Employed as Electronics Engineer but stalled by IT Dept? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: peteb2
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: September 08, 2018, 10:34:16 pm
content: I'd love to hear experiences from any of you who're employed as part of an Engineering (electronics) team (including technicians and electricians) who take care of a Corporate's main specialist Profit-Making equipment, as in it's maintenance to design and research into best replacement choice due to end of life for ongoing development.In resent months we have come to discover that the Companies IT Dept who were traditionally tasked with making certain a peripheral computer (workstation) sitting on a certain desk in as example the Accounts department had access to a printer.... has slowly but surely weeded it's way into parts of the main LAN we Engineers look after. We were always responsible for very specific equipment that the company relies upon to make it's profits much of this gear being computer based running the likes of Windows Server meaning 100s of blades.... We've had some terrifying random failures where the company actually lost revenue attributable purely to 'something being done on the Network'.... (at least we were able to show it wasn't by anything we did).Then in one swoop it was decreed IT Dept would maintain all & every Windows License .... the paperwork if you like. It was funny watching them try and understand that once Windows Booted and ran & then the App was started, nothing else was ever done by Windows. They couldn't get the fact that we had to pay a license on a peripheral's OS that did NOTHING with that OS.... but that's the nature of the industry.In our w/shop where all kinds of things are repaired, systems designed and new technology brainstormed we had a single direct DSL connection to the InterWeb... It served only our department completely and utterly an island with its own firewalls and DMZ. It was our lifeline to access and maintain some of the gear we are in-care of that lives up mountains REMOTELY.... to use the support from many companies that allow us to download their newest update software releases.... and even to cloud base design some fairly complex engineering.We had noticed the DSL was a bit slow compared to the options afforded by Fibre. So a call was made to install a Fibre directly as a replacement.So it was wonderful to do a speedtest and all that with our new fast connection, but a couple of shifts later i've discovered: i cannot now access Fusion 360 where i have a couple of projects on the go, i can't resolve any of the old IPs to remote equipment, & i cant even VNC into my home network where i store 10s of 1000s of data sheet pdf on parts which i am familiar with and don't want to waste time searching for a new copy .... The lot are presented with a BLOCKED screen.Even my personal bought from not buying beer Surface Pro 3 i use in my work, for it's ability to display 4K, can't WiFi now because its internal WiFi module prefers 801.11ac delivered over 5GHz and even that service has GONE.So they say change is always better, but seriously if it's delivered by an IT Dept i really have to see how. The thing in all this is that we have been instructed that's the way it is...So me & my team-mates have effectively lost much of what we did efficiently. We constantly worry should the Systems we maintain suddenly do something wrong was it a LAN intrusion or is the hardware actually showing a failure...In all this, do any of you have a similar situation and how have you managed to keep IT out & away from screwing up the specialised stuff you are tasked to look after?

author: T3sl4co1l
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 08, 2018, 10:57:16 pm
content: Quote from: peteb2 on September 08, 2018, 10:34:16 pmGo on...QuoteI see.....QuoteSo what you're saying is, you're having "terrifying random failures" again, with attributable lost revenue, and you can show it's not your fault?It's not your responsibility to worry... sit back and relax. They'll figure it out (hopefully).Writing down some CYA communications with immediate and corporate managers, and interdepartment messages, would be recommended if you're more worried about it. On that note, if you're worried (the underlying motivation may well be a market shift and layoff strategy or something like that), start job hunting too, never hurts to stay competitive...Tim

