The Glade 4.0

That's true. I'd bet that if you passed AP Calc 1 B/C level, AP Physics A/B level, and did some programming projects, you'd know enough to figure out most solvable Math or Physics problems with just the Internet.

You'd be losing some serious money on that bet. You just described every single one of your classmates by the end of your sophomore year at UMass, including the idiots who washed out.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Most solvable undergrad physics problems...I'd wager you are right.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

The problem isn't that a sufficient body of knowledge is not taught by that point, it's that the audience did not receive it. The aforementioned classes also do not teach vector analysis in sufficient detail, the use of which greatly simplifies problems which are eminently solvable, but are mathematically sloppy enough to convince people otherwise.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Oh, yes.



Which falls in line with the company's mission statement. In other words, all is for the projects. And yes, that's in IT's job description.



See this is what bugs me about Admin. They love to tell the billable folks what "their job description is". And they are almost universally wrong. But, even if they were correct, it STILL doesn't matter. Because everyone's job description is to pull together and service the client.

Regardless, the only folks in this company with an actual technical job description are the admin folks. The other descriptons are generic, as the specifics rely on the current contract.

As I said before, we regularly hire people who don't know jack about computers, but are good engineers and/or have excellent client contacts. We don't need admin folks telling us what they should be doing at $80/hr. If a guy's charging me $80/hr, and you're admin, it's your job to help this guy in any way he needs. I don't want him spinning his wheels on dumb stuff.



I love this response. This is the fastest way for Admin to be shown the door in my company.



In this company, Admin is there to provide whatever services the engineers need. Sooo, sorry you don't like your job, folks, now get off your *** and get to supportin'.



I don't know anything about you. I'm talking about IT and admin folks in general. If you can't help with a specific problem, I'll call someone else. One of the requirements of our admin divisions is to identify potential questions, and identify individuals best suited to handle these.



Oh yeah - remember how I said admin's supposed to provide support? That includes redirecting the engineers to the appropriate personnel. So no - don't stick them somewhere, show them where to take them.



So are sanitation engineers. No, I'm kidding, I'm not an engineering snob. The point is not "engineering" it's billable vs admin.

We have tons of engineers who have no idea how to use AutoCAD. (no, I'm not one of them)

This is not even remotely accurate in any way.

First, pretty much ALL engineers who graduated post 2000 can use CAD (or Microstation, or whatever).

Second, all tasks are for the lowest paid individual. We have draftsmen. They do most of the drafting. I cannot afford to pay a $70/hr engineer to do drafting. **** that. What is usually done, is that the engineer will use the design package to do the design, and the draftsman will do everything else (plan sheet layout, make it look pretty, notes, dimensions, etc.) The reason for this is that it takes me just as long to design it on paper as it does in CAD (longer, actually, because I've very good with CAD).

Third, there's tremendous need for people who don't know CAD. You don't need to know CAD to be an outstanding engineer. I can hire cheaper people to do the CAD work.

Just for the record, this is not an accurate statement.

You have no idea how corporations work internally, do you? "Your guys" are not the boss, who we work for. Your field is not more important, and despite your little prima donna act, the "admin" types (who do not represent one department either, you're lumping the entire rest of the company into "them" and setting yourself above them) do not answer to you. What your'e saying might be true if the client was paying for the service directly, but they are not. They have a contract.

Your management gets together with the management of IT (it doesn't matter that they work for the same company. The managementof IT has equal authority to the management of any other department. In most companies, the CIO is equal in authority to the CFO and other such executives.) The management of IT asks the management of department X what services they want. Department X replies, and IT tells them what it will cost to implement those services. Department X recoils, because they didn't realize it, so they say they can only pay significantly less than the stated cost. So then negotiations continue until a contract, detailing the costs and the "Service Level Agreement" (a description of what services will be provided and in what timeframe) is finalized.

Anything outside that SLA that is done by your IT department is being done as a favor to you. Not only are they not obligated to do it, but it is usually detrimental to the company bottom line for them to go beyond the SLA, as it takes IT resources away from where your department management already decided they were needed most. While Engineer Joe is getting help figuring out how to type a **** web address into a browser and so incompetent he takes 20 minutes to do it, Engineer Steve cannot do his job because his computer has completely crashed and Engineer Joe is monopolizing IT with his trivial bullshit.

