Sysadmin told to spend 20+ hours changing user names, for no reason

My reply would be DO IT YOURSELF.

What a @sshool

just do as your told harold, you're there to implement management policy, so do it.........

Shouldn't they

mac siccar?

Reminds me of the time just after I left a certain Large Telco. We had a standard email scheme.. <firstname><optional disambiguating digit>.<lastname>@xx.com. Worked fine... even mapped nicely to X400 which was the Up and Coming thing in those days. Then the chairman got his knighthood. The email system had to have a special exception added that so that his email address was sir.<firstname>.<lastname>@xx.com. Drove a coach and horses through our carefully crafted scheme and caused my successor to tear his hair out.

suck it up - do the job

Starting off as an apprentice way back when…

I learned quickly I was getting paid the same amount if I was cleaning the gallery camera, getting lunch for tradies or doing actual work.

Simply put - manager wants you to do something then get it done.

Nothing wrong with having an opinion (as I have worked for myself for just shy of 20 years I am full of them!) but don't let your ego get in the way.

Retired System Architect

They have put you in a NO WIN situation. They are meddling with things they do not understand. They want to exercise their power for what they think are neat ideas. But those ideas do not follow industry best practices or conventions. You will not increase your knowledge and skills by following their directions. And, it is unlikely you will learn anything more in the environment they are creating for you. No matter what you do, they will think you are taking too long and your effort is unsatisfactory.

Don't try to get even or complain. Don't even talk about it in your interviews. A negative prior experience just makes you look bad. Start looking for another job IMMEDIATELY. Get the two of them together and say you have to resolve their differences with some kind of standard. Once that is established. Start doing the work. Your goal is to have the job only half done, and a new job, when the shit hits the fan. The users will complain bitterly. And, no matter how careful you are, there will be errors and omissions. There will be complaints about those things as well. By the time they have hired your replacement and resumed the project, they will be famous as campus buffoons.

Think I may as well address of couple of issues that people have raised, which without more information would be perfectly reasonable to mention.

The reason for the usernames as they stand is that they reflect what's called a "staff code". This is used in schools as a shorthand for each member of staff, and it's also what appears on e.g. the timetable. For anyone who left school in the last couple of decades or so, cast your minds back to the way your timetable looked. You'd have a subject (or subject code, e.g. Ma for Maths), room number and then... something like ABC - generally speaking, that's the teacher's initials as students shouldn't know staff's first names (very old British tradition, I know, but it's very common). They already know their own staff codes, so it makes sense to have that as a username as it's one less other thing to remember and these are people who can't deal with plugging a computer in... ;) Believe me, we have to make a LOT of compromises in education!

So people are used to referring to John Smith as e.g. JBS, and you'll see that on e-mails, timetables, pigeon holes, requests to form tutors etc. Some schools even name their forms after the form tutor - we don't because tutors can change and then it's a faff... :P

What I would point out is, as long as you're actually using the middle name as a differentiator, you don't really get any duplications in our staff size (93 FTE count). Exceptions were where a member of staff actually didn't have a middle name, in which case we used what's now being proposed as the new system, but that was rare.

You only begin to get these duplications when you stop including the middle initial, and that's really why I object to this. Yes, I do object to the fact that it's against best practice and I'm busy anyway, but what's REALLY bugging me about it is the fact that it's a stupid system he wants to move to. I can already tell we're going to have two VCHs, two AMOs and... three SDEs! He hasn't proposed a system for how to handle duplicates at all, never mind one that could handle THREE people being the same!

Also, teachers get very attached to their staff codes, you know. It's a bit silly and sentimental but when you've been e.g. JBS for 20-odd years, you do get attached. Personalised number plates are very common too as people ascend up the ranks... :P

So basically this is annoying everyone and achieving nothing... and why? Because he doesn't like the fact he's been given Timetable & Cover as a senior management responsibility and can't cope with remembering who's who just like everyone else.

He has a list of who's who on the wall... I've created documents indexed by surname and staff code that auto-update every midnight from the MIS and linked to them on the Start Menu... plus he can always just look them up from the MIS himself or ask a colleague... and apparently that's still not enough! And then, the only response I get when I point all this out is "hmmm... I think you just need to accept that senior leaders require this change to promote SMART working!"

Sooo... that's why I was pissed off enough to write in about it... :/

User name schemes gone pear shaped

I worked in a department of a university where an originally apparently sensible scheme (within department staff) had been in place but obviously had gone wrong. Under the scheme I could have been "phil", "philip" or "pmr", with the latter being the most desirable. Unfortunately some idiot had allocated that to someone who should have been "prb" (note that this was NOT the only odd one), so I couldn't have it. ("prb" was in fact what he wanted, and was available.) My immediate superior decided to introduce a new rule whereby department staff would have unprefixed usernames otherwise similar to the prefixed ones used by students and also by staff in the other departments of the faculty - three surname letters and first initial. Under this new rule, I was "reyp". I hated it, but one of my duties involved setting up accounts for new staff. It only happened once all the time I was there, but not surprisingly I used the same rule. The user had wanted "dj" but that was prohibited by security policy. I had no middle initial on file for him, but even if I had, would still have allocated him "johd" as a protest against my own user name.

If I had stayed in that place and been promoted to my immediate superior's position I might have started the potentially longwinded process of re-rationalising user names. What made it worse was that student user names were "current year only", and they needed new ones each and every year!