Quota Exceeded
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@havokk said:
I suggest that the answer is always "in the mail server". That way the mail product's indexing and antimalware and backup features can operate on all messages.
I would, too - if email were used as a communication mechanism only.
The problem stems that email is often (mis)used as a file deployment mechanism, meaning people perceive a mail server as a document repository.
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@FrostCat said:
How much time is spent every day by users deleting old mail to keep under the limit?
Very little, if people practise good housekeeping: once it's read, either flag it up as an outstanding task or delete it because the message has already been received (or even setting up message filters that perform this automatically).
The issue stems from people overlooking a seemingly trivial task and soon few seconds accumulate to minutes and hours, which they then resent and moan about a cost to the business. They don't see managing their own mail as their responsibility.
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@FrostCat said:
@Kyanar said:
We have 20,000 employees, and 250MB - 400MB mailbox limits each (naturally, users have PST files ranging from 500MB to 3GB). Without this limit, our Exchange servers alone would consume over 20TB of our SAN storage. We have better things to use 20TB on.
I know SAN != "mirrored RAID," but 20TB of commodity disks is ~$1600 (going by the price of the first 1TB drive I saw on Newegg.) As the very next post to yours says, "That entire post can be summarized as, "I do not know the concept of 'false economy'.""
How much time is spent every day by users deleting old mail to keep under the limit? At the last place I worked at that was dumb enough to have quotas, I probably spent 10-20 minutes every week prioritizing what I felt I could live without.
Just for comparision... I ran a quote through two vendors for 20TB (usable) of SAN. The prices are $62K (usd) and $198K (usd). The first was the cheapest I could find, the second matched the specifications for other SAN's in use at the site. While still below the level o fhealth-insurance, it is definately at a level that (in 99% of the cases) requires major corporate cpital approval...
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@Cassidy said:
I would, too - if email were used as a communication mechanism only.
The problem stems that email is often (mis)used as a file deployment mechanism, meaning people perceive a mail server as a document repository.
So? Excel was designed as a spreadsheet and very few people use it as one. Guess what Microsoft did in response? (Hint: they didn't just stomp their feet and yell, "you're doing it wrong!") Guess how many more copies they sold afterwards?
Embrace reality. The reality is that people want to send files through your email server. Fine. Embrace that. Make it work. Everybody will be happy.
@Cassidy said:
The issue stems from people overlooking a seemingly trivial task and soon few seconds accumulate to minutes and hours, which they then resent and moan about a cost to the business. They don't see managing their own mail as their responsibility.
Right. It's not. You hired that person to do a specific task. I'm guessing, I can't be 100% sure, but I'm guessing that specific task wasn't "keep your email clean".
@Cassidy said:
Filed under: My trash can is full - I demand someone fetch me a larger trashcan!
No. Your company (or the building they lease space from) already takes out the trash of employees. Why? Because they know that making employees do it is a waste of their time. You understand this concept when it comes to trash, and yet it still eludes you when it comes to email. Hm.
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My organization is large enough (somewhere over 50,000 employees) that they should be able to custom craft it. Instead, we got this gem:
From:
Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2013 7:47 AM
Subject: Microsoft Exchange
Your Mailbox Has Exceeded It Storage Limit As Set By Your Administrator 2012, And You Will Not Be Able To Receive New Mails Until You Re-Validate It. To Re-Validate Click here
Thanks System administrator.(where "Click here" was a link)
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@blakeyrat said:
Embrace reality. The reality is that people want to send files through your email server. Fine. Embrace that. Make it work. Everybody will be happy.
I suppose it comes down to that: acceptance that things will be (mis)used widespreadly that they become standard practise, and it costs organisations to implement workarounds rather than impose correct practise.
@blakeyrat said:
You hired that person to do a specific task. I'm guessing, I can't be 100% sure, but I'm guessing that specific task wasn't "keep your email clean".
You guess correct: it wasn't their specific task. But in the overall scheme of things, I expect employees to take responsibility of their personal organisation and I see management of their communication medium to be included, just as I expect guidance that states "thou shall store work documents in this particular directory". If I don't, I'll get utter fuckwits that will save files to whatever location they desire then contact a service desk and rant when they can't find it.
