Most employees say IT issues decrease workplace productivity, morale
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
But HR themselves wont check whether you do jira tickets or whether you do something else. For HR, IT is one of many departments with own set of rules that HR does not get to decide.
How many of these did we do, how many of those, how long did it take to close this type of ticket, etc. So while the technical people could fix things on the spot, they are not allowed to due to the demand for metrics and tracking.
I can see both sides of the debate, but there needs to be a good balance. We can get stuff done and provide metrics without too much overhead.
About ten times as long as wihout using the ticket system and involving middle management
Needing tickets is just reality. Companies see IT as a cost center so they need to justify their existence, which they do with tickets. Creating tickets itself doesn’t need to be adversarial, but the process can be used to try to get people to leave you alone (or at least make it onerous to do so) if that’s what you want.
With this said, if the management demands IT has tickets, this is something that must be reiterated to every employee. "If you go to IT without a ticket, they cannot and will not help you"
While you as an employee may not have been adversarial, it is extremely common for angry users demand help right now for their life ending issue that's more important than anything else in the world! You know, they need that PDF printed right now... While you happen to be working on the server that's keeping 100 other people from working.
(Realistically, everyone outside the department knew me by name. They would call and ask for me any number of ways including outright lying. They'd tell me I was the sole source of any problems getting solved! "Everyone else in that department can't do a thing.")
Please just put tickets in before you reach out to IT and have the number ready. Print it off, even.
You may be quite adept with computer machines, but work a few days in IT support, and you'll understand why there is a ticketing process.
I think at least a part of that problem is that the usual support ticketing process infantilizes users. If you call in and the first question is along the lines of "is it plugged in? have you tried turning it off and on again?" then of course your next ticket will take that level of questioning into account. And call in even for a switched off monitor next time. Because they wouldn't ask that question if that wasn't their job to fix, right?
Also, of course users will try and fail to fix issues themselves. They should be applauded for the intent and empowered to be successful next time (if possible). Instead they are usually berated for failing and breaking stuff along the way. Which leads to the usual sheepish "I didn't do anything, I didn't touch it, it always was broken like that".
Of course there is a minimum number of imbeciles. But most people can be educated and empowered, so they do behave like adults when dealing with problems. "The system" just has to give them that chance.
My experience: when tech support are (very) competent, (very) patient, (very) people-loving people, left to do their work in a low-turnover place with no ticket system, it is (very much) more efficient in the short-term, and absolute magic in the long-term.
If they actually came by, we would just help them and then file a ticket for them to track our work.
There is no reason to force people to file tickets before you help them.
If you want to be seen as a force multiplier for the business that helps people get work done quicker, then actually help people and do the record keeping on your time, not theirs.
[1] Primary business, the shit the makes the money. [2] Support, shit that is done only to support #1.
Things that take a support person 5 minutes are the bulk of the job, and those things have to be accounted for. If you slack on that, people will make their own determination of what constitutes a "simple" issue, you'll wind up with most of the issues the help desk solves not showing up in their metrics at all, and it looks to the higher-ups like the support people are just lazy.
In the places I've worked, support always _loved_ the "idiots" because their problems were simple. Being able to resolve a ticket by putting in a single screw, telling the person to turn on their computer, or initiating a password reset was the easiest kind of win you could get.
Process like jira tickers are literally the thing that improves quality of life of non-idle IT worker.
Your example is actually example of the above. You want your screw to be treated as #1 priority right now. Allowing the technician to finish what he was doing and only then get to your request is not fast enough. But, with that being the norm, work becomes jumping between tasks and trying to finish three things parallelly. It becomes impossible or super ineffective to finish larger tasks.
The situation you describe does sound pretty extreme though. Maybe your org is large enough to warrant it who knows. I don't think I could work someplace that had that much red tape.
I think there can easily be two queues. The formal ticket queue and the "lets just do it to save admin"-queue.
Like, big tasks can't block small fast tasks due to congestion.
