Is anything in IT NOT shit?



  • Heyall,

    As this is the daily WTF, most stuff around here is about IDE's, languages, apps, enterprisey-stuff being shit.

    Is there anything in IT that is good, or at least less shitty than the alternatives?

    On a related note, have you ever had the pleasure of working on a project that went really well, with good co-workers, a good project lead that finished on time on budget and meeting all the requirements?



  • @Kurt.C.Pause said:

    Is there anything in IT that is good, or at least less shitty than the alternatives?

    There is, but we haven't exactly agreed on what it is.



  • Working four days in a week is less shitty than five days…


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election

    You mean besides Desktop Search for the masses?

    Filed Under: Also DiscourseMicrosoftMac Classic



  • @Kurt.C.Pause said:

    On a related note, have you ever had the pleasure of working on a project that went really well, with good co-workers, a good project lead that finished on time on budget and meeting all the requirements?

    In almost 20 years I've been working on IT, that never happened.



  • @Kurt.C.Pause said:

    On a related note, have you ever had the pleasure of working on a project that went really well, with good co-workers, a good project lead that finished on time on budget and meeting all the requirements?

    Yep - September 13th, this year!
    We had an on-premise customer running on a ten year old version of our app, Windows clients talking to an Oracle database.
    The objective was to migrate them to SaaS, so;

    -- From version 2005 to version 2015 of our app
    -- Around 50 database port scripts, including going from varchar to nvarchar and switching blob types
    -- Windows client to web app
    -- From Oracle 8 to SQL Server 2014
    -- 650GB of data
    -- From their hosted data centre to ours

    Our tests showed that we would need an outage of eight days to physically back up the database, ship it across country, upgrade the schema, convert to SQL Server, etc. No way were we getting eight days!

    So we set up the "Trickle Feed" - we took a copy of their data, six weeks before Sep 13th, ported it to the current version, converted to SQL Server and got it up and running in our place.
    The trickle feed was a set of triggers in their old Oracle database that recorded every new, updated or deleted record, with a second app copying the requisite row of data over the VPN, convert dialect, port to current table schema, and insert it into our database.
    It was a joy to watch - when we fired it up it had ~11 million rows to copy and it took just over a week to catch up, Then they were modifying 700,000 rows a day and we could watch the graph of it struggling to keep up live, and then catching up early each evening.

    We took copies of our version of the database every so often to perform UAT and allow them to train on it.

    Come go-live day; Sunday September 13th, we killed all the user connections to their old Oracle system at 08:00 and it took five minutes for the trickle feed to empty the queue and bring the SaaS version up to date. Two hours of testing later, we handed it over to the customer.

    So two hours of downtime instead of eight days.

    It was so well planned, and the customer was so well invested in the project, that it was a total anti-climax that everything went exactly to plan!



  • Oh, and back to the title of the thread; Virtualization. Virtualization is awesome! Single best technical invention in 30 year of IT.





  • @Zacrath said:

    Working four days in a week is less shitty than five days…

    Not if you have to work the same amount overall.



  • Vim's not shit. It's way better than notepad.



  • Still better. Less commute time wasted. Daily IT schedule are also really slack, so you could probably get a week's worth of work done in 4 8 hours days and still have time to read the daily wtf.



  • PowerShell. SCCM/SCCM OSD done right.



  • PowerShell is that shell that can't handle ANSI escapes and takes three times as much typing for anything I've ever wanted to do on a shell on Windows than bash would, right?



  • Only .0001% of the time. It works best for managing windows and Microsoft-related stuff, go figure.


  • 🚽 Regular

    @Kurt.C.Pause said:

    Is there anything in IT that is good

    Cisco IOS is pretty nice. The autocomplete is useful, it follows it's own rules and when things don't do what they should the TAC is pretty military in their response. Apart from that the only other thing I really like is C#, it makes coding fun and easy (for me).



  • Is there anything anywhere that is good?



  • @Cursorkeys said:

    when things don't do what they should the TAC is pretty military in their response.

