When we upgraded from 2003 to 2007, you'd have thought the world was ending.

I don't know exactly how much money was spent on 2007 training because of the new 'ribbon' and the start button, but it had to easily compare to my salary for the year.

That being said, I got 2010 when 2007 was going onto their computers, and I didn't see any major differences.

Now, my new job?  We all have 07.   Nobody cares.   Our email is a web based Outlook abortion that's down half the time anyway.

I have an awesome group of I.T. folks on my staff but I have too few of them.

For example, we have, as of the last inventory, just under 8,000 Windows endpoints, 1,500 printers, more than 600 switches and routers, and 548 servers. Toss in storage arrays, databases, wireless access points, and videoconferencing. Toss in ongoing project work, BYOD, cell phones, seven major sites comprising of two full hospitals, three urgent care sites, ten stories of ambulatory clinics, a office/lab complex, and then a dozen clinics. Toss in an average of 250 helpdesk calls per day. Did I mention the 7,200 customers? Or the 1,000 iPads and cell phones? All of this stuff has systems and services layered on top of it, and you guessed it, if it is infrastructure, its ultimately mine and my staff has to support it. Sound like a lot of work? It is and I have 1/3 the staff I need to support it well.

One contributing factor is that I.T. isn't often set up to do cost accounting, the organization won't do it, or the accounting system doesn't have the ability to charge back, so we look like overhead and therefore, we don't get the appropriate staffing to do the job as well as we can and our users often expect. If departments had to pay for the services they consume out of their own budgets, then the services we provide could stop being the equivalent of welfare.

Another contributing factor is the typical and completely unrealistic belief that enterprise I.T. is the same as setting up your new computer at home. It isn't. The level of compute complexity in a modern enterprise is on par with any other professional endeavor. This fact goes unnoticed by most people.

Another, another contributing factor... the government and the legions of lawyers that have conspired to make laws and regulations forcing us to do things, like filter your web browsing. Others have mentioned it, I'll reiterate it; we don't care what you do as long as you don't make work for us.

I could go on but you get the drift.... I stick with it because it is challenging, and lets face it, well-paying. Were I to do it all over again knowing what I have learned over the last 20 years, I think I might have stayed in land surveying.

My company skipped the "certified" part too.
Part of it is overwork, part of it is under budgeted, the rest of it is other mistakes made.  None of that makes me respect any of them.

Since my IT = ME... He does his job, but has been know to be a douche at times
 

Why are you worried about the updates?  Was your office not working properly?

I am a big fan of making sure everything has as many security holes closed as possible.

Yes understandable but when your at work its really not a users job to worry about that. It should be IT's.  Here we lock down all updates except critical security updates. The other updates stand a chance of doing more harm than good sometimes so are not installed unless there is an issue. In IT its a risk vs gain thing sometimes. I have seen MS updates destroy just about as much as they fix.

As for office versions.. We still have users on 2003 but they are mostly users that only need to use one basic spread sheet. Not worth the $300 upgrade.  

So look at it this way. If your shit is outdated. Maybe its because your not important enough. LOL

generally IT is divided into two or more groups: Software development, Infrastructure, and Help desk / support.

In our shop the infrastructure group is further divided into networking, systems, and desktops. The desktop people do the Office and OS upgrades. They generally mean well, but are probably the lowest paid - and you get what you pay for.  I have learned over the years, that when it is time to upgrade my laptop to a new OS version, like XP to 7; I go out and buy a replacement drive. I clone the hard drive in my laptop and then allow them to do the upgrade. on no less than 3 occasions they have lost everything I had on my hard drive and their backups were worthless. All 3 times I was saved by having a full copy of my hard drive.

The software, network, and systems groups are stellar in comparison. I don't get why they refuse to pay more to the desktop people and hire better qualified employees. We have  thousands of users, and a very large budget.

ETA: I'm in the I.T. department, in the Enterprise Architecture group. We have about 6,000 user on the ERP system alone, not counting all the peripheral systems, BI systems, CAD, etc. We have locations all over the world, but mostly in  North America.

