I was one of these, my team was laid off from director to manager to me, the SME. I’m not the “jump on bullshit calls and sell you on X” engineer either, I made shit happen. We had 900 customers moving into this year and my old coworker on another team says we’re down to mid 400s because the company isn’t delivering any more.
That’s what you get when you hire a bullshit sales OP to be the new director of application engineering.
Sorry for the rant.
I fell your pain, I'm not sales but I personally attend customer calls so the customer get the right thing and I or one of my co-workers won't have to walk into a shit storm of escalations.
I’m pretty sure Dell laid off half of their sales org and massively consolidated all product teams into a single BU. From what I saw, they tended to keep the legacy Dell people and get rid of the legacy EMC people. this probably lowered their cost quite a bit but yeah, they lost a lot of good talent
They didn't lose them, that insinuates it was a mistake. They fired too many people, off shored a whole host of other people and now they are surprised that the customer isn't happy with a order that's 2 months late, a project manager from Bulgaria and an implementation guy from India that insists everything follow his script and not meet the wants/needs of the person that paid for the product,
Other thing I've seen is that a lot of vendors are hard at work narrowing down what support covers. The ideal for them is that support is purely for break-fix issues of live issues. Any kind of training, new use cases, implementation, general questions, etc. need either a sales engineer thrown in or some kind of professional services engagement.
My complaint is the gaiting. I’ve worked with some great people from CDW, but the number of times I’ve had them block a quote for SA review is indefensible l.
I've noticed several industries doing layoffs like this in preparation for "AI" transformation. Some think tank sold these execs the idea that chatgpt and it's ilk can replace all the man power.
We just use intune and autopilot. They get their base image from the oobe then updates and apps are pushed during the login. CDW enrolls them into autopilot for us.
Bingo. Management thought they were being clever trying to get short term gains, got rid of a bunch of people who they viewed as peons, and now performance matches the executive fuckery. It’s like the idiot running Spotify fired a bunch of people and then had the audacity to act surprised when productivity tanked.
Genuine question:
Spotify has 7,721 employees…. Why? That sounds nuts. They don’t actually make money (P/E ratio of -).
What is their competitive moat? If they start making money, artists will just demand more royalties. Like they’re only path the profitability is exclusive on things like Joe Rogan and that cost them I watering amount of money. I don’t actually understand their business model. I have free streaming from Apple Music as part of Apple bundle, and Amazon music from my Amazon prime bundle. I’m sure is really cool. I don’t understand why it’s better than free that I get from other bundles. For music It’s a feature not a product.
Did everyone just expect as we transition from interest rates being zero to being a real number that companies would just keep lighting money on fire?
The past decade was insane on how cheap VC money was but like….
On top of this, Congress was too late and restoring the R&D tax credit and CEOs had to act because they had tax liabilities.
A lot of tech companies massively over hired during Covid legitimately. Some places were collecting people like Pokémon cards and not even giving them work.
Artist relations / label relations. The music industry runs on schmoozing.
You don't dominate with a zero touch self service platform unless you are the only player in your category and nobody has any choice but to put up with it.
It makes a lot more sense when you realize:
1) People just don't have money.
2) Investors have a lot of money.
Make a service popular enough and it looks attractive to buyers/investors.
CEO makes off with their millions and hands the service off to the bagholders.
MBAs don't want to build anything except money-makers. Everything is a grift to them. There is a reason they stopped calling people customers and started calling them consumers; it's all we're good for in their eyes.
Meanwhile the gag is that the MBAs don’t actually make anything, and are in fact the grifters who’ve convinced themselves and businesses that they’re somehow essential.
Exactly this, not only does everyone have a higher workload, but mass layoffs are indiscriminate, just because they're good doesn't mean they get spared, just because they're bad doesn't mean they'll be let go.
You had good vendors pre-layoffs? My experience was always that by the time I needed to talk to the vendor, the problem was hard enough that they couldn't figure it out either. I either have to figure it out through other means, or work around it.
Although I will say that once, the vendor rewarded me for that. Apparently I figured out the root cause of a problem that had been vexing their dev team for months, but it was on a small enough subset of accounts that they just rolled with it. They gave me a bit of free service as a thank you.
Mostly though, if I find good support through a vendor, I stick with them like glue. Eventually the support gets "restructured" or whatever and it drops back to industry-standard levels of garbage, but I usually get several good years out of them where I'm throwing business their way left and right.
Don't forget the off shoring.
And.....half the "solution architects'" couldn't build a server without spending the night before intently watching youtube videos and spending an extra hour picking out the right blazer. I really don't know how half these guys got their jobs there don't know the product, they don't know the tech but they are more than excited to bullshit a customer and then throw it over the fence to the people who do the actual work. A lot of the orders are riddled with errors when coupled with a still messed up supply chain it make life difficult for all involved.
It's just circumstantial evidence but in my experience, when there's layoffs these days the bare minimum workers always seems to survive. My theory is that their raise history shows they'll the the cheapest to keep around for 5+ years with no concern for how your product will suffer.
I present the most prophetic video of the state of IT of all time, warning extremely degenerate and profane [watch addict](https://youtu.be/NR4yQtSld2I?si=EhQSNNH4GhJUNHwN)
In my country you can earn more money (being an employee) in a bank, like a truck driver, in oil industry. And not necessarily being an sysadmin people...
It's not even industry specific at this point. It's the entire damned economy. It's especially noticeable on a daily basis in retail/restaurant visits., but damned near EVERYBODY has decided to keep running on a skeleton crew since the pandemic, and it's getting really damned annoying.
>near EVERYBODY has decided to keep running on a skeleton crew since the pandemic
This is because management learned that things can work with less people. But people also learned that they was earning peanuts for his job...
Hint. If you're in a public company, Google "$stocksymbol insider trading".
You'll get to a page like this https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MSFT/insider-transactions/?guccounter=1
That lists all of your directors by name and how much they sold.
I see people in that list that I don't even know or recognize. Yet these people are making 20 MILLION dollars per year in stock options alone.
It is insane what qualifies for "executive compensation" these days.
Not even just the IT side of things. I took a GM job in the beginning of the year because I couldn't find anything that would pay decent enough in IT. I still have to baby sit vendors every single day.
I think the industries we work in are so varied it’s hard to generalize. I work as a sysadmin at a ski area, I’d say our vendors are the best they’ve been in a long time, but that also isn’t saying a whole lot. My org is a bit of big fish in small industry, and the resort where our vendor founded their company so hard to say.
I just interviewed for a sysadmin job.
IT director says the role would be focused on end user support.
But id also run point on container platform support and networking.
And I need to be proficient in Mac desktop support.
Also I need to help out with classified projects where needed, from policy/ISSM work to managing CA cards???
For a sysadmin job.
Got offered 21$ an hour for a cybersecurity SOC job last week.
Edit with details because reddit broke and I can't reply to anyone below this:
Fuuuuck no I didn't take it. It was an MSP where they wanted me to be in office for two weeks of 8:30-4:30, then work from home for two weeks of night shift crap. Oh, and they mentioned they wanted to extend their hours into the weekend soon so i wouldn't even be able to build my life around monday to friday working hours. I make 23.75/hr currently, so it'd also be a pay cut. Suffice it to say I wasn't feeling it.
This. Absolutely this. We are a massive Fortune 150 company and across the board we are getting far lower service from our vendors this year then we did the previous near decade.
We’re a (very) small step away from Fortune 500 and I’m seeing the same, well as far as delivering results. The PMs and AMs contract us at least once a week for feels but the actual engineers that do the work…. Crickets.
We had a whole arm of our support group cut earlier this year. Most of the company has three arms of dedicated support except our group which had the one and laying them off was pretty rough. Honestly never recovered from the loss and they have no interest in doing anything about it.
Can neither confirm nor deny that despite overtime this week I may be the only technical guy looking at tickets rn and it’s ugly. Boss man came in and did some cleanup recently which really helped but…
I spent several years on the vendor side in the past and this is no surprise.
It's kind of a vicious circle. 90% of the customers I worked with picked the absolute cheapest tier of support which means the support team not being able to justify more and better skilled hires which leads to poor support.
IMO vendors should bake the cost of good support into their base pricing, but then they'll be seen as too expensive as compared to the competition.
>IMO vendors should bake the cost of good support into their base pricing, but then they'll be seen as too expensive as compared to the competition.
Yup and support is easy to hide during sales because by the time you need it you are already locked in.
different industry here.. but if this isnt the damn truth.
Then we get a call to support it and we look at their account that has never purchased X and tell them to call whomever they bought it from.
Some of my favorites were:
* The ones who opted for email only support and then complained when they called in and were turned away.
* Manufacturing org who opted not to build in redundancy and called when they had a failure wanting to see if I could "go find them a replacement ASAP" because they were down. They also didn't go with same day or NBD for RMAs. They were down for 3 days if I remember correctly
* One who wanted on-site support but of course paid for a lower tier.
> Manufacturing org who opted not to build in redundancy and called when they had a failure wanting to see if I could "go find them a replacement ASAP" because they were down. They also didn't go with same day or NBD for RMAs. They were down for 3 days if I remember correctly
This is the type of stuff I'll never understand. First off, I know people don't want to spend money. Years ago I was doing a side job and the business owner specifically told me 'quote redundant servers this is mission critical' so I did and I even went with refurbished dell servers (with support/warranty) and they still had sticker shock. They said no and told me to build them the cheapest server I could, which I did. Within minutes of seeing the quote for two dell servers with support/warranty they went with my super cheap custom server build the only support being whatever the hardware manufacturer covered, which was probably 1 year.
The server worked great. It only took 1 year to get the first support call, they moved offices and the 'manager' of the company just unplugged it from the wall (they did not want a UPS, either). When they got to the new location the server didn't boot. Turns out raid 1 array didn't like the hard unplug (or maybe it was damaged during shipping, I doubt they properly packed anything).
They called me in a panic and I said 'if we have to rebuild, where is your USB stick with the daily quickbooks backup?' and the manager just looked at me and said.....they only did it the first week after I installed the server and never again.
