How reliable is your workplace technology?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m primarily trying to ascertain whether my work tech is worse or equivalent to what most people experience. And I’m coming at it from very much a non-techie user’s perspective.

I work for a very large government agency. All employees use government issued laptops, whether in the office or at home. I use basically 5-6 applications - case management program, email, IM, timekeeping, word processing, and video/telephone conferencing.

Our office conducts hearings, in person, via video, or via phone. Each hearing generally involves 4 participants at different locations.

These are examples of the sort of thing I experience with some regularity:

-This morning, I could not get into my basic case management system for 1 hour. I could not open up a case file due to some “security/mainframe password” issues. Tech support worked on it for 30 minutes and got it working. When I asked what went wrong, they said, “No idea. It just happens sometimes.” Seems to happen to me every month or 2.

-Our agency conducts several hundred thousand hearings each year, and the system has not changed since at least the beginning of covid. At least 1 out of every 3 hearing days there is some sort of communications mishap causeing delays or cancelled hearings. Sometimes the issue involves connecting with an outside user, but other times it just seems to involve our technology running the necessary programs. I am certain that this sort of issue is often exacerbated by human error.

-As of last Wednesday, we were supposed to have transferred to a new timekeeping system. They had been telling us about it for several months, I completed on-line training and attended 2 meetings about it (even tho it was essentially the same as the old system and you just had to get into it and see which buttons to push.) You can guess the punchline - it still isn’t working. And they brilliantly disconnected the old system before realizing whether the new one would work. (I have every expectation that over the next year I will hear of someone getting an award for the fantastic job transitioning the timekeeping systems! ;))

I’ve ceased getting frustrated at such things. Instead, I just expect them. One unfortunate aspect is that it reduces my interest in aspiring towards efficiency, if the basic tools cannot be relied upon. Just keep lowering my expectations…

Like I said, I am definitely a non-techie. I am very happy to use technology, but I do not want to learn how it works or how to trouble shoot it. Give me clear instructions and I will follow them like your best trained monkey! :smiley: And I realize how complicated these computers and networks are. I’m mainly hoping to ascertain whether the sorts of things I regularly encounter are pretty much par for the course across workplaces.

2

I think workplace technology probably has poor reliability everywhere.

When I moved from one facility to another, at about the time people were starting to use computers to present in meetings, I noticed that my department’s monthly meeting kept getting delayed or interrupted by technical malfunctions. I started saying, while we were all sitting around waiting for something to get fixed, that every one of the meetings I had attended so far was delayed or interrupted. It started to become a thing – “Will the circle be unbroken?”

The circle was unbroken for nine years, before a meeting went properly from start to finish.

It might be nice to have some metrics for IT departments. I posted here once about the struggle to get myself a fixed IP address on our company network (I’m just a user and not some kind of admin), and somebody here told me I had no business monkeying around with this as a user, it was strictly an issue for my IT department to handle. When I replied that my IT department simply told me to ping IP addresses until one didn’t respond and just park on that address, the mood suddenly changed, and people started basically giving me their condolences that my IT department was so bad.

3

I’m 64; first job involving offices and computers was 1993-1997.

I’ve only been stuck with using the employer’s computer exclusively for a couple of short-term jobs. What’s been most typical is that I bring my own computer, configured as I want it, and they let me use it. Second most typical is they supply me with a workplace computer but I have my own available and a way to transfer files, ideally also a capacity for remotely controlling the workplace computer so that the one I sit at is my own and I can copy-paste data back and forth between environments at will.

I do get frustrated with workplace acceptance of crappy software and inadequate solutions, but it’s mostly been a background consideration. The network has mostly been good, nearly always better than what I had at home.

4

I work for the DoD. A few years back they made essentially everything reliant on the internet. That’s fine when the internet connection is working, but when it’s not, the entire base grinds to a halt. I literally can’t do anything without it. Can’t even call the IT department to bitch about it because they replaced our traditional phone system with VoIP. :person_facepalming:t2:

5

I work for a company that does contract work for various government agencies. I’ve worked on 3 projects so far. All three were call center, use the company issued laptop and headset jobs. I don’t remember too much about my time at Unemployment. It was awful and I’ve blocked most of it out (no seriously). I do remember the system going down often. It was terrible answering the call of somebody who had been on hold for a long time and telling them the system was down and they would need to call back. At the second project, the Defense Manpower Data Center, system outtages were rare. At welfare, one of the web pages we need to sign into and use every call has problems. It will randomly boot you. This generally erases the last page you filled out and requires you to sign back in.

6

I work for a Japanese firm and we are considered a satillite office. Generally we get software updates and new tech about 6 months to a year after the mothership, so generally about all of the bugs are worked out before we adopt.

We have excellant IT support, but it pains me on how the company treats the IT department. All of them are long term (10-15 years) contract employees. In Japan it is common for people to remain contract employees their entire carrer at a major company, and even though they do get excellant benifits it just seems wrong that they do not hire them on as direct.

7

I work in a huge engineering company in Energy Solutions.

About five years ago the Powers that be launched a new system (Teamcenter) to store all of our drawings, procedures, weld specs, Bills of Material, etc., all in one place. Our old system was user friendly and quick to use - granted, it did not contain all the info that we used.

On paper the new system seemed smart. In practice it’s been an unmitigated disaster. The learning curve alone has cost us thousands and thousands of dollars. The transfer of info was not correct, so we are having to check everything before a vendor can make anything. And don’t get me started about the outages!!! Although, in the last couple of months the outages have been fixed for the most part.

Anyway - you are not alone!

