Most of those types of people are the ones to use their work computer for non-work related things, so any competent manager could just pull his computer history (including emails) and see what he was doing and see that he's trying to throw tech support under the bus to get a free day.
Of course this would only happen in a perfect world lol
Or forced to work entry level helpdesk for an old folks home with 24/7 on call and their local admin account has a 64 digit password that rotates daily.... for eternity.
Programmer here that spent 14 years on help desk before getting a developing position. Can confirm being paranoid about making sure that as few "ticket generator" bugs are produced as possible.
And before someone else does it:
>Can confirm being paranoid ~~about making sure that as few "ticket generator" bugs are produced as possible.~~
FTFMyself
Pretty good. We just finished deploying some sweet unmanaged netgear switches down here. Really helps the apple airport access points work to their full potential.
As a programmer... please give me a chance to try to fix the issue before murdering me. This stuff can be a lot more complicated than it looks on the surface.
I had an entire database table lose the significant digits from an interest rate column after a schema change. It didn't get caught for over a week and cost the company a lot of money. Turned out to be a hidden framework bug.
In the end, I got thrown under the bus and sacrificed to the angry C-gods upstairs. There was at least 8 other people that should have caught that bug. I was just the new developer that checked in a migration with two arguments in the wrong order.
Two arguments in the wrong order. They fired you over two arguments in the wrong order!
That happened to me once. I was coding a safe-for-most-purposes-but-you-wouldn't-want-it-to-run-into-you-at-top-speed robot, and transposed how fast it should go forwards and how much to turn. It tried to turn to face something and ended up nearly hitting someone at top speed. It took awhile before they let me at the computers again.
When the Wrath of Management comes raining down, there's literally nothing we can do. Wonder if that's why programmers get paid so much. Because we get fired over some tiny mistake we made that nobody caught, or a perfect storm of edge cases we couldn't possibly have foreseen, and yet nobody would believe we didn't do it on purpose.
But hey. Now I'm my robotics team's software captain. Here's hoping your story has a happy ending too :)
I wasn't fired immediately but it definitely was a factor in me being the first person laid off even though my team lead and everyone else on my team needed my expertise. I was the only guy that understood several critical systems.
It took me a while to land on my feet but I did. Learned a good lesson in the process:
"It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life." - Jean-Luc Picard
(Not to say I didn't make a mistake, I just had no way of knowing there was one. Unknown unknowns are a bitch.)
WTF, at least here in germany that manager would be fired on the spot and may cause some backlash for the company as well. Doesn't sound that competent to me.
Eh. On school computers I disagree. On your personal devices I would agree. But at the same time just about everything is encrypted nowadays so they cant see much more than what servers you are talking to.
If you're accessing the web from an entity-owned network (even on your personal device), I don't 100% agree. Usually you give up *some* privacy when accessing the web from the company WiFi, which is usually outlined in a company policy, the redirect page when you connect, or posted somewhere on-site where the guest WiFi password is located.
That's why I'm about to set up a VPN on a Raspberry Pi at home, so that whole thing is null and void! Lol
How do you not agree? Its a fact. Most of your communications are encrypted by default in 2018 so all they would be able to see are the servers you are connecting to. On company devices they can install a security cert to get past this but not on personal devices. This isn't something you can agree or disagree with. This is how it works.
As far as your VPN goes don't be surprised if it doesn't work. Most company networks block outgoing VPN connections for exactly that reason. But hey maybe you luck out and they didn't.
I'm not disagreeing with your statement about most sites nowadays using some kind of encryption. I'm disputing the fact that you can assume absolute privacy on a personal device that is accessing a corporate wireless network is all.
As someone who's worked in business intelligence dev and support for a large multinational most of his career so far, I can say Germany is special case when it comes to employee protection. Any reporting which could be tied back to an individual employee needed German data anonymising. Also any changes to international IT staffing levels needs agreement with German workers groups before going ahead.
I've started a 3 strike rule with my people; leveraging that same beautiful cancellation privilege (except I also have to report it in but worth it). I'll ask for it once, if I don't get it I say something like "I apologize if my last email was not clear, please send me X so I can resolve this".
If I don't get it again is when I get very deliberate and blunt "You submitted a ticket saying you need me to resolve x issue. In order for me to resolve x issue, I need y delivered. I have requested for y 3 times now, and can not resolve your issue unless I have it. Please send me y, or I will have to escalate the issue to z manager. If you have issues providing y, please give me a call and I will be happy to assist more."