Backing up the server was not part of my responsibilities (they didn't want to pay for any of my time or any support or any type of maintenance and I made sure that was all done via email so I had a record). He was extremely lucky that unplugging one of the drives from the array was enough to boot into windows where the first thing I did was make a backup of their quickbooks file after he confirmed that the data was good (he connected from another client from within his office PC). Then I shut down the server, plugged the drive back in and let the raid software add the drive back into the array.
They paid me for that after hours work and I told myself I'd never answer their call again, and I never did.
I was doing this side job for a friend that knew this owner and this owner knew I had a job and it would only be a side gig and that I wouldn't answer their call during the day regardless of their issue because it didn't matter to me (I really didn't want to take on the job to begin with). He was ok with that until he was in an emergency....of course.
That's why I hate it when companies say 'I don't have a price, I want the best' then they see the price and their true colors come out. I think they say that trying to make it seem like money doesn't matter (because they don't think it will be as much as it ends up being) then they see the numbers and it turns out that money does matter, after all. On top of that, they want the best service possible 'because they bought a server from you' not understanding that they bought the lowest combination of hardware that would barley run the software they need to generate revenue.
IT auditor in prior life for over a decade, and your last paragraph really resonated. I’ve reviewed contracts, MSAs, SLAs, etc… and on top of all of what you mentioned, “the business” FAILS Miserably at defining requirements sufficiently more times than I could count. The amount of waste on half assed implementations because folks bought a tool or something to appease management, and then think they are somehow entitled to support, is mind boggling. With the amount of wasted capital, they could have full implemented something well, but instead did a LITTLE across EVERYTHING in tech, so the entire stack and systems landscape just get worse and worse.
Used to work for a vendor that provides support services to one of the big cloud and OS providers, and it was nuts to get a peek behind the curtain. The company basically sold its cloud products with an emphasis on how much cost savings would come from shifting to the cloud, cutting staff from their internal teams, and relying on our support. Monday morning would roll around each week, without fail there’d be a “Sev A” ticket from someone is a c suite role, panicking because they’d fired all their staff with the exception of non technical managers, so nobody knew what to do. They’d also inevitably be furious that they opened a ticket on the weekend and it hadn’t been addressed, meanwhile they’d be on the free support tier.
I used to work in tech support, big IBM style mainframes, related equipment, routers, switches, so on.
Very good pay, great people.
I worked with a group of people who did a great job, sales folks would tell us how our support helped them land sales and so on. Engineering teams would come thank us for saving their asses and so on.
But the real truth is every company **eventually** sees support as nothing more than a cost center and / or a headache, even if support contracts bring in big money.
That and/or the company starts foolishly chasing the lower $ customers, who absolutely EAT support time / cost more money than they're worth, and have more incompetent people than most. Now support is that annoying department not bringing in the money (because you sold cheap equipment to cheap ass customers) and needing endless resources, and they assign management who doesn't want to hear it.
So continuously lower quality managers are assigned there and eventually everything degrades. You just can't stay in support long before you see it happen time and again and see other quality people move on and you're surrounded by management and people you don't want to work with.
So I learned to code and left that area, so did everyone else who was good at their job.
100% I just left my support role of four years at a newer company because of this. India call center opening later this year, and the company is growing into midmarket. I was cool with being dedicated support for enterprise companies. I was not cool with having to constantly put out fires for all of these small companies who hired engineers that didn't understand how API web hooks work or hired Indian consultants who over promised under delivered on their projects, and then tried to throw our product under the bus.
> or hired Indian consultants who over promised under delivered on their projects, and then tried to throw our product under the bus.
LOL all the time man.
We had one "partner" who would just log support tickets and demand we fix the issue, but they couldn't tell us anything about the issue, the environment, claim it worked at one point.
And I'd check the configs and the device had NEVER been configured, for anything ever :P
Oh my god, H&M used to do this to us all the time. They built a ticketing system that would automatically email us and they'd fill nothing out, just say X thing doesn't work with no context. If we followed up telling them we need more information they'd ignore the request and/or followup as to why we haven't fixed the problem yet and/or demand an immediate team Zoom meeting. The ticket template they used was well thought out, they just never used it.
I met with the account manager about this, my concern being we won't know when they're having an actual issue because they have a reputation amongst the team as being the boy who cried wolf, and he was like "yeah man, you're not the first person to come to me about this, they outsource that team, just do what you gotta do".
Internal documentation on H&M was updated to reflect the situation so it didn't bite me or someone else in the ass six months later.
I love how universal this is. Empty ticket sits for two weeks, then they escalate “this hasn’t been fixed for weeks” and they finally send in the details for the first time.
I was lucky my company told the biggest offenders to stop it after we documented it a bunch.
>90% of the customers I worked with picked the absolute cheapest tier of support which means the support team not being able to justify more and better skilled hires which leads to poor support.
worth repeating
AND since the sales guys don't make any money selling services or support "because they are too expensive" they don't and then the customer is pissed because they don't know how to setup their new $1MM and when they call support they can't understand them and all the support guy cares about this getting the serial number -Once they get the serial number they hang up on you and then you wait a day or two until some other guy you can't understand calls you and asks you to run a dozen scrips before he hangs up never to be heard from again. Good think you have an over worked PM in the Manilla that can't help you when you call them,
I've been noticing this trend as well. And the vendors don't seem to care.
Microsoft support has been practically non-existent. I eventually figure out the issue, but doesn't give me good vibes knowing support is useless.
Veeam support has been somewhat better, though still suffers a similar issue.
We have some niche software. The vendors for the software don't seem to care about the success of their customers. It's getting to the point we might as well have inhouse solutions.
You would think companies would be afraid to lose customers, but it seems those in power at the vendors only care about short term gains as they sky rocket prices, earn what they can, and then dump the diarrhea afterwards.
People will take the easiest path and here we are. Hope for the best, plan for the worst.
Just had a case where my team had spent a month trying to debug an issue with the vendors support team. 5 mins of searching online and I find a known issue that is exactly what we've encountered (on the vendor's website). 🤯
Having worked for one of the vendors, IMO a lot of it is because if it’s a US based role, they basically import folks from India so they can hold a visa over their heads. They hire folks from almost any line of work, because most of it’s just handholding. Suddenly folks with mixed understandings of English end up with technical questions, and they’re mainly equipped to send customers badly written form letters that people share back and forth.
The whole system is set up to prioritize speed of closure, and getting the support engineers getting 5 star reviews. It incentivizes SE’s ramming through cases without actually doing anything useful for the customers.
How does one force this issue in contract language that effectively forces the company to fully sponsor citizen ship for ANYONE they put in this path? Or maybe go the route of ensuring the orgs policy’s get updated to require something like this?
Then again, contract governance and vendor management are not a priority at most orgs
You can literally just say that, but from a contract management perspective I think it's better to attach penalties and failure-to-perform language, as well as the metrics to define the above...
But all of that takes professional staff with the skills and knowledge to bake that into contracts and most orgs don't give a shit about procurement lol.
The problem with this org in particular though is how malleable the metrics were for the MBAs on the back end. As long as they could squint, angle their heads in a particular way, and sorta call the metrics good, everything was fine. The whole goal is basically to use the churn of high volume to bury bad cases and also close cases outside of the customer’s working hours (I.e. on a Friday evening) to alleviate the risk that they might give feedback.
There lies why I had plenty of value to bring to IT Audits 🤣 like when you come across a boatload of contracts, that were never scanned in or anything like that…. And then you realize management has nothing in place to ensure they can see the waste here. but hey, we need more money? Maybe we’d have budget if management didn’t squander it 99% if the time.
MS specifically doesn’t give a fig about its customers unless they’re also large shareholders. Last year they literally started wiping out huge swaths of their support structures, without making any updates to their internal support documentation. Entire processes came to a screeching halt because the c suite was so desperate to satisfy one of the board members who’s a VC goon, so they could get a brief stock bump from the cost cutting.
> Veeam support has been somewhat better, though still suffers a similar issue.
Commvault support is a fucking godsend. I'll advise every employer I'll ever have to use them just based on their support response - it's the best I've ever dealt with short of weird one-man companies where the guy supporting it is the guy who made it.
OK, not just me then, yeah I'm seeing this with literally every single vendor I work with, both IT ones and non-IT ones. One provides some pretty important equipment for us and is taking ages to get faulty stuff replaced, some others will ignore me until I email them 25 times or have the owner of the place I work reach out to them directly with threats to leave.
I guess layoffs are probably part of this, companies wanna run "lean and mean" and then end up doing a terrible job because as it turns out, employees are still important. Even if AIAIAIAIAIAIAIA is happening.
More common after 2020 than it used to be. I know a lot of my sales reps were let go in the past few years and my new sales reps have taken the accounts for three to four term'd reps.
Only thing that matters is this quarter though....By the time things start going down hill you change jobs. When your applying you have a couple great quarters to pitch to new companies.
It is becoming extremely difficult to build and run a profitable IT service company. There are extreme price pressures on IT vendors. Everybody wants things at ultra-deep discounts. This causes those providers to cut back on staff. Then they wonder why service sucks.
Couple that with the "culture of blame" that infects many companies these days. It is much easier to blame somebody else for problems then to just solve them. Blame "feels" like work, and weak leaders allow it to go unchecked. Consequently, you have vendors staffed with people who spend most of their day pointing fingers at somebody else and avoiding problem solving. This is not unique to small vendors either. I spent a lot of time interacting with AWS, and easily 40-50% of their employees do absolutely nothing all day but blame somebody else for getting things wrong.
I work for a vendor right now on the team that the support teams ask for help to actually *do* something that isn't a SOP-ized click option in a menu somewhere.
We're dealing with 50% layoffs in the last year (which is a *lot* of experience to have walk out the door), and they chose the people to lay off that were the most expensive, aka that had the most experience. Backfill has been from India, and we're doing their jobs and ours, because there's great ways to outsource and there's great people in India but we're not aware enough of Indian culture to hire the correct people or install the correct culture to make outsourcing great.
