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Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005






I'm not going to lie I read it as this first as well.

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jaegerx
Sep 10, 2012

Maybe this post will get me on your ignore list!


Don't we have a few USA government employees in here, how is your life now?

tokin opposition
Apr 8, 2021

"Okay, I'll see you in there."

WATCH PANTHEON (2022) SEASON ONE NOW ON NETFLIX!
not a federal employee but i'm not allowed to get a passport now so I guess I'm not going anywhere for 4-8 years

xzzy
Mar 5, 2009

I'm paid by the gubmint but not actually a federal employee so my full time remote is allegedly safe.

But who knows how hard they're going to push that rulemaking, I ain't gonna put money on it. I just hope I get ignored long enough for the job market to improve so I don't stay unemployed for long.

Aunt Beth
Feb 23, 2006

Baby, you're ready!
Grimey Drawer

tokin opposition posted:

not a federal employee but i'm not allowed to get a passport now so I guess I'm not going anywhere for 4-8 years
Not allowed? Which EO did I miss

tokin opposition
Apr 8, 2021

"Okay, I'll see you in there."

WATCH PANTHEON (2022) SEASON ONE NOW ON NETFLIX!

Aunt Beth posted:

Not allowed? Which EO did I miss

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presiden...ral-government/

Aunt Beth
Feb 23, 2006

Baby, you're ready!
Grimey Drawer
Christ I don’t know if counting the days remaining would make me feel better or worse

jaegerx
Sep 10, 2012

Maybe this post will get me on your ignore list!


English and Irish citizenship for sale, at this point I'm thinking 1 million though for the marriage.

e: I'm a powerBI

Cyks
Mar 17, 2008

The trenches of IT can scar a muppet for life

tokin opposition posted:

not a federal employee but i'm not allowed to get a passport now so I guess I'm not going anywhere for 4-8 years

You should probably apply for one soon as it doesn’t take very long to process, it’s going to take time for policies around that EO to be put in place, and passports are good for 10 years (at least mine is).

jaegerx
Sep 10, 2012

Maybe this post will get me on your ignore list!


I didn't see the title change until now, excellent work IE.

22 Eargesplitten
Oct 10, 2010



SyNack Sassimov posted:

zero vgs maybe? I remember them being an rear end about the whole thing and insulting everyone else for being so STUPID as to pay Dell & HP thousands for what could be scavenged on ebay for peanuts, and it was a great example of the difference between "being good with computers" and understanding what corporate IT is and does. Also, an excellent example of the far-too-common approach of throwing yourself on the wheel to achieve great results and save the company huge money, with the idea that somehow either the corporation will recognize and greatly reward you for your sacrifice, or just giving yourself the mental reward of thinking you're making a difference in the world by doing this, which is one of the most pathetic concepts I can think of when it comes to "changing the world". Here lies Fred, he kept an entire server fleet of 30 year old Compaqs running with gumption and duct tape. Woof.

Yeah, while I am trying to find cost-efficient options that's in large part because I know the company is cost-averse after having a financial crisis a couple years ago. They're doing way better now and have had a ton of management turnover since then but my goal is to find stuff that has good support/warranties while also not giving them sticker shock. Also all their server / network equipment is like 6 years old so I need to convince them to swap that stuff out before things start breaking. Basically I'm trying to minimize the amount of work I have to do by replacing as many time bombs as possible with the budget I have.

CitizenKain
May 27, 2001

That was Gary Cooper, asshole.

Nap Ghost

SyNack Sassimov posted:

zero vgs maybe? I remember them being an rear end about the whole thing and insulting everyone else for being so STUPID as to pay Dell & HP thousands for what could be scavenged on ebay for peanuts, and it was a great example of the difference between "being good with computers" and understanding what corporate IT is and does. Also, an excellent example of the far-too-common approach of throwing yourself on the wheel to achieve great results and save the company huge money, with the idea that somehow either the corporation will recognize and greatly reward you for your sacrifice, or just giving yourself the mental reward of thinking you're making a difference in the world by doing this, which is one of the most pathetic concepts I can think of when it comes to "changing the world". Here lies Fred, he kept an entire server fleet of 30 year old Compaqs running with gumption and duct tape. Woof.

One of my coworkers came from a smaller company that was a lot more tight about spending. They kept things going for far longer, did all the upgrades themselves. For their size, it was worth it. Their budget didn't have room for a 20k server. When we acquired them, he heard a department was getting a new server, and he went and priced out parts, or knew where he could get some cheap ram and so on. It wasn't worth spending that time. The time we'd spend on that, and upgrading hardware was less then just buying the one we needed from a VAR.
I still sometimes do that myself, but then remember that saving 500 bucks on some hardware for a company that made a 40m in profit last quarter is kinda pointless.

