See I'm getting the impression that Feral's experience closely matches what I've seen from the local MSP shops, and your current experience is what a much bigger place does.
Which at least confirms for me: I need to get some schooling and specialize, because fuck this small store shit, anymore.
It's not often I run into a Server 2000 domain functional level, and a 2003 server that has updates pending a reboot.
One of my clients was on 2000 function level. I finally got them on 2012 as part of a massive migration project a few months ago. It feels so good to be able to deploy printers via GPO instead of logon scripts.
It's not often I run into a Server 2000 domain functional level, and a 2003 server that has updates pending a reboot.
One of my clients was on 2000 function level. I finally got them on 2012 as part of a massive migration project a few months ago. It feels so good to be able to deploy printers via GPO instead of logon scripts.
Back on 2003 I was pushing printers via reg keys as GPO's. Is that still a thing?
See I'm getting the impression that Feral's experience closely matches what I've seen from the local MSP shops, and your current experience is what a much bigger place does.
Which at least confirms for me: I need to get some schooling and specialize, because fuck this small store shit, anymore.
Small shops have their benefits and big companies have their drawbacks. It's not as cut and dried as that sounds.
Big companies *tend* to give a lot less of a shit about their employees, treat you like a disposable number, and silo your work role to the point that you don't get a breadth of experience. That can make advancement or finding a new job elsewhere difficult because all you've done for the last 9 months is convert IPX printers to TCP/IP not that i'm speaking from experience in the form of the darkest days of my IT career.
Small companies can be a lot more lenient on things like time off (even just like an hour and a half for a doctor appointment or whatever) and a tight knit, friendly environment.
I've worked for some shitty big companies in my life and I've worked for some awesome small companies, and vice versa.
My current employer is unusually good to work for, to be honest, I'm thankful as fuck for this job.
For my cockroach work this weekend, my boss submitted me to the HR pat-on-the-head newsletter thing, and I got a kudos. I've honestly never had a boss that gave that much of a shit.
It's not often I run into a Server 2000 domain functional level, and a 2003 server that has updates pending a reboot.
One of my clients was on 2000 function level. I finally got them on 2012 as part of a massive migration project a few months ago. It feels so good to be able to deploy printers via GPO instead of logon scripts.
Back on 2003 I was pushing printers via reg keys as GPO's. Is that still a thing?
Not by reg key, though you can still do it that way if you want.
It's native to 2008 and above.
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.
My previous boss was a sales guy that would promise the moon then throw you under the bus when you weren't given enough time or resources to complete the job properly.
New boss is a tech and more or less told one of his clients to go fuck themselves because they were being stupid. It's great.
Because if you're going to attempt to squeeze that big black monster into your slot you will need to be able to take at least 12 inches or else you're going to have a bad time...
It drives me up a wall when a website uses odd port numbers, which means I then need to request the firewall guys to put yet another hole in the firewall for a single site. UGH
Use HTTPS! Forward whatever weird ports you want internally!
My previous boss was a sales guy that would promise the moon then throw you under the bus when you weren't given enough time or resources to complete the job properly.
New boss is a tech and more or less told one of his clients to go fuck themselves because they were being stupid. It's great.
My boss moved up through the ladder from tech here too. I believe the best bosses are people who used to do the work, but they have to have a pretty unusual (for an IT tech) set of people skills to make the jump to management successfully.
It drives me up a wall when a website uses odd port numbers, which means I then need to request the firewall guys to put yet another hole in the firewall for a single site. UGH
Use HTTPS! Forward whatever weird ports you want internally!
If you have a public facing service don't use ports that aren't standard.
Use vhosts and proxypass in apache.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
My previous boss was a sales guy that would promise the moon then throw you under the bus when you weren't given enough time or resources to complete the job properly.
New boss is a tech and more or less told one of his clients to go fuck themselves because they were being stupid. It's great.
My boss moved up through the ladder from tech here too. I believe the best bosses are people who used to do the work, but they have to have a pretty unusual (for an IT tech) set of people skills to make the jump to management successfully.
That's why my guys like me, and want me to manage them, but I can't convince anyone I just don't have the stones to tell an employee how to do their job, or reprimand anyone, or deal with complaint shit. I'm a nervous breakdown waiting to happen every day, management is not for me.
My previous boss was a sales guy that would promise the moon then throw you under the bus when you weren't given enough time or resources to complete the job properly.
New boss is a tech and more or less told one of his clients to go fuck themselves because they were being stupid. It's great.
My boss moved up through the ladder from tech here too. I believe the best bosses are people who used to do the work, but they have to have a pretty unusual (for an IT tech) set of people skills to make the jump to management successfully.
That's why my guys like me, and want me to manage them, but I can't convince anyone I just don't have the stones to tell an employee how to do their job, or reprimand anyone, or deal with complaint shit. I'm a nervous breakdown waiting to happen every day, management is not for me.