The only way they are being unreasonable is if your company is in the high single or low to mid double digits of employees and they are using it as an excuse to avoid work. For large companies, there's enough trouble with managers and officers of the company all thinking they can just take an IT worker at their pleasure regardless of other workload, so they're probably going to be extra defensive for anyone else.
You should work IT servicedesk for a few months for a large company that doesn't want to plow money into IT and see how it is.
IT Operations lives and dies by all the “5 minute real quick” tasks. The fact is that many requests fall into that category, but there can be 100s of those per day. The only way to manage that is by forcing people to open tickets, and then handle them according to priority.
As with all the other criticism in this topic, the fault is with the execs, and not the frontline IT workers.
Running a tight ship may not make everyone happy, but it does force people to prioritize what really needs to get done vs what’s not critical.
Triage is incredibly useful in life and death situations, and has some value in many others. Sticking to unmovable policy no matter what however is not IT Support, it's Corporate, Faceless IT Support that makes everyone who isn't IT dislike us.
The world doesn't have to be this way, and rigid adherance to policy and your disparaging attitude are some of the main reasons I hope I never have to work in soulless corporate IT again.
No one wants to take 4 hours to replace a screw. But the answer is not always so cut and dry. The best we can do is to find a balance. For example, the IT guy fixes the screw right there BUT ensures a ticket was put in by the customer within next few hours.
But it would have been interesting had you told them you couldn't use your computer because the screw is missing, and how do they expect you to log the ticket? Sounds like there is an arsehole in the service desk. I'd lodge a complaint internally.
Beyond that, every user thinks their issue is “just a quick question”. When you have 100s of people who all think that, that’s a whole week of work right there.
And often times something that looks small can turn into a big problem. Why did that screw fall out? Screws don’t just “fall out” for no reason. Did the threads get stripped out? How did that happen? If so maybe the chassis needs to be replaced. Did it pop out because of a swelling battery? If you don’t start with a ticket, there’s nowhere to keep track of all that.
Or just swap the drives with another laptop and send them on their way and then diagnose the other laptop later.
I worked in IT and our mission was always to get the customer working again as quickly as possible, and put as much work on us as possible.
That’s how you add value as an IT organization.
The person recommending a clamshell replacement was telling you "I don't know what screw goes in that hole and actually I don't know how to order that off the vendor's website". They do not turn screws for a living and don't have the technical vocabulary to cope with your problem.
The only way they can get rid of you is to make it the vendor's problem; which means they need to transform your problem into something in the vendor's catalog. Hence, clamshell replacement.
When you went on-site with a ticket it seems like the front desk had no easier option left than to find a "screwdriver turner" (with the big pile of broken stuff in the back room) and get them to actually fix your problem.
Nowadays, if there is a problem with your pencil-equivalent computer plus word-processor, you have to get support from hardly available technicians. You cannot just take the next computer out of a nearby supplies closet. Even worse, after an update, all computers company-wide break at the same time in the same way, no chance for a quick fix. Security is done by weird processes that must be followed to the letter, including learning a new "key profile" by heart every 8 weeks instead of just taking along the company-provided file-closet-key on a keychain. If you use the company provided email client like it is built to be used, e.g. click on attachments, you are at fault for breaking policy and endangering security. If you fail to use obscure processes that said email client doesn't actually want you to use to check for the originator address of an email, you are endangering security. Same for the fancy new phone-replacement-software that needs you to download and execute arbitrary executables which you aren't supposed to do. And the guard at the door has been replaced by an RFID badge that any kid in the subway standing next to you can clone with his phone. Of course you are supposed to know this and wrap that badge in tinfoil outside company premises.
IT issues are so debilitating because users are powerless to fix them. They are blamed for problems that arise just because of the mandated software being unsuitable and insecure. All this gets papered over by heavy processes such that even the people in IT who are trying to help are powerless, bogged down in ticket-pushing busywork, and tons and tons of policies that actually do nothing useful.
Please do not spread FUD. Except for antique technologies. (MCF-1, ...) you can't clone RFID devices.
