Job-ad: Just WTF is involved in this job?



  •  "Assistant Desktop Engineer - Xville We are currently recruiting for a assistant desktop engineer's to be involved in a Windows 7 upgrade. You will ideally have some experience within a IT desktop environment. Any rollout experience would be advantageous. You must be well presented with excellent communication skills. Have your own car and tools. This role is to start 29.02.12 for 2 days. Must have your own Steele top capped boots."

    Steel-capped boots? The mind boggles as to why.



  • Maybe they're replacing old Windows 2000 systems and don't want anybody to get hurt by dropping a 17" CRT monitor on their foot.



  • @GreyWolf said:

    Steel-capped boots? The mind boggles as to why.
    There is this place called the manufacturing industry where they actually make things rather than sit around in nice cushy cubicles and just push electrons around. In general any place that actually does manufacturing requires personal safety equipment such as hearing, eye, head and foot protection, and while it is common for most places to have spare generic hearing and eye and head protection on tap, having spare safety boots is not that common. Besides you'll be far more comfortable in your own pair of nicely worn in safety boots.

    I've been on some shop floors that required ear, eye, head and foot protection as well as long pants, long sleeved shirts, gloves and orange safety vests - and doing so in the middle of summer at temps more than 36 deg C.

    I also had to have safety boots at one place that specifically had metatarsal coverage, which may have made it safer for my feet if something got dropped on them, but the added protection actually made it less safe to climb ladders due to the metatarsal coverage potentially catching on the ladder rung.



  • Either the desktops are located inside a warehouse and everyone who works there is required to wear basic safety gear, or they expect to commemerate the victory of Windows 7 over the forces of Vista and XP by carving a series of rectangular stone slabs.

     

    Both explanations seem equally plausible to me.

     

     



  • There are also some places where users are living, breathing collections of WTF atoms and need a decent kicking.

    Steel toecaps are a requirement for personal health and safety, and usually result a better productivity per kick ration.



  •  I was seriously tempted to buy a pair of safety boots just to be able to apply for this job.Pure curiousity.

    Unfortunately, the contract is only 2 days long, and the cheapest pair of boots I can find costs the equivalent of one day's take-home pay. And I'd never use them again.



  • Recruiter misunderstood what was involved when the client said they were doing a "forklift upgrade" of their environment?

    Seriously though, as others have pointed out, many environments require PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) even if you're only doing light duty work. My favorite story involves a local mine. The cafeteria at the local hospital won the contract to provide overtime meal service. The cafeteria workers wear scrubs as part of their uniform. When delivering meals to the mine, they're required to don a Hard hat, safety vest, safety glasses with side shields, and steel toe boots with metatarsal covers (plus remove all jewelry). I hear it looks pretty ridiculous.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @GreyWolf said:

    Steel-capped boots? The mind boggles as to why.
     

    It's an obvious and common [url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKWvk4eoMH4"]job requirement[/url]



  • I like the way they use the recruiting buzzwords, they add "Engineer" to make it sound important but qualify that with "Assistant" to justify that it pays peanuts.

     



  • If you take a job in the exciting manufacturing sector, you won't have electrons to push around anymore.



  • @GreyWolf said:

    Steel-capped boots? The mind boggles as to why.
    Generally, it's box-ticking, but I have been on a few sites where there were building works going on at the same time, so steelies were necessary.

    A while ago the wife did a job installing new PCs - again, in a bank - where they not only had to wear safety-boots, but also hard-hats because they were crawling under desks, and had to try and plug in (and screw the retaining screws in on) all the cables and so-on whilst wearing thick leather gloves. Oh, and there was an extra person on site whose sole job was opening cardboard boxes with a box-cutter because no-one else was allowed a blade. If I remember rightly, there was also a ban on removing cable-ties once they were fixed in place - not sure if that was H&S or 'security' - even if you'd just installed one in the wrong place. You had to put in a change request to have it removed by the maintenance team (who weren't yet employed, since the site wasn't yet live). If I remember rightly, that ended up taking roughly half a man-day per PC installation.

