Tip jar

If you like CaB and wish to support it, you can use PayPal or KoFi. Thank you, and I hope you continue to enjoy the site - Neil.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Support CaB

Recent

Welcome to Cook'd and Bomb'd. Please login or sign up.

March 28, 2024, 03:10:09 PM

Login with username, password and session length

Have you worked anywhere where the IT wasn't absolute dogshit?

Started by Blinder Data, June 21, 2018, 11:11:51 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

Blinder Data

Well, have you?

At my work we have lots of exciting new VC tech that we barely use because the new signal keeps dropping out

We recently moved to "soft" phones via our laptops. Still doesn't work properly

People seem to have active profiles even though they left the company years ago

And I bet I'm lucky compared to some places

I know we have some IT boffins on here. No offence to you lot, we know it's the fault of big bosses. Would be good if you could reply to that email we sent last week though

Jerzy Bondov

Epson came out with the first computer printer in 1968. 50 years later and nobody has worked out how to make a printer that isn't total shit.

AsparagusTrevor

Our IT is awful. It's one centralised hub in Leeds which serves the whole company across the country, remotely. You have to log a call on their Helpdesk system and then if you're lucky they get back to you the same week.

They know fuck all about any of the software my department uses, and for any issues they usually just fall back on their default fix which is to delete your profile, losing all your personal settings and history in the process.

They have locked Windows settings to the absolute maximum, so any simple problem you could easily fix yourself aren't possible. You can't save shortcuts on the desktop or even right click most files. A colleague of mine had to get used to the high-contrast theme on Windows just because she couldn't change the setting back and didn't want IT to delete her profile again.

A while ago we adopted a new system which was incompatible with a huge chunk of our infrastructure. It was promised this would be fixed so in the meantime we used a ballache of a workaround with lots ways it could go wrong. Several years later we're still using this workaround.

Icehaven

Our IT provision has recently been taken over by Capita and the library management system (LMS) has also just been updated, and surprise surprise it's been a total disaster. It's caused havoc in public libraries by continually failing and leaving the public unable to get onto library computers and staff unable to process new stock. In my library we have to have a separate and restricted version of the LMS, which totally flummoxed Crapita when they were setting up the update, took weeks to sort out leaving us with a huge backlog, and currently I can't order or process any new books as they've now decided it's also set up all wrong with our suppliers. I'm just about ready to go back to using those card pockets for the customers and order the bloody books by post.

Zetetic

Yes.

To the point where my work still depends heavily on their ongoing helpfulness several years after I actually left.

(About to be reorganised in a fashion that'll likely enable stripping back office functions.)

Paul Calf

Almost everywhere. I usually bring my own hardware and configure my own environments so it's usually exactly as I like it, but there was one contract about eight years ago where we were forced to use Windows 2000 and weren't allowed local admin permissions so had to ask for every single software item to be installed.

Although we did have access to the production app servers and database.

New Jack

Yes, in the company where I was the sole IT staff; it was a nightmare for me, the business model turned into essentially a centre of cold-calling phone-cunts, but I fixed everything, upgraded every machine in the building, set up an asset register, and ordered spare everythings so everyone from the director to the call centre drones didn't need to wait even when they did stupid shit like drop water on their phones. Nobody needed anything, I went in finding a muffin on my desk more often than not, so confused they were by competence. I hated the job, but the fit receptionists (plural!) hugging me every day because I made their lives better? Pretty, pretty good; as was directors buying me dinner as thanks - they went from zero IT (how???) to good IT!

I was popular, I was needed, but my asset register revealed dodgy purchases by a director (eg. getting loads of equipment delivered to his house) and lo, I was canned. Then they went bankrupt last year, oweing over £1m in debt and unpaid taxes, so I was probably too good for that place.

The thing with IT the rest of you lot need to know is it's an essential service; when it's shitty staff, overworked or even offshored, it's essentially your company saying "We don't understand IT needs, it's an expense; we therefore don't care about you". I've worked with shitty IT staff before; but I've got far less examples of management who get the balance of expense vs necessity right, and when the balance is right, the users (read: you lot) are looked after properly.