If you think its antique... like, its still widely in use today, i think you are wrong.
One popular example: EV chargers still rely on easily cloneable Mifare Classic for access and billing and are only very slowly changing over to more secure alternatives. And in case it isn't obvious: Mifare Classic security problems were literally more than a decade old knowledge when EV chargers started to be deployed.
https://community.nxp.com/t5/NFC/good-alternative-for-EV-cha...
It isn't FUD if reality is that bad...
Hardware device that copies many keys including encrypted: https://icopyx.com/
Mandated software, like security products, don't exist on a pencil because it can steal all your financial data from an external connection.
IT has policies because of past failures and regulations. They are also bogged down because a ticket can take anywhere from 5 mins to many days and it's impossible to accurately predict what frequency of each type of problem will occur from the known set or how long it each will take. Companies hire a decent amount but they also can't over staff a dept just so everyone gets their issues fixed instantly.
Users can't fix their computer most of the time because they don't know how. A pencil either needs to be sharpened, needs to be replaced, or is working. Everyone can be taught how to do those three things in a short amount of time.
One office object that's not a computer and would be a better comparison is the copy machine. It's a troupe about how often they broke.
There's no need to run in and defend computers, or security policies.
Maybe not from korija in particular; you're probably right about their specific intentions writing that post.
But I've seen posts—hell, I've met people in person—that clearly put forward the opinion that computers are a mistake, they're overly complex, and we need to go back to the time before they existed.
Most of the time, this is at least couched in the form of "Aw, man, these computers are just so dang complicated, y'know? I can never get 'em to work right! You know how it is, right?" But there have been multiple occasions where it was much less playful and much more seriously "computers don't help, they only make things worse, I hate them and we should just all go back to pencil and paper."
Poe's Law[0] is around for a reason.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law for those who aren't familiar
And for what we need computers to do, there is a necessary, irreducible complexity involved, so there is a limit to how simple things could be even in theory.
But the problem isn't with that necessary complexity per se. It is the lack of knowledge in the responsible upper layers of any organisation about how to deal with that. Computers are complex, as essential as pen and paper (or more) and exhibit highly correlated failure modes (i.e. one faulty update or one trojan takes down all of them, just like a fire burns all your papers). This means that a large amount of resources should be expended to prevent problems from occuring in the first place, because they are usually large-scale and severe. Instead, IT gets the minimum amount of resources to keep up with constant firefighting. Also, risk-prevention is frowned upon, the new shiny or the crap everyone uses always has priority, even if it increases risk. Because nobody ever got fired for buying HAL or something.
"computers are complex unlike a pencil" it's mostly complaints about IT "heavy processes such that even the people in IT who are trying to help are powerless, bogged down in ticket-pushing busywork, and tons and tons of policies that actually do nothing useful."
My defense was attemping to explain they are difficult compared to other office products ait's to be expected.
His comment seems to imply that there's failure in the IT process or the way it's run that cause the issues. In other words "we have a process for pencils that work , why not computers " as if process can be scaled linearly
If you let your teams get bogged down with crappy hardware and no support, you also pay, but nobody can count where the losses were and what they sum up to.
Like an invisible tax, you end up paying one way or another, but you'll never know how much and whether it was a good trade.
I was working as a DC tech at a small collocation provider, roughly 120 people company-wide. It was a standard shop these days: O365 apps, Chrome on Windows 10, Slack, etc., totally managed and locked down.
The IT staff were completely unable to control the Windows patching process. They made a lot of noise about gathering office hours for people so they could do OS & app updates when you weren’t working. Except it never, not one time worked.
It was company folklore all the times the Windows patching process took down engineering devices that were actively in use performing upgrades or changes to core routing and switching devices. So because IT couldn’t control patching, core network services were repeatedly lost during maintenance windows. Because the host performing the work would suddenly reboot to patch itself.
Now, I don’t know what lack of competence led to this situation. Maybe Windows Update is truly a horror story. But I’ll tell you one thing for certain: IT didn’t give one shit about the impact their mistakes had on production, on morale, or frankly about much of anything.
