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?"
Interestingly, I'm having a discussion with my boss's boss who wants to know why we don't get more work done on projects. I've tracked our time and it comes out to about:
His response, predictably, was "Only 50% of time on projects? I can't believe you are only 50% efficient."
So, as a simple solution, we've started using RequestTracker It's a simple ticketing system, and everything in the "Interrupts" list goes into the system (otherwise we don't work on it.) And then each week I give a nice list of all the "other things" we worked on. It's been very useful defending my "efficiency."
...as long as it's not illegal or immoral and he's willing to pay my price. And I'm not trying to be funny.
In the last year, that has included IT security auditing, training on various office apps, database development, needs assessment, small network administration, technical writing, etc.
Title- owner. Company size - one. Being self-employed means plenty of non-IT tasks like bookkeeping and janitorial and marketing and purchasing. Hours? Depends. When business is good, I put in 80 hour weeks. When business is not so good, 40-60 hour weeks. But then I pretty much take off all of November and December and a couple of weeks in the summer.
I love my job. My boss is a bitch, but her profit-sharing plan is awesome -- I get 100% of the profits.
computerlady - a brand new Slash-daughter - alone, but no longer invisible, in the
Then I am a programmer / analyst / business analyst, who has to work with the systems group as well as development group. I trouble shoot hardware, release management, installations, and have to work on other projects and give advice to people who generally don't take it, and then they get upset if I don't take their advice.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
I work in aerospace at a big US firm. We still have developers onshore: many of the US government contracts disallow foreign workers for security reasons.
Amazingly, most of my day is not spent working on software, but, on software process. There is all of the overhead involved in keeping our work instructions up to date and our software processes documented so that were are compliant with ISO 9000/1, and CMMI level 5. All of our specs and testing must be formally documented to keep up with DO-178B and contractual obligations.
Because the govt is the customer, there are bi-monthly presentations of our progress, with all the PowerPoint that that entails. The government has their own separate safety team that monitors our team, so a lot of time is spent interfacing with them.
As a consequence we are rather inefficient. To deal with that inefficiency we spend a lot of time in Six Sigma meetings tryings to come up with ways of automating work and creating reusable frameworks. These meetings are truly valuable (see, I'm not totally cynical) but they do take time and require their own documentation.
(The sad thing is that once all this process is up and running, the ISO/CMM documentation makes is so much easier for the company to treat coders like cogs in the machine or to move their jobs offsite. I am so thankful for the government security rules that make my job US citizen only. Whether or not we can keep our California site from moving to Nebraska or some such is another question...)
I am a one-man IT department at a Los Angeles-based company with about 150 employees. I do pretty much everything that's even vaguely related to IT.
:-( ), and I'm coordinating the contractors doing this.
Recently, in only vaguely IT-related stuff, I have worked on the renewal of our phone system support contract, figuring out if an upgrade to our phone system is really necessary, and fighting with the phone system people over incredibly bad terms in a contract. (For example, when they upgrade the system from Windows NT 4 to Windows 2000, they deliver the upgraded system unpatched (!). I told them to patch it as part of their agreement and they said NO NO NO and I said YES YES YES and they finally bent, sort of[*]).
My main job is to develop and maintain my Linux-based CRM+web ordering system that I developed myself. I want to move it to MacOS X to make security administration easier, and that's been taking a lot of my time. But so has developing new software to communicate with a new distribution partner.
We're also replacing our Exchange server (required because of the Windows-based phone system
Finally, when someone's workstation fails or gets a virus or whatever, I have to help him, her or it out. I am incredibly irritated at all the Windows problems that come up, because they distract me from productive work. If I ran the company, nobody, and I mean nobody, would be using Windows. Ugh.
When I feel overstressed, I calm down by reading and writing on a whole bunch of sites, including Slashdot. Slashdot is also work-related because it alerts me to the worst security holes, new directions in computing I should be aware of, and the like.
Recently, I'd say fully 50% of my time has been spent on supervising contractors of various types, but that's extremely unusual. Most of the time I am working on projects on our CRM system and helping users with problems. But recently there has been a lot of supervision. For the most part, I consider it an interesting change of pace, especially since management is understanding about it delaying the other projects I'm supposed to do.
Except for now, when our Exchange server is being replaced next weekend, there's relatively little overtime except during emergencies. But then again, our business is a 8-3 business, more or less.
