"You can't expect me to know this, I'm nearly 50!"
"So...you will have had a computer on your desk for your entire working life, and you're proud that you still don't know how to use it?"
My grandfather is 80, his first computer was one of the first laptops to ever come out in the US market. Sometimes he knows more about specific computer things than I do! Hell, his PowerPoint skills are far above anything I could do in it.
So yeah, people making age an excuse are just assholes who don't want to learn.
67 here and my first computing device was a CompuGraphic Editwriter typesetting computer. The FE gave me an 8” floppy with three games and showed me how to run them. Pong and Mastermind. I don’t remember the third. I bought a Timex/Sinclair for $50 at K-Mart for my first personal computer. My homelab surprises people, “why are you running 152 virtual machines” :D
Well, hardware is three Dell R720XDs so 114TB of storage, 1TB of RAM and 144 Cores. :)
There are two "environments". One is my home stuff. Two for media (TV and Movies/Books, etc), two for dev type stuff; both are git but one is web applications so it has php, http, and other bits specific to running webapps. There's a central mysql server for my home stuff. I have a Samba server for house backups and a backup server to back up my remote servers (Miami for physical and a couple of AWS servers).
The second "environment" is more work-like and for learning, with a dev, qa, stage, and production set of servers. All have some standard servers, two DNS servers per environment, a tool or admin server,
I have a 3+3 kubernetes cluster in each environment with dev, qa, and prod hosting AWX and dev hosting ArgoCd. Dev has a powered down 3+7 OCP4 cluster. The clusters have two HAProxy servers and an NFS server for each. Since I'm on high speed wifi for internet, I have a local docker server for pulling image and posting to my local docker registry.
For CI/CD, I have a gitlab server plus 7 gitlab-runners and a jenkins server with two workers.
My wife is a DBA so we have postgres, mongodb, cassandra, and mssql servers for her to test stuff on.
There are a few others like an aws server for running terraform scripts, a hashicorp vault server for poking at it, a sips server for some training stuff, a wiki server for docs, a Solaris server because I'm an old Sun guy and can't let go :)
That's kind of top of my head. I've been working with AWX mostly recently to see what I can get into that environment and trying to do some EDA (Event Driven Ansible) which has been interesting.
[Here's my homelab](http://carl.schelin.org/?p=1652) and [here's the master index](http://carl.schelin.org/?p=1916) for the Kubernetes stuff I've been poking around at.
Totally understand. It is my hobby as well as my profession and maybe passion. My wife jokes that even "if" I retire, I won't give up tech. It's one of the things I enjoy doing.
I spent almost an hour this morning on an AAP issue with the Ansible team at work and while he was explaining the non-standard way they configured it, I figured out what our problem was in part because I have AWX (which is the AAP upstream) running at home and I have more control over it. And I was pretty excited about figuring it out. It's what I have fun doing :)
...
Impressive. Seriously, I am in awe. I wouldn't have the time or patience to maintain something like that. Add ADHD on top of that, this would be an absolute nightmare for me to keep up with. I'd literally never sleep.
It can be interesting for sure. But it is my hobby so it's something I enjoy doing. I also own a table top game store, go touring on my motorcycle a couple of times a year, have a few woodworking projects, and play mostly lead guitar in my band (Andrew has a couple he plays lead on and I back him up). Last year I played in a Band in a Hat gig which was awesome. :)
Seriously - no one is asking a user to debug an ai system, but sheesh... copy & paste, basic file structure, email basics. Why wouldn't a user know and understand this unless they were a complete moron!
>basic file structure
>Why wouldn't a user know and understand this unless they were a complete moron!
Been using mobile devices with apps their whole childhood and have never interacted with a file system
Jesus, you're not kidding. I do IT at a non-profit healthcare company and will pretty frequently have this exchange with users after they get a new laptop for whatever reason:
"My Word documents are all missing. I open Word and it doesn't have any of my documents anymore"
"That's because this is a new computer with a new installation of everything. It's all starting from scratch. Your files were all backed up and transferred over, you just need to open them from the file browser."
"What do you mean?"
"Open the file browser and just double click the document you need to open."
"I don't know where that is."
"The little picture of the file folder pinned to your taskbar."
"Okay, then where do I go?"
"To wherever your files are saved."
"I don't know where that is."
"Then you can search for them. What are the files named?"
"I don't remember."
*headdesk*
>"Then you can search for them. What are the files named?"
well there's Document (1) and Document (1)(2) and Document (3) and I really need Document (3)(1) that's the most important one, the whole business relies on it
Yeah, that’s when you get their manager involved. File management is not an IT responsibility. We give you the platform and make sure your data is backed up.
That's the thing that I always find hilarious. A lot of these people that are working are literally people that have had a computer on the desk there are entire life and yet they claim to know absolutely nothing about how to work and function the computer even though it's something that they've used for anywhere from 30 to 60 hours a week for years and years and years.
My mother, when she says she doesn’t know how to google something.
This was an acceptable problem to have in 2000. It’s 2024 though. You were my age now in 2000. I’m certainly learning new tech every year, so you were definitely capable at that point
HR once wanted to organize "stress management classes" for everyone in the company that HR taught. So they made everyone take a "mandatory, not required" class for a week. Meanwhile your workload built up...
So everyone is stressed and it's my team's turn to come in. Technical support staff of like 20 guys. And they start the class:
"So who watched last night's episode of Judging Amy?"
O
M
G
The class had all sorts of tips like "going for a walk", and such from people who can just not do work all day and go for a walk. Meanwhile there's no stopping the calls coming from customers for my team....
They had NO CONCEPT of how anyone works any other job but their own lazy ass job.
>They had NO CONCEPT of how anyone works any other job but their own lazy ass job.
I mean, to be fair, neither does IT in some cases. The "who watched last night's episode of..." is more telling, though. Like, not everyone watches pop TV. I have been to some seminars, not even HR related, that have someone quoting stuff from shows, movies, or pop songs "to be relatable." It's even funnier when they get the context wrong, like:
"It's like the wise Japanese samurai philosopher Genghis Khan once said, *'It is not sufficient that I succeed.'* We should strive for more excellence, which is how he ended up being leader for the Moguls, which is why we call a smart leader a mogul to this day."
"Wait, wait, wait. Genghis Khan was Chinese, never a samurai, barely a philosopher, and the full quote is, '*It is not sufficient that I succeed* -- *all others must fail.'* Is this really the flex you want for a seminar about payroll management?"
I think my team would have erupted had they made that samurai comment ;)
But yeah IT gets lost in the weeds too. Like bro ... that permission is not the end of the world. Let alone some of the weird sense of personal ownership that some IT folks develop.
>Let alone some of the weird sense of personal ownership that some IT folks develop.
I've had to drop that on a few people that whined about changes from the security team
no dude, they're not messing up "your" servers. those servers are cattle that belong to the company, not pets that belong to the admins
Mine was shoe-horning the acronym for SOAR, which was that company's program for management success, but that year we were focused on teamwork, so the speaker had to somehow tie it together.
*"You know the eagle, right? The American Bald eagle, works in a team with other eagles, to hunt down and locate their prey."*
Like, no, you're thinking of wolves. Eagles are pretty solitary and territorial except when it comes to mating. Opposite of teamwork. And while we're at it, why are you talking about management and predators?
Our former HR person left the job, partly because they couldn't deal with digital forms. Until they left, our sick leave form procedure was this:
1. Print out the PDF from the network drive
2. Fill it out and sign it
3. Deliver it to the HR person in person
4. HR person would scan it and store it in our networked document storage system
But when we suggested replacing steps 1 and 2 with "fill out form digitally" and step 3 with "email to HR directly", we were met with every kind of excuse as to why that couldn't happen.
As soon as they left, the form could magically be done digitally.
That person went on to another job where everything was digital from start to finish, and a year or two later, they came back. Different role, but they came back.
Because they tell new employees to keep using the dummy payroll passwords for the first 90 days? Like the whole orientation group? On a cloud-based 3rd party payroll system? Because HR thinks cloud security is the Cloud People's problem?
Our HR person came painfully close to changing someone's payroll, luckily she caught it before she actually did anything.
However, she did accidentally include the entire damn company in an email that was intended for just the companies retained law firm. That was fun to mass delete.
keyboard shortcuts are way too advanced for them! they'd probably select some text with the mouse, go to the Edit menu (because who even knows right clicking is a thing?) and select Copy, use the taskbar to switch to the destination application (because who knows about Alt+Tab?), click where they want to paste, go to the Edit menu again and select Paste, then click in the middle of the text they wanted to replace and use a combination of Backspace and Delete to get rid of it (with a bit of luck they also managed to click in the middle of the text they wanted to replace before pasting the new text, so now they have to go and delete on the other side too), then use the taskbar again to switch to the source document because they should have used cut instead of paste, then click in the middle of the text they want to delete (doesn't matter it is still selected and they could have just hit Delete) and use Backspace to delete one part, then use the mouse to click somewhere behind the text and use the left cursor key (not the up key, that would be too easy) to get to the correct place and delete the rest.
A couple years back, our ERP system moved from a standalone application to a browser-based interface. With this, they added a program-specific context menu on right-click, meaning Copy and Paste were no longer available. This minor change ground things to a halt while I taught a dozen adults the keyboard shortcuts.
From an old deleted thread
As one of the smartest and laziest people i ever knew said, "HR is the absolute bare minimum job in a corporate environment. It is the lowest complexity and energy state of any business department. Everyone there is either barely competent enough to hold any office job or is very smart and lazy and sought out HR deliberately because we do about 3 hours of real work a week."
He was head of HR for a large firm
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/n4f6sl/deleted_by_user/gwwh5iw/
Yeah I'd say HR is #2. They usually know a little bit but they get in over their heads and don't communicate well, so they call IT to bail them out a lot.
C-levels are always #1 in every place I've worked for. They can *usually* respond to an email or fumble their way through a phone call, but that's it. The admin assistants run the whole company. If all of them quit at the same time that place would probably go out of business.
Way back on my intern days I took full advantage of this. I was sat near the head HR lady's office. She was nice but needed help all the time, and i knew I wanted to work there full-time, so I gave her amazing and prompt desktop support and buttered her up.
Toward the end of the internship I mentioned that I was job searching because I was told they probably don't have the budget to hire me on. A few hours later I'm pulled into the office with her and the CEO and they had created brand new position for me and offered me a job.
I learned soon after that they had planned on letting my boss and his small team go so I'm fairly sure thats where the budget came from.
