I Pit Our IT Department

The BBQ Pit
1

I have, myself, been an employee in a large organization’s IT Department. And we weren’t well liked, as a department, I tried to be a helpful person, making it that much more possible for people to do their jobs well by giving them the tools or, in most cases, building them for them. Customizing them for the things they wanted to do. I’m decently competent at that stuff, at least within the limited set of environments I’ve built in. I don’t claim to be all-around brilliant or anything like that.

As I said, we weren’t well liked, as a department. It’s an attitude, an anger and a contempt, a frustration and a sense of being trampled upon, like the IT person is here to push you around, not to help you do stuff and they resent it. I know what that’s like. So I want to say that up front. Before I rant at you.

You, the IT Department people where I work. Let me tell you about my day today, working from home. Doing so is a privilege, I don’t have to commute. I don’t have to shell out for the public transportation (rail passes, bus passes) nor do I have to wake up that early so as to arrive at the office. I don’t have to concern myself with other people’s exhalations in yet another COVID season, I’m inherently isolated from that by working from home, and I get to roll out of bed at 8:40 and climb a short flight of stairs to be in my office.

I invested in the situation, I have the hardware and the software to both connect to my workplace-issued computer and run it remotely and to also built tools in my personally owned environment that surrounds it and use them to be more efficient in what I do, and I pass information and file structures and code between the two environments, it’s a great toolbox in total. Oh and yeah, there’s an encrypted drive issued to me by the agency, and any and all files not saved on the agency’s networked drives are instead saved here to this encrypted drive, so in terms of any resources that are “on my local computer”, they’re in a secure space walled off from my personal world on my personal computer. Agency supplied the encrypted drive, I brought the computer.

This morning, I held my cellphone in hand for 2-factor, clicked the VPN connect button, and supplied passwords and codes that had been passed between computer cell and server, but then was told that my operating system on my end was not supported for this connection.

It’s only the VPN itself that declares me obsolete. The actual remote control software (Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection) works fine even from many versions older than what I’m running, and I tend to run the versions of software that I like as tools. But yeah, OK, the VPN is about security so I’ve got to follow your lead.

But you never ever warn us. “Hello, working-from-home folks running MacOS xxxx, you have to upgrade by March xxth; the minumum client OS on the Mac side will be xxxx”. That would be nice; I could upgrade at my convenience within the timeframe. Instead, I try to log on and I can’t get in and I don’t know the minimum OS I need to upgrade to.

I’m remoting in to you from within a virtual machine, an environment configured to run an OS that your picky security VPN software will treat as a legitimate critter. I have several others I could switch to, later versions of this OS and also other totally different operating systems, up to Sonoma on the Mac side and Windows 11 on the Microsoft side.

So I call you.

“I’m getting an error message. This operating system is not allowed in accordance with the security requirements.”

“Are you on a Mac?”

“Yes”

“Well that’s your problem”

“Huh? What do you mean? Did they completely drop support for the Mac last night?”

“No, it’s Apple, they rolled out an update last night and that makes it so it won’t work”

“That’s not what’s going on here…”

“Yes it is, I’m telling you…”

“No it bloody well isn’t, because I don’t have automatic updates turned on!”

“…”

“…Can you tell me the minimum, and the maximum, supported Mac operating system, so I can try with a version that it will accept?”

“Why are you bothering me with this? Just go online and research the product and see what the system requirements are!”

So I go to the company that actually makes the security VPN software package itself. The problem here is going to be that their product isn’t licensed to me, it’s licensed to my employer.

Sure enough, I’m going through a barbed-wire fence of “prove we’re supposed to answer any of your questions”, and I’m just trying to get the system requirements for their damn product. But I’m able to get myself transferred a few times and get connected to someone who at least tries to help. But they just had some outbreak of misbehaving evil code in the wild so yeah I’m a low priority. But he actually tries to find documentation of the current minimum host operating system. Can’t. Says really it should be my IT Department inputting the request because they have an account and can create a support ticket.