@blakeyrat said:
You understand this concept when it comes to trash, and yet it still eludes you when it comes to email. Hm.
The concept - that seemed to elude you - was someone demanding more capacity rather than reduce consumption.
Yes, my company employs someone to empty the trashcans, but they don't employ someone who is responsible for cleaning down employee's mailboxes.
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Well maybe you should. At least hiring a inbox cleaner would be addressing the problem.
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@blakeyrat said:
Well maybe you should. At least hiring a inbox cleaner would be addressing the problem.
We should hire someone to write things for the secretary because they aren't able to do their job.
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@blakeyrat said:
Well maybe you should. At least hiring a inbox cleaner would be addressing the problem.
Premature optimization! There's no quantification here. How much time is actually wasted doing this? Firstly, different employees get different amounts of email. Some simply delete everything after they read it. Others may have auto-archiving set up. Powerpoint rangers no doubt are the people most affected by this. Now...the time people spend moving emails around...some will do this automatically as an organizational thing, even if it's just moving things around on the server instead of some other place. Does this substitute for other non-productive activities (e.g., standing around gossiping, browsing the web, picking the nose, etc) or is this really added wasted time?
I mean, everyone says that this is a huge waste of time, but is it really? How do you know?
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@Ben L. said:
We should hire someone to write things for the secretary because they're too busy giving blow-jobs
I work for the wrong company.
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Speaking of tiny quotas, when I was a helpdesk monkey at IBM Global Services as late as 2008, our Domino quota was 25 fucking megabytes.
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@Cassidy said:
@Ben L. said:
We should hire someone to write things for the secretary because they're too busy giving blow-jobs
I work for the wrong company.
In fairness, the secretaries are ugly 80-year-old men.
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@Nexzus said:
Speaking of tiny quotas, when I was a helpdesk monkey at IBM Global Services as late as 2008, our Domino quota was 25 fucking megabytes.
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@boomzilla said:
@blakeyrat said:
Well maybe you should. At least hiring a inbox cleaner would be addressing the problem.
Premature optimization! There's no quantification here. How much time is actually wasted doing this? Firstly, different employees get different amounts of email. Some simply delete everything after they read it. Others may have auto-archiving set up. Powerpoint rangers no doubt are the people most affected by this. Now...the time people spend moving emails around...some will do this automatically as an organizational thing, even if it's just moving things around on the server instead of some other place. Does this substitute for other non-productive activities (e.g., standing around gossiping, browsing the web, picking the nose, etc) or is this really added wasted time?
I mean, everyone says that this is a huge waste of time, but is it really? How do you know?
"It is not known how many office robberies occur every second, because there is no Wikipedia entry for it."
Classic "argument from ignorance", implying that it's not a time sink because there's no published report or statistical analysis that says so. I could throw it back to you to prove that companies are just as efficient and profitable with low mailbox limits, and you have the same absence of information. It's just an opinion.
So you could plan for everyone to be proactive (forceably or not), that it takes only seconds to manage their mailbox and doesn't impact their other responsibilities, that they keep their water cooler/web browsing/nosepicking time to a minimum, and that this policy won't affect their overall attitude. I don't trust that kind of blind optimism. In this case, getting a proper assessment of productivity as it relates to email management would be a waste of money compared to simply allocating enough storage to eliminate the problem.
My company gives each of us 10 GB, and after 4 years I've only managed to fill up 2/3rds of that. According to the BLS, I'll likely move on from this job before my mailbox gets full (valid in this case). Some people need more space, some need less, and there are lifetime employees or those that bounce around every 2 years. Plus consider the possible growth of the company, do you want a server that handles only the current number of employees with a low 250 MB limit?
Do you plan for the best case scenario? For every aspect I can think of in the IT world, it's best to assume the worst (failover servers, regular backups w/ offsite storage, limiting permissions in case of malicious/careless users, requiring anti-virus software, etc). However getting someone to sign off on a $60-100k email server is another matter.
