Re: Online staff questionnaire

Satya is of the opinion:
On Sat, 11 Jul 2009 14:43:15 +0000 (UTC), Paul wrote:
I spent my last several years being All Things to All People
(application support), which included just enough SA and DBA to pass
on problems to the "real" ones, who had inherited those functions
from me when our swervers went central. Every day was different.

And then they expect you to document procedures that are different every day --
because it's a new problem every day.

Augh, the memories, the pain, the suffering. The job where I'd automated
everything automatable, then had the idiot CIO decide to hire some cheap
idiot based in China[1] to "do all the routine stuff". Attempts to explain
that any routine stuff we identified would be automated away rather than
handed to some monkey fell on deaf ears, and the pleading to find something
for this bloke to do was incessant[2] and drove me mad (literally; I had
something of a nervous breakdown while there -- and, for that matter, so did
the other sysadmin).

My one attempt to document my manual processes looked something like:

= Network Troubleshooting =

1. Identify source of problem. (Some brief stuff about pings, traceroutes)
1. Call relevant provider NOC and work with them to solve the problem.

Apparently, that wasn't considered helpful enough. Some people are
never happy.

Incidentally, this wasn't an attempt to farm the jobs offshore and fire all
the local workers (I didn't get any of that sort of vibe, and I doubt
management was capable of being that subtle). This was just your
bog-standard management-by-recto-cranial-inversion.

That could have been my dream job, if it weren't for the management.

- Matt

[1] That's not to say that everyone in China is an idiot, just that when you
take the wage of an Australian sysadmin, divide it by the
average-cost-of-living ratio, and say "that's what we're going to pay the
sysadmin in China", you're pretty much, by definition, going to get an
idiot, because nobody with any sense would work for that rate when they can
get a whole lot more money working for IBM, HP, Microsoft, Cisco, et al.

[2] That's right, management didn't go "hmm, we've got all these extra
routine tasks to do, let's hire someone cheap to do them", it was "hey,
we've heard that when you outsource your work you save money, so let's hire
someone cheap in China, and then see what we can get them to do".
.

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