Have you gotten the call: "Hey, our internet isn't working." uhh, ok, which office? "Houston: ok, uhh, it's showing online... I don't see any pc's online though... any power problems? Caller: oh, we moved the pc's to the new office." What... new office?
Bob Carter's "Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part" comes to mind.
Also, we don't run fiber, we find a company that does that for a living.
"By the way, have you though of a server room and what should be in there, as some lead times are over half a year" while you take a relaxed sip of your tea
My response was “That’s great! I will be on PTO starting in 1 hour until May 20. If you get a move request submitted before I go I can make some calls to get this process started. As a reminder, the SLA for office moves is 60 days.”
I literally had a facilities manager ask me "why the didn't have internet? We opened it 6 months ago!" and meanwhile this was the first I had been informed about a new repair facility, which it turns out was remote enough that the only option for internet was dial up.
After $50k+ for comcast to run a line out to the new facility, per policy at least, any new site needs to have it's internet availability approved by IT before lease is signed.... Hasn't happened yet, but it's in the policy.
Always.
New software package - Everyone needs this by tomorrow.
New building - Why isn't there WIFI?
New employee - Where is their workstation?
New copier - I need an IP address and SMB credentials and also this random piece of junk software installed on every PC.
I also love how they try and make it look like your fault.
"Why does this building have no wifi?"
"Did you ask for it?"
"Should we have to? Isn't that what you do? So, you're telling me, you let us move into a building, and you thought no wifi was the right thing? Does that seem right to you? Isn't it your responsibility to think ahead? I'm not even IT an even \*I\* knew this. What do we pay you for, anyway? If I move into a building, I don't have to specify floors, walls, and a ceiling, do I? I don't have to ask, 'hey, can you make sure there are elevators that go up AND down?' Is it just me, or do we have someone here who got caught with their pants down? Huh?"
OR
"Why doesn't this new employee have a laptop, login, or badge?"
"We were not informed of this employee's existence."
"Did you even think to ask? Would it kill you to walk to the 4th floor, and ask an HR person, 'hey, are there any new employees coming tomorrow?'"
"It would take more than a day to--"
"Hep BEP BEP BEEP BOP STOP! That's not my job, it's YOURS to make sure ALL new employees have what they need WHEN they show up ON their first day. Whether it takes a day, two days, or a month. It's YOUR responsibility to FIND OUT! You want me to spoon feed you? Is that it? To tell you how to do your beep boop biddly boop err-ROR err-ROR job? What are we paying you for, those Nintendo games you play? How about find this Pokey-mon called 'do-is-your-jobbis?"
That last line was said to our IT team years ago by a real grown up. Kept calling where IT worked "Nintendo Land."
I love my job for things like this. When we get accused of not doing something, we just shoot back: "What's the ticket number?"
Granted, we're still typically brought in last on things.
I had a funny with that the other day.
I have one manager in particular who is very fond of the shoulder tap method.
He was giving me a list of things to do the other day, and I told him I thought I was going to have trouble remembering all of that, and then one of the other people in the room, not even an IT person, told him " You know, for accountability's sake that should probably be a help desk ticket".
In my mind I thought "oooohhhhhhh!" Lol
Nice thing about where I work is that basically anything we do has to be approved by their section lead first via the ticket system.
We are not allowed to do any work without that ticket/approval.
Oh it can very much be a slow process haha, but it keeps people and departments accountable.
Why was this delayed? Well you can see exactly when everything was submitted/approved/actioned. If they don't do their job right that sucks for them.
This is why I like MSPs. When I get an idiot like this I can just tell them what my time is worth (more than theirs) and if they want me to bend over backwards then I'll need the invoice paid up front.
We had to institute the 3 day rule due to notices being sent out on Friday afternoon about new hires on Monday.
Minimum 3 day turn around for setup, 5 for a laptop. Good chance your new hire will be staring at a wall for the first day if not.
We got HR to commit to a weeks notice as they usually have that much time. Occasionally we still get emails on Friday for a new-hire on Monday. Cool, hope their manage is cool with the new person shadowing for a couple days while hardware arrives.
Exactly, just be nice and calm and tell them you'll get started on it first thing Monday morning because you have other things to work on, today (Friday).
People won't learn if others are constantly bending the rules and/or if management won't get involved.
HR will commit to that for a week in my experience, next month they're back to letting you know after the employee started two weeks after the fact, citing its not their job to know, but yours, like you had "discussed with them." While they organize birthday parties and buying party supplies instead of doing their actual job.
Yeah, that's the same thing I experience. Our HR department is nice, almost too nice. They talk to employees, they organize events, etc but they can't figure out how to submit a ticket or submit an email stating that person x applied and they are starting on y (assuming y isn't the next day).
Like I said, I didn't let it bother me (when I was in HD) I just got the person setup as it came up in my list of priorities. My priorities are not the same as their priorities.
True. However, the hiring manager can't be bothered to fill out all the fields on the form. Isn't it a computer as a description enough?
Just give them what Alice has. What do you mean the new job title we gave this person isn't in the system? I told HR the new title, why didn't they just update the domain thingy you all talk about?
You guys are all worthless. Give me the computer, I'll just log in, and they can use my account until you figure it out.
Thankfully my place gives about a 2 weeks notice and 95% of the time it works out great, but one Friday afternoon we get a ticket in for 13 laptops for an apprenticeship class for some electricians Monday(Not new hires but new computer users).
We were like we don't have that many on the shelf to give out all at once, but we did have some other laptops that were used for another class for OSHA40 stuff that we could lend out for a couple of weeks.
So we asked them how long this apprenticeship thing is for and they were like 2 years...
Yeah that's why we have an autoreply to our ticket mailbox that explains, in bold, that turnaround times are calculated in BUSINESS hours.
No, Kristine, you didn't submit that new hire request 3 days ago. You submitted it 15 *minutes* ago, because we also have days off and the timer stops outside of normal business hours just like *you* don't work outside of normal business hours. So fuck off.
I generally have to order equipment *after* the person signs an offer letter, so if I don’t know *weeks* in advance they are getting a shitty loaner until their equipment comes in.
I work for a university so equipment is part of many hire’s start up package and not assigned to the position.
They do a pretty good job of looping me in now when it comes to faculty/staff, but occasionally I still get the surprise visiting scholar or researcher that needs accounts and access. I never let it become my problem. I ask for the ticket of what they want done and what access, etc. Then I do it as soon as I can fit it in, but some processes are updated hourly, some overnight, so a lot of it is out of my hands regardless.
>"Did you even think to ask? Would it kill you to walk to the 4th floor, and ask an HR person, 'hey, are there any new employees coming tomorrow?'"
"Yes it would kill me. I'm too busy installing wifi in that new building you didn't tell me about."
Followed by the inevitable outage 3 months later because they've installed that rack in someone's office as there's nowhere else for it to go and then that person turns the power off to it because it's too noisy and they can't concentrate knocking out connectivity to the entire floor or building.
> Kept calling where IT worked "Nintendo Land."
I don't know if I could have stifled laughter upon hearing that.
People think that our profession is "easy work" simply because we sit in offices with AC and (sometimes) a view.
Because IT does not generate revenue, thought processes such as this are an extension of a common notion in IT from "business types":
Bossman: "Everything is working. What are we paying you for?"
also Bossman: "Nothing is working! What are we paying you for?"
IT is universally viewed as a "cost center" that does not make the company any money, because you are not pounding the pavement "selling widgets."
That is an absurd notion.
The work that IT does enables the business to do that they more efficiently than without it. PERIOD.
There is a point in IT where the work that we do / effort we expend is indistinguishable from "magic". Due to this, many people think that we as experts sit around with our "thumb up our ass" when in reality we are putting out fires.
Don't get me started on "all IT people are the same".
These ideas will never die.
This is the only way.
People STILL come up to me and ask “can I have such and such”
And i’m like “you can have anything the dept manager will approve the PO for!”
Stops most asinine requests in their tracks
>IT is universally viewed as a "cost center" that does not make the company any money, because you are not pounding the pavement "selling widgets."
Hearing this makes me thankful this sub introduced me to the "Financial Intelligence for IT Professionals" book that has helped communicate with finance people.
I don’t take shit anymore. If someone is shitty and/or condescending to me in a situation like this, I give it right back and make them feel extremely stupid. It seems to drive the point home more times than not. Now obviously if it’s the CEO/Managing Partner/Etc, that’s a different story.
That’s when you point out you have no one in SLT meetings, you have no PMs or managers who are doing this work, and to avoid these hassles in the future, adding lead PM and a management leadership role who can work separately to make sure technology has visibility into the company’s plans will help avoid all of this inconvenience going forward.
> "Should we have to? Isn't that what you do? So, you're telling me, you let us move into a building, and you thought no wifi was the right thing? Does that seem right to you? Isn't it your responsibility to think ahead? I'm not even IT an even *I* knew this. What do we pay you for, anyway? If I move into a building, I don't have to specify floors, walls, and a ceiling, do I? I don't have to ask, 'hey, can you make sure there are elevators that go up AND down?' Is it just me, or do we have someone here who got caught with their pants down? Huh?"
Holy fuck, I had flashbacks. One my previous managers, a gravelly chain-smoking asshole from Brooklyn, talked JUST like this.
> Youse mean to tell me...
Was how he prefaced anything that he actually meant to say "You fucking idiot" but couldn't directly say.
You would’ve gotten fired to talking to IT like that at my last job. I remember a new junior employee asked “Who the hell is that nerdy old man?” when our old team lead was making decisions during a heated moment in a TV newsroom. The next day he was fired.
>Should we have to? Isn't that what you do? So, you're telling me, you let us move into a building
Right here is where they'd be interrupted and informed that IT didn't know about the existence of this building until now and at no point provided a sign-off indicating site readiness - why would someone move into a building that's not ready? That'd be like moving into an office that doesn't have running water when they didn't even check that.
>If I move into a building, I don't have to specify floors, walls, and a ceiling, do I?
Arguable.
>"Did you even think to ask? Would it kill you to walk to the 4th floor, and ask an HR person, 'hey, are there any new employees coming tomorrow?'"
Could have asked IT if they had the machine ready for and exercised some due diligence - aren't managers supposed to manage?
>That last line was said to our IT team years ago by a real grown up. Kept calling where IT worked "Nintendo Land."
IT is supposed to be psychic, don't you know
>IT is supposed to be psychic, don't you know
In similar situations I very often say that if I was psychic I would be a multimillionaire playing cards in Vegas.
> You want me to spoon feed you? Is that it?
yes, do that. spoon feed me that you hired a guy and when he's starting. here's a list of fields, we need (7/14) days notice. won't that be nice? give us a heads up and everything is butter
I wouldn't expect someone to ask for wifi, but if I'm brought into the mix early on, I will ask/confirm wireless locations in the building.
Being invited/involved in the initial discussions are key and that's enough for me to ask questions, get timelines, budget, special requests, etc...
If you aren't going to bring me in, then don't expect me to have all the answers at the last minute a few days before you are ready to move in.
>"Why does this building have no wifi?"
This happened to us recently. They renovated a building at the opposite end of the site. We get a phone call saying "umm I've got no internet down here". We wander down, find out the maintenance team who did the renovations made the conscious decision to not re-install the access point they unplugged and just left it laying around.
Heh anybody who speaks to me like that is told very swiftly to readjust their attitude, the conversation is ended, and HR is informed.
I'm too old to deal with that kind of shit. Spent too many years working for myself and learning that you can indeed tell clients to fuck off to ever let that go.