author: dmills
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 08, 2018, 11:33:05 pm
content: Our IT types keep pushing "Cloud" (The latest shiny! seems to be onedrive of all things) and all kinds of centralised management. We keep telling them, "On the office .200 vlan you do what you like, on the engineering .206 vlan you just provide routing to the outside world, no firewalls, no filtering, just route the packets, we will take care of what we need from there".It seems to **mostly** work once we disabused them of notions of locking down switch ports (And brought some Arista kit of our own). There is a rack in engineering that has some switches, servers and a firewall box in it that as a single fibre pair heading off to whatever IT want to do, and a bundle of stuff going into engineering, we own it, not them.The current fight is about multicast routing, modern broadcast facilities are starting to use a LOT of multicast and we really need to be able to duplicate that, but for some reason us slinging around a few tens of Gb/s of SMPTE 2110 flows in our own network is giving IT headaches, even when we don't issue IGMP joins on their bits of the network, so the switches should be dropping it, they have yet to come up with a coherent explanation of what the issue is, never mind wireshark traces showing the problem.VLANs can be your friends here, lets IT think they are in charge of the infrastructure while letting you do your thing without them bitching about machines that are not on their domain servers and under group policy control, just get a vlan for engineering that they leave alone and use a separate 'red wire' for that, with separate network cards if need be, you need your engineers to be at least 'local admin' on their boxes, but they need that anyway to get anything done.Regards, Dan.

author: peteb2
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: September 08, 2018, 11:34:56 pm
content: Quote from: T3sl4co1l on September 08, 2018, 10:57:16 pmYes Tim, there is a massive culture of blame avoidance and butt covering and even the old save a copy of every email or text kind of culture happening. The Toxicity is growing and i really cannot understand why any of our equipment's Network had to ever have anything ever to do with the IT Depart EVER. It never used to.I guess i have been too long in the same job and my real passion is the high-end gear i work on, & being responsible for and not looking for something else to be passionate about.As to jobs, small country, small demand for skill-sets me and my team mates have ... what do you do....I guess i'll be able to slowly negotiate access back to my two projects or i'll do them at home where i can access them on Fusion in my own time but things are at a state in my eyes as a pretty big mess at the moment... plus i work a solo NightShift tonight (Sunday to Monday)... so fingers crossed i don't need fully open internet access.

author: tautech
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 08, 2018, 11:39:03 pm
content: Funny this, as just yesterday over a beer hendorog and I were discussing much the same stuff in corporates he's worked in.Yeah Tim's right on the money, CYA and all that.In today's world where any employee doing their job too well so to show up those above him trips this type of BS to eventually rears its ugly head.About all you can do is make a good e'paper trail and leave it for management to eventually sort out.....well only if they have the skills to see the wood for the trees."Engaged" employees suffer this in many larger companies moreso than those that only go to work to eat their lunch.

author: Mr. Scram
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 09, 2018, 01:04:07 am
content: It often seems to be a breakdown of communication and resulting lack of understanding of each other's needs. People just prefer to fingerpoint and shake their head, but that rarely resolves the situation. In general IT is shoring up networks as attacks become more sophisticated and large scale. Engineers want their free haven untouched by the IT guys. There's a conflict of interests that needs addressing and some mutual understanding.

author: vk6zgo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 09, 2018, 04:00:58 am
content: In my last job before retirement, we didn't have an IT department as such, but a tame IT guy who regularly came in.This place had some equipment driven remotely from a PC.Basically, that is all it had to do.I came in one morning after his visit, & the operators were quite upset, as the PC kept placing the taskbar over some much used operating controls, (OK that was poor design of the GUI by the program designers back in the good old PRC), as well as reverting every few minutes to the normal Windows screen.I sorted out the taskbar straight away, but the other problem, I left for the IT guy ( there was a workaround--- just tap the mouse every minute or so.)The Boss rang up & yelled, & he came back & fixed things.We regularly would lose our access to the Internet, & sometimes internally following his visits.On one occasion, he had been, & amazingly, everything seemed to work.I sent an email to a supplier, & received the message "Blocked due to racial vilification".What?On investigation, if you scrunched up your eyes & used a lot of imagination, his name & ABN numbercould look like a rather nasty remark about indigenous people.Apparently, the local server had a built in censor for emails.Incensed, I sent a in house message to my Boss saying:- This bloody thing has blocked my message forRacial vilification!"You guessed it, that one was blocked for "profanity",so I had to drag my aged carcass downstairs & tell her in person.In the meantime, various other crazy things, initially unnoticed, had come up & been reported by other staff.The Boss rang our IT guy.I wouldn't say she was upset, but there was steam coming out of her ears!