So you should dump your arrogance and realize that when the department gives the collective "**** you" (and they will, with management support) to someone for making demands not supported by the SLA, they are ultimately benefiting the shareholder and the profits.

IT provides the services they are contracted to do as a department, and nothing more. If you want more, you have to pay for it. In advance, as part of the contract.

Also...


The arrogance here is amazing. First of all, you have no clue what the individual job descriptions are of people in other departments. Secondly, I'm discussing IT as a departmental whole, not individual job descriptions. Thirdly, no engineer can get an IT person fired, especially when the IT person is giving the response they have been told to give by their management. The figurative "**** you" response is FREQUENTLY mandated. "You are not give support beyond what the customer is entitled to get." In most companies, helpdesk agents can get written up for too often giving help that the customer is not entitled to get from them, because it sets a precedent and unreasonable expectations which will result in later escalations.

Finally...



This is such a wonderful "pot-kettle" moment. I love it when people call IT and demand to know the number for the tax department. Or even another unrelated IT department. **** off, IT isn't a directory service. Especially in a large company, one division won't even know another division exists. If you call the wrong place, don't expect to get any information. You know what you said about billable hours and not wanting to pay engineer rates for him to learn computer stuff? Great. So why do you want to pay IT rates for something you're supposed to call the switchboard for?

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

It seems like Talya is talking about providing IT support to external customers and Arathain is talking about internal IT support.

Those are often 2 very different animals in how the support groups are structured and run.

Arathain's talking about corporate administrative services and lumping IT into that category, actually, Aizle.

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No, I'm talking internal.

My employer, for example, has 40,000 employees, 10,000 of which are IT staff--half of which report to different executives from each other and are totally disconnected divisions from each other, each containing several separate departments. When one division requests a new service from a particular IT department, they have to pay for it. A contract is put together, and exact responsibilities are defined. That's how it is in most large companies.

(Hell, even between different IT departments in the same enterprise, there are "OLAs" -operational level agreements- that are just as binding. The helpdesk cannot get support from messaging or network infrastructure beyond those OLAs.)

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

And Corporate Administrative Services have to pay for IT contracts, too. Arathain's Engineers wouldn't even get priority over them. A client is a client.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Perhaps, but the "how to use software" things are often times a part of an IT groups responsibilities. Usually what drives that in my experience is the size of the organization. Talya apparently works for a HUGE company. When companies get that large, absolutely the Technical Support (****'s broken) stuff gets separated from the Training (how do I do this) team.

In smaller companies, these areas are often part and parcel of the same organizational team. In fact, I know plenty of people who prefer working at smaller companies for exactly that reason, because it makes their day more interesting due to the variety of hats they need to wear is greater and it keeps their jobs from getting boring.

In reality, neither is "right" or "wrong", provided that the teams have the resources and time to perform to the expectations set before them. You can argue efficiencies of each layout, but most of those are driven by the size of the organization, type of work being done and culture of the company vs. any intrinsic superiority of one methodology over another.

Possibly, however, in my company, it's not just separated, we simply do not have a general "how do I do this" team for basic computer functions. We have a few how-to desks for very specific applications, typically in-house apps or very unusual ones that are used across an entire division and a person would have no way to get exposure to...but if you're calling for detailed help with an excel spreadsheet, you should hire an assistant who knows excel. Or call microsoft. Yes, they'll bill you. Your department can foot the bill--if your manager goes for it. That's because you didn't choose to pay for one during contract negotiations. Common applications and operating system questions are not directly supported here. (Although our helpdesk guys will usually provide basic answers if they happen to know them.)



There's the key. These idiots (or their management) have stated they do not want to pay for how-to support, so it is not in the SLA, and IT hasn't been staffed for it. I am not aware of a single person with MOS certification in my building. Nevertheless, they still try to demand it when they need it.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Yup, and that varies from company to company and industry to industry. Obviously these days, it's pretty much assumed you have a basic understanding of how to do email, Word, Excel, etc. but especially with specialized applications you can't always expect that an employee will have those skills, and it may be worth training them up on them.