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@Manni_reloaded said:
Classic "argument from ignorance", implying that it's not a time sink because there's no published report or statistical analysis that says so. I could throw it back to you to prove that companies are just as efficient and profitable with low mailbox limits, and you have the same absence of information. It's just an opinion.
Thank you for taking the bait.
Seriously, though. There's a lot of screaming about false economy, and I think there's an excellent case for that. But how much? Buying hardware is simple to quantify, and there aren't mitigating factors that reduce the cost, as opposed to the assumption that all time spent moving mail around comes out of the bottom line of productive output.
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Boomzilla is an idiot and still missing the point.
The point is, if you work in IT, your JOB is to make computers and IT systems work smoothly so other people can do their job. The question, "how long does it take really?" isn't the fucking point-- the point is if you're doing your JOB, the user spends 0% of their time thinking about mailbox quotas. The user don't even know the word "quota".
That is the point.
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@blakeyrat said:
Boomzilla is an idiot and still missing the point.
It's comforting to see your reading comprehension hasn't changed. Such a development could be disastrous to the delicate TheDailyWTF ecosystem.
@blakeyrat said:
The point is, if you work in IT, your JOB is to make computers and IT systems work smoothly so other people can do their job. The question, "how long does it take really?" isn't the fucking point-- the point is if you're doing your JOB, the user spends 0% of their time thinking about mailbox quotas. The user don't even know the word "quota".
I know you aren't interested in interesting questions that don't pertain directly to your pet peeves, and that's...OK...sort of. I agree with you that what you've described is ideal. Sadly, as most of us have learned, it's important to understand the constraints of the real world. I guess you also don't realize that the point of your job is that whatever you're doing is more valuable to your employer than whatever they pay you. It's not to make you happy, although worker satisfaction can certainly lead indirectly to making workers more valuable. So, if making sure its employees are ignorant of things like quotas is better for the employer, then the employer should work for that. Your shoulder aliens may be convinced, but obviously PHBs don't trust your shoulder aliens (possibly their best move ever, all things considered).
@blakeyrat said:
That is
themy point.Yes, we all get that. Of course, if you'd taken the time to understand my point, you'd likely have a better argument in favor of your point. I know that's too realistic to get past your shoulder aliens, but it's nevertheless an interesting and useful line of inquiry.
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@boomzilla said:
I guess you also don't realize that the point of your job is that whatever you're doing is more valuable to your employer than whatever they pay you.
I get both sides of the argument, but I'll quote this one for truth and clarity.
In the case of email quotas, there is a case where two people can do the same job (or at least acheive the same effect) in two different ways. So the question is which one is better?
In both cases, they'll have to spend the time to do it, with a cost an a benefit.
Users cleaning their mailbox:
- Cost: # of hours spent * employee salary (for each employee), plus risk of .pst not being backed up * risk of loss of .pst, plus intangible cost of user frustration
- Benefit (to be subtracted by cost): intangible cost of users being better organized / knowing more about the contents of their email
- Risk: Loss of important emails to being deleted rather than filed in a .pstIT department doing away (or massively increasing) quota:
- Cost: Hardware costs + (# of hours spent setting up hardware * IT salary cost), minus # of hours spent on support calls re: quotas * IT salary cost, plus intanglible cost of IT frustration
- Benefit (to be subtracted from cost): intangible cost of more robust and centralized backup solutionBoth of these calculations include the lost opportunity to work on other projects, but those are near impossible to calculate. Let's ignore.
So which one of these outweighs the other? Chances are if you have a large organization, no matter how small the time cost to employees is, multiplying it by each employee will obliterate any benefit. Let's just say 1/2 hour a month == 6 hours per employee per year * 1000 employees == 6000 hours * $20/hour = $12k per year in lost productivity. It gets expensive fast.
So it isn't so much the task or whose "job it is", but more who is better suited and more affordable.
