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
For me, "working knowledge" equates to: Do you know what this is/what it does? Can you do some basic tasks and troubleshooting with it? Would you feel comfortable and able to expand your knowledge on this with experience and further training on it?
It looks like I got the job, btw, just waiting on confirmation from HR
30% raise over my previous gig, and I'll have taken 10 weeks off work by the time I start. To boot, I'll be on an app support team and working basically in an entirely new sector and at a much larger scale than I'm accustomed to.
+22
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FFOnce Upon a TimeIn OaklandRegistered Userregular
Hrmmm, anybody ever dealt with being evaluated by Yates Limited? Some sort of Enterprise consulting firm. Apparently they started 2 days ago (I've only been made aware today) and will be continuing over the next 8 weeks looking at the below (among many other things that I removed to preserve some anonymity)
Operating Model Assessment - How technology assets are managed, utilized and consumed
Technology Spend - Commercial agreements and invoices...reduce technology costs
Network/Telephony/Mobility Assessment - ways to improve the overall network and telephony experience
Hrmmm, anybody ever dealt with being evaluated by Yates Limited? Some sort of Enterprise consulting firm. Apparently they started 2 days ago (I've only been made aware today) and will be continuing over the next 8 weeks looking at the below (among many other things that I removed to preserve some anonymity)
Operating Model Assessment - How technology assets are managed, utilized and consumed
Technology Spend - Commercial agreements and invoices...reduce technology costs
Network/Telephony/Mobility Assessment - ways to improve the overall network and telephony experience
I'm not getting a great feeling from this.
I don't know about them, but my extremely cynical experience with business consultants:
They will come in and ask a lot of questions and demand reams of documentation, but you will be doing all the discovery and compiling work yourself.
The answers you give will be regurgitated back to you in a nice glossy report ultimately telling you nothing you didn't already know.
Any specific solutions you offered to the various challenges you face will be presented to management as their own. The rest will be well known generic boilerplate to be found with a basic google search.
They will want to take over or bundle all your existing contracts and give them to their various partners they get kickbacks from, that despite initial claims of saving money will likely end up costing you more than you are paying today and be more difficult to manage.
They will present a list of possible projects to deal with identified issues, but the contract your company signed way back at the beginning says their scope is purely advisory, meaning they will continue to get paid ridiculous hourly fees to send your bosses a few status emails a week while all actual implementation work will be done by you. You will not be paid more or given more resources to do so.
Once management sees implementation quotes of these projects that might actually improve things, because it's the same stuff you've already been asking them for, everything will be quietly backburnered for a couple years until they forget and decide they need to bring in another consultant to burn money on an assessment again.
Best case, that glossy report can get thrown in to kick management in the ass on something you've already been asking for. Worst case, management are next-quarter penny pinchers and get convinced to also fire everyone for a call center in India.
Just remember that half the people you meet are below average intelligence.
Hrmmm, anybody ever dealt with being evaluated by Yates Limited? Some sort of Enterprise consulting firm. Apparently they started 2 days ago (I've only been made aware today) and will be continuing over the next 8 weeks looking at the below (among many other things that I removed to preserve some anonymity)
Operating Model Assessment - How technology assets are managed, utilized and consumed
Technology Spend - Commercial agreements and invoices...reduce technology costs
Network/Telephony/Mobility Assessment - ways to improve the overall network and telephony experience
I'm not getting a great feeling from this.
I don't know about them, but my extremely cynical experience with business consultants:
They will come in and ask a lot of questions and demand reams of documentation, but you will be doing all the discovery and compiling work yourself.
The answers you give will be regurgitated back to you in a nice glossy report ultimately telling you nothing you didn't already know.
Any specific solutions you offered to the various challenges you face will be presented to management as their own. The rest will be well known generic boilerplate to be found with a basic google search.
They will want to take over or bundle all your existing contracts and give them to their various partners they get kickbacks from, that despite initial claims of saving money will likely end up costing you more than you are paying today and be more difficult to manage.
They will present a list of possible projects to deal with identified issues, but the contract your company signed way back at the beginning says their scope is purely advisory, meaning they will continue to get paid ridiculous hourly fees to send your bosses a few status emails a week while all actual implementation work will be done by you. You will not be paid more or given more resources to do so.
Once management sees implementation quotes of these projects that might actually improve things, because it's the same stuff you've already been asking them for, everything will be quietly backburnered for a couple years until they forget and decide they need to bring in another consultant to burn money on an assessment again.