    If you have nothing better to do, I heartily recommend relocations and deployments purely for the entertainment value. On the very rare occasions when the job isn't a complete WTF from start to finish, everything goes so quickly that you'll be out of there in a quarter or a third of a shift, and it's normal to be paid for the whole shift. The rest of the time, you'll see too many WTFs to count.

    Oh, and you should be able to pick up a pair of safety boots online for $20-30 or so.



  • @EncoreSpod said:

    I like the way they use the recruiting buzzwords, they add "Engineer" to make it sound important
    I think that's part of selling to the client - it's a lot easier to sell the services of 'an engineer' at hundreds of dollars a day. Don't knock it - car insurance is a lot cheaper as an engineer than an IT contractor...



  • @fterfi secure said:

    Don't knock it - car insurance is a lot cheaper as an engineer than an IT contractor...

    Wait, what?



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @fterfi secure said:
    Don't knock it - car insurance is a lot cheaper as an engineer than an IT contractor...

    Wait, what?

    At least here in the UK, your job title makes a big difference to car insurance costs. I checked with my insurance company at the time, and they said the most suitable category for 'deployment engineer' is 'engineer' rather than 'IT contractor'. Who am I to argue if engineers are seen as a much safer risk?



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @fterfi secure said:
    Don't knock it - car insurance is a lot cheaper as an engineer than an IT contractor...

    Wait, what?

    Compare them on this website - I was surprised at how much they can differ.



  • @OzPeter said:

    I also had to have safety boots at one place that specifically had metatarsal coverage, which may have made it safer for my feet if something got dropped on them, but the added protection actually made it less safe to climb ladders due to the metatarsal coverage potentially catching on the ladder rung.

     Would this be a certain large metals manufacturer?

     In order to get past the gate house in addition to wearing all of the above I had to watch a 30 minute safety video, go through 320 PowerPoint sildes (I wish I was making that up -- they spanned two PowerPoint presentations), and a 20 question safety quiz.

     Oh, and if I dared take off either the hard hat or the safety vest while sitting in the conference room I was working in I got yelled at. I've never felt goofier -- sitting behind a nice table, in a Herman Miller chair, with my laptop, in a fully-furnished room decked out in safety gear, because that's what they require of all contractors -- regardless of the specialty being contracted.

     



  • @lincolnjkc said:

     Oh, and if I dared take off either the hard hat or the safety vest while sitting in the conference room I was working in I got yelled at.

    That's probably the single most effective part of the entire training session. Maybe they make you sit through so much guff just to make sufficient time for you to take off your helmet so you get yelled at. Trained.



  • @mott555 said:

    Maybe they're replacing old Windows 2000 systems and don't want anybody to get hurt by dropping a 17" CRT monitor on their foot.

     

    My brother in law worked at a piggery and they were forbidden to wear steel-capped boots. If a sow stands on your foot it is broken. If she stands on a steel-capped boot it will buckle and cause more issues, like making it almost impossible to take it off for the medical people to tend to your broken foot.

    (Apparently)

     

     



  • @Zemm said:

    If a sow stands on your foot it is broken.
     

    Que?

    Pigs are about the same weight as people, are they not? If a fat dude stands on my foot, I get ouchie but it's not broken.



  • @dhromed said:

    @Zemm said:

    If a sow stands on your foot it is broken.
     

    Que?

    Pigs are about the same weight as people, are they not? If a fat dude stands on my foot, I get ouchie but it's not broken.

    Not sure of the exact dimensions, but a pig hoof is probably ~3 sq in.,whereas a fat guy foot in a shoe is more like 48 sq in. So the ballpark pressure ratio is ~8:1 per leg. Also, some domestic pigs can be upwards of 500 lbs or more.



  • @GreyWolf said:

     "Assistant Desktop Engineer - Xville We are currently recruiting for a assistant desktop engineer's to be involved in a Windows 7 upgrade. You will ideally have some experience within a IT desktop environment. Any rollout experience would be advantageous. You must be well presented with excellent communication skills. Have your own car and tools. This role is to start 29.02.12 for 2 days. Must have your own Steele top capped boots."