To allude it to the trash can analogy from earlier: even in the smallest of companies, it's a better value proposition to hire a cleaning company to come by and empty the trash cans. But you can't just say "it isn't the employees job to clean up, that's the cleaner's job". What if the employees just started tossing trash everywhere, not the cans. Leaving food out to be spoiled? Not wiping up a spilled coffee? Pissing on the floor?
In all cases, cleaning up that certainly falls under "the cleaner's" job description. But if they have to deal with that shit, they'll charge more. There's way more work for them to do. It isn't a reasonable thing to expect the cleaners to clean up absolutely everything. In this case it is FAR more economical to send an email that says "If you can't take half a second to get a fucking piece of paper in your goddamn trash can, then go fuck a pig you filthy asshole." Let HR reword the email as needed.
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@Lorne Kates said:
Chances are if you have a large organization, no matter how small the time cost to employees is, multiplying it by each employee will obliterate any benefit. Let's just say 1/2 hour a month == 6 hours per employee per year * 1000 employees == 6000 hours * $20/hour = $12k per year in lost productivity. It gets expensive fast.
$120k not $12k.More importantly, people throw around calculations like these all the time, and while technically correct, they aren't really very meaningful. In many cases, "Lost productivity" is a fallacy because it's based on the false assumption that people would spend that half-hour a month doing actual work and not shopping for purple dildos on Ebay.
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@Ben L. said:
@Cassidy said:
@Ben L. said:
We should hire someone to write things for the secretary because they're too busy giving blow-jobs
I work for the wrong company.
In fairness, the secretaries are ugly 80-year-old men.That's why he wants to be a secretary.
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@El_Heffe said:
$120k not $12k.
It isn't my fucking job to perform reliable and accuracte calculations with numbers and... wait, never mind.
@El_Heffe said:
More importantly, people throw around calculations like these all the time, and while technically correct, they aren't really very meaningful. In many cases, "Lost productivity" is a fallacy because it's based on the false assumption that people would spend that half-hour a month doing actual work and not shopping for purple dildos on Ebay.
I agree, it obviously isn't going to cost $120k. But there is a cost attached to it. And chances are they would browse Ebay in addition to that 1/2 hour per month wasted on cleaning their inbox.
Where I am now, there's a 140MB limit. I have to clean up at least once a month. I put every single minute of that in my time sheet as non-billable hours.
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@boomzilla said:
@Manni_reloaded said:
Classic "argument from ignorance", implying that it's not a time sink because there's no published report or statistical analysis that says so. I could throw it back to you to prove that companies are just as efficient and profitable with low mailbox limits, and you have the same absence of information. It's just an opinion.
Thank you for taking the bait.
Seriously, though. There's a lot of screaming about false economy, and I think there's an excellent case for that. But how much? Buying hardware is simple to quantify, and there aren't mitigating factors that reduce the cost, as opposed to the assumption that all time spent moving mail around comes out of the bottom line of productive output.
How do you quantify when businesses offer 401K matching, tuition reimbursement, and referral bonuses? Some companies go further and provide catered lunches, telecommuting, expense accounts, and corporate vehicles. I used to work for SAIC in the DC area, and they'd rent out the nearby Six Flags park and provide food and drinks for the annual employee appreciation day. The holiday party was always at a large classy hotel with huge buffets and a dozen open bar stations. They're unnecessary perks that cost the company money with no tangible bottom-line benefit, just the employees' sense of well-being and giving the impression that it's a better place to work. Is anyone going to quit because of a low mailbox quota? Of course not. But it's part of a larger set of factors that contribute to employee satisfaction.
Besides, we're well into the 21st century now, we don't have to sneakernet files on 1.44 MB floppy disks anymore. Gigabytes are the new kilobytes, people are readily familiar with the word "terabyte" because chances are they have a drive of that size at home. And since email continues to be one of the strongest and most popular forms of business communication today, the notion of limiting data allocation for it is archaic and short-sighted. It's not always about boiling it down to a quantifiable number.
But if that's your goal, look at Lorne's replies, which assumes a mere 90 seconds per business day for each employee organizing their mailbox. We spend more time on a typical bathroom break. It's not perfectly accurate, but when the sample size exceeds 1000 people, you're speaking in generalities and averages (pay scale, emails sent/received, vacation/time off). When you're talking about an IT expense that comes to a few dollars per employee, it's a barely noticeable line item regardless of the company's size.