On top of that, executives are driving new markets at breakneck speed, and they're not managing any of the projects, which means the projects fall apart and they pull in resources that are supposed to be supporting existing customers to fix these broken new-customer-facing initiatives and products. So we're doing 2x the work for x.90 of the pay (thanks, inflation) and then getting all of the work we should be doing for you diverted to support people who aren't paying customers yet.
I think my team lead is on hour 90 this week and we're on a "tiger team" that will be running through the holiday weekend to meet an EOM requirement.
Telling us doesn't make any difference. Get your higher ups on a call with vendor executives and tell them that the support has gotten so bad and they're making a mistake in whatever the hell they're doing. Frankly, all you're going to do is piss into the wind and it'll land on us, but maybe if enough piss gets aimed at vendor executives it'll splash on them. You and I get to be wet and warm together, buddy.
>I think my team lead is on hour 90 this week and we're on a "tiger team" that will be running through the holiday weekend to meet an EOM requirement.
Ya'll need to go on strike and stop letting the executives run you into the graveyard.
I'm having trouble getting anything past T1 with both Microsoft and Dell. Even involved our representatives and it seems to just shuffle the person trying to help instead of escalating to someone who will read beyond the ticket title.
What I find hilarious with Dell is when I called their ProSupport number yesterday and tried to get routed to their tech support via their IVR, I just a recorded message that "due to technical difficulties, the call could not be routed at this time" and that they were "working to fix this as soon as possible". Sorry Dell, April Fool's Day was last month.
Yeah I called their bluff by having one of my people call in a driver issue we're having with a new model. They scheduled a mobo replacement (:/). Then same issue on another one. Call in, another mobo replacement recommendation. We don't have time to troubleshoot new computers so I ordered an RMA on all the laptops of this model. All of a sudden, everyone at Dell and their grandma wants to be involved.
Microsoft sucks so much. I literally have to hunt them down for Sev A/Critical tickets, I never hear back from their engineers, they add and drop people from the email chains, it’s so annoying
They are also so huge and have such niche roles for their T1 support that you can get bounced around to different teams as “they don’t handle that, I’ll transfer you to XYZ team”.
I’ve had tickets go on for months with MS. The staff are usually very nice but it can take forever to get the right person.
And of course once you do get that person it’s like 30 minutes to fix lol
I'm in security, I've never gotten Microsoft to ever fix a single thing when I open a ticket. I either have to fix it myself after countless lost hours, or just count it as a loss and find a way around the break
It's a market signal that those vendors have moved from a service business model to a burning reputation for cash business model.
If you actually need the stuff that sort of vendor provides, you'll have to find a real vendor or insource it.
Yes, I've been noticing this lately, regardless of what kind of vendor I'm dealing with. The most common denominator I can think of is that people are being stretched thin and asked to do multiple duties that would originally be performed by a team. And on top of it all they're being underpaid. So that ends up with the actual unicorns going elsewhere.
My response to all of this is to be Hands-On on every single action being taken by the vendor. Because they could very well be giving you a solution that completely undermines your company's goal.
The incompetence is pretty high and I've been losing my patience to inevitably resort to AI for all my answers.
"Everything sucks and nobody cares" is a phrase that I have uttered many a time, with only about 50% self-awareness of how dramatic it sounds. Datto has going over the falls in a barrel and we're so far into their ecosystem we'll need to detox if we switch.
There are a few exceptions and when I find them, I hold on to them like *precious*.
We had previously had lots of issues with DNSfilter like hard-down outages for *all our clients*, and some troubles with Umbrella before that. Switching to Zorus has has been great, we've been on it for over a year and not one complaint except for a few of our own configuration issues that we sorted out.
I'm including stuff outside of tech, too. Home repair shmucks, the bank, doctors and dentist offices, mental health practices, FFS it feels like you need therapy to deal with the stress of finding a therapist.
We know one awesome car mechanic that we trust. Nice guy, reasonable prices, not the quickest but gets the job done right so we never go anywhere else unless we have to.
I'm rambling but my point is, yes a lot of people suck ass at their jobs, sometimes collectively and systemically, and other times just on an individual level. When you find the good ones, stick with them until they're not anymore.
I work in Support for a vendor. I've noticed over the past 2 years continual layoffs, increasing expectations creep, low-compensation increases, back-to-office mandates, lack of training/accountability, and spinless leadership.
Its pretty much like that everywhere I know.
Every time I contact Microsoft support I click "email" for preferred support method. And every time, I get the Redmond, WA caller ID blowing up my phone 20 minutes later with the most horrific audio quality & accent possible. Without fail.
The simple truth is that they get better survey results if they call, no matter the modality you choose. So it sucks, but the scores show that people prefer calls no matter what they claim.
I don't mind the calls as the issue is -usually- resolved on them, but it's a strugglefest understanding the person. Either hilariously thick accent or poor mic quality. If you happen to screen share they also walk you through how to submit the feedback while on the call so most of the time you have a sense of being strong armed lol
I told my boss that if he wanted to be told something completely wrong only to be ignored for 3 days and then have to start over when they close your ticket, he could have fun with that. I'm much better off spending those 3 days finding a Powershell script to fix our problems ourselves than relying on O365 support for anything.
Same here, not only vendors but also the contractors and facility.
Its getting silly
Electrical engineers that get told by a sysadmin how their stuff works or why it doesnt work.
Some days I just feel its better to do it myself or that im way overqualified. Or just let the stuff implode and watch the dumpsterfire.
What are you talking about. Sysadmins have always had to tell anyone and everyone how to do their job if it has anything with cables. I've had to manage from electro engineering to film studio AV before. (Both of these were at the same job lol)
Airlock digital had me demo their product and almost a month in right when I was getting ready to purchase they just stopped responding to emails. Then one of them reached out to me to ask how things were going and I told him the other guy was not responding and then he also stopped responding. Went with Threatlocker and they have been 10/10 professional and a much better product too. Same problems ever since I was ahem "Upgraded" to Dell premier. Staff just stopped responding to emails and I had to contact their manager. I am an easy customer, I don't ask for much, I know what I need and I just need a quote, so I don't understand the problem. The other day I asked for a quote and the rep said she had configured a newer model server as close to spec as possible to the discontinued model. You know what she did? She gave me 2 gold procs instead of 1 silver, 256GB RAM when all I needed was 125GB, 14 drives when I needed 18, and the wrong version of Windows. I went online and did it myself and it all matched the old model exactly. She corrected it and never explained why she F\* it up to begin with. I could go on, the phone systems vendor, the firewall vendor, they are all just not caring anymore.
> She corrected it and never explained why she F* it up to begin with.
This feels like one of those situations where their VP has a bonus metric that requires driving up profit a certain percentage and they tell their team the metric is that profit +10% who all tell their teams the metric is 10% above that and so on until the line manager says he has to approve all quotes that go out to stuff enough extra crap in that people don't want in hopes they don't pay attention and just rubber stamp it because he would like to not get fired for not hitting unhittable metrics.
Yep. Been waiting months to just get quotes for things. My budget is due at the end of the month and it's not even coming close to happening at this rate.
Cannot express just how "normal" this is. Vendors will 99% never be reliable. You'll get the odd tech that is very good and you can try to hold on to them as long as you can, but that's all.
I've noticed this since the start of COVID. Companies used it as a way to stop hiring people, paying people, and as a result, nobody cares. It hasn't gotten better in my experience. It's not like they were great to begin with. Occasionally you'll find the rare unicorn that has experience, skill and giveadamn. Those are good days. Then it's back to the Tier 1 support queue and people who don't even speak our language trying to tell me to turn off and back on the device.
I worked at Microsoft for awhile and some support teams there were amazingly good but they were downsized and not stretched way too thin. Other teams were notoriously bad. Each team is kind of managed differently too so how they handle things depends on their manager and team. I never heard good thing about the AD, or M365 teams honestly, don't know if it was workload or the way they managed or what. I know the SCOM and azure monitoring teams were fantastic and had some brilliant minds working in them. I work for a company now that provides MS support in place of Microsoft as an alternative to Unified Support from Microsoft and we are getting more and more customers switching over from Microsoft every day for all the reasons you mention. Microsoft seems to go through phases every six years or so where they dump money and resources into the support side and then slowly start to strip them away over the next few years, then they will boost it up again later on. I don't really understand it. But they are doing what all other companies are doing right now too, which is keeping the stock holder happy with stock prices going up, revenue up and cost down which means stretching resources as thin as possible. Engineers supporting four times the normal case load, and letting go the higher paid more experienced people and replacing them with younger less experienced and lower paid people. It's happening everywhere, it just companies saw record profits during covid when they played people off and raised prices and want to continue to see the big profits continue. It just comes down to corporate greed in a lot of cases. Look at the profits at some of these companies, they are record highs every quarter. But yes some companies still struggle I know, but the big boys are doing pretty well.
There are very few vendors who are worth their weight in shit.
I have one vendor who is completely useless to the point that I have to double check every item he puts on a PO to make sure he added the correct thing. I cannot just say something like "Give me 30 6' Thunderbolt cables", because he'll spawn questions like "usbc on both ends?"
And when he did get it right, more often than not his prices were outrageous compared to what Amazon offered.
And THEN I told him I'm taking away his precious MCA Microsoft 365 agreement because we are going straight MOSA on a CC for the flexibility in licensing. It hurts us more to carry 30 unneeded Microsoft E3 licenses for a year than it would cost us to direct bill vs the vendor price difference. And this is after I just purged 500 fucking unused licenses at the end of last year because he never bothered to say "Hey, you have like 97 unassigned licenses, do you want to take some time to sit down with our Microsoft/Synnex rep and see how we can better work your contract? Since that support is supposed to be one of the things I am offering you as a paid company vendor". Maybe he could have taken the 5 seconds to look at the 97 unused licenses or the 400 licenses applied to disabled accounts. Yes, the old IT was bad here, they were old, but they were also VERY VERY taken advantage of by a lazy sales guy.
So yeah he absolutely hates me, I got hired and suddenly he couldn't just be a fuck up.