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





jaegerx posted:

I didn't see the title change until now, excellent work IE.

I just push the buttons. You all are the real heroes. :glomp:

Shartweek
Feb 15, 2003

D O E S N O T E X I S T
I quit my new job already.

Got hit with a "we're starting an IT liaison program and you'll be traveling to some of our stores as part it, driving all over California and flying out of state to be the face of IT to show that we're not just faceless remote workers" in addition to my normal tickets/tasks and huge Intune project. Recruiter made no mention of this at all, he said at most I'd have to go to the main office (two hours drive from me) once or twice a year for holiday / team meetings. The main reason I quit my last job was because I was traveling to client sites on a near daily basis and was tired of it.

Then I was told, and no mention of this by the recruiter or during the interviews, that the new CEO came from an accounting/finance background two years ago and implemented new goals that were not met last year. They put a hiring freeze in place except to replace people that left, and there were no raises across the entire company the whole year.

On top of that, over the 9 days I was there my team never said a word to me, I felt incredibly alone and when I asked about various things in Jira (never used it before) or the projects I was to work on I was told to just figure it out. No group teams/chats were going on at all, just silence all day except for our morning stand up. My boss was completely non-technical and the only other guy on my team who handled MS cloud poo poo rarely answered me.

Now I feel like complete poo poo, filled with regret both for taking the job and for leaving it, and nothing on the horizon except the possibility of going back to my old MSP as I'm really good friends with my former boss who is now the president. Feel like I made a mistake leaving but I had an anxiety attack after all of these things came to light and I made the choice to bail. Recruiter called immediately but didn't try to get me to stay, just wanted to know why I left so I explained my concerns and thanked him for his time, apologizing to him because he won't get the payout for finding me. But I feel the job was misrepresented by him, I was told I'd be doing server admin work, but that is handled by someone else entirely. And also feel mislead by my boss during the interviews who made zero mention of that stupid IT liaison program poo poo.

I'm down in the dumps now and just needed to vent.

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





I'm really sorry to hear the new job was such a lovely experience. That's never a fun time. But if you left the MSP on good terms and are friends with the boss, don't hesitate to go back. It's awkward and it's frustrating, whatever, we've all made decisions and taken risks that didn't play out. To some degree, that's even in theory respected from a business perspective.

"I thought the grass was greener and it turns out it wasn't. I felt pressured to make a change for my career and it turns out I missed this place. I'm glad to be back and feel energized make Company XYZ the best it can be."

There's even a term for it. Boomerang employees.

Take care of yourself, goon friend!

CitizenKain
May 27, 2001

That was Gary Cooper, asshole.

Nap Ghost

Shartweek posted:

I quit my new job already.

Got hit with a "we're starting an IT liaison program and you'll be traveling to some of our stores as part it, driving all over California and flying out of state to be the face of IT to show that we're not just faceless remote workers" in addition to my normal tickets/tasks and huge Intune project. Recruiter made no mention of this at all, he said at most I'd have to go to the main office (two hours drive from me) once or twice a year for holiday / team meetings. The main reason I quit my last job was because I was traveling to client sites on a near daily basis and was tired of it.

Then I was told, and no mention of this by the recruiter or during the interviews, that the new CEO came from an accounting/finance background two years ago and implemented new goals that were not met last year. They put a hiring freeze in place except to replace people that left, and there were no raises across the entire company the whole year.

On top of that, over the 9 days I was there my team never said a word to me, I felt incredibly alone and when I asked about various things in Jira (never used it before) or the projects I was to work on I was told to just figure it out. No group teams/chats were going on at all, just silence all day except for our morning stand up. My boss was completely non-technical and the only other guy on my team who handled MS cloud poo poo rarely answered me.

Now I feel like complete poo poo, filled with regret both for taking the job and for leaving it, and nothing on the horizon except the possibility of going back to my old MSP as I'm really good friends with my former boss who is now the president. Feel like I made a mistake leaving but I had an anxiety attack after all of these things came to light and I made the choice to bail. Recruiter called immediately but didn't try to get me to stay, just wanted to know why I left so I explained my concerns and thanked him for his time, apologizing to him because he won't get the payout for finding me. But I feel the job was misrepresented by him, I was told I'd be doing server admin work, but that is handled by someone else entirely. And also feel mislead by my boss during the interviews who made zero mention of that stupid IT liaison program poo poo.

I'm down in the dumps now and just needed to vent.

That sucks, but it sounds like you made the right choice. A bait and switch like that early on would only lead to something worse down the line.

I work with multiple people that left, and came back. Some pretty fast, some after a few years. Although I do work for a place that seems to grab onto some people and they just never escape, myself included.