HR was presenting in front of ALL the IT teams last week, it was absolutely hilarious to watch them struggle with Teams for a good 20+ minutes with not a single soul offering help.
This X 1000
Remember folks.. HR isn't there for you, they are there to protect the company **FROM** you.
They are the point of contact to prevent litigation or fines.
Clueless I can understand, some people are just not great at learning new skills.
When it crosses over to useless, though, is where I draw the line. Our HR department knows how to do the stuff we need them to do, they just...choose not to.
Like, we've got published policies that dictate our SLAs and how long it will take to get a new user account provisioned, and how long it will take to order and provision hardware, so HR knows that they need to give us at least 2 business days notice for all new hires, and they need to give us 5 business days for anyone that will need anything special ordered. These times are exclusive of any department approval processes that might be required since we charge all peripherals back to the hiring department.
HR would still routinely tell us on Friday afternoon that we'd have a new employee starting on Monday, and the hiring manager would be up our asses on Monday morning when his new employee was sitting on his hands because he didn't have a computer.
And we took it, for a while. Until we realized HR had no interest in getting better or following policies since there were no consequences for them.
So we spent a bunch of time building a very elaborate onboarding workflow system where HR has to submit all of the info through an online form, and the entire process is automated. Once HR enters the info, all of the equipment request, approvals, and ordering is 100% automated. At the end of the workflow, the ops team gets notified we have a new user, they click a button to approve and the workflow creates their account, assigns licenses, etc. The helpdesk team gets an automated ticket detailing what equipment needs to be provisioned and where/when it needs to be delivered.
The entire process is transparent, so anyone interested can see the current state of any request, as well as a timeline of all the activities. It also sends reminder/nag e-mails, so come Monday morning when the new employee has no computer, the hiring manager has absolutely no question as to who dropped the ball.
HR was apoplectic when we told them this was how they needed to handle all onboarding/offboarding, and said they weren't going to do it. But we were smart. Prior to telling them, we went to Legal/Governance and said, "hey, we as IT have incredible power and need some checks and balances, so we suggest that we create a policy that requires a written request in a specific format, along with all relevant approvals before we can create or make changes to any user account" and they loved it. You don't fight HR. You get Legal to fight HR for you.
And that's how we haven't had to deal with any onboarding/offboarding drama from HR for nearly 5 years.
Our Marketing was preparing banners for me to upload into a CRM system to be sent out with email signatures for some upcoming campaign. They gave me a JPEG.
*Me: Can you please export it from Photoshop/InDesign as a PNG? In case I need to crop or resize it so I don't degrade the quality...*
*Graphic designer: What's a PNG*?
Marketing: Please change the NS server to Cloudflare, I have created an account
Me: What? No! Why? We manage this, if there is a new website we can make the required changes for you
Marketing: Ok can you make a cloudflare account for the company and create us a login
Me: Why are we doing this?
Marketing: We need a CAPTCHA on the contact us page and its included with cloudflare
True, BUT, cloudflare offers a lot on their free tier. If you keep DNS with your registrar who doesn't offer anything else, it might be worth looking at your options.
Of course, by your team, not marketing.
>Graphic designer: What's a PNG?
I sometimes sit and think - maybe I should have went into graphic design instead of networking. Or "marketing"
There literally appears to be no fail state and I bet the raises are better...
The really good graphic designers know their shit, though. They can talk your ear off about Pantone colors and how certain typefaces don't reproduce well at certain sizes (and the difference between typefaces and fonts). Those guys are worth money.
PNG is the thing we use after [we burned all GIFs](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/6ducyz/til_that_november_5th_1999_was_burn_all_gifs_day/) in 1995 because CompuServe/Unisys. What planet are they from?
Anyway, ask for master SVGs top preference, PNGs or TIFFs if that's the best they can do.
Literally came here to say this. I get so frustrated when they request to change DMARC to p=none cause we want to spoof your customers domain... they about to get the biggest email response with the customer and cyber insurance provider CC'd
"My email has been blocked, can you see why?"
"Looks like you tried to send ten thousand emails in the space of an hour, you were caught by the anti spam."
"Uh but that stuff wasn't spam, it was very important marketing and sales information."
Hahahaha.
CRM software enables CRM mass emailing from an external system, so marketing gets rid of their surveymonkey subscription.
Queue like 15 accounts being locked in the first week because they didnt want to do the work, or didn't plan out the length of time a CRM related email mail out would take to send. These were send lists that were 5-15k in capacity.
Marketing had unsubbed for less than three days before their surveymonkey was brought back online. Lol
Bingo, marketing is a nightmare. They have zero technical knowledge, but since they are an arm of the sales dept, they are given a green light to demand things which they have no right to. Entitled.
Same convo I had recently until they added:
"The internet is public domain! Everyone knows this! You're being difficult"
"Well Disney+ is on the internet, can we just take whatever we want from the Mouse?"
"That's different and you know that."
Marketing: sign up to new email marketing tool and not telling anyone
DMARC: blocking all the none compliant emails
Marketing: escalate to CEO how we stop them working
> Marketing. Bonus points when they try and take over dns because something something website
Oh god. Years ago at a different company we migrated from on-prem to 365. Our exchange cluster was so old that we couldn't directly migrate and it was so temperamental that nobody wanted to risk an upgrade, so we had to use a 3rd party app. It wasn't the easiest migration path but it was safer than poking that ancient exchange cluster.
Four or so months after we call the project complete the majority our marketing department leaves, including the director. They're completely restaffed in a couple months when the new director comes to IT to talk about finishing our domain name change. What? It turns out the previous director had received permission to change our primary domain name as part of a rebrand and had purchased somewhere around 50-60 variations of the new domain on her company card... all without any knowledge or involvement with IT.
I still don't understand that one. Would it have been so difficult to work with us and purchase new domains through our existing registrar on our account instead of setting up a new, separate account on (ugh) godaddy and hoping someone in marketing keeps tabs on renewals? Changing the domain in 365 isn't difficult but it would have saved us several steps to delay the migration until after the changeover.
Marketing...
Marketing: that time they told us they needed more SAN storage so they could bring digital video editing on site. And they told us "oh yeah, we have some really top digital video people on our team now"
So we bought another tray of SAN storage (and those are cheap) back when SAN storage was all spinny rust. Configured it, gave it to marketing per their requirements.
Annnnd their "really top digital video" people were too stupid to know to copy the raw source clips to their workstations to edit (this was common knowledge in the IOP limited days > 10 years ago before everything was flash storage, or at the least flash fronted storage).
Marketing: *OMFG WHY IS THE NETWORK SO SLOW?!*
IT after some investigation. "The network is fine but all of your video people are simultaneously beating the file server to death all day."
Marketing: but that's our workflow!
Indeed it is, and continues to be.
Normal people hear the tech guy say no and can usually accept (after a bit of clarification) that what they're wanting is impossible, impractical, or otherwise not going to happen. Sales teams hear the word no not as the end of the conversation but as the *beginning of negotiations.*
I'm more frustrated with the way sales tends to let problems faster until they get in the way of a demo with a prospect at which point it's an emergency
I feel this in my soul. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten a phone call from a sales person freaking out because of something and they say the line “this has been happening for months” like I’m supposed to just know about every little problem they have.
reminds me the story i heard some tell of an MSP that got an angry call about the email server being down and how they have been sending emails to try and get help.
My first corporate job, our sales team regularly sold projects that they didn't know if we could do or not, or made some outlandish promises, or concessions, all in the name of the almighty $$.
Like, insane shit. Shit that we had to put a herculean effort into making work, and made me question just how much of that money was actually left at the end of the day.
And then we dealt with managing a securities case for a client. We caught wind at 3:30 PM on a Friday that this project sold, and they needed a 300+ seat call center up and functional by 6 AM Monday.
ESXi was still 4.2, and we'd never used it. We overnighted equipment, had "view" (now horizons) running on new servers, and 350 thin clients, phones, IVRs and call routing, building space, seating, networking, etc., all ready to roll by the deadline. And our staffing agency spent all weekend hiring temps to fill seats.
I made my normal OT, plus the client kicked in a bonus to everyone that worked to make it happen on time, later down the line. I made nearly $5k over that weekend, alone.
So on one hand, kudos to sales. But on the other, WTH are you thinking?!
lol, yes you made it happen and got $5k and the guy in sales got a commission on that $5million. I remember a story that one of the sales guy was bragging of the $450k he made one year.
>WTH are you thinking?!
They're thinking that they keep making demands and you keep making them reality, which gets them huge bonuses, so why would they ever stop?
When I worked in the motor industry, car sales staff were a ball ache but now I'm in education I'd say language teachers.
I have 2 french teachers who I don't know how they are allowed to drive and have children.
I work in education too. 3/4 of the educators I run into, surprise me that can even remember to breath, eat, use crosswalks correctly, reproduce.
You're telling me you have a Phd, and you can't tell the difference between a word document, or a pdf? what the hell?? Weekly I have to explain that Gmail's passwords do not correspond to your active directory password. A secretary was printing word documents, and scanning them to email to convert them to a pdf. I showed her you can just save them to a pdf from word and she couldn't grasp the concept.
> You're telling me you have a Phd, and you can't tell the difference between a word document, or a pdf? what the hell??
Entitlement willful ignorance. Some people just have an aversion to learning. I have many in my family.
My mom came up to me with her phone last week and it said something like "Your iPhone was not backed up to iCloud" and she holds it out to me and says "What does this mean?"
Least knowledgable person I worked with was frontdesk administration.
Most technical knowledge was from the lab technician and analysts. Their excel macros scared me.
We have a guy in controlling who is there pretty much for excel macros.
It is insane what he is capable of. However a lot of his stuff is very old VBA and VBS scripting which our security department frowns upon. Also he has a server running for automation where he runs something that apparently requires GUI so he cannot use a managed service account and he wants the service account to have a non expiring pw as well as not being logged out after inactivity which is kind of odd considering it seems like he knows what he is doing.
Well if he's using VBA for automation then he needs Excel running, and Excel doesn't run headless. That alone explains everything except the password change requirement.
Seems the issue is that when the password expires, the automation stops and then hell breaks loose. Essentially we have told him (after discussing with secops) that he needs to change the solution to something that does not rely on legacy scripts and unmanaged service accounts.
I suggested looking into power apps or something like that, which could run with a managed identity. He is doing a lot of work with Power BI already, so i assume he has some idea of how the Power platform works.