I don't have any special needs (autism jokes aside) to do even a helpdesk job - personally I think if you fail at helpdesk, you're failing at more fundamental things in life - but it's such a maligned industry. I'd suggest viewing a department as emblematic as a problem higher up the chain - isolated examples of shit workers aside. Same with any department - if you think HR are shit, how did that come to be, and why is it so? Someone's hiring all these cunts, and someone accepts a shit level of service...

spamwangler

Just started somewhere where its good. Bossman who designed the system works here, so he's constantly maintaining it and making little scripts and tweaks to remove annoying little niggles. Feels rare

New Jack

Quote from: spamwangler on June 21, 2018, 12:42:24 PM
Just started somewhere where its good. Bossman who designed the system works here, so he's constantly maintaining it and making little scripts and tweaks to remove annoying little niggles. Feels rare

Bodes well. I've always respected the bossmen and bosswomen who can do what those beneath do, or have done in the past, or otherwise can understand it - which is especially useful when it comes to things like the inevitable promises of X or Y can be done; and yer man seems to have a proactive attitude, which I think is rare and wish there was a magic pill to instil as I'd be spiking coffees like Savile in a 1970s hospital staffroom

Sebastian Cobb

Where I work now we're just given imacs that aren't even connected to the mickeysoft domain. It's great.

If I were to design an IT system from scratch these days I'd probably get some fuckoff blades and make everyone work via vdi. Carrying laptops about is such a luddite thing these days.

Shit Good Nose

One and only one (so far, at least) - Royal and Sun Alliance, where the IT was light years ahead of anything I would use for the subsequent nearly-10 years.  Putting that into context, my current employer is only just now replacing old Nokias and BlackBerrys, and has a firewall which blocks all zipped files.  It just stops them dead outside.  Doesn't even put them into a quarantine folder.  And it doesn't give you a notification that something's been blocked.  And, with GDPR, pretty much every attachment we get is zipped and password protected now.

To temper that, though, everything else about RSA and that job was utter dogshit and I jumped after only 9 months.


Sebastian Cobb

I was subcontract to an oil company in 2009 that still used windows 2000; it took 20 minutes for workstations to boot up from a cold start.

Due to the rigmarole and the years of planning involved they were persevering with their migration to Windows Vista despite microsoft distancing themselves from it and windows 7 being released. Useless.

Zetetic

QuoteAnd, with GDPR, pretty much every attachment we get is zipped and password protected

Hope you've started saving for the fines now.

Sebastian Cobb

If your work has a shitty bit of security software that peeks in zipfiles it's basically your duty to email through a decompression bomb.

https://github.com/damianrusinek/zip-bomb

Paul Calf

I discovered on Friday that if you have video or photographic evidence for the police, it's extremely difficult to transfer it to them in a way that complies with their security policies. The upshot of this is that I now have video files that are legally classed as evidence and if I delete them - whether accidentally or deliberately - I commit a criminal offence.

checkoutgirl

I think I.T is progressively getting worse with new updates. So Microsoft come up with a new Outlook email platform, but to justify a new version they have to add more stuff to it. This slows the whole thing down and makes it buffer 25% of the time. Sending an email means you can't do anything else while it's sending. It crashes more often. You open it at the start of the day and it has to start in safe mode so you lose your view settings for fuck knows what reason. It's fucking pony. I.T can't do shit because the thing is inherently bloated, fucked and unfixable.

Yet companies and organisations still insist on spending billions on getting Microsoft.

Other than that the I.T isn't the worst I've seen in the company I'm in now. Sometimes it depends who you get on the phone and their level of expertise. The real pain in the arse now is this cloud business. Everything has to go on the cloud now and sorting out synchronising the cloud with your computer and assigning permissions etc is a pain in the hole.