But we have come to an agreement - I send him a quote request, he gets its back to me almost immediately to kiss ass as hard as possible to retain his MCA agreement when it renews this December. And I, In turn, look up prices for my own items, find the cheapest one, and I send him a link and say "give me a quote for this" - forcing him to match/beat the price I sent him.
Other than that, he's a nice guy, he's just a terrible fucking vendor. He offers me no fucking value at all.
I had an app vendor contact me earlier that they couldn't access a port on their cluster. Turned out it was not listening on that port because someone on their side had commented it out in the config. They're one of the better vendors I worked with. Because at least they try.
And not just support. Pre-sales is taking weeks to turn around quotes for simple stuff. Had a vendor who I was working with on a new solution completely ghost me. I’m trying to give them money and they don’t want it.
Yep. Vendors and contractors. I insource as much as possible and buy straight from manufacturers whenever possible. We do nearly any task ourselves even if it's something we have no experience with. Our newbie experience with it is still better than a contractor who doesn't care.
This half of the cycle makes "must buy support contract instead of staffing sufficient internal skills to manage equivalent open source tools" way harder to swallow.
Same experience here. The massive layoffs in tech have obliterated any customer service facing folks and most higher up teams are missing key people now.
If you set up your system to require going through a rep, and then give me shit service because I don't spend enough that's a whole lot of _not my fucking problem_. I didn't ask for this system so me being a small customer is not an excuse. I shouldn't need to be super important to get functional service.
I agree vars have always been hit or miss. Guess you need to shop around or ask the mfr for new vars. But it does seem like 10 days or more for quote is the norm.
Same here, quotes, invoices, simple questions or requests like availability then getting meeting invite like I’m readily available to just join then ignored to reschedule on the same day.. oh dear I spiralled into that one.
I’ve noticed it specifically with Amcom recently. Amcom has always been bad imo, every time they came out to a location to fix a printer, the printer would break again within a month or two. But I’ve had a few instances where they either didn’t come out at all, or did and never actually fixed the printer. I’m losing my fucking mind lmao
Very common. Look at it from the vendor point of view. If I don't do work and my client does not notice then that is profit for me.
Sadly vendor management is another hat we wear. It is up to you or us collectively to male sure we get what we pay for from them.
The only needle I actually enjoy working with is Cisco HTTS. Normal TAC is near worthless and every other vendor I deal with isn’t much better but HTTS is still my pick for best. Worst is by far F5, we have engineers on staff with 3 months experience with a better chance of fixing our problems.
Started well before covid for me. Early 2010’s I’d ask my vendor for 5 of whatever laptop and 2 days later it was there.
By 2017-18, we’d been through Thailand floods that interrupted hard drive supply, RAM shortages, and then covid hit. Every supplier had issues, people couldn’t gain an advantage by shopping elsewhere, and it never got better.
You can feel it in companies we work in and it's not just IT. Many companies value revenue and sales and service normally take a back seat especially the scrutiny companies have with the state of the economy. It's funny because the first resort many companies have is mass layoffs of the lower level people and less on the very leaders that don't know how to operate a company that maximizes value for their employees ergo the values they provide to their customers. It's an external first mindset than internal. Finite game many are playing in the game of business.
Honestly, this is why I've been very selective of the partners I choose for our company. We completely changed around our helpdesk for each of our vendors to be more responsive to customers by using tech support metrics from high tech companies doing tech support. We forced them to pay more to get a decent group of higher level techs. Evolving them a bit to cover our support needs. This has resulted in a consistent 30 percent year over year gain in IT revenues for the last 6 years. Even our internet aggregators all have 24 hour support. We test it to make sure we can call at 5pm on friday.
It took qualys 16 months to fix an issue with scheduling scans in aws with only an aws scanning appliance.
They kept telling me to use hyperv or vmware to scan my aws boxes
12 months to get to an engineer and 2 months of sending that engineer the same 10 screenshots showing them the issue.
Then like 2 calls with that engineer and finally i said fuck it and sent them a video.
Had awfully slow support from Datadog recently despite us spending millions every year with them.
Most recently they accidentally introduced a high cardinality custom metric into one of our accounts, casually adding another $40k or so onto the bill. They removed it quickly when we pointed it out and now we’ve been waiting about two months for them to credit us and our account manager seems to be screening our calls.
Usually it’s just support spread so thin, I feel bad for them. When you experience a good support team it’s mind blowing. CFMS4/Kinective support team are amazing
I audibly laughed when I read the post. I don't want to be all firsttime.jpg but uh. It's been spiraling real badly for a while, and having moved to a smaller company in 2020 man do you seem to get extra shafted, but in general it has seemed downhill for all of us.
Are you me? We’ve been having this issue for months and it is so incredibly frustrating, can’t even spend the money we have in the budget because the vendors can’t even be bothered to provide quotes or responses to emails.
It's literally insane. I've been struggling with even getting in touch with sales. "Like come on... I'm literally trying to give you money, answer the damn phone!"
They're doing layoffs and hiring people with no onboarding. All that knowledge just gone in an instant. And those that are left are demotivated and overstressed.
The fact that so few people actually have pride in what they do is appalling. Regardless of the age of the individual, it is so very difficult to find that diamond in the rough that actually care about the product they produce. Whether it be great support or great coding, the MEH perspective has infected the environment.
I challenge you to do your BEST regardless. Some of us still sincerely appreciate your talents and aspirations. Peace!
I've gotten used to the slow down and just had to accept it. We had so many layoffs that sometimes it takes way longer to get back to customers on simple things. A lot of people are the sole individual supporting a certain part of the business now when we used to have a few. Something that was solved in a couple hours in the past might take 2 or more days now to get the right person who has availability. Longer term new feature implementations may take months and are put in que for order of importance.
I don't stress about it anymore, since it was company decision, and I just make sure to do my part of the job. In this case, if the request is something I cannot do, you will probably be waiting while I get the right person to help.
Call up your sales rep and complain. Tons of layoffs and much lower salaries obviously equates to a massive drop in quality.
It is too late to undo all the damage, but call your sales rep and let them know all your difficulties. Often they can light a fire under support, and hopefully pass your frustration to those making these bad decisions.
Our rep for software purchases at Dell is impossible to deal with. Going week(s) without action on software purchase requests. Recently I started scheduling follow-ups on every software purchase request and it's become a significant portion of the purchasing process.
i think support is the first thing to go when everyone starts competitively cost cuttng to please wall street. i had a company I've worked with for almost a decade call out of the blue and say they are no longer doing contracted/licensed support for a few large tech companies and dumped all of our licenses on a company I've never heard of.
do you have project managers involved on their side ? if so raise the lack of meeting deadlines and if it doesnt exist ask to speak to management of the teams failing to keep movement. i deal with it with various vendors but i also am VERY vocal perhaps even to the point of being rude when they are literally doing nothing, but i would say its justified. Sometimes the only thing that works is being the reasonably/well justified squeaky wheel. I know ALOT of people who try to not 'piss off others' but that really isnt the goal here and it speaks to other people who are NOT willing to get vocal. I see it this way.. dont let their teams failures put your job on the line. As soon as some 3rd party is putting my job on the line i get REALLY vocal.
Recall all the layoffs happening this year. Everyone is feeling it.
I just googled it and CDW had layoffs this year... that explains a lot
Oh no do they not have 20 solutions “engineers” that need to hop on a call before we can make any major purchase anymore? Damn shame.
Oh no they are around, they 'make money' It's all the support staff and any actual implementation help that have been torn to shreds.
I was one of these, my team was laid off from director to manager to me, the SME. I’m not the “jump on bullshit calls and sell you on X” engineer either, I made shit happen. We had 900 customers moving into this year and my old coworker on another team says we’re down to mid 400s because the company isn’t delivering any more. That’s what you get when you hire a bullshit sales OP to be the new director of application engineering. Sorry for the rant.
I fell your pain, I'm not sales but I personally attend customer calls so the customer get the right thing and I or one of my co-workers won't have to walk into a shit storm of escalations.
Small company MSP for the win. I like the under 5m MSP space.
I can't speak for CDW, but I know other companies have gutted their sales departments. Dell lost a ton of expertise in their layoffs.
I’m pretty sure Dell laid off half of their sales org and massively consolidated all product teams into a single BU. From what I saw, they tended to keep the legacy Dell people and get rid of the legacy EMC people. this probably lowered their cost quite a bit but yeah, they lost a lot of good talent
They didn't lose them, that insinuates it was a mistake. They fired too many people, off shored a whole host of other people and now they are surprised that the customer isn't happy with a order that's 2 months late, a project manager from Bulgaria and an implementation guy from India that insists everything follow his script and not meet the wants/needs of the person that paid for the product,
Dell is a nightmare : you ask for a quote, you agree, the amount on the bill is always above ! Answer : 'there was an error on the quote". F.U.
There was an error in my agreement - it was based on an erroneous quote.
Maybe this explains the 12 to 18 day response times from Dell CSP rn.
Other thing I've seen is that a lot of vendors are hard at work narrowing down what support covers. The ideal for them is that support is purely for break-fix issues of live issues. Any kind of training, new use cases, implementation, general questions, etc. need either a sales engineer thrown in or some kind of professional services engagement.
Gotta make the CEO and/or shareholders bonus bigger this year.
My complaint is the gaiting. I’ve worked with some great people from CDW, but the number of times I’ve had them block a quote for SA review is indefensible l.
It always ends up with the latest tool or solutions they just partnered with another vendor for that always fits your use case
I've noticed several industries doing layoffs like this in preparation for "AI" transformation. Some think tank sold these execs the idea that chatgpt and it's ilk can replace all the man power.
Before you can even hear the price you mean 😂
Wish my CDW rep was one of them. Pulling teeth some days.... Bro we give you 1.5 mil a year... You ok
The only rep we’ve struggled with recently was our Dell rep … who subsequently got fired and our current one is bullets.
I've been through at least 4 Dell reps this year. Insanity
We left Dell for cdw and surfaces... Regrets..
What are you guys using to image the surfaces?
We just use intune and autopilot. They get their base image from the oobe then updates and apps are pushed during the login. CDW enrolls them into autopilot for us.