Being a good manager for skilled workers is usually better if you don't do the things you're listing as shit you don't like to do.
You just gotta make sure they stay on task, that's it. Keep an eye on productivity.
Once you start micromanaging or punishing people, you'll start losing workers that'll go that extra mile for you.
Complaints are easy, just keep a log of the complaint and if it feels like you should step in (disagreement between two people) do so, but ultimately you should encourage them to work it out. If more than one person comes at you with a similar problem, or it's a problem keeping your team from doing stuff, bark up the chain of command to get it fixed.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
My previous boss was a sales guy that would promise the moon then throw you under the bus when you weren't given enough time or resources to complete the job properly.
New boss is a tech and more or less told one of his clients to go fuck themselves because they were being stupid. It's great.
My boss moved up through the ladder from tech here too. I believe the best bosses are people who used to do the work, but they have to have a pretty unusual (for an IT tech) set of people skills to make the jump to management successfully.
That's why my guys like me, and want me to manage them, but I can't convince anyone I just don't have the stones to tell an employee how to do their job, or reprimand anyone, or deal with complaint shit. I'm a nervous breakdown waiting to happen every day, management is not for me.
Being a good manager for skilled workers is usually better if you don't do the things you're listing as shit you don't like to do.
You just gotta make sure they stay on task, that's it. Keep an eye on productivity.
Once you start micromanaging or punishing people, you'll start losing workers that'll go that extra mile for you.
Complaints are easy, just keep a log of the complaint and if it feels like you should step in (disagreement between two people) do so, but ultimately you should encourage them to work it out. If more than one person comes at you with a similar problem, or it's a problem keeping your team from doing stuff, bark up the chain of command to get it fixed.
I can also understand it'd be hard to reprimand someone you used to work with, but that's why you treat it as #1 a final option and #2 your own fault that it's gotten to that point in the first place. When something's obviously gone wrong, you don't have to start out by dropping the hammer, you start out looking for how you or your company might not have succeeding in supporting the employee. Ask them what happened, and what they need from you to get things right and avoid it in the future.
It only goes to legitimate reprimands if there was either obvious malicious intent, or a consistent pattern of behavior. In either of those cases you're probably already sick of that guy's shit so delivering the consequences aren't going to be hard.
Yeah if John and Frank have a hard time getting along, ask them each individually (and alone) what the problem is. Try to see the common theme between their viewpoints. Don't let it get to the point where they're both pissy and sabotaging each other.
If everyone has a problem with one person, that's where you need to stick to them like me and reese's pb cups.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
It's not just keeping from micro managing the people under you, it's keeping shit off of their heads, too.
That's a whole set of political skills you need. Being micromanaged is bad but being subject to every whim from upper management, getting chewed out for every asinine customer complaint, because your boss folds like a wet paper bag is way worse.
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
I'm moving into a management role in a couple weeks, from just lead engineer into true manager with only part time duties.
And the question of how to discipline is a good one. I think the best view I've heard on it is that it's a series of levels of discussions. As someone else said, your first task is fact finding: Is there something that a person needs that they don't have, and that deficit is what's causing under-performance? After that you start getting punitive, since you gave them the opportunity to help you find out if there were external factors to underperformance.
The real trick in management, though, is even identifying underperformance. If you've got a team of 50 people, how do you tell which engineer is the lazy one? You can't simply rely on moles in the organization, either, as interoffice politics are going to sabotage multiple people, etc.
Managing up is a really important skillset, whether you're already a manager or not.
I spend probably 20% of my time managing my manager because he regularly wants to do batshit insane things that we have to tell him no to.
The hard part is explaining to the manager why you feel the need to do certain projects/upgrades and why software can cost so much.
And then you have the office manager wanting to spend all the cash towards a new configuration of office cubes.
My issue is actually more that he wants to try to spend $texas on bad solutions to problems. Example: we have a terminal server for remote users here (the thing is sized for like 50 people but we only have 15 or so people using it). An issue was identified where because it's just an RDS terminal server there are license issues with some software that just a few people need, but if we install that on the terminal server we have to license it for everyone who uses it.
Instead of using something like App-v to push software packages to an individual user/login, the solution was to build a shitty implementation of a VDi environment where everyone needing remote access basically gets their own Win10 VM. The solution was about $80k when we could have just built an app-v server for 1/16th of the cost. This project was 2/3 done with most of the money spent when I started so I couldn't really put a stop to it.
I've stopped at least 3 similarly stupid things in less than a year here.
I'm moving into a management role in a couple weeks, from just lead engineer into true manager with only part time duties.