    Steel-capped boots? The mind boggles as to why.

     

    They are upgrading (replacing) seven windows and you're going to be standing on top of a desk in the IT dept?  Not sure about rollout experience... if you fall out of a window can you roll when you hit the ground to avoid leg injuries?

     



  • @Zemm said:

    @mott555 said:

    Maybe they're replacing old Windows 2000 systems and don't want anybody to get hurt by dropping a 17" CRT monitor on their foot.

     

    My brother in law worked at a piggery and they were forbidden to wear steel-capped boots. If a sow stands on your foot it is broken. If she stands on a steel-capped boot it will buckle and cause more issues, like making it almost impossible to take it off for the medical people to tend to your broken foot.

    (Apparently)

     

    Urban myth. MythBusters tested that and found it took something like 30,000 pounds to buckle the steel, at that point your foot is screwed whether you're wearing boots or not. Plus I grew up on a farm and have had animals much heavier than pigs step on my steel cap before without any problems.

     



  • @GreyWolf said:

    Unfortunately, the contract is only 2 days long, and the cheapest pair of boots I can find costs the equivalent of one day's take-home pay. And I'd never use them again.

     

    Don't say that, you just need to think creatively!

     



  • @fterfi secure said:

    If you have nothing better to do, I heartily recommend relocations and deployments purely for the entertainment value. On the very rare occasions when the job isn't a complete WTF from start to finish, everything goes so quickly that you'll be out of there in a quarter or a third of a shift, and it's normal to be paid for the whole shift. The rest of the time, you'll see too many WTFs to count.

    I second this.  The best summer job I ever had was working for a company that had a support contract for another organization that was gradually relocating to new office space.  My job was to set up the desktop PCs at each new desk after they had been delivered -- crawling under desks, screwing down VGA connectors, that kind of thing.

    Each day I'd check in and walk around to see if there were any new desks ready to set up.  Usually there weren't, in which case the rest of the morning was spent at one of the picnic tables outside, reading the newspaper and listening to King Crimson tapes.  After a 2-hour lunch break I'd check in again, and if there was still nothing to do, I'd go home and my employer would still bill for the full day.  This went on for several weeks.

    The primary WTF -- other than that I was being paid to do so little -- was that the Ethernet cables they provided me weren't always long enough to reach from the wall panel to the furthest cubicle in each group, so some people had to reconfigure their workspaces so their computer was tucked away at one end of the desk, instead of the logical central position.  I tried to get some longer cables to accomodate these users but the request was denied.

     

     



  • I'd have thought PiXiE boots would be more suitable.



  • @mott555 said:

    @Zemm said:

    @mott555 said:

    Maybe they're replacing old Windows 2000 systems and don't want anybody to get hurt by dropping a 17" CRT monitor on their foot.

     

    My brother in law worked at a piggery and they were forbidden to wear steel-capped boots. If a sow stands on your foot it is broken. If she stands on a steel-capped boot it will buckle and cause more issues, like making it almost impossible to take it off for the medical people to tend to your broken foot.

    (Apparently)

     

    Urban myth. MythBusters tested that and found it took something like 30,000 pounds to buckle the steel, at that point your foot is screwed whether you're wearing boots or not. Plus I grew up on a farm and have had animals much heavier than pigs step on my steel cap before without any problems.

    True, but scary storey: Once when I worked in a distribution center loading a truck, I let my left foot dangle off a small forklift truck (the battery-powered kind that you ride standing).  The forklift lost traction, then almost immediately regained traction which threw it against the inside wall of the truck on the side my foot dangled down from.  Needless to say the cap in my steel toe shoes buckled and I needed to throw them away.  I wasn't hurt, but that definitely wasn't anywhere near 30k pounds...



  • @C-Octothorpe said:

    that definitely wasn't anywhere near 30k pounds...
     

    Sure?

    F = ma and all that.