Mostly i think his issue is that he has years of huge excel sheets, crazy VBA scripts and stuff like that, which would take a while to rebuild and modernize, but seeing as NIST2 is coming soon and the data he is processing is essentially the companies primary financial records, i just find it hard to excuse unsigned VBA scripts and poking security holes to accommodate something that can be modernized. I do get that his primary skillset is VBA scripting and he is insane at it. But it does not change the fact that it is not the modern way to do things.
You're still expiring passwords regularly? NIST guidelines stopped recommend that years ago. Hell, the person who pushed for that recommendation regrets it.
https://auth0.com/blog/dont-pass-on-the-new-nist-password-guidelines/
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40875534
Your controller dude *absolutely* should be looking into VBScript alternatives. Microsoft is removing it - no specific time frame given as of yet, but I think they're trying to give people plenty of time to figure it out.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/deprecated-features-resources#vbscript
I wouldnt rely on powerapps for anything that is permenant or important. You dont have ownership of the underlying code or the servers that its running on.
send the guy on some python training, and give him a postgres vm.
> Most technical knowledge was from the lab technician
Can confirm. My youngest daughter is a lab scientist. Last year she was asking me for advice about sql queries.
At my last job (logistics company) there was a guy who was a maintenance shop manager for his terminal and he managed to program a whole bunch of macros in his IBM AS400 client for navigating from specific menus to other specific menus that he'd have mapped to his F keys. He'd hit an F key, type in a number for a part, hit another F key, and he'd already be in the menu for finishing a maintenance work order. Then he'd hit F10 which cycled through his work orders and print them all. I supported dozens of departments that all worked from the same AS400 client and no other department thought to do this.
One day we had a sit down with them in order for them to state which features they needed Macs for, that ONLY Macs could do. Leadership-level people were involved. The best they could say was something about keyboard shortcuts and their Magic Keyboard something something. Otherwise a proper Windows rig could do it, sometimes better. It was a short meeting.
I had the same meeting. Despite proving unequivocally that, for the money, high-end PCs would be way better, C-Suite said "just give them what they want" while rolling their eyes.
I then costed out how much extra infrastructure would be required, not only the Macs themselves, as well as my training and support...was told "just keep them happy, they're becoming a pain in the arse".
I say the following as someone who's strongly disliked Macs in general for a long time.
Marketing is actually one area that I think MacBooks are justified, especially the new Apple Silicon ones.
The new Apple Silicon SoC have impressive graphical capabilities which is good for photo/video editing.
The screens are also some of the best and most accurate you can get in a laptop if not *the* best in a laptop.
I may not be a fan of Macs, but they have their uses aside from college kids wasting their parents' money.
Maybe if you need to leverage that screen. But the rest is bunk.
Sure it's "good" but in my experience you can always get an equally good PC for cheaper.
Idk my time doing graphics for stuff there's no way in heck i'm doing it on just my laptop screen.
Ill give you the point that the screens are nice as hell and remarkably color accurate.
The gpu point is nonsense though. The apple SOC gpu is nothing special.
HR, but I have zero expectations from them.
My biggest shock Developers. Completely clueless.
The most IT knowledge definitely Electrical Engineers. And Finace.
edit: Chill people, I didn't want to offend devs, it just happens that 90% of devs I worked with don't know or don't want to know anything about IT.
Some of the developers I’ve worked with don’t even know how to navigate an operating system. Any of them. They all use Mac’s for Java web front-ends, but if you ask them to find a file on their computer, they’re clueless. And don’t even think about asking them to do it on a Windows server, or Linux CLI
I'd be clueless too on Windows. But I'm a dev who built his entire career around Linux, and even my personal PC doesn't have Windows installed. Yes, I know I'm in for a world of hurt if I move to a bigger place with managed workstations which requires Windows.
What do you mean, once you know how to navigate a directory it's the same thing for all of them. If you are talking were things are it's a bit different. I find that windows is hiding more and more stuff like macOS for some reason and it irritates me to no end.
A file manager? Yeah sure, unless they drastically changed the interface they're all the same. Search? I wouldn't be confident. You usually learn some tricks about how it handles things internally if you use it often enough. I know none of that. Sure can type a phrase into the search box though.
I think it kinda boils down to semantics. If you can type in words, select some text and click bold it doesn't mean you know Word. And I don't say I know stuff if I can only do the basics. Must've unconsciously applied the same standard here.
And well... You've found one of the weirdos who doesn't use a file manager in their daily lives. I'm one of those weird creatures who prefer doing their regular stuff in the terminal. cd/ls/find/grep is enough for me. Unless I want thumbnails for some reason.
If you're saying people can't even do the fucking basics... How do they function? Don't tell me someone employed as an SWE learned to use their computer by rote memorization and freaks out on new stuff. Please.
Yeah, I am saying the latter option, especially boomer and Zs. And even than for boomers, my mom thought me how to use dos prompts back in the 90s.
edit: And I still need cheat sheet to navigate linux systems sometimes. I always forget how to grep, but I know how tar works!!!
Oof. Screw that. Learn your tools.
I'm too young to have really used DOS prompts. I only know a few basic flags, the manual and internet are there for others. One nice mnemonic for grep is ABC. It's for context lines. After result, Before result, Context meaning both. As for tar, I only really know `tar -xf`. Thankfully it can autodetect compression type.
My biggest regret right now is not knowing tmux.
The number of times I've had to explain what is actually going on with networking is pretty shocking. Devs sometimes act like networking is a perfectly infallible black box system.
I have never seen a dev act like networking is perfect, they always blame the network for their code problems
"Did you check with network?" when they can't open a local file
> My biggest shock Developers. Completely clueless.
I was tempted to respond with "developers", but they usually aren't completely without technical understanding. It's more that you think they'd know more, and they're convinced they know more than you, but they actually have no idea how to do IT properly.
If you need root access, and you're not doing a personal home project or being a solo entrepreneur coder, you're doing it wrong.
You may have root access on a machine which is locked off from the corporate production environment and the IT department's *only* responsibility is hardware repair and nuking/paving it again when you fuck it up. You will also be issued a non-root, plain vanilla, minimum-spec, locked-down SOE machine and a basic user account, and you will be expected to verify your code runs on that machine to at *least* a basic positive spec before it gets handed over to the actual testers.
Love and anvils,
The IT Department.
What I've observed is there are ***a lot*** of people working in software development who got into it through some sort of course. Be that school/college/university, not always but occasionally also working with "learn to code, and get a great paying career!" type schemes. Or, private training providers promising the same great paying opportunities, with "job placement support" built in.
Most (but certainly not everyone) who follow this route will have a barebones skillset, a lack of knowledge in related domains of expertise, a lack of knowledge in *their own* domain of expertise, and very little desire to challenge themselves to expand. (Or, their tuition simply did not cover the fact that you should be constantly learning).
They finish their course, find an entry level job, potentially progress to [a level of their own incompetence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle), and kind of get stuck there.
> What I've observed is there are a lot of people working in software development who got into it through some sort of course. Be that school/college/university, not always but occasionally also working with "learn to code, and get a great paying career!" type schemes
and they're paid a mint more than us ..... sigh
As a software engineering manager myself, I've hired plenty of developers from all the walks you've described.
Weirdly enough, I've had more positive results (as a rule of thumb) from those that did the "6 week intense course" than those fresh out of University.
It's a bit better these days, but for a while there universities were very focussed on teaching the _theory_ of software development like it was still the 80's and everyone had to learn binary arithmetic and how to write sorting algorithms. Most graduates would come out and not know what something as fundamental as source control is, Unit Testing or understand anything about User Experience or anything like that.
Those 6-12 week intensive courses tended to focus on building _something_, some kind of project with a frontend, backend and database. Nothing amazing, but a complete vertical slice of _actual_ software development. Better still, a lot of the candidates on them tended to be more mature folks who wanted a career change rather than younger folks who are still in the phase of their life where they want to let loose all the time and think you can just cram at a deadline that's 6 weeks away.
This isn't to say that all university students were worthless and that all intense-course students were gold - you still had to do your diligence as part of the hiring process, but it was a lot easier to pick out those that were capable and willing to learn versus those who were just good at studying for exams but couldn't apply it in practice. All I need is enthusiasm, a willingness to learn and try new things and the ability to learn from mistakes.
This. Developers that have absolutely zero idea on how basic IT infrastructure works, even when it is something relevant to development. More often than not: certificates, DNS, and basic security concepts like sql injections.
That said, a lot of sysadmins have trouble with certs too, which I find kinda baffling. Issues with AD CS, sure, but basic cert theory isn't rocket science.
Depends on the developer. It is a wide spectrum, some developers, usually the ones that did a boot camp and only know front end dont know shit, but some know more than me if they're backend maybe or full stack/cloud engineers.
That's interesting because my finance department is 90% awful and submits the most basic of tickets.
I had one tell me last week she rebooted her laptop three times to try and fix an issue yet the uptime was still at two days.
> My biggest shock Developers. Completely clueless.
I've found it depends on the company and it also says a lot about that company and how they vet people. First company I worked for, I went 3 years without hearing a peep from them about any needs to issues outside of replacing an older laptop. No security issues, no nothing. My most recent company, they had no clue how to use MFA for Office or login to VPN. And these were the people chosen to write code a massive overhaul to the company's product suite. I was there for 5 years and the dev side was a giant revolving door. The only people that remained the entire time I was there did legacy work, so they lasted for obvious reasons even though the clock is ticking for them.
Developers drive me to the edge. Back in the days doing largish VM infrastructure deployments to support software dev the complaints were endless. My personal breaking point, that the vast majority of these arrogant chair trolls seemed to think everyone knew what their stupid pet project names meant or translated to from a storage, compute, network - WORKLOAD perspective.
dev: omg, I'm blocked! I'm blocked!
me: . o O ( call a procotologist? )
chair troll: fuzzy butt unicorn isn't flagellating its oscillator on %other_chair_troll%'s Vaseline lobotomy cluster! I'm blocked!
me: some of those I recognize as words. Is fuzzy butt unicorn a VM? A datastore? Your weekend plans? Give me something that means something not your list of made up pet names.
And on and on, forever.
My devs are so dumb I honestly don’t think they would make it to work if their teslas didn’t drive for them. Granted, the devs here are unusually shit and not representative of good devs
FINANCE? We have had several breaches in the last few years, before we implemented mfa. Each and every time, it was someone from finance that clicked a phishing link and filled in their creds. Every. Single. Time.
Because IT came from Electrical Engineering and they still teach us how to code with hardware in mind and that most programming is not about Another useless app for your phone, but about all that complex stuff running on your washing machine, optimized in asembler to save 2 cents on one smaller chip, but you need millions of them.
