Slashdot Mirror
What Do You Do at Work?
mabhatter654 asks: "With all the talk of 'inefficent' and 'uncooperative' American workers, what do most Slashdot readers actually DO at work? Currently, I'm one of those 'IT' workers at a small manufacturer. Yes, I'm called the 'SysAdmin' but that changes monthly. I'm responsible for the companies network, AS/400, website, PC troubleshooting, phones, etc. But...I also get pushed into other things like ISO compliance, Quality issues, as well as babysitting the shop floor/nite QC on 'off' shifts on a regular basis. Of course, the 'SysAdmin' work suffers...when you spend more than half of your day on other tasks. But that does make me part of the inefficent IT problem that bosses like to talk so much about now days. I'm curious how many other Slashdot readers 'multitask' in non-IT rolls while officially still in that capacity. I'm looking for your 'title', company size, and both IT/non-IT tasks you perform. Also, Does 'multitasking' add more or less value to your position at the company. i.e. the IT tasks that don't ever happen versus helping management in another department? Oh yeah, how about those hours too! How much overtime do you put in and how much of that is due to the other work?"
You insensitive clod!
You're asking slashdot, during the middle of the work day, what we do at work?
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
I do my one page-a-day (or more ;O)) at Distributed Proofreaders.
Oh, wait, did you mean what I'm supposed to do at work?
"The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it." -- Ayn Rand
"Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like Im working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too.. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work."
and that 15 minutes is patching openssh
I spend most of my time filling out TPS reports and looking for the new cover sheet so I can get submitted correctly.
1. Bad signature
2. ?????
3. Profit
read slashdot
I maintain a database of half a billion dollars worth of excess aircraft parts using dBase IV for DOS. I also maintain the superfast network of Pentium 133s running Windows 98se.
Yes, I am quite happy when I get home to bask in the warm glow of my eMac running Mac OS X.
I don't have a job you insensitive clod!!!
__________
Love conquers all... except CANCER
When at work and not working (various good reasons, to be sure) I'm working as the infamous DeathKitten, keeping the old marsh clear of trolls and hags!
But seriously, keeping the marsh orderly is hard work at times. *nod-slash-smile*
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
I'm supposed to read /.!
Do you have to clean bathrooms, too?
Seriously, I had a job once where I was told that in addition to our regular duties we would also be cleaning the bathrooms and vacuuming the office. "Be sure," they said, "to dust the chairs."
Um, yea.. I check this site to make sure no one from work is browsing and posting. Yea, thats it.... And I have to do it often, too. You know, so nothing slips through the cracks.
What, me Tweet?
You sound like you need the serivces of Terry Tate, Office Linebacker...
"You kill the Joe, you make some Mo' Baby! Whoo whooooo!"
+++OK ATH
because IT tends to over-promise and under-deliver. In addition, of course, IT teams tend to be better paid than most, and the stuff we do is hard to quantify - what's the value to the company of an email system ? a billing system ? a website ?
In "Dancing with bears", Tom Demarco and Tim Lister make the point that on an IT project, we're tracking costs to an ever-increasing degree - time, expenses, over-runs down to the cent - but almost never track the benefits. The feature that gets added to the project because the VP read about it in a magazine, the little switch that lets your favourite customer bypass the security system, the 87th report - they may well be hugely valuable, but we just don't know.
Efficiency is not just determined by cost, it's the ratio of cost to benefit. On the IT side, we can controll (some of) the costs, but surely it's up to the business to make sure that the benefit is managed equally professionally.
The lure of off-shore outsourcing is twofold - there's the promise of cheaper stuff, but also the reduced requirement of the business to justify the benefits of their projects and features. Instead of a partnership between the "business" and the IT team, the relationship becomes "customer/vendor", which for many business folk is a lot more comfortable.
In the long run, I believe that - unless you manage the benefits - there is no price point at which you can afford to ignore the benefit part of the equation.
It's all very well in practice, but it will never work in theory.
If the developer cannot do his job, the company has no product and pretty soon neither of you has a job.
If you can't find a way for the developer's tools to run correctly without administrator priviledges for "everything", then your OS is fucked up. Microsoft had an example of how to do it properly (Xenix) in-house before they released Windoze 1.0, and ignored it.
And if two Windoze utilities conflict on your server and fuck it up, you're still stuck sorting it out. Sometimes the tools have bugs. Unless the developer has the source to the tool (gonna get the source to the interface for an in-circuit emulator? how about Visual Studio?) the developer can't control what it does to the system. They still probably have to use it, if for no other reason than it's the company standard. I don't know which is more ridiculous: letting anyone touch the company webserver, or insisting that cross-development source code files on a desktop workstation are in any way equivalent. Making it impossible for someone to do their job will do that; if it's your policy, it's your fault. You really want to make brownie points? Hose someone's computer with some magic update that blows away some essential driver that was working just fine the day before, then make them wait five days to get around to letting them do their job again. (That happened to me too. I don't work there any more.)As for my current situation, I've now got permanent local admin rights on my own desktop. The revision control system works as it is supposed to, I can actually use the editor to edit files, and the various tools are installed and running. The truly sick thing is, everything was working fine for the guy who had the same computer before me... so IT had to know how to set it up properly, they just thought that was optional for me. Is that your attitude too?
It's probably mutual. Today I wish that I could take the Fortune-50 customer for the project I'm working on that's been delayed because of IT's screwups and point them at the people responsible for making me run in circles trying to figure out why my tools didn't work instead of getting product out the door. If there's any resemblance to you, I'm sure it's just coincidence.Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
...someone in higher management worked out that too much time was being taken up by unproductive administrivia...
No comment.