And the question of how to discipline is a good one. I think the best view I've heard on it is that it's a series of levels of discussions. As someone else said, your first task is fact finding: Is there something that a person needs that they don't have, and that deficit is what's causing under-performance? After that you start getting punitive, since you gave them the opportunity to help you find out if there were external factors to underperformance.
The real trick in management, though, is even identifying underperformance. If you've got a team of 50 people, how do you tell which engineer is the lazy one? You can't simply rely on moles in the organization, either, as interoffice politics are going to sabotage multiple people, etc.
Also wouldn't you technically need a license for everyone that uses the RDP server anyways? It's essentially an RDP server backend to the whole process, so anything that triggers an TS license warning is still gonna trigger on app-v, right?
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
haha so I come back after a few hours and you're all still talking about this.
First, I'm not 100% sure that App-v was the best solution, it was one example I used as a "is there a better way to do this lets maybe spend a few minutes researching". Regardless, I'm pretty sure I could have easily come up with a better solution than what was being proposed.
Second, I'm not talking about giving many users access to a single piece of software, we're actually trying to fix that. I'll use Acrobat Pro as an example. We only want to license that for specific users, and some of those users use the terminal server. App-v would allow me to push a virtualized application on a per user basis, and they could use it on whatever domain machine they wanted. Other users on the terminal server would not be able to run it.
Again, that was just an idea I had that I hadn't flushed out. The crux was that my boss "designed" a bad solution without any actual technical input and then spent the money and said "here go set this up" That's the moral of the story. :rotate:
Can't say I've ever had the misfortune of dealing with any software that had actual TS-aware licensing but was then unable to license a subset of users on the server.
Just remember that half the people you meet are below average intelligence.
I received an email today which I feel more or less completely explains the tendency of companies to suddenly turn out to have large, unpatched, worthlessly configured systems.
As part of an ongoing legal battle to get the New York City Police Department to track money police have grabbed in cash forfeitures, an attorney for the city told a Manhattan judge on October 17 that part of the reason the NYPD can't comply with such requests is that the department's evidence database has no backup. If the database servers that power NYPD's Property and Evidence Tracking System (PETS)—designed and installed by Capgemini under a $25.5 million contract between 2009 and 2012—were to fail, all data on stored evidence would simply cease to exist.
Courthouse News reported that Manhattan Supreme Court judge Arlene Bluth responded repeatedly to the city's attorney with the same phrase: “That’s insane.”
Last year, NYPD’s Assistant Deputy Commissioner Robert Messner told the City Council's public safety committee that “attempts to perform the types of searches envisioned in the bill will lead to system crashes and significant delays during the intake and release process.” The claim was key to the department’s refusal to provide the data accounting for the approximately $6 million seized in cash and property every year. As of 2013, according to the nonprofit group Bronx Defenders, the NYPD was carrying a balance sheet of more than $68 million in cash seized.
City attorney Neil Giovanatti continued that line of argument. He claimed that the NYPD doesn’t have the technical capability to pull an audit report from its forfeiture database—because the system wasn’t designed to do that.
Still that's a multinational corporation. They should have had something that's basically COTS internally ready to go to deploy that's been in use for decades at that point.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
Posts
It's not often I run into a Server 2000 domain functional level, and a 2003 server that has updates pending a reboot.
Which at least confirms for me: I need to get some schooling and specialize, because fuck this small store shit, anymore.
One of my clients was on 2000 function level. I finally got them on 2012 as part of a massive migration project a few months ago. It feels so good to be able to deploy printers via GPO instead of logon scripts.
Back on 2003 I was pushing printers via reg keys as GPO's. Is that still a thing?
Small shops have their benefits and big companies have their drawbacks. It's not as cut and dried as that sounds.
Big companies *tend* to give a lot less of a shit about their employees, treat you like a disposable number, and silo your work role to the point that you don't get a breadth of experience. That can make advancement or finding a new job elsewhere difficult because all you've done for the last 9 months is convert IPX printers to TCP/IP not that i'm speaking from experience in the form of the darkest days of my IT career.
Small companies can be a lot more lenient on things like time off (even just like an hour and a half for a doctor appointment or whatever) and a tight knit, friendly environment.
I've worked for some shitty big companies in my life and I've worked for some awesome small companies, and vice versa.
My current employer is unusually good to work for, to be honest, I'm thankful as fuck for this job.
For my cockroach work this weekend, my boss submitted me to the HR pat-on-the-head newsletter thing, and I got a kudos. I've honestly never had a boss that gave that much of a shit.
Not by reg key, though you can still do it that way if you want.
It's native to 2008 and above.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
New boss is a tech and more or less told one of his clients to go fuck themselves because they were being stupid. It's great.
Use HTTPS! Forward whatever weird ports you want internally!
My boss moved up through the ladder from tech here too. I believe the best bosses are people who used to do the work, but they have to have a pretty unusual (for an IT tech) set of people skills to make the jump to management successfully.