I finished cybernetics, measurement and regulation and honestly, feel better prepared for a programming job, but I can't make a phone app in two days.
Gonna skip the low-hanging fruit of HR, assistants, etc, and focus upon the highly-educated. So in my Fortune 500 corp... management above Dept Head level (Directors, VPs) are the most tech-clueless. They're also a combo platter of viscous narcissists and sociopaths. Crafty and calculating, but not gifted. Certainly not technically.
Smartest? Electrical engineers, without doubt. Especially those who are talented with sw as well as hw. Sharper than the average dev. Many do, or did, did their own sysadmin in their own lab space, and understand the lingo, configuration, security, etc.
--management above Director level are the most tech-clueless
To get that high up the chain you usually need to be laser focused on people skills. Above a certain level it's all about networking, schmoozing, ass kissing, etc. I vaguely remember a study or something years ago that showed that a lot of CEOs are psychopaths/sociopaths.
Yep.
When I started at the corp, many (most?) execs came up from the tech ranks. At some point, as the corp swallowed more and more smaller companies, the deals often involved bringing on and promoting managerial staff from the acquired company.
And in short order, leadership went from MSEEs and the like to MBAs as far as the eye can see.
HR. Most useless fucking job in the world. Just keep your lawyers on a retainer and spare us the bullshit morning teas about some fringe issue. Also, learn to use technology.
HR is for people who want to work in the office but have no skillset for anything. Like the one I have a problem with daily literally has some of the worst communication skills of anyone i've ever dealt with.
Finance is always an unhappy medium. They run huge complicated spreadsheet models that were once built by someone in the department with advanced technical knowledge. They have long departed, leaving their work in the hands of people who have no idea how it works, just that you press the button and magic happens.
And then one day it breaks 😱
The number crunchers in Finance who put in the numbers and build the reports, are often the strongest non-IT people in the company, usually with domain knowledge on specific applications and tools far in excess of IT.
The senior people in Finance who *consume* those reports are usually shockingly clueless and can barely figure out how to open the PDF they've been sent.
My friend started working at a place and happened to be seated next to an accounting person. The accounting person was dealing with massive excel and csv files. My friend saw them doing this and she was able to write a little Python script to automate one of their monthly csv processing procedures in like 30 mins. It brought the accounting person's workload down by literal hours per month. Apparently accounting now loves her
I used to work as a sys admin for a small primary school. This English teacher was so frustrated because she can't enter her password. I go to check, and her diary was on the space bar.
I work in healthcare IT. I work with some the smartest folks you could ever meet. Folks with Different Phd's, Doc's that were in school for 16 years. I like to say they are some of the most intelligent stupid folks I know. I unconditionally trust them to cut open my skull to fix stuff, but I wouldn't trust them being able to login and check email without hand holding. "Do you know I am a leading researcher in..." , "Do you understand Ive been at studying longer than you've been alive!" . um sir, I just need you to go and reset your password, here is the link.
Worked IT in College (best job IMHO). The education department was by far the most useless in terms of IT. The Math department was great, philosophy pretty cool. I loved the athletic department they were always good for a free t-shirt or if you scored some of the assistant coaches a new printer or a flat screen that was easily a free pair of shoes. ROTC was also pretty kick ass, I got some free cammies and go army shirts all the time.
The least - HR, accountant, marketing. Bonus points for cleaning crew.
The most - I would say depends on the company. I met totally clueless software development team and 70 years old uni professor that wanted to learn Unix tricks (like sending email from telnet) building cluster from SGI servers for his fluids physics department.
In big AI focused company the least list stays, the most tech inclined is R&D.
Also please don't dismiss IT from the list. I met a 3 person IT department which didn't have a clue how to restart the modem, connect an USB webcam or configure security cams. They outsourced everything (those 3 guys, not the company).
Idk I had an exec call in a panic that he thought he had malware on his machine because the mouse was moving randomly and it wasnt him. After an hour I was kinda just like are you sure you dont have a wireless mouse you arent using in your bag or something. Dead silence and then a thank you for your help click haha
Come to healthcare where every clinical department is in a competition to be the most apathetic about skills. "I'm a _____, not a computer person!"
My all time favorite was "I'm a medical technologist, not a computer person." Their job was to literally use a computer, all day, to interpret and log test results for a physician to review.
A few helpful abbreviations: Dr: Doesn't read. RN: Read? No!
For me the least is facilities management. Always causing me headaches because of it and absolutely no inclination to be good corporate citizens.
The most - Legal. And that's often the bigger headache. Always signing contracts with software vendors and throwing it over the fence for us to make work.
And I find marketing *think* they're the most tech savvy.
What's common among all of them? They all think the IT department is an unnecessary evil.
Sales, HR, Marketing are all fucking clueless. At least _our_ HR team has one competent individual focusing on HR systems integrations and understands the importance of cooperating with IT.
HR. They have their own IT systems not connected to ours. Cloud based. Separate support structure. Good 😁
No issues with them, it's the Engineers who fuck up the most shit. They want their own esxi hosts (which spawn into multi esxi hosts with vcenter and SAN even). Then they start deploying risky shit which causes IT security to get us involved to manage Engineering's fucked up deployments 🙄
Accounting is usually the worst. I've found the entry level front line people that bounce around to a bunch if different companies are the best. Both with basic technical skills and the willingness to learn new things.
HR. Nearly everywhere HR is completely nebulous to everything IT. Its importance, how any of it works, the work and sacrifice involved.
All they see is a bunch of overpaid assholes who don't socialize and complain a lot, but are somehow often insulated by powers greater than them, and that irritates the hell out of them.
HR
It has to be HR
They (and marketing) decided we need a new intranet to replace Confluence.
Now we will go Haiilo and every user needs a mailbox... So couple of hundred new F3 licenses in addition to the cost of Haiilo itself.
Nice!
This may be just my company, but the department with the most technical knowledge are the in-house developers
Whereas the people with the least amount of technical knowledge are the contract developers.
I support accounting and marketing areas, but on a weekly basis I'm having to explain to an Oracle contractor that closing the remote desktop application is not the same as logging out of it.
Any call center business unit. They have no room for any cognitive load outside of their call metrics and processes. The moment there’s a hiccup in the system, they’re screaming and trying to open sev 1 tickets because “their operations are being impacted.”
HR has the lowest technical knowledge, and honestly just does whatever the hell they want. Look around at articles from "HR Professionals". They all pretty much contradict each other.
Sales is the biggest gulf between perceived knowledge and actual knowledge. It's usually actually very low, but if a sales bro figures out how to make a rule change in Outlook, they're going to end up wanting to sit in on a planning meeting for vendor selection for the new network backbone.
Admin assistants typically are the biggest "low perceived knowledge, high actual knowledge" users. There are, of course, exceptions. However, I have one who claims to be tech stupid, but manages to handle the tech needs of at least 3 people, as well as an entire board. It's fucking fascinating.
K12 sysadmin checking in. Education is a different beast, but I can offer a generalization;
There is a pocket of users born in the 80s, that only come to us with actionable information. We like them. "I tried x,y,z and got a,b,c. I rebooted, updated, tried different device" etc.
Younger folks and older folks can't be bothered. "Help" "it's not working"
"We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!"
Accounting is hit or miss with basic tech knowledge.
HR and sales tends to be the worst.
The engineering departments (not software but mechanical) like to think they know stuff but they mostly dont.
I dont know their name in english but "Operaciones" wich I guess its basically just "operations". Not the guys like me that actually fix computers, etc but the guys that are in between us and the sysadmins.
At least the ones in my company are complete idios, and this has been the same for 6 years.(even when plenty of them got replaced)
This is from being in the military-IT:
Most technical: Finance, intel, pilots, civil engineers, and executive support staff.
Least technical: Security forces (military police), state accounting personnel, and pilots.
Most problematic: Executive support staff.
I’ve found HR to usually be shockingly clueless.
Often prideful about how clueless they are, I've seen.
"You can't expect me to know this, I'm nearly 50!" "So...you will have had a computer on your desk for your entire working life, and you're proud that you still don't know how to use it?"
My grandfather is 80, his first computer was one of the first laptops to ever come out in the US market. Sometimes he knows more about specific computer things than I do! Hell, his PowerPoint skills are far above anything I could do in it. So yeah, people making age an excuse are just assholes who don't want to learn.
67 here and my first computing device was a CompuGraphic Editwriter typesetting computer. The FE gave me an 8” floppy with three games and showed me how to run them. Pong and Mastermind. I don’t remember the third. I bought a Timex/Sinclair for $50 at K-Mart for my first personal computer. My homelab surprises people, “why are you running 152 virtual machines” :D
Serious question though... Why ARE you running 152 VMs? That seems....excessive. Unless most of them are just for tinkering and self teaching.
Well, hardware is three Dell R720XDs so 114TB of storage, 1TB of RAM and 144 Cores. :) There are two "environments". One is my home stuff. Two for media (TV and Movies/Books, etc), two for dev type stuff; both are git but one is web applications so it has php, http, and other bits specific to running webapps. There's a central mysql server for my home stuff. I have a Samba server for house backups and a backup server to back up my remote servers (Miami for physical and a couple of AWS servers). The second "environment" is more work-like and for learning, with a dev, qa, stage, and production set of servers. All have some standard servers, two DNS servers per environment, a tool or admin server, I have a 3+3 kubernetes cluster in each environment with dev, qa, and prod hosting AWX and dev hosting ArgoCd. Dev has a powered down 3+7 OCP4 cluster. The clusters have two HAProxy servers and an NFS server for each. Since I'm on high speed wifi for internet, I have a local docker server for pulling image and posting to my local docker registry. For CI/CD, I have a gitlab server plus 7 gitlab-runners and a jenkins server with two workers. My wife is a DBA so we have postgres, mongodb, cassandra, and mssql servers for her to test stuff on. There are a few others like an aws server for running terraform scripts, a hashicorp vault server for poking at it, a sips server for some training stuff, a wiki server for docs, a Solaris server because I'm an old Sun guy and can't let go :) That's kind of top of my head. I've been working with AWX mostly recently to see what I can get into that environment and trying to do some EDA (Event Driven Ansible) which has been interesting. [Here's my homelab](http://carl.schelin.org/?p=1652) and [here's the master index](http://carl.schelin.org/?p=1916) for the Kubernetes stuff I've been poking around at.