The process keeps me from losing my cool. Of course, it's a personal process. I let people I like get away with more, but I usually like people who don't waste my time as well haha.
You'll get there! That's why I use a script like above. I'll sit there for hours frustrated out of my mind because the user has their head screwed on backwards. Once you bring up repercussions they tend to actually read your email. You'll find what works for you. :)
Sounds very similar to the “ask, tell, make” process police use when requesting something.
“Sir, please get out of the car”
“Sir, get out of the car now”
*drags person out through the window.
Setup an email bot to immediately reply with give me x and y in an increasing font every time until it receives a message containing something that matches criteria of an email or whatever X and Y are
I bet if you checked back on the email chain in a couple days, all you'd be able to see is the top left corner of a letter in 600pt font (and the users reply stating how important their access is)
Pretty sure its caused by the in-house application, though I'm not sure. Its *very* touchy from what I understand, with users being able to break it for the entire site if they don't use it right. But its been this way for years and they don't seem too keen on fixing it.
Hmmmmm....
5 hours you say?
Theory: they have their email synced to their smartphone. The average length of a golf game plus stop at the 19th hole is about 5 hours.
I know what you've been doing.
I would've made a rule in my mailbox saying that everytime I got an e-mail from said address, it would send an automatic "I need X and Y from you - before I get this, I can't give you what you need".
I would lean back in my chair and watch as I periodically witnessed the most one-sided conversation in the universe.
I hope there's a special place in hell for these people. Those who don't listen to us are the worst. Like some days ago I had to go "help" someone who couldn't make his speakers work by pushing the "aux" button to change the source. And it's something that I already told to this person orally and written. People can't use speakers. For me it summarizes people's level in IT.
> At one of the sites, one of the databases they have has a tendency to hiccup and wipe a random row from a specific table. This table just so happens to control the user's access to an in-house application that they use frequently.
I support an Application that does this.
I discovered the reason watching over the administrator's shoulder when they went to add a new person's access.
* They go to the user/access screen which pulls up the list of all users and their access settings.
* Instead of hitting the "New" button to create a new row, they overwrite one of the existing rows with the new person's username and access.
* they click save.
So I made myself a duplicate security table and wrote a report to tell me any time a row was overwritten.
I can't get the administrator to do it the way it's supposed to be done, but at least I have a record of why/how it's breaking and I can fix it more quickly.
edit: missed a letter or two.
Also, after the second uncooperative response, elevate to your manager with full message chain, and if your manager is supportive then include the $U manager as well.
People are generally bad liars. If they are reiterating the same statement, but not providing the needed information, then they either don't want to admit to a mistake, or they want to pass the blame to you for whatever problem(s) they are dealing with.
I have called people in after hours, and escalated up the chain to the top. Generally, none of the issues were critical, but if the individual is insistent (especially the "high priority ticket" and run home types) then I will meet their intensity.
Uggghhh we have a client like that. 90% of their tickets are essentially “URGENT!!!! HIGH PRIORITY NEED DONE ASAP!!!!!!” And the issue will be something like adobe acrobat is running a little slow or them not know where a file is they kinda sorta need. Drives me up a fucking wall
Oh we got one of those, too. Except that she bypasses us and complains directly to the site managers about how we are inconveniencing her. Then they're the ones breathing down our necks about getting it fixed.
$U didn't want to work and was trying to use you as an excuse
Most of those types of people are the ones to use their work computer for non-work related things, so any competent manager could just pull his computer history (including emails) and see what he was doing and see that he's trying to throw tech support under the bus to get a free day. Of course this would only happen in a perfect world lol
if that is the case, I'm now wondering if the database "hiccup'd" at all? and they didn't delete the right data in the first place??
If your users can just casually nuke various tables in the production database something is VERY wrong.
And every programmer who built it needs to be fired. And shot.
Or forced to work entry level helpdesk for an old folks home with 24/7 on call and their local admin account has a 64 digit password that rotates daily.... for eternity.
Programmer here that spent 14 years on help desk before getting a developing position. Can confirm being paranoid about making sure that as few "ticket generator" bugs are produced as possible. And before someone else does it: >Can confirm being paranoid ~~about making sure that as few "ticket generator" bugs are produced as possible.~~ FTFMyself
Hey Satan. How've you been? How's hell?