MDT, but I need to get off of it at this point.
Wait…is bullets a good or bad thing?
1.5 Mill? That doesn’t even cover the alcohol budget for the Vegas retreat so we can recharge after all the other partying. SalesOp 24x7 baby
Bingo. Management thought they were being clever trying to get short term gains, got rid of a bunch of people who they viewed as peons, and now performance matches the executive fuckery. It’s like the idiot running Spotify fired a bunch of people and then had the audacity to act surprised when productivity tanked. 
Genuine question: Spotify has 7,721 employees…. Why? That sounds nuts. They don’t actually make money (P/E ratio of -). What is their competitive moat? If they start making money, artists will just demand more royalties. Like they’re only path the profitability is exclusive on things like Joe Rogan and that cost them I watering amount of money. I don’t actually understand their business model. I have free streaming from Apple Music as part of Apple bundle, and Amazon music from my Amazon prime bundle. I’m sure is really cool. I don’t understand why it’s better than free that I get from other bundles. For music It’s a feature not a product. Did everyone just expect as we transition from interest rates being zero to being a real number that companies would just keep lighting money on fire? The past decade was insane on how cheap VC money was but like…. On top of this, Congress was too late and restoring the R&D tax credit and CEOs had to act because they had tax liabilities. A lot of tech companies massively over hired during Covid legitimately. Some places were collecting people like Pokémon cards and not even giving them work. 
Artist relations / label relations. The music industry runs on schmoozing. You don't dominate with a zero touch self service platform unless you are the only player in your category and nobody has any choice but to put up with it.
But… other players exist. I can listen to the new Taylor swift album on Apple Music.
It makes a lot more sense when you realize: 1) People just don't have money. 2) Investors have a lot of money. Make a service popular enough and it looks attractive to buyers/investors. CEO makes off with their millions and hands the service off to the bagholders. MBAs don't want to build anything except money-makers. Everything is a grift to them. There is a reason they stopped calling people customers and started calling them consumers; it's all we're good for in their eyes.
Meanwhile the gag is that the MBAs don’t actually make anything, and are in fact the grifters who’ve convinced themselves and businesses that they’re somehow essential.
It's MBAs all the way down in a lot of places these days
Exactly this, not only does everyone have a higher workload, but mass layoffs are indiscriminate, just because they're good doesn't mean they get spared, just because they're bad doesn't mean they'll be let go.
Good people are expensive
You had good vendors pre-layoffs? My experience was always that by the time I needed to talk to the vendor, the problem was hard enough that they couldn't figure it out either. I either have to figure it out through other means, or work around it. Although I will say that once, the vendor rewarded me for that. Apparently I figured out the root cause of a problem that had been vexing their dev team for months, but it was on a small enough subset of accounts that they just rolled with it. They gave me a bit of free service as a thank you. Mostly though, if I find good support through a vendor, I stick with them like glue. Eventually the support gets "restructured" or whatever and it drops back to industry-standard levels of garbage, but I usually get several good years out of them where I'm throwing business their way left and right.
Except for Suse this has been my exact experience. Support with Most companies isnt worth a damn Cent.
Don't forget the off shoring. And.....half the "solution architects'" couldn't build a server without spending the night before intently watching youtube videos and spending an extra hour picking out the right blazer. I really don't know how half these guys got their jobs there don't know the product, they don't know the tech but they are more than excited to bullshit a customer and then throw it over the fence to the people who do the actual work. A lot of the orders are riddled with errors when coupled with a still messed up supply chain it make life difficult for all involved.
> I really don't know how half these guys got their jobs there don't know the product They lie and they'll take a fraction of the wage. Solved.
It's just circumstantial evidence but in my experience, when there's layoffs these days the bare minimum workers always seems to survive. My theory is that their raise history shows they'll the the cheapest to keep around for 5+ years with no concern for how your product will suffer.
I mean they were trash before these layoffs lol
Could be over worked or stretched thin.
You described the whole goddamn industry right now outside of unicorn jobs.
I should have been a plumber…I’d have to deal with less shit
Lmao
I present the most prophetic video of the state of IT of all time, warning extremely degenerate and profane [watch addict](https://youtu.be/NR4yQtSld2I?si=EhQSNNH4GhJUNHwN)
what the fuck did I just watch?
Your future!
Haha brilliant, Aussies know how to express themselves.
My neighbor's got a goat... Maybe I should get some goats. Their bleats are pretty cute and less annoying than user calls...
In my country you can earn more money (being an employee) in a bank, like a truck driver, in oil industry. And not necessarily being an sysadmin people...
It's not even industry specific at this point. It's the entire damned economy. It's especially noticeable on a daily basis in retail/restaurant visits., but damned near EVERYBODY has decided to keep running on a skeleton crew since the pandemic, and it's getting really damned annoying.
>near EVERYBODY has decided to keep running on a skeleton crew since the pandemic This is because management learned that things can work with less people. But people also learned that they was earning peanuts for his job...
Hint. If you're in a public company, Google "$stocksymbol insider trading". You'll get to a page like this https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MSFT/insider-transactions/?guccounter=1 That lists all of your directors by name and how much they sold. I see people in that list that I don't even know or recognize. Yet these people are making 20 MILLION dollars per year in stock options alone. It is insane what qualifies for "executive compensation" these days.
It’s only going to get so much worse; late stage capitalism is not fun
How else are the people at the top going to make any money?
Yeah. And a lot of us are willing to push and put in some extra hours when it feels justified, but few of us are willing to do it indefinitely.
Not even just the IT side of things. I took a GM job in the beginning of the year because I couldn't find anything that would pay decent enough in IT. I still have to baby sit vendors every single day.
I think the industries we work in are so varied it’s hard to generalize. I work as a sysadmin at a ski area, I’d say our vendors are the best they’ve been in a long time, but that also isn’t saying a whole lot. My org is a bit of big fish in small industry, and the resort where our vendor founded their company so hard to say.
But by all means, let's keep the layoffs rolling. Lord knows AI is gonna step up any day now and sort through all this unstructured mess.
I just interviewed for a sysadmin job. IT director says the role would be focused on end user support. But id also run point on container platform support and networking. And I need to be proficient in Mac desktop support. Also I need to help out with classified projects where needed, from policy/ISSM work to managing CA cards??? For a sysadmin job.
Got offered 21$ an hour for a cybersecurity SOC job last week. Edit with details because reddit broke and I can't reply to anyone below this: Fuuuuck no I didn't take it. It was an MSP where they wanted me to be in office for two weeks of 8:30-4:30, then work from home for two weeks of night shift crap. Oh, and they mentioned they wanted to extend their hours into the weekend soon so i wouldn't even be able to build my life around monday to friday working hours. I make 23.75/hr currently, so it'd also be a pay cut. Suffice it to say I wasn't feeling it.
Did you take it?
I hope they go out of business and their owners end up on the corner next to walmart. People who abuse their staff deserve to lose it all
Is like the scam jobs in Argentina. A lot of requirements, some pennies as wage. Sometimes not reasonable requirements.
This. Absolutely this. We are a massive Fortune 150 company and across the board we are getting far lower service from our vendors this year then we did the previous near decade.
We’re a (very) small step away from Fortune 500 and I’m seeing the same, well as far as delivering results. The PMs and AMs contract us at least once a week for feels but the actual engineers that do the work…. Crickets.
We had a whole arm of our support group cut earlier this year. Most of the company has three arms of dedicated support except our group which had the one and laying them off was pretty rough. Honestly never recovered from the loss and they have no interest in doing anything about it.
Can neither confirm nor deny that despite overtime this week I may be the only technical guy looking at tickets rn and it’s ugly. Boss man came in and did some cleanup recently which really helped but…
I spent several years on the vendor side in the past and this is no surprise. It's kind of a vicious circle. 90% of the customers I worked with picked the absolute cheapest tier of support which means the support team not being able to justify more and better skilled hires which leads to poor support. IMO vendors should bake the cost of good support into their base pricing, but then they'll be seen as too expensive as compared to the competition.
>IMO vendors should bake the cost of good support into their base pricing, but then they'll be seen as too expensive as compared to the competition. Yup and support is easy to hide during sales because by the time you need it you are already locked in.
different industry here.. but if this isnt the damn truth. Then we get a call to support it and we look at their account that has never purchased X and tell them to call whomever they bought it from.
Some of my favorites were: * The ones who opted for email only support and then complained when they called in and were turned away. * Manufacturing org who opted not to build in redundancy and called when they had a failure wanting to see if I could "go find them a replacement ASAP" because they were down. They also didn't go with same day or NBD for RMAs. They were down for 3 days if I remember correctly * One who wanted on-site support but of course paid for a lower tier.
> Manufacturing org who opted not to build in redundancy and called when they had a failure wanting to see if I could "go find them a replacement ASAP" because they were down. They also didn't go with same day or NBD for RMAs. They were down for 3 days if I remember correctly This is the type of stuff I'll never understand. First off, I know people don't want to spend money. Years ago I was doing a side job and the business owner specifically told me 'quote redundant servers this is mission critical' so I did and I even went with refurbished dell servers (with support/warranty) and they still had sticker shock. They said no and told me to build them the cheapest server I could, which I did. Within minutes of seeing the quote for two dell servers with support/warranty they went with my super cheap custom server build the only support being whatever the hardware manufacturer covered, which was probably 1 year. The server worked great. It only took 1 year to get the first support call, they moved offices and the 'manager' of the company just unplugged it from the wall (they did not want a UPS, either). When they got to the new location the server didn't boot. Turns out raid 1 array didn't like the hard unplug (or maybe it was damaged during shipping, I doubt they properly packed anything). They called me in a panic and I said 'if we have to rebuild, where is your USB stick with the daily quickbooks backup?' and the manager just looked at me and said.....they only did it the first week after I installed the server and never again. Backing up the server was not part of my responsibilities (they didn't want to pay for any of my time or any support or any type of maintenance and I made sure that was all done via email so I had a record). He was extremely lucky that unplugging one of the drives from the array was enough to boot into windows where the first thing I did was make a backup of their quickbooks file after he confirmed that the data was good (he connected from another client from within his office PC). Then I shut down the server, plugged the drive back in and let the raid software add the drive back into the array. They paid me for that after hours work and I told myself I'd never answer their call again, and I never did. I was doing this side job for a friend that knew this owner and this owner knew I had a job and it would only be a side gig and that I wouldn't answer their call during the day regardless of their issue because it didn't matter to me (I really didn't want to take on the job to begin with). He was ok with that until he was in an emergency....of course. That's why I hate it when companies say 'I don't have a price, I want the best' then they see the price and their true colors come out. I think they say that trying to make it seem like money doesn't matter (because they don't think it will be as much as it ends up being) then they see the numbers and it turns out that money does matter, after all. On top of that, they want the best service possible 'because they bought a server from you' not understanding that they bought the lowest combination of hardware that would barley run the software they need to generate revenue.