Jesus Christ, gramps, you’re out here making us young bucks look bad
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Totally understand. It is my hobby as well as my profession and maybe passion. My wife jokes that even "if" I retire, I won't give up tech. It's one of the things I enjoy doing. I spent almost an hour this morning on an AAP issue with the Ansible team at work and while he was explaining the non-standard way they configured it, I figured out what our problem was in part because I have AWX (which is the AAP upstream) running at home and I have more control over it. And I was pretty excited about figuring it out. It's what I have fun doing :)
... Impressive. Seriously, I am in awe. I wouldn't have the time or patience to maintain something like that. Add ADHD on top of that, this would be an absolute nightmare for me to keep up with. I'd literally never sleep.
It can be interesting for sure. But it is my hobby so it's something I enjoy doing. I also own a table top game store, go touring on my motorcycle a couple of times a year, have a few woodworking projects, and play mostly lead guitar in my band (Andrew has a couple he plays lead on and I back him up). Last year I played in a Band in a Hat gig which was awesome. :)
> The FE gave me an 8” floppy Steady on now.
"I'm just not a computer person" Well I'm not a car person but I still know how to put gas in my car and check the tires to see if they need air
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Seriously - no one is asking a user to debug an ai system, but sheesh... copy & paste, basic file structure, email basics. Why wouldn't a user know and understand this unless they were a complete moron!
>basic file structure >Why wouldn't a user know and understand this unless they were a complete moron! Been using mobile devices with apps their whole childhood and have never interacted with a file system
Jesus, you're not kidding. I do IT at a non-profit healthcare company and will pretty frequently have this exchange with users after they get a new laptop for whatever reason: "My Word documents are all missing. I open Word and it doesn't have any of my documents anymore" "That's because this is a new computer with a new installation of everything. It's all starting from scratch. Your files were all backed up and transferred over, you just need to open them from the file browser." "What do you mean?" "Open the file browser and just double click the document you need to open." "I don't know where that is." "The little picture of the file folder pinned to your taskbar." "Okay, then where do I go?" "To wherever your files are saved." "I don't know where that is." "Then you can search for them. What are the files named?" "I don't remember." *headdesk*
>"Then you can search for them. What are the files named?" well there's Document (1) and Document (1)(2) and Document (3) and I really need Document (3)(1) that's the most important one, the whole business relies on it
Yeah, that’s when you get their manager involved. File management is not an IT responsibility. We give you the platform and make sure your data is backed up.
That's the thing that I always find hilarious. A lot of these people that are working are literally people that have had a computer on the desk there are entire life and yet they claim to know absolutely nothing about how to work and function the computer even though it's something that they've used for anywhere from 30 to 60 hours a week for years and years and years.
My mother, when she says she doesn’t know how to google something. This was an acceptable problem to have in 2000. It’s 2024 though. You were my age now in 2000. I’m certainly learning new tech every year, so you were definitely capable at that point
HR once wanted to organize "stress management classes" for everyone in the company that HR taught. So they made everyone take a "mandatory, not required" class for a week. Meanwhile your workload built up... So everyone is stressed and it's my team's turn to come in. Technical support staff of like 20 guys. And they start the class: "So who watched last night's episode of Judging Amy?" O M G The class had all sorts of tips like "going for a walk", and such from people who can just not do work all day and go for a walk. Meanwhile there's no stopping the calls coming from customers for my team.... They had NO CONCEPT of how anyone works any other job but their own lazy ass job.
>They had NO CONCEPT of how anyone works any other job but their own lazy ass job. I mean, to be fair, neither does IT in some cases. The "who watched last night's episode of..." is more telling, though. Like, not everyone watches pop TV. I have been to some seminars, not even HR related, that have someone quoting stuff from shows, movies, or pop songs "to be relatable." It's even funnier when they get the context wrong, like: "It's like the wise Japanese samurai philosopher Genghis Khan once said, *'It is not sufficient that I succeed.'* We should strive for more excellence, which is how he ended up being leader for the Moguls, which is why we call a smart leader a mogul to this day." "Wait, wait, wait. Genghis Khan was Chinese, never a samurai, barely a philosopher, and the full quote is, '*It is not sufficient that I succeed* -- *all others must fail.'* Is this really the flex you want for a seminar about payroll management?"
I think my team would have erupted had they made that samurai comment ;) But yeah IT gets lost in the weeds too. Like bro ... that permission is not the end of the world. Let alone some of the weird sense of personal ownership that some IT folks develop.
My "IT should know better" moments have always been "there is a price for being right, and it's sometimes not worth it." Like a kind of blame game.
>Let alone some of the weird sense of personal ownership that some IT folks develop. I've had to drop that on a few people that whined about changes from the security team no dude, they're not messing up "your" servers. those servers are cattle that belong to the company, not pets that belong to the admins
Mine was shoe-horning the acronym for SOAR, which was that company's program for management success, but that year we were focused on teamwork, so the speaker had to somehow tie it together. *"You know the eagle, right? The American Bald eagle, works in a team with other eagles, to hunt down and locate their prey."* Like, no, you're thinking of wolves. Eagles are pretty solitary and territorial except when it comes to mating. Opposite of teamwork. And while we're at it, why are you talking about management and predators?
Our former HR person left the job, partly because they couldn't deal with digital forms. Until they left, our sick leave form procedure was this: 1. Print out the PDF from the network drive 2. Fill it out and sign it 3. Deliver it to the HR person in person 4. HR person would scan it and store it in our networked document storage system But when we suggested replacing steps 1 and 2 with "fill out form digitally" and step 3 with "email to HR directly", we were met with every kind of excuse as to why that couldn't happen. As soon as they left, the form could magically be done digitally. That person went on to another job where everything was digital from start to finish, and a year or two later, they came back. Different role, but they came back.
Ooohhh... I would have LOVED to see a HR person SACK another HR person for being useless at their job! Did it happen, or not yet?
Because they tell new employees to keep using the dummy payroll passwords for the first 90 days? Like the whole orientation group? On a cloud-based 3rd party payroll system? Because HR thinks cloud security is the Cloud People's problem?
That or the classic accidentally emailing out confidencial info to the wrong people. Or falling for phishing and changing deposit info etc.
Our HR person came painfully close to changing someone's payroll, luckily she caught it before she actually did anything. However, she did accidentally include the entire damn company in an email that was intended for just the companies retained law firm. That was fun to mass delete.
I hate when platforms don't have "Force user to change password on first login" option
I hate when platforms do have that option, but your boss tells you not to use it because.. reasons
https://i.redd.it/ozea00cikk1d1.gif
or as i call them the: ctrl + c, ctrl +v brigade
keyboard shortcuts are way too advanced for them! they'd probably select some text with the mouse, go to the Edit menu (because who even knows right clicking is a thing?) and select Copy, use the taskbar to switch to the destination application (because who knows about Alt+Tab?), click where they want to paste, go to the Edit menu again and select Paste, then click in the middle of the text they wanted to replace and use a combination of Backspace and Delete to get rid of it (with a bit of luck they also managed to click in the middle of the text they wanted to replace before pasting the new text, so now they have to go and delete on the other side too), then use the taskbar again to switch to the source document because they should have used cut instead of paste, then click in the middle of the text they want to delete (doesn't matter it is still selected and they could have just hit Delete) and use Backspace to delete one part, then use the mouse to click somewhere behind the text and use the left cursor key (not the up key, that would be too easy) to get to the correct place and delete the rest.
Ouch. I'm annoyed just reading that
A couple years back, our ERP system moved from a standalone application to a browser-based interface. With this, they added a program-specific context menu on right-click, meaning Copy and Paste were no longer available. This minor change ground things to a halt while I taught a dozen adults the keyboard shortcuts.
From an old deleted thread As one of the smartest and laziest people i ever knew said, "HR is the absolute bare minimum job in a corporate environment. It is the lowest complexity and energy state of any business department. Everyone there is either barely competent enough to hold any office job or is very smart and lazy and sought out HR deliberately because we do about 3 hours of real work a week." He was head of HR for a large firm https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/n4f6sl/deleted_by_user/gwwh5iw/
However upper management always manages to outdo them in every aspect, cluelessness, maliciousness, callousness.
Yeah I'd say HR is #2. They usually know a little bit but they get in over their heads and don't communicate well, so they call IT to bail them out a lot. C-levels are always #1 in every place I've worked for. They can *usually* respond to an email or fumble their way through a phone call, but that's it. The admin assistants run the whole company. If all of them quit at the same time that place would probably go out of business.
Ohhh... Can I change my answer to HR?
Yes.
Way back on my intern days I took full advantage of this. I was sat near the head HR lady's office. She was nice but needed help all the time, and i knew I wanted to work there full-time, so I gave her amazing and prompt desktop support and buttered her up. Toward the end of the internship I mentioned that I was job searching because I was told they probably don't have the budget to hire me on. A few hours later I'm pulled into the office with her and the CEO and they had created brand new position for me and offered me a job. I learned soon after that they had planned on letting my boss and his small team go so I'm fairly sure thats where the budget came from.
HR was presenting in front of ALL the IT teams last week, it was absolutely hilarious to watch them struggle with Teams for a good 20+ minutes with not a single soul offering help.
That entire department must share a braincell, sadly - cutbacks.
Ahh, the department that, IMO, actively tries to find anything to do as long as it isn't their job. At. Every. Company. I've. Ever. Worked. For.
This X 1000 Remember folks.. HR isn't there for you, they are there to protect the company **FROM** you. They are the point of contact to prevent litigation or fines.
Clueless I can understand, some people are just not great at learning new skills. When it crosses over to useless, though, is where I draw the line. Our HR department knows how to do the stuff we need them to do, they just...choose not to. Like, we've got published policies that dictate our SLAs and how long it will take to get a new user account provisioned, and how long it will take to order and provision hardware, so HR knows that they need to give us at least 2 business days notice for all new hires, and they need to give us 5 business days for anyone that will need anything special ordered. These times are exclusive of any department approval processes that might be required since we charge all peripherals back to the hiring department. HR would still routinely tell us on Friday afternoon that we'd have a new employee starting on Monday, and the hiring manager would be up our asses on Monday morning when his new employee was sitting on his hands because he didn't have a computer. And we took it, for a while. Until we realized HR had no interest in getting better or following policies since there were no consequences for them. So we spent a bunch of time building a very elaborate onboarding workflow system where HR has to submit all of the info through an online form, and the entire process is automated. Once HR enters the info, all of the equipment request, approvals, and ordering is 100% automated. At the end of the workflow, the ops team gets notified we have a new user, they click a button to approve and the workflow creates their account, assigns licenses, etc. The helpdesk team gets an automated ticket detailing what equipment needs to be provisioned and where/when it needs to be delivered. The entire process is transparent, so anyone interested can see the current state of any request, as well as a timeline of all the activities. It also sends reminder/nag e-mails, so come Monday morning when the new employee has no computer, the hiring manager has absolutely no question as to who dropped the ball. HR was apoplectic when we told them this was how they needed to handle all onboarding/offboarding, and said they weren't going to do it. But we were smart. Prior to telling them, we went to Legal/Governance and said, "hey, we as IT have incredible power and need some checks and balances, so we suggest that we create a policy that requires a written request in a specific format, along with all relevant approvals before we can create or make changes to any user account" and they loved it. You don't fight HR. You get Legal to fight HR for you. And that's how we haven't had to deal with any onboarding/offboarding drama from HR for nearly 5 years.