author: hendorog
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 09, 2018, 04:32:12 am
content: Yep. We had similar issues working in development. Our needs were very different to your average office worker as well.Basically the problem actually isn't the IT guys. They are an inevitable outcome of the environment in which they work.It is management who have created a 'siloed' organisation, where one silo - engineering - needs another silo - IT - to operate. Each silo grows until it has management etc and then they start fighting each other. Corporates make money in spite of their structures, not because of it.What they need to do is create a cross functional organisation where everyone is actually trying to ship the product.Buy a couple of copies of 'The Phoenix Project', read one yourself and then drop it on the IT managers desk, and drop the other copy on his bosses desk.Sit back and watch the magic happen. Or not. But watch it anyway.

author: coppercone2
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 09, 2018, 04:34:35 am
content: haha grown ass men are trusted to design shit that won't kill people (or will kill the right people) and you got someone making sure there is no profanity

author: boB
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: September 09, 2018, 04:50:02 am
content: MAN I sure feel your pain ! IF I understand your problem.... When the IT crowd (funny show BTW !) doesn't understand what it takes to do your engineering job, the bureaucracy takes over and you get the results you have...I am fortunate to work at a small-ish company (~75 people) with about 15 engineers and ONE of these engineering tech types actually IS our IT guy. Another engineer knows enough to help a lot too if necessary. Most time is in engineering but of course there is time spent on company IT and installing certain software, etc.Really hard to find multi-capable people these days here in the US.boB

author: filssavi
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: September 09, 2018, 06:39:53 am
content: Wanting to be the devil’s advocate, we also have to say that usually T&M gear is a massive security vulnerability dince they have usually very old operating systems, never updated as full of holes, and use insecure means for remote access ssh with default password or god forbids telnetModern malawares are actively searching for this kind of devices to be able to get a foothold in the corporate network. Also given the power and complexity of attack tools today any homegrown protocol, not designed for security from the get go is likely easily exploitable hence the mistrust from ITUnfortunately we have also to say that most EE (I’m not saying all but most) are not really that knowledgeable in network operation and most IT Guys know nothing of engineering, and where there is no common ground the problems crop up

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 09, 2018, 08:10:49 am
content: Jesus Christ this thread is a shitfest.I’m a qualified EE but the day job is software and infrastructure architecture. I design the networks and software. I bridge both worlds. I understand the engineering requirements and the IT and business requirements.Genuinely OP is a fine example of a risk assessment nightmare.1. Windows licenses. Never had an audit have you? The whole business is liable for the engineering team’s escapades.2. Remote access to separate VLAN you maintain. That’s a nightmare. I saw VNC being mentioned which might as well be sending stuff over plain text. Do you use two factor authentication? Can you hop onto the corporate network via a vulnerable device? (Test gear running ancient version of Windows as already mentioned).3. Using your own kit for company business. I’m sure that running your crap infested tablet on the corporate network is a great idea.The IT guys understand you’re running something which is a massive business liability. That’s a fact. If this was my company you’d be air gapped before the end of the day until this is fixed. Why? Because I’ve seen the bad outcome here which is the business getting hit by cryptolocker because some arrogant person brought his personal surface in and connected it to the engineering LAN (yes I’ve seen this). The team has no DR at all and basically lost everything. They could even pay ransom to get it back because the cryptolocker infrastructure is mostly gone. The real cost here as about £600k. This was paid by cutting staff starting with the culprit who left without a reference.Sit down with them and work together so you can build a secure network TOGETHER and you’re going to have to compromise. Yes you. And you don’t get a choice. They do know what they’re doing by the sounds. You clearly dont.Notably I take all the shit like that that no one else will touch with a barge pole. I’ve seen businesses close, people lose their careers and things they have spent decades building because of one dick screwing up.BTW The Phoenix Project is horse shit. I’ve torn that bollocks a new arse hole many times before. Read Gravity’s Rainbow or something with a bit more substance which isn’t some management ideology pretending to be literature. Not that you can call Phoenix Project literature as it was clearly penned by someone with a head injury.