Typically what I've seen over my years in the workforce is that if someone is completely clueless about an application, they will have that employee attend a class at some external school. But often if it's just that they maybe don't know how pivot tables work in Excel, they will go to the resident Excel expert for some guidance on how to set those up, etc.

There are engineering firms who have IT departments composed of half a dozen people, who's sole purpose for being employed at that company is to ensure that the engineers have working computers. Arathain's statement that they exist because it's not worth paying the engineers for isn't entirely inaccurate, however his general attitude toward IT has some flaws. Those IT people exist at a company to make sure that my computer is hooked up to the network, and that I can send my document to the big 17" x 22" printer. They are there to make sure that I have internet access, that I can connect to vendor sites, check prices, check the weather in Oklahoma, check labor rates, check local zoning restrictions, and other such things. They are not there to teach me how to use a computer, or to help me use CAS and CAD software packages. Most of the software we use, the people in IT do not know, and have no call to know. If I can't use a CAS, I'm not qualified for whatever job I'm seeking, and that's really all there is to it.

There are also firms in which, yes, the engineers are more important than the IT department. This is especially true of the engineers who are capable of performing their job without a computer. The pitfall we're encountering here in this thread is that there are some engineers who routinely blame IT for their own failures. For example, the engineers who operate under the assumption that safety factors and square-foot estimates are a substitute for actual knowledge and talent. The people who, as freshmen, were all bright-eyed and eager to become MEs, only to wash out and switch to a lesser discipline. The fact that the engineers might be the most important people at a particular company doesn't mean that IT should be wasting their time dealing with a talentless hack who failed Control Systems.

_________________
Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I actually don't support any engineers. I'm just mentally substituting for Arathain our own prima-donna money-makers, our stock brokers Investment Advisors. (1000 people out of 40,000 in the company, who make up a disproportionate amount of the complaining.) If we have any of Arathain's type of engineers employed by this company, I cannot imagine where they'd work.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

It's always enjoyable listening to folks complain about the people who make their jobs difficult, when those people are the reason their jobs exist.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

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That was rather the entire point of my linked blog post, which started this conversation.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I read it, it doesn't impact my enjoyment in the usual whine-fest in the least.


I thought you would have figured out that I'd read your linked blog entry when I made the post regarding IT and vehicles (4wd no less).

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Nope, that is training or actually most likely somewhere in HR - to train and make sure people hired are actually up to the level.

IT support is not about hand holding and yes I've hung up on senior VP's because they are demanding services we don't do and when he reported it the CIO made him call me directly to apologize for his tone. Arathain is completely broke ass-backwards when it comes to what is normally expected of IT in the modern era in corporate America. Maybe in a podunk back-asswords town or a medium or small company that never got their *** out of the mid 90's but not in the Real World.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Yeah, that's pretty common, these days. If people are being abusive toward you, you typically need to give them a warning before you hang up, but people are empowered to hang up on the user if they disregard the warning. Gone are the days when you can call a helpdesk and scream at them just because you're an executive.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Honestly I don't think this is specific to IT, most people in any job would despise this kind of attitude. You are there to suck this guy's cock, no matter how much he craps on you. It's not the fact that they don't know how to use the computer, it's the fact that they don't know how to use it and have no intention of ever learning anything about it, thinking such things are beneath them or that they don't have the time to learn, therefore forcing you to come help them for the same crap every three days. Oh, he called IT about something completely unrelated to IT? Well you better help him with whatever the hell it is, finding out whatever you need to, he's important and you're not. Run, run little peons.

I honestly don't know how IT people deal with it when they are called in to someone's office because he's installed so much malware on his own computer to the extent that it needs to be reformatted, and after you spend hours doing this he ***** at you because the items on his desktop are in the wrong order. Of course you need to come down and move those desktop items for him, he won't do it, that's a job for the help. You try to advise him what kind of email attachments not to open to avoid this problem in the future, and get informed that no, he has to open these things, he has no time to read and discern between "good" and "bad" ones. Fixing "computer stuff" is your job, I don't want to deal with it. And honestly, can't you put something on the computer that will do this for me so I don't have to deal with any problems in the future even though I don't intend to change my behavior?