Work Rant. Day in the life of an I.T. Guy

flhrci said:
So, you could have been an underpaid CFI or an airline pilot? Better or worse is the question?

David
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Really anything at this point. I work crazy hours trying to fix this crap and just now my 6yr old slips this on my desk.
I want a job that can't follow me home.

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Scrabo said:
You know SAP really means "Stop All Production".

We have a heavily customized Global SAP deployment that added at least 40% to the code base of the out of the box SAP. We just get people trained to an acceptable level then jump ship, some to SAP America as consultants for 3 times the money.

Back to square 1
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I gagged on "heavily customized" - all software sucks; now you have unique software that sucks. And years of re-re-engineering your customizations, regression testing, rinse, repeat. . .God bless you.
 
Sundancer said:
I gagged on "heavily customized" - all software sucks; now you have unique software that sucks. And years of re-re-engineering your customizations, regression testing, rinse, repeat. . .God bless you.
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It's employment !!!

It's that customized we have experienced SAP consultants come in on a Monday and walk away days later because it's so far from the standard
 
Sundancer said:
I gagged on "heavily customized" - all software sucks; now you have unique software that sucks. And years of re-re-engineering your customizations, regression testing, rinse, repeat. . .God bless you.
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"But you said update V7.3A wouldn't impact our customizations..."
 
Or my favorite... " it's only a small technical change"
 
I resisted customizing a "solution", and won out (mostly) by using stand-alone customized front-end and back-ends. Then we just had to deal with schema changes (mostly). Had to gag down one moderate sized customization to the delivered package. I left the organization in 2007, and have been back every year (mostly) to help 'em deal with it on each new release. . .I like the money, but I feel so tawdry. . .
 
He didn't post because he's busy having fun with the kiddo. He mentioned he lost the first tickle war on FB.

Yay for ditching stupid never ending IT garbage to play with those you love.

As far as feeling sorry for him, I know where he's at... And there's definitely a very nice golden handcuffs awaiting at the door if anyone else wants to do IT work. No checkrides and not much chance of losing a medical and not getting paid.

So it's got pleasure, and pain. The pleasure part is on payday. Otherwise nobody would do it.

I forgot House of Cards dropped tonight and scheduled a mail server maintenance. Stupid MySQL corruption and of course MySQL is a total crap RDBMS so it can't be repaired online. Dump and restore.

It was nice to get 7GB of allocated but empty table space back, though.

What a total piece of trash that software is. Its popularity boggles the mind when better free RDBMS systems are available that aren't retarded.
 
I too am stuck in a job because the pay is good. I really get along well with my co-workers. They're great people. The bosses are tolerable. And, I work indoors at a technically challenging job. Many of the (we'll call them customers) I come into contact with are just having very bad days. They're sick, in pain, or scared. And sometimes, all the above. They're families are worried, often to the point of being overwrought. I can't blame them; that is a very slim majority of them, anyway. A significant percentage of them however, are filthy, disgusting, violent, or just rude. And, OFTEN all the above.

I feel for ya man. I never wanted to work in this field. But, it was the only thing I could see available and providing an opportunity to continue to live a decent life style that would otherwise might have been lost to me as a result of a lack of a contingency plan (on my part) after world politics ruined my plan A.
 
Yes it was a good evening.
We wrestled and played and then I put them in bed.

Then the wife and I had drinks in the hot tub.
half an hour or so later, I see a shadow. My daughter woke up and was poking her head through the doggy door.

"Mommy. Daddy? Can I get in?"
I said sure but go wake your brother up and get him.

So we had a fun evening staying up late and being silly.

Now they are all asleep and I can put together a modified test plan that highlights mitigating incompetence.
 
I will be able to put them through college. (and buy an airplane)
I can put up with a lot for that :)
 
I spent over 25 years in IT. This all sounds familiar. Dilbert resonates for a reason.
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
Really anything at this point. I work crazy hours trying to fix this crap and just now my 6yr old slips this on my desk.
I want a job that can't follow me home.
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Hey, at least you get to see your kids during the week. I rarely see my 9 year old conscious and moving, between Monday and Friday, since I don't get home from work before he leaves for school. I get up to go to work long after he's in bed. The 15 year old is a little different. Working overnights keep me away from the customer and most of the corporate stupidity and politics, so I can maintain my sanity.
 
Your day sounds like everything in the Air Force. And I mean EVERYTHING. I deal with idiots worse than Jennifer everyday. I feel your pain.
 
Craig said:
Hey, at least you get to see your kids during the week. I rarely see my 9 year old conscious and moving, between Monday and Friday, since I don't get home from work before he leaves for school. I get up to go to work long after he's in bed. The 15 year old is a little different. Working overnights keep me away from the customer and most of the corporate stupidity and politics, so I can maintain my sanity.
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That sux.
I dislike it when I get home after they are already asleep.
 
WUT WUT!!

I am so sick of being 'on call'....one week, 24 hours a day, every 5 weeks. Nothing ****es me off more than getting paged at 2, 3, 4:00 in the morning for some stupid reason. BUT, come pay day, it makes my IT boo-boo feel better.
 
Not in the IT field, but I too was on call at one point in my career, with only being off every other weekend. I found it helped my inflated sense of importance in the beginning, then reality set in. The number of calls at 3 in the morning that bordered on just silly senseless stuff that should be handled by the people there, the lack of rest, the constant thinking about work and just plane overload made me soon realize no one should be as indispensable as I thought I was and in fact was not. Fortunately I was a young man at the time and able to recognize my error. After a little training, expectations communicated to my staff, and me letting loose of the reins, it turned out to be the best job I have ever had. Amazing that most people want to make decisions, and given the right tools they will make the right one. I was still on call for the rest of my time there and was rarely disappointed when I went in the morning without a call in the night, which happened more frequently. IT may be a very different enviornement. :rolleyes:
 
Caramon13 said:
6PC yeah, sounds a typical "day in the life of" situation for IT.