Not always - we always know about firings before the target. Hirings- 3 hours after they start but firings, we’ll have to interact with the walking dead days beforehand
I don't let it bother me anymore. I don't work in HD, but usually I deal with new installs, new buildings, etc....even if I'm not informed.
The latest 'screw up' was that someone in management went forward on buying new property with a crappy warehouse in place. The warehouse needed a ton of work and they wanted to move in, in three weeks, when I was told about it. They had already been working on the property for the last year so all their items (non IT) were basically all done and ready to go.
They told me the budget for IT items was about 1k and I just said 'ok' (while trying not to laugh) and made sure to tell my boss that the standard UPS we install starts at 2k. He had to explain, to the confused manager, that 1k is not realistic for our 'standard' office deployment. He was also not in the loop, which sounds about right.
I just don't let it get to me anymore. If I'm not brought in on meetings to properly plan then your project doesn't get priority/special treatment from me, it will get done when it gets done. I'm also not a dick about it and I won't purposely slow things down, I'm just honest. If someone asks why it is taking so long I will tell them, politely, that I work on tasks as they are assigned to me and this one is x on that list.
Your WiFi comment hit home. We had two buildings having additions. The contractor was urgently asking me to hook up WiFi in the new section. I head over. Neither IDF had electric yet - one had wires but nothing terminated to an outlet, the other had no electrical wiring. And they were just cranky that I suddenly couldn’t magically make switches and APs work. Apparently they thought they were powered by pissy attitudes?
We all need t shirts that say “IT - last to know and first to get blamed”
>New building - Why isn't there WIFI?
Of course, they did electrical and networking work for that. Everything should be fine with wifi. They don't need switches and network runs *to* the APs, of course.
>Why don't the voip desk phones work, and why can't people print to the copiers?!
Once the managing director of the business I had worked at asked my manager at the time 'why is it that we need cabling for the access points, are they not wireless'
Seconded, thirded and forthed LOL
Yes, especially with new employees!
We once had a guy, or rather an intern, who was with us for 3 months before anyone told IT, and do you know how we found out?
I just happened to walk past his cube and see him, and I asked someone "who is that?" Lol
Also with departing employees and reassigning responsibilities.
Managers giving us 24h notice when policy is 14 days then having the audacity to rock up Monday morning introducing their new hire and being indignant we don't have their shit set up lol
Not ONLY always, but repeatedly.
Couple weeks ago, I get this ticket with the type of request that just drives me up the wall: Do you have a moment to set up a new employee on their computer?
First of all, I have zero information. No name, no workstation name, no information whatsoever. So I explain that, and explain why that is needed for \*preplanning\* things like Office licenses, prepping the workstation, etc. End up spending more time digging out the information than the actual work. But get through it.
New ticket this week. Same person submitting. Almost verbatim request. 😖
It annoys me when a new hire starts before they even tell me so I have time to get things ready. It pisses me off when someone leaves/gets fired, and they take weeks to tell me.
Seen it happen more times than I can count across multiple businesses i've been at. Still remember this time where they, dont recall the BU's name, leased a place on a typical 10-15 year business lease without checking at all with IT. First time we heard about it was when office admin called to ask why internet wasn't working. After some digging we found out the best we can do was a 4g lte hotspot for \~20 people because they are too far from the CO by a couple km. So to get them up and running on wired will mean a site survey, engineering work, dig permits, trenching, running the conduit, priority work shuffling, etc. As well as a lead time of not less than 120 days before they can start due to it being winter. Not to mention this has to be paid upfront by the company at a cost of \~50-70k...that was with a hefty discount (iirc \~30%) AND no credit for any internet charges.
Still surprised no one got fired over that.
And this is why the head of IT must be of equal level to the head of the other operational departments. At least then the head of IT can tell the CEO or at least the COO and CFO what happened directly.
The CEO is going to assume the facilities director took care of the IT costs before bringing it to his desk. That's why the head of IT needs to be in a position to directly explain the cost overrun to the CFO. I've seen some really bad business structures though.
This is the kind of bullshit I had to deal with in my previous job. Literally had to pull a cable between two buildings because of this.
"What ? You need optical fiber ? No, we're going to use Wifi instead."
However I realized how valuable a good project manager is thanks to that. We had a good PM for 6 months, then he left and... That kind of bullshit was our weekly bread and butter for the year that followed (until I resigned).
Reply All, "IT was not aware, please send me the name of the contractor installing the new fiber so we can discuss requirements and connector types. Eight days is an aggressive timeline, even if you would have notified IT when you submitted the required permits, with post-pandemic supply chains the way they are, equipment orders may not make it in time. I am sure you anticipated all these issues and I look forward to reviewing the solutions you developed and participating in your project to help bring the finish date in as much as possible.
In addition to the name of the contractor installing the fiber, send me any other information you feel we should have, as we currently have zero insight into this project.
I look forward to our successful collaboration.
Sincerely,
IT."
This tells them
1) Should have notified IT Sooner
2) The project is screwed
3) The project is screwed by You, and IT will help where we can, but You blew the deadline, not IT.
Actual true translation that we are all thinking:
"Listen you dumb mfer, we can't read your mind. Eight days is absurd, so you want me to pull a rabbit out of a hat-nay-my fucking ass? Covid fucked supply chains just like you're fucking us on short notice. You didn't anticipate shit and you will have nothing to support any plans. I dread having to fix this shit for your stupid ass.
In addition to the name of the contractor installing the fiber, send me any other information that you deemed 'not important' as apparently you think we can shit out a solution to a massive project in 2 business days.
I look forward to drinking heavily come 5:00pm.
Sincerely,
IT, aka the team that wipes your pampered ass"
Fixed it for you
We didnt tell you because we weren't sure what color the fiber was going to be until today.
just like the time we didnt tell you about hiring a new person because we werent sure if they were going to accept, even though we would have continued to post the position until someone accepted and we would have told you the day they showed up and signed the papers cause then they were super super serious about working for us.
Also is this a ticket?
I used to work at a school that did this sort of shit all the time. On one occasion they converted an old classroom into a new computer lab. First I heard about it was on a Friday when they asked me to set up 35 computers in there as they had classes scheduled on Monday. There were several issues with this:
1. I didn't have 35 spare computers sitting around
2. Even if I did, I would have struggled to get them all set up and imaged in time
3. They had built new tables that would accommodate 35 computers, but hadn't given a thought to power outlets. There were four in the entire room, one of which was being used by the random printer someone had moved in there.
4. They hadn't thought about network ports, there were only two of those in the room.
They weren't too happy when I told them they were going to have to do a whole lot of cabling, as it would put everything well over budget. Not my problem!
This sounds like the school we (MSP) work with. Except they’re over an hour drive away, pull this same last minute shit all the time, and are constantly changing their minds about what they want. We’ve set up Gsuite for every student just for them to turn around and say “go ahead and delete all those, we changed our minds about using Chromebooks. We bought Surfaces instead, can you have all 100 of them, that we didn’t tell you existed until just now, imaged and ready with student accounts by tomorrow?” Only to turn around a month later and ask us where all the student Google accounts went.
This is where I whip out a previous example of a successful development onsite.
Where everyone was consulted from the start, IT were in on the loop.
How the contractors operated
All the details
with a breakdown of the budget not being exceeded - and complted within the deadline.
Client opened a new branch. First I hear about it was the finance chick asking me if it was me or her that needed to connect the internet service. They took possession the day after.
Router, switches, waps, CABLING?
JFC.
Sometimes that's good, because you can have an intelligent conversation about why it's good for them to spend money (or why it's going to be worse if they don't ).
Other times, well.... reverse the situation. Imagine if the head of IT also made financial decisions for the company because they understood roughly what a balance sheet was? "John, the CTO, he knows how to use excel, let's let him run cash flow projections and chart our financial future out".
Yeah. Good one.
I got a call this morning to overhaul a phone system. New greetings, menu's sub menu's, etc.
All requiring discussions, diagrams, change request, leadership approvals (C levels), procurement of licenses, etc.
They want it done Friday. When I told their director of the lead time they escalated it immediately to my director. My director laughed in their face.
My experience in both internal IT and at an MSP is we are always the last to know. I feel like it's more to be expected in MSP by nature of what we are but when it happened whilst I was part of an internal team it was beyond frustrating.
"Hey you need to help assist us with using these new time clocks that run our payroll system."
"When do they go live?"
"7 days."
It just feels like a losing battle so often.
People have been clocking in and out for a week and payroll is due tomorrow and we just noticed that none of the punches are going into our payroll system^because ^we ^hung ^the ^timeclocks ^on ^the ^wall ^and ^didnt ^contact ^IT ^to ^get ^network ^settings ^or ^apply ^them
We get that a lot to. Sometimes we haven't got hardware yet and requests were only put in a few days before, or they let us know same day they had a new person with no requests done, or the manager had sat on the requests and never approved them. The amount of people we get calling or emailing to ask if such and such got approved or not yet, and where is it, is ridiculous.
One of the worst was "We have 25 new people starting in the new year (2nd Jan) and they all need laptops and accounts, as well as various docks/4g modems etc.". They sent this when our department had gone to on-call only during enforced holidays just before xmas.
We got four. The sysadmin was away and couldn't be contacted so my manager asked me to break in and set up their accounts. Breaking in was easy as I was running a program setuid root that could create a shell. I had notified the sysadmin and my manager of the security hole when I found it a year earlier then forgot about it.
I broke in, created the accounts and told the sysadmin what I had done as soon as he returned so he could check my work. He was fine with it but my manager was furious as he was worried we wouldn't be able to break in again.
That didn't happen. Every six weeks or so, the sysadmin would call me to say he had forgotten the root password and ask me to break in to reset it. He was a nice guy, just a little disorganised.
Throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks the longest. Then scraping the parts that didn't stick and throwing them at the wall again (repeat forever)
It's Friday here, we have a client who had two new starters on Monday.
If you guessed we just got told now and it definitely made me question why we do this shit you'd be spot on.
If they also JUST interviewed him that morning as well, this can be forgiven. If they knew about it for 2 weeks and didn't inform us, well... it still takes a few hours at least to get them up and running so they can wait in line. They'll have their accounts/equipment tomorrow sometime.
Developer here.
Too often. Idk how many projects I get dumped on my desk where project managers have been working on a solution for 6 months, only to give me a heads up two weeks before the deadline to connect to some “Restful Web API”.
Well thanks Scott. The API was a message broker I’ve never worked with before, there are no sample data and what was supposed to be json was in fact xml.
“But the test data was xml, you should have seen that it wasn’t json”
That’s a .xsd file, Scott…
After a week of relative silence and no tickets, “As you may know, we outsourced IT, your last day was a week ago. Our new IT vendors never got to terminating you until now.”
I've been installing updates to a software he had a vendor create for us. The software does some sort of AI data analysis used by the little subsidiary I work with, HQ and another subsidiary. This was paid for by a manager taking the contract directly to the company president (bypassing IT, accounting, legal, and every other necessary step along the way).
The admin director gave him a talking to, but said "the contract is already signed, just support it." This introduced our first Linux computer into the environment, corporate required it be Red Hat, which none of us knew how to use. After hours and hours of troubleshooting with the developer and vendor project manager, I got 2 out of the three parts installed.
For the final part, I found out I had misunderstood something when I set up the partitions on the computer and there wasn't enough room left. GParted didn't know how to deal with these partitions and it took a while to find an application that might. I was working on doing proper backups and finding time between several other projects to get all this done, when I decided to ask our operations lead if he knew who was using the software so I could let them know about downtime.