I cool my servers with a swimming pool. But, I don't do corporate IT.
Cooling a Home server with a swimming pool - If there is moisture or humidity but still reasonable ambient temps then look at water cooling. I live in Queensland, Aus. and we see loads of humidity that is usually sea air laiden with salt. The last stuff you don't want around gear. I have solutions with some customers where the servers are modded with water cooling gear (CPU's, GPU's, DIMM's) then run external facing quick-disconnects. The rack then has a pair of header lines wich the servers are connected to and then also a large radiator in the top of the Rack cabinet. This is to collect any other heat in the cabinet from things like PSU's and HDD's. The coolant in the system is kept as a local closed loop with a heat exchanger (stainless steel) that then exchanges heat from the closed loop to water from a swimming pool.
Simple temp sensors or temp switches keep an eye on the servers, if the coolant stops, servers shut down.

It does sound complicated but when done, is actually pretty straight forward and can be done on a budget. When this is compared to hardware and install costs of A/C and then the running costs, saving come quick.

There is also immersion cooling for the keen

My IT department forces me to choose needlessly-complex passwords and change them seemingly every other week.

I bypass it by calling IT every time my password expires.  I claim that the password reset is not working, even though it is.  I make them manually reset my password to exactly what it was before.  I've had the same password for like 2 years now with this method.  It's the only way I can remember my password.

I've only had one lady argue with me and I just played dumb for like 15 minutes before she finally just did what I asked her to do.

Our IT password policy is retarded.

Part of my Admin responsibilities involve taking care of the internal infrastructure too.

I hate it, and thus I take it out on those whom I need to fix something for.

In my experience, it is not a coincidence that the last two letters in "shit" are IT.

They have us change ours every 3-4 months. Drives me crazy.

being an IT guy , this is how I see myself as a floating giant brain and how I see others as tards in suits ...



Just reboot first before you even contact me...

It's not so much the changing that's annoying.  It's the needless complexity.

Passwords are important, and phrases with spaces are great. We suggest this to our customers, and we employ spaces frequently in our rotational passwords.

Also, boofuckinghoo.  Passwords are the first line of defense against easy compromises. Every day I deal with a metric fuckton of subscriber accounts that are compromised in some way, shape or form due to a shitty password.

Wouldn't get you far where I work.  They'd reset it to a standard password with the "User must change password on next login" box checked.

Changing them frequently causes people to write them down. A written down password is not a password.

I could probably go through the top drawer of the desks of your users and get 30% of the passwords.

Social Engineering trumps complex password schemes.

NMCI.

I am the IT dept.. and I have to say that 95% of the problems we have are user created. The other 5% are the dipshits who are in charge and make the decisions.
that is all :)

There is an argument on both sides, and a balance needs to be struck.
We decided to avoid that question entirely by having 101924 unrelated constantly reset passwords, ensuring nobody ever knows their own password, which leads to perfect security.
The practice is not quite so rosy.  

Making horrible password policies doesn't fix your problem and instead adds problems for end-users like me.



My IT department doesn't do that.  If they did, I'd probably keep calling back over and over until they did it right.  

Actually it does mitigate the problem of easily crackable passwords.  It obviously makes it more difficult for the users to remember their passwords but the alternative is to give a bad actor access your network.  Again users are the first line of defense for a network.



That is the right way.  Just because you don't like it doesn't mean they are doing it wrong.  

First, I don't care what version of office is new - people haven't learned anything new since 2003 (or earlier).
Second, I am the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastard_Operator_From_Hell.
Third - if they give you (or anyone) admin, they are idiots.

Your password policy is probably based on HIPAA or Sarbanes.  GOVT SUX, but we gotta work with them.

I remember a password scheme that used a little credit card thing with an LCD display that showed a number.  The number was your password, and it changed every few minutes.

Everyone just left the card in their laptop bag or desk.  Same deal.

Humans are always the weakest link.

I can see that working. After 15 minutes, I'd turn off password expiration for you, just so I didn't have to get your call again.

I do not have the patience I did when I got into this field.

Your health system faith based and non profit?

If you increase the scope of what you have, you have where I work.

TR

You're thinking of 2-factory authentication, like RSA SecurID.  The key fob with the random numbers is only 1 of the 2 factors.  There is typically a PIN or password also associated.  So you can have a simple 4 digit PIN that you remember like your ATM card and it's not easily crackable because you need to possess that key fob for the 2nd half of the password.  So leaving the fob with the laptop (while not a good idea) is not giving away your password because the "bad guy" doesn't know your PIN.



 

You have no idea what you are talking about, but you are an expert on what can and cannot be done, and how we should do our jobs.
Yes, you're that guy.

Nick