author: hendorog
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 09, 2018, 08:27:35 am
content: Quote from: bd139 on September 09, 2018, 08:10:49 amYes there were some types at my last company with closed minds too, not open to new ideas. Big companies are all about risk minimisation as you say, which results in resistance to changing anything. Changes to software take forever (or longer) and there is a complete inability to respond to, well, to anything.The Phoenix Project, in real life, turns that on its head and creates a culture where change is rapid, changes actually work instead of being rolled back, and people get on board and enjoy it. It was cool to see the guys who were completely negative get on board.For management its a no brainer.

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 09, 2018, 08:32:47 am
content: The Phoenix project glorifies operations, which is notably a service function rather than a revenue stream, and forgets that the business is somewhat larger than the focus of the book. It’s fine if the primary business is IT ie you’re a software focused business (well it’s not as it promotes the current CD fad which is so broken it’s unbelievable). I think it’s extremely dangerous in the wrong hands.People create an environment that allows rapid change, not a book or ideology. 90% of what I do is pulling out barriers to this rather than actually specifying a process model. Remove the cost sinks, enable the things the business is good at, decrease risks and job done. Businesses which are functional self organise. Every business is different.Phoenix Project is the equivalent of stalin’s Death march orders for some companies. The book should be burned and that’s it.Plus there is a plot hole where they forget someone isn’t on side, who suddenly gets mashed and wakes up having totally changed his ideology. It’s like when they did the code review of the book on github that someone opened a plot hole ticket and pulled the drunk guy cliche. The whole thing is horrid. Dire. Trash.

author: hendorog
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 09, 2018, 08:56:40 am
content: Quote from: bd139 on September 09, 2018, 08:32:47 amOne thing I recall from the book is how they were able to avoid IT audit requirements by realising the business (i.e. finance) were already mitigating the risks that IT Risk Management were adamant they needed to control themselves. The IT Risk Management guy chucked his toys and walked out in the book.That's one example of the way it takes a holistic view instead of the typical IT 'we need to control it all' approach.Here is an example - no one from Architecture or Development was permitted any access at all to production machines. This was due to Sarbanes Oxley controls put in place by ITRM (which were not required, see above). Yet we had to pass over accurate install instructions to the Sys Admin to deploy anything. Which was impossible as we could not know the environment was exactly what we expected it to be.So you jump through all of the hoops, take the month or two to get the change ready, wait for all of the approvals, wait for the change window, wait until the admins have time, and then they do it and it fails, is rolled back and you get to start again.When you have done that a few dozen times, and then sat through the Change Review meetings which are invoked by the clipboard brigade to ream you when something fails, you kinda lose a bit of faith in the status quo. But of course, we will do better next time. Definition of madness perhaps?When the book says 10 deploys a day, and we couldn't do one a month, then it's no wonder it came as a shock.The book was a scarily accurate description of the IT environment I was working in at the time. It won't be the same for all of course.

author: Kjelt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 09, 2018, 09:08:08 am
content: It sounds to me you're in a transition phase at this moment where some it rinkles have to be ironed out.You probably will never ever have the it freedom you were used to and the reason is as above stated by bd139 the world changed and it changed from internal services to outside defense, in the trenches trying to keep the bad guys out.Those are the times and you join them or leave them.Now see with the it guys how you can get things back to work. Ask for a shared server for your team and store your datasheets there as simple example, no need to call home for that, your working for a professional company, go start acting as a professional for peats sake.