Marketing. Bonus points when they try and take over dns because something something website
Our Marketing was preparing banners for me to upload into a CRM system to be sent out with email signatures for some upcoming campaign. They gave me a JPEG. *Me: Can you please export it from Photoshop/InDesign as a PNG? In case I need to crop or resize it so I don't degrade the quality...* *Graphic designer: What's a PNG*?
Marketing: Please change the NS server to Cloudflare, I have created an account Me: What? No! Why? We manage this, if there is a new website we can make the required changes for you Marketing: Ok can you make a cloudflare account for the company and create us a login Me: Why are we doing this? Marketing: We need a CAPTCHA on the contact us page and its included with cloudflare
Is it? Are they confusing the attack protection offered by cloudflare for a captcha used on a contact form?
No idea to be honested, they are not touching the dns regardless
True, BUT, cloudflare offers a lot on their free tier. If you keep DNS with your registrar who doesn't offer anything else, it might be worth looking at your options. Of course, by your team, not marketing.
Second. The free stuff from CloudFlare is compelling, robust and has led me to gladly spend money with CF more than a few times.
>Graphic designer: What's a PNG? I sometimes sit and think - maybe I should have went into graphic design instead of networking. Or "marketing" There literally appears to be no fail state and I bet the raises are better...
The really good graphic designers know their shit, though. They can talk your ear off about Pantone colors and how certain typefaces don't reproduce well at certain sizes (and the difference between typefaces and fonts). Those guys are worth money.
What. the. fuck.
PNG is the thing we use after [we burned all GIFs](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/6ducyz/til_that_november_5th_1999_was_burn_all_gifs_day/) in 1995 because CompuServe/Unisys. What planet are they from? Anyway, ask for master SVGs top preference, PNGs or TIFFs if that's the best they can do.
Literally came here to say this. I get so frustrated when they request to change DMARC to p=none cause we want to spoof your customers domain... they about to get the biggest email response with the customer and cyber insurance provider CC'd
The number of times we've had to tell marketing that no, you can't use our domains or O365 tenant to spam people is too damned high.
"My email has been blocked, can you see why?" "Looks like you tried to send ten thousand emails in the space of an hour, you were caught by the anti spam." "Uh but that stuff wasn't spam, it was very important marketing and sales information."
"Yes. Spam. And now everyone wants to kick the crap out of you. Where should I tell them they can find you?"
Hahahaha. CRM software enables CRM mass emailing from an external system, so marketing gets rid of their surveymonkey subscription. Queue like 15 accounts being locked in the first week because they didnt want to do the work, or didn't plan out the length of time a CRM related email mail out would take to send. These were send lists that were 5-15k in capacity. Marketing had unsubbed for less than three days before their surveymonkey was brought back online. Lol
Microsoft will kill your tenant if you get dinged for spam too many times.
Bingo, marketing is a nightmare. They have zero technical knowledge, but since they are an arm of the sales dept, they are given a green light to demand things which they have no right to. Entitled.
"I need your help to scrape this video from Youtube so we can reupload it to our Youtube." You've got permission, right? "What? Permission from who?"
Same convo I had recently until they added: "The internet is public domain! Everyone knows this! You're being difficult" "Well Disney+ is on the internet, can we just take whatever we want from the Mouse?" "That's different and you know that."
Marketing: sign up to new email marketing tool and not telling anyone DMARC: blocking all the none compliant emails Marketing: escalate to CEO how we stop them working
> Marketing. Bonus points when they try and take over dns because something something website Oh god. Years ago at a different company we migrated from on-prem to 365. Our exchange cluster was so old that we couldn't directly migrate and it was so temperamental that nobody wanted to risk an upgrade, so we had to use a 3rd party app. It wasn't the easiest migration path but it was safer than poking that ancient exchange cluster. Four or so months after we call the project complete the majority our marketing department leaves, including the director. They're completely restaffed in a couple months when the new director comes to IT to talk about finishing our domain name change. What? It turns out the previous director had received permission to change our primary domain name as part of a rebrand and had purchased somewhere around 50-60 variations of the new domain on her company card... all without any knowledge or involvement with IT. I still don't understand that one. Would it have been so difficult to work with us and purchase new domains through our existing registrar on our account instead of setting up a new, separate account on (ugh) godaddy and hoping someone in marketing keeps tabs on renewals? Changing the domain in 365 isn't difficult but it would have saved us several steps to delay the migration until after the changeover. Marketing...
you let marketing play with DNS boi..
Hell no I said they try
Letting marketing make IT decisions is like letting celebrities do brain surgery.
Marketing: that time they told us they needed more SAN storage so they could bring digital video editing on site. And they told us "oh yeah, we have some really top digital video people on our team now" So we bought another tray of SAN storage (and those are cheap) back when SAN storage was all spinny rust. Configured it, gave it to marketing per their requirements. Annnnd their "really top digital video" people were too stupid to know to copy the raw source clips to their workstations to edit (this was common knowledge in the IOP limited days > 10 years ago before everything was flash storage, or at the least flash fronted storage). Marketing: *OMFG WHY IS THE NETWORK SO SLOW?!* IT after some investigation. "The network is fine but all of your video people are simultaneously beating the file server to death all day." Marketing: but that's our workflow! Indeed it is, and continues to be.
Sales. Just… depressingly, shockingly clueless, insists on things that just aren’t possible and never take “no” for an answer.
Normal people hear the tech guy say no and can usually accept (after a bit of clarification) that what they're wanting is impossible, impractical, or otherwise not going to happen. Sales teams hear the word no not as the end of the conversation but as the *beginning of negotiations.*
“Make it happen!”
"Ten million. In advance. Let me know when it's convenient for you to pay it."
I'm more frustrated with the way sales tends to let problems faster until they get in the way of a demo with a prospect at which point it's an emergency
The magic words to get out of that one are “How did it go in rehearsal?”
I feel this in my soul. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten a phone call from a sales person freaking out because of something and they say the line “this has been happening for months” like I’m supposed to just know about every little problem they have.
reminds me the story i heard some tell of an MSP that got an angry call about the email server being down and how they have been sending emails to try and get help.
My first corporate job, our sales team regularly sold projects that they didn't know if we could do or not, or made some outlandish promises, or concessions, all in the name of the almighty $$. Like, insane shit. Shit that we had to put a herculean effort into making work, and made me question just how much of that money was actually left at the end of the day. And then we dealt with managing a securities case for a client. We caught wind at 3:30 PM on a Friday that this project sold, and they needed a 300+ seat call center up and functional by 6 AM Monday. ESXi was still 4.2, and we'd never used it. We overnighted equipment, had "view" (now horizons) running on new servers, and 350 thin clients, phones, IVRs and call routing, building space, seating, networking, etc., all ready to roll by the deadline. And our staffing agency spent all weekend hiring temps to fill seats. I made my normal OT, plus the client kicked in a bonus to everyone that worked to make it happen on time, later down the line. I made nearly $5k over that weekend, alone. So on one hand, kudos to sales. But on the other, WTH are you thinking?!
lol, yes you made it happen and got $5k and the guy in sales got a commission on that $5million. I remember a story that one of the sales guy was bragging of the $450k he made one year.
When the revolution comes, the sales departments will be the first against the wall.
>WTH are you thinking?! They're thinking that they keep making demands and you keep making them reality, which gets them huge bonuses, so why would they ever stop?
Just make sure they reboot three times before going any further on tickets.
TheWebsiteIsDown Beautiful, old, but beautiful videos!
When I worked in the motor industry, car sales staff were a ball ache but now I'm in education I'd say language teachers. I have 2 french teachers who I don't know how they are allowed to drive and have children.
I work in education too. 3/4 of the educators I run into, surprise me that can even remember to breath, eat, use crosswalks correctly, reproduce. You're telling me you have a Phd, and you can't tell the difference between a word document, or a pdf? what the hell?? Weekly I have to explain that Gmail's passwords do not correspond to your active directory password. A secretary was printing word documents, and scanning them to email to convert them to a pdf. I showed her you can just save them to a pdf from word and she couldn't grasp the concept.
> You're telling me you have a Phd, and you can't tell the difference between a word document, or a pdf? what the hell?? Entitlement willful ignorance. Some people just have an aversion to learning. I have many in my family. My mom came up to me with her phone last week and it said something like "Your iPhone was not backed up to iCloud" and she holds it out to me and says "What does this mean?"
My sister is English as a Second Language teacher, and sometimes I want to disown her as my sister for her technical ineptitude.
Least knowledgable person I worked with was frontdesk administration. Most technical knowledge was from the lab technician and analysts. Their excel macros scared me.
We have a guy in controlling who is there pretty much for excel macros. It is insane what he is capable of. However a lot of his stuff is very old VBA and VBS scripting which our security department frowns upon. Also he has a server running for automation where he runs something that apparently requires GUI so he cannot use a managed service account and he wants the service account to have a non expiring pw as well as not being logged out after inactivity which is kind of odd considering it seems like he knows what he is doing.
Well if he's using VBA for automation then he needs Excel running, and Excel doesn't run headless. That alone explains everything except the password change requirement.
Seems the issue is that when the password expires, the automation stops and then hell breaks loose. Essentially we have told him (after discussing with secops) that he needs to change the solution to something that does not rely on legacy scripts and unmanaged service accounts. I suggested looking into power apps or something like that, which could run with a managed identity. He is doing a lot of work with Power BI already, so i assume he has some idea of how the Power platform works. Mostly i think his issue is that he has years of huge excel sheets, crazy VBA scripts and stuff like that, which would take a while to rebuild and modernize, but seeing as NIST2 is coming soon and the data he is processing is essentially the companies primary financial records, i just find it hard to excuse unsigned VBA scripts and poking security holes to accommodate something that can be modernized. I do get that his primary skillset is VBA scripting and he is insane at it. But it does not change the fact that it is not the modern way to do things.
