfortunately my manager is at the hospital with a sick friend, so half of the people are trying to 'help' because she is away, and the other half are CC'ing her and making her get involved when she should be with her friend. And the people above manager that are involved are in my direct chain of command. In the past year they have added multiple layers of management whose only job is to look at reports and ask you why your tickets are not updated and why tickets are sitting unassigned. The problem is they all have a point. I am not meeting the metrics. I have old cases that have been open too long. I have new cases I need to pick up and focus on due to escalations, and I have things I haven't statused in the past 2 days because I have been dealing with stuff on fire. At this point, I have 20 tickets, and spending any time working on one gets me in trouble with the other 19. I am not able to say that the metrics are wrong, because they hired a bunch of people and spend money developing the processes and metrics, and folks get very defensive regarding the way things are.
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May 22, 2014 16:54
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LEAD SENIOR EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENT MANAGER
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DrAlexanderTobacco posted:Can you make a case that you're working 100%, that you're not slacking - That you're overworked? Better yet, do you track your time spent in the ticketing system? The problem at this point is that we are no longer engineers responsible for fixing issues, were are ticket monkeys responsible for following processes. It their mind, if processes are followed, there should be no issue. I'm leaving out a lot for brevity and to hide details, but things might come to a head at some point, and they will have to decide if people or processes are important.
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May 22, 2014 17:30
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Just heard that a company I used to work for went to discretionary time off for people at manager and above. This means there is no vacation pool, you can take vacation according to the needs of the business, ie, never. Most management people, due to time in grade, have at least 4 weeks vacation. While they are not allowed to roll it over, by this time they may have 2 weeks accrued. The company has stated per their lawyers, they do not need to pay out for any vacation lost.
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Jun 3, 2014 16:39
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The folks that are affected by this are management level. Since they are managers of the business, they know when is appropriate to take vacation. This is all the direction they have so far. Cynically, this is a ploy to get more US based managers to leave. Most people at management level have a lot of vacation time, due to being 15 + years with the company. Some folks are only staying because getting 4-5 weeks vacation a year is incredible for the US. This company also has a history of saying, 'oops, we didn't hit our numbers, no raise for you.' So I am sure taking vacation will be frowned upon if things are not 100% perfect, and they never are. FYI, most non managers were told a while ago to pack up their stuff because their job is being outsourced.
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Jun 3, 2014 17:44
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Sickening posted:It means that you have to have it approved. It's even worse than that. Since these are management types, they don't have a time system, so there are no blackouts or anything like that. They can take time off as long as they, as a manager, feel that their decision is in the best interest of the company.
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Jun 3, 2014 18:05
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Oddhair posted:On the flip side of this, I was on a web chat with Avaya for 45 loving minutes yesterday, asking if a discontinued part had been replaced or had a new number. That was the entire purpose of my attempting to chat with them, and might I add that even getting the chat window to respond requires you to be logged into their site. The rep spent the entire chat hemming and hawing only to wrap up that they couldn't identify us as a reseller/business partner even with our partner ID and therefore couldn't help with anything. I'm the one who got certified to earn us that reseller certification, now called the APSS-SME, so it's a little extra galling. I only resort to web chat as a last resort, it's the worst possible way [for the customer] to have to interact with a business. Maybe if it wasn't like pulling teeth trying to find part numbers I wouldn't need to resort to chatting. Why hello Avaya BP friend! This is my hell every day. My favorite was asking for a password reset for a command line password (as opposed to web interface), and having the person I was chatting with not knowing what I was talking about, to the point that they were recommending I try telnet instead of ssh to fix a password issue. FYI, most US low tier folks are gone and have been replaced overseas. Most of the tier 3 people are in Canada or overseas. Most of development is overseas.
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Jun 3, 2014 23:16
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