Like the rest of the workforce, IT is overwhelmed, overworked, under appreciated, and fed up with the BS. But it sure seems like they go out of their way to screw people over.
Behind the scene, it is a never ending war between me who says "if your want your data to be safe, we need to patch", and the business that says "no, those is quarter rend (or stuff like this)'.
So I say" on, sign this paper what you start that you do not want your data to be secure"
And it goes on forever.
This is exhausting for everyone, but IT is zero the very bottom of thefood chain, we cannot claim sales or new products and provide z utility like water or trash collection.
So this is not always that someone is trying to screw you over, out is just that technology works the way it works, with the money that is invested in it.
But in my experience that isn't how it goes. It goes how you suggested: ITSecOps presents an easy-to-decide case based on a false premise, and then immediately asks for CYA if the company says no. Over time, this becomes a rubber stamp from management, who are also demoralized by the process.
The solution is to not present every security patch as a sky-is-falling event, but rather to be reasonable about the threats one faces and the impact to the business of forcing updates.
You would think it do be that way, but it don't....
Especially with things like Microsoft's megapatches they distribute these days. You are asking for the potential impact of anywhere from 10 to 100 patches custom tailored to the particular applications you're running on your server. Now you're asking for some large number of manhours of in depth analysis in a department that's already short on time.
And as often as there is a patch that breaks the application, there is a patch that was released as a low impact that suddenly is high impact because it can be chained into an exploit, and now IT/SecOps is looking at the servers history to make sure it wasn't exploited at some time in the past.
What is helpful here is not delaying patches, but instead having good testing environments that run the same version of the production application so the patch can be tested there first. Of course that costs a lot so you don't see it as often as you should.
Do you work in cybersecurity? have you done security assessment - the real, technicals ones before?
I did. I coded (a tiny, tiny) part of the Linux kernel. My teams break systems for a living.
If you have actually done security assessments than you know, of course, that there is no way to assess whether a vulnerability is low or high before shit hits the fan. When MS says "critical", then I say "critical" as well. I am not going to plat smart ass and then realize that in the shitty cathedral of systems businesses build there is THE configuration that allows for an exploit.
Anything lower than critical - I do not care/ This can be done later. Bit is it is critical, it will be applied immediately, breaking systems and important presentations of the C-whatever. If the business has something against me then feel free to escalate to my management and tell them that they do want their data to be insecure. Because this is what they do want. Some tried - their systems are patched as the others.
Everyone today is a doctor, football coach an,d recently cybersecurty expert. Yes, maybe your IT team sucks, but others just want to do their fucking dmn, work.
But, I do find some irony in a statement like "it is critical, it will be applied immediately, breaking systems and important presentations of the C-whatever. If the business has something against me then feel free to escalate to my management" when the title of the article we're talking about is Report: 95% of employees say IT issues decrease workplace productivity and morale. If you don't see the connection between "I don't care how this affects you" and "IT causes low productivity and morale", well then I guess all I can do is laugh, and be glad I've left IT desk work for data center technician work.
I understand your rubber-stamp thing (I see it a lot with "audits") but I refuse to be one. This is a lot of friction but ultimately I got the trust of the company (a very big company).
One of the things I changed about 6 or 8 years ago was the patching process. Patching was done during maintenance windows and froze during quarter ends and similar.
OTOH a wormable vulnerability, a ero day or similar will not wait - so I requested a decision of the owners of the data: either availability or security. They asked me all kind of questions such as "what is the probability" to what I answered that I have no idea. But if the recommendation of the vendor is to patch NOW then utr is also mine.
And our systems are always patched, and I sleep better, they sleep better, everyone sleeps better.
If you work in IT you know what this is either the useless dept that puts barriers, or the saviour when there is trouble. Nobody from these 95% realize that there may be reasons for the restrictions, even if at home they do not need a password or backup or patch or something.
