'Twas the night before Y2K and a grinch stole the IT department's overtime payout Not just the week but The Register's working year has drawn to an end, and that means it's time to wrap things up with the last of our slow-news-week festive editions of On-Call, the column we compile after kind readers send in their stories of support jobs that went south. Today: tales of tech support over the holiday period …
The company where I was working offered a one-off payment of £750 for anyone willing to sacrifice their 'new millennium' celebrations in order to be on call over the midnight of Y2k. This was all agreed early in 1999, even though we'd clearly demonstrated that there was no issue with our PCs or servers, by the simple process of setting the clocks forward to 31st Dec on a range of test systems and watching them rollover.
Then in mid-99 they decided to eliminate the European head office and manage all European ops direct from the New Jersey head office (try to imagine how well that worked out). But those who left still got their £750 on top of a quite generous severance package. Which made for a very happy new year.
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I was running a station for a broadcaster one Christmas and was going down to my parents for the festive season. There wasn't just me there was engineering cover on call as well but there were non technical things that only I was going to fix. Also as it was Christmas there was a a cover presenter for the late shift who was new to the station. There isn't much of a signal on any mobile network at my parents house so I gave them my parents land line number. I said that if it was a real emergency and only if it was they should call it. I pointed out that my dad would not be pleased to be woken up after midnight. Oddly the only call I ever got was to say "everything is fine" and "Happy Christmas". Apparently my notes were so good that it was hard to go wrong.
A mate who was about a month into his new job at a new company was doing the Christmas period departmental cover. He spotted a serious problem on the 31st December at 17:55 and attempted to escalate it but was unable to reach anyone. In desperation he resorted to the disaster recovery plan looking for phone numbers. He tried to call the Head of Technology but somehow read the wrong phone number. He had in fact dialled the Chief Executive who was already out for the evening and had no idea what the problem that was being explained to him meant. He did however have the personal number of the Head of Technology and passed that on. Fearing a bollocking from the CEO he sent an apology email and received one back saying that he'd done the right thing. Oh and thank god it hadn't been any later as the CEO might not have been of sound mind and body much later.
... I always volunteered to work the final week or ten days of the calendar year. To me, those days are the start of NEXT year. I celebrate Solstice, and have since I were a nipper. Seems more important to me than a made-up birthday party trying to take the place of the start of winter ... or the last day of a calendar year that doesn't match up to where the Earth really is in it's orbit, for that matter.
No, I'm not Wiccan, or any other religion ... I just like the fact that the days are getting longer now. Starting early spring veggies soon!
If you mean knotweed, goats when it first shows up (to eat what's above ground), followed by hogs to root out what's underground. You have roughly two seasons to implement this. If it's older than a couple years, either dig and burn, or good old fashioned glyphosate applied every time/place there is an outbreak. There are no other options.
You can guess how I know this ...
To you and yours, all the best for a wonderful holiday season, and a healthy and prosperous 2018"
I was hoping for a nice quiet Christmas, last-minute dash to John Lewis on Sunday, family, friends lunch on Christmas Day etc. But no. at 3pm yesterday I get last second screaming from a project manager, "biggest client ... blah, blah ... SLA level 1 support needed .. offshore SLA support not available from Mumbai .. panic panic .. can you cover 24/7 until Thursday?".
As my better half said, "just charge them £1,000 per call until they get the message"
Happy Blooming Christmas to all (except my employer and project managers everywhere)
In this country I think people have an aversion to talking about money generally, we just hope rewards we are promised are big rather than have the awkward conversation to clarify just how big. We don't like talking about the salaries are on or sometimes believe we deserve more than we are on, even if we do we seldom do anything about it.
Everyone else thinks IT is a cushy job and we are paid a fortune for little. We all know that's not true, we also know we are the first to be screwed over financially or with our jobs as opposed to everyone else in the company.
I think the attitude towards IT and IT workers in general needs to change to be more positive and recognise the skills we have and how much the world would be in the shit (and in the dark ages) without us. That would make for the best Christmas present we could all get one year.
"Everyone else thinks IT is a cushy job and we are paid a fortune for little. We all know that's not true, we also know we are the first to be screwed over financially or with our jobs as opposed to everyone else in the company."
Having previously been in the scientific side of the Civil Service I can tell you that that's not confined to IT. There seems to be a strange dichotomy in the managerial mind: if they can't understand what's being done it must be very little and yet they realise they couldn't do it themselves.