Hope that helps.
D
[*] (Yes, our phone system runs under Windows. It's called Interactive Intelligence, and I'll give you a free clue: Don't buy it. Don't argue that it's bad because it runs Windows, even though that, too, is true. Instead, argue that it's bad because maintenance is incredibly expensive, non-responsive and our VAR maintaining it is desperate for revenues. It also appears to require a complete hardware replacement every five years or so, which is not long for something costing as much as a house in a crummy area of Southern California. Because many of the support problems, including quasi-compulsory upgrades, are thanks to the software developer and not the VAR, I cannot recommend buying this software even if you find a better VAR than we did).
*including reading slashdot
Let's see...
. I write delphi code, user interface design and database design for hospital project;
. I write php/javascript/html code, user interface design and database sesign for the web project;
. Server management is up to me;
. I do the network management as well;
. MS-DOS memory optimization (!!!) for the old software (e.g. new machines on client side). I do this because I'm the only person on the company that played games on MS-DOS back in 1994...
. Internal hardware support;
I'm doing some research in colege too... All of that consumes my brain to the last drop and I end up working 60+ hours/week.
It IS insane, but if you take off presure, I like doing all this stuff... don't YOU?
sorry if I can't write good...
\m/
Unchallenged Master of None. And I love it that way. I can always hire or outsource when we do need an unchallenged Master. I get to be the one and only IT person at a small subsidiary to a large financial company. I lay out the budget, make all the decisions on purchasing, outsourcing, business recovery, etc. I do a lot of paperwork for compliance purposes which I kind of hate. I spend the rest of my time training users, acting as help desk, evaluating new products and tech, and trying to keep up with all the security alerts I get from the parent corp. It has been a wonderful position. I love being the "CIO" of a tiny company.
That was the way it used to be. Recently the parent company has taken it on themselves to pull ALL IT functions under one roof. Somebody thought it would be a Great Idea to have one group of people be all things to all business units and subsidiaries. Consolidate to save costs. What a novel idea. It has truly been a nightmare. What used to take literally 5 minutes now takes 2 weeks and requires 800 signatures. It's the most inefficient set up I can imagine. My users are forced to call a centralized help desk that is staffed by inexpensive entry-level folks that have no idea what we do, what apps we have installed, what our business model is, what constitutes a risk, etc. These people are fine, but imagine your company's help desk if they got calls from other companies in different industries. When calls get escalated we get a visit from an upper level Corporate IT person who either
A: doesn't get it anywhere close to right because they've never seen half of the software we use to do business, have not been made aware of the security model, and have never been told what functionality we need.
OR B: They swallow their pride and ask me, so then get it right but resent me for being king of my little pond.
This is true for most departments - their business systems needs are very different from each other.
So where we used to be a fast nimble outfit that took every advantage of current and emerging technologies to gain efficiencies and stay on top of the competition, now we are a slow, backward, bureaucracy driven, lawyer ridden, hack shop that can't load an MS Office template without 2 forms, a signature, a phone call, a ticket number, and a 5 day turnaround time.. And that's JUST for an Office template to print out mailing labels. You don't want to hear about adding forms to our web site or patching a SQL server, or (OMG!) upgrading apps on a desktop PC!
It's a total nightmare. We aren't saving any money. We're much less efficient. The entire dept. is beyond pulling their hair out. The parent corp's Holier-than-thou attitude leaves us with no hope. And just about anything I could do to rectify the situation is a violation of corporate policy.
I went from loving my job to hating it to the point where I'm sick to my stomach in less than 3 months. And it has nothing to do with the efficiency of workers and everything to do with incompetent power-hungry management whose main concerns are buzzword compliance, covering their asses, and of course short term stock prices over long term profitability.
I'm not used to being a bitter person so I'm putting my energies toward getting the heck out of Dodge.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
I the only IT guy at a small company. If things are working well everyone leaves me alone. That gives me time to expand my knowledge on things (tech related which are sometimes work related) so that I can make better decisions or just be more aware of what is out there and can be done. Otherwise I do the generic sysadmin sorts of things, fix people's PCs, patch servers, occasionally suggest improvements to the infrastructure to the people that have hold of the purse strings. I read slashdot. I am also the only non-management male employee so if there is any handywork that has to be done I've kind of become the defacto handyman. I also have the luxury of being called in for "heavy-lifting" duty, i.e. boxes full of paper, moving furniture, etc. It wouldn't be so bad if these women were attractive. *grin* I'd probably fall all over myself trying to help them out. But alas, they're not. *frown* A lot of these things they could easily do themselves i.e. hang a picture. I'm amazed at how useless people can become in a work environment. It also doesn't help that I'm the comoplete opposite from the BOFH.
