Offtopic - My work morning so far.

"JustWaitingForAMate" (justwaitingforamate) 12/10/2015 at 16:33 • Filed to: offtopic, work, fuckmylife

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My interactions with offshore support staff at our software providers company :

Me : So that’s the issue with planning in the system.

Supporter : Oh very good, can you please send me a screenshot of the parameters being used.

Me : Already done, I extracted them to an excel file, there were 10 of them that we’ve changed from the default values, they’re attached to the ticket.

Supporter : Oh no no no, I need a screenshot of all the parameters direct from the system.

Me : ....They’re almost all default parameters, we’ve changed 10, I’ve sent the 10 to you, load up a default parameter set and they’re all the same except for those 10.

Supporter : Oh yes, but I need to see all of them, so please send me a screenshot.

Me : So, you want me to scroll through the page, taking multiple screenshots of all the parameters, all 200+ of them, stitch them all together for you, and attach them to the ticket?

Supporter : Yes exactly.

Me : And you’re going to do what with all of them?

Supporter : I will create the same parameter set in our system and replicate the issue.

Me : By changing the 10 parameters that I’ve indicated?

Supporter : Yes yes.

Me :

Jesus fuck, it’s not even 9am, I haven’t had a coffee. I’m not ready for this.

MontegoMan562 is a Capri RS Owner > JustWaitingForAMate 12/10/2015 at 16:41

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Clearly he doesn’t trust you.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > JustWaitingForAMate 12/10/2015 at 16:42

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How dare you do their work for them in a way that makes sense, instead of making a fool of yourself doing something illogical and permit them to quadruple their hours spent on this. How dare you, sir.

JustWaitingForAMate > MontegoMan562 is a Capri RS Owner 12/10/2015 at 16:42

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Hey, I’m a trustworthy guy! I’ve only hacked their black box software to make it dance to my tune once! Well...once this year.

MontegoMan562 is a Capri RS Owner > JustWaitingForAMate 12/10/2015 at 16:47

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Hahahaha

JustWaitingForAMate > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 12/10/2015 at 16:49

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We had an issue a few years ago, null pointer exception, caused the web server component to fall over every time. We found what triggered it, documented it, dived into the workflow, the trace logs, worked out exactly how it was falling over on it self, gave them reams of data, the function name that was failing and the exact steps to replicate the issue in their system...and they dragged the investigation out over 6 months until the next version of the software was available and told us to upgrade instead of patching it because it was ‘too hard’.

Azrek > JustWaitingForAMate 12/10/2015 at 16:50

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I had to move across multiple states recently...and I determined that Realtors and I speak different languages.

Me: Hi, I am looking for a 2 Bed/1.5 bath in this area with a parking spot and accepts pets.
Realtor: Great, here is a list of 39 places in our area that might suit you. Just X out any you don’t like.
*2 minutes later*
Realtor: Oh, you didn’t like all 39 properties?
Me: No, outta the 39, 2 had a parking spot and neither allowed pets.
Realtor: So what are you looking for?
Me: Is there someone else I can talk to?

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > JustWaitingForAMate 12/10/2015 at 16:51

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Is this them having some idea that by gasping along with minimum competence, they can straddle the gap between being fired and having total job security? Or are they actually this stupid or wedded to process?

JustWaitingForAMate > MontegoMan562 is a Capri RS Owner 12/10/2015 at 16:54

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I went to a conference where one of their reps got up during a panel and asked ‘so is anyone doing anything interesting with our product that they want to talk about’.

So I replied :

‘Oh we’ve worked out how your engine executes actions and all the parameters required for each action, so now we can trigger any workflow we want at any point in the system without having to use your trigger points or any of the system constrains you’ve put in place to stop that. So I’ve written a batch of programs that let us do whatever we want, whenever we want with your software without actually modifying any of your code or IP.’

‘...you fucking wot?’

I don’t think he liked me much after that.

MontegoMan562 is a Capri RS Owner > JustWaitingForAMate 12/10/2015 at 16:58

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Well, that explains everything.

(hysterical btw)

JustWaitingForAMate > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 12/10/2015 at 17:41

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A little from column A and a little from column B.

they-will-know-my-velocity > JustWaitingForAMate 12/10/2015 at 19:03

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Goddamn I wish we had more people that worked for my industry that new what was up.

