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What the gently caress is this "scrum" bullshit and why is my team forced to do it? "Yesterday I worked on and closed help desk tickets. Today I'm going to work on and close help desk tickets. There are no roadblocks to me working on and closing help desk tickets." I'd literally rather work for a child with cerebral palsy and Down's syndrome.
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Aug 12, 2014 16:22
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I loving hate working in IT. I am sick of certifications and acronyms and constant meetings and office libertarians and micromanaging CTOs. I need a new career.
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Sep 8, 2014 15:13
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Are there telltale signs that you're going to get laid off/fired? I think what I've believed to be sudden culture changes are actually indications of much more significant, non-trivial changes. My boss has been quiet lately, our monthly one-on-ones have silently disappeared, the CTO's overbearing micromanagement might actually be his way of determining who to cut/not to cut, and just today there were a spat of emails sent by other managers to our CTO praising me and my work - which feels like they're trying to spare me from the chopping block. Overall it feels weird, but so far it's just a gut feeling. Maybe I'm reading too much into things, so I'm going to have a chat with my boss tomorrow. I'm also going to rewrite my resume and start hunting again.
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Sep 9, 2014 05:58
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mllaneza posted:If you're on good terms with your boss, have that chat offsite and possibly after hours. Would the conversation somehow be different this way?
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Sep 9, 2014 13:36
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psydude posted:I know this is probably an unpopular opinion with the *nix neckbeards around here, but I've come to the conclusion Nagios is goddamned terrible. Nagios is unadulterated poo poo and I don't understand its popularity. Trying to get it to pull and display Windows event logs in an easily-parsed format is a nightmare, and I never successfully did it. I followed the exact syntax in the nagios manual for WinEventLog and it didn't output at all the way it was written that it would. Endless experimentation after doing it by the book got me an eighth of the way to where I needed to be. The flipside is that we have like five other tools for monitoring and none of them are properly configured and we end up getting 20 different email/text alerts when server response times are abnormal. And none of them are looking at Windows event logs.
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Oct 17, 2014 18:20
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dennyk posted:Seriously though, if one of the included plugins isn't doing what you need, just find an alternative out there, or roll your own. The API is dead simple; all you have to do is return a particular exit code for the check condition and whatever text you want describing the check result (plus some optional and easily formatted performance data if appropriate). If you know enough PowerShell black magic to parse the event log, it should be pretty simple to write a quick script that will check for whatever entries you need to alert on (though to be honest, I'm not sure what trouble you'd be having with the default plugin, as we're using it to alert on specific event log entries on several of our systems without a problem). The default plugin ends up returning more information than can actually fit into the email alert, so it gets truncated. To top it off, the check it's returning isn't even any entry in the event log that I can find; I have no clue where it's pulling the warning from. To illustrate, this is exactly the output I get when I use the default plugin: warning: Sophos Anti-Virus: (18), error: WinMgmt: (51), error: SideBySide: (1), warning: CertEnroll: (3147), warning: CertEnroll: (3150), warning: CertEnroll: (4), error: WDSIMGSRV: (19), warning: ASP.NET 4.0.30319.0: (4), warning: SceCli: (34), error: WinMgmt: (52), error: WinMgmt: (52), warning: Wlclntfy: (1), warning: Wlclntfy: (1), warning: Wlclntfy: (4), warning: Wlclntfy: (5), warning: Wlclntfy: (5), warning: Sophos Message Router: (13), error: Sophos Message Router: (1), warning: l2nd: (10), error: Disk: (4), warning: KDC: (4), warning: KDC: (7), error: TermDD: (6), warning: Disk: (13), error: TermDD: (6), warning: IPMIDRV: (10), error: TermService: (9), warning: USER32: (93), warning: EventLog: (52), warning: EventLog: (51), warning: EventLog: (52), warning: EventLog: (2), warn... When I check Event Viewer, there is nothing that is even remotely related to this in any of the logs. It returns this same error every hour and when there is actually something wrong in the event log, it doesn't notify us of that. The manual entry for the default plugin does not at all indicate what any of this could mean. I've tried third-party plugins and they literally return nothing. Everything I've read suggests that the default plugin should "just work" but there appears to be no resources or guidance for when it doesn't. I'm not saying that Nagios is intrinsically bad, as what I previously said about it was hyperbole, but trying to figure it out on my own is a tough nut to crack. I've had more success figuring out issues with Java and C++ code than with Nagios, and I'm not a coder by any stretch. Lil Miss Clackamas fucked around with this message at 18:22 on Oct 20, 2014 |
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Oct 20, 2014 17:00
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dennyk posted:Hmm, that looks like whatever filtering options you are using aren't working properly. Seems to be just vomiting up every error and warning it's found in the entire event log. Are you using the NSClient++ CheckEventLog module? If so, check your filter syntax (the documentation is here), particularly for the generated or written filter keywords; the operator syntax is rather counter-intuitive and it's really easy to screw up and, for example, tell it to find all events generated at least an hour ago or more instead of within the past hour as you intended. I recall that it took a bit of fiddling with the filters in our setup to get the alerts working properly without generating false alarms due to old log entries or unrelated event log messages caught by accident. Thanks for the tip. I am using the NSclient++ module, and I'm going to experiment with one of these checks again when I get the chance. If I'm reading this correctly, I would need to change my check from 1h to -1h in order to check in the last hour?