Best case, that glossy report can get thrown in to kick management in the ass on something you've already been asking for. Worst case, management are next-quarter penny pinchers and get convinced to also fire everyone for a call center in India.
Cool, so my company is gonna burn more money. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Hrmmm, anybody ever dealt with being evaluated by Yates Limited? Some sort of Enterprise consulting firm. Apparently they started 2 days ago (I've only been made aware today) and will be continuing over the next 8 weeks looking at the below (among many other things that I removed to preserve some anonymity)
Operating Model Assessment - How technology assets are managed, utilized and consumed
Technology Spend - Commercial agreements and invoices...reduce technology costs
Network/Telephony/Mobility Assessment - ways to improve the overall network and telephony experience
I'm not getting a great feeling from this.
I don't know about them, but my extremely cynical experience with business consultants:
They will come in and ask a lot of questions and demand reams of documentation, but you will be doing all the discovery and compiling work yourself.
The answers you give will be regurgitated back to you in a nice glossy report ultimately telling you nothing you didn't already know.
Any specific solutions you offered to the various challenges you face will be presented to management as their own. The rest will be well known generic boilerplate to be found with a basic google search.
They will want to take over or bundle all your existing contracts and give them to their various partners they get kickbacks from, that despite initial claims of saving money will likely end up costing you more than you are paying today and be more difficult to manage.
They will present a list of possible projects to deal with identified issues, but the contract your company signed way back at the beginning says their scope is purely advisory, meaning they will continue to get paid ridiculous hourly fees to send your bosses a few status emails a week while all actual implementation work will be done by you. You will not be paid more or given more resources to do so.
Once management sees implementation quotes of these projects that might actually improve things, because it's the same stuff you've already been asking them for, everything will be quietly backburnered for a couple years until they forget and decide they need to bring in another consultant to burn money on an assessment again.
Best case, that glossy report can get thrown in to kick management in the ass on something you've already been asking for. Worst case, management are next-quarter penny pinchers and get convinced to also fire everyone for a call center in India.
Cool, so my company is gonna burn more money. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Hrmmm, anybody ever dealt with being evaluated by Yates Limited? Some sort of Enterprise consulting firm. Apparently they started 2 days ago (I've only been made aware today) and will be continuing over the next 8 weeks looking at the below (among many other things that I removed to preserve some anonymity)
Operating Model Assessment - How technology assets are managed, utilized and consumed
Technology Spend - Commercial agreements and invoices...reduce technology costs
Network/Telephony/Mobility Assessment - ways to improve the overall network and telephony experience
I'm not getting a great feeling from this.
I don't know about them, but my extremely cynical experience with business consultants:
They will come in and ask a lot of questions and demand reams of documentation, but you will be doing all the discovery and compiling work yourself.
The answers you give will be regurgitated back to you in a nice glossy report ultimately telling you nothing you didn't already know.
Any specific solutions you offered to the various challenges you face will be presented to management as their own. The rest will be well known generic boilerplate to be found with a basic google search.
They will want to take over or bundle all your existing contracts and give them to their various partners they get kickbacks from, that despite initial claims of saving money will likely end up costing you more than you are paying today and be more difficult to manage.
They will present a list of possible projects to deal with identified issues, but the contract your company signed way back at the beginning says their scope is purely advisory, meaning they will continue to get paid ridiculous hourly fees to send your bosses a few status emails a week while all actual implementation work will be done by you. You will not be paid more or given more resources to do so.
Once management sees implementation quotes of these projects that might actually improve things, because it's the same stuff you've already been asking them for, everything will be quietly backburnered for a couple years until they forget and decide they need to bring in another consultant to burn money on an assessment again.
Best case, that glossy report can get thrown in to kick management in the ass on something you've already been asking for. Worst case, management are next-quarter penny pinchers and get convinced to also fire everyone for a call center in India.
As a former management consultant, I will say that the outcome of any given engagement is almost entirely dependent upon the sponsor of said engagement (and their reasons for sponsorship) or the motivating force behind your engagement (e.g., being a privacy consultant for a company that needs to be GDPR-compliant).