    I don't know the mass of a forklift, nor was I there to gauge its acceleration towards the wall, but hey, that a tends to make a big difference.

    Additionally, some pressure vectors may cause more damage to a steel toe than others.

     



  • @Rootbeer said:

    The primary WTF was that the Ethernet cables they provided me weren't always long enough to reach from the wall panel to the furthest cubicle in each group, so some people had to reconfigure their workspaces so their computer was tucked away at one end of the desk, instead of the logical central position.
    Our IT guy does the same thing.  Every time he sets up a computer or other equipment requiring an ethernet cable, he uses a cable that's just exactly the needed length with absolutely no extra.  If you ever need to move something, you can't.



  • @OzPeter said:

    @GreyWolf said:
    Steel-capped boots? The mind boggles as to why.
    There is this place called the manufacturing industry where they actually make things rather than sit around in nice cushy cubicles and just push electrons around. In general any place that actually does manufacturing requires personal safety equipment such as hearing, eye, head and foot protection, and while it is common for most places to have spare generic hearing and eye and head protection on tap, having spare safety boots is not that common. Besides you'll be far more comfortable in your own pair of nicely worn in safety boots.

    I've been on some shop floors that required ear, eye, head and foot protection as well as long pants, long sleeved shirts, gloves and orange safety vests - and doing so in the middle of summer at temps more than 36 deg C.

    I also had to have safety boots at one place that specifically had metatarsal coverage, which may have made it safer for my feet if something got dropped on them, but the added protection actually made it less safe to climb ladders due to the metatarsal coverage potentially catching on the ladder rung.

    tl;dr version: OP didn't recognize an opportunity because it had work boots on





  • @GreyWolf said:

    Steele top capped boots



    Fixed your broken-ass jpg. -TheShadowMod



  • @El_Heffe said:

    Every time he sets up a computer or other equipment requiring an ethernet cable, he uses a cable that's just exactly the needed length with absolutely no extra.  If you ever need something moving, he needs to swap your cable for one that's the new (correct) length.

    FTFY.



  • @Zecc said:

    Fixed your broken-ass jpg. -TheShadowMod
    Will you believe I used that ironically?



  • @mott555 said:

    @Zemm said:

    @mott555 said:

    Maybe they're replacing old Windows 2000 systems and don't want anybody to get hurt by dropping a 17" CRT monitor on their foot.

     

    My brother in law worked at a piggery and they were forbidden to wear steel-capped boots. If a sow stands on your foot it is broken. If she stands on a steel-capped boot it will buckle and cause more issues, like making it almost impossible to take it off for the medical people to tend to your broken foot.

    (Apparently)

     

    Urban myth. MythBusters tested that and found it took something like 30,000 pounds to buckle the steel, at that point your foot is screwed whether you're wearing boots or not. Plus I grew up on a farm and have had animals much heavier than pigs step on my steel cap before without any problems.

     

    @mott555 said:

    @Zemm said:

    @mott555 said:

    Maybe they're replacing old Windows 2000 systems and don't want anybody to get hurt by dropping a 17" CRT monitor on their foot.

     

    My brother in law worked at a piggery and they were forbidden to wear steel-capped boots. If a sow stands on your foot it is broken. If she stands on a steel-capped boot it will buckle and cause more issues, like making it almost impossible to take it off for the medical people to tend to your broken foot.

    (Apparently)

     

    Urban myth. MythBusters tested that and found it took something like 30,000 pounds to buckle the steel, at that point your foot is screwed whether you're wearing boots or not. Plus I grew up on a farm and have had animals much heavier than pigs step on my steel cap before without any problems.

    I've had a horse stand on my foot, and neither it nor I were wearing steel-toe-capped boots.  Afterwards my foot was sore, but nothing was broken.

    I guess a pig's foot might be proportionately smaller than a hoof and concentrate the weight over a narrower area, but then again most pigs weigh a lot less than most horses.



  • @DaveK said:

    I've had a horse stand on my foot, and neither it nor I were wearing steel-toe-capped boots.  Afterwards my foot was sore, but nothing was broken.