I've been fortunate to have had one of those managers. I was on a two week secondment to our US team and wondered why everyone there was so happy and motivated, compared to the grumpy crew I worked with in the UK. For instance - our manager refused to hire someone we had personally recommended, for their technical skills, because she didn't like the socks he wore to the interview. She also had no clue as to what we actually did, in stark contrast with the US manager; who I once spotted walking through the support centre and, seeing that one of the incoming call queues had a long wait time, he pulled up a chair, put on a headset and dealt with the backlog. First day on my return to the UK I made a request to move permanently to the US, so glad that it got granted.
Now be fair.
When you have half a dozen users all screaming that their computers aren't finding the shared documents at 4:30 on a Friday, you can't see anything wrong when you log in yourself and and the network expert has gone home early to nurse a sick relative you need to have the right kind of socks. Otherwise who knows what might happen.
Happy New year.
,,,they realise they couldn't do it themselves...
20+ years ago, my then employer provided IT support for a number of small businesses. I came across a couple where the management was proud that it did not understand IT. Oddly, those particular businesses were not there a couple of years later when I decided to do a bit of research. Engineering businesses and people who actually produce things do go bust from time to time but those ones were accountants!
Here in America would would sue. there is a slight chance of a work place shooting for that much money.
I grew up with family in the trades. I can tell you this if you shorted union trades men that much money the feds would be involved. Not because the have that much pull or the feds want to help out.
No it's cause your ass went missing and the FBI suspects foul play. At a minimum some union thugs would show up.
My current IT department has put up walls over the past few years to push staff to use our support system and not call us, literally everything to prevent interaction with staff is done. It must be done via the support system, if that's not possible it must be done via e-mail and if that's not possible there is an EMERGENCY ONLY line they can use and if it's not an emergency they get a telling off.
We've gone from being fairly visible to invisible in just 3 years, we're no longer allowed to attend "silly project team meetings" which means we're now unaware of what's coming as IT management aren't attending either and we're being left to run around at the last minute. We're landed with software/hardware that we've to support which in some cases we have no idea how to support!
So absolutely we need people to see us in a different, more positive light but that's got to start with our IT management enabling us to be seen more often and in a more positive light. If the only time you see someone is when things have gone to **** then you'll quickly start dreading them turning up!
OH God! Silo working. Over the years (decades) I've butted my head against both sides of deliberately created silo walls so many f*cking times.(Both in the IT and non-IT aspects of my work). It's either management preventing us from contacting other departments directly, or them being not allowed to contact us. This is never in the interests of efficiency - and of course is a brilliant way to prevent efficient working. It's purely about poor management trying to make sure that their incompetence isn't found out. i.e. if one part of their empire is being screwed over, or the service they provide to other departments is being curtailed even in the teeth of sound logic they don't want any one else to know until it's too late. And then they will play one team off against the other. For example front line staff being told that the reprographics team will only be able to accept a limited range of the work they've always done because we've been overwhelming them, while the reprographics team are told that they are having cuts made because front line staff are no longer sending them certain kinds of work. Of course it does get found out eventually. But either they just ride out the storm ( and of course by then it's become old news so no one takes much notice ) or these so-called managers have moved on.
I feel your pain, we were expected to find out everything for ourselves, training was non-existent - my boss said you should read about new products and how to support them in our lunch hour.... and if I ever hear 'Agile' again in my life, I'll stick that Surface laptop down their damn throats - bitter, moi?
Firing the staff and telling them you are getting £50 is a dick move
Except that this is a tried and tested method by administration and HR staff everywhere. Case study:
JP Morgan UK have x number of support technicians with the exact required skill set for Infrastructure Support - Cloud Automation Engineering. Come end of Q3 an admin wonk (not an HR one I might add) decides to offshore these jobs and place all the UK technicians on 3 months notice, and because they all work in the sensitive areas of the bank they are placed on gardening leave: hence there is now no support at all. During this time JPM try to recruit a team in India (understanding of LOB technology drivers, cloud structure, LDAP, SAML, OAUTH2, OpenID Connect etc.) but to no avail.
The admin moron is now summoned to senior management to explain in person why there is now no support at all for DevOps.
Best option for JPM is to take a deep breath and admit the mistake, pay the support team a very large bonus and hope that they will come back to work, but this is JPMorgan and they don't do things like that.
All the support team have their redundancy period accelerated to 1 week and receive 6 months pay plus their expected annual bonus. They are then signed back to JPMorgan on a minimum 3 year contract, at contractor rates of around £1,000 per day, i.e. more than 4 times their existing salary.
OPM and all that ...
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