In many cases, you will have an executive hire a consultant to provide what I like to call "white collar evidence" (think white collar crime) to promote a specific agenda. If you can provide enough compelling evidence, that may give them enough juice to push something through. In more complicated situations, you can absolutely get hired to do something in anticipation that you will fail - if you don't, then the report gets quietly buried or dismissed, and if you do, then they win and can move on to the next big game hunt. In rare cases, you will find an organization that is truly trying to behave in the best manner possible (ethically, rationally, etc.), and your work will be assessed for what it is and weighed against competing priorities - sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, most times you get a little (but not everything) of what you recommend. As with most things in life, it gets pretty messy, too. You can have the best sponsor in the world with a ton of organizational pull and can produce the best work possible, but that sponsor may leave for greener pastures and their replacement doesn't want to have anything to do with you.
Note that motivations and agendas aren't necessarily selfish or evil. For example, a diversity executive may believe very strongly in promoting diversity in their company, and they will hire you to try to help them build a case to do things like target more minority hires or to remove personal identifiers from resumes.
There's also the other big, often-overlapping bucket of consulting, where you ostensibly hire a professional firm that specializes in particular work to do things that your organization cannot do. In those cases, what you generally get are a series of interns and new hires being poorly paid and overworked while a high-priced white-collar salesman (again, think white collar crime, then throw in some used-car-lot sales hair gel) flashes their credentials and pretty smile to get you to pay them money that sometimes would be better spent just hiring your own in-house expertise full-time.
The interesting thing about that second type of consulting is that a huge chunk of it can be described as hiring "copy/paste monkeys" - you are hiring warm bodies with a bare minimum of cognitive skill who are able to manipulate Microsoft Excel to perform tasks that computer automation is increasingly able to do.
Isn't "warm bodies with a bare minimum of cognitive skill who are able to manipulate Microsoft Excel" computer automation in and of itself? It's automating the manipulation of computers.
And now in another (lame) complaint: what the fuck is up with the new layout in Android Chrome? It's like they suddenly decided that showing *more* browser and less webpage was the best idea.
( < . . .
+1
Options
ShadowfireVermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered Userregular
And now in another (lame) complaint: what the fuck is up with the new layout in Android Chrome? It's like they suddenly decided that showing *more* browser and less webpage was the best idea.
I have that on my work phone but not my home phone and I'm not sure why yet. I'd like to keep it away though.
They want the bar on the bottom because top-bar is hard to reach on big phones. I'm not sure why they felt the need to make it bigger, though.
Sure, but the address bar is still at the top, and now you have to position yourself to reach both. And the bars just stay there robbing your screen space. And no option to go back to the other setup.
Just feels not very well thought out.
( < . . .
+1
Options
ShadowfireVermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered Userregular
That bottom bar also doesn't hide itself like the top bar does. Which means it's always taking up real estate.
I've already switched on my desktop and I'll probably do that on my phone, but my work phone is pretty buttoned down. Can't install anything that's not whitelisted.
Was asked to buy an adapter because a user didn't like the built in speakers on their new monitor. They wanted HD sound, so they found this DP->VGA adapter.
:biggrin:
However, these monitor manufacturers are annoying. If you're going to put weak speakers in a monitor, at least forward face them! They faced them up! Viewsonic. We need to talk.
I'm left-handed, but I just use ambidextrous mice and they've been fine for me. (actively right-handed ones are no good, but neutral ones are okay)
Microsoft's mice have always been a fairly safe bet; heck, I'm still using a wired intellimouse 1.1, but they have newer ones that are symmetrical, too.
New jobs are hard, y'all. I think I'm gonna thrive, though. Just gonna take a few tears and some big boy pants.
To stay on topic, as a lefty, I've always used a "normal" mouse because the nature of my left handedness is fine motor control on the right and hulk smash on the left. Most of the left handers I've met in my life are this way as well. We just write with our hulk smash hand as well.
New jobs are hard, y'all. I think I'm gonna thrive, though. Just gonna take a few tears and some big boy pants.
To stay on topic, as a lefty, I've always used a "normal" mouse because the nature of my left handedness is fine motor control on the right and hulk smash on the left. Most of the left handers I've met in my life are this way as well. We just write with our hulk smash hand as well.
I sincerely feel you. New jobs, even when you take them expressly because they're hard, are super scary when they're hard. And choosing to go somewhere where you won't be the smartest person in the room is deeply unnerving at some points, because you suddenly feel dumb and wonder how you got hired.
I feel these things for sure.
What is this I don't even.