author: hans
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 09, 2018, 09:10:31 am
content: Quote from: peteb2 on September 08, 2018, 10:34:16 pmA previous job I used to work at dealt with GPS terminals used in farming equipment. Some run Linux, some run Windows. As support is often carried out by the not-very-IT-minded-people, a combination of consumer-level tools were used to sync/transfer files: TeamViewer, Dropbox and flash drives. Some machines had internet connectivity via 3G modems, but some did not in which case flash drives were essential.At some point IT decided that new measures were needed to prevent IP leaking the company, a completely realistic threat model. So suddenly we couldn't use any of the aforementioned tools anymore. All clients couldn't read/write to USB drives anymore. Domains like Dropbox were blocked as they were not deemed "enterprise file sharing utility". Similar story to TeamViewer.The service and production department basically went completely down. The most fortunate thing was, that IT support was done with only 7 hrs timezone difference..No prior communication was done when this measure was introduced. Perhaps to stop people from taking certain actions beforehand. A short-term fix was: exceptions were granted to certain machines on the network, in particular in engineering, service and some production machines. However long-term alternatives were found, as with those kind of exceptions you could argue what the net effect is if you exempt everyone machine, especially if those machines carry among the most "mission critical" data of the company.I think in terms of IT, you can fight it for as long as you want, but it will only make your job increasingly harder. Try to understand what threats IT is trying to protect, and how your specialized niche fits in to that.

author: timgiles
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: September 09, 2018, 09:49:38 am
content: Networking chaps quickly build themselves an ivory tower. As a senior developer/system architect, I can not believe some of the arguments I have had with various networking people needing production servers up and having given months of warning, suffering from VLAN issues and lack of allocated IPs and the like. At no point have I found them to be service or customer minded. Everything works or fails ultimately in modern IT by the network and as such, they see themselves as untouchable.So reading this thread at least has helped me understand it is not just the company I worked for until recently that had these problems.

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 09, 2018, 10:05:07 am
content: Quote from: hans on September 09, 2018, 09:10:31 amWait until team viewer or Dropbox are down or someone forgets to pay a bill. Or even worse someone loses a flash drive with all the customer info on in unencrypted. This does happen and there is a much higher cost for fucking up on this level. You’re doing it wrong. go back and fix it.Quote from: timgiles on September 09, 2018, 09:49:38 amYou must run infrastructure as an internal service. They have an SLA with the rest of the company and their entire status be performance related or you get these ivory towers. This is a common problem.What is 10x worse is when you get development teams in charge of infrastructure. Devops and continuous delivery is the worst of both worlds. People who don’t know a VLAN from a WLAN deploying VPCs in AWS with everything open to the world and people who just about learned powershell a month ago being tasked with fixing a bug in a production c# app.It’s a shit show. Don’t go there.Really the biggest failure of IT and interaction with any other services is the "us and them" culture that exists. This thread is the pinnacle of "us and them". The humans are dysfunctional, not the technology here.

author: dmills
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 09, 2018, 11:06:10 am
content: DevOps is the bastard step child of 'Extreme programming' and 'Agile development'.Basically code for we have no project management, no design, no release plan but we can release loads of slightly broken shit quickly (But without release notes), it is the antithesis of good engineering.Regards, Dan.

author: Marco
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 09, 2018, 11:21:22 am
content: Quote from: peteb2 on September 08, 2018, 10:34:16 pmDo you use that on a company license or a personal one? If it's a personal one and you're an employee you done fucked up, get it on a company license. If it's on a company license just tell them you have company issued software and they have to get it to work, if they don't respond repeat and CC it up the chain.QuoteAssuming it's the company's remote equipment idem ditto.QuoteSilly paranoia, but that's up to them really. Also a full time employee should be expected to keep his resources local. What if you quit or become unable to work and maintain your server?QuoteAnnoying, but you're the one BYOD'ing buggy hardware. In general I think BYOD is utterly retarded IT policy, again what if someone else needs to take over your work quickly? If you really need it get your manager to sign off for a request for a 4K laptop, then it becomes the IT department's problem to get it to work ... also they can handle backups in a sane way then.They will never get out of the way, but with good management they can be brought to heel.