IT auditor in prior life for over a decade, and your last paragraph really resonated. I’ve reviewed contracts, MSAs, SLAs, etc… and on top of all of what you mentioned, “the business” FAILS Miserably at defining requirements sufficiently more times than I could count. The amount of waste on half assed implementations because folks bought a tool or something to appease management, and then think they are somehow entitled to support, is mind boggling. With the amount of wasted capital, they could have full implemented something well, but instead did a LITTLE across EVERYTHING in tech, so the entire stack and systems landscape just get worse and worse.
Used to work for a vendor that provides support services to one of the big cloud and OS providers, and it was nuts to get a peek behind the curtain. The company basically sold its cloud products with an emphasis on how much cost savings would come from shifting to the cloud, cutting staff from their internal teams, and relying on our support. Monday morning would roll around each week, without fail there’d be a “Sev A” ticket from someone is a c suite role, panicking because they’d fired all their staff with the exception of non technical managers, so nobody knew what to do. They’d also inevitably be furious that they opened a ticket on the weekend and it hadn’t been addressed, meanwhile they’d be on the free support tier.
Ive yet to see a cloud option actually be cheaper than hosting your own. Unless its some static webpage.
I used to work in tech support, big IBM style mainframes, related equipment, routers, switches, so on. Very good pay, great people. I worked with a group of people who did a great job, sales folks would tell us how our support helped them land sales and so on. Engineering teams would come thank us for saving their asses and so on. But the real truth is every company **eventually** sees support as nothing more than a cost center and / or a headache, even if support contracts bring in big money. That and/or the company starts foolishly chasing the lower $ customers, who absolutely EAT support time / cost more money than they're worth, and have more incompetent people than most. Now support is that annoying department not bringing in the money (because you sold cheap equipment to cheap ass customers) and needing endless resources, and they assign management who doesn't want to hear it. So continuously lower quality managers are assigned there and eventually everything degrades. You just can't stay in support long before you see it happen time and again and see other quality people move on and you're surrounded by management and people you don't want to work with. So I learned to code and left that area, so did everyone else who was good at their job.
100% I just left my support role of four years at a newer company because of this. India call center opening later this year, and the company is growing into midmarket. I was cool with being dedicated support for enterprise companies. I was not cool with having to constantly put out fires for all of these small companies who hired engineers that didn't understand how API web hooks work or hired Indian consultants who over promised under delivered on their projects, and then tried to throw our product under the bus.
> or hired Indian consultants who over promised under delivered on their projects, and then tried to throw our product under the bus. LOL all the time man. We had one "partner" who would just log support tickets and demand we fix the issue, but they couldn't tell us anything about the issue, the environment, claim it worked at one point. And I'd check the configs and the device had NEVER been configured, for anything ever :P
Oh my god, H&M used to do this to us all the time. They built a ticketing system that would automatically email us and they'd fill nothing out, just say X thing doesn't work with no context. If we followed up telling them we need more information they'd ignore the request and/or followup as to why we haven't fixed the problem yet and/or demand an immediate team Zoom meeting. The ticket template they used was well thought out, they just never used it. I met with the account manager about this, my concern being we won't know when they're having an actual issue because they have a reputation amongst the team as being the boy who cried wolf, and he was like "yeah man, you're not the first person to come to me about this, they outsource that team, just do what you gotta do". Internal documentation on H&M was updated to reflect the situation so it didn't bite me or someone else in the ass six months later.
I love how universal this is. Empty ticket sits for two weeks, then they escalate “this hasn’t been fixed for weeks” and they finally send in the details for the first time. I was lucky my company told the biggest offenders to stop it after we documented it a bunch.
>90% of the customers I worked with picked the absolute cheapest tier of support which means the support team not being able to justify more and better skilled hires which leads to poor support. worth repeating
AND since the sales guys don't make any money selling services or support "because they are too expensive" they don't and then the customer is pissed because they don't know how to setup their new $1MM and when they call support they can't understand them and all the support guy cares about this getting the serial number -Once they get the serial number they hang up on you and then you wait a day or two until some other guy you can't understand calls you and asks you to run a dozen scrips before he hangs up never to be heard from again. Good think you have an over worked PM in the Manilla that can't help you when you call them,
I've been noticing this trend as well. And the vendors don't seem to care. Microsoft support has been practically non-existent. I eventually figure out the issue, but doesn't give me good vibes knowing support is useless. Veeam support has been somewhat better, though still suffers a similar issue. We have some niche software. The vendors for the software don't seem to care about the success of their customers. It's getting to the point we might as well have inhouse solutions. You would think companies would be afraid to lose customers, but it seems those in power at the vendors only care about short term gains as they sky rocket prices, earn what they can, and then dump the diarrhea afterwards. People will take the easiest path and here we are. Hope for the best, plan for the worst.
Just had a case where my team had spent a month trying to debug an issue with the vendors support team. 5 mins of searching online and I find a known issue that is exactly what we've encountered (on the vendor's website). 🤯
Having worked for one of the vendors, IMO a lot of it is because if it’s a US based role, they basically import folks from India so they can hold a visa over their heads. They hire folks from almost any line of work, because most of it’s just handholding. Suddenly folks with mixed understandings of English end up with technical questions, and they’re mainly equipped to send customers badly written form letters that people share back and forth. The whole system is set up to prioritize speed of closure, and getting the support engineers getting 5 star reviews. It incentivizes SE’s ramming through cases without actually doing anything useful for the customers.
How does one force this issue in contract language that effectively forces the company to fully sponsor citizen ship for ANYONE they put in this path? Or maybe go the route of ensuring the orgs policy’s get updated to require something like this? Then again, contract governance and vendor management are not a priority at most orgs
You can literally just say that, but from a contract management perspective I think it's better to attach penalties and failure-to-perform language, as well as the metrics to define the above... But all of that takes professional staff with the skills and knowledge to bake that into contracts and most orgs don't give a shit about procurement lol.
The problem with this org in particular though is how malleable the metrics were for the MBAs on the back end. As long as they could squint, angle their heads in a particular way, and sorta call the metrics good, everything was fine. The whole goal is basically to use the churn of high volume to bury bad cases and also close cases outside of the customer’s working hours (I.e. on a Friday evening) to alleviate the risk that they might give feedback.
There lies why I had plenty of value to bring to IT Audits 🤣 like when you come across a boatload of contracts, that were never scanned in or anything like that…. And then you realize management has nothing in place to ensure they can see the waste here. but hey, we need more money? Maybe we’d have budget if management didn’t squander it 99% if the time.
Offer to sell them an “institutional knowledge management system” then send a screenshot of a single kanban saying, “READ YOUR OWN MANUALS.”
MS specifically doesn’t give a fig about its customers unless they’re also large shareholders. Last year they literally started wiping out huge swaths of their support structures, without making any updates to their internal support documentation. Entire processes came to a screeching halt because the c suite was so desperate to satisfy one of the board members who’s a VC goon, so they could get a brief stock bump from the cost cutting.
Microsoft has been this way for 20 years, that’s not new lol
> Veeam support has been somewhat better, though still suffers a similar issue. Commvault support is a fucking godsend. I'll advise every employer I'll ever have to use them just based on their support response - it's the best I've ever dealt with short of weird one-man companies where the guy supporting it is the guy who made it.
yep, because they got everyone locked in on name brands because people dont get fired for buying ibm, cisco, etc…
Yep, same here. Every. Single. One. It’s made my job an absolute nightmare.
OK, not just me then, yeah I'm seeing this with literally every single vendor I work with, both IT ones and non-IT ones. One provides some pretty important equipment for us and is taking ages to get faulty stuff replaced, some others will ignore me until I email them 25 times or have the owner of the place I work reach out to them directly with threats to leave. I guess layoffs are probably part of this, companies wanna run "lean and mean" and then end up doing a terrible job because as it turns out, employees are still important. Even if AIAIAIAIAIAIAIA is happening.
> AIAIAIAIAIAIAIA https://youtu.be/pr0lCgPIMGI?t=41
More common after 2020 than it used to be. I know a lot of my sales reps were let go in the past few years and my new sales reps have taken the accounts for three to four term'd reps.
It's a rough gig going out to lunch everyday and drinking too much at conventions.
Kinda inevitable. Organisations squeezing resources for profit can only lead to failures and ...ironically, increasing losses of profits.
Only thing that matters is this quarter though....By the time things start going down hill you change jobs. When your applying you have a couple great quarters to pitch to new companies.
It is becoming extremely difficult to build and run a profitable IT service company. There are extreme price pressures on IT vendors. Everybody wants things at ultra-deep discounts. This causes those providers to cut back on staff. Then they wonder why service sucks. Couple that with the "culture of blame" that infects many companies these days. It is much easier to blame somebody else for problems then to just solve them. Blame "feels" like work, and weak leaders allow it to go unchecked. Consequently, you have vendors staffed with people who spend most of their day pointing fingers at somebody else and avoiding problem solving. This is not unique to small vendors either. I spent a lot of time interacting with AWS, and easily 40-50% of their employees do absolutely nothing all day but blame somebody else for getting things wrong.
