IMO, there are two different meanings for being on-call.
1) Formal on-call, where there's a certain agreed-upon response time, perhaps even an SLA, and you have on-call shifts. This is common in devops.
2) Informal on-call, where there's no agreed-upon response time and therefore no expectation of immediate response, but a more casual agreement that you make a best effort.
#2 just comes with the job IMO. I expect my employer to call me if all of our servers have crashed on a Sunday. However, I should be able to say "Sorry, I was in a movie" or "I was asleep" when they ask me why I didn't pick up the phone right away. To be honest, I don't think that this is really that big of an industry collective action problem. I haven't seen this abused very much. And I also don't think it's reasonable to draw a bright line that you can never ever call me after hours. Even if we have coverage, I'd still rather know when things go wrong, because I don't want to walk into a mess when I do come back into the office.
I've had bad experiences with #1. That's where I think employers are simply offloading the responsibility for keeping up on adequate staffing level onto on-call technicians. If I'm on Pacific time and we have staff on the Eastern seaboard, such that a system outage at 6am is likely a work stoppage during our official business hours, then we need to pay somebody to be available at 6am. If our posted office hours include Saturday, then we need to pay somebody to be available on Saturday.
I much prefer #1 personally..I am in mostly devops-related work, I'm on call one week a month but typically there are 0 incidents, and if there are I have my phone setup w/ a terminal emulator etc. so I can fix anything from there and don't need to cart a computer around, and for the rest of the time outside of work hours I turn everything off and don't give a fuck about work at all. If i walk into a mess when I come into the office? meh at least I was beautifully stress free in my off hours until that point.
Of course we also only do oncall for actual emergencies i.e client facing services or sites down; if something is down and special butterfly employee A can't work from home @ 10 PM? fuck em.
The worst part was Windows and networking both had India teams but Unix did not.
So windows and networking were broken?
I kid, I kid...
Funny part of that is we actually HAD an India team but no one trusted the with anything.
We had an external call center that we used for overnight stuff, but they regularly fucked things up worse than if they had just taken a message and left it for us to resolve the next morning. And asking them to just do that would have been a waste of money (you can hire a call answer service to do that for about $100/month), so I fired them.
Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
A huge part of whether or not your company culture abuses work-life balance is entirely dependent upon either company leadership or client relationship management. A significant proportion of off-hours calls you get for any job are not actually emergencies, but if the person taking the call or the person paying the bills is unable or unwilling to push back on the client request, then you get the "all shit rolls downhill" problem.
What you'll often find is that it's just the two people talking on the phone who are causing problems for literally everyone else. The client representative is just trying to get as much as they can as easily as they can, and they are happy to ask you for the moon as long as you keep smiling and saying, "Yes, sir, may I have another?" It makes them look good to squeeze as much free shit as they can out of the vendor. And the CRM just says yes to everything because it makes them look good to keep the client happy. Like, everyone else involved is an adult and understands how contracts and SLAs work, and would be fine if the back-and-forth was limited to: "Can we have X?" "No it's not in the SLA if you want X then pay us more". But since the two primary points-of-contact are incentivized to just throw shit to the next person and ask for stuff, it snowballs into a larger problem.
Honestly I blame the CRMs the most, since you should expect clients to ask for anything and everything, but it's the CRM's job to figure out how to say no when it's appropriate to do so. Like, they might be fine with getting called by clients 24/7 because that's their job, but it doesn't mean they should be passing that pain down to the rest of the company. There are some cases where it's leadership that's the problem (because they let their CRMs get railroaded or actively encourage it). In those cases your best bet is to just find another job unless you expect a leadership change sometime soon.
For the 20th fucking time over 9 years, I have told this person they should print to PDF instead of printing and scanning to email.
They looked at me like I had just invented computers, and wanted to lavish praise upon me for my smartness.
I'm not fucking having it! I don't deserve it! I don't need it! I need you to stop talking shit behind my back and do this one thing a smarter way!
*starts heading out the door*
I don't think I should get a fucking medal for coming up with the same fucking solution I've already come up with 19 other times, and given to the same person all those times!
*muffled screams from outside*
I'd give you a fucking medal if you'd just print to a PDF or export to a PDF or use any of the 100,000 fucking free tools baked into every productivity suite and OS these days to make a goddamn PDF!
someone from like komodo or something like that has been cold calling my office looking for "someone in IT"
why do sales people not understand that that never works with IT people
"Thank you for calling! I have a tremendous opportunity for you! My name is. DAN PATRICK of the Democratic Republic of Congo and One of the close aides to the former President of the Democratic Republic of Congo LAURENT KABILA of blessed memory, may his soul rest in peace..."
My last job paid 25 cents per call. Per fucking call.