+1
Options
lwt1973King of ThievesSyndicationRegistered Userregular
No, I won't order you a new phone because you are having issues getting calls when smoking in the garage when you're supposed to be outside.
"He's sulking in his tent like Achilles! It's the Iliad?...from Homer?! READ A BOOK!!" -Handy
Okay Admin thread - I have a new longer term project. We are moving more of our departmental assets off of the universities free shared servers because their support has been dropping, and now we can't even use domain masking (ie ourdepartment.ouruniversity.edu) with SSL anymore ("It's available on our paid hosting plans!").
So, I've already got a working app authenticating to the Incommon Federation with Shibboleth. If we move other resources off to their own webservers, I'd like to set up a shared authentication server for our departmental sites, as well as the web app I manage (and possibly another one coming on line in the near future), so I only have to manage and deal with one implementation of the Incommon "fun".
Now, problem is, I have no idea where to even begin on this. Does anyone have knowledge of a decent guide, or at least even a good set of Google terms? Most of what I'm googling is bringing up SSO troubleshooting, which isn't really helpful for getting started. Or is this a horribly bad idea for some reason I haven't thought of yet because we decided to look into this about 10 minutes ago?
Does your boss know you're playing Progress Quest?
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
Okay Admin thread - I have a new longer term project. We are moving more of our departmental assets off of the universities free shared servers because their support has been dropping, and now we can't even use domain masking (ie ourdepartment.ouruniversity.edu) with SSL anymore ("It's available on our paid hosting plans!").
So, I've already got a working app authenticating to the Incommon Federation with Shibboleth. If we move other resources off to their own webservers, I'd like to set up a shared authentication server for our departmental sites, as well as the web app I manage (and possibly another one coming on line in the near future), so I only have to manage and deal with one implementation of the Incommon "fun".
Now, problem is, I have no idea where to even begin on this. Does anyone have knowledge of a decent guide, or at least even a good set of Google terms? Most of what I'm googling is bringing up SSO troubleshooting, which isn't really helpful for getting started. Or is this a horribly bad idea for some reason I haven't thought of yet because we decided to look into this about 10 minutes ago?
Posts
It looks like I got the job, btw, just waiting on confirmation from HR
30% raise over my previous gig, and I'll have taken 10 weeks off work by the time I start. To boot, I'll be on an app support team and working basically in an entirely new sector and at a much larger scale than I'm accustomed to.
Operating Model Assessment - How technology assets are managed, utilized and consumed
Technology Spend - Commercial agreements and invoices...reduce technology costs
Network/Telephony/Mobility Assessment - ways to improve the overall network and telephony experience
I'm not getting a great feeling from this.
I don't know about them, but my extremely cynical experience with business consultants:
They will come in and ask a lot of questions and demand reams of documentation, but you will be doing all the discovery and compiling work yourself.
The answers you give will be regurgitated back to you in a nice glossy report ultimately telling you nothing you didn't already know.
Any specific solutions you offered to the various challenges you face will be presented to management as their own. The rest will be well known generic boilerplate to be found with a basic google search.
They will want to take over or bundle all your existing contracts and give them to their various partners they get kickbacks from, that despite initial claims of saving money will likely end up costing you more than you are paying today and be more difficult to manage.
They will present a list of possible projects to deal with identified issues, but the contract your company signed way back at the beginning says their scope is purely advisory, meaning they will continue to get paid ridiculous hourly fees to send your bosses a few status emails a week while all actual implementation work will be done by you. You will not be paid more or given more resources to do so.
Once management sees implementation quotes of these projects that might actually improve things, because it's the same stuff you've already been asking them for, everything will be quietly backburnered for a couple years until they forget and decide they need to bring in another consultant to burn money on an assessment again.
Best case, that glossy report can get thrown in to kick management in the ass on something you've already been asking for. Worst case, management are next-quarter penny pinchers and get convinced to also fire everyone for a call center in India.
You are all fucking welcome.
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
Cool, so my company is gonna burn more money. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
To leverage the tool she just posted above:
https://foaas.com/anyway/Yates/FF
As a former management consultant, I will say that the outcome of any given engagement is almost entirely dependent upon the sponsor of said engagement (and their reasons for sponsorship) or the motivating force behind your engagement (e.g., being a privacy consultant for a company that needs to be GDPR-compliant).