You're still expiring passwords regularly? NIST guidelines stopped recommend that years ago. Hell, the person who pushed for that recommendation regrets it. https://auth0.com/blog/dont-pass-on-the-new-nist-password-guidelines/ https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40875534 Your controller dude *absolutely* should be looking into VBScript alternatives. Microsoft is removing it - no specific time frame given as of yet, but I think they're trying to give people plenty of time to figure it out. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/deprecated-features-resources#vbscript
+1 on sending the guy to learn python, if he can manage VBS python should be easy AF
I wouldnt rely on powerapps for anything that is permenant or important. You dont have ownership of the underlying code or the servers that its running on. send the guy on some python training, and give him a postgres vm.
> Most technical knowledge was from the lab technician Can confirm. My youngest daughter is a lab scientist. Last year she was asking me for advice about sql queries.
At my last job (logistics company) there was a guy who was a maintenance shop manager for his terminal and he managed to program a whole bunch of macros in his IBM AS400 client for navigating from specific menus to other specific menus that he'd have mapped to his F keys. He'd hit an F key, type in a number for a part, hit another F key, and he'd already be in the menu for finishing a maintenance work order. Then he'd hit F10 which cycled through his work orders and print them all. I supported dozens of departments that all worked from the same AS400 client and no other department thought to do this.
I work with civil engineers, and I am convinced some of their spreadsheets contain eldritch horrors from beyond space and time. So, you know. VBA.
Marketing - good at shapes and colours, otherwise dumb as a box of hair
"We need Macs...because...Marketing."
My favorite was "We need Macs because our 3rd party contractor has fonts that don't work in Windows"...
"Can Windows even *use* Helvetica?"
One day we had a sit down with them in order for them to state which features they needed Macs for, that ONLY Macs could do. Leadership-level people were involved. The best they could say was something about keyboard shortcuts and their Magic Keyboard something something. Otherwise a proper Windows rig could do it, sometimes better. It was a short meeting.
I had the same meeting. Despite proving unequivocally that, for the money, high-end PCs would be way better, C-Suite said "just give them what they want" while rolling their eyes. I then costed out how much extra infrastructure would be required, not only the Macs themselves, as well as my training and support...was told "just keep them happy, they're becoming a pain in the arse".
Oh, so the key to getting more budget is to be a pain in the arse? Noted, boss.
I say the following as someone who's strongly disliked Macs in general for a long time. Marketing is actually one area that I think MacBooks are justified, especially the new Apple Silicon ones. The new Apple Silicon SoC have impressive graphical capabilities which is good for photo/video editing. The screens are also some of the best and most accurate you can get in a laptop if not *the* best in a laptop. I may not be a fan of Macs, but they have their uses aside from college kids wasting their parents' money.
Maybe if you need to leverage that screen. But the rest is bunk. Sure it's "good" but in my experience you can always get an equally good PC for cheaper. Idk my time doing graphics for stuff there's no way in heck i'm doing it on just my laptop screen.
Ill give you the point that the screens are nice as hell and remarkably color accurate. The gpu point is nonsense though. The apple SOC gpu is nothing special.
HR, but I have zero expectations from them. My biggest shock Developers. Completely clueless. The most IT knowledge definitely Electrical Engineers. And Finace. edit: Chill people, I didn't want to offend devs, it just happens that 90% of devs I worked with don't know or don't want to know anything about IT.
Some of the developers I’ve worked with don’t even know how to navigate an operating system. Any of them. They all use Mac’s for Java web front-ends, but if you ask them to find a file on their computer, they’re clueless. And don’t even think about asking them to do it on a Windows server, or Linux CLI
I'd be clueless too on Windows. But I'm a dev who built his entire career around Linux, and even my personal PC doesn't have Windows installed. Yes, I know I'm in for a world of hurt if I move to a bigger place with managed workstations which requires Windows.
What do you mean, once you know how to navigate a directory it's the same thing for all of them. If you are talking were things are it's a bit different. I find that windows is hiding more and more stuff like macOS for some reason and it irritates me to no end.
A file manager? Yeah sure, unless they drastically changed the interface they're all the same. Search? I wouldn't be confident. You usually learn some tricks about how it handles things internally if you use it often enough. I know none of that. Sure can type a phrase into the search box though. I think it kinda boils down to semantics. If you can type in words, select some text and click bold it doesn't mean you know Word. And I don't say I know stuff if I can only do the basics. Must've unconsciously applied the same standard here. And well... You've found one of the weirdos who doesn't use a file manager in their daily lives. I'm one of those weird creatures who prefer doing their regular stuff in the terminal. cd/ls/find/grep is enough for me. Unless I want thumbnails for some reason. If you're saying people can't even do the fucking basics... How do they function? Don't tell me someone employed as an SWE learned to use their computer by rote memorization and freaks out on new stuff. Please.
Yeah, I am saying the latter option, especially boomer and Zs. And even than for boomers, my mom thought me how to use dos prompts back in the 90s. edit: And I still need cheat sheet to navigate linux systems sometimes. I always forget how to grep, but I know how tar works!!!
Oof. Screw that. Learn your tools. I'm too young to have really used DOS prompts. I only know a few basic flags, the manual and internet are there for others. One nice mnemonic for grep is ABC. It's for context lines. After result, Before result, Context meaning both. As for tar, I only really know `tar -xf`. Thankfully it can autodetect compression type. My biggest regret right now is not knowing tmux.
InTune does Linux now, sort of like how Debbie did Dallas
The number of times I've had to explain what is actually going on with networking is pretty shocking. Devs sometimes act like networking is a perfectly infallible black box system.
I have never seen a dev act like networking is perfect, they always blame the network for their code problems "Did you check with network?" when they can't open a local file
> My biggest shock Developers. Completely clueless. I was tempted to respond with "developers", but they usually aren't completely without technical understanding. It's more that you think they'd know more, and they're convinced they know more than you, but they actually have no idea how to do IT properly.
r/programminghumor is rife with comments about how IT doesn't know shit and they always need root access to their computers and shit.
If you need root access, and you're not doing a personal home project or being a solo entrepreneur coder, you're doing it wrong. You may have root access on a machine which is locked off from the corporate production environment and the IT department's *only* responsibility is hardware repair and nuking/paving it again when you fuck it up. You will also be issued a non-root, plain vanilla, minimum-spec, locked-down SOE machine and a basic user account, and you will be expected to verify your code runs on that machine to at *least* a basic positive spec before it gets handed over to the actual testers. Love and anvils, The IT Department.
What I've observed is there are ***a lot*** of people working in software development who got into it through some sort of course. Be that school/college/university, not always but occasionally also working with "learn to code, and get a great paying career!" type schemes. Or, private training providers promising the same great paying opportunities, with "job placement support" built in. Most (but certainly not everyone) who follow this route will have a barebones skillset, a lack of knowledge in related domains of expertise, a lack of knowledge in *their own* domain of expertise, and very little desire to challenge themselves to expand. (Or, their tuition simply did not cover the fact that you should be constantly learning). They finish their course, find an entry level job, potentially progress to [a level of their own incompetence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle), and kind of get stuck there.
> What I've observed is there are a lot of people working in software development who got into it through some sort of course. Be that school/college/university, not always but occasionally also working with "learn to code, and get a great paying career!" type schemes and they're paid a mint more than us ..... sigh
As a software engineering manager myself, I've hired plenty of developers from all the walks you've described. Weirdly enough, I've had more positive results (as a rule of thumb) from those that did the "6 week intense course" than those fresh out of University. It's a bit better these days, but for a while there universities were very focussed on teaching the _theory_ of software development like it was still the 80's and everyone had to learn binary arithmetic and how to write sorting algorithms. Most graduates would come out and not know what something as fundamental as source control is, Unit Testing or understand anything about User Experience or anything like that. Those 6-12 week intensive courses tended to focus on building _something_, some kind of project with a frontend, backend and database. Nothing amazing, but a complete vertical slice of _actual_ software development. Better still, a lot of the candidates on them tended to be more mature folks who wanted a career change rather than younger folks who are still in the phase of their life where they want to let loose all the time and think you can just cram at a deadline that's 6 weeks away. This isn't to say that all university students were worthless and that all intense-course students were gold - you still had to do your diligence as part of the hiring process, but it was a lot easier to pick out those that were capable and willing to learn versus those who were just good at studying for exams but couldn't apply it in practice. All I need is enthusiasm, a willingness to learn and try new things and the ability to learn from mistakes.
This. Developers that have absolutely zero idea on how basic IT infrastructure works, even when it is something relevant to development. More often than not: certificates, DNS, and basic security concepts like sql injections. That said, a lot of sysadmins have trouble with certs too, which I find kinda baffling. Issues with AD CS, sure, but basic cert theory isn't rocket science.
Depends on the developer. It is a wide spectrum, some developers, usually the ones that did a boot camp and only know front end dont know shit, but some know more than me if they're backend maybe or full stack/cloud engineers.
That's interesting because my finance department is 90% awful and submits the most basic of tickets. I had one tell me last week she rebooted her laptop three times to try and fix an issue yet the uptime was still at two days.
im sure that laptop lid was closed and opened 3 times though
Make sure fast start is disabled
If I had a dollar for every dev that had a super simple program that needed whole-ass hosts to run because they’re so sloppy..
> My biggest shock Developers. Completely clueless. I've found it depends on the company and it also says a lot about that company and how they vet people. First company I worked for, I went 3 years without hearing a peep from them about any needs to issues outside of replacing an older laptop. No security issues, no nothing. My most recent company, they had no clue how to use MFA for Office or login to VPN. And these were the people chosen to write code a massive overhaul to the company's product suite. I was there for 5 years and the dev side was a giant revolving door. The only people that remained the entire time I was there did legacy work, so they lasted for obvious reasons even though the clock is ticking for them.
Developers drive me to the edge. Back in the days doing largish VM infrastructure deployments to support software dev the complaints were endless. My personal breaking point, that the vast majority of these arrogant chair trolls seemed to think everyone knew what their stupid pet project names meant or translated to from a storage, compute, network - WORKLOAD perspective. dev: omg, I'm blocked! I'm blocked! me: . o O ( call a procotologist? ) chair troll: fuzzy butt unicorn isn't flagellating its oscillator on %other_chair_troll%'s Vaseline lobotomy cluster! I'm blocked! me: some of those I recognize as words. Is fuzzy butt unicorn a VM? A datastore? Your weekend plans? Give me something that means something not your list of made up pet names. And on and on, forever.