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@Manni_reloaded said:
@boomzilla said:
Seriously, though. There's a lot of screaming about false economy, and I think there's an excellent case for that. But how much? Buying hardware is simple to quantify, and there aren't mitigating factors that reduce the cost, as opposed to the assumption that all time spent moving mail around comes out of the bottom line of productive output.
...ramble...
You should really try to collect your thoughts and stay on topic. It would make your replies more interesting to read. Or, use caps and lots of profanity, and you may acquire a blakeyrat like following. Your choice, I guess.
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Oh wait I remember you now, you're the guy that likes the brief snarky responses where you're being purposely obtuse rather than admitting your opinion doesn't have anything to back it up. I'll try to keep things shorter in the future so you don't get confused.
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@Manni_reloaded said:
Oh wait I remember you now, you're the guy that likes the brief snarky responses where you're being purposely obtuse rather than admitting your opinion doesn't have anything to back it up. I'll try to keep things shorter in the future so you don't get confused.
Or you could try having a point and understand what everyone else is talking about. But yeah, shorter rambles are definitely better than long ones. Maybe you just had to get that stuff out and replied to my post because it was most recent.
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@blakeyrat said:
Talk to your company's head accountant, give them the cost of your drives, and they'd laugh you out of their office going, "don't bother me with that petty shit, just do it!"
A good point, but generally you don't ask the accountant if you can buy big new hard drives for your quotas, do you? You ask PHB and he or she asks PHB+1 and so on.
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@Nagesh said:
Do not provide local drive.
I used to use a workstation that had no local disk at all. The OS came in entirely over NFS (except for a bootstrap bit in a ROM or something, I suppose). But the worst was paging over NFS. Over a congested 10Mb ethernet link.
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@blakeyrat said:
the point is if you're doing your JOB, the user spends 0% of their time thinking about mailbox quotas.
.. and if your job was to implement a policy that required adding quotas, the user spends 0% of their time thinking about it...@blakeyrat said:
The user don't even know the word "quota".
... until they hit the limit then find that it has 100% impact upon their productivity. It works both ways. @blakeyrat said:
That is the point.
Your point seems to be that IT service delivery should completely serve the users' whim and rush out to provide more storage for users that demand it, absorbing problems and incidents that arise as a result of uncontrolled consumption. I don't believe that should be the case - they serve the business, and lack of control over resource consumption means organisational-wide impact caused by an individual user.[1]
@joe.edwards said:
@Ben L. said:
In fairness, the secretaries are ugly 80-year-old men.
That's why he wants to be a secretary.I appear to have all the required qualities.
[1] which has occurred for a few of my customers when C*O demanded mailbox quotas were dropped [2] then wanted to know why MSexchange fell over a few months later.
[2] yes, same C*O people that took ages about signing off purchase orders for more disk storage to cope with their increasing consumption.
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@dkf said:
I used to use a workstation that had no local disk at all. The OS came in entirely over NFS (except for a bootstrap bit in a ROM or something, I suppose).
Sun workstations?@dkf said:
But the worst was paging over NFS. Over a congested 10Mb ethernet link.
Feel the laaaaag.
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@Manni_reloaded said:
Oh wait I remember you now, you're the guy that likes the brief snarky responses where you're being purposely obtuse rather than admitting your opinion doesn't have anything to back it up. I'll try to keep things shorter in the future so you don't get confused.
You didn't quote your message, and now I can't tell who you're talking about. =(
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@Cassidy said:
@blakeyrat said:
The user don't even know the word "quota".
... until they hit the limit then find that it has 100% impact upon their productivity. It works both ways.
I think I finally understand what the huge disconnect is with this issue. We're too focused on the solution, and not the problem.
The problem isn't quotas. Truly, the problem is "It is now everyone's job, IT and staff, to ensure we don't run out of hard drive space on our mail server, and that important emails are not lost. Find a solution that solves this issue, using the most efficient balance of effort between staff and IT."