We have equipment that breaksdown and we manually have to put in comments when we build a service ticket for it. Which is fine. But then to notify the rest of the company about it we have to manually put in notes in a totally different place in the same program so the other half of the company (that has no business fucking about in our repair tickets) can see the updates. My coworker has a good bit of OCD and has found the the database where our ticket’s info is stored and he has figured out how to designate the fields we use to generate a short but sweet update that is automatically updated AND has built an excel spreadsheet that as long as it is opened by someone with the proper credentials updates immediately as changes are made.

And all he needs to make the whole thing work if for someone to give him access to the database for a couple hours. Instead we get an answer that they are working on the issue and we are on the list. Should have something built in......6 months.

Sigh.

samssun > JustWaitingForAMate 12/10/2015 at 19:55

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Don’t you just love that there’s an entire industry built around “knowledge transfer” from competent Americans to towers full of drones who can’t tie their shoes without an SOP?

I have dropped a mail. Please advise urgently ETA, do the needful, and confirm on same!

samssun > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 12/10/2015 at 20:00

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It’s a mix of culture, and the lowest-common-denominator mass hiring places like Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, and Wipro do, so that they can slap on whatever credentials an American company is asking for.

You end up replacing competent individuals here with drones who can’t problem solve and won’t make any independent decision. If it’s not explicitly in their instruction manual, they’re paralyzed.

JustWaitingForAMate > samssun 12/10/2015 at 20:16

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do the needful!!

OMFG! It is a thing that is said! We lost out shit in the local office when one of our offshore guys used it. It’s now our go to phrase when joking around.

And in my case it was competent Australians. Hey, I’ve got a great idea, let’s make the guy redundant that wrote code in the mainframe system that’s older then I am, and replace him with 2 offshore guys! Because 30 years of domain knowledge can be transferred in 3 months of training!

JustWaitingForAMate > samssun 12/10/2015 at 20:19

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It is entertaining to put them in situations where their mind just shuts down and they start to panic.

Rude and crude I know, but fuck ‘em I lost good friends and competent people when corporate decided offshore was the way to go.

JustWaitingForAMate > they-will-know-my-velocity 12/10/2015 at 20:26

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Ok, so here’s one for you.

We changed our ticketing system that is used for customer raised incidents as well as monitoring alerts from our scripts across hundreds of different servers and many clients. A majority of our servers used functionality that would connect to the ticketing system, provide all the relevant information, server name, issue, severity etc, and generate a ticket that would be sent to the right support team queue.

During the final testing phase they realized that the new software did not have that functionality, there was no way for a server to connect and generate an incident. So what did we do? Did we stop everything and build that functionality? Oh fuck no, we pointed our alerts at a different system that didn’t raise incidents and implemented ‘swivel chair’ functionality, where an offshore resource would look at the console, see an issue, then manually create a ticket in the new system, and put the code change on the back burner.

So now, we have no automatic ticket generation, we have delays because of the manual input, and we have incidents fail to get reported because of the incompetent people spinning between the two systems.

This has been going on for a year now, with no ETA on the new functionality.

they-will-know-my-velocity > JustWaitingForAMate 12/10/2015 at 21:03

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Probably never if it’s like ours.

gmporschenut also a fan of hondas > JustWaitingForAMate 12/11/2015 at 00:36

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my response to that gizmodo article

My company outsourced tech support to India, and fired half the team. Unfortunately they replaced them with idiots reading off a script, which just meant that the ones that were kept had to work twice as hard.

Worst encounter. I had been working on a project for 2 months, saving everything on the central server, that gets backed up every night. walk in, turn on my computer, log in, all my folders are empty. Can access everything, see subfolders, but every file in my personal folder is missing. I can see all the files in the common folder, but my personal folder just has subfolders. Call tech support, “are you sure that’s were you saved them? did you delete them? check your recycle bin.. Can you send me a screen-shots of what the folders look like?”

me: what?!?! can you see any files?

Tech: “oh we don’t have access to those folders”

After 10 minutes of this person repeating the whole conversation to their manager they go, “Oh you unsynced from blah blah”

me: I have no idea what are you talking about. How would I even do that? I turned it on, logged in, and didn’t do anything

Tech: I don’t know, you did something, next time don’t be so careless