I'm not saying all IT workers are stupid but...

[yllus]

Why would you want to have an IT infrastructure full of people that think that users are losers, when you can just pay a cloud supplier? And every year, you have a savings in your organizational budget from all of those salaries that you have eliminated.

If a company thinks that outsourcing their IT to the cloud will improve their customer support and general ease of use they're hilariously mistaken. I say this as someone who worked for half a decade at a major cloud infrastructure provider. Your user's complaints disappear into the cloud that the hosting also comes from.

I do think that IT departments who look down upon their users are despicable. I think it'd be better to not house IT on a separate floor or office somewhere but to embed them in the rest of the workers spread out of the floor - give them a sense of "in it together". Otherwise it's too easy to get a persecuted minority complex.

 

[SaDiZTiKStyLeZ]

Good thing they can't be more stupid than you!

 

[unokitty]

StinkyPinky,

According to an Educause survey of 391 institutions, 71 percent were expecting a major or minor decrease in their budget, 19 percent were expecting it to stay the same, and 9 percent expected an increase.

Glad that you have everything that you need. Hope that that continues for you.

You realize though that its probably not appropriate to try to gereralize from a sample size of one, right?

I suppose you're one of those people that thought emails would end our reliance on paper?

???

Uno

 

[unokitty]

If a company thinks that outsourcing their IT to the cloud will improve their customer support and general ease of use they're hilariously mistaken. I say this as someone who worked for half a decade at a major cloud infrastructure provider. Your user's complaints disappear into the cloud that the hosting also comes from.

I do think that IT departments who look down upon their users are despicable. I think it'd be better to not house IT on a separate floor or office somewhere but to embed them in the rest of the workers spread out of the floor - give them a sense of "in it together". Otherwise it's too easy to get a persecuted minority complex.

Appreciate your input.

Didn't mean to imply that problems go away with the cloud.

My perception is that one of the primary motivations for going to the cloud is cost control.

But I think that it can also be helpful in setting user expectations. For example, when a school outsources their email to Google, most users know what to expect. And if they don't, there is alot of documentation...

Also, I think that there are political advantages to having certain services be outsourced.

If you don't mind, could you tell us why people bought services from the cloud infrastructure provider that you worked for? Don't need any specifics. But in general, were they looking to save money? Or were they looking to do something that they didn't have the inhouse expertise to do? Or, something else?

Thanks in advance,
Uno

 

[Exterous]

For most companies, IT services are a cost. Consequently, their IT departments are prime candidates for outsourcing

Maybe if the company decides to run everything standard and not have any customized software/layout. I have no realistic idea on how wide spread that is but from my own experience the three places I have working in IT for have all opted for unique customization/quirks born from laziness/cost/cool idea/ignorance that any time we have needed to farm something out there are a host of added costs involved in the outsorced labor figuring out what we did, how it was done and how the heck to fix it/migrate it. There is a lot to be said for someone who knows the system, who is in the building (or one of the buildings) and who the people know well

Honestly as the gadgets that everyone wants interfaced with everything else (Despite my abhorrence to BYOD) and the growing needs of information security I don't see IT going anywhere anytime soon - but I am not exactly an unbiased person in the matter

I do think that IT departments who look down upon their users are despicable.

Its not our fault everyone else is incompetent!

I think it'd be better to not house IT on a separate floor or office somewhere but to embed them in the rest of the workers spread out of the floor - give them a sense of "in it together". Otherwise it's too easy to get a persecuted minority complex.

This works well until something bad happens - then I can't seems to get anything done about the crisis because of everyone coming up to me telling/asking me about the crisis Might just be a smaller IT dept thing though (Only two of us for the company)

 

[Exterous]

I suppose you're one of those people that thought emails would end our reliance on paper?

I still have one guy who prints out any email he gets that he thinks IT should be involved in and will hand it to me

Dude - you can just hit the forward button and send it to me. No need to print it out. Nice guy though

 

[brianmanahan]

this thread is stupid.

:thumbsup:

 

[brianmanahan]

many of the systems that they have created seem obtuse

i take it you've never used vi, lol

perhaps you are the obtuse one

 

[Zargon]

StinkyPinky,

According to an Educause survey of 391 institutions, 71 percent were expecting a major or minor decrease in their budget, 19 percent were expecting it to stay the same, and 9 percent expected an increase.