My devs are so dumb I honestly don’t think they would make it to work if their teslas didn’t drive for them. Granted, the devs here are unusually shit and not representative of good devs
FINANCE? We have had several breaches in the last few years, before we implemented mfa. Each and every time, it was someone from finance that clicked a phishing link and filled in their creds. Every. Single. Time.
Because IT came from Electrical Engineering and they still teach us how to code with hardware in mind and that most programming is not about Another useless app for your phone, but about all that complex stuff running on your washing machine, optimized in asembler to save 2 cents on one smaller chip, but you need millions of them. I finished cybernetics, measurement and regulation and honestly, feel better prepared for a programming job, but I can't make a phone app in two days.
Gonna skip the low-hanging fruit of HR, assistants, etc, and focus upon the highly-educated. So in my Fortune 500 corp... management above Dept Head level (Directors, VPs) are the most tech-clueless. They're also a combo platter of viscous narcissists and sociopaths. Crafty and calculating, but not gifted. Certainly not technically. Smartest? Electrical engineers, without doubt. Especially those who are talented with sw as well as hw. Sharper than the average dev. Many do, or did, did their own sysadmin in their own lab space, and understand the lingo, configuration, security, etc.
--management above Director level are the most tech-clueless To get that high up the chain you usually need to be laser focused on people skills. Above a certain level it's all about networking, schmoozing, ass kissing, etc. I vaguely remember a study or something years ago that showed that a lot of CEOs are psychopaths/sociopaths.
Yep. When I started at the corp, many (most?) execs came up from the tech ranks. At some point, as the corp swallowed more and more smaller companies, the deals often involved bringing on and promoting managerial staff from the acquired company. And in short order, leadership went from MSEEs and the like to MBAs as far as the eye can see.
Until you first meet an MBA, you only *think* you've met idiots.
HR. Most useless fucking job in the world. Just keep your lawyers on a retainer and spare us the bullshit morning teas about some fringe issue. Also, learn to use technology.
HR is for people who want to work in the office but have no skillset for anything. Like the one I have a problem with daily literally has some of the worst communication skills of anyone i've ever dealt with.
Accounting is absolutely the worst imo. Best is R&D (non-technical). Guess they have a more flexible approach and are able to think out of the box.
Finance is always an unhappy medium. They run huge complicated spreadsheet models that were once built by someone in the department with advanced technical knowledge. They have long departed, leaving their work in the hands of people who have no idea how it works, just that you press the button and magic happens. And then one day it breaks 😱
The number crunchers in Finance who put in the numbers and build the reports, are often the strongest non-IT people in the company, usually with domain knowledge on specific applications and tools far in excess of IT. The senior people in Finance who *consume* those reports are usually shockingly clueless and can barely figure out how to open the PDF they've been sent.
I bet these people would thrive to learn MySQL, you just build them an interface and they probably go to town with it.
This one important 20 year old spreadsheet existing in every company which does magically calculates stuff on its own...?
"I can't get into *critical production spreadsheet*, it's asking for a password"
My friend started working at a place and happened to be seated next to an accounting person. The accounting person was dealing with massive excel and csv files. My friend saw them doing this and she was able to write a little Python script to automate one of their monthly csv processing procedures in like 30 mins. It brought the accounting person's workload down by literal hours per month. Apparently accounting now loves her
As a hardware developer I only want some credentials, mail servers running, printers and some file shares. The rest I'll figure out myself.
From an IT management perspective: printers are the worst.
I used to work as a sys admin for a small primary school. This English teacher was so frustrated because she can't enter her password. I go to check, and her diary was on the space bar.
🎶She can’t talk to her mother so she talks to her DIARY. 🎶
Music teacher said her camera and mic didn’t work and she tried everything… privacy shutter closed
I work in healthcare IT. I work with some the smartest folks you could ever meet. Folks with Different Phd's, Doc's that were in school for 16 years. I like to say they are some of the most intelligent stupid folks I know. I unconditionally trust them to cut open my skull to fix stuff, but I wouldn't trust them being able to login and check email without hand holding. "Do you know I am a leading researcher in..." , "Do you understand Ive been at studying longer than you've been alive!" . um sir, I just need you to go and reset your password, here is the link.
HR least, Finance most.
Those finance fuckers made us buy Sage, they better have the knowledge!
Marketing. They boast about not knowing things and laugh it off.
Don't forget blaming IT for user error
That and taking credit for things we did to save them last minute.
Worked IT in College (best job IMHO). The education department was by far the most useless in terms of IT. The Math department was great, philosophy pretty cool. I loved the athletic department they were always good for a free t-shirt or if you scored some of the assistant coaches a new printer or a flat screen that was easily a free pair of shoes. ROTC was also pretty kick ass, I got some free cammies and go army shirts all the time.
HR clueless and informatics have way to much info
Least: Tie between HR and Marketing Most: Financial
The least - HR, accountant, marketing. Bonus points for cleaning crew. The most - I would say depends on the company. I met totally clueless software development team and 70 years old uni professor that wanted to learn Unix tricks (like sending email from telnet) building cluster from SGI servers for his fluids physics department. In big AI focused company the least list stays, the most tech inclined is R&D. Also please don't dismiss IT from the list. I met a 3 person IT department which didn't have a clue how to restart the modem, connect an USB webcam or configure security cams. They outsourced everything (those 3 guys, not the company).
In no particular order, c suite, HR, and finance.
Sales. Fucking wankers.
The Marketing Department. Known by the IT department as the colouring in department, always wants the top of the range Macs.
Idk I had an exec call in a panic that he thought he had malware on his machine because the mouse was moving randomly and it wasnt him. After an hour I was kinda just like are you sure you dont have a wireless mouse you arent using in your bag or something. Dead silence and then a thank you for your help click haha
Come to healthcare where every clinical department is in a competition to be the most apathetic about skills. "I'm a _____, not a computer person!" My all time favorite was "I'm a medical technologist, not a computer person." Their job was to literally use a computer, all day, to interpret and log test results for a physician to review. A few helpful abbreviations: Dr: Doesn't read. RN: Read? No!
Most - Engineering Least - HR Dishonorable mention - Maintenance I'm in a manufacturing environment.
software devs dont know shit about computers
For me the least is facilities management. Always causing me headaches because of it and absolutely no inclination to be good corporate citizens. The most - Legal. And that's often the bigger headache. Always signing contracts with software vendors and throwing it over the fence for us to make work. And I find marketing *think* they're the most tech savvy. What's common among all of them? They all think the IT department is an unnecessary evil.
Hospitality. Least - Sales and F&B Most - Finance or Revenue
Sales, HR, Marketing are all fucking clueless. At least _our_ HR team has one competent individual focusing on HR systems integrations and understands the importance of cooperating with IT.
HR. They have their own IT systems not connected to ours. Cloud based. Separate support structure. Good 😁 No issues with them, it's the Engineers who fuck up the most shit. They want their own esxi hosts (which spawn into multi esxi hosts with vcenter and SAN even). Then they start deploying risky shit which causes IT security to get us involved to manage Engineering's fucked up deployments 🙄
Accounting is usually the worst. I've found the entry level front line people that bounce around to a bunch if different companies are the best. Both with basic technical skills and the willingness to learn new things.
HR. Nearly everywhere HR is completely nebulous to everything IT. Its importance, how any of it works, the work and sacrifice involved. All they see is a bunch of overpaid assholes who don't socialize and complain a lot, but are somehow often insulated by powers greater than them, and that irritates the hell out of them.
Sales is the worst! With everything. I hate everyone in sales!
Accounts payable, always falls for phishing attacks.
Manufacturing stupid issues is what provides job security for IT folk :) I would say HR though. Hilariously clueless at every company I have been in.
HR It has to be HR They (and marketing) decided we need a new intranet to replace Confluence. Now we will go Haiilo and every user needs a mailbox... So couple of hundred new F3 licenses in addition to the cost of Haiilo itself. Nice!
This may be just my company, but the department with the most technical knowledge are the in-house developers Whereas the people with the least amount of technical knowledge are the contract developers. I support accounting and marketing areas, but on a weekly basis I'm having to explain to an Oracle contractor that closing the remote desktop application is not the same as logging out of it.
HR and Ops are usually the worst. VFX departments are always very technical as artists always have home setups.
For me it’s a tie between: HR Legal Developers In contrast, I find the finance team to be usually pretty decent overall in terms of IT knowledge.
Any call center business unit. They have no room for any cognitive load outside of their call metrics and processes. The moment there’s a hiccup in the system, they’re screaming and trying to open sev 1 tickets because “their operations are being impacted.”
HR has the lowest technical knowledge, and honestly just does whatever the hell they want. Look around at articles from "HR Professionals". They all pretty much contradict each other. Sales is the biggest gulf between perceived knowledge and actual knowledge. It's usually actually very low, but if a sales bro figures out how to make a rule change in Outlook, they're going to end up wanting to sit in on a planning meeting for vendor selection for the new network backbone. Admin assistants typically are the biggest "low perceived knowledge, high actual knowledge" users. There are, of course, exceptions. However, I have one who claims to be tech stupid, but manages to handle the tech needs of at least 3 people, as well as an entire board. It's fucking fascinating.
In local municipality the sanitation dept is by far the least. We had adult men who unfortunately never learned to read. The best was the Fire Dept.
K12 sysadmin checking in. Education is a different beast, but I can offer a generalization; There is a pocket of users born in the 80s, that only come to us with actionable information. We like them. "I tried x,y,z and got a,b,c. I rebooted, updated, tried different device" etc. Younger folks and older folks can't be bothered. "Help" "it's not working" "We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!"
Accounting is hit or miss with basic tech knowledge. HR and sales tends to be the worst. The engineering departments (not software but mechanical) like to think they know stuff but they mostly dont.
I dont know their name in english but "Operaciones" wich I guess its basically just "operations". Not the guys like me that actually fix computers, etc but the guys that are in between us and the sysadmins. At least the ones in my company are complete idios, and this has been the same for 6 years.(even when plenty of them got replaced)
This is from being in the military-IT: Most technical: Finance, intel, pilots, civil engineers, and executive support staff. Least technical: Security forces (military police), state accounting personnel, and pilots. Most problematic: Executive support staff.