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Oct 21, 2014 17:14
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Sirotan posted:Cool guys, thanks for making me feel like a valued employee. I told the doctor I saw he didn't need to write me a note since I figured everyone would be reasonable about things. Guess they are going to make me do this the hard way. Rule of thumb: never ever decline a doctor's note. That poo poo is a get out of jail free card. Your employer is last on the list of who is going to give a poo poo about you, let alone value you, so get it in writing, CYA, etc.
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Oct 23, 2014 19:08
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AlternateAccount posted:Oh for gently caress's sake, please briskly walk to the nearest incinerator and throw yourself into it. The final libertarian solution: you can freely-associate yourself into the incinerator.
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Oct 23, 2014 21:02
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Lightning Jim posted:There are still at least 3 people from my old team that have basically elected to not change their situation. Why would you get irritated at something that literally has no bearing on you?
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Nov 21, 2014 19:01
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ConfusedUs posted:Pissing me off: job postings, for which I meet every listed qualification, but after several interviews it turns out I'm missing a key skill that wasn't advertised yet is integral to the job. This is why interviews should be paid. No worker's time should be wasted like this.
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Nov 24, 2014 23:54
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psydude posted:Just wait till you go to an actual developing country. The US will look like Sweden. This doesn't excuse many of our poor labor conditions, but god drat can it get much, much worse. It sure can. Being the richest country and having a lot of geopolitical clout does not make you a developed country however. Look around - our infrastructure is 80 years and falling apart, our labor laws are nonexistent, a single health problem can force you into bankruptcy and literally destroy your life, unions are pretty much nonexistent as well... All the while the the boss is literally screaming at you because you're sick and just need some rest. In the richest country in the world. It truly amazes me that there aren't more office shootings.
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Dec 18, 2014 16:18
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evol262 posted:The US has its problems, but saying it's not a developed country (or talking about problems like you're a 22 year old who's just discovering how the world works and thinks the sky is falling) is inane. Is emigrating illegally to another country because you couldn't afford the half-million dollar hospital bill due to a brain aneurysm you had no control of inane? My friend's health insurance he had through his employer didn't protect him from that. Comparing the United States to Mogadishu and saying "Just discovering the how the world works huh?  " is a nice thing to do if you're a complete moron, but if you're at all grounded in reality then maybe you'd accede that it's not a trait of any other developed country on the face of this planet. And our IT employers are complicit in these kinds of things happening.
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Dec 18, 2014 18:12
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That's correct, but China and India aren't claiming to be leaders of the free world or, with the exception of China, the richest countries on the planet. Is life better here than in the majority of India? In many ways, especially if you're white, certainly. But consider the proportion of money in a Scandinavian country's economy and their welfare and labor laws, and compare that to the US'. We're much richer, yet people's lives literally depend on them having a job, while no such disparity exists across Scandinavia. Taking sick time? Maternity leave? Even taking vacation hours to which you are entitled are tickets to getting screamed at by your employer and risk getting fired, and losing everything you have. While the problem is systemic across all industries in the US, it is truly some poo poo that pisses me off and I think it's always relevant to working in IT. Nobody should have to worry about losing everything because they need to rest at home for a few measly days in a country where we can afford to not have that happen.