Aunt Beth
Feb 23, 2006

Baby, you're ready!
Grimey Drawer
I’ve also worked with people who left and returned, we were glad to get them back.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

tokin opposition posted:

frankenservers are for homelabs, if it's not you paying the bill go for the fanciest, most overpriced item possible
the deranged ramblings of someone who's never run 15,000 NUCs in production using custom-built racks and power distribution

The Muffinlord
Mar 3, 2007

newbid stupie?
I don't know, everyone, maybe it is presumptuous of me to think that a technical product manager, who is the listed owner of an application that recently had a high profile company-wide launch, to know if the listed support team in ServiceNow is correct. I guess I'm just asking too much of them.

22 Eargesplitten
Oct 10, 2010



Earlier this week I had two company reps who I had to do tech support for while doing what they were saying for their product.

johnny park
Sep 15, 2009

If my boss suddenly sprung major travel on me as part of my job I'd quit in a hurry too. I get annoyed enough just having to drive half an hour to jobsites once or twice a year

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


Also the huge difference in competence that different companies have with travel. If they're booking flights, airport transfers, arranging hotels, have a sensible and well documented policy on PDs, and give you a company card then travel can be bearable.

22 Eargesplitten
Oct 10, 2010



The only reason not being full remote with at most 1-2 trips per year isn’t a dealbreaker for me is that my commute is about 10 minutes, I have free EV charging, and a private office. The free EV charging might be going away but I’m hoping that gets put off for as long as possible. I haven’t had to charge my car at home in weeks, which has saved me multiple dollars.

How much work is setting up Autopilot, assuming we don’t have InTune set up yet? I am primarily concerned about it for new equipment at this point as we still have to replace like 80% of the computers by October. The MSP will set stuff up but they are slow and it requires like 30 minutes of work per computer on my end.

My last job was remote but wanted me to visit the Europe office at some point. I was excited about that because I planned on taking advantage of the free flights to take a week or two off before flying back to travel around since I’ve never been to Europe, but that didn’t happen.

George H.W. Cunt
Oct 6, 2010

If they take away the EV charging just snake a long rear end extension cord into the parking lot bing bong simple

George H.W. Cunt
Oct 6, 2010

double

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


If you have no Autopilot project off the ground yet, buy from a supplier that can put the devices into your Autopilot tenant (add licenses for your IT team so you can at least log in) and then continue the image the machines as you normally would. Then everything is sitting ready to Autopilot and resetting the machine is all that's needed to start it off.

Getting a basic Intune policy in place is maybe a couple days work if you're learning at you go and documenting your progress. Application packaging is harder but I would try and get the budget to buy Intune Suite at this point and just call it the cost of doing things properly, falling back to adding the Enterprise Application Management add-on if you can't get budget for the full suite.

22 Eargesplitten
Oct 10, 2010



So that would be a reason to buy from CDW, I could have them set the new PCs up with Autopilot? My “IT team” is me and one other guy that is currently one day a week through the MSP, so I might just get one license. The MSP sets everything up through ScreenConnect once I have Windows running and ScreenConnect installed, but they have a 3-4 day turnaround at best.

We’re not currently imaging, just setting everything up by hand, so I’m not sure what work I would have to do before autopilot could take over.

I think the packages thing would be nice, different departments have like 10 different setups of what applications they need installed on top of the basics.

The Fool
Oct 16, 2003


The end goal for autopilot is to have the vendor enroll your devices then ship directly to your users so you never have to actually touch the device.

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


You can buy direct from Dell and they will put devices in Autopilot as well.

https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000204734/windows-autopilot-invite-dell-as-an-oem-partner

Vendors that aren't able to push them straight into your tenant should still be able to give you a CSV of the hardware hashes in your order that you can upload.

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





I don't think you need to rush to make all these changes. If you're in a circus, be a clown. If you're doing 3-4 laptops from Best Buy a year, imaging with CloneZilla is fine. Onboarding into Intune and starting to use Autopilot is modular work that you can work towards and build upon. Take your time to learn about it and do a piece here and a piece there.

Here's a good place to start - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/credentials/certifications/modern-desktop/?practice-assessment-type=certification

22 Eargesplitten
Oct 10, 2010



We’re at about 8 PCs a month right now, I’m hoping to accelerate that because I don’t want to slide in under the wire on Windows 10 EOL. Thankfully when the MSP or I are ordering equipment we aren’t dealing with Best Buy specials and I think someone might have explained to the owner that those Best Buy laptops have an extra $200 cost for a Windows 11 Pro license, I haven’t seen any new ones in the past month.