The solution was staff filing emails, and IT enforcing quotas. But somewhere along the lines that became the problem. "Quotas must be enforced. What solution can we come up to ensure this?" Thus we get draconian quota limits, snarky "over limit" emails, staff filing (or PRINTING) emails, etc.
It's like arguing over how to make it more fair for all the phone-owners on a party line to get equal phone time. Party line was a solution to the problem of "How do we make sure the maximum number of people have access to a phone?" Individual phone numbers were too scarce and too expensive. Now they're cheap, there's more exchanges and area codes-- or, hell, everyone has a cell phone!
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@Cassidy said:
.. and if your job was to implement a policy that required adding quotas, the user spends 0% of their time thinking about it...
I can't parse that sentence.
@Cassidy said:
... until they hit the limit then find that it has 100% impact upon their productivity. It works both ways.
They don't know the word "quota" because they never hit the limit because there is no limit.
@Cassidy said:
Your point seems to be that IT service delivery should completely serve the users' whim and rush out to provide more storage for users that demand it,
My point is that IT should pre-emptively provide enough storage so that there's no need to "rush out" and there's no users that demand it. If a user is demanding more storage, they aren't doing their job-- which means IT didn't do THEIR job.
Or from a more pragmatic viewpoint, my company uses Box.com for network drive storage. My Box has a quota is 999 terabytes. Our Exchange server has no quota at all. I work at a place where IT does their fucking job so I never have to think about any of this shit and I don't hate the IT guys at my company for wasting my time.
@Cassidy said:
[1] which has occurred for a few of my customers when C*O demanded mailbox quotas were dropped [2] then wanted to know why MSexchange fell over a few months later.
Then IT sure FUCKED UP by not monitoring the email server, huh? Is this supposed to convince me? "Quotas are good because IT is utterly fucking incompetent and lets Exchange crash and die because they weren't looking at it! Derp!"
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@Lorne Kates said:
The problem isn't quotas. Truly, the problem is "It is now everyone's job, IT and staff, to ensure we don't run out of hard drive space on our mail server, and that important emails are not lost. Find a solution that solves this issue, using the most efficient balance of effort between staff and IT."
The problem is not preventing the loss of important mails (mails are small and can easily be archived and backed up). The problem is the loss of important large documents and files. The solution is simply. Store important large documents and files in the official document repository system for everybody to find and only mail around the links.My professional life has become a lot simpler since I started working for clients adopting this strategy. Now I know where to go in order to find documentation instead of running around the building to find the correct guy that has the correct version of a relevant document somewhere hidden in his 'sent items'@Lorne Kates said:
Individual phone numbers were too scarce and too expensive. Now they're cheap, there's more exchanges and area codes-- or, hell, everyone has a cell phone
oh shiny
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@blakeyrat said:
I can't parse that sentence.
That sounded like an 80's text adventure to me.
@blakeyrat said:They don't know the word "quota" because they never hit the limit because there is no limit.
How the hell can there not be a limit? Even your Box.com account has one.
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@toon said:
How the hell can there not be a limit? Even your Box.com account has one.
At some point the limit becomes purely philosophical.
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@toon said:
How the hell can there not be a limit? Even your Box.com account has one.
Jesus fuck, you pedantic dickweeds. Go fucking pedantic dickweed yourself to death. Preferably on some other forum.
How do you not get punched in the face 20 times a day? Or do you just wear protective face-punch resistant headgear?
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There is a limit, even if it seems unreachable. If there is no quota, then the limit is the physical capacity of the server. The problem with that is that everybody is sharing the same pool, so the limit is not uniform. Say one abusive user sees free unlimited storage and starts emailing himself 1GB+ files for archiving; there's no quota, so nothing stops him from doing this, but before long he's using the majority of the shared email server space. Now there's less space left for everybody else, so the other users have a limit now that is considerably lower, but invisible to everyone but the administrators. As soon as the abusive user hits the physical capacity of the server, suddenly no users can receive emails, even though they did nothing wrong and have comparatively small inboxes.