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Dec 18, 2014 19:02
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psydude posted:All valid points, but one thing people always fail to realize about Scandinavia is that not a single Scandinavian country has a population larger than New York City. It's much easier to effect positive change in a smaller, more homogeneous population. Take a country with a population 35 times bigger than Sweden's, with a relatively recent history of domestic slavery and genocide, and with diverse ethnic and religious groups, and getting anyone to agree on anything as simple as minor changes to a social safety net becomes nearly impossible. Look at how much push back there was to the ACA - the exact same system designed and championed by the Republican candidate in 2012, and which numerous governmental and independent agencies had projected to save the US taxpayers billions of dollars over the course of just two decades. While on its face, the argument "Sweden's population doesn't approach America's by a longshot, checkmate." might make sense, consider that the population of the entirety of Western Europe is 80 million bodies larger than the United States and all Western European countries have universal healthcare, and worker's rights, and a robust welfare system to protect and grow its citizens. The States part of the United States are much like individual countries, and there's zero legitimate reason - none - that we can't implement and accomplish the same things.
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Dec 18, 2014 20:08
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Good news: being let out early because of the snow. Bad news: CTO came over to my desk and said to me, "You should think about getting snow tires because I don't want to have to feel like I need to let you leave early because you don't have the proper tires. They're an inexpensive investment and will make you that much safer." gently caress you. First of all, snow tires do not make driving in snow or ice safe. Driving in snow and ice is dangerous, period. I don't care what you're driving, it's always dangerous. If the conditions are such that driving in all-seasons warrants going home/closing the office, then winter tires will not make the conditions safer to drive. You're not invincible in your all-wheel drive vehicle and that attitude endangers the lives of others on the road. Second of all, if you're saying that I need to buy snow tires as part of my job, then buy them for me. I don't even have a place to store an extra set of tires in my tiny rear end apartment, let alone the cash to drop hundreds of dollars of my own money because some bitch at work told me to. Third of all, you make a quarter of a million dollars in salary, don't tell me what's affordable you bourgeoisie son of a bitch. If you cared about my safety, you'd foot the bill. You don't; you care about the metrics. Kill yourself.
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Dec 29, 2014 19:47
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Sure, I'll accede that if you live in a place like Norway where helium is constantly in a liquid state, snow tires make a difference. But all-season tires are actually very good in all seasons, and are good enough for everything but the most extreme climates. Doesn't change the fact that laying the fault of weather and physics on my shoulders and trying to guilt trip me into buying something expensive that doesn't actually make driving in dangerous conditions not dangerous just so you can make me come into work when I shouldn't is beyond asinine. Coming into work is not worth sacrificing my safety, and I shouldn't be expected to do that.
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Dec 29, 2014 20:20
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Before this CTO came on, working at my job was great. Things were relaxed, and we just did our jobs. When he came onboard, he didn't trust any of us to do our jobs and we had to push back hard to get him to just slightly tone down the micromanaging. He would openly question my boss' decisions and thought processes in front of the team and do things like literally stand over my shoulder and watch what I was doing on the computer. He started implementing metrics for everything we touch which he now uses to create more work for us e.g. "The site went down for 15 minutes on Saturday, this is wrecking our metrics, we need to get all hands on deck to figure out why and prevent it from ever happening again in the future." When before the metrics nobody got upset and nobody besides the person on-call noticed a small amount of downtime on the weekend and it ultimately had no impact or effect on anything. It's just a constant hair-on-fire attitude to everything; you can't even make an innocuous joke about what you're working on because he will take that to mean you don't take the issue seriously, so he steps in to fill the serious part for you. He started these stand-up SCRUM meetings, which were really just status updates to him disguised as a team-building exercise. Now no one stands up at these meetings, they run 30+ minutes - whether there's three people there or ten - because everyone feels like they have to say as much stuff as possible to make themselves look as busy as possible. Now that's not enough for him, and he wants us to say what we're planning to work on for the week in addition to the daily status reports. It's a very small company, I'm almost exclusively working on help desk, and saying, "I'm working on help desk tickets" isn't a good enough status report even though that's my job. It feels like I'm being put on the hot seat when compared to the developer I'm standing next to who can wax on and on for 25 minutes about crons. The worst part is that nobody will listen to us. He was friends with a bunch of the executives prior to coming here, and now he's friends with all of them. Complaints to his superiors might as well be written on a piece of paper and thrown in a trash bin. I've worked for shittier companies with shittier bosses, but the fact that this place was so good to work and almost overnight turned into crap is so incredibly disappointing and frustrating. I dread coming into work now, and I really don't know what to do short of finding a new job, but I dread job interviews just as much. This whole thing sucks.
