this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024
1064 points (97.6% liked)
Not The Onion
12319 readers
601 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Comments must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This just puts a huge spotlight on the thing I hate the most about my line of work. I'm sure it's not just my line of work with this problem, but there's plenty of examples of workplaces that do not have this problem.
My career is in IT support. Whether doing systems administration or networking or something else related, it's my lifeblood.
Almost every job I've ever had in this field works on the basis of tickets. A concept which, isn't in and of itself a problem, nor is it unusual. Similar systems exist in many careers; they're similar to a chit in the restaurant industry, which contains an order, which is passed to the kitchen for the cooks/chefs to complete. Same thing. And there's examples of this same idea across many careers, called all kinds of things from a requisition, to a work order, they're all variations on the same idea.
The trouble begins with how tickets are worked and completed. In other industries, you pick up a task, whether a chit or work order, you finish the task, and you mark it as complete, but in IT, it's very different in one key way. We have to not only justify and report everything we do, but also mark down exactly how long it took. It's this last point that's the problem. I am under continual scrutiny, every minute of every day to justify what I've done, and when I did it. In every job I've had, my ability to fill every second of my day with records of what I've done and how long it took to do is praised, or the lack of that ability can create some significant issues with maintaining my employment status.
There are good reasons to keep these records, to have a record of changes, and coordinate with coworkers, in the event they need to continue work I've started, or vice versa, and to note when something changed so that if issues arise, those actions can be examined as a potential cause. But this requirement has become weaponized by every employer to keep a stranglehold on productivity. If you take too long on a task that they think should have taken less time, you're suddenly found in a meeting where you have to explain why you were so inefficient. If you excel and you're able to complete your tasks quickly, that faster pace becomes the new standard, and anyone who isn't capable of keeping up gets reprimanded for dragging their heels and wasting time.
The goal posts continually move. I can't so much as take an extended shit without someone taking notice.
Meanwhile, so many jobs are simply focused on being present and looking busy. Before I went into IT, I worked at a grocery store, and short of clearly and obviously standing around doing literally nothing, no manager even took notice of you. If you were doing something, literally anything that looks even remotely productive, you were left alone. Which isn't to mention all the down time, when there isn't anything to do, and you just go and adjust the products on the shelf needlessly because it made you look busy. That same concept can be applied to a lot of different jobs, but with IT, it's not sufficient to simply look busy. Your time must be put into a ticket.
It's oppressive and the way of things in IT.
And the mentality you've described is extra bullshit in an IT or support role, as I'm sure you're aware.
This is paraphrased in the "Doom talk" I had to have with my boss back when I was working in systems maintenance. As in, he'd come into my office and complain, "Every time I come in here you're just playing Doom. You need to justify your salary or otherwise maybe we don't need to pay you."
What MBA's and PHB's don't realize is that IT and systems maintenance is not a production-oriented operation. You're not making widgets. The metric is not how many tickets do we generate and how fast are they solved. The metric is, how can we have as few tickets as possible? Because by and large what you're doing in support and IT is fixing stuff that's broken. The ideal state for the business to be in is not to have anything that's broken at all, on a minute-to-minute basis.
Boss, you want to see me in my office playing Doom. Because that means none of your millions and millions of dollars of mission critical infrastructure which your engineers rely upon to generate billable hours is on fire. If any of it catches fire today, I am on site to put it out. If anyone has a problem or a question, I am on call to solve it. If there is maintenance to be performed or new equipment to be rolled out, I'll be doing that. But otherwise I'm not going to invent busywork just to placate middle management which, as a whole, can't reliably remember which of the two mouse buttons to click.
Yep. I'm in the midst of that. We're in a "busy" season for my clients (mostly finance/accounting people), and I've reduced my output hours per day to a lower amount because I want to be more available for more time so that I can jump on critical issues as they arise. For the most part, you want to jump on critical things regardless of the situation, but right now it's more critical because of the busy season, so minor gripes get sidelined, all of my maintenance and other duties, like projects, scripting, etc, are all on hold, favoring time to resolution over almost everything else. So if I can be free more than normal so that I have the bandwidth to take care of things when they arise, so much the better. I don't want to be distracted writing a script when a critical ticket drops and I miss it by a few hours while the customers are unable to work because I was debugging a PowerShell function.
So my logged hours are down because I refuse to pick up dormant unimportant tasks while I'm idle. I use the time to review all tickets and just patrol the service tickets for critical issues. I have absolutely no reservations about doing it.
I agree, the goal should always be to play doom. Not because you ignore your work, but because there's nothing to do since everything works. IT support isn't here to justify their existence by staying busy. We're here so that when you need help, we can help. If there's nothing to do, then we're standing ready, and if we play doom, or Halo, or literally any other game/distraction/whatever, while we wait, as long as it doesn't impact our ability to respond when needed, then that's fine. That's what everyone should want. If the hardware is so unreliable that you're constantly having to work on it to keep it running, then, as IT, you fucked up.
I'll also mention that there's a paradox in IT: we're expected to do so much and if you just do all the work by hand, you'll be busy all the time. If you leverage scripts and scheduled tasks, you can significantly cut down on your workload. The paradox is that when you don't have those scripts and scheduled tasks, and you're doing everything by hand, you don't have enough time to create the scripts to reduce your workload.
I'll give an example. At a previous workplace, the bossman was very much in favor of doing things by hand, the original business model was T&M. He later moved to a more MSP model, where people are paying regardless of how much time was spent, so my focus shifted to automate everything and drop the ticket load as much as possible. In one such case, we kept getting issues related to a service failing. I don't recall what the issue was, nor what problem it created, but I remember that simply restarting the service fixed the problem. So instead of fielding dozens of tickets a year to restart the stupid service, I added a scheduled task to run a script that would restart the service automatically every week at (some godawful hour) AM, on a Sunday or something. Once that script was scheduled for weekly runs, we stopped getting those tickets.
I have dozens of other examples along the same lines. One of my most proud moments was a script to fix a service where, if another service was running before it, the service wouldn't load properly. The program service just wouldn't start if a system service was running. It was a non-critical system service, but both had to be running after boot time. I had already tried every combination of delayed start, and every time, the program service would fall because the system service ended up running too quickly. So I made a script to shut down the system service, start the program service, and then restart the system service, and scheduled it to run 15 minutes after boot, anytime the system restarted (usually overnight for patching). Once that was in place, complaints of (program) not working after patch day, went away.
I hate repeating process because nobody thought to actually fix the problem, they just patched it back together manually. When faced with a reoccurring problem, I look at how I can stop it from happening; of course I fix it in the short term but as soon as I'm done I'm working on a script that can do it for me, then figuring out the best way to trigger the script so that I don't have to be involved.
No matter how busy you are, finding a way to get rid of problems like that, by any means necessary, is essential; otherwise, you'll be drowning in tasks to fix stuff that shouldn't be broken.