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 09, 2018, 11:36:14 am
content: Quote from: dmills on September 09, 2018, 11:06:10 amTo be fair it works on typical 3-5man start up type environments, which is also typically the people who write so much love about it. The place it falls on its arse is when fad management try and retrospectively apply it to a business, product and team to fix a process model failure rather than actually work out what the problem is to start with. Need to play chess one move at a time, not by buying a new board and pieces.

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 09, 2018, 12:16:17 pm
content: Quote from: Mr. Scram on September 09, 2018, 01:04:07 amandQuote from: timgiles on September 09, 2018, 09:49:38 amAs an IT guy of sorts (early career was on-site Mac support, later was technical translation and writing and UX), I really hate the arrogance of most corporate IT.I understand that security and liability are serious issues, but the guys that manage that often forget that they cannot paralyze the business! They forget that IT isstaff, not line, that they are only there to provide tools to the departments that actually carry out the company’s core activities. IT often deludes itself into believing that it is more important than the rest of the business, and becomes a dictatorship. This tail-wagging-the-dog then manifests as things like IT selecting software for line employees, which then gets chosen based on what’s convenient for IT, not what’s actually best for the employees that will use it. (Like... yeah, let’s choose a one-time savings of $10K in IT, who cares if the productivity of the entire 50-head engineering department drops 20% as a result...)To me as a UX-centric guy (something I guess I learned from being a lifelong Mac user, where being user-centric has always been central to the development culture), they really need to learn to work WITH their users, not see themselves as above them.Quote from: dmills on September 09, 2018, 11:06:10 amUgh, don’t get me started...Years ago I worked at a small software company doing mostly user support and documentation, but also some testing and UX.There was no formal methodology, nor anything approaching discipline in a code-test-fix-retest-release cycle. (Once “Agile” became a thing, the lead dev simply declared they were switching to that; in other words, continuing the shit show that they’d already been doing.) Predictably, bug fixes often introduced new bugs that were often worse than the original one. I pushed and pushed for a better testing cycle (I would have liked a month of beta testing, but a week was the most I could get any agreement for), but despite promises for improvement, it never changed, and the support department (which also did the documentation and testing) had to deal with the aftermath of one buggy update after another. As a product used primarily by universities under site licenses, we also had many university sysadmins pushing us to do fewer, but better tested, updates, since they didn’t update their system images but a few times a year.Once, we’d actually managed to have a pretty good (maybe 3 week) beta period, and the update was working well, so we in support gave the go-ahead to push it. The lead dev did so sometime around midnight. The next day, he came in and proudly told us that inspiration had struck, and he’d come up with a way to implement a much-requested feature. Which he did. And included it in the update. Well, we in support hadn’t even had a chance toseeit, never mindtestit, and by noon our email inbox was bursting at the seams with messages from users whose work had ground to a halt, since the update broke a core feature of the program. It was another of those moments where you wish that homicide were legal...

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 09, 2018, 01:06:20 pm
content: Quote from: vk6zgo on September 09, 2018, 04:00:58 amAh yes, the clbutticScunthorpe problem...