You have to take a blinking online course just to learn how to use the fucking thing. Of course the whole shitshow will be overhauled in 5 years and we'll have to take another course to learn how to use that complete fuck up of a system.

pigamus

Quote from: Jerzy Bondov on June 21, 2018, 11:16:49 AM
Epson came out with the first computer printer in 1968. 50 years later and nobody has worked out how to make a printer that isn't total shit.

The printer with my Amstrad CPC was a good lad. Fairly faint printouts but reliable, and no ripoff printer cartridges either. I'm sure whoever was in charge of that company was and remains an exemplary individual.

Sebastian Cobb

Quote from: checkoutgirl on June 21, 2018, 01:36:08 PM
I think I.T is progressively getting worse with new updates. So Microsoft come up with a new Outlook email platform, but to justify a new version they have to add more stuff to it. This slows the whole thing down and makes it buffer 25% of the time. Sending an email means you can't do anything else while it's sending. It crashes more often. You open it at the start of the day and it has to start in safe mode so you lose your view settings for fuck knows what reason. It's fucking pony. I.T can't do shit because the thing is inherently bloated, fucked and unfixable.

Yet companies and organisations still insist on spending billions on getting Microsoft.

Other than that the I.T isn't the worst I've seen in the company I'm in now. Sometimes it depends who you get on the phone and their level of expertise. The real pain in the arse now is this cloud business. Everything has to go on the cloud now and sorting out synchronising the cloud with your computer and assigning permissions etc is a pain in the hole.

You have to take a blinking online course just to learn how to use the fucking thing. Of course the whole shitshow will be overhauled in 5 years and we'll have to take another course to learn how to use that complete fuck up of a system.

Corporate it software is awful. Windows is ruined by it.

Sharepoint has to be the worst thing ever. You might as well shred your documents as no cunt will ever manage to find them. It's quite disheartening being made to document something knowing full well nobody will read it because it'll never be found.

DrGreggles

I work in IT and, in theory, where I work everything should be fine.
The machines are new and decent, the network is stable, the onsite team are experienced and qualified, everyone knows what they're supposed to do and how to do it.

Unfortunately the decision was made at the start of the contract to out-source the roles of others to various different companies. So the service desk is in Newcastle and the network config is done in Reading, the standardised build is built/maintained in Scotland and the parts come from Holland.

There is so much red tape in place that even a job that should take 30 minutes can take days to resolve. Add to that the difficulty in synchronising the different teams/companies to schedule work is bloody impossible - even though it should be simple.

The annoying this is that it all becomes "IT's fault", where it's nothing of the sort. It's down to whoever decided to out-source everything and then set procedures in place that we're contractually obliged to adhere to - even though we know perfectly well that it's both time consuming and expensive.

Sherringford Hovis

Quote from: Paul Calf on June 21, 2018, 01:31:12 PM
the police, it's extremely difficult

Emergency services comms and IT are utter dogshit. No, wait, something more prehistoric than dogshit - sabre-toothed tigershit?

If it weren't for Googlemaps and giffgaff, no fire engine or ambulance would arrive at the right place in a timely fashion ever. Don't know about plod, despite seemingly bottomless budgets I've never met a copper who could find his arse with both hands, let alone operate a computer.

jonno

I work for a large bank, IT support is offshored to Lithuania so getting apps installed/working, passwords changed etc. is a right laugh.

Rocket Surgery

Least pleasant sites I've ever worked on?

Building sites.

Aaaah.


Sebastian Cobb

Quote from: DrGreggles on June 21, 2018, 03:55:30 PM
I work in IT and, in theory, where I work everything should be fine.
The machines are new and decent, the network is stable, the onsite team are experienced and qualified, everyone knows what they're supposed to do and how to do it.

Unfortunately the decision was made at the start of the contract to out-source the roles of others to various different companies. So the service desk is in Newcastle and the network config is done in Reading, the standardised build is built/maintained in Scotland and the parts come from Holland.

There is so much red tape in place that even a job that should take 30 minutes can take days to resolve. Add to that the difficulty in synchronising the different teams/companies to schedule work is bloody impossible - even though it should be simple.