I want to try to get this endpoint upgrade done quickly so I can get to the server infrastructure upgrade which tbh I’m going to try to get to be a cloud migration because A) it’s a monthly cost rather than a 6 figure up front cost and B) I can spin that as solutions architect work for my resume.

CloneZilla with a USB-C external SSD with the various department images does seem like the other option, although I haven’t looked into either option enough to properly assess it. I just was reading the corpospeak about Autopilot and InTune and didn’t understand what it actually does.

E: also I want to spend company money to improve efficiency because that way I can get more done while doing less work and slacking off in my private office more.

Double E: facilities brought a couple space heaters in for my office and the freezing server closet. So I just plugged them both into the power strip the servers are attached to (:v:)

22 Eargesplitten fucked around with this message at 16:44 on Jan 24, 2025

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





Well, what is being done now with those 8 endpoints a month? What was being done before you were hired?

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


For what it's worth I would take your job on, in-office 5 days a week is negated by a ten minute commute, a private office and the budget and will to overhaul things even if you're not totally flush with cash. I kind of miss seeing things through to the end and then doing something different.

22 Eargesplitten posted:

Manual setup for each one, apparently. Which takes several hours for each one. It seems like a few years ago they were using Acronis but that image seems to be way out of date, like Windows 10 21H1 or something like that.

Are they billing you half a day labour for each PC setup? If so then Intune+Autopilot should be the easiest thing in the world to get budget approval for.

22 Eargesplitten
Oct 10, 2010



Internet Explorer posted:

Well, what is being done now with those 8 endpoints a month? What was being done before you were hired?

Manual setup for each one, apparently. Which takes several hours for each one. It seems like a few years ago they were using Acronis but that image seems to be way out of date, like Windows 10 21H1 or something like that.

When they went through financial problems a while back the entire IT team got laid off/quit and they’ve been using a MSP ever since but realized that it really sucks only having someone on-site once a week and having a minimum 1.5 hour response time to even assign tickets.

The Fool
Oct 16, 2003


back in 2008 or so the msp I worked at did clonezilla imaging over the network so we could pxe boot the computer, pick the client image we needed from a menu and walk away

GreenNight
Feb 19, 2006
Turning the light on the darkest places, you and I know we got to face this now. We got to face this now.

The Fool posted:

back in 2008 or so the msp I worked at did clonezilla imaging over the network so we could pxe boot the computer, pick the client image we needed from a menu and walk away

I did that with Novell Zenworks.

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





22 Eargesplitten posted:


E: also I want to spend company money to improve efficiency because that way I can get more done while doing less work and slacking off in my private office more.

Double E: facilities brought a couple space heaters in for my office and the freezing server closet. So I just plugged them both into the power strip the servers are attached to (:v:)

I mean, yeah, you should "do IT." If you have a magic wand, go ahead and use it. But with where it sounds like the company is at, where your knowledge on the topic is at, and if we're doing stuff like plugging two space heaters into the server "power strip" then my guess is that it's going to be a heavier lift.

By the way, don't do that.

22 Eargesplitten
Oct 10, 2010



I thought the :v: made it obvious that was a joke. They’re on their own outlets and I’m monitoring temperature several times a day to find where it will maintain a stable 50-70 since we don’t seem to have temperature alarms or anything in there.

22 Eargesplitten
Oct 10, 2010



Thanks Ants posted:

For what it's worth I would take your job on, in-office 5 days a week is negated by a ten minute commute, a private office and the budget and will to overhaul things even if you're not totally flush with cash. I kind of miss seeing things through to the end and then doing something different.

Are they billing you half a day labour for each PC setup? If so then Intune+Autopilot should be the easiest thing in the world to get budget approval for.

I don’t know what the billing looks like, I think it might be a flat-rate contract? IIRC when I looked at the last year’s expenses it was regular identical or near-identical payments totaling about the burdened cost of another $80-90k year employee. Which would be a good deal if they were more responsive overnight and had people on overnight who actually knew how to do stuff, but escalated tickets take a week or more to get a response and nobody puts in external updates when I see they have been updating the ticket.

22 Eargesplitten fucked around with this message at 16:56 on Jan 24, 2025

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The Muffinlord
Mar 3, 2007

newbid stupie?
I wonder if "ten minutes" is a record for the fastest turnaround between one of my team sending out an analyst review and said analyst showing up in our Teams with questions about it, confirming my suspicion that the team leads actually aren't reviewing these at all and just sending them to the analyst with no comment of their own.

I usually send them out after-hours, since we primarily review analysts from the other regional desks, and this was a good reminder why. At least it was still a pretty good review, and I didn't get hit with a ton of vitriol but instead an earnest question on how to improve a trouble area for them.

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