author: Tandy
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: September 09, 2018, 01:37:40 pm
content: As someone who was an IT manager for a software company for several years I would like to explain how we did it the right way.Our IT team were responsible for providing the core services, this means things like the network infrastructure, internet connections, email servers, file servers, accounting systems, customer databases, backups, firewalls and anti-virus etc and the basic systems for each employee.All employees had their own PC or laptop that was completely locked down, they had no administration rights and could not (easily) do stupid things like install dodgy software or turn off the anti-virus software. As the IT department were responsible for ensuring that all employees had working systems, that data is kept secure and that software licences are all properly accounted for it has to be like this. You can not expect someone to take responsibility for licence compliance, security and stability of systems and then let people install random junk they have downloaded that then goes and wannacrys the network. Any software added to the system had to be installed by the IT staff and therefore added to the update schedule to ensure all security patches were applied.So how do we deal with developers and support staff that have to experiment with stuff?First we had a separate network segment for development systems, there were all sorts of environments that were required for support purposes, different hardware and software combinations that were kept as a live support environment so that support staff can attempt to reproduce problems of the same set-up as a customer. It is impossible to have enough expertise in all these different systems and ensure they are all secure. All these systems were regularly updated with all security patched issued by the supplier but assumed to be insecure. They were therefore limited to accessing only essential services, they could not for example access the customer database or accounting systems. They were imaged to a set configuration and were never used for core services. The support team could administer the systems as required and they were regularly returned to their default image state once any support case had been closed.Developers were given a virtual machine that they could fire up to run any tests they needed without breaking their primary system and development environment. They also had an isolated set of systems that were completely managed by them for testing stuff on during the development, that was a so called dirty network that had all sorts of random stuff on it and would often go horribly wrong but that wasn't our problem as we had no responsibility for it.

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 09, 2018, 01:49:04 pm
content: You’re hired

author: dmills
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 09, 2018, 03:28:03 pm
content: That dirty network is the key, and actually in our shop it very seldom has an issue (Apart from the odd drive failure, and occasionally some clown writing an ARP client that gets it wrong and replies to EVERY ARP packet, who me, working on some custom TCP-IP stuff in an FPGA?), mind you there are basically 6 people who use it and we all sit within thrown object range of each other which concentrates the mind. That FPGA thing nearly got me nerfed to death.The general office network on the other hand is the biggest, flakiest POS I have ever run across, I mean the CRM system, basically just a database in a server room somewhere right? Well apart from the inability to connect to the thing over the VPN (Just slightly important to the sales guys, they tell me) apparently someone had forgotten to renew a X.509 cert, you would think this would be a 15 minute job, not three frigging days....On that subject do NOT get me started on the VPN, flaky, unreliable and SLOW, compare and contrast with ssh into our private dev server on the dirty network, damn near instant, key exchange happens, up comes a shell and away you go (No passwords, they are inferior to public key for authentication). I also caught the VPN installer fucking around with my very carefully set up routing tables, and installing suid binaries without asking.Why does a VPN even need some externally validated cert? It is private, we control both ends, we should just be able to generate a key pair for each user and distribute the appropriate bits, why the hell does a VPN need a cert issued by a CA?Regards, Dan.

author: Jr460
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: September 09, 2018, 03:37:13 pm
content: Wow, just wow.EE background and that got me into CAD systems long ago and more and more general IT. Some of my first jobs in IT were in support of engineering departments.This is what I've gathered over the years.<I had something much longer typed up.... >Both the engineers and IT are doing things wrong. Both sides can be massive jerks.

author: Tandy
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: September 09, 2018, 03:59:57 pm
content: If the office network has poor reliability then someone is doing something wrong. Sadly it is quite difficult to get good IT staff that understand what is critical to the business, but then a lot of them are employed by management who see IT as a cost rather than as a crucial part of their business. They therefore hire a MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional) and a couple of spotty kids that are experts at Grand Theft Auto and expect them to run critical systems.The problem is the transition from a startup mentality to an established business that is growing. When a business is small and new everybody chips in and does what they can, the founder is probably doing things like the accounts, while one of the software developers is managing the mail server and salesperson is running the customer database. As a business grows these things no longer make sense though. A sales person shouldn't be messing with backing up a database, or copying stuff onto a new laptop, they should be out there selling. Similarly the lead software developer shouldn't be wasting time managing the mail server. There comes a point where these responsibilities need to be given to other people and they become their primary responsibility, not just a sideline.If you hire bad accountants and bad IT staff then you are going to get what you hired.My tenure as an IT manager was with a company that had a huge legacy from their startup time as well as having disparate systems from acquiring other young companies when I arrived. There would be a DNS server running on a Sun system sat on someones desk in Scotland that was also used for compiling the Solaris build of a product. But when their system crashed everyone lost access to everything. If that system was up and running while other systems were booting in Sweden they would fail to boot as they could not validate licences. Files were being shared using windows file sharing from individual PCs on the network with no backups. So you had this crazy situation where when the office was moved various people's computers all had to started in a particular sequence otherwise nothing worked. Things grew organically during their fast growth but it just doesn't scale, there comes a point where things have to be properly designed. The sooner you do that the less work you have later on, be it in your accounting practices or your IT systems.