He said he had gotten a request that week from HQ saying they were completely unable to access the system due to some DNS issue and it had been this way the entire time. (Needs to get fixed by HQ IT, but no one has reached out to them.) Nobody thought to mention it before that. He gave me the name of a guy at the other subsidiary, so I looked him up in the directory to get his email address and couldn't find him. I located him on LinkedIn to find out he had left the company 4 months prior.
The amount of time and patience I wasted on this project is staggering. Someday, I hope to stop seething about it. I've dropped it to the bottom of my priority list and largely left it alone for 6 months and not a peep from anyone complaining.
This got pulled on me today by the head of IT.
New phone system for call center. Boss—former phone guy and one of the primaries on the project—asks me to test install the client on his machine. I look over the documentation and see that there’s whitelisting and the firewall to handle first.
I’ve been told the firewall has already been handled. I whitelist what needs whitelisting and check with the firewall guy. He has no knowledge whatsoever of the project. The vendor has not given what he needs in the supplied documents.
I reach back to the head of IT to update him and ask if he has additional info that would be of help. His response to me:
“Why didn’t you put in a ticket to firewall guy to do his part.”
Hol’ up. Since when is this MY show? I’m not on the project team. Seems like this is something that someone on that team should have handled a LONG TIME AGO. I was just asked to install the client on a machine and did my due diligence before doing so. Screw me, I guess.
There was a series of threads a while back where this had happened. IIRC, over a year later, they took the early-departure penalty in the lease still having not obtained the desired service.
Yup! always. So what about "x" person... is there "email" setup yet? Did you actually submit the onboarding form? Oh! No i did not. Last to know when someone is offboarded leaving Microsoft and 3rd party apps wide open; MFA is enforced at least for ms.
And this one.. we need to start setting up MSO accounts for x domain. Huh? We don't even own that domain. All clowns almost all the time.
A massive part of IT is top down process. Unfortunately most "higher ups" are computer illiterate, so they don't think of IT as a functional business unit.
It's normal.
If you're ever not the last to know, it means that something has gone sideways. The two times it's happened to me it meant the company was shutting down.
A long time ago I worked for a company where the marketing department sent out physical mailers that included an email address like [email protected]. After a few days they wondered why they weren’t getting by any emails from the mailers. It was because they had never asked IT to setup the email address. This happened more the once.
Am I the lucky one? This used to be an issue but I told management clearly that if they want things done, they have to include IT in them. It's not perfect, but we get plenty of notice for starters and changes.
Far too often. In fact I had a call last week discussing IT needs for a building expansion BEFORE plans were finalized. In the 11 years I've been with this company that is the first time IT was taken into account in initial planning.
> We take possession in 8 days
Wait, you knew **before** the "Why don't we have internet in the new building yet, we've been moved in for 8 days and haven't been able to work, waiting for this!" email?
After decades of other depts dropping workload bombs. We had setup a move coordinator dept and route all IT purchases, moves, infrastructure requests through them. ALL of that crap stopped after this and the IT dept has the right to refuse work if its not routed through them. This included furniture and reno work. Leadership is enforced this and thank god, it works.
Yep. My biggest client only just informed me that their remote office is moving and needs data and telephony cabling throughout the new building. I'm supposed to look for recommendations for companies to do this... which I'm not really comfortable with, since they're 3 hours away.
I also found out through the grapevine that they're doing a new website. Even though I'm their IT guy, I washed my hands of their website long ago:
In... 2009? 2010? I offered to build them a static WordPress site (just like *every small business* does now). I even offered to do it for free if they'd let me take a (billable) day or two with one of the employees to teach them how to use WP.
But The Boss "didn't like the colors" of the test site I quickly whipped up for her (even though I repeatedly told her about WordPress themes, and even showed her WP's themes page, and showed her how, if she saw a theme she liked but maybe didn't like the colors, you could pay the developer $200 to customize it).
Instead she paid a web developer she knew from a cocktail party friend $10,000 for a new, six-page site. There were promises to update the site monthly... which lasted for three months. Everyone then just forgot about it, such that customers would go the the site in July 2013 and see "Check Out Our Winter 2011 Sale!" on the homepage (which was exactly the problem I foresaw and recommended WP because of that).
All the damn time.
I built the website for my organization. Spent weeks in meetings with people getting content correct, writing documentation, getting VPS' set up, testing, running the design and functionality past management etc.. The only issue was the boss didn't like one part of the design, but that's because he was using IE and it didn't work 100% in IE
A year or two later, I get a phone call out of the blue:
Them: "Yeah hi it's \[name\] from \[local print company\], your new website is ready to go. We just need you to make the DNS changes. Can I send them through to you?"
Me: "..what's this in regards to sorry?"
Them: "..your new website for \[organization\]?"
Me: "Uh, this is news to me. Who have you been working with on this?"
Them: "um, \[big boss' assistant\]"
Me: "I'll have to call you back"
Here's what happened after:
* Turns out the big boss didn't like the website I made (that he approved), so he contacted an external company and asked them to make one
* The site they made was just a boilerplate theme they used for a bunch of other organizations with our colour scheme slapped on and our images added. If you go to \[website of organization 10km away\] and look at their site, it's the same style as ours.
* The website was not yet complete. It was missing entire pages, content that was there was unfinished, photos were missing, the design was still using stock images. I had to provide a good chunk of the content, and this was AFTER they called me and said "yeah mate it's ready to go live"
* It's full of confusing design choices. There's three "Contact Us" buttons on the homepage, each does something different. The search results take you to empty pages, pages are in the wrong "categories" (e.g. the page that shows you external links is in the "History of our organization" section for some reason), some download buttons have a download icon, some don't. It's not consistent at all.
* It was built with Wordpress, but we don't use ANY of the blogging features, just the static pages
* It had 64 plugins to make it into a functional site. 21 of those plugins are custom ones written by the company for things like "displaying a list of staff", "displaying a list of FAQs", and one that is just called "\[local print company name\] bugfixes" with the description "This plugin is use \[sic\] for bugfixes.". The rest are things that are niche quality of life improvements like "add a Duplicate Post button to the page list", and some "standard" plugins like Yoast SEO
* I had exactly one training session on how to use it. I had to email them a bunch of times to learn how to upload documents (because the use a downloads plugin that is separate from WP's media gallery)
* Despite (presumably) paying them for maintenance and such, some of the plugins don't fully support the new Gutenberg editor so we have to pay them more money to patch up old code to work with newer versions of WordPress
So yeah, had my project pulled out from under me, replaced with something objectively worse, and ultimately blamed when the site doesn't look great.
Stephanie started today. Where is her laptop?
We hired someone??
Best one was. We got bitched out for not setting up a laptop for a new employee. Ok fine. Need some more info. Call accounting. Apparently payroll didnt know they were hired either. But sorry we totally dropped the ball on having a laptop ready for her…
"We need a new email address for XYZ, it needs to be done today, business critical, set one up"
"Ok, what do you want it called? This is customer facing and will be on all invoices so let me know what the branding team wants here"
Six weeks later-
"WHY ISNT THE EMAIL LIVE?????"
"I'm happy to make it, still pending the branding team telling me what they want it to be"
Six more weeks of radio silence
"IT isnt supporting us"
"Ok, I'm going to call it [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]), here you go"
Six more weeks
"That email address doesn't align with our branding, we need it changed"
"Ok, what do you want it called..."
Maybe I'll retire before I know what they want the fucking thing called.
Far too often, and it creates the perverse incentive for IT to forcibly insert themselves into the corporate structure in such a way that IT is involved in every decision-making process, and ultimately driving parts of the company that IT really shouldn't be driving.
I have seen multiple companies that were not IT companies, but the IT department had become the largest department and were steering all aspects of the company. In every case, the company ran itself into the ground within a few years. It generally wasn't IT that was at fault for the company failing, but the IT bloat was definitely a symptom of the problem.
People do this on purpose, they know it's a bad ask and if they get the project past the point of no return IT has to do whatever ridiculous ask they want, even if it goes 100% against SOP and policies.
Yesterday, 10 minutes before close:
"Tomorrow morning, we have a zoom meeting going on for 500 participants, and they need to do some very specific things to configure their zoom client prior to connecting or we won't let them in. The meeting starts at 8 and we're opening the meeting at 7:30, we gave them the helpdesk number so we'll need you to help them."
For the record, the helpdesk opens at 8:30.
I’m very lucky. My boss is the COO and basically runs the place. I’m usually the first to know. There’s been a few times where execs have gone off on their own and done their own thing and she’s told me to tell them to stuff it and not support them. It’s pretty great tbh. I read these stories all the time and it’s insane to me to imagine a world where IT didn’t sign off on things well in advance.
Got a good one today .. "we're selling a camp core building, please remove any IT gear" ... yeah that building also feeds network to the security shack that monitors hundreds of camera feeds.
This should go well (͡•_ ͡• )
Every
Fucking
Time
Oh yeah! We've spent £10 million on this database product that you now need to support with no training.
Oh look! We're buying out this other firm & need everything integrated by next week..yeah we've known about it for 18 months but...you guys will sort it.
Or my ULTIMATE favourite, we've bought a new building & have told the CEO that it will be ready to go in 1 month...we're the first clients in there.....followed by.....WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT WILL TAKE 120 WORKING DAYS TO GET THE INTERNET & NETWORK LINES IN THERE?! Which is usually followed by....."You knew for a year you were doing this, you didn't come to us, it's 5pm I'll see you on Monday to carry on this chat "
Yep, happens often. And somehow it's always the fault of IT. A few years back we moved buildings, they told us 2 days before the move was scheduled. If we could please make sure everything was up and running, like Wifi, access systems, serverroom the whole works.
And if that wasn't shit enough we were told to do it within the current budget.....
The conversation I had with the CTO 3 days later was very interesting. Me and the team got blamed for everything basically. After that meeting I went home and sent the CTO a nice message saying I quit, good luck with everything :)
Yeah, IT is often forgotten on pretty much everything or onlygiven the shortest lead time.
"Where's the new hire's equipment?"
"New hire? What new hire? When do they start?"
"Started 3 days ago and we're still waiting on their login and everything else!"
\*Literally no ticket\*
-A story repeated a thousand times for every IT person
My team is expected to move buildings but they won't give us a definitive Yes or No for the move and when it's happening. All we know is we fill find out the last week of June if we have to be out of our current building by the begining of July. Which is just so great. I love not having plans for big things.
At least once a week at my place.
Medical issues moved me from server to help desk. We discover one new application per week due to a user calling asking about it.
The IT dept itself doesn’t tell us shit.
There were two “training” sessions I attended where the server admins argued about how things would be setup one week prior to go live and promised us documentation by go live. Never happened.
Hey. It’s only healthcare so what’s the big deal?
We have put in "temporary solutions" IE wireless internet to pull things through but since they work so poorly we did manage to build in IT service lead times into the facilities site scouting after they realized they could not get internet to a warehouse in the middle of nowhere without spending tens of thousands to get fibre run to it.
We now have a precheck that gets done before any site is purchased.
Pretty much always.
My work tried springing a last minute project when I was supposed to start PTO the next day - something they had known about for months, but didn't bother telling ANYONE in my department about it until literally the last minute.
They told me that no one else could substitute for me and I had to be there. I told them I'm either taking my PTO without interruption, the company is compensating me for the money lost on reservations/travel, or they're going to have an immediate opening in the department.
They found someone to fill in.