    They bomb you?



  • @Captain said:

    Vim's not shit. It's way better than notepad.

    Everything's better than notepad.


  • 🚽 Regular

    Regimented would have probably been a better word choice, they do drop engineers into your site very quickly if that counts :)

    You pay though the nose for it but the support is really awesome when you need it, we don't have much Cisco kit but their reputation seems to be deserved.



  • In case of software development, the cost of :doing_it_wrong: is nearly always underestimated. They always thing that if something is wrong in the beginning, it'd be easy and cheap to get it corrected.

    If you hire wrong person to meddle with your code, just hire another later and through trial and error, you'll eventually find the right person to manage the codebase (but don't cease accept new development request in that period, and not allocate time to allow anyone to actually fix the codebase by aligning the code to the right place) If you see a bug, just add some code to mask it and come back later, without ever actually assign time to go back and fix it.

    That is, IMO, why we see so much :wtf: here.



  • Agreed. In my 10+ years of career, the best I ever get is 3 out of them. It has good co-workers, a good project lead that knows what he is doing, and the project meets all the requirements when completes, just not on time on budget.

    The project has already been delayed for 2.5 years when I joined it. Their team has only 2-3 people assigned to in the first 2 years when the contract quoted it should be 6. With adequate manpower poured in later, the project is successfully delivered.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @Kurt.C.Pause said:

    Is there anything in IT that is good, or at least less shitty than the alternatives?

    No.

    This topic has been marked as Closed


  • BINNED

    @skotl said:

    it was a total anti-climax

    I just hate those days



  • @Kurt.C.Pause said:

    Is there anything in IT that is good, or at least less shitty than the alternatives?

    The pay.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election

    @Kurt.C.Pause said:

    On a related note, have you ever had the pleasure of working on a project that went really well, with good co-workers, a good project lead that finished on time on budget and meeting all the requirements?

    Yes. At my last job (web development), we had one particularly great customer, who knew how much his online shop was worth, so he treated us with a lot of respect in the form of realistic deadlines, good communication and reasonable contracts. Unfortunately, only 20% of our income came from that client, so we had a lot of shitty clients as well.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    The endless stream of shit is very amusing. Just when you think you've seen the most retarded thing you can possibly imagine someone defies expectation. It's wonderful.

    @asdf said:

    Unfortunately, only 20% of our income came from that client, so we had a lot of shitty clients as well.
    That should be fortunately and you're sure as shit he doesn't know that. Give anyone that sort of leverage and they'll start trying to fuck you over. It's all fun and games until money enters the equation.

    *edit Or am I just unnecessarily jaded?





  • I find myself in the position where I feel very lucky for working on this field. I started as sysadmin and moved to development but even when I had to throw CAT cable over rooftops and configure the IP of yet another WinME shit I liked it.

    Now that I'm doing full development work I like it even more. Not many fields allow you to work from home or sitting on a perfectly stable environment 8h a day with full employee benefits, good salaries and that small chance of hitting it big and become billionaire. All of this without a great life changing responsibility like doctors or lawyers. I know about avionics, and all that stuff, but most of us won't touch a real time system ever.

    I also had the opportunity to work in other stuff before going full IT (I even served on the army) so that helps to place some perspective on my situation and feel embraced on the idea that there are many less fulfilling and harder jobs out there. Like telemarketing... Fuck that.

    Your boss is a dick? You never had a sargeant hitting you in the head with a helmet.

    You're stressed about a deadline? If you're good (and know it) it's not your fault. That's why management exists, to be blamed. Responsibility is on the paycheck.

    The tools suck? Well, get your work done and then work with/on whatever you want when you go home. Mechanics usually have hobbies building their own cars or rockets. Do the same with software. It would only make you better.

    Company doesn't appreciate your job? Probably because IT is only a medium for profit. Find a place where IT is the product.

    And if all of this fails, the biggest problem when switching IT jobs is matching your current salary.



  • @Eldelshell said:

    And if all of this fails, the biggest problem when switching IT jobs is matching your current salary.

