IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

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Mist

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Denamian said:
I really wish Quest would issue headsets to their work from home people. Having to talk to them on speaker is pain.

Granted, they could be lying when they say they don't have headsets when I ask them to take it off speaker so I'm not hearing myself on delay the whole time.
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When COVID started I spent 2 weeks of my life getting Avaya to spin up mothballed licensing servers to generate license keys for remote agent features for way-past-end-of-life PBXes for Quest and then going around finding said servers on their network and setting up WFH for all their call centers all across the country. There were about 7 large Avaya core systems of various ages and 15ish smaller systems that served 2-3 offices that had never been merged into one of the larger ones.

I totally believe they don't have headsets. They probably just ripped the phones off their desks and ran out of the building like it was on fire.
 
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Denamian

Denamian

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Mist said:
When COVID started I spent 2 weeks of my life getting Avaya to spin up mothballed licensing servers to generate license keys for remote agent features for way-past-end-of-life PBXes for Quest and then going around finding said servers on their network and setting up WFH for all their call centers all across the country. There were about 7 large Avaya core systems of various ages and 15ish smaller systems that served 2-3 offices that had never been merged into one of the larger ones.

I totally believe they don't have headsets. They probably just ripped the phones off their desks and ran out of the building like it was on fire.
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We did that with Altigen gear last year. Several phones died and we were short on hardware before we finally ditched that shit.

I wouldn't be surprised if they're running soft phones on a laptop so there's one less piece of gear to break. Cheapass laptop mics with the weak speakers turned up to max.
 
Mist

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A lot of companies have people are on softphones, especially contact center agents. Some are on phones reprovisioned as traditional H323 VPN phones, others are SIP remote workers, while some companies issued VPN routers to people to take home. Some people are just using SIP softphone clients on their mobile phones.

The past 18 months has been the absolute fucking apocalypse for telecom/contact center engineering.

And now STIR/SHAKEN - Wikipedia.
 
Mist

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I'm 7 months into the new job and this meme perfectly sums up the circumstances of my departure from my former employer.

1628896634983.png
 
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Vinen

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ToeMissile said:
Just timed my teams start up. 14s into a tab with a webpage *shrug*
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Teams. The only person who contacts me on that is my SVP's Admin. I asked her to just email me or use slack. I pretty much ignore teams as its quite possibly the worst tool I've encountered in my life since the previous incarnation of the same tool.'
 
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Mist

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My org is using Teams company-wide and it's fine. It'll be better when they get it out of Electron though.
 
Break

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Mine consolidated from a mish mash of Webex Teams, Office Communicator, Hipchat and Telegram to MS Teams about a year ago. It's better than Webex in some ways and worse than others, for some reason it kills my vmware workstation VM network performance sometimes for no known reason and restarting Teams fixes it, otherwise I only barely hate it because click around different chats is very slow.
 
Mist

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They don't make it obvious or easy to clear your Teams cache, but it's in %appdata%\Microsoft\Teams\Cache.

This cache is used both by the web version and the standalone Electron app.
 
Phazael

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Mist said:
My org is using Teams company-wide and it's fine. It'll be better when they get it out of Electron though.
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When I was still at DHS they used it, exclusively. I like its functionality but it is just such a resource hog on the client side (and for the local LANs). Nowhere near as bad as Webex, but its a pain in the ass to get large meetings with video set up. New gig I have can barely handle Zoom conference meetings, but that mostly has to do with middle managers forcing their grunts to keep it open with video so they can micro their WAH people like tyrants.

Side note, I too upgraded my career. Glad to be the fuck away from DHS (USCIS) for a variety of reasons, but new gig gave me zero shit about WAH. Workload is much higher, but since I can work at home on my own fucking fiber fed UniFi wired network I actually have more reliable network than our HQ office the suits want me to commute to 90 mins every day. No distractions and they keep giving me more and more Sysad rights because I chew through any work they toss my way with zero supervision needed. Feels good to be appreciated and have power over my life, even if the environment is fucked up in certain ways.
 
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Deathwing

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Teams does seamless updating. That is fine. Without notification is not. Hop into a meeting today and a good chunk of screen real estate has been lost to bigger participant boxes. This has been a common theme in Teams, sacrificing functionality for UI form.

Not necessarily a Teams gripe, but where I experience it most: chat channels. I do not read them as there is too much traffic on them. And if you do join a conversation, you are notified of every damn message until it finally dies. I tell people that I don't read them and if you want specific attention on the subject, you must @ people, which does mostly defeat the purpose of the chat channel.