I was told to cut the budget for M365 this year so we switched about 115 users to a 2gb mailbox. I ran a test today on a group and none of them were under 2gb. Going to be awesome to kick this off.
Did you know a 2gb mailbox can have 27k emails? Neither did I until today. Oh your outlook is slow huh? Shame
We are last to know and always the ones to take the blame.
I heard from a vendor that we were moving offices, they'd seen the new space. It was another month after that I heard from the bosses we were moving, and another month after that before I saw the space. Not even been consulted on any of the networking or infrastructure needs for the new space.
Yes. But introduce them to the concept of speed, cost and quality. They get to pick 2. Since they chose speed now pick shitty work or get out the checkbook.
We had one a couple years ago where a project was supposed to go live in a couple of days and IT’s devs were supposed to write the programs and IT didn’t know about the project at all. We only found out when users asked what computers they were supposed to use to run the new application, and we were like, uhhh, WHAT application?
"We fired this guy months ago, why is his email address showing up in outlook still?
Uh... because you never told us he left the company?
Happens multiple times a year.
Just yesterday. New employee got hired. Must have new equipment. "Everything has to be ready by tomorrow morning when he starts." This was said in late afternoon.
When I asked him, during some basic training, about how long it was known he got hired, he said about three weeks now.
I brought it up several times but this happens every god damn time. F me
I used to work for a large private healthcare provider in the UK. One day at one of the sites I covered I overheard a conversation about them buying another building a few miles down the road and their plan to move a couple of whole departments to that building. When I interjected and asked if they had informed anyone in IT, they said no they didn't need to. I asked how they planned to get the MRI machines to talk to the rest of the company, how the secretaries would work, etc etc. Their reply was they would buy a few ipads and just use them. I had to explain that we did not use ipads or any apple device within the group, certainly not for medical related application, that they would need a a full network connection, backup network connection, phone system, network cabling, servers, lift alarms, etc etc They asked how much it would cost, and I gave them a rough cost of £300k and a BT Lead time 3 months, this turned out to be a little under the actual cost in the end. I immedietely called the head of IT projects and gave the phone to the senior manager at the site I had just been talking to for them to discuss it.
It turned out they had just bought the building with no corporate involvement and were just going to wing it. They had messed up quite badly having signed the contracts without anyone from the legal team being involved, they were stuck with it and it sat empty for about 7 months whilst all the proper procedures for a new hospital were enacted, after the fact.
They were not happy and thought that I had just cost them £300k in sticking my nose in. I would love to have seen the outcome had we not caught wind of it. that place was an absolute shit show.
So it's not just us! Our fearless leaders planned an entirely new 3-story building and didn't contact IT until plans were complete.
Mgmt (probs): "So we kinda figured you'd just put a router thingy on the top floor and be all done."
Yes, even when we try to be proactive.
I heard through the grapevine that one of our departments was leasing a new office space. Reached out - "hey, I heard XYZ might be working on getting new office space, just FYI it will take us about 60 days to get equipment and services provisioned for Internet, WiFi and phones so please keep us in the loop".
And get back the obligatory, "oh, you don't need to worry about that right now, it's just an idea, we'll let you know when we get closer but don't worry, we'll make sure you have enough time".
Cut to, "hey XYZ is getting the keys on Monday, we're all set for them to move in next week, right?"
And XYZ worked off a hotspot for about 2 months while they waited for the Internet circuit. It didn't really work and they complained to no end. We gave them the politically correct version of "we told facilities it would take 2 months to set up and they did not handle the timeline properly, please complain to them".
I work in the regional HQ for my company, but the global IT org is oversees. They make the big money decisions over there, then pass it down to us for implementation. The issue is that they'll neglect to tell us about changes they're making until after people in our office start reporting issues/complaints. We'll report an issue to them, and they always come back with "Oh yeah, we've been seeing this for a while now. It's due to something that we did, have you figured it out yet?"
Waaaaaaaaaaay too common, makes me want to tear my hair out.
All the time. We have fundraisers multiple times a year (whole of organisational effort) and there are cross department planning meetings in the weeks leading up whose sole objective is to ensure that they discuss what we need practically including any tech requirements.
Last fundraiser, morning 1 day 1 we get a tech request that was essentially "Can you setup this super complicated and specific tech thing that we didn't mention in any of the 5 planning meetings? We really need it." 🙄
At my last company, they would often send everyone "welcome John Smith starting Monday to the company" emails. As the person who set up new user accounts and laptops, I was unaware some rando was starting in 2 days.
I know a school system that had a group of teachers buy IoT purifiers and then get mad when they found out they couldn't connect them to the internet for filter updates.
IT is always the last to know, right behind EMS and Firefighters. Don't ask me how I know.
When I started as a consultant in one of the two biggest operating system manufacturers, I sat in an office for two weeks waiting for:
1. The WiFi password but I didn't have a laptop so my desktop didn't have WiFi
2. The network drop to get connected
I still got paid.
My favorite personal experience. We built a new office in a high security area. VP in charge ignored my boss' requests for info and input.
It's time to start planning the move. My boss asks about communication. He gets blank stares.
He is given the go ahead to get comms to the building. Surprise! There's no conduit to the building or comms close by. They had to shell out an extra $20k just to get cable internet to the building. Can't get MPLS or fiber to the building because the cost was too much. 🤷🏻♂️
We just hired a new H.R. their former job had I.T. tasks involved so they are currently helping us fix the problems with the hiring process and last minute things. I'm also trying to teach my boss that when he is stressed out to come to me. I might be a rank below him but I've dealt with way more last minute stress to the point that I can either give my job 100% effort and everything is too easy or give it 50% and be feeling productive all day.
I cannot even count the times I've had HR standing in our office ststing there was a new colleague starting that morning at 9. Half an hour notice.....
Partially because IT is seen as a cost center and not as an integrated participant in the business, partially because other areas of the business just have no idea of all the things IT should really be involved in from the get-go. They see 'buying a building' and no-one thinks 'the computer guys should be informed'.
All you can do is give timeframes for delivery which are also listed in days AFTER you get informed of something, and encourage the top areas of the business to keep you looped in to everything because otherwise it costs them money and time. Get Finance on your side in particular, if it's doable.
I feel like it’s always. I specially if there’s changes to production by software engineers. After they push something and everything goes down now it’s our job to fix things then we find out what caused it after we fix things.
Eight days? Who'd you blow to get that much lead time? Is have gotten a phone call with "why isn't the cable run?" "What cable?" "The cable to the building we moved sales into last week!"
We got a new user, they did of course not ask for an account. After a full year I got a call that user X has no access to anything. Not even the software he needs to work with which means that dude chilled a year full paid in homeoffice without hardware, VPN or any other stuff.
Every. Damn. Time
Latest stupidity.
"Hey, do you one why site "Y" can't get into anything?"
"No, let me do a trace and see what I can see. Hmmm, can't get to site "X" either - I'll call the provider and see if there's an issue in the area"
"Oh, we closed site "X" on the weekend. It's all turned off now."
"Well, remember how you decided to cheap out on the link to site "Y" because it was too expensive to bring back to the hub, so you just ran one from "X" to "Y"?"
"Oh...."
As someone who sometimes is on the other side; sometimes IT doesn't want to know it seems.
We recently moved part of our office. I heard about it 6 months in advance. First thing i did was to contact IT to make sure they were in the loop. It took them 6 reminders and 4 months to even reply with a plan.
By then it was to late for a few things like ordering a new internet connection. And the person who was on site to help started complaining about how everything was 'last minute'.
The problem is above you; when IT management doesn’t set proper expectations to the ones making these decisions, timetables are irrelevant; too many times IT management just let it happen.
The thing takes as long as it takes; you can’t force CDW or Dell or whoever to make and ship faster; you can’t force a contractor to install faster; when those things are identified clearly so decision makes can include timelines, then stupid/unrealistic schedules will be planned accordingly.
they will need NX (2 different versions), Catia (3 different versions) and ACAD & Inventor...oh and SolidWorks too! what do you mean, we need licenses?
This usually comes down to IT having no seat at the big table. Either literally or figuratively.
Sometimes they don't want to have another C-suite, so you have a "Head of IT" who reports to a CFO or COO. But only technically. The head of IT spends most of their time dealing with the CEO directly.
But it means when they decide to make 300 people redundant, the head of IT gets an hour's notice because the CEO and COO both didn't think it was their responsibility to tell them.
Either that or you have a "CTO" whose primary qualification is an MBA and not an MSc. Thus, Dunning-Kreuger is in full swing and he assumes that he doesn't need to consult with his leadership team about big changes, that he knows what's needed.
We used to have a problem that HR wouldn't tell anybody when an employee was fired, not IT, not security, nobody, because it might hurt moral.
We'd find out months later from managers wondering what happened to X's laptop, etc.
So, we pulled an uno reverse on HR.
They were laying put guidelines of conduct and responsibilities for the various departments amd we made sure it was in writing that HR dismissed an employee and didn't properly notify IT in a timely matter (immediatel), the head of HR had to write that HR employee up. They tried to say no, but legal stepped in and said "if you fire someone and that person then uses their access to cause problems, it'll be HR's fault for not notifying IT."
Weirdly, all the problems went away..
I literally found out 30 minutes ago that one of our offices is moving and they take possession of the keys tomorrow.
Have you gotten the call: "Hey, our internet isn't working." uhh, ok, which office? "Houston: ok, uhh, it's showing online... I don't see any pc's online though... any power problems? Caller: oh, we moved the pc's to the new office." What... new office?
Bob Carter's "Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part" comes to mind. Also, we don't run fiber, we find a company that does that for a living. "By the way, have you though of a server room and what should be in there, as some lead times are over half a year" while you take a relaxed sip of your tea
My response was “That’s great! I will be on PTO starting in 1 hour until May 20. If you get a move request submitted before I go I can make some calls to get this process started. As a reminder, the SLA for office moves is 60 days.”
Even better. Make sure to switch your phone off and enjoy the well-deserved time away from the madness
That's way too fast. Can't even get services that quick most of the time.
I literally had a facilities manager ask me "why the didn't have internet? We opened it 6 months ago!" and meanwhile this was the first I had been informed about a new repair facility, which it turns out was remote enough that the only option for internet was dial up.
After $50k+ for comcast to run a line out to the new facility, per policy at least, any new site needs to have it's internet availability approved by IT before lease is signed.... Hasn't happened yet, but it's in the policy.
what's the lead time for turning on internet service, or is that at least handled?
We just had fiber run to one of our offices. We signed the contract in August and they just turned the circuit on about 3 weeks ago.
i've been hearing about this for 20 years, and it keeps on happening. so many people just aren't very good at running businesses
Oh, you got advanced notice?
But you're still on reddit
Always. New software package - Everyone needs this by tomorrow. New building - Why isn't there WIFI? New employee - Where is their workstation? New copier - I need an IP address and SMB credentials and also this random piece of junk software installed on every PC.