The annoying this is that it all becomes "IT's fault", where it's nothing of the sort. It's down to whoever decided to out-source everything and then set procedures in place that we're contractually obliged to adhere to - even though we know perfectly well that it's both time consuming and expensive.

I'm a developer but my favourite thing to work on is our asset ingest system that I inherited; there's no QA or actual process so it literally means I can fuck around with it all I like and if it breaks some people from upstairs email me then I fix it. One of our providers supplies content that went out live and has a sting saying 'this isn't live so don't phone in you moron' and I wrote a bit of image recognition code to pick that up and cut it off so it doesn't break the subtitles because the cunts didn't offset them. No formal process at all... 'oi does this work?' 'yeah nice one'. Sorted.

spamwangler

partner's place of work is a shop, has a computer till/inventory system, - the company that designed the system are on windows motherfucking 95 still apparently

Sebastian Cobb

Quote from: spamwangler on June 21, 2018, 09:30:42 PM
partner's place of work is a shop, has a computer till/inventory system, - the company that designed the system are on windows motherfucking 95 still apparently

This is very common with CNC gear. ISA control cards and that.

My old man worked in trunk radio. Parts of that involved sending data over radio before cellular networks did it all for you. One of the systems they did was West Midlands Travel; I remember them having a mad rush to replace all the 10 year old 386 pc's as the hard drives were dying and having to buy in bulk a load of pentium 2 based machines (by then slow as fuck) that could support the isa radio control cards.


Shoulders?-Stomach!

We have an enormous IT team at our place and in fairness they are much relied upon and generally we find their work up to scratch. There are some lazy cunts though - open office and you can see them watching BMX videos on YouTube while upstairs legal assistants are working their guts out for less money.

Sebastian Cobb

I don't think it's the IT departments' fault folk in legal get rinsed.

We employ a 17 year old coder that got paid more than a 22 year old legal apprentice. I think the apprentice was underpaid.

shiftwork2

NHS so we've just said adios to Windows XP, prompted by the cyberattack of last year.  Windows 7 is quite the cool new thing isn't it?  The IT people are very nice though.

Cloud

Nope and I work in IT.

Previous job was at a charity, we had literally no money.  On the whole the staff were great, in fact I really miss the thing of enjoying the company of the people you work with enough to socialise with them (a feeling I've not had since).  But I could only do a limited amount of things to help with ancient donated computers.  There were always a few people who thought I was shit because I couldn't "put go faster stripes" on 10 year old hardware, magic new PCs out of the air or I resisted the idea of just pirating a few more copies of MS Office.  But what can you do, no money.  They went into liquidation...

Current job is a for profit and the budget is flexible despite ailing profits, aimless leadership and constant talk of tightening belts and We Must Try Harder... but in the way is the fact that I work under an existing IT manager.  And he's an absolute "Bastard Operator From Hell", Arnold Judas Rimmer incarnate, smeghead.  Favourite word is "nope", blames the users for everything, and his favourite pastime is dismissing and contradicting any input I try to make.  The positive side is many of the users actually mention to me that they actively try to get me when they need something because I treat them like human beings and don't shout at them that they have more than 5 tabs open and haven't run ccleaner and defraggler recently and the sudden bluescreens and thrashing hard drive (SHITTY SPINNING HARD DRIVES, WHICH HE STILL SPECS OUT IN NEW BUILDS REEEEEEEEEEE) must be because of that.  I know that our IT is shit, I freely admit to other users that our IT is shit.  I was sharing the pain of one of them earlier waiting for a laptop to thrash its way past the login screen and acknowledged that it probably would've been faster to just go and re-type on a desktop what she wanted access to.  Some of them seem to realise that I have the predicament of a manager who shoots me down if I suggest radical things like an SSD rollout or spending any sort of money on user experience though.

To be honest, I end up feeling demotivated as fuck and just dicking around on the internet half the time, under the mindset of "what's the point".