Glad that you have everything that you need. Hope that that continues for you.

You realize though that its probably not appropriate to try to gereralize from a sample size of one, right?



???

Uno

higher education is (IN GENERAL RIGHT NOW) getting gutted because states are suffering and the university systems are a big hunk of red ink on their budgets. you are generalizing there from a SMALL portion of a SMALL portion of the population there

 

[CVSiN]

Must be tough. Providing support for people you don't respect. Fortunately it doesn't appear that that situation isn't likely to continue. For example:

"In the long run, the IT department is unlikely to survive, at least not in its familiar form," .... "It will have little left to do once the bulk of business computing shifts out of private data centers and into the cloud. Business units and even individual employees will be able to control the processing of information directly, without the need for legions of technical people."

From, The IT department is dead

Article about a book from the author of "Does IT Matter".

The future. Its not looking like the past.

Uno

And who do you think is going to manage the Citrix Farms? and the AD and Exchange?

those systems dont magically fix and maintain themselves.. not to mention hardware and networking will never go away.
You cant outsource that stuff.

I just left a 100% cloud integrated company. using VDI and Citrix and dumb terminals.. and guess what.. our workload actually doubled compared to a windows7 native environment.

way more work to do on cloud based services pushing and packaging and managing the software..
and still have to do all the AD security groups work.

People that think that IT is going out of style are as dumb as the OP and his company..

and yes we do think ALL users are freaking morons.. and if you did put us on the floors integrated with the populace we would just IM each other and still share our dumbaass user stories.

 

[unokitty]

higher education is (IN GENERAL RIGHT NOW) getting gutted because states are suffering and the university systems are a big hunk of red ink on their budgets. you are generalizing there from a SMALL portion of a SMALL portion of the population there

I just posted the results of an Educause Survey. There are no generalisations in my post only facts supported by external links to the original survey.

While you are entitled to own opinions, you are not entitled to your own facts.

Uno

 

[unokitty]

and yes we do think ALL users are freaking morons.. and if you did put us on the floors integrated with the populace we would just IM each other and still share our dumbaass user stories.

You have my sympathy.

I don't think that I would ever be happy with a job where I provided service to "freaking morons".

Best of luck with that,
Uno

 

[yllus]

Appreciate your input.

Didn't mean to imply that problems go away with the cloud.

My perception is that one of the primary motivations for going to the cloud is cost control.

But I think that it can also be helpful in setting user expectations. For example, when a school outsources their email to Google, most users know what to expect. And if they don't, there is alot of documentation...

Also, I think that there are political advantages to having certain services be outsourced.

If you don't mind, could you tell us why people bought services from the cloud infrastructure provider that you worked for? Don't need any specifics. But in general, were they looking to save money? Or were they looking to do something that they didn't have the inhouse expertise to do? Or, something else?

Thanks in advance,
Uno

You're definitely spot on by saying the primary motivator is cost - that was my experience. Before getting into Exchange hosting, we crunched the numbers to see at what point it made sense for customers to stop outsourcing and bring their Exchange infrastructure in-house; I wish I could remember the exact figures, but in general a company with less than 1000 employees doesn't benefit from keeping things internally managed. (Lots of companies overrate the secrecy of their e-mail, though, and do it anyways.)

You're also exactly right in that user expectations automatically change - people expect better uptime, but they lessen their expectation for human-assisted support.

Microsoft charges a fee per every user on an Exchange server so outsourced providers actually charge a pretty penny for their services. I suppose the real benefit you attain is in not having to hire an Exchange admin or two, plus server and network costs and maintenance. That's easily six figures in savings a year. I left that company before Google Apps really started to take off so I wonder how much that's seeping in to major Fortune 500 companies...

And who do you think is going to manage the Citrix Farms? and the AD and Exchange?

those systems dont magically fix and maintain themselves.. not to mention hardware and networking will never go away.
You cant outsource that stuff.

I just left a 100% cloud integrated company. using VDI and Citrix and dumb terminals.. and guess what.. our workload actually doubled compared to a windows7 native environment.

way more work to do on cloud based services pushing and packaging and managing the software..
and still have to do all the AD security groups work.

People that think that IT is going out of style are as dumb as the OP and his company..

and yes we do think ALL users are freaking morons.. and if you did put us on the floors integrated with the populace we would just IM each other and still share our dumbaass user stories.