8

I use Word, Outlook, Chrome, Explorer, Adobe, and Teams. If someone out of office sends me a WebEx or Zoom link, I can use that. I have a VPN option for working on the road or at home.

I don’t have any problems. It all generally works. If there is a problem affecting a program generally, IT is good about sending out notices that they’re working on it and then status reports. We have VOIP phones but they’ve never gone down.

If I have a problem with my own computer, IT is very good about answering calls. Rarely on hold for more than a minute. If my problem takes more than the allotted time at Tier I, they’ll have someone from Tier II call. That’s generally within an hour. I once even made it to Tier III. (I envisage Tier III gurus as wearing long red robes and chanting by candlelight when they’re not on a call.)

Also do my timesheet by computer. It’s extremely reliable. Never gone down, and never makes a mistake (at least nothing I’ve ever caught, and I keep a paper record as well, to double-check.)

9

I own a small business. We use Windows 98. Enough said.

10

This is the one that gets me. I teach at a community college. Most of the classes I teach are in computer labs. The machines are all getting long in the tooth. And they are so chock full of useless garbage (biggest offender: McAfee), they run rather slowly. And gawd forbid if the machine freezes up and I have to reboot it.

This past Monday, first day of Summer quarter, this happened. The machine at the instructor’s desk was being laggy, so right as class was supposed to start I announced I was resetting the machine. I joked that it would be ten minutes before it was in a usable state. Except it really did take ten minutes!

And: every computer on campus seems to be loaded with the same set of software, whether it can be used on a particular machine or not. For example, the instructor computers in the classrooms have touch screen monitors, which can be used like a tablet and “drawn” on. The software used for these is also loaded into, and continually running on, all of the student computers, and the computers in the math office as well. All of which have regular, non- touch screen monitors. It’s ridiculous.

Before the computers were all upgraded to Windows 10, I could open up the task manager and kill a lot of this garbage. But not anymore! No permissions to do anything. I can’t even delete unwanted icons from the desktop in my personal account.

I keep thinking I should fork out for a laptop, put my desired Linux distro on it, and use that as my work computer.

11

Although I am retired, I have an account on my dept. server where I have a web site that contains all my published papers and some other stuff. But I hadn’t signed on for a couple years and seem to have forgotten the password (needed to upload–anyone can download). I wrote to our (presumed) sysop a couple of times–no answer. Finally, I wrote to our office manager who answered that the sysop had retired a year ago and was apparently not replaced–I should write to the generic university IT. I did that yesterday morning and two days later have no reply (except the formal, "We’ve received your email and will get back ASAP). To be fair, today is probably a day off for Canada Day (tomorrow).

12

I work for a fintech company. It really does depend. We make so many changes that you never know which update will cause everything to crash.

It is extremely exhausting and I’m done.

13

My company uses Citrix. I’ve never used it before working for this company, so I don’t really have a baseline to measure by. But I hear that it’s one of those things that never really works well.

14

Ouch.

15

I work for a consulting engineering firm, about 12 people total.

In terms of hardware, everyone’s using dual-monitor PCs that are <4 years old and running Windows 11.

We’re generally up-to-date with software: Microsoft 365 (what they call MS Office these days), AutoCAD, Bluebeam Revu, all current.

For file-sharing and WFH we something called Egnyte. IMO it’s a lot better than LogMeIn. One neat feature is it lets us send read-only links to our files to others a la Dropbox.

I’ve used Citrix in the past when I was in college, and it worked well for me at that time.

16

I work for a multinational tech firm, and our workplace computers, network and software are all reliable and up-to-date. We have dedicated, fast dev- and sys-ops teams, including a 2-man team in our little satellite office. The company is all-in on the enterprise versions of everything. Which makes a huge difference, I think.

17

I work for a large firm (over 1 million employees) with everything we do (seemingly) mediated by technology.

There are pockets of technology that are unreliable (particular applications, certain satellite offices) but those impact a small minority of employees.

Poor user training and aptitude on the other hand is endemic. People who think features are bugs. People who hate collaboration tools and want to work with “clean handoffs”.

Lots of people who think Lotus Notes and Lotus 1-2-3 represented the golden age of computing and do things the hard way because they are unaware of or unwilling to use things developed in the last twenty years.

Conversely we have newer employees who seem to give not a single fuck about information security. They’d put everything out where everyone could see it. The system prevents them from doing this, and they are constantly trying to bypass or “override” this.

18

I work for a huge multinational organisation that needs reliable international comms and mostly it works well.
What we aren’t is particularly cutting edge. The requirement to roll out to tens of thousands of colleagues means that we are unlikely to ever be early adopters but once we decide to do it we have the muscle to do it well and give round-the-clock support.
One thing that I’ve personally had some impact in is the move away from local and bespoke systems. We now go “off-the-shelf” wherever possible with interoperability an absolute must-have and we are much better off for doing so.

The thing that continues to bother me is the hit-and-miss nature of simple hot desk tech.
The idea is that each desk has a lovely big curved ultra-wide with associated keyboard and mouse. You boot up, plug in a single USB-c and that’s it.

The amount of times people shuffle around trying a set-up that works is incredible.

Either the cables, the docks or the monitor are sub-standard or unreliable in some way. Such a silly little thing that probably comes from someone wanting to shave a few quid off off the quote and not actually trialling it to destruction in the first place.

19

There’s a lot of bad things I can say about my company but the technology is fine. It’s a relatively new fintech firm.

I have a new MacBook Pro, this is the first company I’ve worked for that is entirely in the Apple ecosystem. The software I use is fairly up to date. Sure things go down from time to time and it does seem to be getting worse as we seem to layoff more people every day. But, having worked for too many firms using dot com era technology, I’m happy