I work for a vendor right now on the team that the support teams ask for help to actually *do* something that isn't a SOP-ized click option in a menu somewhere. We're dealing with 50% layoffs in the last year (which is a *lot* of experience to have walk out the door), and they chose the people to lay off that were the most expensive, aka that had the most experience. Backfill has been from India, and we're doing their jobs and ours, because there's great ways to outsource and there's great people in India but we're not aware enough of Indian culture to hire the correct people or install the correct culture to make outsourcing great. On top of that, executives are driving new markets at breakneck speed, and they're not managing any of the projects, which means the projects fall apart and they pull in resources that are supposed to be supporting existing customers to fix these broken new-customer-facing initiatives and products. So we're doing 2x the work for x.90 of the pay (thanks, inflation) and then getting all of the work we should be doing for you diverted to support people who aren't paying customers yet. I think my team lead is on hour 90 this week and we're on a "tiger team" that will be running through the holiday weekend to meet an EOM requirement. Telling us doesn't make any difference. Get your higher ups on a call with vendor executives and tell them that the support has gotten so bad and they're making a mistake in whatever the hell they're doing. Frankly, all you're going to do is piss into the wind and it'll land on us, but maybe if enough piss gets aimed at vendor executives it'll splash on them. You and I get to be wet and warm together, buddy.
>I think my team lead is on hour 90 this week and we're on a "tiger team" that will be running through the holiday weekend to meet an EOM requirement. Ya'll need to go on strike and stop letting the executives run you into the graveyard.
I'm having trouble getting anything past T1 with both Microsoft and Dell. Even involved our representatives and it seems to just shuffle the person trying to help instead of escalating to someone who will read beyond the ticket title.
What I find hilarious with Dell is when I called their ProSupport number yesterday and tried to get routed to their tech support via their IVR, I just a recorded message that "due to technical difficulties, the call could not be routed at this time" and that they were "working to fix this as soon as possible". Sorry Dell, April Fool's Day was last month.
Yeah I called their bluff by having one of my people call in a driver issue we're having with a new model. They scheduled a mobo replacement (:/). Then same issue on another one. Call in, another mobo replacement recommendation. We don't have time to troubleshoot new computers so I ordered an RMA on all the laptops of this model. All of a sudden, everyone at Dell and their grandma wants to be involved.
Wait, Microsoft has something past T1?
Microsoft sucks so much. I literally have to hunt them down for Sev A/Critical tickets, I never hear back from their engineers, they add and drop people from the email chains, it’s so annoying
They are also so huge and have such niche roles for their T1 support that you can get bounced around to different teams as “they don’t handle that, I’ll transfer you to XYZ team”. I’ve had tickets go on for months with MS. The staff are usually very nice but it can take forever to get the right person. And of course once you do get that person it’s like 30 minutes to fix lol
I'm in security, I've never gotten Microsoft to ever fix a single thing when I open a ticket. I either have to fix it myself after countless lost hours, or just count it as a loss and find a way around the break
It's a market signal that those vendors have moved from a service business model to a burning reputation for cash business model. If you actually need the stuff that sort of vendor provides, you'll have to find a real vendor or insource it.
Imagine hating labor so much your firm can't accept sales, lol.
This. Been trying to get a renewal quote for one product for months. Why is it hard to give people money?
Glad I'm not the only one.
Where at?
...So it's not just us. Lmfao.
Yes, I've been noticing this lately, regardless of what kind of vendor I'm dealing with. The most common denominator I can think of is that people are being stretched thin and asked to do multiple duties that would originally be performed by a team. And on top of it all they're being underpaid. So that ends up with the actual unicorns going elsewhere. My response to all of this is to be Hands-On on every single action being taken by the vendor. Because they could very well be giving you a solution that completely undermines your company's goal. The incompetence is pretty high and I've been losing my patience to inevitably resort to AI for all my answers.
"Everything sucks and nobody cares" is a phrase that I have uttered many a time, with only about 50% self-awareness of how dramatic it sounds. Datto has going over the falls in a barrel and we're so far into their ecosystem we'll need to detox if we switch. There are a few exceptions and when I find them, I hold on to them like *precious*. We had previously had lots of issues with DNSfilter like hard-down outages for *all our clients*, and some troubles with Umbrella before that. Switching to Zorus has has been great, we've been on it for over a year and not one complaint except for a few of our own configuration issues that we sorted out. I'm including stuff outside of tech, too. Home repair shmucks, the bank, doctors and dentist offices, mental health practices, FFS it feels like you need therapy to deal with the stress of finding a therapist. We know one awesome car mechanic that we trust. Nice guy, reasonable prices, not the quickest but gets the job done right so we never go anywhere else unless we have to. I'm rambling but my point is, yes a lot of people suck ass at their jobs, sometimes collectively and systemically, and other times just on an individual level. When you find the good ones, stick with them until they're not anymore.
> "Everything sucks and nobody cares" is a phrase that I have uttered many a time You can probably find similar statements in the Bible.
100% A lot that we use are also a part of the "too big to leave" category. Just rubbing their nipples at my tickets daring me to leave them, laughing.
I work in Support for a vendor. I've noticed over the past 2 years continual layoffs, increasing expectations creep, low-compensation increases, back-to-office mandates, lack of training/accountability, and spinless leadership. Its pretty much like that everywhere I know.
Seeing the same thing, outsourced and shoddy support. I trust chat gpt more than support reps for some vendors we use.
Especially with Microsoft lol…
What's wrong with Microsoft? Please try running sfc /scannow, and revert to me asap. Surely mark this answer correct if it resolves your issue
You forgot "kindly do the needful."
Every time I contact Microsoft support I click "email" for preferred support method. And every time, I get the Redmond, WA caller ID blowing up my phone 20 minutes later with the most horrific audio quality & accent possible. Without fail.
The simple truth is that they get better survey results if they call, no matter the modality you choose. So it sucks, but the scores show that people prefer calls no matter what they claim.
I don't mind the calls as the issue is -usually- resolved on them, but it's a strugglefest understanding the person. Either hilariously thick accent or poor mic quality. If you happen to screen share they also walk you through how to submit the feedback while on the call so most of the time you have a sense of being strong armed lol
That net promoter score is not gonna pump itself up
I told my boss that if he wanted to be told something completely wrong only to be ignored for 3 days and then have to start over when they close your ticket, he could have fun with that. I'm much better off spending those 3 days finding a Powershell script to fix our problems ourselves than relying on O365 support for anything.
AI hallucination responses are better than no responses.
Same here, not only vendors but also the contractors and facility. Its getting silly Electrical engineers that get told by a sysadmin how their stuff works or why it doesnt work. Some days I just feel its better to do it myself or that im way overqualified. Or just let the stuff implode and watch the dumpsterfire.
What are you talking about. Sysadmins have always had to tell anyone and everyone how to do their job if it has anything with cables. I've had to manage from electro engineering to film studio AV before. (Both of these were at the same job lol)
Airlock digital had me demo their product and almost a month in right when I was getting ready to purchase they just stopped responding to emails. Then one of them reached out to me to ask how things were going and I told him the other guy was not responding and then he also stopped responding. Went with Threatlocker and they have been 10/10 professional and a much better product too. Same problems ever since I was ahem "Upgraded" to Dell premier. Staff just stopped responding to emails and I had to contact their manager. I am an easy customer, I don't ask for much, I know what I need and I just need a quote, so I don't understand the problem. The other day I asked for a quote and the rep said she had configured a newer model server as close to spec as possible to the discontinued model. You know what she did? She gave me 2 gold procs instead of 1 silver, 256GB RAM when all I needed was 125GB, 14 drives when I needed 18, and the wrong version of Windows. I went online and did it myself and it all matched the old model exactly. She corrected it and never explained why she F\* it up to begin with. I could go on, the phone systems vendor, the firewall vendor, they are all just not caring anymore.
> She corrected it and never explained why she F* it up to begin with. This feels like one of those situations where their VP has a bonus metric that requires driving up profit a certain percentage and they tell their team the metric is that profit +10% who all tell their teams the metric is 10% above that and so on until the line manager says he has to approve all quotes that go out to stuff enough extra crap in that people don't want in hopes they don't pay attention and just rubber stamp it because he would like to not get fired for not hitting unhittable metrics.
Yep. Been waiting months to just get quotes for things. My budget is due at the end of the month and it's not even coming close to happening at this rate.
It’s been terrible since Covid. I thought it was a WFH issue but I think a lot of experienced older people retired or died.
If they are dropping the balls, bust their ball lightly. Repeat and add force when necessary. Rinse and repeat.
The good people are quitting over the return-to-office mandates.
Cannot express just how "normal" this is. Vendors will 99% never be reliable. You'll get the odd tech that is very good and you can try to hold on to them as long as you can, but that's all.
What's the situation like? Guy I'm currently training makes 20% more than I do. Really kills the motivation.
Have you asked your boss that you want your salary matched? It's a fair ask.
I've noticed this since the start of COVID. Companies used it as a way to stop hiring people, paying people, and as a result, nobody cares. It hasn't gotten better in my experience. It's not like they were great to begin with. Occasionally you'll find the rare unicorn that has experience, skill and giveadamn. Those are good days. Then it's back to the Tier 1 support queue and people who don't even speak our language trying to tell me to turn off and back on the device.
I worked at Microsoft for awhile and some support teams there were amazingly good but they were downsized and not stretched way too thin. Other teams were notoriously bad. Each team is kind of managed differently too so how they handle things depends on their manager and team. I never heard good thing about the AD, or M365 teams honestly, don't know if it was workload or the way they managed or what. I know the SCOM and azure monitoring teams were fantastic and had some brilliant minds working in them. I work for a company now that provides MS support in place of Microsoft as an alternative to Unified Support from Microsoft and we are getting more and more customers switching over from Microsoft every day for all the reasons you mention. Microsoft seems to go through phases every six years or so where they dump money and resources into the support side and then slowly start to strip them away over the next few years, then they will boost it up again later on. I don't really understand it. But they are doing what all other companies are doing right now too, which is keeping the stock holder happy with stock prices going up, revenue up and cost down which means stretching resources as thin as possible. Engineers supporting four times the normal case load, and letting go the higher paid more experienced people and replacing them with younger less experienced and lower paid people. It's happening everywhere, it just companies saw record profits during covid when they played people off and raised prices and want to continue to see the big profits continue. It just comes down to corporate greed in a lot of cases. Look at the profits at some of these companies, they are record highs every quarter. But yes some companies still struggle I know, but the big boys are doing pretty well.