It would be much easier to work in some "added values" departments such as marketing and not in the water^H^H^H^H^H IT one.But I love my work.
Even in a competent and interested IT department, the change from "patch Tuesday, same time every month" to "now every patch is up for negotiation" seems like a non-trivial overhead, given that we assume it's desirable to install them all eventually. Exercising power for power's sake. One off asking "can we eat later today" is reasonable but if dinner is always inconvenient for someone then decide once "dinner is later" or "we eat separate dinners", don't have a dinnertime negotiation every day.
- Nobody has ordered a new machine, takes up to a month to sort out
- Their name is spelled wrong in the email system, takes weeks to fix. Especially bad if your role is external facing.
- Subscriptions have not been made for necessary services eg Bloomberg
- Access is denied due to the initial password being unknown. It takes a week to sort out.
I've even heard of people quitting their new job due to one of these issues. It makes the place look really amateur when a new joiner isn't set up to start when they arrive.
Edit: I also left another position at another company (to move to a different position at the same company) mostly because it meant I would get a new computer instead of one that would take 20 minutes to boot (and required mid-day reboots as well)
As you would guess, overbearing security policies came in nearly overnight. Development had to be done on machines with (practically) no internet connection, approved devices were crappy laptops with no memory, developers couldn't access systems to diagnose issues, looking away from your machine for more than 5 minutes had it locked.
Everything just took five to ten times longer. You hear people say "the company still pays you for your time", but of course job satisfaction is important, and the company just hemorrhaged developers.
I have to change my password every 2 months, I can’t change power settings without an admin account (it’s locked on balanced), ssh wasn’t working because I needed admin to start the service, I can’t change which programs run at startup, I can’t uninstall programs that they’ve preinstalled even if I don’t use them, they automatically install/reinstall Java 8 which messes up my JAVA_HOME environment variable and I’ll randomly have to fix it so I can compile my Java 11 code base, everything in my home folder automatically goes to One Drive (rip node_modules), the fan runs at 100% no matter what because of some shitty corporate back ground processes.
It’s absolutely maddening. I’m going to reinstall my own copy of Windows or buy my own machine soon.
And now my corp Win10 machine is so clogged up with firewalls, antivirals, ZScaler and CarbonBlack whatever the fuck that is that the machine regularly stalls and just sits there for seconds at a time. In the middle of typing. It's put a dragchute on my productivity but they're paying me so fuck it.
- 2 "IT guys" for > 500 headcount company - If you look at IT guy instant messaging app you will see many unread notifications all the time. Without tickets it's impossible to properly prioritize and divide work. "Tickets" for everything" was one of my first change. - They are responsible for the broadest set of technologies / vendors I've ever seen. That includes: networking (including cabling, switched, wireless routing, VPN, firewalls), laptops, office apps, conferencing hardware (and software), IT security, accounting and warehouse software (including their MS SQL databases,) windows servers, virtualization, managing email accounts and maaaany more. - without tickets they can't show real amount of work they are doing so justifying adjustment budget and staffing for the need is a big challenge. On the other hand everybody expects to fix trivial problems without forms (so most of their work!). - Upper management don't perceive the as value but only as a cost - trivial problems could be fixed faster but that would require supplies for spare parts. This is bigger than you may think: few generations of laptops in use, office hardware, spare monitors, docking stations etc. That require office space for a small "warehouse" which is not free. How to justify this need considering the previous points? - many people fix "trivial problems" themselves: replacing cable, "borrowing" cable/mouse/monitor from a different desks. That creates more work for the IT guys: more issues because of incomplete office hardware.
It might be the IT person doesn't have time to work on new issues. Or it might be the middle manager doesn't want to fight for what we really need. Or the executive doesn't want to spend money on what they don't personally care about. Or the engineer doesn't want to work with operations on how the product should work. Or human resources doesn't care how painful it is to onboard in the company. Or the company as a whole doesn't care how difficult it is to just find some information, or communicate across teams.