Don't let it get you down. I'm 28, previously worked for 6 years in the IT field ... up until losing my job and working in retail for 4 months last year. And I didn't consider it fun at all - not even once.
This reminds me of a big argument I had over compensation, when worked at a big computer retailer back in the late 1980s. I complained that as the only technically-oriented sales rep, I did an inordinate amount of work for the other sales reps, configuring their systems and troubleshooting, etc. and of course they made the sales commissions and I got nothing. I had a small base salary plus commissions, I told the boss I wanted to be compensated for the work I was doing for everyone else, by an increase to my base salary. The boss refused to believe I spent that much time helping everyone else, so I worked out a plan. For a full week, every 5 minutes, I would write down everything I was doing. I had a little timer that went off every 5 min, I took it everywhere except on sales calls. It took a huge amount of effort to record things constantly, but I was out to prove a point. After the week, I compiled the report, and it turned out that I spent more than half my time doing uncompensated work for other sales reps. I was the only rep doing work for other reps, all the other reps solely did their own work. I had proven my point, but do you think I got a raise? No, of course not.
I run a Virtual Private Server hosting company. I'd say my most of my time was spent dealing with people.
That includes answering simple questions for potential customers. And every now and then answering 'hard' support questions which might have me googling around trying to find answers.
I spend a bit of time setting up new servers. That used to take hours per server. Now I've got a personal best of 30 minutes (and that included a fully featured kernel recompile).
Since my server setups are pretty standard and the management of them is pretty much scripted, the day to day management of a lot of servers isn't that much of a handful.
Other than the support and hardware side of things, its a bit of everything: Billing; updating the default software installs; working on the website; adding HOWTOs; finding cheaper/faster/better host servers and network connections; reading the wht forums; new customer setups; answering 4AM in the morning pages; ...
- I fight the company IT department to get the permissions I require to run the software I need to do my job.
- I fight again to gain ownership of the files containing the source code I have to edit to produce the company's products. (It doesn't do anyone much good if the files are set read-only and owned by some administrative function other than me as they're checked out of the revision management system, but that's what IT's default settings did.)
- I fight the undocumented and idiotic conflicts between pieces of Windoze software. For instance, today I discovered that a certain serial port chip-programmer application is completely locked out of the use of a port if I use XP's Hyperterminal on that same port, and I can only use that port with the programmer app again if I reboot Windoze. (Bill Gates, you suck dead rotting donkey cock.)
- I fight the absurd and ridiculous limitations of test software, such as a hard limit of ten messages I can pre-define to be sent on the test bus when I have come to need a minimum of 11. (Even more ironic, the test hardware I'm driving is based on Linux and ought to be way more capable than the crippled Windoze interface I must use to talk to it.)
Talk to me next month and I'll probably have a new litany of complaints. I do thank ghu that I only have to deal with the reboot monkeys of IT rather than generic Windoze lusers, though.Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I took a IT sabbatical. I work for a walmart now, as inventory control specalist. Though, I wear countless number of hats. I also unload trucks, stock, pull department manager duites, drive and maintain various heavy lift equipment with great ease requiring operating lisences and a mechanic's wrench to keep things in order. The unloading trucks part of the job does me better than a gym. I am one of the managers' "Ill give it all I got" people and train everyone in my department to be the same. (Now I just have to teach them to think ahead of management without relying on me to do so for them)
I haul around about 20 to 30 1/2 ton to 2 ton pallets for 2 hours with a manual pallet jack and stock for 2 to 3 hours and unload trucks for 2 to 3 hours (depending on other activities). I swear after Q1 of 2004 when I go back to IT work, I will be one of the strongest IT guys with the ability to handle anything thrown at me. I have learned to enjoy the odd jobs as they break up the monotony of things, and told management that fact. Just so long as they realize odd jobs are to break up the regular duties, not the other way around.
DRACO-
Consider yourself blessed if you are sneezed on by a dragon and only get wet, it could have been a fireball.