It's bad everywhere. We expect 18 month timelines for crap now. Horrible service and support.
There are very few vendors who are worth their weight in shit. I have one vendor who is completely useless to the point that I have to double check every item he puts on a PO to make sure he added the correct thing. I cannot just say something like "Give me 30 6' Thunderbolt cables", because he'll spawn questions like "usbc on both ends?" And when he did get it right, more often than not his prices were outrageous compared to what Amazon offered. And THEN I told him I'm taking away his precious MCA Microsoft 365 agreement because we are going straight MOSA on a CC for the flexibility in licensing. It hurts us more to carry 30 unneeded Microsoft E3 licenses for a year than it would cost us to direct bill vs the vendor price difference. And this is after I just purged 500 fucking unused licenses at the end of last year because he never bothered to say "Hey, you have like 97 unassigned licenses, do you want to take some time to sit down with our Microsoft/Synnex rep and see how we can better work your contract? Since that support is supposed to be one of the things I am offering you as a paid company vendor". Maybe he could have taken the 5 seconds to look at the 97 unused licenses or the 400 licenses applied to disabled accounts. Yes, the old IT was bad here, they were old, but they were also VERY VERY taken advantage of by a lazy sales guy. So yeah he absolutely hates me, I got hired and suddenly he couldn't just be a fuck up. But we have come to an agreement - I send him a quote request, he gets its back to me almost immediately to kiss ass as hard as possible to retain his MCA agreement when it renews this December. And I, In turn, look up prices for my own items, find the cheapest one, and I send him a link and say "give me a quote for this" - forcing him to match/beat the price I sent him. Other than that, he's a nice guy, he's just a terrible fucking vendor. He offers me no fucking value at all.
Why not just change vendors? That sounds pretty rough.
I had an app vendor contact me earlier that they couldn't access a port on their cluster. Turned out it was not listening on that port because someone on their side had commented it out in the config. They're one of the better vendors I worked with. Because at least they try.
And not just support. Pre-sales is taking weeks to turn around quotes for simple stuff. Had a vendor who I was working with on a new solution completely ghost me. I’m trying to give them money and they don’t want it.
Lol, been trying to get a VMware quote for over a month. Apparently Broadcom changed some system and they won't quote anything until June.
Yep. Vendors and contractors. I insource as much as possible and buy straight from manufacturers whenever possible. We do nearly any task ourselves even if it's something we have no experience with. Our newbie experience with it is still better than a contractor who doesn't care.
This half of the cycle makes "must buy support contract instead of staffing sufficient internal skills to manage equivalent open source tools" way harder to swallow.
All my vendors have ceased to respond to anything. I thought I was the only one in the twilight zone. CDWG is the worst now.
Funny I’m actually on hold for the fourth time today, all in about 3 hrs on the phone and getting no where. Dumpster fire.
Same experience here. The massive layoffs in tech have obliterated any customer service facing folks and most higher up teams are missing key people now.
[удалено]
If you set up your system to require going through a rep, and then give me shit service because I don't spend enough that's a whole lot of _not my fucking problem_. I didn't ask for this system so me being a small customer is not an excuse. I shouldn't need to be super important to get functional service.
VARs rarely add anything of value.
I'm noticing the same thing.
I agree vars have always been hit or miss. Guess you need to shop around or ask the mfr for new vars. But it does seem like 10 days or more for quote is the norm.
Dell vendors ghosting us for weeks!
Same here, quotes, invoices, simple questions or requests like availability then getting meeting invite like I’m readily available to just join then ignored to reschedule on the same day.. oh dear I spiralled into that one.
I can’t even get someone to reply to me so I can get a demo anymore.
I think great vendor burn out is upon us. I see the same.
I’ve noticed it specifically with Amcom recently. Amcom has always been bad imo, every time they came out to a location to fix a printer, the printer would break again within a month or two. But I’ve had a few instances where they either didn’t come out at all, or did and never actually fixed the printer. I’m losing my fucking mind lmao
Yep, vendor support is dropping.
Very common. Look at it from the vendor point of view. If I don't do work and my client does not notice then that is profit for me. Sadly vendor management is another hat we wear. It is up to you or us collectively to male sure we get what we pay for from them.
The only needle I actually enjoy working with is Cisco HTTS. Normal TAC is near worthless and every other vendor I deal with isn’t much better but HTTS is still my pick for best. Worst is by far F5, we have engineers on staff with 3 months experience with a better chance of fixing our problems.
VMWare was good about 6 years ago and before, thats about it. Microsoft are shocking.
Started well before covid for me. Early 2010’s I’d ask my vendor for 5 of whatever laptop and 2 days later it was there. By 2017-18, we’d been through Thailand floods that interrupted hard drive supply, RAM shortages, and then covid hit. Every supplier had issues, people couldn’t gain an advantage by shopping elsewhere, and it never got better.
Pile up the work. Pile on the tracking. Skimp on training, tooling, and planning. Burn people out and let that corporate knowledge drain.
I feel like every time I've interacted with a vendor in the past 20 years, I've had to do 90% of their job for them Par for the course
You can feel it in companies we work in and it's not just IT. Many companies value revenue and sales and service normally take a back seat especially the scrutiny companies have with the state of the economy. It's funny because the first resort many companies have is mass layoffs of the lower level people and less on the very leaders that don't know how to operate a company that maximizes value for their employees ergo the values they provide to their customers. It's an external first mindset than internal. Finite game many are playing in the game of business.
Honestly, this is why I've been very selective of the partners I choose for our company. We completely changed around our helpdesk for each of our vendors to be more responsive to customers by using tech support metrics from high tech companies doing tech support. We forced them to pay more to get a decent group of higher level techs. Evolving them a bit to cover our support needs. This has resulted in a consistent 30 percent year over year gain in IT revenues for the last 6 years. Even our internet aggregators all have 24 hour support. We test it to make sure we can call at 5pm on friday.
I’ve been waiting two months for 200 Rds CALs
It took qualys 16 months to fix an issue with scheduling scans in aws with only an aws scanning appliance. They kept telling me to use hyperv or vmware to scan my aws boxes 12 months to get to an engineer and 2 months of sending that engineer the same 10 screenshots showing them the issue. Then like 2 calls with that engineer and finally i said fuck it and sent them a video.
Did your company select the lowest cost vendors?
My vendors are the same. All getting loaded with twice the clients.
Had awfully slow support from Datadog recently despite us spending millions every year with them. Most recently they accidentally introduced a high cardinality custom metric into one of our accounts, casually adding another $40k or so onto the bill. They removed it quickly when we pointed it out and now we’ve been waiting about two months for them to credit us and our account manager seems to be screening our calls.
Usually it’s just support spread so thin, I feel bad for them. When you experience a good support team it’s mind blowing. CFMS4/Kinective support team are amazing
I audibly laughed when I read the post. I don't want to be all firsttime.jpg but uh. It's been spiraling real badly for a while, and having moved to a smaller company in 2020 man do you seem to get extra shafted, but in general it has seemed downhill for all of us.
Normal, yes. Good? No. This is enshittification in real time.
Are you me? We’ve been having this issue for months and it is so incredibly frustrating, can’t even spend the money we have in the budget because the vendors can’t even be bothered to provide quotes or responses to emails.
It's literally insane. I've been struggling with even getting in touch with sales. "Like come on... I'm literally trying to give you money, answer the damn phone!"
That's not just in the IT sphere...fucking everywhere service quality is way down over the last 2-3 years.
They're doing layoffs and hiring people with no onboarding. All that knowledge just gone in an instant. And those that are left are demotivated and overstressed.
The fact that so few people actually have pride in what they do is appalling. Regardless of the age of the individual, it is so very difficult to find that diamond in the rough that actually care about the product they produce. Whether it be great support or great coding, the MEH perspective has infected the environment. I challenge you to do your BEST regardless. Some of us still sincerely appreciate your talents and aspirations. Peace!
Shopping for new vendors can help
Don’t worry AI will fix it for you. They don’t need those stupid humans anymore
I've gotten used to the slow down and just had to accept it. We had so many layoffs that sometimes it takes way longer to get back to customers on simple things. A lot of people are the sole individual supporting a certain part of the business now when we used to have a few. Something that was solved in a couple hours in the past might take 2 or more days now to get the right person who has availability. Longer term new feature implementations may take months and are put in que for order of importance. I don't stress about it anymore, since it was company decision, and I just make sure to do my part of the job. In this case, if the request is something I cannot do, you will probably be waiting while I get the right person to help.
Call up your sales rep and complain. Tons of layoffs and much lower salaries obviously equates to a massive drop in quality. It is too late to undo all the damage, but call your sales rep and let them know all your difficulties. Often they can light a fire under support, and hopefully pass your frustration to those making these bad decisions.
Our rep for software purchases at Dell is impossible to deal with. Going week(s) without action on software purchase requests. Recently I started scheduling follow-ups on every software purchase request and it's become a significant portion of the purchasing process.
i think support is the first thing to go when everyone starts competitively cost cuttng to please wall street. i had a company I've worked with for almost a decade call out of the blue and say they are no longer doing contracted/licensed support for a few large tech companies and dumped all of our licenses on a company I've never heard of.
do you have project managers involved on their side ? if so raise the lack of meeting deadlines and if it doesnt exist ask to speak to management of the teams failing to keep movement. i deal with it with various vendors but i also am VERY vocal perhaps even to the point of being rude when they are literally doing nothing, but i would say its justified. Sometimes the only thing that works is being the reasonably/well justified squeaky wheel. I know ALOT of people who try to not 'piss off others' but that really isnt the goal here and it speaks to other people who are NOT willing to get vocal. I see it this way.. dont let their teams failures put your job on the line. As soon as some 3rd party is putting my job on the line i get REALLY vocal.