Yeah. That. Exactly that.

Fine. I’m guessing that they hopped it to MacOS 13; I do have a MacOS 13 virtual machine set up, but their connection software isn’t installed on it yet, and I’d need to move all my tools and either install or upgrade a handful of apps I was using in 12. What the hell else am I going to do with my time, okay…

I get the same message under MacOS 13. Well… MacOS 14 is the current latest and greatest… and the IT Department guy said “Apple just rolled out an update that isn’t compatible with the latest VPN software” when I called him. So just how narrow a range are they supporting? Not the bleeding edge but not far from it either.

I do eventually end up installing everything on my MacOS 14 virtual machine, and lo and behold, after a security update to the VPN software (which had not prompted on the other OS versions) and a reboot, I was able to connect.

Hey. Hey, IT Department. You weren’t helping. I got a better attempt from someone at the commercial VPN product support line, and I don’t have an account with them.

2

I do IT support for a living. Whoever supports you sucks at their job. It sounds like they made assumptions, told you to fix it yourself, then didn’t care enough to make sure you were fixed. That’s total shit.

The role of the IT department is to ensure you can do your job and to do their best within policy to make that job efficient and improve productivity. They failed.

Maybe they’re overloaded, poorly trained, unsupported, and so on. Maybe there’s a good reason they suck. That doesn’t mean they don’t suck. I’d be ashamed to do my job the way they did.

3

I’ve given up on our IT department fixing anything. I just want them to stop breaking stuff.

And how do you have it set up that I need to update my Windows at least 4 days out of the 5 I work everyday?

4

I do have some sympathy for IT support not listening to me when I say “The problem isn’t XYZ!” when they probably hear that 100 times a day where the problem turns out to be XYZ.

5

This is the sort of situation where I would go over the IT person’s head and talk to a supervisor from the IT side.

6

I work in IT (we call it IS, whatever). When COVID struck our staff of 18 had over half of the people in the company (about 250 out of 500) working from home within 72 hours. It was quite incredible.

We only do maintenance during maintenance ‘windows’ always after hours and on the weekends. Notifications go out first to those affected.

We are loved, and also a little feared :heart_eyes: :skull_and_crossbones:

7

I’m also in IT. It looks like you have a very complicated setup that you decided to use. I don’t see why IT should help with that.

8

Because they require the use of a VPN and it is not working on a not-uncommon setup.

9

I actually understand that frustration. MAC doesn’t play well with our equipment and our network. We have presenters show up with MAC machines, but they don’t have the peripherals needed to get their MAC to interface with our equipment. For example, MAC doesn’t have HDMI, you have to have an HDMI to USBCE converter. Do they ever have one? No. Apple School Manager sucks, by the way.

10

If I had any reason to expect to be using some of your equipment as an external display, I would arrive with USB-C adapters for DVI, HDMI, miniHDMI, DisplayPort, MiniDisplayPort, VGA, classic USB, and classic Mac DB-15.

More likely, I’d use one of my own external displays — either the cute little ViewSonics that fit in my computer bag or the Brookstone projector.

I don’t expect the IT Departments to hold my Mac-centric hand. I do need them to support us in basic ways, like if you’re going to require certain protocols and whatnot, you should know how to enable or implement those on all of the platforms that any of your users are likely to be deploying. Macs and the most common Unix builds and Windows 7 and 11, not just Windows 10 and nothing but.

11

There is nothing unusual about using an older version of macOS, which is all this boils down to. Lots of people have older computers or don’t update. They very much should know the required OS version for use of the software they mandate.

That said, the fact the software company also didn’t know is also ridiculous.

12

Also, the people who were on automatic updates were also unable to connect, because the latest build of the MacOS broke their VPN application. So damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

13

Perhaps if a TPS report had been filed this could have all been avoided?

