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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?"
"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
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
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...)
Where I've worked, IT wasn't regarded as inefficient but I think it's regarded as too expensive everywhere.
I'm used to management hating IT because it's a cost center. Here's what I wish I could tell management:
IT is hard.
You get what you pay for.
I'd like to see some of these managers try taking their car to a cheap mechanic.
IT requires acting almost compulsively, lots of obscure knowledge, and troubleshooting. Then there are the hours.
Troubleshooting is helped tremendously by natural ability, and is not easy to teach. The obscure knowledge requires being enough of a geek to keep up, and the more background you have in how stuff works, the better off you are. Compulsive behavior is a pain for most of us.
I know that the reason I got pulled onto other tasks was that they knew that I'd just Make It Work. I watched a former CIO pulling on cat5e with all his might when he was helping out on a cable run. If you pull on it too hard, it'll probably work, but you sure won't full bandwidth out of it. I often worked on nights and weekends to minimize impact on my office. Backups have to work and be tested. If you don't have backups, you might as well not have IT. I know places like that too, but what do you think of a software shop where nobody is specifically responsible for things like the FTP server, or there are no real backups?
Unfortunately, it's difficult to sell most of this on a resume. I guess that's where years of experience are suppposed to come in, but I know that in many cases that doesn't do it.
Where did you hear that American IT is inefficient? Is this some sort of specific story or rumor? Traditionally, American workers are very productive, and my experience in IT is similar. I know the network architect at one company where I worked saved them hundreds of thousands of dollars on their phone bills by redesigning their telephone system. IT has made a lot of other support staff unneccessary.
I like the mechanic analogy a lot. You can delay maintenance for a long time, and put up with little problems, but ultimately your car will require professional attention. Even for people who buy a new car every two years, maintenance is cheaper than doing none. With a few years experience, a mechanic at a dealership can make 80k.
Almost all of my coworkers in IT have worked their asses off too, even the mediocre ones.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.