    You're now in a sewer, hoping the next gallery will be less smelly.



  • No, everything in IT is shit because you can't spell shit without IT.



  • I wish I could do IT like a the A-team did war, solving only the hardest, scariest and interesting problems. Why isn't this a possible career path?



  • Try to get a job at Apple, they seem to be inventing IT... All over again.



  • With added "magical and revolutionary" juice.


  • BINNED

    @blakeyrat said:

    Is there anything anywhere that is good?

    MacOS Classic? 🛂

    Filed under: Sturgeon was an optimist


  • Garbage Person

    @fbmac said:

    I wish I could do IT like a the A-team did war, solving only the hardest, scariest and interesting problems. Why isn't this a possible career path?

    On paper, I am a System Architect and Super-Senior Developer.

    In practice, I am the only living human who fits the following criteria:

    1. Knows near as makes no difference everything about our systems and dependencies
    2. Has sufficient mental capacity and experience with the systems and business processes to infer where something has gone off the rails
    3. Has sufficient technical prowess to prove where things went off the rails.

    This means that every time some idiot fucks up and pushes the wrong buttons, completely shits on a customer ticket, an app that was never properly QA'd (because 'we don't have the time to SQA customer apps') has some critical bug and we are hemmoraghing money by the hour, I get to fix it. Often by rewriting entire swathes of functionality, occasionally at the framework level literally on the fly with no safety net. Hard, scary and occasionally interesting.

    It's fucking miserable. You don't want that for yourself.


  • 🚽 Regular

    @rc4 said:

    PowerShell

    Needs a better auto complete UI. A popup menu would be ideal, but similar to bash would work too.


  • Java Dev

    Yeah, I can see that. I've got pretty near that knowledge on our product, except for the fact it interacts with oracle database and I doubt there's a living human who can tell what's the problem with an oracle database. And we've got QA.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    Topical:

    http://i.imgur.com/MUbBNCp.png

    Topical while trying to post "topical":

    http://i.imgur.com/xfupHWR.png

    And while trying to post "topical about topical", my avatar broke. Somehow.

    http://i.imgur.com/BC2lLEJ.png

    And a hard refresh to fix the avatar complete shitfucked the css

    http://i.imgur.com/zD5X8UZ.png

    Discourse!



  • @fbmac said:

    I wish I could do IT like a the A-team did war, solving only the hardest, scariest and interesting problems. Why isn't this a possible career path?

    None of those problems are actually USEFUL to human beings. They're all just mental wankery. We already have a way of doing that: get a PhD.



  • @Zacrath said:

    @Captain said:
    Vim's not shit. It's way better than notepad.

    Everything's better than notepad.

    Except vi(m)



  • @Kurt.C.Pause said:

    On a related note, have you ever had the pleasure of working on a project that went really well, with good co-workers, a good project lead that finished on time on budget and meeting all the requirements?

    Regularly, actually.
    (Yes, sane employers do exist.)


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Weng said:

    It's fucking miserable. You don't want that for yourself.

    So remind us why you still work there?



  • He's an idiot. I told him to leave like 2 years ago. And I'm always right.



  • @Luhmann said:

    @skotl said:
    it was a total anti-climax

    I just hate those days

    Do you resent your auntie having a little fun?


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    Except for when you're trolling?



  • @Kurt.C.Pause said:

    have you ever had the pleasure of working on a project that went really well, with good co-workers, a good project lead that finished on time on budget and meeting all the requirements?

    This happened a lot at my first job after college. But then again, I may have been too young and naïve to notice the problems.



  • There's IntelliSense in the IDE, which is pretty damn good IMO.



  • Is there anything anywhere that is good?

    cheescake!
    pancakes!
    curries!

    (sorry, after baking x-mas cokies for 6 hours today, my mind is kindof food-focused)



  • +1


  • BINNED

    Not at all, I just don't get why I'm responsible for the pleasure of my aunt and uncle. I was only aiming for my niece.


Log in to reply