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Jan 6, 2015 19:47
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Dick Trauma posted:Please use my example and don't hang on too long trying to turn that job into something worth having again. If there's one thing I've learned about work it's that if your boss is the only problem you're still screwed, because you can't fix your boss. True, and yours is a great example. The problem is I get some pretty outrageous benefits here, way better than anything I could have asked for as a first job out of college. I'll be hard-pressed to find anything comparable. Roargasm posted:He sounds like a dick but this is the worst possible answer when you get asked for an agenda. Sure it would be a bad answer if being asked for an agenda was a unique request. But it's every single day. I have a job, a daily routine, and you can only come up with new, unique agendas every single day for so long, especially in a small company. We've been doing these daily meetings for over half a year now and it just gets tougher and tougher to grasp at straws. It's tough to make myself sound busy, even more so than doing actual work. I shouldn't be in a meeting every single day describing to someone what my job is.
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Jan 6, 2015 20:45
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Ursine Asylum posted:SCRUM is one of those things that can be super useful or super stupid, if you've got a manager that's cargo culting "successful people" and not knowing why then it's pretty dumb but being in a company that uses it properly has resulted in one of the least painful jobs I've ever had from a supportive-manager standpoint. v And that works for you because you're a developer and things are always breaking and it's easy to have something unique to add that could help the team and improve the process. I can see how SCRUM works for the devs and for project management in general, that's really where it shines. But it shouldn't be used as a status update for the boss' boss. When you're help desk in a small company and the bulk of your tickets consist of "This user flipped their airplane mode switch to ON and could not connect to the wireless network. It was resolved by turning it OFF." and people question you, then it's not good. If I had things breaking all the time in huge ways that I could fix, I would describe those too. The problem is that we maintain things well here, and if I'm doing my job right then I won't have much to report. It's not like I don't do work. The place where my role really stands out is at these big events that we do; I recently saved the company millions at the last one and it got me a very good annual report and a raise. Accomplishments like that shouldn't be overshadowed because my typical routine is revealed as uneventful through what are essentially daily interrogations where I have to justify my job.
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Jan 6, 2015 21:11
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Ursine Asylum posted:I can grant you that. It sounds like your boss is a "shoots self in foot" type of guy anyways. At the last big event we did he mocked a product in front of one of the key people involved in that product, a person whom the company has a great working relationship with and pretty much relies on for these events. It wasn't good.
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Jan 6, 2015 21:32
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go3 posted:Its a tragedy that basic managerial tasks and oversight have devolved to the point that poo poo like this is a Real Thing. It's real, and it's less about management and oversight than it is about control and asserting authority. We go into the room, present ourselves to the CTO, who then goes last after all of us and speaks only in buzzwords. My ears ring every day with "take that offline", "ping them on this", "get that on your radar", "this will be a game changer", "get them in the loop on this", and other poo poo I really can't comprehend anymore.
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Jan 6, 2015 23:49
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Skex posted:I'm convinced that "Managers" at my company spend all their time in meetings dreaming up ways to make our jobs more tedious and soul crushing. Many managers seem to do this anyway, and I'd rather have them doing it out of sight than around me all the time. The physical presence of a bad manager can make daily working life a living hell.
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Jan 7, 2015 02:45
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Ursine Asylum posted:To be quite honest, this kind of reaction would make me treat you like a It's not so much turn-of-phrase as it is a "I-sound-like-a-really-big-moron". I've heard the phrase uttered literally no where else by no one else other than the chief technology officer, a person so detached from the realities of IT that they shouldn't even be in the position.
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Jan 7, 2015 16:02
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who doesn't understand metaphors or turns of phrase if you did it on a regular basis.
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Do you have a spine made of Squand or something? Don't let people touch your poo poo or tell you how to work if it's not transgressing others. Next time he does that, take out the sawed-off you have underneath the desk and blow his skull across the cubicle farm. Then burn the office down to hide the evidence.
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Jan 8, 2015 00:21
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I would literally kill for an IT union.
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Mar 11, 2015 16:39
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The anti-union talk in here is literally some of the dumbest poo poo I've ever read. Plenty of bad employees keep their jobs in non-union shops, I don't see how that's even a concern in the first place? I don't understand how people can be so oblivious or even supportive of the coercive power-imbalance between employer and employee. It's bullshit like this that makes wages a race to the bottom.
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Mar 12, 2015 15:58
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