author: hendorog
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 09, 2018, 07:11:09 pm
content: Quote from: timgiles on September 09, 2018, 09:49:38 amYour experience exactly mirrors mine. I believe this behaviour is inevitable and is due to the environment they are put into. bd189 has alluded to that pressure of taking responsibility for the entire company.I knew when I posted here about DevOps it wouldn't be well received. It is not well understood how to do these things properly.But businesses will eventually start to fail because of their inability to deliver IT solutions, and the others will have to seek out better ways to operate.Quote from: dmills on September 09, 2018, 11:06:10 amDoing the same thing you do now, but in much smaller chunks, is the guts of it.So someone at your organisation must have decided the process you used to follow was so poor, that they threw the good stuff out with the bad.For example, Ops required us to hand them the code to them 1 month before it was planned to be released.So they could, well, shine it, I guess? They never looked at it until the day before. But sure, that way is better. Whats a month anyway, the project is already 6 months late. But we have a project plan, a signed off design, and a release plan so that's OK. Just having those things doesn't make a project work.

author: T3sl4co1l
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 10, 2018, 03:29:17 am
content: I'm quite glad that:1. At home, I do my own IT. It's a mess, my mess, and no one else touches it. That includes MAC filtering and all that.2. At my primary customer, they have quite good corporate IT. They have quite good employees in general; everyone is either given only the access they need, or trusted to not do retarded things with their admin access. I don't know of any clusters that have happened... but I'm in engineering, not IT, so I might not know. Issues are dealt with promptly, machines are kept up-to-date, network uptime is very good.We're probably quite privileged to be a profitable and "fast moving*" company, that can't afford to make stupid decisions that grind everyone to a halt, or cheap out on IT to much the same end.*Not in the management wank sense, but in that the market sector isn't one where you can slouch around and sponge off of existing customers. Rather, business is a constant process of acquiring new customers, while reducing costs for existing ones.Tim

author: vk6zgo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 10, 2018, 04:20:12 am
content: In the job before the one I mentioned earlier, management was paranoid about IP, to the extent that they wouldn't let us see circuit diagrams of the stuff we were building.(A bit difficult to fault find when as often happened, the product didn't work)This company had a bunch of IT guys who the customers could ring up & consult with at any time.They would also travel to them to sort things out if need be.Sound good?The problem was, the Software was rock solid, & most problems were either electronic or mechanical!The Software was definitely " the jewel in the crown", but although they "talked good security", was much more vulnerable than the hardware, which was really all "public domain".They did make a fuss about the possibility of "hackers" getting into the internal network, but neglected the real possibility of someone breaking in & placing a miniature surveillance camera where it could see staff using passwords, then repeating the same visit to steal software .The physical security was such that you could break in with a "sharp fingernail".There was also the issue of the laptop that disappeared.Of course, management were unlikely to think that hard---- it might make their heads hurt!Not IT or security related, but capable of quite devastating results if things went bad, was the fact that the whole electronics production facility was powered from a series of "daisy chained" power boards!The best case would be if the OH&S people dropped by & shut them down, the worst is obvious.After I left,I dropped back one day.Still the same setup, but now they had, for some reason, set up a CCTV watching the electronics area.No idea why---scared someone would steal a few feet of solder?