And yet, years after the adoption, I still learn of news only disseminated on those channels. IT outages, important fixes to our test database, etc. Only communicated to a chat channel. It bothers me two fold that people still think this is a good way to notify people of important information(email works better 99% of the time) and I have underlings wasting their time sifting through it.
 
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Denamian

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Deathwing said:
Teams does seamless updating. That is fine. Without notification is not.
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Back at work tonight for the first time in a week and it took over 15 minutes before my laptop was useable. Why? Teams fucking updating on boot and eating up all the system resources to do so. Granted, it's a shitty, low spec laptop but on a normal day I have everything I need loaded in 1-2 minutes after boot.
 
OU Ariakas

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Khane said:
Hey I work in a business too. A common theme! Surprise, Surprise!
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Way late, but FTFY.

I have been on the process side of technical consulting in the past and it made me realize how worthless bleeding edge technology is if you have no way to audit its use or acceptance. Most mid-sized companies that really need to standardize the mess that they grew out of initially will buy the shiniest new toys and then use 10% of the features (poorly) because they find out that it will cost 2-3x the initial cost to in training or new skillsets to effectively use the stuff.
 
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Mist

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OU Ariakas said:
Way late, but FTFY.

I have been on the process side of technical consulting in the past and it made me realize how worthless bleeding edge technology is if you have no way to audit its use or acceptance. Most mid-sized companies that really need to standardize the mess that they grew out of initially will buy the shiniest new toys and then use 10% of the features (poorly) because they find out that it will cost 2-3x the initial cost to in training or new skillsets to effectively use the stuff.
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Implement shiny new cloud-based CRM or ITSM platform-as-a-service, use <10% of the features because you don't have a Salesforce/SNOW/JIRA/whatever developers on staff to implement any of the automation that was supposed to save you money.

But hey, at least you're not using a ticket system that runs on aspx pages anymore.
 
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OU Ariakas

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Mist said:
Implement shiny new cloud-based CRM or ITSM platform-as-a-service, use <10% of the features because you don't have a Salesforce/SNOW/JIRA/whatever developers on staff to implement any of the automation that was supposed to save you money.

But hey, at least you're not using a ticket system that runs on aspx pages anymore.
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It actually makes my job harder trying to sell these people on the ITSM/CSM/CRM projects because they will intentionally decrease the project scope when I tell them that to truly implement the solution they will need to spend 3x on people that have done this before and will help them over the first 12-18 months to make sure that it is a successful rollout.
 
Mist

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OU Ariakas said:
It actually makes my job harder trying to sell these people on the ITSM/CSM/CRM projects because they will intentionally decrease the project scope when I tell them that to truly implement the solution they will need to spend 3x on people that have done this before and will help them over the first 12-18 months to make sure that it is a successful rollout.
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I really wanna make a slight career pivot into that space.
 
OU Ariakas

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Mist said:
I really wanna make a slight career pivot into that space.
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I have been in tech sales for almost my entire career and the move to consulting was initially great because I was straight salary with bonus instead of salary+commission; but a few years in I was getting restless because even though I was getting good end of year reviews and promotions I felt that they were all political and that I never knew how well I was truly performing. You would not have that problem in the consulting space because your part of the consultation would be the design/implementation/day 1 support/train the trainer sort of stuff and honestly, if you can find a niche at a Deloitte, PWC, or Accenture where you are the go to team lead for a particular 'practice' (i.e. Call Center modernization practice) you can write your own compensation package. The only problem is that you would be expected to be onsite and customer facing for the projects which means M-Th travel every week and actual engagement with people.
 
Mist

Mist

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OU Ariakas said:
I have been in tech sales for almost my entire career and the move to consulting was initially great because I was straight salary with bonus instead of salary+commission; but a few years in I was getting restless because even though I was getting good end of year reviews and promotions I felt that they were all political and that I never knew how well I was truly performing. You would not have that problem in the consulting space because your part of the consultation would be the design/implementation/day 1 support/train the trainer sort of stuff and honestly, if you can find a niche at a Deloitte, PWC, or Accenture where you are the go to team lead for a particular 'practice' (i.e. Call Center modernization practice) you can write your own compensation package. The only problem is that you would be expected to be onsite and customer facing for the projects which means M-Th travel every week and actual engagement with people.
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I meant getting out of Contact Center implementations and moving into CRM/ITSM implementations.
 
OU Ariakas

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Mist said:
I meant getting out of Contact Center implementations and moving into CRM/ITSM implementations.
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My company has an entire SNOW practice; I could get you in touch with someone about an implementation job if you ever wanted to test the waters.

Edit: It is a Fortune 200 company so this is not like a 10 person shop.
 
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