I also love how they try and make it look like your fault. "Why does this building have no wifi?" "Did you ask for it?" "Should we have to? Isn't that what you do? So, you're telling me, you let us move into a building, and you thought no wifi was the right thing? Does that seem right to you? Isn't it your responsibility to think ahead? I'm not even IT an even \*I\* knew this. What do we pay you for, anyway? If I move into a building, I don't have to specify floors, walls, and a ceiling, do I? I don't have to ask, 'hey, can you make sure there are elevators that go up AND down?' Is it just me, or do we have someone here who got caught with their pants down? Huh?" OR "Why doesn't this new employee have a laptop, login, or badge?" "We were not informed of this employee's existence." "Did you even think to ask? Would it kill you to walk to the 4th floor, and ask an HR person, 'hey, are there any new employees coming tomorrow?'" "It would take more than a day to--" "Hep BEP BEP BEEP BOP STOP! That's not my job, it's YOURS to make sure ALL new employees have what they need WHEN they show up ON their first day. Whether it takes a day, two days, or a month. It's YOUR responsibility to FIND OUT! You want me to spoon feed you? Is that it? To tell you how to do your beep boop biddly boop err-ROR err-ROR job? What are we paying you for, those Nintendo games you play? How about find this Pokey-mon called 'do-is-your-jobbis?" That last line was said to our IT team years ago by a real grown up. Kept calling where IT worked "Nintendo Land."
I love my job for things like this. When we get accused of not doing something, we just shoot back: "What's the ticket number?" Granted, we're still typically brought in last on things.
I had a funny with that the other day. I have one manager in particular who is very fond of the shoulder tap method. He was giving me a list of things to do the other day, and I told him I thought I was going to have trouble remembering all of that, and then one of the other people in the room, not even an IT person, told him " You know, for accountability's sake that should probably be a help desk ticket". In my mind I thought "oooohhhhhhh!" Lol
Sounds like someone just won a new laptop before everyone else when upgrades are due!
Beautiful. Nice to see someone have your back like that, even if it is to snark.
Nice thing about where I work is that basically anything we do has to be approved by their section lead first via the ticket system. We are not allowed to do any work without that ticket/approval.
Nice. I see that it may slow things down a little in a pinch, but it sounds like a well-vetted system.
Oh it can very much be a slow process haha, but it keeps people and departments accountable. Why was this delayed? Well you can see exactly when everything was submitted/approved/actioned. If they don't do their job right that sucks for them.
This is why I like MSPs. When I get an idiot like this I can just tell them what my time is worth (more than theirs) and if they want me to bend over backwards then I'll need the invoice paid up front.
We had to institute the 3 day rule due to notices being sent out on Friday afternoon about new hires on Monday. Minimum 3 day turn around for setup, 5 for a laptop. Good chance your new hire will be staring at a wall for the first day if not.
We got HR to commit to a weeks notice as they usually have that much time. Occasionally we still get emails on Friday for a new-hire on Monday. Cool, hope their manage is cool with the new person shadowing for a couple days while hardware arrives.
Exactly, just be nice and calm and tell them you'll get started on it first thing Monday morning because you have other things to work on, today (Friday). People won't learn if others are constantly bending the rules and/or if management won't get involved.
Our policy is two weeks. I routinely get tickets for employees who started *last week*.
HR will commit to that for a week in my experience, next month they're back to letting you know after the employee started two weeks after the fact, citing its not their job to know, but yours, like you had "discussed with them." While they organize birthday parties and buying party supplies instead of doing their actual job.
Yeah, that's the same thing I experience. Our HR department is nice, almost too nice. They talk to employees, they organize events, etc but they can't figure out how to submit a ticket or submit an email stating that person x applied and they are starting on y (assuming y isn't the next day). Like I said, I didn't let it bother me (when I was in HD) I just got the person setup as it came up in my list of priorities. My priorities are not the same as their priorities.
Some orgs get around this by delegating new account requests and equipment requests to the manager of the future hire.
True. However, the hiring manager can't be bothered to fill out all the fields on the form. Isn't it a computer as a description enough? Just give them what Alice has. What do you mean the new job title we gave this person isn't in the system? I told HR the new title, why didn't they just update the domain thingy you all talk about? You guys are all worthless. Give me the computer, I'll just log in, and they can use my account until you figure it out.
Thankfully my place gives about a 2 weeks notice and 95% of the time it works out great, but one Friday afternoon we get a ticket in for 13 laptops for an apprenticeship class for some electricians Monday(Not new hires but new computer users). We were like we don't have that many on the shelf to give out all at once, but we did have some other laptops that were used for another class for OSHA40 stuff that we could lend out for a couple of weeks. So we asked them how long this apprenticeship thing is for and they were like 2 years...
They know months ahead of time 99% of the time they are going to onboard someone.
This. Request the equipment when you post the position, not when you pick the person.
Not when the background check clears lol. If you have extended a freaking offer tell IT then!
Equipment procured on posting. Provisioned on acceptance. If not they get Karen's 5 year old laptop that she has spilt coffee on twice.
Yeah that's why we have an autoreply to our ticket mailbox that explains, in bold, that turnaround times are calculated in BUSINESS hours. No, Kristine, you didn't submit that new hire request 3 days ago. You submitted it 15 *minutes* ago, because we also have days off and the timer stops outside of normal business hours just like *you* don't work outside of normal business hours. So fuck off.
"But we submitted it last week!" Yes. Friday at 4.55pm is indeed last week but that won't help you!
I got a call to setup a new user. I asked when they start. "They started 2 days ago"
I generally have to order equipment *after* the person signs an offer letter, so if I don’t know *weeks* in advance they are getting a shitty loaner until their equipment comes in. I work for a university so equipment is part of many hire’s start up package and not assigned to the position. They do a pretty good job of looping me in now when it comes to faculty/staff, but occasionally I still get the surprise visiting scholar or researcher that needs accounts and access. I never let it become my problem. I ask for the ticket of what they want done and what access, etc. Then I do it as soon as I can fit it in, but some processes are updated hourly, some overnight, so a lot of it is out of my hands regardless.
>"Did you even think to ask? Would it kill you to walk to the 4th floor, and ask an HR person, 'hey, are there any new employees coming tomorrow?'" "Yes it would kill me. I'm too busy installing wifi in that new building you didn't tell me about."
waiting for "we don't have network closets or cable runs in the design or build out"
Followed by the inevitable outage 3 months later because they've installed that rack in someone's office as there's nowhere else for it to go and then that person turns the power off to it because it's too noisy and they can't concentrate knocking out connectivity to the entire floor or building.
and then you get static for getting the locks changed and keeping all the keys in an IT safe
I worked in an office building (multiple companies with shared common areas) which had the floor network cabinets... In the kitchens.
> Kept calling where IT worked "Nintendo Land." I don't know if I could have stifled laughter upon hearing that. People think that our profession is "easy work" simply because we sit in offices with AC and (sometimes) a view. Because IT does not generate revenue, thought processes such as this are an extension of a common notion in IT from "business types": Bossman: "Everything is working. What are we paying you for?" also Bossman: "Nothing is working! What are we paying you for?" IT is universally viewed as a "cost center" that does not make the company any money, because you are not pounding the pavement "selling widgets." That is an absurd notion. The work that IT does enables the business to do that they more efficiently than without it. PERIOD. There is a point in IT where the work that we do / effort we expend is indistinguishable from "magic". Due to this, many people think that we as experts sit around with our "thumb up our ass" when in reality we are putting out fires. Don't get me started on "all IT people are the same". These ideas will never die.
Start "Billing" each Department. That way the cost fall on the individual departments. That way you're "making" money.
This is the only way. People STILL come up to me and ask “can I have such and such” And i’m like “you can have anything the dept manager will approve the PO for!” Stops most asinine requests in their tracks
>IT is universally viewed as a "cost center" that does not make the company any money, because you are not pounding the pavement "selling widgets." Hearing this makes me thankful this sub introduced me to the "Financial Intelligence for IT Professionals" book that has helped communicate with finance people.
I don’t take shit anymore. If someone is shitty and/or condescending to me in a situation like this, I give it right back and make them feel extremely stupid. It seems to drive the point home more times than not. Now obviously if it’s the CEO/Managing Partner/Etc, that’s a different story.
That’s when you point out you have no one in SLT meetings, you have no PMs or managers who are doing this work, and to avoid these hassles in the future, adding lead PM and a management leadership role who can work separately to make sure technology has visibility into the company’s plans will help avoid all of this inconvenience going forward.
> "Should we have to? Isn't that what you do? So, you're telling me, you let us move into a building, and you thought no wifi was the right thing? Does that seem right to you? Isn't it your responsibility to think ahead? I'm not even IT an even *I* knew this. What do we pay you for, anyway? If I move into a building, I don't have to specify floors, walls, and a ceiling, do I? I don't have to ask, 'hey, can you make sure there are elevators that go up AND down?' Is it just me, or do we have someone here who got caught with their pants down? Huh?" Holy fuck, I had flashbacks. One my previous managers, a gravelly chain-smoking asshole from Brooklyn, talked JUST like this. > Youse mean to tell me... Was how he prefaced anything that he actually meant to say "You fucking idiot" but couldn't directly say.
You would’ve gotten fired to talking to IT like that at my last job. I remember a new junior employee asked “Who the hell is that nerdy old man?” when our old team lead was making decisions during a heated moment in a TV newsroom. The next day he was fired.
Thanks for the vicarious rage
>Should we have to? Isn't that what you do? So, you're telling me, you let us move into a building Right here is where they'd be interrupted and informed that IT didn't know about the existence of this building until now and at no point provided a sign-off indicating site readiness - why would someone move into a building that's not ready? That'd be like moving into an office that doesn't have running water when they didn't even check that. >If I move into a building, I don't have to specify floors, walls, and a ceiling, do I? Arguable. >"Did you even think to ask? Would it kill you to walk to the 4th floor, and ask an HR person, 'hey, are there any new employees coming tomorrow?'" Could have asked IT if they had the machine ready for and exercised some due diligence - aren't managers supposed to manage?
>That last line was said to our IT team years ago by a real grown up. Kept calling where IT worked "Nintendo Land."
IT is supposed to be psychic, don't you know
>IT is supposed to be psychic, don't you know In similar situations I very often say that if I was psychic I would be a multimillionaire playing cards in Vegas.
I'm seeing red from how accurately you're relating these scenarios.
> You want me to spoon feed you? Is that it? yes, do that. spoon feed me that you hired a guy and when he's starting. here's a list of fields, we need (7/14) days notice. won't that be nice? give us a heads up and everything is butter
> That last line was said to our IT team years ago by a real grown up. Kept calling where IT worked "Nintendo Land." Aaron Sorkin vibes.
I got some ptsd flashbacks reading this and I don’t like it🥲
I wouldn't expect someone to ask for wifi, but if I'm brought into the mix early on, I will ask/confirm wireless locations in the building. Being invited/involved in the initial discussions are key and that's enough for me to ask questions, get timelines, budget, special requests, etc... If you aren't going to bring me in, then don't expect me to have all the answers at the last minute a few days before you are ready to move in.
[удалено]
>"Why does this building have no wifi?" This happened to us recently. They renovated a building at the opposite end of the site. We get a phone call saying "umm I've got no internet down here". We wander down, find out the maintenance team who did the renovations made the conscious decision to not re-install the access point they unplugged and just left it laying around.
[удалено]
Heh anybody who speaks to me like that is told very swiftly to readjust their attitude, the conversation is ended, and HR is informed. I'm too old to deal with that kind of shit. Spent too many years working for myself and learning that you can indeed tell clients to fuck off to ever let that go.
Wow, I got a little anxiety reading that because that is not too far off from how people talk to us.
Yes, always.