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@blakeyrat said:
I can't parse that sentence.
I broke it in the wrong place, but the point was: pointless shouting at someone to do their job if setting quotas IS actually their job.@blakeyrat said:
If a user is demanding more storage, they aren't doing their job-- which means IT didn't do THEIR job.
So if a user filled up network storage with their entire MP3 collection and ran short of space, they should expect IT to jump into increasing storage?
Yes, I know this is a contrived example: the point is that IT is often seen as a resource that should pander to the needs of users - usually by people that do not understand the cost of their actions. A user shouldn't be demanding more storage without justifying it, and the need to "rush out" is simply as a result of a reaction to late communication. It doesn't happen often.
@blakeyrat said:
Then IT sure FUCKED UP by not monitoring the email server, huh?
Erm, no. The fact they knew it was running low in capacity means that they did monitor it. They reported it but it was ignored. They added quotas to control growth and were told to remove them. They put in requests for more disk storage to cope with uncontrolled consumption and C*O sat on the requests despite repeated warnings. Then when services were brought down, they smugly pulled the "told you so" tale.
@blakeyrat said:
"Quotas are good because IT is utterly fucking incompetent and lets Exchange crash and die because they weren't looking at it! Derp!"
Again, the fact that they knew it was heading for a service interruption means they were looking at it but were powerless to purchase more disks off their own steam so took an (IT) option open to them: implementing quotas, which were then overriden by management. You may call that fucking incompetant, but the failure lay with the decision-makers.
(having said that, the admins I dealt with in this case were smug fuckwits and openly user-hostile, so "fucking incompetant" is not entirely inaccurate.)
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@Cassidy said:
I broke it in the wrong place, but the point was: pointless shouting at someone to do their job if setting quotas IS actually their job.
That's not their job. That might be what they think their job is, but they're wrong.
@Cassidy said:
So if a user filled up network storage with their entire MP3 collection and ran short of space, they should expect IT to jump into increasing storage?
First of all, as I already pointed-out and you completely ignored, if they ever have to "jump into increasing storage" they've ALREADY fucked up.
Secondly, that's a HR problem not an IT problem. It's not IT's job to deal with an employee wasting time with MP3s or whatever, it's HR's job. And the fact that that person was hired in the first place is another HR problem.
@Cassidy said:
A user shouldn't be demanding more storage without justifying it,
Right. They should never be demanding it at all because it should be there already. I've made that point, what, 5 times now? Could you maybe give a tiny sign you've allowed it to soak into your soft absorbent head before utterly ignoring it? Right now I'm not sure if you're ignoring it because you're too stupid to comprehend it, or because acknowledging it would defeat your lame-ass wrong arguments.
@Cassidy said:
Erm, no.
It's like a douchier version of starting a sentence with, "well, actually..." I did not know that was possible!
@Cassidy said:
The fact they knew it was running low in capacity means that they did monitor it. They reported it but it was ignored. They added quotas to control growth and were told to remove them. They put in requests for more disk storage to cope with uncontrolled consumption and C*O sat on the requests despite repeated warnings.
Then they failed at their job. What do you want from me exactly? Here's a quick summary of this argument:
Cassidy: "An IT team removed quotas and the email server went down!"
Me: "Then they're incompetent."
Cassidy: "Erm, no! They were awful at communicating their needs and failed to get the resources required to do their job!"
Me: "Then they're incompetent."If you're trying to get across the point that a lot of IT people are terrible at their job then: DUH! Of course! That is not surprising and has nothing to do with this conversation! If you're trying to make some other point, then I really have no idea what it is. Them being incompetent in two different ways seems irrelevant to the basic point that they were incompetent.
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@blakeyrat said:
Then they failed at their job. What do you want from me exactly? Here's a quick summary of this argument:
Well, actually...Cassidy: "An IT team removed quotas and the email server went down!"
Me: "Then they're incompetent."
Cassidy: "Erm, no! They were awful at communicating their needs and failed to get the resources required to do their job!"