14

Yes, all of that sounds exactly like where I work.

In my case we had over 3,000 employees all working from home at the same time for an extended period of time, and a large percentage of them had to be swapped from a desktop machine to a laptop to enable them to do so, as well as having other accessories for work and training. It took about a week. But we have a lot more than 18 staff helping. This is an entire state agency. I was pretty impressed with what we had to do once an emergency mandate happened. And all told it went relatively smoothly.

And yeah, we have what we call “evening maintenance” which occurs only during the times when a person isn’t expected to be working. We do ask people to leave their computers on overnight and connected remotely (assuming they are not leaving it in the office, most people don’t anymore), and that way they stay updated and it shouldn’t affect their work time. Updates that require outages are usually on the weekend.

15

Of the OP had just said “I have a Mac and IT won’t help,” I might have more sympathy. The long paragraph about how special their setup is made it sound worse.

16

At my work we do not have a BYOD policy. If you want to connect to our agency, you have to use one of the devices we provide. It avoids all of the headaches being described in the OP.

I have worked where BYOD was the standard, and yeah, it does suck. But you have to be flexible. If you are going to allow people to use anything, then you need to be prepared to deal with anything. If you allow Macs, you can’t say, “You have a Mac so this won’t work.” And if you have standards people need to follow, you have to communicate those, otherwise they can’t be followed, and it’s not their fault things aren’t working, it’s completely yours.

Now, I do recall that when I supported mobile devices at that BYOD organization, I had to tell people many times a day, “You don’t have an iPhone so you can’t do that.” But that was just because an iPhone has features other devices don’t. That experience guaranteed I was going to be an iPhone user from that point forward.

17

Some people had laptops with docking stations. But certainly not all. That was mostly a shared laptop (by department) for when they collected data in the field.

We where in the process of converting people over to VM’s (virtual machines) so that helped a lot. But, they still needed a good internet connection and computer (and monitors) at home to switch to that.

Not to mention a place to work at home. That turned out to be a bit of a conundrum for many. Especially if they had kids and school was closed down.

We had a contest for best home office (it was sort of tongue in cheek). One persons desk was an air hocky table. Another’s stand up desk was a laptop on top of a 30 pack of PBR’s. They both used those though.

I was in need of a new home computer anyway, so I updated that ASAP. And I was a lucky one, I already have a great quiet place to work from. And we have a room that is sort of multi-purpose. That was great for my wife. But she prefers, and sort of needs to go into the office. I don’t need to at all.

Because of the maintenance period windows, I do have to do things at odd hours. Not having to go into the office is fabulous. I’ll retire before they get me to do that again. Should have been doing it for 10 years.

18

Unfortunately much of what I do is hands-on. Not all of it, so I do get to work from home often (in fact I’m doing that right now). But I have to go in a lot; for example I was in the office earlier this morning. And while they were declaring mandatory working from home, I was one of the few lucky people given an exception. It was weird driving empty streets to an empty parking lot into an empty office, it was like being a postapocalyptic IT support guy. Made for a smooth commute however!

19

Yeah. Our Service Desk and Operations people didn’t have a lot of options to work from home. They can to a degree though. You can’t install new hardware at work from your home.

Some folks do a kind of 50/50 thing. That’s a great help though for them if they have to be home for something else, but can do at least a bit of work. It does not seem like anyone is abusing it. The Powers that be thought they would, or the mico-managers where worried that they would have nothing to do.

If anything, us WFH folks are putting in more hours since its so easy to just do it. Sys Admins and Programmers can work from pretty much anywhere. My mom passed away during the COVID mess, and I just bought a system to work from her house. I’m still doing that as I take care of her ‘estate’. I’m hardly rich, but had the means to do it.

My sympathies really go out to all of those that simply can’t work from home and had to suffer through the nuttiness that was COVID.

20

Maybe it was, but somebody shitcanned it because it didn’t have a cover sheet.