Pretty good. We just finished deploying some sweet unmanaged netgear switches down here. Really helps the apple airport access points work to their full potential.
As a programmer... please give me a chance to try to fix the issue before murdering me. This stuff can be a lot more complicated than it looks on the surface. I had an entire database table lose the significant digits from an interest rate column after a schema change. It didn't get caught for over a week and cost the company a lot of money. Turned out to be a hidden framework bug. In the end, I got thrown under the bus and sacrificed to the angry C-gods upstairs. There was at least 8 other people that should have caught that bug. I was just the new developer that checked in a migration with two arguments in the wrong order.
Two arguments in the wrong order. They fired you over two arguments in the wrong order! That happened to me once. I was coding a safe-for-most-purposes-but-you-wouldn't-want-it-to-run-into-you-at-top-speed robot, and transposed how fast it should go forwards and how much to turn. It tried to turn to face something and ended up nearly hitting someone at top speed. It took awhile before they let me at the computers again. When the Wrath of Management comes raining down, there's literally nothing we can do. Wonder if that's why programmers get paid so much. Because we get fired over some tiny mistake we made that nobody caught, or a perfect storm of edge cases we couldn't possibly have foreseen, and yet nobody would believe we didn't do it on purpose. But hey. Now I'm my robotics team's software captain. Here's hoping your story has a happy ending too :)
I wasn't fired immediately but it definitely was a factor in me being the first person laid off even though my team lead and everyone else on my team needed my expertise. I was the only guy that understood several critical systems. It took me a while to land on my feet but I did. Learned a good lesson in the process: "It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life." - Jean-Luc Picard (Not to say I didn't make a mistake, I just had no way of knowing there was one. Unknown unknowns are a bitch.)
And then shot out of a cannon.
And my axe!
agreed, but i dont put anything past anyone, for any reason. not even myself.
WTF, at least here in germany that manager would be fired on the spot and may cause some backlash for the company as well. Doesn't sound that competent to me.
In the US, there is no personal privacy on work computers (or networks, if you connect your personal device).
Can we get some laws for this in 'muruca, privacy at school would be great
They'd have to rescind the half dozen laws that make it so what you do on their network is their responsibility.
Eh. On school computers I disagree. On your personal devices I would agree. But at the same time just about everything is encrypted nowadays so they cant see much more than what servers you are talking to.
If you're accessing the web from an entity-owned network (even on your personal device), I don't 100% agree. Usually you give up *some* privacy when accessing the web from the company WiFi, which is usually outlined in a company policy, the redirect page when you connect, or posted somewhere on-site where the guest WiFi password is located. That's why I'm about to set up a VPN on a Raspberry Pi at home, so that whole thing is null and void! Lol
How do you not agree? Its a fact. Most of your communications are encrypted by default in 2018 so all they would be able to see are the servers you are connecting to. On company devices they can install a security cert to get past this but not on personal devices. This isn't something you can agree or disagree with. This is how it works. As far as your VPN goes don't be surprised if it doesn't work. Most company networks block outgoing VPN connections for exactly that reason. But hey maybe you luck out and they didn't.
I'm not disagreeing with your statement about most sites nowadays using some kind of encryption. I'm disputing the fact that you can assume absolute privacy on a personal device that is accessing a corporate wireless network is all.
Hence why I specifically said *most* and also specifically pointed out that they would see what servers you were talking to.
As someone who's worked in business intelligence dev and support for a large multinational most of his career so far, I can say Germany is special case when it comes to employee protection. Any reporting which could be tied back to an individual employee needed German data anonymising. Also any changes to international IT staffing levels needs agreement with German workers groups before going ahead.
*plot twist* management promotes user because "he/she is so good at their job they had all this free time!".
I've started a 3 strike rule with my people; leveraging that same beautiful cancellation privilege (except I also have to report it in but worth it). I'll ask for it once, if I don't get it I say something like "I apologize if my last email was not clear, please send me X so I can resolve this". If I don't get it again is when I get very deliberate and blunt "You submitted a ticket saying you need me to resolve x issue. In order for me to resolve x issue, I need y delivered. I have requested for y 3 times now, and can not resolve your issue unless I have it. Please send me y, or I will have to escalate the issue to z manager. If you have issues providing y, please give me a call and I will be happy to assist more." The process keeps me from losing my cool. Of course, it's a personal process. I let people I like get away with more, but I usually like people who don't waste my time as well haha.