Document EVERYTHING. I probably look like I am asking stupid questions, but I run everything through my boss and her boss. It's all documented. And it's happened a few times where I get blamed for things and I'll politely find that email from 3 months ago where I was asked to do something stupid and just let that speak for itself.

I learned the importance of documentation early on and it has saved me more times than I can count.

Document the meeting with you and her, document the emails between her boss and that persons boss. Document that you documented.

It's ALWAYS political @SixPapaCharlie. Work, like life is a game. It's sometimes just played differently...
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Maintaining your "Pearl Harbor File" is critical. When I worked for Intel I routinely violated the company policy about deleting old e-mails. I kept virtually everything. It came in handy one day. I had an e-mail squirreled away from the FCC with an interpretation of their rules that was to our liking. Some years later the subject came up again and the FCC reps said, "We never said that!". I forwarded their old e-mail and basically said, "Read 'em and weep. Yes, you did." Document, document, document. And remember where you filed it. You never know when it will come in handy.

weilke said:
Dilbert is a documentary.
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I've been saying that for years.
 
The only thing I don't see mentioned is - why don't you talk to the clerk's boss directly, one on one. Get them to not admit they overstated success, just that things can even be faster (see resident clerk for comparison). And do the same with next boss up if necessary. No one wants to see the project go tango uniform so just ask for their help in preventing that. They might be able to say things they would never put in an email.
 
For two years I worked in a toxic environment like that. Never again. Cultural problems are almost always due to leadership ineptness.
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
That sux.
I dislike it when I get home after they are already asleep.
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I have had a few days like that in the last several weeks. Last week, i was at my desk at 0640, crawled into bed at 0230 the next day. Missed an entire day of my 19 month old's life
 
Sac Arrow said:
I don't think stupid political PITA is confined to the field of IT.
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Agreed. I have seen a lot of politicking, back-stabbing and head-climbing in regular R&D departments and have lived through some creative BS invented. Eventually, I decided not to fight it. Not my paygrade. My boss needs to handle this junk. And he is not happy about that. :D
 
Somewhere in the above conversation was a discussion on customizing off the shelf software. God I used to hate that back when I was heavily involved in IT in a corporate environment.

You pay tons of money for software that is actually pretty well designed and thought out, and then you spend even more money to customize it to fit existing work processes just because staff (and likely management) don't want to change what they do.

Sometimes you are forced to code in inefficient processes that should have been done away with years ago.

A perfect example is creating a process that creates a printed report so that "the big guy" does not have to look at a computer.
 
RalphInCA said:
A perfect example is creating a process that creates a printed report so that "the big guy" does not have to look at a computer.
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We recently went through this:

- Certain managers are saying they're not sure what IT is always doing.
- Hired PM. PM says "let's make some pretty graphs and charts in the already-paid-for ticket system showing progress that uppers have been paying for for ten years.
- One of the uppers walks over one day and says to me, "PM wants me to log into ticket system to see something and my login isn't working."
- I log into ticket system as admin and see "Last Login Date: Never" for him.

LOL. Everyone *thought* the tracking we were all told to do was actually being used.

Amazing how many other things getting their logins working "fixed". Not even the CTO had noticed they were making up monthly numbers for a decade.

They do get credit for their guesstimates being amazingly close for all that time... Haha. That's what they do, after all...
 
Okay the first thing that came to my mind is why is she not taking the initative to develop her knowledge of this SAP interface on her own accord? I googled it, and could figure it out quickly. She is waiting for training sessions with WasteOfSpace to learn it? The fact that she initially came to you means that she does not trust his judgement and leadership skills. He is claiming that she needs time to learn this "new" system? It is not like she is transitioning from an old one. Being a new hire she should know what is expected when she accepted the job. Since WasteOfSpace and WasteOfSpace's Boss claims that she has processed them all, and is awaiting more, how about verifing that claim? Have they been done correctly? Check. Sounds to me like there is a lot of blaming going on, and not enough efficacy and cooperation.
 
PrincessPilotNJ said:
Okay the first thing that came to my mind is why is she not taking the initative to develop her knowledge of this SAP interface on her own accord? I googled it, and could figure it out quickly.
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I knew all those intense training courses were a waste of time.
 
So I read the original post and at the end shrugged it off. That's SOP at many if not most shops. Around here we put crap systems into place then make workers suffer for months or years, and when people complain we admit that it's a known defect and is on the to-do list of things to fix.

I've been out of IT for quite a while now and times have really changed.
THEN:
* Project Managers? Pfft. Teams were created, work assigned, test, test, test and if something went askew in production it was #1 priority to fix.
* If something went askew and it was due to laziness there was a chance the person responsible would be looking for a new job.
* The IT team was in charge of/very good at collecting requirements.

NOW:
* There's a good chance the PM has never written a line of code in his/her life. The PM is more focused on following procedures than on creating a stellar end product.
* Every system has known flaws. IT knows about it but is not interested in sharing it with the people who will be using the system. But if someone reports it they're told "yeah, we know".
* Business Analysts positions were created about the same time as Project Managers. Business Analysts are typically some fresh-from-college kids with little experience and no IT background. They're the ones responsible for providing the requirements to the IT folks.
 
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