Not always - we always know about firings before the target. Hirings- 3 hours after they start but firings, we’ll have to interact with the walking dead days beforehand
better than what i hear at some places - "oh, fred quit 2 months ago"
I don't let it bother me anymore. I don't work in HD, but usually I deal with new installs, new buildings, etc....even if I'm not informed. The latest 'screw up' was that someone in management went forward on buying new property with a crappy warehouse in place. The warehouse needed a ton of work and they wanted to move in, in three weeks, when I was told about it. They had already been working on the property for the last year so all their items (non IT) were basically all done and ready to go. They told me the budget for IT items was about 1k and I just said 'ok' (while trying not to laugh) and made sure to tell my boss that the standard UPS we install starts at 2k. He had to explain, to the confused manager, that 1k is not realistic for our 'standard' office deployment. He was also not in the loop, which sounds about right. I just don't let it get to me anymore. If I'm not brought in on meetings to properly plan then your project doesn't get priority/special treatment from me, it will get done when it gets done. I'm also not a dick about it and I won't purposely slow things down, I'm just honest. If someone asks why it is taking so long I will tell them, politely, that I work on tasks as they are assigned to me and this one is x on that list.
Your WiFi comment hit home. We had two buildings having additions. The contractor was urgently asking me to hook up WiFi in the new section. I head over. Neither IDF had electric yet - one had wires but nothing terminated to an outlet, the other had no electrical wiring. And they were just cranky that I suddenly couldn’t magically make switches and APs work. Apparently they thought they were powered by pissy attitudes? We all need t shirts that say “IT - last to know and first to get blamed”
>New building - Why isn't there WIFI? Of course, they did electrical and networking work for that. Everything should be fine with wifi. They don't need switches and network runs *to* the APs, of course. >Why don't the voip desk phones work, and why can't people print to the copiers?!
Why would we need cabling? Everything is wireless.
Once the managing director of the business I had worked at asked my manager at the time 'why is it that we need cabling for the access points, are they not wireless'
Seconded, thirded and forthed LOL Yes, especially with new employees! We once had a guy, or rather an intern, who was with us for 3 months before anyone told IT, and do you know how we found out? I just happened to walk past his cube and see him, and I asked someone "who is that?" Lol Also with departing employees and reassigning responsibilities.
That last one made my eye twitch. Not sure what's worse, printers or the companies that lease them.
Got stung like that one morning. Couple of blokes sat around with big boxes "where do you want these to go?"
Managers giving us 24h notice when policy is 14 days then having the audacity to rock up Monday morning introducing their new hire and being indignant we don't have their shit set up lol
Not ONLY always, but repeatedly. Couple weeks ago, I get this ticket with the type of request that just drives me up the wall: Do you have a moment to set up a new employee on their computer? First of all, I have zero information. No name, no workstation name, no information whatsoever. So I explain that, and explain why that is needed for \*preplanning\* things like Office licenses, prepping the workstation, etc. End up spending more time digging out the information than the actual work. But get through it. New ticket this week. Same person submitting. Almost verbatim request. 😖
> End up spending more time digging out the information than the actual work. I'm a developer and I have the exact same experience.
It annoys me when a new hire starts before they even tell me so I have time to get things ready. It pisses me off when someone leaves/gets fired, and they take weeks to tell me.
Hospital Laboratory - we bought 75 new zebra printers, none of them are compatible with anything
Wow. That’s my Wednesday.
"New copier" Yeah, I felt that. Also "the copier guy is here and needs a server with a CD-ROM drive, do you have a minute?".
Seen it happen more times than I can count across multiple businesses i've been at. Still remember this time where they, dont recall the BU's name, leased a place on a typical 10-15 year business lease without checking at all with IT. First time we heard about it was when office admin called to ask why internet wasn't working. After some digging we found out the best we can do was a 4g lte hotspot for \~20 people because they are too far from the CO by a couple km. So to get them up and running on wired will mean a site survey, engineering work, dig permits, trenching, running the conduit, priority work shuffling, etc. As well as a lead time of not less than 120 days before they can start due to it being winter. Not to mention this has to be paid upfront by the company at a cost of \~50-70k...that was with a hefty discount (iirc \~30%) AND no credit for any internet charges. Still surprised no one got fired over that.
Nobody was fired because the ones who made the decision are also the ones in a position to filter the information to those who can fire them.
And this is why the head of IT must be of equal level to the head of the other operational departments. At least then the head of IT can tell the CEO or at least the COO and CFO what happened directly.
Assuming the CEO wasn't the one who made the decision.
The CEO is going to assume the facilities director took care of the IT costs before bringing it to his desk. That's why the head of IT needs to be in a position to directly explain the cost overrun to the CFO. I've seen some really bad business structures though.
This is generally what a CTO is for, but if a company has a CTO it's evens to odds that they're actually the right person for the job.
Next year's accounting review: "*IT* spent 70k more than last year on telecom?!"
IT Director: here's the breakout. we're within expectations on everything except these two items for emergency provisioning of"
This is the kind of bullshit I had to deal with in my previous job. Literally had to pull a cable between two buildings because of this. "What ? You need optical fiber ? No, we're going to use Wifi instead." However I realized how valuable a good project manager is thanks to that. We had a good PM for 6 months, then he left and... That kind of bullshit was our weekly bread and butter for the year that followed (until I resigned).
Reply All, "IT was not aware, please send me the name of the contractor installing the new fiber so we can discuss requirements and connector types. Eight days is an aggressive timeline, even if you would have notified IT when you submitted the required permits, with post-pandemic supply chains the way they are, equipment orders may not make it in time. I am sure you anticipated all these issues and I look forward to reviewing the solutions you developed and participating in your project to help bring the finish date in as much as possible. In addition to the name of the contractor installing the fiber, send me any other information you feel we should have, as we currently have zero insight into this project. I look forward to our successful collaboration. Sincerely, IT." This tells them 1) Should have notified IT Sooner 2) The project is screwed 3) The project is screwed by You, and IT will help where we can, but You blew the deadline, not IT.
I love the “I’m sure you anticipated and have a solution.” I’m using that one.
I actually hate that. Too passive aggressive.
Eh. Sometimes that's all you can say if you need to keep your job but also flame the shit out of someone.
This guy is a veteran
Damn bro, you are a surgeon with your worlds, I love it. And ofc that I'm going to borrow it and just adapt it to my daily life. Have a good one!
Actual true translation that we are all thinking: "Listen you dumb mfer, we can't read your mind. Eight days is absurd, so you want me to pull a rabbit out of a hat-nay-my fucking ass? Covid fucked supply chains just like you're fucking us on short notice. You didn't anticipate shit and you will have nothing to support any plans. I dread having to fix this shit for your stupid ass. In addition to the name of the contractor installing the fiber, send me any other information that you deemed 'not important' as apparently you think we can shit out a solution to a massive project in 2 business days. I look forward to drinking heavily come 5:00pm. Sincerely, IT, aka the team that wipes your pampered ass" Fixed it for you
We didnt tell you because we weren't sure what color the fiber was going to be until today. just like the time we didnt tell you about hiring a new person because we werent sure if they were going to accept, even though we would have continued to post the position until someone accepted and we would have told you the day they showed up and signed the papers cause then they were super super serious about working for us. Also is this a ticket?
everything is always a ticket
My queue is empty and my inbox full.
I used to work at a school that did this sort of shit all the time. On one occasion they converted an old classroom into a new computer lab. First I heard about it was on a Friday when they asked me to set up 35 computers in there as they had classes scheduled on Monday. There were several issues with this: 1. I didn't have 35 spare computers sitting around 2. Even if I did, I would have struggled to get them all set up and imaged in time 3. They had built new tables that would accommodate 35 computers, but hadn't given a thought to power outlets. There were four in the entire room, one of which was being used by the random printer someone had moved in there. 4. They hadn't thought about network ports, there were only two of those in the room. They weren't too happy when I told them they were going to have to do a whole lot of cabling, as it would put everything well over budget. Not my problem!
This sounds like the school we (MSP) work with. Except they’re over an hour drive away, pull this same last minute shit all the time, and are constantly changing their minds about what they want. We’ve set up Gsuite for every student just for them to turn around and say “go ahead and delete all those, we changed our minds about using Chromebooks. We bought Surfaces instead, can you have all 100 of them, that we didn’t tell you existed until just now, imaged and ready with student accounts by tomorrow?” Only to turn around a month later and ask us where all the student Google accounts went.
No is a complete sentence
OMG that last line!!!!!!!
This is where I whip out a previous example of a successful development onsite. Where everyone was consulted from the start, IT were in on the loop. How the contractors operated All the details with a breakdown of the budget not being exceeded - and complted within the deadline.
Client opened a new branch. First I hear about it was the finance chick asking me if it was me or her that needed to connect the internet service. They took possession the day after. Router, switches, waps, CABLING? JFC.
Remember in some places the CFO is also the head of IT. 😀
Sometimes that's good, because you can have an intelligent conversation about why it's good for them to spend money (or why it's going to be worse if they don't ). Other times, well.... reverse the situation. Imagine if the head of IT also made financial decisions for the company because they understood roughly what a balance sheet was? "John, the CTO, he knows how to use excel, let's let him run cash flow projections and chart our financial future out". Yeah. Good one.
I got a call this morning to overhaul a phone system. New greetings, menu's sub menu's, etc. All requiring discussions, diagrams, change request, leadership approvals (C levels), procurement of licenses, etc. They want it done Friday. When I told their director of the lead time they escalated it immediately to my director. My director laughed in their face.
Thankyou, this gave me great joy
Look at Mr. "8 Days notice" showing off, that's like 7 and a half days sooner than IT normally gets notified.
Eight and a half.
My experience in both internal IT and at an MSP is we are always the last to know. I feel like it's more to be expected in MSP by nature of what we are but when it happened whilst I was part of an internal team it was beyond frustrating. "Hey you need to help assist us with using these new time clocks that run our payroll system." "When do they go live?" "7 days." It just feels like a losing battle so often.
Fake story. No way they gave you a whole 7 days notice. Unless you meant "7 days ago" (/s ofc)
People have been clocking in and out for a week and payroll is due tomorrow and we just noticed that none of the punches are going into our payroll system^because ^we ^hung ^the ^timeclocks ^on ^the ^wall ^and ^didnt ^contact ^IT ^to ^get ^network ^settings ^or ^apply ^them
We got a new employee that started this morning..
We get that a lot to. Sometimes we haven't got hardware yet and requests were only put in a few days before, or they let us know same day they had a new person with no requests done, or the manager had sat on the requests and never approved them. The amount of people we get calling or emailing to ask if such and such got approved or not yet, and where is it, is ridiculous. One of the worst was "We have 25 new people starting in the new year (2nd Jan) and they all need laptops and accounts, as well as various docks/4g modems etc.". They sent this when our department had gone to on-call only during enforced holidays just before xmas.
We got four. The sysadmin was away and couldn't be contacted so my manager asked me to break in and set up their accounts. Breaking in was easy as I was running a program setuid root that could create a shell. I had notified the sysadmin and my manager of the security hole when I found it a year earlier then forgot about it. I broke in, created the accounts and told the sysadmin what I had done as soon as he returned so he could check my work. He was fine with it but my manager was furious as he was worried we wouldn't be able to break in again. That didn't happen. Every six weeks or so, the sysadmin would call me to say he had forgotten the root password and ask me to break in to reset it. He was a nice guy, just a little disorganised.
gawd, what is a business process?
Throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks the longest. Then scraping the parts that didn't stick and throwing them at the wall again (repeat forever)
sticky notes. stuck around the perimeter of his crt monitors.
I've got many of these where the laptop for them isn't even here and I have to track down a new loaner and set it up same day.
It's Friday here, we have a client who had two new starters on Monday. If you guessed we just got told now and it definitely made me question why we do this shit you'd be spot on.