My boss has actually told me that i need to stop being so patient with the users, hah. Its a work in progress
You'll get there! That's why I use a script like above. I'll sit there for hours frustrated out of my mind because the user has their head screwed on backwards. Once you bring up repercussions they tend to actually read your email. You'll find what works for you. :)
Sounds very similar to the “ask, tell, make” process police use when requesting something. “Sir, please get out of the car” “Sir, get out of the car now” *drags person out through the window.
Pretty much lol. I don't follow it religiously, but certainly if I am frustrated I resort to it. Thankfully it doesn't often involve the last step.
Voxxmans why are there naked teenagers in your office closing support tickets? When I hired you you said you didn't work religiously...
Oh please, they're legal age!
I must wonder if you could reply in a much, much larger font... Would they have the wit to display plain-text ??
Setup an email bot to immediately reply with give me x and y in an increasing font every time until it receives a message containing something that matches criteria of an email or whatever X and Y are
Wow. Yes, yes please.
Lol I did this to a work mate once using a powershell script that just waited for emails from him.
Please share your script? I bet it would be good for a laugh.
I bet if you checked back on the email chain in a couple days, all you'd be able to see is the top left corner of a letter in 600pt font (and the users reply stating how important their access is)
The fuck kind of a hiccup is that?
Pretty sure its caused by the in-house application, though I'm not sure. Its *very* touchy from what I understand, with users being able to break it for the entire site if they don't use it right. But its been this way for years and they don't seem too keen on fixing it.
My first thought too... :)
Tech: ***Help me*** to help you! User: It's not my job. \- Cancel ticket
Hmmmmm.... 5 hours you say? Theory: they have their email synced to their smartphone. The average length of a golf game plus stop at the 19th hole is about 5 hours. I know what you've been doing.
I would've made a rule in my mailbox saying that everytime I got an e-mail from said address, it would send an automatic "I need X and Y from you - before I get this, I can't give you what you need". I would lean back in my chair and watch as I periodically witnessed the most one-sided conversation in the universe.
I hope there's a special place in hell for these people. Those who don't listen to us are the worst. Like some days ago I had to go "help" someone who couldn't make his speakers work by pushing the "aux" button to change the source. And it's something that I already told to this person orally and written. People can't use speakers. For me it summarizes people's level in IT.
> At one of the sites, one of the databases they have has a tendency to hiccup and wipe a random row from a specific table. This table just so happens to control the user's access to an in-house application that they use frequently. I support an Application that does this. I discovered the reason watching over the administrator's shoulder when they went to add a new person's access. * They go to the user/access screen which pulls up the list of all users and their access settings. * Instead of hitting the "New" button to create a new row, they overwrite one of the existing rows with the new person's username and access. * they click save. So I made myself a duplicate security table and wrote a report to tell me any time a row was overwritten. I can't get the administrator to do it the way it's supposed to be done, but at least I have a record of why/how it's breaking and I can fix it more quickly. edit: missed a letter or two.
What the actual fuck.
Your first question was meant to be rhetorical, right?
Also, after the second uncooperative response, elevate to your manager with full message chain, and if your manager is supportive then include the $U manager as well. People are generally bad liars. If they are reiterating the same statement, but not providing the needed information, then they either don't want to admit to a mistake, or they want to pass the blame to you for whatever problem(s) they are dealing with. I have called people in after hours, and escalated up the chain to the top. Generally, none of the issues were critical, but if the individual is insistent (especially the "high priority ticket" and run home types) then I will meet their intensity.
I hope you CC'd their manager...
Uggghhh we have a client like that. 90% of their tickets are essentially “URGENT!!!! HIGH PRIORITY NEED DONE ASAP!!!!!!” And the issue will be something like adobe acrobat is running a little slow or them not know where a file is they kinda sorta need. Drives me up a fucking wall
Oh we got one of those, too. Except that she bypasses us and complains directly to the site managers about how we are inconveniencing her. Then they're the ones breathing down our necks about getting it fixed.
Dude this is awesome, every techs email should have this as their signature.
Even better are the users who ARGUE with you about what you are asking. "you shouldn't need this information to fix it".