Let me put it to you like this: Some dude called at 9 pm with a downed ATM. I fixed it. 25 cents.
Someone else called with a downed ATM. At 3 in the fucking morning. I fixed it. 25 cents.
Someone called at 10:30 AM on a Saturday because their servers were completely down because some dipshit in my company deployed a registry "fix" that overwrote all of the domain information in the registry for every single fucking customer we had, so I was on the phone for 12 hours spinning up new machines and pulling data from our backup server.
25. Fucking. Cents.
Jesus, when I did ATM stuff I was the one calling people but all our techs ended the day at 5PM. We ran 24 hours and I Was on the 4PM - Midnight shift. I gotta tell you though I both feel for people and hated people who worked for a bank with a "call 24/7" policy who would get mad at me for doing what their employer told my employer to do.
lwt1973King of ThievesSyndicationRegistered Userregular
I send out an email to a customer letting them know the file that was sent was a test file and the format is wrong. I get an email back from them stating that the file's format is wrong.
"He's sulking in his tent like Achilles! It's the Iliad?...from Homer?! READ A BOOK!!" -Handy
I send out an email to a customer letting them know the file that was sent was a test file and the format is wrong. I get an email back from them stating that the file's format is wrong.
Our facilities manager is the worst about this. I like him personally, but he pulls shit like
Him: "Hey, the electrician needs some IP addresses and some ethernet ports activated for a new power monitoring system"
Me: "Okay, by when?"
Him: "He's here right now."
Me: "When did you schedule this?"
Him: "Well, I called him last week but I didn't know exactly when he'd show up."
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
End-user Alice put in three helpdesk tickets for three different application problems on her workstation, just like she was supposed to. Those tickets went in between Thursday and Monday. None of the application problems were complete work-stoppage, though they are pretty inconvenient.
Technician Brian grabbed all of the tickets on Friday & Monday, reached out to Alice, couldn't get hold of her, and asked her to call back when she was available.
Today, Alice's manager, Chris, called the general IT helpline. Chris got hold of technician David, and proceeded to bitch David out that Alice's computer was still broken. David asked Chris, "Okay, I see a few tickets here. What else is wrong?" and Chris angrily replied, "Everything! The whole computer is broken!"
David had lots of other shit to do so I agreed to handle it.
I called up Alice and told her I wanted to help with her computer. I went through the open tickets and verified each one with her. She had one additional minor problem she hadn't yet put in a ticket about. Then I started to launch a remote control console, when Alice said:
"I have to use my computer right now because I have a deadline. Can I give you a call later this afternoon?"
:rotate:
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
"The government is requiring us to have email addresses that say 'username-department@company.com. Please change all email addresses in my department to reflect that."
Me:
"This is a pretty unusual request. Can you give me more detail?"
User:
"The government wants contractors working for {client corporation name} to have email addresses that clearly delineate what department they're in."
Me, incredulous:
"Okay. Which government agency is it, and do you have any written documentation about it?"
User:
"It's {client corporation name} who is requiring it."
After a lot of back and forth, I still don't fully understand what the fuck is going on, but as far as I can tell, it's going like this:
{Client corporation} is a contractor for a government agency.
We're a subcontractor for {client corporation}.
The government contract is pushing a requirement down on the client corporation.
We're included in that requirement, because we're a subcontractor.
Y'know, if you had just said from the beginning that this is a contractual requirement for one of our clients instead of blaming it on the government this would have been much easier.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
I work for a (fed) govt agency and write contract requirements on the regular. This is the most unusual thing I've ever heard.
This sounds more like someone in <gov agency> just has a stick up their ass about dealing with contractor personnel. Said agency reps can just ask for updated rosters regularly.
Man if you want to control how your contactor's email addresses look, then give them accounts on your own damn email system.
What total nonsense.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
+12
Options
NEO|PhyteThey follow the stars, bound together.Strands in a braid till the end.Registered Userregular
Encountered an odd thing at work (Retail in a place that does tech stuff). Customer brought in a cable, the print on the cable itself was for cat5, but the ends crimped on it were for whichever variant of phone plug uses all 6 connectors. Would there be a legit reason for having that sort of line cable for plugging into a DSL modem compared to a standard phone cord?
It was that somehow, from within the derelict-horror, they had learned a way to see inside an ugly, broken thing... And take away its pain.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
Man if you want to control how your contactor's email addresses look, then give them accounts on your own damn email system.
What total nonsense.
What bothers me isn't so much that the request is fucking bizarre, it's that the requestor isn't giving me straight answers to my questions and is acting a bit put out that I'm asking questions at all.
Just do the needful!