In many cases, you will have an executive hire a consultant to provide what I like to call "white collar evidence" (think white collar crime) to promote a specific agenda. If you can provide enough compelling evidence, that may give them enough juice to push something through. In more complicated situations, you can absolutely get hired to do something in anticipation that you will fail - if you don't, then the report gets quietly buried or dismissed, and if you do, then they win and can move on to the next big game hunt. In rare cases, you will find an organization that is truly trying to behave in the best manner possible (ethically, rationally, etc.), and your work will be assessed for what it is and weighed against competing priorities - sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, most times you get a little (but not everything) of what you recommend. As with most things in life, it gets pretty messy, too. You can have the best sponsor in the world with a ton of organizational pull and can produce the best work possible, but that sponsor may leave for greener pastures and their replacement doesn't want to have anything to do with you.
Note that motivations and agendas aren't necessarily selfish or evil. For example, a diversity executive may believe very strongly in promoting diversity in their company, and they will hire you to try to help them build a case to do things like target more minority hires or to remove personal identifiers from resumes.
There's also the other big, often-overlapping bucket of consulting, where you ostensibly hire a professional firm that specializes in particular work to do things that your organization cannot do. In those cases, what you generally get are a series of interns and new hires being poorly paid and overworked while a high-priced white-collar salesman (again, think white collar crime, then throw in some used-car-lot sales hair gel) flashes their credentials and pretty smile to get you to pay them money that sometimes would be better spent just hiring your own in-house expertise full-time.
The interesting thing about that second type of consulting is that a huge chunk of it can be described as hiring "copy/paste monkeys" - you are hiring warm bodies with a bare minimum of cognitive skill who are able to manipulate Microsoft Excel to perform tasks that computer automation is increasingly able to do.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
why do so few people show any initiative in trying to fix things themselves?
Because you fix it for them.
Instead of fixing it for them, make them fix it with you helping them. If you make them do it enough, they'll eventually learn.
I have that on my work phone but not my home phone and I'm not sure why yet. I'd like to keep it away though.
Sure, but the address bar is still at the top, and now you have to position yourself to reach both. And the bars just stay there robbing your screen space. And no option to go back to the other setup.
Just feels not very well thought out.
Did that so fast...
The only thing that I'm missing is that it doesn't reload the webpage when you "pull down."
I've already switched on my desktop and I'll probably do that on my phone, but my work phone is pretty buttoned down. Can't install anything that's not whitelisted.
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
I believe there's an extension on mobile for that
Feels good to finally be putting some of my ideas in place.
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
Yeah, I loved it when I finally started getting some service monitoring into place.
Next project: tracing!
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
It has documentation, are we sure it's really open source?
~ Buckaroo Banzai
:biggrin:
However, these monitor manufacturers are annoying. If you're going to put weak speakers in a monitor, at least forward face them! They faced them up! Viewsonic. We need to talk.
Microsoft's mice have always been a fairly safe bet; heck, I'm still using a wired intellimouse 1.1, but they have newer ones that are symmetrical, too.
To stay on topic, as a lefty, I've always used a "normal" mouse because the nature of my left handedness is fine motor control on the right and hulk smash on the left. Most of the left handers I've met in my life are this way as well. We just write with our hulk smash hand as well.
I sincerely feel you. New jobs, even when you take them expressly because they're hard, are super scary when they're hard. And choosing to go somewhere where you won't be the smartest person in the room is deeply unnerving at some points, because you suddenly feel dumb and wonder how you got hired.
I feel these things for sure.
So, I've already got a working app authenticating to the Incommon Federation with Shibboleth. If we move other resources off to their own webservers, I'd like to set up a shared authentication server for our departmental sites, as well as the web app I manage (and possibly another one coming on line in the near future), so I only have to manage and deal with one implementation of the Incommon "fun".
Now, problem is, I have no idea where to even begin on this. Does anyone have knowledge of a decent guide, or at least even a good set of Google terms? Most of what I'm googling is bringing up SSO troubleshooting, which isn't really helpful for getting started. Or is this a horribly bad idea for some reason I haven't thought of yet because we decided to look into this about 10 minutes ago?
Does your boss know you're playing Progress Quest?
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
https://www.shibboleth.net/index/basic/ ?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Shibboleth acts as an identity provider (IDP), authenticating to Incommon on the back end and offering SSO on the front end
You set up your other websites as service providers that consume SAML tokens from Shibboleth
I might have the details slightly wrong because I'm just extrapolating from other SSO platforms
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.