It's usually never just one person or group at fault. The culture sets the tone for how well people listen for problems, how willing they are to jump in and fix them, and whether they even think it's OK to try to fix them. Apathy, fear, and jadedness will drive everyone to stop making things better. If you find yourself in such an environment, my advice is to quit immediately, because changing culture is just about the hardest thing there is.
"If my boss can't start this 90 min Zoom call that could be an email because his headset is broken, that is some sweet blessed relief from this drudgery."
They probably just thought that answer was funny.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
Is there anything about IT that specifically amplifies these issues, or are there similar issues in other contexts which aren't IT-related?
IMO it's easy to blame the technology. But when virtually all individual corporate tooling relies on IT, there's no real control group to provide an alternative.
A lot of the problems listed below sound like they could be solved relatively easily - if the will was there, and if the corporate relationships around them didn't promote bureaucratic non-solutions because of turf wars, irrational policy, lack of effective oversight, and so on.
Maybe eventually they'll be an insurance policy against lost revenue from security breaches and we stop getting in developers way. One can only hope
There are polices like this, but with the prevalence of ransomeware attacks, insurers demand proof that IT departments adopt safeguards that help mitigate risk. This is in conflict with providing productive work environments to developers.
I have actually been unable to work at all for 17 days this year so far due to stupid issues caused by poorly tested changes or having to wait for tickets to be cleared.
But I give less of a fuck these days. I can do other things and still be paid.
- 37% : Security/regulatory policies
- 37% : IT overwhelmed by number of issues that need resolving
- 35% : Lack of training for IT personnel
- 34% : Handling the shift to hybrid/remote work
- 32% : Increasing number of endpoints to manage
- 31% : Technology in place is not appropriate for supporting DEX
- 27% : Lack of knowledge around DEX
- 25% : Lack of budget to support DEX efforts
- 19% : Lack of buy-in from leadership around importance of DEX
- 2% : No challenges being faced
(with some snark: statistics on signup/login requirements before viewing published reports, and presenting statistics in images instead of tabular data formats were not reported)
I would bet you can figure out how bad IT is going to be by the CFO's attitude towards IT. Doesn't really matter what the CIO thinks because the justification for budget makes you do stupid things.
Also extra people are needed to manage change. Changing operating systems, new hardware, new policies, system updates, etc. If you can't change quickly enough, technical debt and costs pile up.
This means that too many people are going through hurdles with IT, not that problems cause problems. It shows that companies need to streamline and improve their IT processes so that fewer employees are impacted.
We're in agreement what exactly was the purpose of the survey...
See: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
Developers cannot have local admin privileges, making many task much more cumbersome. Machines run multiple AV products including Fireeye’s xAgent, Windows Defender, and BitDefender. They use Netspoke to inspect all traffic including HTTPS traffic. If that wasn’t enough, Thycotic is used to selectively allow processes to launch and is single threaded. Thycotic is extremely slow, especially for git operations and tools that tend to spawn multiple processes.
A handy rule for deciding when someone is worth reading: when they invent a TLA for something obvious, to make it sound like they've actually done something, they are not worth reading.
- outbound http proxies sometimes falling for a few specific URLs but the issue was never debugged
- employee portal logging you out after a couple minutes of inactivity
- expenses claiming Web app which could've been 2 plain HTML forms but somehow required IE and was so bad I had "calm down after doing expenses" breaks
The bar is really around: don't actively make people angry.
-Web policies that actively prevent you from doing research in key company technologies (edit: fake example, but effectively it was on the level of a gun maker blocking searches on firearms)
-No budget for replacing/upgrading outdated computers that get absolutely crushed by memory hogging corporate nannyware. It's amazing how little you get done when it takes five minutes to open Excel
-Computers not arriving until well after the start date of new hires
-Outdated database access prograns that won't run on x64 systems (or better yet, are still run on terminals and the only viable means of export was printing...and yes I ran into that only a couple years ago in a Fortune 100)
I get a lot of this is outside the hands of IT to actually fix, but they're still "IT Problems" even if the root cause is shitty management