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
0
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ShadowfireVermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered Userregular
Encountered an odd thing at work (Retail in a place that does tech stuff). Customer brought in a cable, the print on the cable itself was for cat5, but the ends crimped on it were for whichever variant of phone plug uses all 6 connectors. Would there be a legit reason for having that sort of line cable for plugging into a DSL modem compared to a standard phone cord?
Sounds like an RJ25C connection? I have no idea why you'd use it on a DSL modem though. An RJ14 is usually used on a bonded DSL system, but I've never seen them bond three lines together.
edit: I am the worst, and a few small mistakes queued mail for a good 17 hours. Thank fuck it's a long weekend.
Also, we hired a new manager. Dude came in, looking for a big ole IT department that he could sit back and manage. "We're 3 people including the manager and you'll be crawling under desks."
He still got the job, just what we need - another fucking temp. I can't wait for him to put his mark on the department, make a raft of changes and miraculously find another job and fuck off before finishing anything.
I come from a Puppet shop but Ansible is so so good.
Mostly just huntin' monsters.
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
0
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
When a job listing says that the position requires "working knowledge" of a given product, what level of proficiency would you take that to mean?
"Working knowledge of SQL" in an app support position seems like it could mean any number of things. I've done some very light DBA tasks in the past and would be comfortable migrating or restoring instances or writing simple queries, but ughhhhh everything about hiring is terrible
Posts
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
So windows and networking were broken?
I kid, I kid...
I much prefer #1 personally..I am in mostly devops-related work, I'm on call one week a month but typically there are 0 incidents, and if there are I have my phone setup w/ a terminal emulator etc. so I can fix anything from there and don't need to cart a computer around, and for the rest of the time outside of work hours I turn everything off and don't give a fuck about work at all. If i walk into a mess when I come into the office? meh at least I was beautifully stress free in my off hours until that point.
Of course we also only do oncall for actual emergencies i.e client facing services or sites down; if something is down and special butterfly employee A can't work from home @ 10 PM? fuck em.
Funny part of that is we actually HAD an India team but no one trusted them with anything.
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
We had an external call center that we used for overnight stuff, but they regularly fucked things up worse than if they had just taken a message and left it for us to resolve the next morning. And asking them to just do that would have been a waste of money (you can hire a call answer service to do that for about $100/month), so I fired them.
What you'll often find is that it's just the two people talking on the phone who are causing problems for literally everyone else. The client representative is just trying to get as much as they can as easily as they can, and they are happy to ask you for the moon as long as you keep smiling and saying, "Yes, sir, may I have another?" It makes them look good to squeeze as much free shit as they can out of the vendor. And the CRM just says yes to everything because it makes them look good to keep the client happy. Like, everyone else involved is an adult and understands how contracts and SLAs work, and would be fine if the back-and-forth was limited to: "Can we have X?" "No it's not in the SLA if you want X then pay us more". But since the two primary points-of-contact are incentivized to just throw shit to the next person and ask for stuff, it snowballs into a larger problem.
Honestly I blame the CRMs the most, since you should expect clients to ask for anything and everything, but it's the CRM's job to figure out how to say no when it's appropriate to do so. Like, they might be fine with getting called by clients 24/7 because that's their job, but it doesn't mean they should be passing that pain down to the rest of the company. There are some cases where it's leadership that's the problem (because they let their CRMs get railroaded or actively encourage it). In those cases your best bet is to just find another job unless you expect a leadership change sometime soon.
They looked at me like I had just invented computers, and wanted to lavish praise upon me for my smartness.
I'm not fucking having it! I don't deserve it! I don't need it! I need you to stop talking shit behind my back and do this one thing a smarter way!
*starts heading out the door*
I don't think I should get a fucking medal for coming up with the same fucking solution I've already come up with 19 other times, and given to the same person all those times!
*muffled screams from outside*
I'd give you a fucking medal if you'd just print to a PDF or export to a PDF or use any of the 100,000 fucking free tools baked into every productivity suite and OS these days to make a goddamn PDF!
*continued ranting from down the street*
why do sales people not understand that that never works with IT people
"No se habla ingles."
"Thank you for calling! I have a tremendous opportunity for you! My name is. DAN PATRICK of the Democratic Republic of Congo and One of the close aides to the former President of the Democratic Republic of Congo LAURENT KABILA of blessed memory, may his soul rest in peace..."
Jesus, when I did ATM stuff I was the one calling people but all our techs ended the day at 5PM. We ran 24 hours and I Was on the 4PM - Midnight shift. I gotta tell you though I both feel for people and hated people who worked for a bank with a "call 24/7" policy who would get mad at me for doing what their employer told my employer to do.
SYN + ACK
Me: When was this ever planned and why was I never informed of it, considering I manage IT for an entire deparment/building?