    I guess a pig's foot might be proportionately smaller than a hoof and concentrate the weight over a narrower area, but then again most pigs weigh a lot less than most horses.

    I've had a girlfriend run over my unprotected foot. It hurt, but only for a few minutes.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @DaveK said:

    I've had a horse stand on my foot, and neither it nor I were wearing steel-toe-capped boots.  Afterwards my foot was sore, but nothing was broken.

    I guess a pig's foot might be proportionately smaller than a hoof and concentrate the weight over a narrower area, but then again most pigs weigh a lot less than most horses.

    I've had a girlfriend run over my unprotected foot. It hurt, but only for a few minutes.

    I'm a foot-clan ninja and some giant turtle hit me in the head with a nun-chuck. It was ok, though, it was one of the cartoons and turns out I'm a robot in those.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Filed under: <FONT color=#698d73>sounded funnier in my head</FONT>
    You should start tagging all your posts like this.



  • @fterfi secure said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    @fterfi secure said:
    Don't knock it - car insurance is a lot cheaper as an engineer than an IT contractor...

    Wait, what?

    At least here in the UK, your job title makes a big difference to car insurance costs. I checked with my insurance company at the time, and they said the most suitable category for 'deployment engineer' is 'engineer' rather than 'IT contractor'. Who am I to argue if engineers are seen as a much safer risk?




    How rigid are job titles in the UK that this works? Depending on the whims of my current boss, I am either Senior Programmer, Software Development Director, or Financial Reporting Manager. At other jobs, I have been an "engineer", an "analyst", a "software developer", a "technician", and so on. I was even an "administrator" once. This sounds impressive enough, but I must admit I was underpaid (and a bad driver) the whole time. If I thought it would help me get car insurance, I'm sure I could get my boss to call me Lord Admiral of the Ocean Sea... it's not as if he gives a flip about the insurance company.



    You all are perhaps the closest country on Earth, culturally, to my own... and yet, you lock up people for doing monkey dances and dutifully report your job duties to your auto insurance salesmen. Barely 50 years after Sir Winston, we have a nation of lambs being led gently but unsubtly to slaughter... but without hurt feelings or "drink drivers". Sad, I find this.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @bridget99 said:

    @fterfi secure said:
    @morbiuswilters said:
    @fterfi secure said:
    Don't knock it - car insurance is a lot cheaper as an engineer than an IT contractor...

    Wait, what?

    At least here in the UK, your job title makes a big difference to car insurance costs. I checked with my insurance company at the time, and they said the most suitable category for 'deployment engineer' is 'engineer' rather than 'IT contractor'. Who am I to argue if engineers are seen as a much safer risk?




    How rigid are job titles in the UK that this works?
    They're not rigid, at least not in my experience - this is the whole point behind the MSE site linked to earlier; what anyone does may fall under any (reasonable sub-set of) job titles, some of which are more expensive to insure for driving. Some of the more pertinent suggestions given when 'Applications Programmer' was chosen (in increasing order of insurance premiums - there was about 4% difference between best and worst when I did it) :

    Data Processor
    Data Administrator
    Data Co-Ordinator
    Computer Engineer
    Software Engineer
    Applications Engineer
    Systems Engineer
    Engineer
    IT Manager
    IT Consultant
    Computer Consultant
    Technical Advisor
    Technical Instructor
    Computer Manager
    Web Designer
    Computer Analyst
    Systems Analyst
    Computer Technician
    


  • @bridget99 said:

    Software Development Director
    " And... CUT! "

    " Okay, now paste... "



  • @Zecc said:

    @bridget99 said:

    Software Development Director
    " And... CUT! "

    " Okay, now paste... "

     

    More like  "We'll fix it in post."

     



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    I've had a girlfriend
    Really?



  • @belgariontheking said:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    I've had a girlfriend
    Really?

    Well, it was a girlfriend-for-hire.

    Fine, it was a hooker. A lady hooker.

    Fine, it was a dude hooker.



  •  And you undertipped.

     

    >:(


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