Active Directory and Exchange can be easily managed and hosted remotely.

The cloud services company I worked at was just beginning the process of a major overhaul of their client services (read: help desk) area as they and others grasp that the platform is becoming a commodity, and it's service that will make the difference between retaining a client and losing them to the next company who undercuts your prices by 0.5%. I hope your tech skills are very good because I'm doubtful your attitude will get you very far in the future.

 

[unokitty]

You're definitely spot on by saying the primary motivator is cost - that was my experience. Before getting into Exchange hosting, we crunched the numbers to see at what point it made sense for customers to stop outsourcing and bring their Exchange infrastructure in-house; I wish I could remember the exact figures, but in general a company with less than 1000 employees doesn't benefit from keeping things internally managed. (Lots of companies overrate the secrecy of their e-mail, though, and do it anyways.)

You're also exactly right in that user expectations automatically change - people expect better uptime, but they lessen their expectation for human-assisted support.

Microsoft charges a fee per every user on an Exchange server so outsourced providers actually charge a pretty penny for their services. I suppose the real benefit you attain is in not having to hire an Exchange admin or two, plus server and network costs and maintenance. That's easily six figures in savings a year. I left that company before Google Apps really started to take off so I wonder how much that's seeping in to major Fortune 500 companies...

Thanks!

Appreciate your insights.

Uno

 

[SpatiallyAware]

Every single company I've known who has gone to hosted exchange services have severely regretted it after about a year. My industry consists of ~20 to ~2000 employee companies, these are businesses that are supposed to be prime candidates for hosted exch setups.

Long story short, they are always sold on how amazing it is... and it's fine until the moment you need ANYTHING other than a simple user added. I'm doing business with a company where we've formed a partnership.. The other company uses hosted exchange services and was supposed to handle all email junk of said partnership corp. After ~6 weeks of dicking around with their service provider they completely gave up trying to have this second domain added and asked if our IT staff could do it, which took all of 2 hours.

Everything is just such a HUGE deal and not 'part of the package you paid for'.

I have seen this over, and over, and over.. I've heard of at least 5-6 very serious situations where the hosted service company wouldn't provide a 'regular' service without huge charges. I've heard of everything from aliases costing $50 per month to someone having their email backups hijacked for what was essentially ransom money.

I have been convinced that hosted services are not a great fit for a 'decent' business. If you run a sweatshop and don't care about CS then fine... save yourself $500 a year and farm it out.


What IT Admin doesn't know exchange?? Even a small shop should have an IT guy who can handle this stuff internally, in my opinion.

 

[SpatiallyAware]

And I agree that a lot of the attitudes in here from IT people are abysmal.

You are a service provider, it's amazing how terrible some of you think about your coworkers and clients. If you are this frustrated at "idiot users" then I recommend finding a job field that makes you happy instead of miserable.

 

[CVSiN]

And I agree that a lot of the attitudes in here from IT people are abysmal.

You are a service provider, it's amazing how terrible some of you think about your coworkers and clients. If you are this frustrated at "idiot users" then I recommend finding a job field that makes you happy instead of miserable.

Sorry no such position exists.. work is work.. it is not enjoyable. there are 19000000 other things in this world I'd rather be doing than slaving my life away.
I put on my smile at work and nod happily like a good little soldier.. and do my job well.. but that's all it is a job to earn money to have a real life..

ROFL,
"Service Provider" does not include me as a Senior Network Admin getting calls on " how do I take a screen shot?" or "can you fix my home network or computer?"
or "How do I add a signature to my email?"
"Why do I have this popup that says I am infected with a virus?"

I'm sorry I have much better things to do with my time.
I provide a service.. I keep the network up and running and the servers and SQL databases properly maintained.

just because I am an "IT guy" does not make me your helpdesk.

Been in the gig for over 20 years now..
and I have yet to meet an "IT person" that didn't laugh at his users behind their backs.

We share "dumb user" stories between each other like others tell war stories..


That's ok though.. we hear the "IT Dept sucks" stories as well.. it's a vicious circle.

 

[SpatiallyAware]

I know 'your type' (I hate to generalize but you fit it) very very well.

If users are coming to you (as a s. network admin) with those sorts of problems then there is some breakdown in your ticketing system which translates to an issue with IT management.

Even if you do have a decent ticketing system, you have no right to be rude to your coworkers.