Tuesday: We just need access to offices to swap out the phone hardware.
Me: Ok, sure.
Friday: We may need someone on site to do network configuration changes and to set up the DHCP scopes.
()*&@!%(*&@#()*@#)(*&@#()*&@%()*@$%
NO.
Our facilities manager is the worst about this. I like him personally, but he pulls shit like
Him: "Hey, the electrician needs some IP addresses and some ethernet ports activated for a new power monitoring system"
Me: "Okay, by when?"
Him: "He's here right now."
Me: "When did you schedule this?"
Him: "Well, I called him last week but I didn't know exactly when he'd show up."
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Initialize conf dirs as git repos.
You're welcome.
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
I think I get what you're after but I very rarely understand what the fuck I'm doing with git.
You can basically fuck up any of the conf files and it doesn't matter. Revert.
You can also branches them and then in a script just switch branches of you need special.case configs.
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
It's not that crazy once you understand the concepts. It's just that understanding those is hard because of some terminology.
Still, you will pretty much only be using add, commit and possibly checkout and reset HEAD.
It's good enough to toy around with configuration, but if you're already there you might as well look into chef/ansible/puppet.
Yes. For most things you want a real CM.
For one off shit or local shit this works well though.
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
instructions unclear, now everything is on fire
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
We have all our configurations in one repo, deployed with Ansible.
Technician Brian grabbed all of the tickets on Friday & Monday, reached out to Alice, couldn't get hold of her, and asked her to call back when she was available.
Today, Alice's manager, Chris, called the general IT helpline. Chris got hold of technician David, and proceeded to bitch David out that Alice's computer was still broken. David asked Chris, "Okay, I see a few tickets here. What else is wrong?" and Chris angrily replied, "Everything! The whole computer is broken!"
David had lots of other shit to do so I agreed to handle it.
I called up Alice and told her I wanted to help with her computer. I went through the open tickets and verified each one with her. She had one additional minor problem she hadn't yet put in a ticket about. Then I started to launch a remote control console, when Alice said:
"I have to use my computer right now because I have a deadline. Can I give you a call later this afternoon?"
:rotate:
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Guess who's going to be on vacation this weekend, and the next?
"The government is requiring us to have email addresses that say 'username-department@company.com. Please change all email addresses in my department to reflect that."
Me:
"This is a pretty unusual request. Can you give me more detail?"
User:
"The government wants contractors working for {client corporation name} to have email addresses that clearly delineate what department they're in."
Me, incredulous:
"Okay. Which government agency is it, and do you have any written documentation about it?"
User:
"It's {client corporation name} who is requiring it."
After a lot of back and forth, I still don't fully understand what the fuck is going on, but as far as I can tell, it's going like this:
{Client corporation} is a contractor for a government agency.
We're a subcontractor for {client corporation}.
The government contract is pushing a requirement down on the client corporation.
We're included in that requirement, because we're a subcontractor.
Y'know, if you had just said from the beginning that this is a contractual requirement for one of our clients instead of blaming it on the government this would have been much easier.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I work for a (fed) govt agency and write contract requirements on the regular. This is the most unusual thing I've ever heard.
This sounds more like someone in <gov agency> just has a stick up their ass about dealing with contractor personnel. Said agency reps can just ask for updated rosters regularly.
What total nonsense.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
What bothers me isn't so much that the request is fucking bizarre, it's that the requestor isn't giving me straight answers to my questions and is acting a bit put out that I'm asking questions at all.
Just do the needful!
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Sounds like an RJ25C connection? I have no idea why you'd use it on a DSL modem though. An RJ14 is usually used on a bonded DSL system, but I've never seen them bond three lines together.
I am working on an ansible migration ( on top of prometheus rollout) .
Just set up manual runs of ansible to require 2fa.
All without having prod access yet.
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
Also, we hired a new manager. Dude came in, looking for a big ole IT department that he could sit back and manage. "We're 3 people including the manager and you'll be crawling under desks."
He still got the job, just what we need - another fucking temp. I can't wait for him to put his mark on the department, make a raft of changes and miraculously find another job and fuck off before finishing anything.
Annnnnnd, phone off, keys in hand, I'm out of here.
Don't you just pull the power plug on the server? I saw that on NCIS one time...
I once did an action RPG session where we had to disable a bomb.
One guy: *smashes computer screen showing countdown*
Everyone: *ten seconds of silence and staring*
Other guy: "...run?"
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
"Working knowledge of SQL" in an app support position seems like it could mean any number of things. I've done some very light DBA tasks in the past and would be comfortable migrating or restoring instances or writing simple queries, but ughhhhh everything about hiring is terrible
Need to prepare for an interview and that's one of my current weaker points. (Haven't touched Apache in a while.)