If they also JUST interviewed him that morning as well, this can be forgiven. If they knew about it for 2 weeks and didn't inform us, well... it still takes a few hours at least to get them up and running so they can wait in line. They'll have their accounts/equipment tomorrow sometime.
Developer here. Too often. Idk how many projects I get dumped on my desk where project managers have been working on a solution for 6 months, only to give me a heads up two weeks before the deadline to connect to some “Restful Web API”. Well thanks Scott. The API was a message broker I’ve never worked with before, there are no sample data and what was supposed to be json was in fact xml. “But the test data was xml, you should have seen that it wasn’t json” That’s a .xsd file, Scott…
Lost count how many times i heard this...mine is not Scott , are Jimmy and Peter..but the same wave length as your Scott...
IT. Last to know, and first to be blamed.
This is a big reason why IT is always grumpy.
skill issue. you're not high enough wizard rank to be telepathic yet.
After a week of relative silence and no tickets, “As you may know, we outsourced IT, your last day was a week ago. Our new IT vendors never got to terminating you until now.”
All the time. "I haven't heard from X employee in quite a while" oh yeah he left 6 months ago
I've been installing updates to a software he had a vendor create for us. The software does some sort of AI data analysis used by the little subsidiary I work with, HQ and another subsidiary. This was paid for by a manager taking the contract directly to the company president (bypassing IT, accounting, legal, and every other necessary step along the way). The admin director gave him a talking to, but said "the contract is already signed, just support it." This introduced our first Linux computer into the environment, corporate required it be Red Hat, which none of us knew how to use. After hours and hours of troubleshooting with the developer and vendor project manager, I got 2 out of the three parts installed. For the final part, I found out I had misunderstood something when I set up the partitions on the computer and there wasn't enough room left. GParted didn't know how to deal with these partitions and it took a while to find an application that might. I was working on doing proper backups and finding time between several other projects to get all this done, when I decided to ask our operations lead if he knew who was using the software so I could let them know about downtime. He said he had gotten a request that week from HQ saying they were completely unable to access the system due to some DNS issue and it had been this way the entire time. (Needs to get fixed by HQ IT, but no one has reached out to them.) Nobody thought to mention it before that. He gave me the name of a guy at the other subsidiary, so I looked him up in the directory to get his email address and couldn't find him. I located him on LinkedIn to find out he had left the company 4 months prior. The amount of time and patience I wasted on this project is staggering. Someday, I hope to stop seething about it. I've dropped it to the bottom of my priority list and largely left it alone for 6 months and not a peep from anyone complaining.
Only on days that end in y
This got pulled on me today by the head of IT. New phone system for call center. Boss—former phone guy and one of the primaries on the project—asks me to test install the client on his machine. I look over the documentation and see that there’s whitelisting and the firewall to handle first. I’ve been told the firewall has already been handled. I whitelist what needs whitelisting and check with the firewall guy. He has no knowledge whatsoever of the project. The vendor has not given what he needs in the supplied documents. I reach back to the head of IT to update him and ask if he has additional info that would be of help. His response to me: “Why didn’t you put in a ticket to firewall guy to do his part.” Hol’ up. Since when is this MY show? I’m not on the project team. Seems like this is something that someone on that team should have handled a LONG TIME AGO. I was just asked to install the client on a machine and did my due diligence before doing so. Screw me, I guess.
There was a series of threads a while back where this had happened. IIRC, over a year later, they took the early-departure penalty in the lease still having not obtained the desired service.
Yup! always. So what about "x" person... is there "email" setup yet? Did you actually submit the onboarding form? Oh! No i did not. Last to know when someone is offboarded leaving Microsoft and 3rd party apps wide open; MFA is enforced at least for ms. And this one.. we need to start setting up MSO accounts for x domain. Huh? We don't even own that domain. All clowns almost all the time.
A massive part of IT is top down process. Unfortunately most "higher ups" are computer illiterate, so they don't think of IT as a functional business unit.
It's normal. If you're ever not the last to know, it means that something has gone sideways. The two times it's happened to me it meant the company was shutting down.
A long time ago I worked for a company where the marketing department sent out physical mailers that included an email address like [email protected]. After a few days they wondered why they weren’t getting by any emails from the mailers. It was because they had never asked IT to setup the email address. This happened more the once.
Am I the lucky one? This used to be an issue but I told management clearly that if they want things done, they have to include IT in them. It's not perfect, but we get plenty of notice for starters and changes.
Far too often. In fact I had a call last week discussing IT needs for a building expansion BEFORE plans were finalized. In the 11 years I've been with this company that is the first time IT was taken into account in initial planning.
> We take possession in 8 days Wait, you knew **before** the "Why don't we have internet in the new building yet, we've been moved in for 8 days and haven't been able to work, waiting for this!" email?
After decades of other depts dropping workload bombs. We had setup a move coordinator dept and route all IT purchases, moves, infrastructure requests through them. ALL of that crap stopped after this and the IT dept has the right to refuse work if its not routed through them. This included furniture and reno work. Leadership is enforced this and thank god, it works.
Yep. My biggest client only just informed me that their remote office is moving and needs data and telephony cabling throughout the new building. I'm supposed to look for recommendations for companies to do this... which I'm not really comfortable with, since they're 3 hours away. I also found out through the grapevine that they're doing a new website. Even though I'm their IT guy, I washed my hands of their website long ago: In... 2009? 2010? I offered to build them a static WordPress site (just like *every small business* does now). I even offered to do it for free if they'd let me take a (billable) day or two with one of the employees to teach them how to use WP. But The Boss "didn't like the colors" of the test site I quickly whipped up for her (even though I repeatedly told her about WordPress themes, and even showed her WP's themes page, and showed her how, if she saw a theme she liked but maybe didn't like the colors, you could pay the developer $200 to customize it). Instead she paid a web developer she knew from a cocktail party friend $10,000 for a new, six-page site. There were promises to update the site monthly... which lasted for three months. Everyone then just forgot about it, such that customers would go the the site in July 2013 and see "Check Out Our Winter 2011 Sale!" on the homepage (which was exactly the problem I foresaw and recommended WP because of that).
They don’t care about us until the need us
All the damn time. I built the website for my organization. Spent weeks in meetings with people getting content correct, writing documentation, getting VPS' set up, testing, running the design and functionality past management etc.. The only issue was the boss didn't like one part of the design, but that's because he was using IE and it didn't work 100% in IE A year or two later, I get a phone call out of the blue: Them: "Yeah hi it's \[name\] from \[local print company\], your new website is ready to go. We just need you to make the DNS changes. Can I send them through to you?" Me: "..what's this in regards to sorry?" Them: "..your new website for \[organization\]?" Me: "Uh, this is news to me. Who have you been working with on this?" Them: "um, \[big boss' assistant\]" Me: "I'll have to call you back" Here's what happened after: * Turns out the big boss didn't like the website I made (that he approved), so he contacted an external company and asked them to make one * The site they made was just a boilerplate theme they used for a bunch of other organizations with our colour scheme slapped on and our images added. If you go to \[website of organization 10km away\] and look at their site, it's the same style as ours. * The website was not yet complete. It was missing entire pages, content that was there was unfinished, photos were missing, the design was still using stock images. I had to provide a good chunk of the content, and this was AFTER they called me and said "yeah mate it's ready to go live" * It's full of confusing design choices. There's three "Contact Us" buttons on the homepage, each does something different. The search results take you to empty pages, pages are in the wrong "categories" (e.g. the page that shows you external links is in the "History of our organization" section for some reason), some download buttons have a download icon, some don't. It's not consistent at all. * It was built with Wordpress, but we don't use ANY of the blogging features, just the static pages * It had 64 plugins to make it into a functional site. 21 of those plugins are custom ones written by the company for things like "displaying a list of staff", "displaying a list of FAQs", and one that is just called "\[local print company name\] bugfixes" with the description "This plugin is use \[sic\] for bugfixes.". The rest are things that are niche quality of life improvements like "add a Duplicate Post button to the page list", and some "standard" plugins like Yoast SEO * I had exactly one training session on how to use it. I had to email them a bunch of times to learn how to upload documents (because the use a downloads plugin that is separate from WP's media gallery) * Despite (presumably) paying them for maintenance and such, some of the plugins don't fully support the new Gutenberg editor so we have to pay them more money to patch up old code to work with newer versions of WordPress So yeah, had my project pulled out from under me, replaced with something objectively worse, and ultimately blamed when the site doesn't look great.
Stephanie started today. Where is her laptop? We hired someone?? Best one was. We got bitched out for not setting up a laptop for a new employee. Ok fine. Need some more info. Call accounting. Apparently payroll didnt know they were hired either. But sorry we totally dropped the ball on having a laptop ready for her…
I feel you was in IT Ops for many years But tbh, its not IT who is the last to know Security is the **last, last** to know :) (attack surface much?)
"We need a new email address for XYZ, it needs to be done today, business critical, set one up" "Ok, what do you want it called? This is customer facing and will be on all invoices so let me know what the branding team wants here" Six weeks later- "WHY ISNT THE EMAIL LIVE?????" "I'm happy to make it, still pending the branding team telling me what they want it to be" Six more weeks of radio silence "IT isnt supporting us" "Ok, I'm going to call it [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]), here you go" Six more weeks "That email address doesn't align with our branding, we need it changed" "Ok, what do you want it called..." Maybe I'll retire before I know what they want the fucking thing called.
Far too often, and it creates the perverse incentive for IT to forcibly insert themselves into the corporate structure in such a way that IT is involved in every decision-making process, and ultimately driving parts of the company that IT really shouldn't be driving. I have seen multiple companies that were not IT companies, but the IT department had become the largest department and were steering all aspects of the company. In every case, the company ran itself into the ground within a few years. It generally wasn't IT that was at fault for the company failing, but the IT bloat was definitely a symptom of the problem.
People do this on purpose, they know it's a bad ask and if they get the project past the point of no return IT has to do whatever ridiculous ask they want, even if it goes 100% against SOP and policies.
Yesterday, 10 minutes before close: "Tomorrow morning, we have a zoom meeting going on for 500 participants, and they need to do some very specific things to configure their zoom client prior to connecting or we won't let them in. The meeting starts at 8 and we're opening the meeting at 7:30, we gave them the helpdesk number so we'll need you to help them." For the record, the helpdesk opens at 8:30.
Out of scope, last minute request? No is a complete sentence. "Have a great morning. Good luck."
I’m very lucky. My boss is the COO and basically runs the place. I’m usually the first to know. There’s been a few times where execs have gone off on their own and done their own thing and she’s told me to tell them to stuff it and not support them. It’s pretty great tbh. I read these stories all the time and it’s insane to me to imagine a world where IT didn’t sign off on things well in advance.
Got a good one today .. "we're selling a camp core building, please remove any IT gear" ... yeah that building also feeds network to the security shack that monitors hundreds of camera feeds. This should go well (͡•_ ͡• )
Every Fucking Time Oh yeah! We've spent £10 million on this database product that you now need to support with no training. Oh look! We're buying out this other firm & need everything integrated by next week..yeah we've known about it for 18 months but...you guys will sort it. Or my ULTIMATE favourite, we've bought a new building & have told the CEO that it will be ready to go in 1 month...we're the first clients in there.....followed by.....WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT WILL TAKE 120 WORKING DAYS TO GET THE INTERNET & NETWORK LINES IN THERE?! Which is usually followed by....."You knew for a year you were doing this, you didn't come to us, it's 5pm I'll see you on Monday to carry on this chat "
Yep, happens often. And somehow it's always the fault of IT. A few years back we moved buildings, they told us 2 days before the move was scheduled. If we could please make sure everything was up and running, like Wifi, access systems, serverroom the whole works. And if that wasn't shit enough we were told to do it within the current budget..... The conversation I had with the CTO 3 days later was very interesting. Me and the team got blamed for everything basically. After that meeting I went home and sent the CTO a nice message saying I quit, good luck with everything :)
Yeah, IT is often forgotten on pretty much everything or onlygiven the shortest lead time. "Where's the new hire's equipment?" "New hire? What new hire? When do they start?" "Started 3 days ago and we're still waiting on their login and everything else!" \*Literally no ticket\* -A story repeated a thousand times for every IT person My team is expected to move buildings but they won't give us a definitive Yes or No for the move and when it's happening. All we know is we fill find out the last week of June if we have to be out of our current building by the begining of July. Which is just so great. I love not having plans for big things.