You are the perfect example of what I call a "toxic employee". There's nothing wrong with directing a coworker to some other IT staff or to the ticketing system. You're so miserable that you end up offended at anyone talking to you.. Like I said, it's very sad. Go work in the woods cutting down trees or something, then maybe you wouldn't be bothered by these "idiots" who dare have the gall to ask their network admin a question.

 

[alkemyst]

lol at ticketing systems you are behind and the employees.

wear that badge.

9 times out of 10 in that situation, you are a pure cost and that person inquireing is an asset.

We don't do ticketing in my line of work for my position (we have a NOC and other things that do). If my customer (our client) calls me at midnight, I am on the hook. This is not official as we have service contracts, but as an employee here I can't really tell them to go pound sand.

In the end I love this arrangement.

Fortunately that's rare.

 

[CVSiN]

I know 'your type' (I hate to generalize but you fit it) very very well.

If users are coming to you (as a s. network admin) with those sorts of problems then there is some breakdown in your ticketing system which translates to an issue with IT management.

Even if you do have a decent ticketing system, you have no right to be rude to your coworkers.


You are the perfect example of what I call a "toxic employee". There's nothing wrong with directing a coworker to some other IT staff or to the ticketing system. You're so miserable that you end up offended at anyone talking to you.. Like I said, it's very sad. Go work in the woods cutting down trees or something, then maybe you wouldn't be bothered by these "idiots" who dare have the gall to ask their network admin a question.

Who said I don't help those users.. or direct them to the proper people?
who is generalizing now..
Like i said above I am NEVER rude to my users..
Do we laugh at them behind your backs.. hell yes we do.

you already classified me as a loser that has a miserable attitude.. and if that was true how would I still have a job? Or be even functional at life?
NOWHERE did i say I was rude or didn't help my users.. YOU said that.
I merely said I don't have time for that kinda BS and that we laugh at stupid users on a daily basis..

What I say here among peers that I don't work with is 1 thing.. I' am being honest and candid. How I present myself and my work ethic in real life keeps me employed and awarded.

anyone can hate a job and still be damn good at it.. and also put on one hell of a show for 8-12 hours a day for the employer.. and still LOATHE what they do..
I know very few people except a few type A personality workaholics that really "like" what they do.. most are like me just counting the hours till offtime or weekend.

 

[alkemyst]

Who said I don't help those users.. or direct them to the proper people?
who is generalizing now..
Like i said above I am NEVER rude to my users..
Do we laugh at them behind your backs.. hell yes we do.

you already classified me as a loser that has a miserable attitude.. and if that was true how would I still have a job? Or be even functional at life?
NOWHERE did i say I was rude or didn't help my users.. YOU said that.
I merely said I don't have time for that kinda BS and that we laugh at stupid users on a daily basis..

What I say here among peers that I don't work with is 1 thing.. I' am being honest and candid. How I present myself and my work ethic in real life keeps me employed and awarded.

anyone can hate a job and still be damn good at it.. and also put on one hell of a show for 8-12 hours a day for the employer.. and still LOATHE what they do..
I know very few people except a few type A personality workaholics that really "like" what they do.. most are like me just counting the hours till offtime or weekend.

that's a fucking sad story. What keeps you there?

 

[Jadow]

at most companies, the applications / databases in use are not new and were built by IT people many eons ago. The current IT folks inherited it.

Most likely changing something like you're describing would require costly development, this may not be the highest priority on the dev roadmap, and would be more costly to fix than the problem is worth.

 

[CVSiN]

that's a fucking sad story. What keeps you there?

That's pretty much any job..
the only job I was ever happy at was the Military.. everything after that has been a "job"

 

[SpatiallyAware]

That's pretty much any job..
the only job I was ever happy at was the Military.. everything after that has been a "job"

No, it really isn't.

Work is not just about making money. You spend so much of your life at work that it's not worth being miserable for any increase in pay. Go find something you love.

 

[SpatiallyAware]

at most companies, the applications / databases in use are not new and were built by IT people many eons ago. The current IT folks inherited it.

Most likely changing something like you're describing would require costly development, this may not be the highest priority on the dev roadmap, and would be more costly to fix than the problem is worth.

Many times these problems are directly with the highest level IT manager/director/CTO.

They need to justify the costs involved in fixing these sorts of things to whoever is controlling the company.