Me: "Then they're incompetent."If you're trying to get across the point that a lot of IT people are terrible at their job then: DUH! Of course! That is not surprising and has nothing to do with this conversation! If you're trying to make some other point, then I really have no idea what it is. Them being incompetent in two different ways seems irrelevant to the basic point that they were incompetent.
If they saw what was happening, suggested ways of preventing it, but didn't have the authority to actually do those things, I wouldn't say the failed at their job. Rather, the bosses failed at their job, the IT guys simply didn't have the power to actually do their job.
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@Sutherlands said:
If they saw what was happening, suggested ways of preventing it, but didn't have the authority to actually do those things, I wouldn't say the failed at their job. Rather, the bosses failed at their job, the IT guys simply didn't have the power to actually do their job.
Excuses excuses. The mail server went down. They failed at their jobs. Period.
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@Sutherlands said:
If they saw what was happening, suggested ways of preventing it, but didn't have the authority to actually do those things, I wouldn't say the failed at their job. Rather, the bosses failed at their job, the IT guys simply didn't have the power to actually do their job.
Don't try to bring in "the real world" in an argument with blakeyrat. Clearly, the right thing for IT to do is whatever The Right Thing is, regardless of the authority and money given to them by management. This all boils down to poor management (or at least a trade off that's been made). Unless there really are places where IT gets a blank check and no oversight or guidance. Maybe it actually happens in the state of Washington, with their legal pot and depressing rainy days.
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@Sutherlands said:
If they saw what was happening, suggested ways of preventing it, but didn't have the authority to actually do those things, I wouldn't say the failed at their job. Rather, the bosses failed at their job, the IT guys simply didn't have the power to actually do their job.
Thank $deity someone actually understood.[1]
@blakeyrat said:
They failed at their jobs.
"they" being upper management directing to remove a control feature then gerrymandering with making a purchasing decision which eventually caused a loss of service.
@boomzilla said:
This all boils down to poor management
Blame the managers, blame the managers... hey, how come we hav--
-- oh, wait. Wrong time and place. As you were.
[1] I *am* going to concede that said admins were nest-feathering dickheads and their manner of communication could easily have exacerbated the situation, but when I was shown emails that had gone back and forth there was no denying they had sent several warnings and received only dismissive replies. There was no reason they had to be so smug about it, though.
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@blakeyrat said:
@Cassidy said:
Filed under: My trash can is full - I demand someone fetch me a larger trashcan!
No. Your company (or the building they lease space from) already takes out the trash of employees. Why? Because they know that making employees do it is a waste of their time.
I had my own policy, which can be summed up as "my trash can is full; I'm finished for the day".
Some days I'd hit that threshold while the guys in the corner offices were still in line at Starbucks on their way to work.
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@Kyanar said:
We have better things to use 20TB on.
For once, I doubt it. You probably think you have better uses for 20TB of SAN, now, ask the salespeople.
Anyway, the question is not what is a better use of 20TB. It is if an extra SAN is worth the productivity increase it will bring. Just do the math and see if saving a few minutes of work from those 20k people every week pays for a SAN?
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@blakeyrat said:
Also, if you really want large documents moved to some alternate storage, why not have the email server just do it automatically in the first place? Why force the users to do manual work when you could easily do it for them? Then there can't be any screwups, the users get a more friendly experience, and everybody's happy, right? Duh?
And seriously, 20 TB for 20,000 employees? That's peanuts. PEANUTS! And yes I know what redundant backed-up storage costs, it's still fucking peanuts. Imagine that 20,000 employees' health coverage costs. Your storage is a tiny fraction of one percentage of that. The fact that he thinks it's some kind of issue means he has NO idea what things cost at all. Talk to your company's head accountant, give them the cost of your drives, and they'd laugh you out of their office going, "don't bother me with that petty shit, just do it!"
Peanuts? We do have better things to spend 20TB on. Like, for example, 20 TB of medical records. And since anything over $1000 requires capital approval (which means it has to go to a goddamn committee for approval), you wouldn't get laughed at, they'd burst into tears.
Also, our employee's health coverage costs is Zero.