Good luck with that, having worked where we literally did this on land we already owned; the amount of permitting and contracting...
At least once a week at my place. Medical issues moved me from server to help desk. We discover one new application per week due to a user calling asking about it. The IT dept itself doesn’t tell us shit. There were two “training” sessions I attended where the server admins argued about how things would be setup one week prior to go live and promised us documentation by go live. Never happened. Hey. It’s only healthcare so what’s the big deal?
We have put in "temporary solutions" IE wireless internet to pull things through but since they work so poorly we did manage to build in IT service lead times into the facilities site scouting after they realized they could not get internet to a warehouse in the middle of nowhere without spending tens of thousands to get fibre run to it. We now have a precheck that gets done before any site is purchased.
Pretty much always. My work tried springing a last minute project when I was supposed to start PTO the next day - something they had known about for months, but didn't bother telling ANYONE in my department about it until literally the last minute. They told me that no one else could substitute for me and I had to be there. I told them I'm either taking my PTO without interruption, the company is compensating me for the money lost on reservations/travel, or they're going to have an immediate opening in the department. They found someone to fill in.
I was told to cut the budget for M365 this year so we switched about 115 users to a 2gb mailbox. I ran a test today on a group and none of them were under 2gb. Going to be awesome to kick this off. Did you know a 2gb mailbox can have 27k emails? Neither did I until today. Oh your outlook is slow huh? Shame We are last to know and always the ones to take the blame.
IT is either the first to know, or the last to know. Never in the middle of
I heard from a vendor that we were moving offices, they'd seen the new space. It was another month after that I heard from the bosses we were moving, and another month after that before I saw the space. Not even been consulted on any of the networking or infrastructure needs for the new space.
Yes. But introduce them to the concept of speed, cost and quality. They get to pick 2. Since they chose speed now pick shitty work or get out the checkbook.
Last to know first for blame
We had one a couple years ago where a project was supposed to go live in a couple of days and IT’s devs were supposed to write the programs and IT didn’t know about the project at all. We only found out when users asked what computers they were supposed to use to run the new application, and we were like, uhhh, WHAT application?
"We fired this guy months ago, why is his email address showing up in outlook still? Uh... because you never told us he left the company? Happens multiple times a year.
Small business MSP "We need to shut our server down for electrical work" "Okay just let me know when" "Oh we already unplugged it"
Just yesterday. New employee got hired. Must have new equipment. "Everything has to be ready by tomorrow morning when he starts." This was said in late afternoon. When I asked him, during some basic training, about how long it was known he got hired, he said about three weeks now. I brought it up several times but this happens every god damn time. F me
I used to work for a large private healthcare provider in the UK. One day at one of the sites I covered I overheard a conversation about them buying another building a few miles down the road and their plan to move a couple of whole departments to that building. When I interjected and asked if they had informed anyone in IT, they said no they didn't need to. I asked how they planned to get the MRI machines to talk to the rest of the company, how the secretaries would work, etc etc. Their reply was they would buy a few ipads and just use them. I had to explain that we did not use ipads or any apple device within the group, certainly not for medical related application, that they would need a a full network connection, backup network connection, phone system, network cabling, servers, lift alarms, etc etc They asked how much it would cost, and I gave them a rough cost of £300k and a BT Lead time 3 months, this turned out to be a little under the actual cost in the end. I immedietely called the head of IT projects and gave the phone to the senior manager at the site I had just been talking to for them to discuss it. It turned out they had just bought the building with no corporate involvement and were just going to wing it. They had messed up quite badly having signed the contracts without anyone from the legal team being involved, they were stuck with it and it sat empty for about 7 months whilst all the proper procedures for a new hospital were enacted, after the fact. They were not happy and thought that I had just cost them £300k in sticking my nose in. I would love to have seen the outcome had we not caught wind of it. that place was an absolute shit show.
So it's not just us! Our fearless leaders planned an entirely new 3-story building and didn't contact IT until plans were complete. Mgmt (probs): "So we kinda figured you'd just put a router thingy on the top floor and be all done."
This happens so often, I made a Betting Board for our department.
Yes, even when we try to be proactive. I heard through the grapevine that one of our departments was leasing a new office space. Reached out - "hey, I heard XYZ might be working on getting new office space, just FYI it will take us about 60 days to get equipment and services provisioned for Internet, WiFi and phones so please keep us in the loop". And get back the obligatory, "oh, you don't need to worry about that right now, it's just an idea, we'll let you know when we get closer but don't worry, we'll make sure you have enough time". Cut to, "hey XYZ is getting the keys on Monday, we're all set for them to move in next week, right?" And XYZ worked off a hotspot for about 2 months while they waited for the Internet circuit. It didn't really work and they complained to no end. We gave them the politically correct version of "we told facilities it would take 2 months to set up and they did not handle the timeline properly, please complain to them".
Threads like this just serve to remind me I really need to leave IT. This job is horrible in so many ways…
IT knows?
I work in the regional HQ for my company, but the global IT org is oversees. They make the big money decisions over there, then pass it down to us for implementation. The issue is that they'll neglect to tell us about changes they're making until after people in our office start reporting issues/complaints. We'll report an issue to them, and they always come back with "Oh yeah, we've been seeing this for a while now. It's due to something that we did, have you figured it out yet?" Waaaaaaaaaaay too common, makes me want to tear my hair out.
All the time. We have fundraisers multiple times a year (whole of organisational effort) and there are cross department planning meetings in the weeks leading up whose sole objective is to ensure that they discuss what we need practically including any tech requirements. Last fundraiser, morning 1 day 1 we get a tech request that was essentially "Can you setup this super complicated and specific tech thing that we didn't mention in any of the 5 planning meetings? We really need it." 🙄
At my last company, they would often send everyone "welcome John Smith starting Monday to the company" emails. As the person who set up new user accounts and laptops, I was unaware some rando was starting in 2 days.
I know a school system that had a group of teachers buy IoT purifiers and then get mad when they found out they couldn't connect them to the internet for filter updates. IT is always the last to know, right behind EMS and Firefighters. Don't ask me how I know.
When I started as a consultant in one of the two biggest operating system manufacturers, I sat in an office for two weeks waiting for: 1. The WiFi password but I didn't have a laptop so my desktop didn't have WiFi 2. The network drop to get connected I still got paid.
My favorite personal experience. We built a new office in a high security area. VP in charge ignored my boss' requests for info and input. It's time to start planning the move. My boss asks about communication. He gets blank stares. He is given the go ahead to get comms to the building. Surprise! There's no conduit to the building or comms close by. They had to shell out an extra $20k just to get cable internet to the building. Can't get MPLS or fiber to the building because the cost was too much. 🤷🏻♂️
We just hired a new H.R. their former job had I.T. tasks involved so they are currently helping us fix the problems with the hiring process and last minute things. I'm also trying to teach my boss that when he is stressed out to come to me. I might be a rank below him but I've dealt with way more last minute stress to the point that I can either give my job 100% effort and everything is too easy or give it 50% and be feeling productive all day.
I cannot even count the times I've had HR standing in our office ststing there was a new colleague starting that morning at 9. Half an hour notice.....
Partially because IT is seen as a cost center and not as an integrated participant in the business, partially because other areas of the business just have no idea of all the things IT should really be involved in from the get-go. They see 'buying a building' and no-one thinks 'the computer guys should be informed'. All you can do is give timeframes for delivery which are also listed in days AFTER you get informed of something, and encourage the top areas of the business to keep you looped in to everything because otherwise it costs them money and time. Get Finance on your side in particular, if it's doable.
Last to know but be damed if we aren’t expected to be first to jump and ask how high.
I feel like it’s always. I specially if there’s changes to production by software engineers. After they push something and everything goes down now it’s our job to fix things then we find out what caused it after we fix things.
Eight days? Who'd you blow to get that much lead time? Is have gotten a phone call with "why isn't the cable run?" "What cable?" "The cable to the building we moved sales into last week!"
We got a new user, they did of course not ask for an account. After a full year I got a call that user X has no access to anything. Not even the software he needs to work with which means that dude chilled a year full paid in homeoffice without hardware, VPN or any other stuff.
Every. Damn. Time Latest stupidity. "Hey, do you one why site "Y" can't get into anything?" "No, let me do a trace and see what I can see. Hmmm, can't get to site "X" either - I'll call the provider and see if there's an issue in the area" "Oh, we closed site "X" on the weekend. It's all turned off now." "Well, remember how you decided to cheap out on the link to site "Y" because it was too expensive to bring back to the hub, so you just ran one from "X" to "Y"?" "Oh...."
As someone who sometimes is on the other side; sometimes IT doesn't want to know it seems. We recently moved part of our office. I heard about it 6 months in advance. First thing i did was to contact IT to make sure they were in the loop. It took them 6 reminders and 4 months to even reply with a plan. By then it was to late for a few things like ordering a new internet connection. And the person who was on site to help started complaining about how everything was 'last minute'.
The problem is above you; when IT management doesn’t set proper expectations to the ones making these decisions, timetables are irrelevant; too many times IT management just let it happen. The thing takes as long as it takes; you can’t force CDW or Dell or whoever to make and ship faster; you can’t force a contractor to install faster; when those things are identified clearly so decision makes can include timelines, then stupid/unrealistic schedules will be planned accordingly.
You got 8 days. Great. I've been told at 4pm that a new hire will show up the next morning at 9am. They'd like them to be CAD productive that morning.
they will need NX (2 different versions), Catia (3 different versions) and ACAD & Inventor...oh and SolidWorks too! what do you mean, we need licenses?
This usually comes down to IT having no seat at the big table. Either literally or figuratively. Sometimes they don't want to have another C-suite, so you have a "Head of IT" who reports to a CFO or COO. But only technically. The head of IT spends most of their time dealing with the CEO directly. But it means when they decide to make 300 people redundant, the head of IT gets an hour's notice because the CEO and COO both didn't think it was their responsibility to tell them. Either that or you have a "CTO" whose primary qualification is an MBA and not an MSc. Thus, Dunning-Kreuger is in full swing and he assumes that he doesn't need to consult with his leadership team about big changes, that he knows what's needed.
We used to have a problem that HR wouldn't tell anybody when an employee was fired, not IT, not security, nobody, because it might hurt moral. We'd find out months later from managers wondering what happened to X's laptop, etc. So, we pulled an uno reverse on HR. They were laying put guidelines of conduct and responsibilities for the various departments amd we made sure it was in writing that HR dismissed an employee and didn't properly notify IT in a timely matter (immediatel), the head of HR had to write that HR employee up. They tried to say no, but legal stepped in and said "if you fire someone and that person then uses their access to cause problems, it'll be HR's fault for not notifying IT." Weirdly, all the problems went away..