If you have a public facing service don't use ports that aren't standard.
Use vhosts and proxypass in apache.
That's why my guys like me, and want me to manage them, but I can't convince anyone I just don't have the stones to tell an employee how to do their job, or reprimand anyone, or deal with complaint shit. I'm a nervous breakdown waiting to happen every day, management is not for me.
Being a good manager for skilled workers is usually better if you don't do the things you're listing as shit you don't like to do.
You just gotta make sure they stay on task, that's it. Keep an eye on productivity.
Once you start micromanaging or punishing people, you'll start losing workers that'll go that extra mile for you.
Complaints are easy, just keep a log of the complaint and if it feels like you should step in (disagreement between two people) do so, but ultimately you should encourage them to work it out. If more than one person comes at you with a similar problem, or it's a problem keeping your team from doing stuff, bark up the chain of command to get it fixed.
I can also understand it'd be hard to reprimand someone you used to work with, but that's why you treat it as #1 a final option and #2 your own fault that it's gotten to that point in the first place. When something's obviously gone wrong, you don't have to start out by dropping the hammer, you start out looking for how you or your company might not have succeeding in supporting the employee. Ask them what happened, and what they need from you to get things right and avoid it in the future.
It only goes to legitimate reprimands if there was either obvious malicious intent, or a consistent pattern of behavior. In either of those cases you're probably already sick of that guy's shit so delivering the consequences aren't going to be hard.
If everyone has a problem with one person, that's where you need to stick to them like me and reese's pb cups.
It's not just keeping from micro managing the people under you, it's keeping shit off of their heads, too.
That's a whole set of political skills you need. Being micromanaged is bad but being subject to every whim from upper management, getting chewed out for every asinine customer complaint, because your boss folds like a wet paper bag is way worse.
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
I spend probably 20% of my time managing my manager because he regularly wants to do batshit insane things that we have to tell him no to.
The hard part is explaining to the manager why you feel the need to do certain projects/upgrades and why software can cost so much.
And then you have the office manager wanting to spend all the cash towards a new configuration of office cubes.
And the question of how to discipline is a good one. I think the best view I've heard on it is that it's a series of levels of discussions. As someone else said, your first task is fact finding: Is there something that a person needs that they don't have, and that deficit is what's causing under-performance? After that you start getting punitive, since you gave them the opportunity to help you find out if there were external factors to underperformance.
The real trick in management, though, is even identifying underperformance. If you've got a team of 50 people, how do you tell which engineer is the lazy one? You can't simply rely on moles in the organization, either, as interoffice politics are going to sabotage multiple people, etc.
My issue is actually more that he wants to try to spend $texas on bad solutions to problems. Example: we have a terminal server for remote users here (the thing is sized for like 50 people but we only have 15 or so people using it). An issue was identified where because it's just an RDS terminal server there are license issues with some software that just a few people need, but if we install that on the terminal server we have to license it for everyone who uses it.
Instead of using something like App-v to push software packages to an individual user/login, the solution was to build a shitty implementation of a VDi environment where everyone needing remote access basically gets their own Win10 VM. The solution was about $80k when we could have just built an app-v server for 1/16th of the cost. This project was 2/3 done with most of the money spent when I started so I couldn't really put a stop to it.
I've stopped at least 3 similarly stupid things in less than a year here.
Also, employees fucking hate performance metrics.
The performance on it is kind of shitty, did they fix that?
Installing directly on a RDS server means you need to license for each CAL on that server. Probably, based on licensing legalese.
It's something I had an issue with. It pops up an error and says "please pay for a TS licensed version".
TS and Citrix used to be a great way around multi-user licensing, but vendors are on top of that shit now.
And if they had used app-v they wouldn't have had to and could have saved money... but they still.. would have had to?
First, I'm not 100% sure that App-v was the best solution, it was one example I used as a "is there a better way to do this lets maybe spend a few minutes researching". Regardless, I'm pretty sure I could have easily come up with a better solution than what was being proposed.
Second, I'm not talking about giving many users access to a single piece of software, we're actually trying to fix that. I'll use Acrobat Pro as an example. We only want to license that for specific users, and some of those users use the terminal server. App-v would allow me to push a virtualized application on a per user basis, and they could use it on whatever domain machine they wanted. Other users on the terminal server would not be able to run it.
Again, that was just an idea I had that I hadn't flushed out. The crux was that my boss "designed" a bad solution without any actual technical input and then spent the money and said "here go set this up" That's the moral of the story. :rotate:
In my defense I wasn't paying any attention at all to whenever it was you stated the problem.
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/10/nypd-database-that-tracks-seized-evidence-and-cash-has-no-backup/
They can't even search through evidence without it crashing that's fucking nuts.
welcome to the world of government contracting.